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Friday, April 30, 2004

MIT makes Jack Valenti look like an idiot

MIT's The Tech interviews the MPAA's outgoing spokesmonster Jack Valenti, with hilarious results. It's not often that a slickster as teflon coated as Jack gets made to look an utter fool (though I'd welcome a round onstage with him in front of a university audience) so bravo and bravo again to The Tech's Keith J. Winstein, who ran circles around Valenti.

TT: Indeed, but are you doing that when you rent a movie from Blockbuster and you watch it at home? ... I run Linux on my computer. There’s no product I can buy that’s licensed to watch [DVDs]. If I go to Blockbuster and rent a movie and watch it, am I a bad person? Is that bad?

JV: No, you’re not a bad person. But you don’t have any right.

TT: But I rented the movie. Why should it be illegal?

JV: Well then, you have to get a machine that’s licensed to show it.

TT: Here’s one of these machines; it’s just not licensed.

[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line “qrpff” DVD descrambler.]

TT: If you type that in, it’ll let you watch movies.

JV: You designed this?

TT: Yes.

JV: Un-fucking-believable.

Link (via Joi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:33:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Erotic art photography censored in Norway

An anti-obscenity statute sparked an online controversy in Norway recently, when the Norwegian online erotic magazine Cupido published some explicit, autobiographical art-porn shots from Brooklyn-based photographer Siege. The specific issue in question is not currently online in entirety, but you can see one of the offending shots here (upper right-hand corner). Some of the work was also recently blogged on BoingBoing, here. Cupido editor Cecilie Kjensli in Norway sent the following e-mail to the banned-in-Norway photographer:

"You know what. Something stupid has happened. Cupido har been sensuratet for first time during 20 years because of your pictures :) I have told you before that we are not aloud to print pictures with genital touhing. Our law system sais you cant show pictures that can offend people, so i thougt that no boddy would be offended of this in an erotic magazine. I understand if they were printed in a newspaper or a womans magazin, but not ours.

"Our distributor dissagred with me the way they understand the law, so they put a black spot in the face of the girls sukking you, I belive. So I told the press. That you are a trendy New York phothografer with a girlfriend and that you have a good appetite for sex and that you like taking pictures of you doing it. I read this on Nerve.com I think. Hope you'r not angry at me for this. I was wear of that something like this could happen, so when it did, I tipsed one of the biggest and best tabloid newspaper in Norway, and they made a huge reportage on it telling people that you actually can take off the black spot. And it showed the stupid porn-law, as we call it, from a good perspectiv. Here is the link to the reportage in the newspaper. I'm the one with the dildoes."

Link to Norwegian Newsmagazine Dagbladet's story about the "stupid porn law" (contains sexually explicit images, and lots of little black censorship circles) (also seen on Fleshbot, where you will also find this link to the best porn news headline EVER.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:27:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Random, April-fresh obscenities hidden in XML file on deodorant website

Says Fleshbot:

Someone at b3ta found this XML list of obscenities on a website for women's deodorant (wtf?) and recommends that "any ambitious young swearers out there study it thoroughly"; we plan on using the term "chutney ferret" as much as possible from now on.

Link to deodorant ad webpage, Link to the offending XML.

update: BoingBoing readers Dan and Aaron each wrote to point out that the XML list appears to be banned words -- the site offers a "make your own personalized t-shirt" thing. Dan says, "Try clicking on 'Prizes,' and then 'Design mantra T-shirt'. If you attempt to design a shirt with one of the phrases or words in the XML list, you will be chastized for using disallowed language. And how!"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:06:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New guestblogger -- Russ Kick of The Memory Hole and Disinformation

First, thanks to our outgoing guestblogger Alan Graham, for holding down the right hand column this past month.

Next: A warm welcome to our new guestblogger, Russ Kick, the author of several books, including The Disinformation Book of Lists: Subversive Facts and Hidden Information in Rapid-Fire Format and 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know. Mr. Kick is also the editor of many anthologies, such as Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies; You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths; and Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies. He has also written articles and a column for the Village Voice.

The Memory Hole, a website devoted to rescuing knowledge and freeing information, is his labor of love. Russ first made the front page of the New York Times when he digitally uncensored a heavily-redacted Justice Department report. In April 2004, he posted 288 previously unseen photos of military coffins coming back from Iraq, which he had pried loose from the Air Force. This set off a worldwide media frenzy leading to the front pages of most major newspapers, heavy rotation on CNN, the lead story on network newscasts, and interviews on Good Morning America and CBS Evening News. You can browse through some of that extensive media coverage here, via Google News search. Yesterday, the Memory Hole published these graphic and disturbing screen captures from video footage documenting abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel. Related news here.

I have no doubt that Russ will indeed Kick it on the BoingBoing guestblog. Welcome!
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:36:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snapshots from Hell, Singapore-style

Following up on this earlier post about museums in Asia that depict Buddhist Hell, BoingBoing reader Heng-Cheong sends us more photos of the Hell exhibit in Singapore's Tiger Balm Gardens, better known locally as Haw Par Villa. Shown here, the Filthy Blood Pond, part of a special section in Hell reserved for sinners who have (begin quote)

* kidnapped little boys [Ed. note: AHEM, cough cough]
* claimed to have lost somebody's deposit (probably an estate agent)
* are an incompetent physician or
* are a matchmaker

"For this, you are slapped with extreme thirst and hunger, soaked in ice, dipped in volcano, or forced to bathe in filthy blood."
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:05:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless real-space gaming -- NetAttack

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

When you play a computer game, you interact with what is on your monitor, even if you're outside playing on a mobile phone. You don't interact with your physical environment. Now, computer scientists from Fraunhofer FIT want you to play outside, sharing the outdoor experience offered by children's games. NetAttack "is a new type of indoor/outdoor Augmented Reality game that makes the actual physical environment an inherent part of the game itself." In this game, two teams are fighting to destroy the central database of a virtual big company. Both teams have indoor players, who control the game from their laptop computers, and outdoor players, equipped with GPS receivers, trackers, sensors and video cameras.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:52:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Dining Zen

cypher's foodlog
project denny's
taco world
casa bonita
late night dining guide
menu database
el bocadillo del diablo
email lunchboxes
final meals
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:49:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

interview with Sealand designer

Etoy Zak says:

i just compiled some conversations with Daniel van der Velden, an interesting graphic designer who initiated the conceptual (and hypothetical) identity proposal "Meta Haven: Sealand Identity Project". I think his work is one model for critical/smart graphic design... while also being fucking cool..

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:34:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Battelle on Google's S-1

John Battelle's analysis of Google's S-1 filing -- and particularily, the charming-but-stilted founders' letter -- is fascinating and insightful:

The letter states, among other things, that 1. We don't need to do this for the money; 2. We have no plans to run our business to satisfy Wall Street's need for smooth earnings predictability; 3. We plan to give no earnings guidance, not at least as it's understood on Wall St.; 4. Don't ask us to do so, we'll simply decline the request; 5. We'll do odd things that you won' t understand; 6. We will make big bets on things that may not work out; 7. We run the company as a triumvirate, so there will not be clear leadership from one person like most other companies; 8. We bridge the media and tech industries (interesting), which are in flux, so we've chosen a two-class stock structure similar to the NYT, WashPost, and NYT that helps us avoid being taken over by those forces; 9. We plan using an auction model, as it feels fairer and we understand auctions from AdWords; 10. Don't invest in us if this scares you at all, or the price feels too high; 11. Don't even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees; 12. We believe in the idea of Don't Be Evil; 13. It's evil to pay for placement or inclusion (a swipe at Yahoo); 14. We hope to bridge the digital divide through Gmail type free services and a foundation with at least 1% of profits and equity to help make the world a better place; 17. Betting on Google is a bet on Sergey and Larry (this was said multiple times, making me wonder if there wasn't some odd future blame being assigned here by the VCs or bankers); 18. This letter is our way of answering the questions we can't answer in the coming months due to the IPO quiet period.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

1981 computer catalogue scanned and posted

I swear, the scans out of this 1981 computer catalogue are more fascinating than all the patent medicines in a 19th-century Sears-Roebuck. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:30:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stross's future-rant

Tomorrow, I'll be interviewing Charlie Stross at Plokta.con, a con in Newbury, UK. He's the Guest-of-Honour, and he's written up a corker of a GoH contribution for the programme book.

Eusocial animals like ants, termites, bees, or naked mole rats, exhibit curious behaviour; their societies are stratified by role, with workers, warriors, and reproductive castes that may differ morphologically from one another. Humans aren't so obviously specialized, but if you consider our machines as part of our extended phenotype, it begins to look that way: if our machines become intentionally driven, and they're tailored to play different roles in our society, then you could argue that we occupy some kind of privileged position in a hive-relationship with tools that require our continued safety and comfort in order to further their own reproduction. There's nobody here in this hive but us queens, and the living machines we so carelessly manufacture as conveniences for our own comfort. Individual ants or other eusocial insect species all share the same genetic code, but different castes express radically different phenotypic traits, and indeed most ants are sterile workers who can only further their genetic traits by ensuring that their cousin, aunt or mother the hive-queen succeeds. Our machines don't share our genome (yet), but they share parts of the vast haze of information that has gathered around the genome, and they can only reproduce through us.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:28:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling's new novel is out -- catch the book-tour!

Bruce Sterling's new novel, The Zenith Angle, is out now. To give you an idea of how much I liked this book -- a technothriller about post-9/11 hacker-entrepreneurs, and the military-industrial complex -- here's the blurb I wrote:

Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops. The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before the month is out. Lots of books are called "thrillers" but very few are this thrilling.

Bruce is going on a ten-city US book tour -- check here for dates! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:19:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple's new DRM reneges on your purchase conditions, picks your pocket

The new iTunes has stricter DRM than the last version, limiting the number of times you can burn your playlists to seven (it used to be ten), and detecting and blocking similar playlists. Jason Schultz has some good ranty analysis about what this means:

So after one year and 70 million songs, $0.99 now buys you less rather than more -- seven hard burns instead of ten soft ones. What will Apple "allow" us to do with the music we "buy" next year? three burns? one? zero?

And what about the songs you've already bought? Don't we get to keep the rights we had before the change?

Well, Apple has conveniently reserved its rights to make changes -- unilaterially -- to its DRM and your ability to make fair use via its Terms of Service and Terms of Sale pretty much anytime it pleases, without even having to give you notice.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:17:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Using a game to describe all the images on the net

ESP Game (reg required, cypherpunks/cypherpunks works) is a game whose objective is to incent English-speaking net users to keyword-label every image on the Internet. The game throws up an image in a Java applet, then asks you and an anonymous "partner" elsewhere on the net to type in keywords until both of you have a word in common -- IOW, until you and a stranger can agree on a good label for the picture. Presumably, this is being added to a metadata database for the purpose of cataloguing all the images on the net. Neat idea. Link (Thanks, Jed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:07:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free mall WiFi on the rise

Shopping malls across the US are adding free WiFi:

A very small number of the 1,130 malls in the United States have wireless access. But, she said, an increasing number are thinking of installing the capability.

For instance, Westfield America Trust said most of its 62 regional and super regional shopping centers will soon offer the service. Taubman, which owns or manages 31 malls, began offering Wi-Fi services yesterday at its The Shops at Willow Bend in Plano, Texas.

"If you look at malls in general, you are really seeing owners bring in things that allow for more people to come do a variety of things at the center," Duker said. "The mall has become more than a place to shop."

Link (via WiFiNetNews)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:02:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steampunk/dead media photoshopping contest

Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest is "Vintage Products" -- lots of nice steampunk and dead-media licks here. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Man-and-Robot standup comedy in Japan

BoingBoing pal Steve Portigal points us to "a demo of Japanese speaking robot technology, presented as a duo-standup routine featuring one of Japan's well-known comics. The robot is called PaPeJiro. So, if the robot kills - does that violate [Isaac Asimov's] Three Laws [of Robotics]?" Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:14:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LayerOne Technology Conference in LA June 12-13

BoingBoing buddy boogah says:

A few of us have been working overtime to get a little technology conference together in Los Angeles. We've tried to make LayerOne an event for both the geek set and the suit in IT and our roster of speakers can back those claims up. In fact, here's a sampling of four of our dozen speakers:

- Danny O'Brien will be rehashing his talk from Emerging Tech 2004 [a crowd favorite] about the work habits of alpha geeks.
- Jason Schultz from the EFF talking about the DMCA and how it's stifling innovation.
- USC professor Douglas Thomas covering the politics of code.
- Dan Kaminsky, author of network toolset Paketto Keiretsu cranking out some more code/theory that's bound to marvel and frighten.

Not bad, eh? There's eight more talks where those four came from. We're currently in the middle of early bird registration - where we're shaving $10 off the $50 door price. That's a weekend's worth of talks and a free beer social on Saturday night for $40.

Link

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

Third porn actor tests positive for HIV -- Jessica Dee

Fleshbot says:

[A] third adult performer, Jessica Dee, has also tested positive for HIV. Unlike Lara Roxx, who was just entering the business, Jessica has considerable video and photo experience under her belt. A search for her name at Ask Jolene turns up at least one photoset which seems to match the thumbnail photo of her in the AVN article; you can look that one up yourself if you're as morbidly curious as we were.

"Another Woman Who Worked with Darren James Tests HIV-Positive" (AVN)
"Jessica Dee Identified as Third HIV-Positive Performer" (AVN)
Jessica Dee (videography @ Search Extreme)

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:17:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bob Moog documentary looks great

The video clips from the new Bob Moog (inventor of the Moog synthesizer) documentary (titled "moog") are very exciting. Can't wait to see it. He says inventing things is a combination of "discovering and witnessing." (As an aside, isn't "Moog" a great name. It has that mod 60s sound that's perfect for a synthesizer. I don't think it would have been as popular had his last name been anything else.) Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:07:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC TV channel offers programming for pets

From the Guardian: Pet TV "is being billed by the BBC as an attempt to find out what sort of TV programmes, sounds and images animals respond to. The interactive TV service will consist of a looped series of images and sounds, including clips of snooker balls rolling across the green baize, frisbees flying through the air, cat toys and cartoon characters such as Top Cat." Link (Registration required, unless you use the wonderful bugmenot.com) (Thanks, Carlo!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:11:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Patriot Act designed to protect Patriot Act by preventing challenges to it to be made public

Great headline from the Washington Post: "Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act." It has to do with the ACLU filing a lawsuit challenging something in the Patriot Act, but a different provision in the Patriot Act made it illegal for the ACLU to reveal the lawsuit. Neat! Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:53:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russian MP3 site sells music for about five cents a song

The Sydney Morning Herald spoke to a lawyer about allofmp3.com, the Russian company that sells tons of online music by the gigabyte, and he said it is not likely that anyone who buys music from the site could get in trouble.

We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property. His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?" Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."

Link (Thanks, JNelsonW!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:35:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Googie landmark threatened with demolition

Seal Beach, California's UFO-shaped Parasol diner, which is kept in pristine 1967 original condition by its owner, is scheduled to be torn down by a shopping mall developer in May. This site has more Parasol pictures, articles, and a link to an online petition. Link (Thanks, Todd!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:21:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mod a disposable cam into a stun-gun

TechTV has a HOWTO for modifying a disposable camera into a stun-gun:

These disposable cameras (about $5 dollars a pop) have a capacitor that can store up to 600 volts of stopping power. When the capacitor discharges those volts, it delivers an amperage comparable to stun guns. Perfect for our shocking device.

Link (Thanks, LVX23!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:48:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Howard Stern has a secret blog?

Our friends at Gawker mutter into their Xantinis:

America's public enemy #1, radio-dude Howard Stern, made an off-hand remark on this morning's show -- he claims he writes a secret weblog. Stern said he writes as "another character" and that only "about 4 people are in on the joke." OK, he's almost certainly not Rance, who repeatedly claims to be an actor and not a fat guy eating Twinkies in his basement, laughing at a credulous, gossip-starved public.

If anyone out there has candidates for what might be Stern's secret blog, let us know -- if the blogger brags about hurling prosciutto at a stripper's ass, that might be a tip-off.

Link, And see also this previous Boingboing entry about mystery celeblogger "Rance" (George Clooney? Owen Wilson? Jimmy Hoffa? Alf?), Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:11:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

E-Girl: Hack Your Way to Hollywood

In Wired News today, a story I filed about Heather Robinson -- also known as E-Girl. Her dark tale of following databases to Hollywood dreams broke first in the book Hollywood, Interrupted by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner.

An America Online customer service rep illicitly surfs the company's customer database, ferrets out private data on celebrity members and then hunts them down online under a false identity, seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood.

Sound like a prelude to prison? Not in the case of Heather Robinson. The former AOL employee managed to parlay privacy violations into useful contacts in Hollywood. With the help of those contacts, Robinson, 25, landed a movie deal, and she's using her toehold in the industry to advance another.

Later this week, Universal Pictures will start filming Robinson's first movie, The Perfect Man, a romantic comedy staring Hillary Duff and Heather Locklear. The film is about a teenage daughter who tries to create a "nonexistent boyfriend for her dejected mother," Robinson said. The story is based on another of her youthful indiscretions when she was 16 -- this one involving a stolen credit card and thousands of dollars of purchases.

Some would say it takes Robinson's level of moxie to succeed in Hollywood. In fact, the favorite legend in the movie business is that of a hard-working kid who starts in the mail room and through ambition, flexible ethical standards and political skill becomes a mogul. Judging by her exploits so far, Robinson is well on her way.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:01:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reality-TV human baby giveaway, pissed-off Uri Geller claims trademark breach

The ABC-TV program 20/20 will air a contest between five couples on the show this Friday -- the winners get to adopt a real-live, pooping, crying baby. So, let me get this straight. You can't say "fuck," but you can broadcast a raffle for a human being? Snip from SJ Merc story:

"What's that? You say the program and host Barbara Walters have gone too far this time? What do you know about television? ABC knows a winner when it sees it and this is Nielsen gold, my friend. A reality show with a human life on the line -- all disguised as news programming.

Let the other shows have half-naked people betraying each other on a deserted island. Give them the half-naked people eating buckets of bug eyes. And the half-naked people putting up with Donald Trump. And the half-naked people trying to get other half-naked people to marry them."

Link to SJ Merc story, Link to NY Post story (Thanks to several BB readers who pointed to this, including Iain Cooper)

UPDATE: Stop press! The real scandal here? Celebrity spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller is outraged at news of the 20/20 baby giveaway episode. He's planning legal action, and claims he owns a worldwide patent on any reality TV show that involves winning a baby. "I will speak to my patent attorney," says Geller, "I own the idea." Whatever, dear BoingBoing readers, but let me set the record straight: I own the patent on any reality-TV show involving live mudwrestling smackdowns between Uri Geller and Barbara Walters, and I will personally bend the spoon of anyone who forgets it. Link to Reuters story.

UPDATE 2: BoingBoing reader Kevin T. Keith says: "As a matter of fact, Uri Geller does hold a patent for a reality TV show that involves competing to adopt a baby. You can view the patent by going to the Patent and Trademark Office's Applications search page here and entering the phrase "in/geller-uri" (without quotation marks) in the large search window. The world gets weirder and weirder."

UPDATE 3: BoingBoing reader Marc Ascolese, who is a patent attorney, says -- more or less -- not so fast, mister spoonbender:

The link included above takes you to the search site for published U.S. patent applications (not issued patents). This does not mean that a U.S. Patent has been granted. Under certain circumstances, the USPTO requires applications to be published. In fact, if you go here, and enter the application number for Geller's patent application (09/757609) you can see some current status information. Basically, the application has not been examined yet. Because this application has been classified in U.S. Class 705, we can expect that it will be examined pretty rigorously. It may be a long time before Geller has an issued U.S. Patent he can enforce. Class 705 is where most "business method" type applications end up. For more about that, look here. Who said being a patent attorney was dull!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:01:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Look like a film noir babe

Online clothing boutique Danger Dame offers some super-cool retro styles for wannabe vixens. Lace up, slink over to a barstool, and pretend you're in a Raymond Chandler novel with a tragic ending.
Link to Danger Dame shop. See also this lush new Taschen book, FILM NOIR.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:01:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mathematical patterns in African-American hairstyles

What is the mathematical, fractal relationship between shapes found in beehive honeycombs, a pineapple, tesselating hexagons, and African-American hair braiding? Dr. Gloria Gilmer, founding president of the International Study Group on Ethnomathematics, is glad you asked.
Link (Thanks, Siege)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:00:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hoax --> Operation Take one for the Country

Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post, BoingBoing reader buddha says:

Single Southern Guy calls out the Operation Take One For The Country crew, claiming the whole thing is a hoax. Why? The radio station, DJs, and broadcast company involved in the interview transcribed on the OTOFTC site don't exist.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:00:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moblog image import app

BoingBoing reader Joshua says:

A few weeks ago, I read the post you guys made about MoblogUK, a creative commons licensed alternative to TextAmerica. I'd been searching for an alternative for awhile, so I was pretty excited to find it. After switching I wanted a way to get my images from TextAmerica over to the new site at MoblogUK, so I wrote this app to make the process easy. Besides parsing a TextAmerica moblog and sending the entries off to MoblogUK it can also save your TextAmerica entries locally in an XML/XSL format...in case you ever want to do that for some reason!

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:00:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Life is tough for game developers, says study

It looks like it's all work and no play for game developers. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has a white paper titled "Quality of Life in the Game Industry: Challenges and Best Practices." Some of the findings:

Crunch time is omnipresent, during which respondents work 65 to 80 hours a week.

The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours 13% of the time.

Overtime is often uncompensated.

Spouses are likely to respond that "You work too much..." (61.5%); "You are always stressed out." (43.5%); "You don't make enough money." (35.6%)

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:47:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free WiFi in the National Mall

Open Park is a community wireless group that is bringing free, open WiFi to the National Mall in DC, so that the next time you find yourself on the steps of the Supreme Court -- or wandering a Smithsonian building -- you can get online. Link (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:45:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bad film physics to teach good real physics

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is a very good physics primer in the guise of a very funny critique of the ways that Hollywood bends the laws of physics when it makes movies.

Saying that shards of broken glass are razor sharp is an understatement. A shattered window contains thousands of incredibly sharp edges and dagger-like points. It takes almost no force for one of these points or edges to cause a laceration. However, people in movies routinely jump through plate glass windows without receiving a single scratch.

Broken glass has at least two mechanisms for slashing a person diving through a window: its weight and its inertia. First, large heavy shards of glass can fall like guillotines, slicing off body parts. Second, when a person jumps or, even worse, drives a motorcycle through a window, the shards of glass tend to stay in place due to their inertia. The only way to move them is to apply a force. If the person's body provides this force by pushing on the edge of a piece of glass, it can slice right through clothing, skin, and flesh. In the real world, jumping or driving through a plate glass window would be suicidal.

There are individuals who have accidentally fallen through windows without sustaining serious injuries. There are also people who have survived the Ebola virus. However, in both cases the odds are not particularly good.

Link (Thanks, Peter!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:43:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Baen ebooks CDs as .torrents

Baen Books is a successful science fiction publisher that releases a lot of its titles as non-DRM text/html files via its website and on CDROMs bound into its book. Now, all six of the Baen CDs, representing a substantial library of science fiction, are available as Bit Torrent files, to be gang-downloaded to all comers at speed. Link (Thanks, Robotech Master!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:40:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoshopped dream houses

Lots of tasty entries into this Worth1000 photoshopping contest to design a fantastical dream house. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:21:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grip-tape for your mouse

Mousegrips are peel-and-stick rubberized decals that you can attach to your mouse to absorb hand-goo, sweat and burger king. When Apple switched from the old, integrated-handle "toilet seat" iBooks to the white, smooth, seamless EZ-fumble models, I went out and bought a bunch of crazy skateboard liners and cut-and-pasted them onto the chassis to give my clumsiness a fighting chance against the iBooks' inherent fragility. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:19:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Flickr features

Flickr, the image-sharing social software app, has rolled out a bunch of new features, including this one, which does very intuitive group-based access-control to files:

Photostreams are a new way to share your photos on Flickr, on simple webpages where you control who sees what. All the photos you upload automatically go into your Photostream, but different viewers see different images, depending on their relationship to you.

How does it work?

* As always, you can make photos public or private. You can also restrict the viewing to people who you have tagged with a specific relationship ("only show this to friends or better").
* Public photos appear to everyone viewing your Photostream, but you can exclude any public photo if you'd like.
* You can also see the collected streams of your friends' photos at http://flickr.com/photos/friends/, and the latest public photos on Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:51:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Wi-Fi positioning system

Here's an article I wrote for TheFeature about Quarterscope's interesting Wi-Fi technology that could enhance or replace GPS in some instances. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:35:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyright, Technology, and The New Surveillance

Sonia Katyal of Fordham Law School has written a thought-provoking paper on the relationship between copyright enforcement and privacy in the digital age. Some very interesting observations here on the increasingly invasive methods used by rightsholders to control how intellectual property is accessed and shared. Excerpt:

A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously.

This paradox, in turn, leads to the tension between privacy and intellectual property. Both areas of law face significant challenges because of technology's ever-expanding pace of development. Yet courts often exacerbate these challenges by sacrificing one area of law for the other, by eroding principles of informational privacy for the sake of unlimited control over intellectual property. Laws developed to address the problem of online piracy - in particular, the DMCA - have been unwittingly misplaced, inviting intellectual property owners to create private systems of copyright monitoring that I refer to as piracy surveillance. Piracy surveillance comprises extrajudicial methods of copyright enforcement that detect, deter, and control acts of consumer infringement.

Ms. Katyal's paper was selected as the winning entry for the 2004 Yale Law School Cybercrime and Digital Law Enforcement Conference writing competition. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:38:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nekkid Klingon babes

Fleshbot says:

Let it be noted that this is the first, last, and only piece of "Star Trek"-inspired porn we will ever feature here on Fleshbot; we're not big science fiction fans, but these sexy morph chicks were just too hot to pass up.

Naked Klingon Women (Geocities site - thanks Jay). See also: NudeTrek.com (AVS protected archive of alt.binaries.startrek.adult)

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:32:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi + planes = warflying

BoingBoing pal, wireless ubergeek, and SoCalWug co-founder Mike Outmesguine says:

I went warflying yesterday with folks from DailyWireless.com, TomsHardware.com, HighspeedLA.com, and CNN. We took off on parallel runways and flew in formation throughout the flight. While the planes were next to each other, we set up an in-flight wireless network and did a videoconferencing session from plane-to-plane. WiFi in the sky! Additionally, we performed a wireless network survey during the flight and found about 4000 access points.

link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:21:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Making life

The current issue of Scientific American features a mind-blowing article by W. Wayt Gibbs about "synthetic biology," the effort to create designer organisms from the bottom up:

"This nascent field has three major goals: One, learn about life by building it, rather than by tearing it apart. Two, make genetic engineering worthy of its name--a discipline that continuously improves by standardizing its previous creations and recombining them to make new and more sophisticated systems. And three, stretch the boundaries of life and of machines until the two overlap to yield truly programmable organisms. Already TNT-detecting and artemisinin-producing microbes seem within reach. The current prototypes are relatively primitive, but the vision is undeniably grand: think of it as Life, version 2.0."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:56:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Self-propelled swarming robot traffic cones: nuff sed.

Self-propelled swarming robot traffic cones: nuff sed.

The new road markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a bid to help reduce the $100 billion per year that the Department of Transportation estimates is lost to the US economy through accidents and delays caused by highway lane closures.

The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones. Farritor says they can open and close traffic lanes faster and more safely than humans.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

$10,000 1965 "kitchen computer"

Mitch sez, "Another Jetsonian Relic: A $10K kitchen computer ca. 1965. Notice the orange-and-black Star Trek: TOS design." Link (Thanks, Mitch!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:24:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Killer noise-cancelling headset designed for NYSE trading-floor

The Boom is a noise-reducing headset designed for use on the NYSE trading floor that is said to be capable of delivering comprehensible speech even in the noisiest of environments. I'm ditching my landline this month in favour of a VoIP soft-phone on my PowerBook, so it's serendipity that I came across this headset today. Link (via Cool Tools)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:04:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bootable CD turns 486s into meshing WiFi routers

Glenn Fleishmann has written a blog entry about an amazing new WiFi project at Champaign-Urbana, to create a bootable disk image that turns its host machines into meshing wireless repeaters.

The CUWiN project wants to allow self-forming, noncentralized, mesh-based Wi-Fi networks using standard, old PCs with no configuration. Slightly more advanced units could be ruggedized boxes using Compact Flash, but the basic unit would be a 486 or later PC with a bootable CD-ROM or bootable floppy that bootstraps a CD-ROM. Once booted, a unit finds other similar units without any other configuration or control and forms a mesh.

"We've been developing software now since about 2000, and our idea is to build software that is super user friendly, super easy for someone who doesn't understand the nuances of the technology or community wireless networking to set up their own system," said Meinrath. It's an attempt to enable community networking to spread beyond the folks who are self-starters.

Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:57:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AdBusters new sneaker to compete toe-to-toe with Nikes

AdBusters has created their own brand of Converse-like sneakers, made by unionized workers. The launch of "Black Spot" sneakers is accompanied by a "subvertising" campaign aimed at humiliating Phil Knight and the Nike corporation. Link (Thanks, Seamus!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:50:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Knudsen's Dairy cookbook dissected

James Lileks is in rare form today as he dissects the recipes to be had in a vintage Knudsen's Dairy cookbook.

Chicken Curry Salad. The recipe says “toss lightly,” but I suppose that depends on how much you eat and how bad the cramps get. The item in the middle is the Holiday Salad, although which holiday is best celebrated with tumor-studded Bruise Cake I’m not entirely certain. The item on the bottom is – well, steel yourself.

Corned Beef Salad Loaf.

I kid you not.

Meat Jell-O.

Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:44:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

James Patrick Kelly's wonderful sf stories online as free audiobooks

James Patrick Kelly, my friend and mentor, is one of the finest short story writers working in science fiction today. His stories are like perfect little gems, and his advice on story-writing was the most important artistic advice I've ever received.

Which is a preamble to some of the best news I've ever imparted: Jim Kelly is releasing audiobooks of his stories on teh net under a Creative Commons license. I know what I'm gonna be listening to before bed and on the tube this month. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:36:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Not your father's CIA

"When people think of the CIA, they think of people lurking around in trenchcoats, sending messages in code, and using cool tools to do their job. Well, to some extent that's true, but it's not the whole story." For the rest, visit the Central Intelligence Agency Homepage for Kids! Link (Thanks, Dr. Maz!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:40:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Attack of the giant snails

Federal health officials are hunting down these Giant African Land Snails that can transmit meningitis, destroy plants, are extremely fruitful and multiplicitous, according to an AP report:

"In 1966, a Miami boy smuggled three Giant African Land Snails into the country. His grandmother eventually released them into a garden, and in seven years there were more than 18,000 of them. The eradication program took 10 years, according to the USDA."

Recently, a parent donated several of the beasties to a Wisconsin school. The US Department of Agriculture was called in after teachers learned that their latest classroom pets were illegal aliens. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:58:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese gamer suing MMO company over artifact duplication dispute

A Chinese gamer who bought a sword that was deleted by the game-host because it had been duplicated by the seller is suing the game-host to reinstate his sword and apologise. As Terra Nova's Dan Hunter says, "Virtual property, duping, and fraud. Heaven."

After many hours of playing the game, he earned 140 million units of game money, which he spent buying a powerful sword from another player through an online trading platform provided by the operator in November.

On November 16, he found the sword had been deleted from his account. After contacting Optisp several times, he was told that the sword was deleted because it was illegally duplicated.

He is asking the court to order Optisp to give back his sword, which he estimates is worth 1,000 yuan (US$120) in real money, and apologize.

Link (via Terra Nova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:15:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social history of "operation take one for the country"

Following up on this post about an online movement of women who offer free casual sex to Iraq-bound soldiers, BoingBoing reader James Stanek says:

America has a long standing tradition of this sort of behavior, going at least as far back as WWII. Although the term "Charity Girl" is/was generally used in reference to women who had sex for gifts and/or fun, its also used in a more specific way. I found this via a9.com in "No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease' by Allan M. Brandt (p. 81):

Physicians and social workers frequently commented that the professional prostitute had given way to the so-called "patriotic prostitute" and "charity girl." As one CTCA social worker wrote: 'The peculiar charm and glamour which surrounds the man in uniform causes an unusual type of prostitute to spring up in time of war. Girls idealize the soldier and many really feel that nothing is wrong when done for him. One such girl said she had never sold herself to a civilian but felt she was doing her bit when she had been with eight soldiers in a night.' The "girl problem," as it became popularly known, seemed even more ominous to reformers than commercialized vice because it so often included youngsters from respectable, middle-class backgrounds. "Girls apparently of good families drive up in their cars and invite the soldiers who happen to be along the roadside near the camp to come to supper to a roadhouse or the nearest city," explained Dr. Jennie H. Harris. "The results are the usual ones."

I'm not a particular expert or even particularly interested in this field, its just that I remember reading about this in college and it always stuck with me as one of those "Aha" moments where you realize references to the "good old days" should be treated with large skepticism. My college read was "Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America" by John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman (p. 260-261):

The response of moral reformers points to the changes that had occurred since the previous generation. Whereas those of the First World War focused on the dangers of prostitution, by the 1940s it was the behavior of "amateur girls"--popularly known as khaki-wackies, victory girls, and good-time Charlottes--that concerned moralists.

Update: Boingboing reader Abe says, "takeoneforthecountry.com is down, boingboinged perhaps. But it appears to be mirrored at takeoneforthecountry.org and takeoneforthecountry.net"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:00:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social Network Spam = SNAM

Snagged from Michael Tchong's "Trendsetters" newsletter:

Social networks have spawned a new form of spam that uses the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) message feature frequently found in this new genre of networks. Google's Orkut, a network of some 200,000 members, offers the ability to send messages to FOAFs. FOAF messages often contain conference promotions or job postings that, while low in volume, will one day require action on the part of network managers.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:30:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moblogachella

Going to the Coachella music festival in the Southern California desert this weekend? I hate you, because you are going to see Radiohead, and I, who lack tickets, am not. Anyway -- bring sunscreen. Bring water. Bring your phonecam. Mark Brown of buzznet says:

Buzznet will be hosting a Coachella Festival moblog that anyone can contribute to from the Polo Fields during this weekend's music & art festival. As always, it is easy to contribute just email photos and blog text to 'coachella@buzznet.com'. As long as everyone's cellphones work out there, this will be a very successful event. Last year AT&T worked fine for me. But i've heard that the networks get *very* busy late in the day. If only they had wi-fi too...

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:28:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Basecamp: project-management web-app from 37Signals

37Signals, a fantastic web-dev company, has produced a new project-management app called Basecamp that looks like a winner. Not only is it extremely pretty and easy-to-follow -- I'd expect no less from the usability wonks at 37Signals -- but it's also open: information flows out of the app as RSS and can be bulk-exported in XML, so none of your precious project-management material becomes a lever to lock you into paying the (surprisingly reasonable) monthly rates.

Also nice: the option for iChatAV-based support, and 30 day free trials.

Finally, there's a fit and finish here that makes it feel like something much more stable than a just-launched product, for example, Basecamp can be skinned to look like your internal website and you can reference it with custom URLs that don't contain any hint that your project is being hosted anywhere but your own site: as the marketing bumpf points out, this is the kind of thing that can give you appearance of really intimidating savviness to your clients. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brit Airways' honorifics kick United's ass

Thomas sez, "Thought United Airlines covered every possible title? Not a chance. British Airways covers absolutely everything including -- I kid you not -- 'His Holiness' and 'Her Majesty'. Because I'm sure the Pope needs air miles."

Mr Mrs Ms Miss Dr Herr Monsieur Hr Frau A V M Admiraal Admiral Air Cdre Air Commodore Air Marshal Air Vice Marshal Alderman Alhaji Ambassador Baron Barones Brig Brig Gen Brig General Brigadier Brigadier General Brother Canon Capt Captain Cardinal Cdr Chief Cik Cmdr Col Col Dr Colonel Commandant Commander Commissioner Commodore Comte Comtessa Congressman Conseiller Consul Conte Contessa Corporal Councillor Count Countess Crown Prince Crown Princess Dame Datin Dato Datuk Datuk Seri Deacon Deaconess Dean Dhr Dipl Ing Doctor Dott Dott sa Dr Dr Ing Dra Drs Embajador Embajadora En Encik Eng Eur Ing Exma Sra Exmo Sr F O Father First Lieutient First Officer Flt Lieut Flying Officer Fr Frau Fraulein Fru Gen Generaal General Governor Graaf Gravin Group Captain Grp Capt H E Dr H H H M H R H Hajah Haji Hajim Her Highness Her Majesty Herr High Chief His Highness His Holiness His Majesty Hon Hr Hra Ing Ir Jonkheer Judge Justice Khun Ying Kolonel Lady Lcda Lic Lieut Lieut Cdr Lieut Col Lieut Gen Lord M M L M R Madame Mademoiselle Maj Gen Major Master Mevrouw Miss Mlle Mme Monsieur Monsignor Mr Mrs Ms Mstr Nti Pastor President Prince Princess Princesse Prinses Prof Prof Dr Prof Sir Professor Puan Puan Sri Rabbi Rear Admiral Rev Rev Canon Rev Dr Rev Mother Reverend Rva Senator Sergeant Sheikh Sheikha Sig Sig na Sig ra Sir Sister Sqn Ldr Sr Sr D Sra Srta Sultan Tan Sri Tan Sri Dato Tengku Teuku Than Puying The Hon Dr The Hon Justice The Hon Miss The Hon Mr The Hon Mrs The Hon Ms The Hon Sir The Very Rev Toh Puan Tun Vice Admiral Viscount Viscountess Wg Cdr

Link (Thanks, Thomas!) Update: Johannes points out a glaring omission here: in German, someone with multiple PhDs goes by Doktor Doktor Doktor (und zo weiter), abbreviated DDDDr -- how does BA expect to attract hyper-educated Germanic people without this honorific in its otherwise exhaustive list?

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Voyeuristic vintage snapshots of Disneyland

Disneyland is one of the most-photographed piecces of real-estate in the world. Since 1955, visitors to the park have been exhaustively documenting it with photos and slides. Now, the Disnephiles of The Imaginary World have assembled a "virtual tour" made up of scans of slides shot at Disneyland in the 1950s and 1960s. This combines the thrill of fanboy history with the voyeurism of going through family photo albums found at thrift shops, and just about made my day. Link (Thanks, Hork!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:04:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

United Airlines' honorific overload

United Airlines' Mileage Plus signup form has an unbelieveable array of options for "Title," including "Swami" and "Cantor."

Mr Ms Mrs Miss Dr 1sgt 1st Lt 2nd Lt Adm Baron Baroness Bishop Brig Gen Brother Cantor Capt Cardinal Cmdr Cmst Col Count Countess Cpl Cpo Dean Duchess Duke Elder Ens Father Fleet Adm General Governor Gysgt Hon Imam Judge Lady Lcpl Lord Lt Lt Cmdr Lt Col Lt Gen Lt Jg Ma Major Major Gen Mcpo Mgysgt Minister Monsignor Most Rev Mother Msgt Mstr Pastor Petty Off Pfc Po1 Po2 Po3 President Prince Prof Pvt Rabbi Rear Adm Rev Right Rev Scpo Senator Sfc Sgt Sgtmaj Sir Sister Smn Smn1 Smst Sp4 Sp5 Sp6 Sr Sra Srta Ssgt Swami Tech Sgt Very Rev Vice Adm

Link (Thanks, Ken!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:54:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Major new Blosxom version in alpha

Rael Dornfest has come up from air after a prodigious bout of writing and editing, and promptly produced an alpha of the next major rev of his brilliant blogging tool, Blosxom:

It's been massively refactored, all but rewritten, object-oriented, and usable as a CGI script, module, or indeed subclassed. Oh, and I'm afraid it's grown a bit, now weighing in at a massive 15K (slightly less, actually) ;-)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tropical deepfreeze photoshopping contest

Worth1000's new photoshopping contest is live for voting. The theme is "Let it Snow: Snow scenes where you'd least expect them." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:47:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SF show photoshop mashups

This Fark photoshopping contest invites participants to mash up two or science fiction TV shows or movies. I love this one, as well as the Gerry Anderson/Trek classic one... Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:39:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

When booty calls: Free sex for Iraq-bound soldiers?

Just when you thought war couldn't get any weirder, you stumble accross a text ad on Wonkette for an "online movement" known as Operation Take One For The Country. Let's just hope they're packing condoms.

Mission Statement: To discretely provide US troops shipping out overseas with the most sensually pleasing departure possible.

OTOFTC is a movement of like-minded women (women predominantly as of right now) who have covertly organized into groups to frequent eating and drinking establishments near armed service bases where troops are preparing to ship out overseas, and take one for the country, so to speak. We are a virtual organization and have no official headquarters or charter. We believe US service men and women deserve our support and we are willing to make caring choices about making them happy.

Kelly here! WOW!! - The site is finally up and running. I guess the time had to come. This site means this organization's existence is no longer covert, but remember, our missions should still be.

Link (via Fleshbot)

UPDATE: There's some interesting social-sexual history behind this story. A BoingBoing reader writes in with background on "charity girls" from earlier wars: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:56:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online t-shirt store: "we were gagged by Google"

Y-que, my favorite t-shirt store in glamorous Silverlake, LA, CA, claims to have been "gagged by Google." This is the online shop that makes all the "FREE [MISBEHAVING CELEBRITY NAME HERE]" t-shirts, and the TOTAL RETARD shirts bearing Arnold Schwarzenneger's smug mug. Free Y-Que!

From: Google:The following...items that must be removed from your site in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:

Recall Bush - White T-shirt (with radio control on head)
Dumb and Dumber White T-shirt - Bush and Blair: The Movie
You're Fired - George W. Bush White T-shirt
Dump Cheney White T-shirt - "Halliburton" tattooed across head
Miserable Failure T-shirt - George W. Bush
Kerry sucks (too) - T-shirt"

In order to stay in business and continue advertising on Google we are moving all of our political merchandise to a separate website located at: FashionCriminal.com. If you find any offensive or negative merchandise on this website, please contact us immediately at: billw@ekay.com and we will transfer the items to the other website asap.

I'd welcome a response from Google on this. Link to Y-Que home, Link to a gallery of the "banned," politically-oriented t-shirts. This isn't the first (or the last) AdWords-related conflict. In other news, I saw a beat-up art car driving down Sunset Boulevard today with "SWITCH LIARS IN 2004 || VOTE KERRY" painted on the side.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:38:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pizza delivery calls used to nab deadbeats

I love this: the state of Missouri is using pizza delivery lists to track down people that owe court-imposed fines.

David Coplen, the state office's budget director, said he discovered that pizza delivery lists are one of the best sources such companies use to locate people. "There are literally millions of dollars of uncollected fines, fees and court costs out there," Coplen said. [...] Databases compiled by private companies and government agencies are a key tool for firms such as ACS, Coplen said, and "one of the databases they find to be most helpful are pizza delivery databases." "When you call to order a pizza, you usually give them your correct name, your correct address and your correct phone number," he said.

Moral of the story: if you owe money to the court, use a pseudonym when ordering pizza. Link (Via IP)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:21:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wacky new dance craze: krumping

MTV dictates:

We've been deprived all these years. We've never seen Krusty the Clown popping his booty, Ronald McDonald never C-walked, and Bozo ... forget about it. He could probably barely do a jig, let alone shake his whole body like an enraged zombie from "28 Days Later."

Well, the dark ages are over. There's a group of California clowns doing the thang. We've gotten a potent dosage of clown dancing -- or krumping, as it's called -- in videos such as Missy Elliott's "I'm Really Hot" and the Black Eyed Peas "Hey Mama." Now the ringleader of the crunk circus act says the mainstream had better look out, because he's bringing more than balloons and giant shoes. The krumping era just may be upon us.

Link (Thanks, Mara!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:02:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hard disk heads can be polished with green tea

Green tea is an environmentally sound substitute for diamond polishing compound used in the preparation of super-smooth hard-disk read-write heads.

John Lombardi, at Ventana Research based in Tuscon, Arizona in the US, suspected that green tea might also provide be an effective compound for polishing magnetic read-write heads. This was because tannin, a chemical that gives tea and coffee a bitter taste, binds to certain ceramic and metal materials. It is this quality that causes it to stain teapots and mugs...

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:55:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wok-tobogganing

Chiseen -- Cantonese for "crazy" -- is a Chinese sport in which kids in giant woks toboggan down angled moving sidewalks at night. Video here: Link Alternate QuickTime Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:14:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microchip detects traces of 33 different species of animals in food

"The presence of unwanted or unknown animal species in food, can have a range of effects from benign to deathly serious and is of great concern for public health, economic, religious and legal reasons. Manufacturers and consumers alike have been unable to examine the composition of food at a molecular level. However, for the first time, the bioMérieux FoodExpert-ID Array is being used to detect DNA sequences specific to an animal, allowing species composition to be determined, safeguarding the purity and authenticity of food products." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:21:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pixelpalooza's 2004 icon design winners

Here are the winners of the Iconfactory's Pixelpalooza competition. Link (Thanks Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:13:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nifty Bluetooth phone application for OS X

BluePhoneMenu is a menu bar icon that displays Caller ID for your Bluetooth phone, as well as the phone's signal strength and battery power. Link    

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:49:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of Bush using unsuspecting woman as human Kleenex

Here's an astounding video clip that clearly shows President Bush wiping his eyeglasses on an unwitting woman's clothing during his appearance on The David Letterman Show.

How would you feel about a person who thinks it is okay to grab your shirt and use it clean their eyeglasses? That's how arrogant our President is. During a commercial break on the David Letterman show, producer Maria Pope was on stage and discussing something with Letterman, and while she was standing there in front of Bush, George leaned forward, grabbed the back of her sweater and used it to clean his glasses.

Link (Via Horkulated)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:17:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secret Service interrogate 15-year-old for making forbidden art

A teenager drew some anti-war posters that were critical of Bush's policies, and his art teacher alerted school administrators, who in turn called the police. The cops went to the feds, and the Secret Service questioned the boy about his art.

The drawing that drew the most attention showed a man in what appeared to be Middle Eastern-style clothing, holding a rifle. He also was holding a stick with the oversize head of President Bush on it. The student said the head was enlarged because it was intended to be an effigy, Cravens said. The caption called for an end to the war in Iraq.

Link (Via IP)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:57:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 26, 2004

Sweet BBQ

The sun is out and the birds are singing and all my neighbors are roasting flesh on the communal patio, so I've been thinking about buying a BBQ. I think I just found it: the futuristic, portable Q:

Looking like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a jet engine, the Q BBQ can be carried around like a briefcase, but opens up Transformer-style to become a stylish, stand-alone, gas-powered grill. Crafted in durable steel, the Q uses inexpensive little propane tanks that fit right inside the grill. You'll get hours of cooking time from just one tank! It also has dual gas controls with a full range of temperatures, so you can sear burgers on one side of the grill and gently toast buns on the other, just by adjusting the flame.

Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:45:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Size, not weight, is the key factor in shipping logistics

The Royal Mail, which currently prices shipping on weight, is petitioning to change its pricing to be based on size -- apparently, size is the most important determinant of the actual cost of shipping goods.

Royal Mail's pricing structure has been in place for decades, and was inherited from a time when mail was sorted by hand...

Mr Dales said some customers would experience price rises and other price cuts, but the vast majority -- 74% -- would be unaffected by the proposed changes.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:38:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Morse cellphone

This Morse phone is the teaser for a Worth1000 photoshopping contest called "Vintage Products." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Legoland deploys WiFi kiddee-trackers

The Legoland theme park has depoloyed tracker bracelets for kiddees based on WiFi tracking tag from Bluesoft.

Available for rent in the Information Office, a Kidspotter ensures that parents can always find their children whenever necessary. On entering the park, the wristband is placed on the child's arm. If parents lose sight of their child, they can send an SMS message to the Kidspotter system during their entire visit. They will then automatically receive a return message stating the name of the park area and the map coordinate of their child's position in the park. On their special Kidspotter map of the park, parents can easily see where to find their child. The Kidspotter kit consists of a small wristband with a tiny sender, plus a special Kidspotter map of the park.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:22:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanoscale spider-feet point the way to extreme stickiness

A Swiss/German research team have published an article in Smart Materials and Structures analyzing the feet of jumping spiders. These feet covered in nanoscale fibers depending from thicker hairs, and the overall bundle is small enough that the van de Waals force -- "an interesting form of adhesion is that, unlike many glues, the surrounding environment does not affect it" -- creates a very high degree of waterproof, grease-proof, dirt-proof stickiness.

"We found out that when all 600,000 tips are in contact with an underlying surface the spider can produce an adhesive force of 170 times its own weight. That's like Spiderman clinging to the flat surface of a window on a building by his fingertips and toes only, whilst rescuing 170 adults who are hanging on to his back!"

...The total van der Waals force on the spider's feet is very strong, but it is the sum of many very small forces on each molecule. The researchers believe the spider lifts its leg so that the setules are lifted successively, not all at once, and it does not need to be very strong to do this. All you would have to do to lift a future kind of Post-it® note is peel it off slowly.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boomboxes of yesteryear

Once upon a time, there were no iPods. This online museum offers images of boomboxes from the 1970s and '80s. A look back at music technology's humble roots, "when the idea of a personal stereo experience was a bit of a novelty." Serving suggestion: Crank up the volume on your PC and listen to this totally free teaser clip of "White Lines" by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel while you're browsing these amazing images of old-school funk-delivery systems. Fun, baby.
Link (Thanks, asthmatic)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:29:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What's on John Lennon's iPod?

Boing Boing guestbar alum Todd Lappin sez: "Sort of.  This is an interesting tale of what might've been."

A long lost jukebox owned by John Lennon has revealed that, when it came to musical inspiration, even the Beatles got by with a little help from their friends.

The 15 kg [Swiss-made KB Discomatic]  portable jukebox, owned by Lennon around 40 years ago, was bought by the late Bristol music promoter John Midwinter for just £2,500 at a Christie's sale of Beatles memorabilia in 1989. He then spent years restoring it to working order and researching its 41 discs. Listed in Lennon's handwriting, they are effectively the Desert Island Discs which helped shape his musical genius.

[...]

Artists featured on the jukebox include the Animals, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson and Gene Vincent. There are no Beatles records and only one sung by a woman, Fontella Bass's 'Rescue Me'. In Lennon's rough and ready scrawl, with gaps and crossings out, The Lovin' Spoonful become 'The Lovin's Spoonfuls' and Otis Redding is 'Ottis Redding'.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:31:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tales of a Tron Tailor

Earlier this month, Cory blogged one man's amazingly detailed reproduction of a Tron costume. Now, our pal Gabe ups the ante with a pointer to Jay Maynard's masterwork. Link

Update: Jay Maynard "on being an Internet phenomenon." Link (Thanks, George!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:55:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Wars Kid versus Kill Bill

This is the best internet video mashup evar: the Star Wars Kid (a net-icon famous for having captured his Darth Maul light-staff fights on video, thus becoming the subject of Internet mockery, which led to a really bogus lawsuit) matted extremely well into the Kill Bill trailer. I am in awe of the video effects wizardry here. 2.2MB WMV Link Alternate Link Alternate Link 2 Alternate Link 3 Alternate Link 4 (via Little Fucking Ray of Sunshine)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:08:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Shirley comments on Scientific American article about "Tyranny of Choice"

Writer John Shirley has some interesting things to say about a new Scientific American article called "Tyranny of Choice" (paid subscription required to read article, you can read more about the article on Alternet.)

They suggest there are two basic types of choosers, Maximizers and Satisficers. The former aim to make the best possible choice in a near obsessive way, the latter tend to settle for 'good enough'. Maximizers spend a long time shopping, can't make up their minds what to buy for a gift, channel surf like a cokehead searching through the rug for fallen powder...

Maximizers in particular are prone to unhappiness in our society--there are too many choices, just too damn much input in general, and they can't deal with it. Satisficers are having a hard time too; they tend to go to lower stress options--and those are harder to find. But they're less likely to be depressed and suicidal.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:55:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Ramones documentary you may never get to see

The Ramones documentary, End of the Century, has won critical acclaim at every festival and screening it played at. But the two nearly bankrupt filmmakers who made it are having a hard time getting sign off from the surviving Ramones.

Even when the movie was shown at Slamdance, the filmmakers had not obtained permission to use archival concert footage and music from the Ramones and other bands. They had also never gotten the Ramones to sign releases for their interviews, which took more than three years to conduct. ... The film's release has been further complicated by the filmmakers' financial situation. By the time the film was presented at Slamdance, Mr. Gramaglia and his brother, John, a producer, had amassed a debt of about $65,000 in production expenses. They owed Chinagraph, an editing house, another $150,000 and they estimated they would have to spend several hundred thousand dollars more to secure the rights to music and concert footage.

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:10:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Webby Award nominees

The nominees for the 2004 Webby Awards have been announced. I'm the "chair" of the Weird category and Mark and former guestblogger Karen Marcelo are two of the judges. Quite a few of the sites will be familiar to regular Boing Boing readers. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:00:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Many Worlds theory invalidated

Kathryn Cramer breaks the story on a to-be-presented Harvard talk on an experiment that appears to invalidate both the "Many Worlds" and "Copenhagen" theories of quantum mechanics. Kathryn is the daughter of John Cramer, a physicist whose "Transactional Interpretetation" hypothesis is the only one left intact by the experiment's findings.

It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment, because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism, then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the absence of interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole or the other.

Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secrets of the music biz

After an employee of Virgin's "indy" label V2 quit last week, he sent a great poison pen open letter to a bunch of music industry types:

"So, before i got let go, we had our weekly marketing meeting yesterday. They brought in a psychic person and everyone joined hands and did a seance... I'm not kidding, even if I wasn't fired I wanted to quit on the spot."

Link (via Gawker)
Update: Boing Boing reader Don Richards-Boeff points us to a Rolling Stone article revealing that the email above is a marketing hoax. Actually though, the whole truth though is stranger than the fiction the publicity firm created. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:51:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Game Boy Advance overclockers

These guys are overclocking the GameBoy Advance so that it can run fast enough to act as a SuperNES emulator:

When I saw loopy had released a SNES emulator I thought it was great! There were some limitations because of GBA processing speed, so we came up with a design to successfully overclock the GBA that is compatible with flash carts (so far - read on). We've already sent a prototype of our design for loopy to test with and he has had success with his Flash Advance Turbo 128, and we have successfully tested on our Flash2Advance 256. Unfortunately, though, it looks like different brands of Flash carts are reacting slightly differently to the Acceleration, so this is where we want to ask the community for their help. We want to test with all flash cart brands out there so we can finalize our design to be compatible with as many carts as possible.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA's noise-spoofs turned into noise-rock

Claire Chanel, the person behind the Jay-Z Construction Set, has decided to net.judo-ify the RIAA's spoof tracks, random noise disguised as top-40 singles which it promulgates on the P2P netowrks.

As a follow-up to our last project, the Jay-Z Construction Set, Scary Sherman and I decided to take a fair & balanced route by highlighting one of the positive moves made recently by music industry leaders.

The RIAA-Mix Vol.1 is a compilation of the hottest underground remixes of top40 hit tracks produced by the upcoming talent at Overpeer. These homages to 20th century noise artists and avant composers pull a frightening bait and switch on listeners veering wildly from recognizable pop hooks to jarring digital distortion.

Available at riaamix.com as downloadable mp3s, streaming flash audio, or on a compact disc, we're hoping our compilation can help support the arrival of challenging new music to mainstream exposure.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Erotic photo gallery "Silver," by Siege

Nerve.com just published a new gallery of work by Brooklyn-based erotic photographer Siege. I wrote the intro. Fleshbot says the images "combine filters and projections to stunning effect," and offers a free sneak preview, but the complete Nerve gallery requires a paid subscription. Neither are work-safe.
Link to Nerve.com gallery.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:08:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian Greens building election platform via open wiki

Forget Presidential blogs. The Green Party of Canada is thinking way outside the blog: it's assembling its party platform for the next fedeal election via a public wiki. Link (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:58:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Random comics

Earlier this month, we posted Monochrom's call-for-submissions for jpegs of random punchline-text from comic strips. Now, Monochrom brings us the outcome: a web page werein a single-frame comic and a punchine are combined at random. The results are funny-esque and very weird. Reload often. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:54:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Play iTunes tracks without restrictions under Windows

Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen has released a new anti-DRM tool called DeDRMS, which enables unrestricted playback of iTunes Music Store tracks under Windows. Andrew is hosting a compiled binary and the source on the San Francisco State University server. Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:50:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Retro-repro kitchen appliances

Elmira Stove Works makes and sells repro stoves and fridges styled to look like 1850s and 1950s kitchen appliances. Link (via Pirotcar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:41:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 25, 2004

Corn syrup: the sticky kiiller

Atkinsians know that the devil has a name and that it is High Fructose Coorn Syrup, Elevator of Insulin and Most High Gycemic. It's validating, therefore, to see some sciency-type news about how bad corn syrup is for us, how it's creating a nation of diabetics, and how it accounts for 10 percent of the average American's daily calorie intake. Yow.

"This shows the increase in the past 20 years is almost exclusively carbohydrates and certainly corn syrup consumption has increased dramatically."

Gross said he was not "picking on the corn syrup industry," but added, "It is hard to ignore the fact that 20 percent of our carbohydrates are coming from corn syrup -- 10 percent of our total calories."

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:52:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Latte art, part two

Following up on this earlier Boingboing post, an anonymous reader points us to this cool news article about a guy in Australia who totally trumps all those sucka baristas still making wimpy little hearts and zigzags in the caffe lattes. He paints faces in foam. Each portrait only takes him about 30 seconds, so your drink doesn't go cold. Snip:

"When you pour the milk in and the cream hits, it's just like a blank canvas on which to paint," the 36-year old said. Mr Phillips and fiancee Bernadette Farrugia started Flavors of Lakhoum in Swan St five years ago and he dabbled with the idea while pouring coffee.

"Sometimes you see swirls and patterns when you're pouring the coffee in, and one day I was pouring it and I saw an eye appear," he said. "From there I just drew in a mouth and ears. I've been slowly practising since then, but have got pretty good in the last few months - every month I find ways to add more detail."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:58:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Archival Zen

prelinger archive
early new york films
british pathe
project gutenberg
beinecke rare book library
british library
internet archive
stockstock festival
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:02:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saudi Arabia and phonecams

The only Saudi blogger I know of, Alhamedi Alanezi, talks about phonecams and culture in his country. "When the Saudi people finally rise up in revolt and throw out the House of Saud," he says, " it won't be for democratic reform, and it won't be for an islamic republic. It'll be about mobile phones."
Link (Thanks, Mitchell)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:43:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Latte art

Cool blog about the designs baristas can make in the foamy milk that sits on top of your caffe latte. My favorite coffee hang in Los Angeles is Urth (even though I can never get a table), in part because their coffee is dark, sweet, earthy, and delicious -- and in part because the guys who make it draw little hearts and zigzags in the foam.
Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc!)

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

More on London Booted

Following up on this BoingBoing post about the bootleg Clash remix project "London Booted," Will says:

We featured a preview of London Booted in issue-zero of our bootleg newsletter, which you can find here if you're interested (it's down the bottom in the "Coming Soon" section). We're also planning a follow up for issue-two (out 29th April) where we'll be talking to the remixers involved and also they guy who organised the project (only subscribers to the mailing list will get this issue).

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:14:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 24, 2004

Open letter to crackhead

A San Francisco Craigslister has written an open letter to the crackhead who improvised a pipe from his motorcycle's sparkplugs:

On Wednesday morning I emerged from my girlfriend's building by U.N. Plaza to find that you had sawed the tops off both the sparkplugs on my motorcycle. At the time, I had no idea why anyone would do that. Other than the sparkplugs, the bike was untouched. Some kind of bizarre vandalism? A fraternity prank gone awry? I had no idea. All I knew is that I looked like a huge douchebag riding the Muni to work in a padded motorcycle jacket and helmet.

Because the bike was immobilized I got a $35 street sweeping ticket that night. Thursday I had it towed to the shop ($45) where they replaced the sparkplugs and the boots ($50 including labor). They explained to me that "people" - I use the term loosely here - like you break off the tops of spark plugs and use the porcelain tubes to smoke crack. As an engineer and former MacGyver fan, in a way I think this is kind of cool. But then I remember that I just paid $100 for YOUR crackpipes, and I get angry again.

Link (Thanks, brecht!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Low-carbers booted out of buffet for meat-centric consumption

A couple who were on a low-carb diet were ejected from a Utah all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant for eating too much meat.

"We've never claimed to be an all-you-can-eat establishment," said Johanson. "Our understanding is a buffet is just a style of eating."

The general manager was carving the meat, and became concerned about having enough for other patrons, Johanson said. So when Amaama went up for his 12th slice, the manager asked Amaama to stop.

Link (Thanks, George!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:50:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spanish translation and augmentation of Ebooks: Neither E nor Books

This is screamingly cool: I gave a talk at this year's Emerging Tech conference called Ebooks: Neither E nor Books and released the text into the public domain. Alas, the slides that accompanied the talk were full of copyrighted images that I was in no position to release into the public domain with the talk.

Now, Javier Candeira has taken the public domain text and translated it into Spanish, adding extensive footnotes. But his friend José Antonio Millán went one better -- several better, in fact -- he then used used my notes about the slides I'd used to "illuminate" the translation with clip art he discovered on the Net, and then went through the piece and added hyperlinks. My Spanish is wildly imperfect, but it's good enough to see that this is a good, thoughtful translation, and the illustrations and citations are tremendous. Link (Thanks (a lot!) Javier!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:37:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woody Woodpecker laugh-guy is dead

Harry Babbit, the voice of Woody Woodpecker's laugh in the Woody Woodpecker novelty song, is dead.

Dubbed "Handsome Harry" by Kyser, Babbitt sang on several hits, including "Three Little Fishies,""On A Slow Boat to China,""(Lights Out) 'Til Reveille,""He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings,""Jingle, Jangle, Jingle" and "The Umbrella Man."

Babbitt's high voice was later used on a solo recording of "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth," for which he included a lisp. He was even responsible for the laugh on "Woody Woodpecker," Kyser's 1948 hit novelty tune.

Link (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:35:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Obsessive spreadsheet community

Noting geeks' propensity for creating spreadsheets to track random crap ("number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss's mood"), Anil Dash proposes "ExcelPile" -- a place to put your obsessive spreadsheets. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:49:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

References in Kill Bill

Here's a pretty exhaustive-looking catalogue of film references in Tarantino's Kill Bill duology. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:46:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Questionnaire for mind-control perpetrators

Here's a questionnaire posted by a "mind control victim" (who believes there's a controlling microchip in his skull) addressed to "perpetrators" of "mind-control/electronic harassment." It stresses that this is an anonymous opportunity for mind-controller to come clean abotu their motives, with questions like, "Will you tell us why you are a harassment agent?", "Are you also controlled?" and "Are you in fear for your life?" Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:44:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 23, 2004

A New Pentagon Papers Case - Newspapers, Blogs and the Diebold/Jones Day Memos

Ernest Miller sez: Last Tuesday it was revealed that Diebold was informed by its lawyers that using uncertified e-voting software in California was probably illegal. Where did this information come from? Leaked legal memos from Diebold's law firm, Jones Day. Last Tuesday afternoon a judge ordered that all documents not already published on the internet be returned to Jones Day. But, if you can't stop newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers, why can you stop a newspaper from publishing memos dealing with important issues regarding voting equipment? Perhaps the lesson for newspapers is that if you think the public should be informed, publish as much as possible and don't try to hold back information for 'exclusives.'" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:29:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jetsonian relic: the Ready Lady Chair

Dan sez: "This chair is straight out of a "house of the future" cartoon. It is upholstered in a silky beige vinyl and has a Velcro sealed back flap that opens to reveal a fold-out ironing board, an iron, and a GE hair dryer (the kind with the bag that you put over your head - and the bag is connected by a plastic tube to the hair dryer). There is a label on the inside of the back flap identifying the chair as being a "Ready Lady Chair" made by Castro Convertibles." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:20:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mystery meat haute cuisine

Slate reviews The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, a trendy new English cookbook devoted to the preparation of offcuts, snouts, rectii, marrow, and bladders of all description.

One reason seems to be the frisson of naughtiness associated with eating such things. Due to the crackdown on the consumption of various meat byproducts in a post-mad cow U.K., lambs' brains are still illegal in England. (But this hasn't stopped Henderson from jotting down a few recipes, "so that when lamb's brain is freed from its sentence we shall be ready to celebrate its liberty.") Wondering about the legality of lambs' brains—given that I'd eaten them, or at any rate trace quantities of them, at Babbo—I went to Ottomanelli's butcher shop in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Frank Ottomanelli told me that lambs' brains are legal in America. "What happens is you buy the whole head, and then I'll get the brains out for you, as a courtesy," he smiled. I ran through a list of other Henderson ingredients I was curious about: pig's head? pig's spleen? pig's feet? "The only thing on the pig that we don't have is the squeal," Frank said. So, tally your ingredients, intrepid chefs, and get thee to a butcher shop. And for those of adventurous tastes but milder temperament, just head to your local restaurant. I hear the Testa's good.

Link (via Megnut)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:27:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ad Standards Agency sez: video pirates are terrorists!

The Advertising Standards Agency was asked to investigate the anti-piracy ads that run before the UK's movies, in which a link between terrorism and DVD bootlegging is asserted.

The advertisers said the commercial had been given a "U" certificate by the British Board of Film Classification; they believed it did not appeal to fear unduly or without good reason. They said they could not send all the substantiation they held about the link between piracy and terrorism because it was confidential. The advertisers sent a report, published on the European Union website, that stated "Terrorist groups also commonly become involved in counterfeiting and piracy as a mean of financing their activities". They sent the Executive Summary of a report, by the Alliance Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, entitled "Proving the Connection"; that report claimed "There is evidence of proscribed groups in Northern Ireland using intellectual property fraud as a fund raising activity for their criminal activities.

Link (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:22:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC's disgust survey

Test your disgust threshold by taking this photo survey. Before you look, know that you may consider some of these pictures to be disgusting. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:41:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steam Boy Trailer

Scott sez: "Steam Boy, the long awaited and highly anticipated Anime film from Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo is finally nearing completion and is slated for release later this year. The trailer is up on the Japanese site and looks damn cool. From what I can see Otomo has once again created dazzling visuals -- the lush Victorian interiors and the elegance of the mechanical designs (Steam Punk, anyone?) should leave everyone in awe. The film cost 2.4 billion Yen (US$20.2m) to produce, just a few dollars short of the 2.4 billion Yen that it cost to produce Spirited Away, the most expensive Anime feature ever. In contrast, Steam Boy comprises 180 000 cels, 1.5 times as many as Spirited Away." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:32:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanowire nanomemory

This image depicts a novel design for a nanomemory device that its inventors believe can store 40 gigabits of data per square centimeter. Developed by scientists at the University of Southern California and the NASA Ames Research Center, the self-assembled molecular memory consists of a nanowire coated with a layer of transistors. In traditional computer memory chips, each transistor holds one bit of information. The beauty of this nano-enabled approach is that the transistors can be put in eight distinct states depending on the voltage applied. That means each "memory cell" can hold three bits of data. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:59:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wacked MP3: Murray Saul "It's Friday!"

BoingBoing reader Keith points us to an entry on a very cool underground MP3 blog, which I won't name here because I don't want to kill them with a traffic flood.

[They posted a link to an MP3 of] the lunatic radio ravings of a guy named Murray Saul, who is just SO GODDAMNED HAPPY that it's Friday! I dare you to listen to him scream about the "CHOCOLATE COVERED WEEKEND!" and not immediately feel happier to just be alive.

You can learn more about Murray Saul, an eccentric Ohio salesman and radio announcer, here. Our friend Leonard Lin has kindly offered to host the file on a BoingBoingable server, so have at it. It's pretty goddamned funny. I think some of it might be obliquely pornographic. It's just off the hook. Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:15:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photo-Journey through Buddhist Hell

BoingBoing reader Juergen points us to:

"Photo documentation of dioramas depicting the 6 different buddhist hells. Contains abused people, chopped off limbs and pee filled ponds. Of course this place is in Japan, where else can you find something like this?"
Link

Update: BoingBoing reader Alexander points us to a similar exhibit at the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore. Equally surreal and spooky. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:05:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 22, 2004

Petition against the Canadian DMCA

There's a petition against Canada's proposed DMCA-like copyright law up at the Digital Copyright Canada Wiki:

We, the undersigned residents of Canada draw attention of the House to the following:

THAT the Copyright Act is properly recognised as being a careful balance between the rights of creators and the rights of the public (including viewers, readers and listeners);

THAT the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously affirmed this view in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada;

THAT digital technologies have recently given copyright holders the ability to upset the balance in the Copyright Act by preventing Canadians from accessing works for purposes that have been legally granted to them;

THAT the creation of original works is nourished by wide accessibility of earlier works, including a vibrant public domain;

THAT dissemination of cultural ideas requires that they be preserved in a form that is accessible to future generations; and

THAT historically, consultations regarding changes to the Copyright Act have mostly taken place with creators, intermediaries and only some special users (such as educators and librarians)

THEREFORE, your petitioners call upon Parliament to ensure generally that users are recognised as interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about proposed changes to the Copyright Act and to ensure in particular that any changes at least preserve all existing users' rights, including the right to use copyrighted materials under Fair Dealing and the right to make private copies of audio recordings. We further call upon Parliament not to extend the term of copyright; and to recognise the right of citizens to personally control their own communication devices.

Link (Thanks, Raymond!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:05:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

McDonald's advertising materials

MrPromo is an Internet-based custom signage supplier to McDonald's restaurants. You apparently need to prove that you're a real McD's to actual get an order fulfilled, but it's really fun to poke aorund on the site and see all this disembodied greasebomb promo material and graphic elements. Link (Thanks, idogcow!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Used cellphone market taking off

The NYT reports on the growing US market for refurbished, used cellphones.

Many customers for these retreads are more interested in price tags than multimedia messaging or games of Snake II. "They say, 'I just want to make a phone call,' " said Jay Ellison, executive vice president of U.S. Cellular (www.uscc.com), a wireless carrier based in Chicago, which operates in 26 states and maintains a small inventory of refurbished handsets in its stores.

But there is also the cellphone equivalent of the preowned BMW. ReCellular, a company based in Dexter, Mich., resells about four million handsets in bulk worldwide each year. Of the 1.5 million it resells domestically, mostly for use in prepaid wireless plans, "plenty are higher-end with cameras and bells and whistles," said Eric Forster, an executive for the company, which finds buyers for phones collected by charities, as well as retailers' overstocks and trade-ins.

Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Miniature Khutu's Pyramid turns your Japanese mobile phone into a PVR

Engadget reports on a really cool-sounding, complicated and hard-to-explain device from Japan: a 1/2000 scale model of Khufu’s Pyramid with a Secure Digital slot in it. You put the pyramid atop your television and it turns your TV's video feed into 3GPP -- the file-format used by Japanese videophones. The idea is that you can load these into your camera phone's SD slot and watch TV on the way to work. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Possum Fur Nipple Warmers

Sometimes, you blog things just because you can. In honor of Earth Day, I present to you eco-friendly possum-fur nipple warmers and g-strings from New Zealand. PETA may not approve, but this sure beats using slabs of tofu.

Introduced into New Zealand about 150 years ago from Australia, the brushtail possum has multiplied now to over 70,000,000. With no predators, this pest has decimated huge tracts of New Zealand native forests eating 21,000 tons of vegetation nightly. Both bird life (including the Kiwi) and many unique types of trees are threatened with extinction because of the brushtail possum. This marsupial is only very distantly related to the American Opossum. The brushtail possum has a fur similar in quality to mink and colours range from silver to red brown to dark brown. Preservation of New Zealand Native Forests requires control of the possum population. All controls used in the past have had minimum impact. Poisoning of possums is an environmentally unacceptable way of control. Only through world wide marketing of possum fur products can this pest be safely controlled.

Link (via Warren with some help from Google)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:53:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World's greatest Wi-Fi signal finder

Glenn Fleishman got his hands on a prototype of a new, tiny, Wi-Fi signal finder, and he likes it a lot. There's a video clip of it on his site.

Chrysalis previews their WiFi Seeker, a keychain sized device for instant Wi-Fi signal finding: Chrysalis sent me a demo unit of its just-unveiled WiFi Seeker, which they designed to differentiate 80211b/g networks from other devices. Two previous Wi-Fi signal finders fell short in ways the Seeker does not.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:44:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Onion launches premium subscription site

The ever-funny Onion just launched a "premium" site with extra content, for subscribers, at a price. How is it different from the free Onion? It's like, a fancy French shallot from the farmer's market, versus a regular old supermarket yellow one. Sort of. Oh, here's the Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:31:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Major DoJ warez crackdown -- Operation Fastlink

Covert DoJ investigations into online swapping of copyrighted materials have identified over 100 people in the USA and other countries involved in the distribution of music, movies, and software valued at over $50 million. The initiative is called Operation Fastlink, and targeted warez groups like Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class and Project X. Excerpt from DoJ press release:

Attorney General John Ashcroft announced today the most far-reaching and aggressive enforcement action ever undertaken against organizations involved in illegal intellectual property piracy over the Internet. Beginning yesterday morning, law enforcement from 10 countries and the United States conducted over 120 searches worldwide to dismantle some of the most well-known and prolific online piracy organizations.

"Intellectual property theft is a global problem that hurts economies around the world. To be effective, we must respond globally," Attorney General Ashcroft said. "In the past 24 hours, working closely with our foreign law enforcement counterparts, we have moved aggressively to strike at the very core of the international online piracy world."

Link to DoJ press release, Link to related coverage from AP. (Thanks, JP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:21:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bill O'Reilly mistakes Globe and Mail for Socialist Worker

Bill O'Reilly called The Globe and Mail, a rock-ribbed, conservative Canadian newspaper "the far-left Toronto Globe and Mail," because a columnist in the paper descibed the Fox News Network (which is coming to Canada) as humorously exemplary of American foolishness. O'Reilly urged his listeners to write in to the columnist and give him what-for, and they did, calling him an "intellectual" and a "Canadian" and asking if he'd ever served in Vietnam.

Reacting to my column, which cheerfully suggested that the proposal to bring the Fox News Channel to Canada should be acted upon promptly, so that we can all take a look, and get a laugh, O'Reilly gave us a Fox-style whacking. In his segment The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day, he quoted from my column (which called him "pompous"), dismissed The Globe as a lefty outfit and said, "Hey you pinheads up there, I may be pompous, but at least I'm honest."

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dirty Mechanical Paper Dolls

Paper pervert and Boingboing reader Sandrine Sheon points us to a gallery of adult-oriented "naughty automata":

These are modern, gender-bending versions of old-fashioned wind-up toys, but all made of paper and very funny. They include a spanking duo, fucking skeletons, miss and mister masturbation, and a live paper sex act. You can also see animations of the toys in action.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:44:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Academic essay on ShitBegone toilet paper and postmodernism

Surprisingly readable academic paper with more information about ShitBegone toilet paper (which I blogged previously).

[Jed] Ela did the reverse of DuChamp: he exhibited a single role of a toilet paper he had thought of as a joke, called ‘Shitbegone’.  The exhibit was a great success, and Ela realised he could actually make money by mass-producing Shitbegone and selling it in stores.  What differentiates this from the sale of other artistic reproductions is that Ela markets Shitbegone as toilet paper, not as art: he sells it by the case (“96 double rolls for $44.99. That's 47 cents per roll!”).  What started as something like Warhol’s soup cases turns into an idiosyncratic case of the product development and marketing of a basic essential commodity.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:21:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prison system responds on Silver PEN winner

John wrote to the Connecticut prison system about the imprisoned Silver PEN Award winner whose work was erased after her win was announced. He heard back:

My name is Brian Garnett. I am the Director of External Affairs for the Connecticut Department of Correction and I am responding to an e-mail which Governor Rowland's Office has referred to me. You had expressed concerns regarding the status of the writing program which is led by Wally Lamb at the York Correctional Institution. Let me make clear, that this program, which has been conducted for the past five years, is continuing at the prison. The Department of Correction is extremely proud of this unique and innovative program just as we are proud of the accomplishments of the women who have participated. The introspection and self-examination offered through the writing experience provides positive rehabilitative benefits. The program was temporarily on hold for about a month, as concerns were addressed about the dissemination of news within the prison, of the $25,000 PEN America prize, awarded to one of the inmate authors. The Department of Correction had been given no prior notice of the nomination or the awarding of the prize. There is a very real concern regarding safety and security for the inmate and the prison, with her being identified as having access to that amount of money. Based on a recent productive and positive meeting of all parties, including Mr. Lamb, the issues have been resolved. Media reports also charged that writing materials were destroyed. There was never any malicious intent on the part of the Department, nor was any destruction ordered at any time. Our only intention was requiring that the writings be committed to computer disks to fully preserve those materials and ensure they would be in place when the program started up again. We have now learned those initial reports of destruction were erroneous and little if any material was lost. Thank you for your time and concern.

(Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:23:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Silmarillion in 1,000 words

The Silmarillion is a dense book chronicling the minutest minutae of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Reading it is something of an accomplishment in itself -- but now you can fake it, thanks to The Silmarillion in 1,000 Words.

VALAQUENTA:

MANWE: I'm in charge!
VARDA: I'm Manwe's spouse. And the queen of the stars!
NAMO: I do death and fate. They call me Mandos.
VAIRE: I'm Namo's spouse. I weave things.
IRMO: I have gardens. They call me Lorien.
ESTE: I'm Irmo's spouse. I take care of the gardens.
YAVANNA: I make things grow.
NIENNA: I'm sad.
ULMO: I live in the ocean.
AULE: I'm Yavanna's spouse. I've got a great big hammer! I made dwarves.
NESSA: I dance.
OROME: I hunt!
VANA: I'm Orome's spouse. I make living things happy.
TULKAS: I'm strong. I'm Nessa's spouse. I got here last.
MELKOR: I'm bad, momma, I'm ONE BAD MUTHA-
TULKAS: Grar.
MELKOR: Um. Yeah. Hiding now.

Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:06:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Business 2.0 feature on Creative Commons

Andy Raskin has turned in a very good, long feature on Creative Commons -- including some quotes from me -- that does a terrrific job of explaining the project and why it's important.

The "sharing economy" is built on a supply-and-demand equation wholly alien to traditional media companies -- the record labels, Hollywood studios, and publishing houses that support strict copyright enforcement. It's powered instead by the Allan Vilhans of the world, digital artists who promote sharing as a means to obtain everything from 15 minutes of Internet fame to licensing deals, job offers, and mainstream publishing contracts. For these artists, rampant Internet file swapping isn't a threat, but a blessing: the cheapest way to move from unknown to known.

The sharing economy is already worth billions of dollars, but its direct beneficiaries aren't mainstream entertainment companies. Instead, they're the likes of Apple (AAPL), Adobe (ADBE), and EarthLink (ELNK) -- firms that sell the hardware, software, and bandwidth required to produce and distribute, say, a Howard Dean howl remix. But for the sharing economy to expand its scope and realize its full potential, it needs a signpost: a branded icon participants can use to tell each other, "Download my work. Modify it. Send it to a friend. Please." Creative Commons aims to play that role.

Link (Thanks, Todd!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:03:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help the Kerry campaign design better t-shirts

Designs on the White House is a collaborative project to design t-shirts for the John Kerry campaign -- not authorised by Kerry -- with winners picked by Atrios and others.

Designs On The White House is a grassroots fund-raising organization in support of the John Kerry 2004 Presidential campaign. We aim to mobilize the creative community through an online design contest, judged by designers, celebrities, and activists. Winning designs will be available for resale on T-shirts and other products, and all proceeds after expenses will benefit the John Kerry Presidential campaign. Designs on the White House Organization (DOTWHO) is an independent political committee and is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

Link (Thanks, Kerim)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:57:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Porn star privacy and the adult industry's HIV scare

Fleshbot asks: do porn stars have the same right to medical privacy as the rest of us? In an effort to prevent the spread of HIV within the adult film industry, last week the AIM Healthcare foundation published names and testing status of actors who had recently worked with Darren James and Lara Roxx -- two actors who had just tested positive for HIV. Was it right for AIM to publish that information online?

It's a tough call, especially since the difference between public and private personas tend to get conflated for adult performers more than they do for other types of celebrities. In a new article at LA Voice, Mack Read says that AIM "may have done a wrong thing for all the right reasons, but without considering all the legal and ethical consequences," while Gay Porn Blog noted the issues at stake in a post last week. Both entries are open to comments if you want to have your say.

"Does HIV List Invade L.A. Porn Stars' Privacy?" (lavoice.org)
"Str8 Star with AIDS - Partners Named" (gaypornblog.com)
See also: "Four Women That Worked With James Have Negative HIV Test Results" (AVN)

Link

Update: It's now officially an "HIV outbreak," according to Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA). They're forcing AIM to turn over all records related to Darren James and Lara Roxx, and records of "first- and second-generation" actors who may have been exposed to the virus through working with James or Roxx. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:24:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Time Magazine launches a blog

"Techno File" is a new big-media-blog authored by TIME Magazine writer Eric Roston, described as "a daily commentary on the technology that will carry us through tomorrow -- and the stuff that keeps us stuck in yesterday." Here it is, on TypePad. Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc )

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:15:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Back to the Future Car for sale on Ebay

For sale on ebay:

'You never will again in this accurate recreation of the DeLorean Time Machine made famous in the Back to the Future movie series. This recreation was painstakingly researched for nearly 5 years before construction. Dozens of original photographs, details, and interviews with the original vehicle builders and collectors were compiled to make sure no detail was left un-accounted for. All of the interior and exterior Time Machine components were made to last, but at the same time not damage the integrity of the original vehicle. (...) Motion picture parts replicated through archival photos and extensive research; working interior and exterior lighting system including the "Flux Capacitor", "Time Circuits" and exterior "Flux Dispersion Banding.'

Link (Thanks, Dave)

BoingBoing reader Jesse Mazer says, "The guy who put up that Back to the Future DeLorean for auction is actually not the one who made it, and apparently he's using the creator's copyrighted photos of the car without permission, which previously resulted in a similar auction being taken down...also, according to the creator, he sold it to the guy because it had "a totally junked frame". The info is here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:11:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Talking Trash

BoingBoing reader ben peek says:

Talking garbage bins, how's that not futuristic coolness? but how long until they get irritating? (and will they update the poptune bins monthly?) from the article:

"In a uniquely German mix of hi-tech gadgetry and environmental awareness, Berlin authorities are installing talking trash cans in some of the German capital's most popular squares. Pop your litter into one of the bins and it's liable to say thank you. Or welcome you to Berlin in English, French or Japanese. Or even sing.

After a successful trial period, 20 of the bins have been installed in the Zoologischer Garten area of western Berlin's biggest shopping district and at the bustling business and entertainment hub of Potsdamer Platz."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:03:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

State of the Artists

My latest article for TheFeature.com is now online. It's about art that incorporates, and sometimes critiques, mobile technology:

"Research laboratories are the avant-garde art galleries of the 21st century. That shouldn't come as a surprise though. Art is a lens through which engineers can raise tough questions about the science fictions that they create, and we inhabit."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:02:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Octopus Robot

Boingboing reader LVX23 says:

Check out this cool "autonomous wheeled climbing robot" from the French Autonomous Systems Lab. They call it the "octopus". Now if only they could hack a humvee body on top...

Link Correction: BoingBoing reader Carrick says, "the octopus robot is not from the "French" Autonomous Systems Lab, rather it's from a lab of L'Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:00:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down

There are many reasons I love the Internet, but the fact that weblogs like this one exists would have to be one of them. "Nice cup of tea and a sit down" is the Internet hub for cake, tea, and biscuits, and it's edited by a fellow named Stuart. That's it. Period. Simple. It's totally sincere and sweet, and full of breaking news about which flavor of jam is most popular for discriminating toast aficionados, newly resurrected teas, and so on. Sometimes, Stuart posts tea-and-biscuit related art, like a portrait of "Two little old space-alien ladies having a nice sit down." At present, Stuart is pretty worked up about the fact that the "iconic" biscuit known as Tim Tams have recently become available to UK consumers, after a long and ardurous struggle. "Tescos sell them now," says Stuart. "Hooray, you have to tell everyone, they're fantastic! Enjoy!"
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:57:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steal this remix

BoingBoing reader fluffy says:

Forget about underground remixes of mainstream music - this site (inspired by the wonderful songfight.org) is an ongoing collaborative remix project where independent musicians remix each other. It's great!

link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:53:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

London: The (Magnificent) Biography

I've just finished Peter Ackroyd's magnificent London: The Biography, an 800-page history of London spanning 2,000 years of history. I read it mostly on the tube, in London, while travelling to one place or another, on airplanes, while flying into or out of the city. The book is a triumph in that it manages to convey the unknowable vastness of London's environs and dwellers and history without ever having the hubris to imply that is has captured it or contained it.

The prose is glorious and even drunken in places: clearly this is a labour of love, years-long opus penned by someone who loves and is intimate with London -- even if the city is, as he says, so large that no person could hope to walk its every street in a lifetime. I can't remember the last time I smiled so much while reading a book, nor when I made so many notes of things to look up and do later.

The thing I liked best about Ackroyd's vision is the idea of continuity, which speaks directly to an idea I've been having lately: that books are a practice, not a product. Here's what I mean: the Bible was a book even before it was bound between covers; the fact that it was scroll-shaped didn't make it any less bookish. By the same token, one of my novels, represented as a text-file, is also a book -- even if it doesn't look anything like a bound volume -- even if it doesn't look like anything, period. A scroll, a bound volume, a CD of audio, a text-file: they're all "books" even if they're all different.

What a book is, is a collection of literary, manufacturing, commercial, and technological practices. And what all these different kinds of books have in common with one another is that their practices are continuous with one another. A Torah in scroll is related to a bound edition because the latter couldn't exist without the former: the latter rises up from the former, perhaps inevitably. The "book" is the continuous practice of writing, reading, marketing, distributing and publishing that dates back thousands of years.

We're continuous, too. The "me" who wrote my most recent novel -- which I'm very happy with, indeed! -- is not the "me" who wrote the one before that. The new one is informed with the lessons from the last one, and the intervening living. The me who wrote the last book could not have written the next one -- but the me I became could. And those two mes are continuous with one another: one gave rise to the next.

London is continuous. It's not a place -- its borders have shifted and shifted again over thousands of years. It's not a race of people -- its inhabitants have changed in individual identity and culture so many times that the culture and ethnicity of London 2004 is nearly completely different from London 0000. It's not a collection of architecture, or a map of roads, or a political system, for all of these have changed and changed and changed. London isn't even its name: London's had many names over the years.

London is a practice: London is what Londoners are doing right now, which is informed by, midwifed by, descended from what Londoners were doing yesterday. London is what Londoners do.

I'd suspected this, and Ackroyd nailed it up and down for me. He shows how the currents of London are fraught with eddies, whirlpools of continuity, so the 1960s movement to wipe London clean of its Victorian fooforaw and build modern high-rises echoes the 1860s destruction of 14 churches under the Union of Benefices Act, which, in turn, echoes the 1760s demolition of the gates to the city walls because they "obstructed the free current of air."

I've been buttonholing Londoners all month with intelligences gleaned from Ackroyd's book -- a triumph nearly on the scale of Trafalgar Square or the discovery of the physics of the arch or the rebuilding after the Fire. I'll be chewing it over for years.

Peter's Hill and Upper Thames Street were laid out in the twelfth century. Other street-surfaces and frontages have a similar history, with property divisions remaining intact for many hundreds of years. Even the devastation of the Great Fire could not erase the ancient lanes and boundaries. In a similar pattern of continuity those streets which were newly laid out after the Fire showed tenacity of purpose. Ironmonger Lane, for instance, ahs had the same width for almost 355 years. That width was and is 14 feet, originally sufficient to allow two carts to pass each other without hindrance or blockage. It is another aspect of this continuous London history that its structure can accommodate itself to quite different modes of transport.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Picasso Guernica coverup at UN, one year later

BoingBoing reader Jamie McCarthy writes

"Hi Xeni, re this story you blogged last year -- Take a look at this:

On Feb. 5, 2003, Negroponte sat next to Colin Powell for his historic speech to the U.N. urging multilateral war. That evening, at 10:51:58 PM EST, that photo of Negroponte was snapped, in front of the Guernica reproduction but far enough to its left that the curtain apparently did not stretch (or maybe the curtain had been removed that late in the evening). Now, a year later, that photo ended up on the homepage of the Coalition Provisional Authority. You can verify the timestamp in Photoshop by opening the JPEG, going to File Info, clicking Advanced, and looking at the XMP Core Properties. Small world...

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:00:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chickenhawk henpeck begins

Great commentary from Reason's Tim Cavanaugh on the infighting between pro-war chickenhawks.

It's hard to say which of these sides is more contemptible, and I only hope neither ever runs out of bullets. The Stay-the-Coursers are, as ever, courageous enough to sacrifice other Americans' lives in support of their Wilsonian fancies. But I find the Wobblies even more perplexing. Did these goddamn dimwits really think things were going to go any better? Pipes I can at least credit with deviousness: He wants Iraq to descend into chaos so he can say something along the lines of "See? Perpetual war is the only language Arabs understand." The editors of the National Review, demonstrate their lack of acquaintance with human life as it is lived on planet Earth consistently enough that I guess they really are surprised to find democracy-building isn't as simple as advertised.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:20:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogging, Equality, and the Future

BoingBoing reader Donald Melanson says:

Mindjack's Melanie McBride talked to a number of people including Rebecca Blood and Danah Boyd about the future of blogging and some of the important issues facing it (equality, privilege, access and standards). The result is "Linked Out: Blogging, Equality, and the Future", an in-depth piece that will hopefully encourage further discussion and debate of issues it raises.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:37:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Digital camera silliness: secret finger trick

This page has dozens of photos like the one shown here. Safe for work, but if your boss catches you checking it out, you'll have to let her/him in on the secret. Link (via horkulated)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:13:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Simple but brilliant bag sealer

New patented Clip-n-Seal uses a plastic rod and clamp to seal a plastic bag. Invented by a dotcom burnout. Here's a profile of him. Link (Via idfuel)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:59:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Frequently spat-on bus drivers get DNA kits to collect evidence

About once a week, a bus driver in Edinburgh gets gobbed on. To nab the sickening spitters, the drivers have been given "saliva recovery kits" -- aka "spit kits."

The kits include sterile swabs to pick up any trace of an offender’s DNA. The packs also contain a pair of latex gloves and an evidence collection bag.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:53:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New tool for the molecular machine shop

University of Michigan researchers are using a femtosecond pulsed laser as a milling machine capable of carving out features as small as 20 nanometers, 1/5000th the diameter of a human hair. The new approach trumps state-of-the-art electron beam lithography because it can machine features in three dimensions. "If we have three channels on a plane, we can link the outer two without cutting into the center one, we can go down over and up, we can cut a U-shape," said one of the principal investigators. "Not being constrained to one plane, the level of complexity that can be achieved is much greater." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:00:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bloggers in Iraq

A piece in today's USA Today about the growing weblog community -- in Iraq.

Fadhil's blog, iraqthemodel.blogspot.com, tells of his life and the lives of his two brothers. One brother also is a dentist, and the other is a pediatrician. "We wanted to help bridge the gap, not just between the U.S. and Iraq, but with the entire Islamic world," says Ali Fadhil, 34, the pediatrician. "The media is always taking a look at the bad stuff. We want to show the good progress in Iraq." The brothers' blog is written with an unusually pro-American viewpoint, especially coming from three Sunni Muslims. Sunnis — among them, Saddam Hussein — dominated Iraq's majority Shiite Muslim population before the war.

(...)There are about 30 Iraqi bloggers in Baghdad, plus a few other blogs written by Iraqis abroad. Not all share the Fadhil brothers' optimism. "You have your Fox TV. I am offering a counter response," says Faisa Jarrar, whose blog is critical of the U.S. occupation. Her mixed Sunni-Shiite family began in December with a joint blog, afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com. Now, each of Jarrar's three sons has his own blog. Raed, 26, Jarrar's eldest, is studying in Jordan. Khalid, 21, and Majid, 17, are in Baghdad. "All of our efforts are more individual efforts, but we have one common goal, to show the world what is really going on," Majid says.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:22:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robots Are Us! benefit in San Francisco

Jed sez, "The Speculative Literature Foundation is holding an event in San Francisco this coming Friday, April 23, as a fundraiser for the new SLF Fountain Award for sf short stories of exceptional literary quality. The event will feature Pat Murphy, Rudy Rucker, Terry Bisson, Ken Wharton, Charlie Anders, and Omnicircus ("an experimental, surreal-psychedelic musical-cabaret group"); 7:00 p.m., $10-$20 sliding scale at the door. It'll be at 550 Natoma, a few blocks from the Civic Center BART station, near 7th and Mission." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:36:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stepheon's Confusion on Salon

My copy of Neal Stephenson's Confusion, the new, enormous sequel to Quicksilver, arrived in the mail yesterday before I left for Turin, and it's in my suitcase, waiting for me. Quicksilver was a remarkable book, a triumphant combination of Stephenson's trivia-obsessed, research-intensive approach to the precursors of the information age (viz. Snow Crash's Nam-Shub of Enki and Cryptonomicon's Bletchley Park sequences) and his gift for sprawling, braided stoorylines that combine slapstick action scenes with intense, emotional passages.

Salon's running a double feature on Stephenson today: a long interview with Neal, and a review by Andrew Leonard. Both are highly recommended -- I can't wait to sink my teeth into this book.

Science was new and they didn't know how to do it yet. Science was and is a somewhat contentious thing. Someone's got a theory and they promulgate that theory and then something else comes along and alters, improves on or even flatly contradicts it. Now that we've got 350 years of perspective on this, scientists understand that this is how it's done and there's a mechanism in place for how to do it. It's refereed journals and it's become institutionalized. They didn't have that perspective on it. They couldn't stand back and say, Well, my theory may get contradicted here and there, but this guy who's contradicting it will get contradicted in turn. They didn't have that expectation. They didn't have journals. The first two journals were the Journale de Savants, which was about 1665, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society, which was right about the same time. Leibniz had to found his own journal in order to publish his own work. They were kind of banging around in the dark trying to figure out how to do this.

Hooke, for example, when he figured out how arches work, published it as an anagram. He condensed the idea into this pithy statement: "The ideal form of an arch is the form of a chain hanging, flipped upside down." Then he scrambled the letters to make an anagram and published it. That way, he wasn't giving away the secret, but if somebody came along a few years later and claimed that they'd invented it, he could just unscramble what he'd published. He was establishing precedence.

Hooke squabbled with [Christiaan] Huygens over a bunch of clock-related inventions. This kind of thing was just rife. It came to a head in a grotesque way in the priority dispute over [who invented] the calculus. That was so embarrassing to the whole institution of science and people were so nauseated by it that it taught everyone a lesson. After that, no one would dream of doing what Newton did, which was to invent something really important and then sit on it for 30 years.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:18:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spammer starting SpamKing clothing line: "Just opt out"

Scott Richter, one of the original Big Name Spammers, has decided to augment his email marketing biz with a line of SpamKing clothing.

Richter said the line, initially hats, shirts and panties, will be aimed at the hip-hop, grunge and skateboarding crowds. It will feature sayings such as "Just opt out," and "Click it."

Link (via Lawmeme)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:01:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

2nd Circuit opinion affirms fair use -- even when the source is infringing

On Copyfight, Jason Schulz calls out to a recent Second Circuit opinion in which the value of fair use is affirmed, even when the material itself is taken from an infringer. This is the right decision: if I want to make a critical documentary about a Star Wars movie, and the only way for me to get my clips is by downloading them from Kazaa, my reuse of the material should be fair use -- even if the person who ripped the movie and put it on a P2P net is infringing.

"Fair use is not a doctrine that exists by sufferance, or that is earned by good works and clean morals; it is a right--codified in § 107 and recognized since shortly after the Statute of Anne--that is "necessary to fulfill copyright's very purpose, '[t]o promote the Progress of science and the useful arts . . . .'"

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:58:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Darth Vader's flagship for sale on eBay

This guy spent three years building an enourmous model of Star Wars Super Star Destroyer -- Darth Vader's flagship. It's to the same scale as the 4" figurines, making it a kind of jumbo skiffy dollhouse for your Lucasfilm dollies. It's pretty amazing. Bidding stands at £305 right now with four days left.

Taking almost 3 years to make, this is the one of a kind 4" scale figure toy that I always wanted, and now I have built it. I just wish I’d had one of these when I was a kid. And for kids this Star Destroyer has been built. The ship is constructed almost entirely of wood and all the parts are quite chunky with nothing small to break off (unless abused). It is approximately 2 metres in length, 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre high, it is rather large but built solidly. Caster wheels on the base allow for easy movement and the top section can be removed for storage and easier transportation. Not for under 3s but great fun to play with from 6 – 60 year olds!

Link (Thanks, Peter!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:35:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gardner Dozois stepping down from Asimov's

Gardner Dozois, the long-sitting editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, is stepping down to pursue personal writing projects. Gardner's won the Hugo for best editor 14 times, making him one of the award-winningest editors in the history of the field, and the stories in Asimov's are stunningly well-represented at every year's Nebula and Hugo awards. Dozois popularized the term "cyberpunk" and was a midwife for the literary movement. Gardner's also the first editor to have bought a story from me for a pro market, and the first Year's Best editor to buy a reprint from me, for his definitive, astonishing, long running Year's Best Sceince Fiction anthologies.

Sheila Williams -- currently Managing Editor -- is stepping into Gardner's position, which is itself exciting news: Sheila was a real protege of Asimov's, a friend of his who has been with the magazine even longer than Gardner has. Sheila's always been the "business" editor at Asimov's, the one who handles the logistics and keeps track of who's where and working on what. She knows the Asimov's stable as well as anyone and is herself a shrewd and astute editor.

But the biggest news here is that Gardner is going to go back to work on his own fiction. When I entered the field, all I knew about Gardner was that he was the magazine editor to sell to, but gradually, I discovered that Gardner had once been considered the writer to watch in the field, a talented and lively prose stylist whose output had all but stopped when he took over the berth at Asimov's and began editing his fantastic Year's Best anthologies.

So the field has lost one of its best editors, but it's gained back one of its best writers. That's pretty cool. Link (Thanks, Vera!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:26:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT coverage of prison attack on creative writing has gaping hole

The NYT has reported, twice, on the prison creative writing program whose student won a Silver PEN award for First Amendment Writing and was rewarded by having all of her -- and her classmates' -- work erased by the prison system. As much as the Times loved the human interest angle of this story ("Prisoners win award!") they never bothered to pick up the AP newswire story on the unconscionable, tragic response from the prison system. Link 1, Link 2 (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Move over, Grey Album -- "London, Booted"

Former BoingBoing guestblogger Todd Lappin says,

"Hot on the heels of the Grey Album comes another innnnteresting mash-up/bootleg project that was originally posted as a collaborative challenge to DJs in February. The goal: Take one track from the Clash's "London Calling," and "remix it, add to it, subtract from it - put your own tributary spin on it." The result is "London Booted" - 19 tracks (plus a few bonus extras) of eclectically reinterpreted Clash. In return for the download, the project organizers are asking listeners to donate to one of several charities, including Future Forests, a reforestation initiative that was a favorite of Joe Strummer. For £17.50 you can even have your own tree in Joe Strummer's Rebel Woods, a future forests project on the Isle of Lucy... er... Skye."

Pretty righteous. I'm fond of "Bubba's Got a Brand New Cadillac," "What about Brixton," and "(Spanish Bombs) over Baghdad," a mashup with a track from Outkast's Stankonia. Hmmmm.... Outklash? Link to London Booted home, and try this alternate site if that doesn't work.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:34:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tubby little fluffy all stuffed with RAM

This Winne-the-Pooh-looking plush toy conceals a 128MB flash-memory drive and MP3 player. Link (via Gizmodo and PlayerBlog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:00:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gucci's iPod case

Gucci's shipping a $200 iPod case with all the stylish aesthetics of a chintz sofa-cover. Link (via Gizmodo)
to

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:58:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Poop Report

Dan Brekke sez: "In looking for the story that must be behind ShitBegone, I came across a feature on SB's founder and resident genius, a Brooklyn lad named Jed Ela. The site running the feature deserves the attention of all who've ever spent a moment of deep thought on the wonders of the body's excretory system and its effects on our world: The Poop Report." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:08:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Taxpayers unwittingly paying for Republican National Committee's propaganda

Tex sez: "It appears that our tax money is being used to spread RNC propaganda.

Go here to this taxpayer-funded site and read at the bottom. These lines are there:

America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the President's policies are doing; or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation.

Now go to this page. Go down to the bottom. In bold in the next to the last paragraph you will read:

America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the President's polices are doing; or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation.

"

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:00:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weird books for tinkerers and mad scientists

I came across an ad for Lindsay's Technical Books in Popular Science. The ad reads like a classified that would have been in the back of the magazine fifty years ago: "Secrets! Melt Metal! Machine Shop! Hydrogen! Old Time Radio! Tesla! Chemistry! Incredible plans, lost secrets, forgotten how-to, and strange books!" It looks like these folks have a lot of fun in their basement labs and backyard foundries. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:06:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Up close review of GMail

Here's a review of Google's Gmail, written by a Beta user.

This is the time to say that for Gmail you are not senders of electronic messages, you are "conversers." For this reason, when you delete a message, Gmail will tell you, "The conversation has been moved to the trash."

This is about more than semantics. If, in Hotmail for example, you send four emails to four friends, asking them their opinion about a certain restaurant, every answer comes in as a separate email. Google thinks this is a mistake. "It's a conversation," the service maintains, and it put all the answers together under one roof - the "conversation." Thus, instead of four answers, you'll get one answer containing the messages from each friend who responded to your question.

Link (via Interesting People)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:02:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The art of Ron Popiel

Dominic sez: "IDFuel is a daily Industrial Design magazine, and we have just published our first full length article about the exhibit of Ron Popiel's inventions at the Chicago Cultural Center. Lots of cool pictures and commentary on the Pocket Fisherman, the O-Matics, and a multitude of lesser known gadgets." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:46:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Excellent '60s anti-Beatles pamphlet cover

Cover art from a religious tract titled "Communism, Hypnotism & The Beatles." I wish the whole pamphlet were online. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:28:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ShitBegone: no-frills toilet paper

A Boing Boing reader sez: "ShitBegone toilet paper is a quality product that exemplifies your attitude and approach to life. ShitBegone Value is a basic, 100% recycled toilet paper for those who don't need to pay for top-notch softness— like businesses and single men." 96 rolls for $44.99 Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:31:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nevermind chocolates, survey says people give passwords away for nothing.

Boingboing reader R.I. Pienaar says:

I noticed this BoingBoing post about people swapping passwords for chocolate. Here is another article from January along the same lines -- except no offers for anything, and 90% of people still gave passwords.

Link. The BBC now has more on the choco-password connection, here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:26:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charlie Stross and me at Plokta.con, May 1

Plokta.con is a regional science fiction convention in Newbury, UK. Charlie Stross is this year's Guest of Honour, and I'll be coming out on Saturday, May 1 to conduct Charlie's Guest of Honour interview. Hope to see you there! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:44:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

U of T open source conference

University of Toronto is throwing a three-day open source conference from May 9-11 at Con Hall. Cheap student tix are available until the end of the month.

# Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat, the world's most successful Linux company
# Eben Moglen, Columbia law professor and general counsel, Free Software Foundation
# Steve Weber, Berkeley political economy professor whose Harvard University Press book on open source will appear this April
# Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server Project
# Derek Keats, recent chair of the first major African conference on open source

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:39:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prison wipes creative-writing class HDDs after student wins PEN award

A creative-writing student in a prison in Connecticut won a $25,000 PEN American Center prize for the work she did in jail. The prison system responded by erasing all of the writing produced by her and her classmates.

15 women inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the prison's school ordered all hard drives used for the class erased and its computer disks turned over...

Department of Correction Commissioner Theresa Lantz halted the writing program March 29 after learning that inmate Barbara Parsons Lane had won a $25,000 PEN American Center prize for her work on the 2003 book "Couldn't Keep It To Myself: Testimonies from our Imprisoned Sisters."

Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:33:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mayor of Salt Lake City is an idiot

The Mayor of Salt Lake City is opposed to municipal Internet projects, because the Internet is bad for your quality of life and deprives you of fresh air.

"I just don't see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files," he said. "We should spend money on getting people fit, rather than deteriorating their quality of life with higher bandwidth to surf the Net."

Link (via Werblog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:27:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Functional replica siege engines

Kaden hand-builds and sells these functional mantelpiece/desktop replicas of medieval siege engines, which he calls "antiques from a parallel universe." I'm partial to the ballista. Link (Thanks, Kaden!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:24:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soft-boiled-egg cakemod HOWTO

This cakemodder has devised a "soft-boiled egg cake" filled with lemon curd. Yummy! Link (Thanks, Yi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:20:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gothic dress made from umbrellas

Howard sez, "My friend Erin was inspired by the BB entry about the dress made with umbrellas. So as a school assignment (she's a fashion design major), she designed and fashioned together an umbrella dress done up in a 'elegant gothic lolita' style." Link (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:17:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 19, 2004

Will trade passwords for chocolate

According to this Security Pipeline article, nearly three quarters of office workers in an impromptu man-on-the-street survey were willing to give up their passwords when offered the bribe of a chocolate bar. Heh. Heaven only knows what they'd fork over for venti latte with extra foam. Link (Thanks, Mitch!)

BoingBoing reader Joe Buck was among a number of hardened cynics who wrote in to say, "If a person on the street offers me a chocolate bar in exchange for my password, and it's a good chocolate bar, I'll happily tell him or her a password... except that it will be fake." Man, the next time some internet security journalist approaches me clutching a wad of Godiva, I sure as hell know what I'm gonna say!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:34:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kill Bill, the Czech online game.

Online game apparently created by/for this Czech company to promote Crate and Barrel aficionado Quentin Tarantino's new film Kill Bill in Eastern Europe.
Link (Via Geisha)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:28:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nuclear Missiles pose a health hazard

Concerned for the health of people being killed by nuclear bombs, the EPA has ordered new, less-toxic, rockets to be installed on ICBMs.

"In order to comply with EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulations, and at a cost of about $5.2 million per ICBM, the rocket motors on 500 Minuteman III missiles will be replaced with new ones. These rockets will emit less toxic chemicals when used."

"EPA regulations do not apply in foreign countries, so no changes are being made to reduce the harmful environmental effects of the nuclear warheads."

Link (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:32:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soup imitates art: Warhol-style Campbell's tomato soup on sale

To commemorate the work of Andy Warhol, Campbell's is selling four packs of tomato soup with Warhol-esque labels. Link (Via WOW)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:00:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Computer geek" sentenced to 13 years for making ricin

Ken Olson, a former employee of Agilent in Spokane Washington, was sentenced to 13 years for making ricin, a highly toxic chemical derived from castor beans. It's very easy to make ricin and castor beans are legal to possess and are readily available. Prosecutors say Olson was plotting to kill his wife and take up with his mistress. Olson's wife and mistress have teamed up to defend him.

The trouble began Aug. 21, 2001, when a co-worker at Agilent found an 80-page document on how to make a bomb. The co-worker took the document to supervisors, who traced it to Olsen's computer. Company investigators examined his Internet logs and discovered Olsen had spent more than a year researching explosives and poisons. They found books in his cubicle on how to kill people without leaving a trace and a piece of paper with calculations of dosages for a 150-pound person — the approximate weight of his wife.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:27:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online gallery of extreme-goth Japanese dolls

Photos of ultra-creepy Japanese dolls. Sort of "Silence of the Lambs" meets "Dream House Barbie."
Link (Thanks, Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:23:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF waging war on bullshit Internet patents

This is so freaking cool: EFF is going to start actively busting bullshit Internet patents, hunting down prior art and getting the USPTO to revoke the patents.

The new EFF initiative seeks to document these threats and fight back against them. EFF has pledged to file "re-examination" requests with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), asking the agency to revoke patents that are having negative effects on Internet innovation and free expression.

"More and more, people are using software and Internet technology to express themselves," said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "Patent owners who threaten this expression are creating a chilling effect on free speech."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:57:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paint-your-floors HOWTO

Great Apartment Therapy blog post on how to paint your floors "without screwing it up" -- the results speak for themselves. Link (via Megnut)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:55:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ESC-key chairs

This German company is offering $90 stools shaped like giant ESC keys: "the perfect pouf for all victims of the new media collapse!" Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Intel IT manager simulation simulates sexist workplace assumptions, too

Amy sez, "Intel has a game on their website called 'The Intel IT Manager Game - The simulation of an IT department.' It's supposed to simulate the tasks of an IT manager, including hiring new people. But guess what? All of the characters are male! You couldn't even hire a woman if you tried, because there are no female characters!! Link (Thanks, Amy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:43:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thin models boost self-image?

A University of Toronto study posits that most young women who are exposed to media images of thin models are actually inspired in a positive way. "Our findings suggest that these images may actually make young women feel good about themselves because they treat that image as a fantasy goal, thinking, She looks great and I could look like that, too," says psychology professor Peter Herman, co-author of the study. Before you call BS though, know that Herman then adds that "young women who are really super-invested in trying to emulate this image may be the ones who go on to develop a true eating disorder."

"The idea that these thin media ideals are inspiring rather than depressing is almost necessary to account for the fact that young women - and just about everybody else - spend a lot of time voluntarily exposing themselves to these images," he says.

Masochism is very mysterious, Dr. Herman. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:56:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amherst asks: What is this thing?

Thsi thing is from Amherst's Archives and Special Collections. No one there knows what it's purpose is, and they are asking for readers to help. (I'll bet Boing Boing's readers will come up with the answer today.)

The device is about 12 inches across and is seen here sitting on its flat wooden platform; apparently, it would be removed from the platform for use. The raised lid has a clip that restrains a spring-loaded brass oval, here shown released and resting on top of a ring of brass arms. Each brass arm has at its narrow end a sharp, upward-facing point. Those points form the innermost oval. The arms are connected to padded, movable wooden rods hanging below the device.

Link (Thanks, Anne!)

Mel Johnson sez: I believe I know what this device is. In fact, as a child I had my head inside one, in the old McFarlin's Men's Clothing Store in Rochester, New York. A piece of paper is fastened in the top of the device - probably held by the thee pins nearest the center. Then the device is placed over someones head, with the padded rods over and around the head, so the rods cushion the outer circumference of the head, the flat surfaces of the device being parallel to the floor. Something happens with the piece of paper such that an outline of the head is punched in the paper with the pointed rods, giving the shape of the head. It was used in clothing stores to aid in fitting hats. My head was pear-shaped!

Anne sez: Here's some confirmation of the hat-fitting hypothesis: a picture of a similar hat-fitting device, a "conformateur", apparently patented in the 1850s by one Monsieur Maillard. It's shown on the head. Antiques like this are apparently still used in hat-making today, because no-one is manufacturing new ones. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:34:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transgender in Thailand, online.

Following up on last week's post on the subject, BoingBoing reader Rachel writes:

The Thai word translated as "transvestite" or "shemale" is khatoey, also spelled katoey, kathoey and several other ways. The word doesn't really have the negative ring of those two English words. And, trust me, those English words do have a negative ring. Call any TS woman in the US a "shemale" and she'll be deeply insulted 98% of the time. Very few crossdressers in the US like the term "transvestite". If you're looking for an English word to describe these women, "transsexual" is probably closest; "pre-op transsexual" or "non-op transsexual" is possibly more accurate, though contentious.

Probably the best site around to actually get to know the khatoey is Andrew Matzner's Transgender in Thailand site . I also recommend looking at my site for a more general view of transgender life in Asia. You might also read my journal about getting SRS in Thailand.

I think that the site you linked to -- Alcazar's -- is primarily a club in Pattaya. The contest is quite glamorous and highly-esteemed, but that is because Alcazar's itself is the most famous kathoey cabaret in Thailand. I think that the contest is primarily a promotion for the club; it isn't so much about Hollywood dreams as it is about helping secure Alcazar's place in the drag universe. Finally, a plea: I hope that you are interested in the khatoey women as people, not as sex objects; your entry on BoingBoing seems to indicate that you are curious about their roles in society and how society views them, not in prodding them with a virtual stick as so many others have. If you are in fact approaching them with respect, then you have my heartfelt thanks.

Link. Photo: Thai kickboxer-turned-beauty-queen Nong Tum, whose life story is now a movie. Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:51:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Criticism in Japan for "Lost in Translation"

Interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor on reactions in Japan to the film Lost in Translation -- which is evidently not translating so well.

[T]he film is under attack for cultural bias, and for maximizing its humor by depicting Japanese as robotic and cartoon-like. The question is: to what degree is the film insensitive - and to what extent is this the kind of "poking fun" that some ethnic groups now ignore? Until now, none of these voices or questions has come from Japan. Indeed, while "Lost in Translation" opened all over the world last fall, it opened in image-conscious Tokyo only last weekend. Some sources say this is deliberate. Japanese decorum on culturally sensitive matters precludes angry protest or high-volume misgivings about images that might be considered unfair or "unpleasant," to use a local reviewer's term. But it is telling that the Academy-award-winning "valentine" can be seen here only in a small 300-seat theater in Shibuya, and critics warn that the film may hurt the feelings of ordinary Japanese.

Link, and Link to background on earlier inter-cultural criticism of the film (via Joi Ito)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:50:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My Crate and Barrel Moment with Quentin Tarantino

Well, you could call it that. Christen Nelson's blog entry about her chance encounter with filmmaker Quentin Tarantino at a shopping mall in Los Angeles. Ms. Nelson is an actor and former member of the infamous Groundlings Theatre, and was recently cast for a new Rob Reiner television pilot.

"That's a dynamite purse. Where'd you get it?" As I turned to respond to the question and the little bells in my head went off alerting me to the fact that the voice I heard sounded just like Quentin... oh my God I would recognize that big bell pepper of a head anywhere... Tarantino!

My pink vinyl purse with two black cats joined at the tail often generates conversation, had I known that the man who brought me Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction would engage me in conversation I would have paid 10 times the price. So I said,"ohIgotitinCanadafouryearsagoitssupersturdyanditholdseverythingbecauseit'sjustonebigcompartmentIloveit. I don't mean to be a gay jackass but... you're Quentin Tarantino AND YOU ARE THE BALLS!" Seriously that is what I said.

Link (Thanks, Shane)

UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Jason writes:

Christen Nelson's story [about a chance shopping encounter with famed film director Quentin Tarantino] was wicked cool and being that I am a detail-obsessed freak I went over to Crate and Barrel to see the registry. Sure enough, it exists! And sure enough there were 16 Espresso Peppermills requested. However, none of them have been fulfilled. So that leads a kind of question to Christen's wonderful closer about the 4 mills from Dennis. I hate to peek behind the curtain and go 'Boo!,' but...

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:38:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pulp Fiction -- new RSS reader for Mac OSX

Coming to beta for Mac OS X on May 1st: a new RSS reader called "Pulp Fiction." Link (thanks, Jean-Luc )

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:31:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Condensed, snarkified Pericles

Francis sez, " My Shakespeare reading group got around to Pericles on Sunday afternoon, and the plot was so far-fetched, even by Shakespearean standards, that I felt it needed documenting. So I wrote a condensed, snarkified version of the entire play."

HELICANUS: What's the matter, my lord?

PERICLES: Oh...the king of Antioch is sleeping with his daughter and now he wants to kill me because he's afraid I'll tell everyone about it or something. (He leans out the window.) OH, IF ONLY I HAD NEVER LEARNED HE WAS SLEEPING WITH HIS DAUGHTER.

HELICANUS: I can see how that would be a problem. Maybe you should leave town until he cools off, or dies, or whatever, since it's pretty easy to find you here.

PERICLES: Since I'm prince and all.

HELICANUS: Exactly.

Link (Thanks, Francis!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:23:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 18, 2004

Porn Valley's HIV Crisis -- Lara Roxx interview, blog updates

Adult Video News has what appears to be the first extensive interview with Canadian teenager (conflicting reports peg her age at 18, 19, 21, and 22, thanks Fleshbot) Lara Roxx, the second of two porn actors to be diagnosed HIV positive last week.

When she arrived in L.A. in mid-March from Montreal, on a ticket paid for with borrowed funds, her short brown hair streaked with pink, all she wanted to do was perform in enough scenes to create a nest-egg that she could take back to Canada and use to go on with her life. Instead, she's now broke, jobless and had been staying with friends, and if the tests come back Saturday evening as she's hoping they won't, HIV-positive.

"My manager [Daniel Perrault] woke me up on that morning that they all found out,"Roxx told AVN.com. "I was very upset on that day; I don't even remember what day it was."It was Tuesday, April 13, the day the news broke that popular performer Darren James had contracted HIV -- the first active performer on the straight side of the industry to do so in nearly five years.

"When I got there, me and Marc had a little conversation, because Thomas Hope told me I was going to do a d.p., and so I get there and Marc Anthony tells me it's a d.a., which stands for double anal, "Roxx recalled. "And I'm like, '‘What? I've never done a double anal.' And he's like, 'Well, that's what we need. It's either that or nothing.' And that's how they do it. But Marc Anthony was playing that, and I think that really sucks, because I'm mad at the friend I thought I had in Marc, because he knew double anal was dangerous. I knew it too, really, probably, but I was just putting it way back in my mind because I was down in California to make the maximum amount of money, to come back home wealthy. I had plans for the money."

LinK to AVN interview. Fleshbot has also been doing a terrific job of pointing to good sources of breaking news on the HIV scare -- the industry's first in five years. AVN is collecting donations to assist Ms. Roxx, and also posts news that adult film star Jenna Jameson has launched a fundraising campaign to help porn industry workers suffering financial hardships from both the quarantine and the production moratorium. And Carly Milne at Pornblography posts this damning rant from one porn industry worker who says, "I'm about the most gung-ho porno guy you'll ever meet. But I'm pretty sick to my stomach right now hearing about the people who just don't care."

Update: The L.A. Daily News reports that a state-county task force has drafted a plan that would make condom use mandatory in the industry. The plan would require production companies to comply with a CAL-OSHA injury and illness prevention plan, and those who do not comply would face closure. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:45:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bay Area hip hop jargon glossary

Former BoingBoing guestblogger and Business 2.0 editor Todd Lappin points us to an online glossary of hip-hop and gangster language that is regionally specific to the San Francisco Bay Area.

The list includes terms which are now part of the broader lexicon of American popular speech (like "cabbage," "cheddar," and "scratch," all of which mean money). But I found plenty of terms in here that were new for me. For instance: "Dipped in Butta sauce" (Hella fitted, g\'d up, creased up from tha feet up), "Burners" (a cellular telephone that is being used illegally), and "Fedex" (an individual that delivers quick money). Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:31:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are you now or have you ever been a Subservient Chicken?

BoingBoing reader Dave says:

Ms. Jardin, Though you might be intereested in this tidbit. I got a phone call from International Communications Research (ICR) for a survey yesterday. Buried among the questions about credit counseling services, political affiliation, and consumption of coffee, tobacco, and fast food products, I got this series of questions.

"Do you have an Internet connection? Have you ever visited the website subservientchicken.com? Would you visit it again?"

These were followed up by questions about the BK Tendercrisp Sandwich and their low-carb menu. Looks like they're looking to evaluate the potency of their stealth marketing campaign.

Link to earlier BoingBoing posts on the Subservient Chicken online ad, including an expose of the chicken's X-rated code (which has now been removed from the site. No "blowjob" or "hump me"s for you today.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:15:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Live blogging from NAB-RTNDA television industry convention

LostRemote's Cory Bergman says:

A couple of us are blogging from TV's largest annual convention, NAB-RTNDA, in Vegas all week. We're the only site blogging the event, and we'll post the most forward-thinking ideas and the most promising new technology.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:12:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art from AA batteries

Fully functional batteries transformed into hip objets d'art.
Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:54:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are Hybrids as Green as Fuel Cells?

BoingBoing pal Frank Boosman says:

NPR's All Things Considered had an interview (audio only) recently with journalist Matt Wald, "author of an article questioning the optimistic vision of the so-called "hydrogen economy" published in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American." Wald talks about "wells to wheels," the total efficiency and pollution from source to use of different methods of powering cars. Apparently buying a hybrid (a Prius, presumably) is just as green as a fuel cell would be.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:48:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Vintage Electronics Zen

pocket calculator show
commodore 64 heaven
vinyl data
world of spectrum
amiga forever
video synths
dot matrix synth
atari coin op flyers
seeing double
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:47:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web-based iTunes Music Store client and library

The Downhill Battle people are hosting a web-based script that searches the iTunes Music Store and allows you to interact with it as though you were using a copy of iTunes itself. The script is open-source, and they hope the script will be used for innovative functionality in other apps, like providing 30-second previews and metadate for tracks on P2P nets. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:49:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clean Slate "amnesty" euthanized

Jason Schultz analyzes the recording industry's withdrawal of its perp-walk "Clean Slate" program.

The RIAA has finally seen the light with regard to its "Clean Slate" program, which offered false amnesty, or shamnesty, to people who admitted to file sharing. Citing the success of its "education" campaign, the group has abruptly cancelled the program.

"Clean Slate" promised that in exchange for a confession, you could gain meaningful protection from lawsuits for copyright infringement. In fact, the program left you vulnerable to lawsuits by record companies and music publishers, as well as bands like Metallica that retain independent control of music rights.

Eric Parke, represented by Ira Rothken, brought suit, charging fraudulent business practices -- and here, perhaps, we can glean the true reason for the RIAA's change of heart. Its attorneys announced during a recent court proceeding that the group had discontinued "Clean Slate" -- and that therefore the case was moot. The announcement took Mr. Parke, his attorney and the judge by surprise.

Link (Thanks Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:46:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

1995 web-hosting rates

This web-page advertising a 1995 web-hosting service is a reminder of the kind of crazy rates we got away with in the early day of the Interweb.

Sun, Dec 28, 1995

Special Offer! WorldWideWeb Precence for only $250 per month ($100 setup)!

* Your own unique WWW address (e.g. w3.1c4.net/www/users/j/jhs/index.html)!
* 1 mail account (e.g. you@mail7.1c4.net)!
* 3Mb storage space! More than enough for a modern information service.
* Unlimited FTP updates and transfers.
* 30 day money-back guarantee and no minimum contract.
* FULL customer technical support during normal office hours!
* Page Design, graphic design, and html authoring and cgi scripting is available from $50 to $125 per hour, domain name registration and maintenance is $100 per year.

Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nebula Award winners

Locus Online has this year's Nebula winners:

NOVEL: The Speek of Dark, Elizabeth Moon (Ballantine)
NOVELLA: Coraline, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins)
NOVELETTE: "The Empire of Ice Cream", Jeffrey Ford (Sci Fiction, 26 Feb 2003)
SHORT STORY: "What I Didn't See", Karen Joy Fowler (Sci Fiction 10 Jul 2002)
SCRIPT: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair & Peter Jackson (New Line Cinema; based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien)
DAMON KNIGHT MEMORIAL GRAND MASTER AWARD: Robert Silverberg
SERVICE TO SFWA AWARD: Ann Crispin
SERVICE TO SFWA AWARD: Michael Capobianco

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:55:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 17, 2004

No Nebula for me, alas

Well, thanks to Jack Bell, I just listened in on Connie Willis reading out the winners for the Best Novelette category at the Nebulas. My story, 0wnz0red, didn't win, alas. However, I am here to tell you that standing in a hotel in Linz, phone clamped to ear, listening to someone read out the Nebula winners thousands of miles and nine timezones away, was enough to set my heart racing. Thanks to everyone who nominated me and voted for me. It truly is an honour just to be nominated. Eileen Gunn would have given my acceptance speech, had I won, may as well reproduce it here for alternate historians:

If there's anything worse than a long award-speech, it's a long award-speech by proxy, so this is short. I deeply regret not being there tonight, and I am thrilled down to my boots by this honour. In this age of Neil Gaiman's Hugo speeches, it's a cliche to say, "Holy fuck, I've won a Nebula," but really, after all, holy fuck, I've won a Nebula.

Thanks to everyone, but especially to my editors, co-workers and copyfighters, to my agent Don Maass and the Gibraltar Point workshop, and to all the slashdotters and other netizens who downloaded this from Salon.

And thanks to Eileen for letting me make her say "fuck" twice, er, three times, in front of all of you.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Giant LAN party runs girl geeks off the premises

Katla was one of the few women to attend a 5,000-person LAN party in Norway called The Gathering. Some of the "boys" at the LAN party decided to make a movie consisting of close-ups fo the tits and asses of the women in attendance. Katla's sworn off The Gathering -- her post is heartbreaking.

It was to much to hope for. 5 days running around with fellow geeks, doing geeky stuff. I sdont think i want to go back here, and now i just want to go home, damb brats. now there is not female geeks here anymore. but girls, and doubt not for a secound that they are here for your pleasure only. fucking assholes. and they are still here. they did not get kicked out. and i doubt they will be. Dam shame, it could have been fun beeing a geek here. but i think ill just stay away.

Link (via Misbehaving)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:07:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mickey Mouse's dwindling brand

Great NYT feature on the dwindling importance of Mickey Mouse as a character, and the attempts of the Disney organization to reimagine Mickey as a relevant character today.

"I was around 6 when I first saw him," [Maurice Sendak] said. "It filled me with joy. I think it was those primary colors so vivid and pure, taken up with the most incredibly beautiful animation, reminding you of Fred Astaire. Oh! And his character was the kind I wished I'd had as a child: brave and sassy and nasty and crooked and thinking of ways to outdo people." The joy leached from Mr. Sendak's voice. "Not like the lifeless fat pig he is now."

Mr. Sendak is hardly alone in mourning the mouse's decline. "Boring," "embalmed," "neglected," "irrelevant," "deracinated" and, perhaps most damning, "over" are some of the adjectives that cropped up in recent interviews with people in the cartoon, movie and marketing businesses.

Link (Thanks, Warren!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Retired patent examiner turned Rube Goldberg

Arthur Paul Pedrick was a UK patent examiner who retired and filed many patents for whacky, impractical inventions.

A horse-powered car, putting the cart before the horse. To control the speed, the car's accelerator pedal varies the thrust which the horse must exert to reach its feedbox 2. The brake pedal is linked to the horse's halter. The ignition switch can give the horse's posterior a mild electric shock to stimulate it into movement.

Link (via Monochrom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:27:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anyone with a Sidekick going to the Nebs?

If anyone is going to be at tonight's Nebula Award ceremony with a Sidekick or other wireless email appliance, can you send me an email after the novellette category winner is announced, letting me know if I won? I'm in Linz, Austria, and I'm guessing the award will be announced somewhere around 8PM, which is 5AM here -- I'm setting an alarm for 5... Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:47:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Logan Airport deploys snitch-squad

Logan Airport is deploying undercover snoops who will keep an eye out for anxious, sweaty, inappropriately dressed air-travellers who are observing security measures. These people will be sent away for secondary cavity-screening. You know, the number of times I've shown up at a warm-weather airport in a cold-weather coat (formy destination), sweating, anxious, and bug-eyed at the National Guard teenagers threatening to blow their zits off with their hulking carbines... Welcome to the future: a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

[O]fficials watch people as they move through terminals. They look for odd or suspicious behavior: heavy clothes on a hot day, loiterers without luggage, anyone observing security methods.

At the security checkpoints, screening supervisors have a score sheet with a list of behaviors on it. If a passenger hits a certain number, a law enforcement officer will be notified to question the person.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:08:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 16, 2004

Final Transmet collection available

The final Transmetropolitan collection, "Transmetropolitan: One More Time," is available for pre-order on Amazon. It's the tenth book, collecting issues 55-60: there are nine other books collecting the earlier issues, and as good as those issues were, it's in this, the final volume of the most original and invigorating sf comic I've ever read, that Ellis outdoes himself, pulling together a finale to his five-year serial that's triumphant, sad and brave. When the last issue came out, I wrote a Wired review of it -- and rereading it today reminds me of just how exciting it was to get a new Transmet ish at the comic-shop. It was Transmet that turned me into a comics reader again: I'm so glad that the whole series is now available for sale. Link (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Economics of Hacking an Election

Counterpane.com's Bruce Schneier sez: "How hard would it be to swing an election by hacking computerized voting machines? How valuable would it be? I did the math, and the results are even scarier than I expected them to be." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:22:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brains and beauty, etc.

A brain study released today shows that the human ability to appreciate aesthetics is based in the prefontal cortex, part of the brain involved in decision making. The scientists at the Balearic Islands University in Spain came to this conclusion by imaging their subjects' brains while looking at art and photography. According to the study, quoted in Scientific American, "'a phylogenetic change in the prefontal cortex could give way to the decorative and artistic profusion' in humans."

Another study published today by Northwestern University suggests that "Eureka!" moments of insight activate "a distinct area in the right hemisphere of the brain's temporal cortex," a region where semantic connections occur.

"For thousands of years people have said that insight feels different from more straightforward problem solving," one of the researchers said. "We believe this is the first research showing that distinct computational and neural mechanisms lead to these breakthrough moments."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:33:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

White roofs cut air-conditioning by 40%

Painting our roofs and roads white would substaintially reduce the cost (both monetary and environmental) of cooling our cities.

Cooler roofs come from changing the color of the material used for roofing shingles. Most homes have to be re-roofed about every 20 years. Changing from a dark shingle (once traditional because it was more "wood like") to a light-colored (titanium-based white or terra cotta red) shingle can cut air conditioning costs by up to 40%. Georgia has been a leader in pushing cool roofs, passing a state law encouraging the shift. A few other states and regions also provide incentives, and the federal government is considering adding heat reflectivity requirements to housing regulations.

Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:51:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian government funding DRM with tax-dollars

The Canadian government is giving away tax-dollars to fund the creation of digital rights management software. I think I'm going to throw up. Or go on tax strike. The idea that the Canadian government is going to spend my arts-career-earned dollars on doomed techno-snake-oil whose only use is to frustrate posterity, steal the public's rights in copyright, and justify the existence of stunningly evil anti-circumvention laws -- Christ, it makes me want to spit.

To assist in the development and implementation of online, copyright management and licensing systems and mechanisms that facilitate access to and the exploitation of one or all types of existing or copyrighted works, in particular Canadian, including works where multiple ownership arrangements exist, preferably through the development of a single-window model.

Link (Thanks, Damien!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:53:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

British Library audio archive coming

The British Library is releasing a ton of audio from its archive on the Web -- though the article implies that it will only be available to higher education institutions.

Examples held on the British Library site include a live recording of Paul Robeson in Othello, Florence Nightingale speaking in one of the earliest sound recordings, as well as the genesis of Sherlock Holmes.

These historic recordings will be made freely available to further and higher education institutions in the UK and will include a wide range of materials, including classical and popular music, broadcast radio, oral history, and field and location recordings of traditional music.

Link (Thanks, Patricio!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:48:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

London blogger get-together in the planning stages

Imajes is planning a London blogger get-together -- I'm hoping it'll happen on a day when I can make it. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:45:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Wireless Firefighter

Here's an article I wrote for TheFeature about a new research projected at UC Berkeley to outfit firefighters with high-tech wireless helmets to help them navigate through burning buildings. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:52:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The how and why of happiness

Long article about happiness from The Guardian. I was especially interested in the part that reported that people, on average, are least happy at age 42, because they realize they aren't going to be rich and famous like they thought when they were in their twenties. After 42, though, they stop worrying about it, and start enjoying life more.

'People start out in life pretty certain that they're going to end up like David Beckham or win the Nobel Prize,' says Oswald. 'Then, after a few years, they discover it's quite tough out there - not just in their careers, but in life. Unsurprisingly, their happiness drops.' The good news is that the downer doesn't last. According to Oswald, if you trace the trajectory of most peoples' happiness over time it resembles a J-curve. People typically record high satisfaction levels in their early twenties. These then fall steadily towards middle age, before troughing at around 42. Most of us then grow steadily happier as we get older, with those in their sixties expressing the highest satisfaction levels of all - as long, that is, as they stay healthy.

Link (Via LinkmachineGo)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:22:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paper DVDs

Sony and Toppan Printing have developed DVDs consisting of 51 percent paper. Data is stored on the discs using a blue laser instead of red. The smaller wavelength of blue laser light means that 25 gigabytes of data can be packed onto each paper/polymer disk, more than twice the capacity of traditional polycarbonate plastic-based DVDs. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:22:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How-to cartoons for kids

Howtoons are how-to project cartoons for kids, with a good mix of mischief, smartassery, and science. Link (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:38:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple takes Playfair bullying to India

Playfair is the program that removes the use-restriction wrapper from your iTunes Music Store tracks. It used to be hosted on SourceForge, but they chickened out when Apple sent them a bullying note demanding takedown under the ludicrous and loathesome DMCA. Playfair moved to a host in India, which apparently has no such law, but now Apple has nastygrammed the Indian hosts too, resulting in another takedown while the Indians get some legal advice. Gee, Apple, you really can't buy publicity like this. Well, you can. But why would you want to? Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UCLA Geophysicist says major quake to hit LA by September

A geophysicist with a good track record of predicting quakes based on fault line stress data says Los Angeles will experience a nasty 6.4 quake by September.

The experts predicted in June an earthquake measuring 6.4 or higher would strike within nine months in a 496-kilometre region of central California, including San Simeon, where a 6.5-magnitude temblor struck December 22, killing two people. In July, they said they predicted a magnitude 7.0 or higher quake in a region that included Hokkaido by December 28. The September 25 quake fell within that period. Now they predict a major quake will hit an area that stretches across desert regions to the east of Los Angeles, home to around nine million people, including the Mojave desert and the resort town of Palm Springs, which lies near the notorious San Andreas fault.

Link (Via IP)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:16:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Average PC has 28 spywarez running on it

Earthlink's spyware-hunting add-on has been running since January. In that time, it's found an average of 28 spyware apps on users' PCs.

The Spy Audit by EarthLink reflects the results of scans involving over one million computers between January and March.

It uncovered more than 29.5 million examples of spyware. These are parasite programs sometimes come attached to software downloaded from the web.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seekrit Royal Mail site lets you look up cruft-free postcodes

The UK Royal Mail has redesigned its site in craptacular, non-accessible glory, shutting off people using assistive devices from looking up postcodes. The official line of the post office is that Britons "begin to notice dramatic improvements in accessibility in the next two months." As NTK points out, though, the old, lynx-friendly site is still accessible at a s33kr1t URL. Link (via NTK)

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

Howard Waldrop is blogging! Yee-goddamned-HAW!

Howard Waldrop, the legendary science fiction writer whose short stories -- such as "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll" and "Night of the Cooters" -- are some of the best sf I've ever read, has taken over Bruce Sterling's old berth as blogger-in-residence for the brilliant sf mag Infinite Matrix. I thank the universe that I lived to read a blog penned by Howard Waldrop. Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:29:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tire-slashing cyclist jailed

A cyclist who slashed 2,000 car-tyres after being drenched by a car has been sentenced to 16 months in jail. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:05:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 15, 2004

Johannes Grenzfurthner's blog

Former guestblogger Johannes Grenzfurthner has started a blog for Monochrom, the Austrian arts collective he's a member of -- it's full of the same wonderful stuff that he posted to our sidebar last month. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Electric Company video and audio

The Electric Company archive has audio ("Arthur J. Crank sings 'S On The End'," "Easy Reader," "Greedy Greg Grabbed," "The HEY YOU GUYS! Song," "Monolith," etc) and video ("There's A Banana In Your Ear!," "I Am Cute" with Mel Brooks, and "Silhouette Syllables" with Morgan Freeman) from one of the all-time great musical kids' shows of the 1970. Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:41:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Headphones that can record their input as MP3

Engadet reports on Aiwa's new ¥15,000 headphones, which can take standard audio input and play it through and/or record it as an MP3 to its built-in 128MB of memory. It's a great idea, and I can think of a million things I would love to use them for, from recording tracks off vinyl records to the air-traffic control chatter on Channel 12 on United flights. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:05:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pig Brother: swine voyeurism

Darren sez, "Watch a family of wild boars, live with video and audio 24-hours a day. I watched and listened for a few minutes tonight, which is tomorrow morning in German boar time. I didn't see any pigs, but I did hear them. The audio is fantastic--very atmospheric. You can hear them scuffling around and snorting in the dirt. Over the past two weeks, apparently this site in Germany was become something of a phenomenon, registering 1.5 million visitors." Link (Thanks, Darren!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:47:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF guide to Gmail privacy

Donna sez: "EFF provides a quick and dirty technical work-around for protecting your privacy if you want to use Google's beta Gmail service - only a temporary fix, and there's the rub: Google needs to step up and provide a solution that protects its customers' privacy (and the same goes for other businesses than can link email to search data!)."

For current and prospective Gmail users, we suggest that you start by deleting your existing Google cookies before you use Gmail (and before you enter your real name or existing email address in any Google form). This will help prevent your pre-existing search history from becoming associated with your identity in the future. (Note that it will also cause you to lose any Google preferences you have entered, such as language or adult content preferences.)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:46:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shooting for RFID in guns

Verichip announced the development of a gun safety system based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. The aim is to prevent a gun from being fired by anyone other than its owner. Here's how it works: A gun is outfitted with an RFID reader. An RFID tag is implanted in the gun owner's hand. Only in the presence of that tag will the handgun allow its trigger to be unlocked. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:31:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellular sounds

What do cells sound like? Nanotech pioneer Jim Gimzewski and grad student Andrew Pelling are using the tiny tip of an atomic force microscope like the needle of a record player to pick up a cell's sound-generating vibrations. Gimzewski has named the fieled "sonocytology." From a Smithsonian Magazine article about the research:

"The distance the cell wall moves determines the amplitude, or volume, of the sound wave, and the speed of the up-and-down movement is its frequency, or pitch. Though the volume of the yeast cell sound was far too low to be heard, Gimzewski says its frequency was theoretically within the range of human hearing. 'So all we're doing is turning up the volume,' he adds."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:59:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The whacky world of income tax protesters

Great Reason article about people who flat out refuse to pay income taxes.

While in the past evangelists of the "income tax is a fraud" message have tended to sell books and seminars, the We The People Foundation has the advantage of being hard to blithely condemn as a scam. It is not a business selling advice but a nonprofit dedicated to spending money -- more than $1 million since taking up this fight -- to spread the word. Its founder claims Gandhi as his influence: From him Schulz learned that to fight an unjust tyranny, you need a proactive, nonviolent mass movement, and that is what he is trying to create.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:59:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stephenson's money-centric interview on Wired News

Paul Boutin conducted an interview with Neal Stephenson for Wired News in honour of Neal's new book, Confusion, sequel to the Leibnitzpunk doorstopper Quicksilver, a book that I like more and more the further I get from it (that is, when I read it, I liked it OK, but the more I think about it, the better I like it). Paul got Stephenson to expound for quite a while on money and what it means, a subject on which Neal has many interesting and rarely-heard things to say.

[M]oney is a sort of medium for the exchange of information. When the price of cloth went up in Antwerp, it was because the system of international trade, in some fashion that's too complex for us to understand, was transmitting information about the supply/demand balance. Money makes that kind of information flow better.

Nowadays money is electronic and there's plenty of it. Back then, money had to be silver or gold. In those days silver came from the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Peru, and gold came from the Portuguese colony of Brazil. It was transported across the Atlantic to Europe, though English and other privateers did their best to intercept it en route. Some of it circulated in European markets, some was hoarded in the vaults of wealthy families and institutions, and a lot of it flowed east toward India and China. China was notoriously hungry for silver. It was a complicated flow pattern, with any number of sources and sinks and eddies and feedback loops, and like any other such system it was capable of chaotic behavior. If enough people hoarded their metal, a money shortage would develop, which would make it very difficult to conduct trade on any level beyond that of a village market, and throttle the flow of information.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:57:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jenna Jameson has a really nice house

According to this New York Times article about porn star Jenna Jameson's fabulous abode, we weblogger/freelance writer types are totally in the wrong business. I mean -- check out the size of her shoe closet, for chrissakes.
Link (Thanks, Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:55:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thai Lady-Man beauty contest

I'm no expert on Thai society, but I'm fascinated by the role of transvestites and transsexuals in Thai movies and popular culture. The relative social acceptance of "lady boys" seems to be rooted in part in Buddhist tradition, but modern manifestations owe as much to Holllywood dreams as anything else. For instance: the "Greatest Lady-man Pageant in the World," which took place last Friday in Pattaya, promising lady-men "more beautiful than you have ever seen anywhere before."
Link to Lady-Man Pageant website, Link to Flash-based website for the forthcoming Thai film Beautiful Boxer ("He fights like a man so he can become a woman").

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:45:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Attogram scale can weigh viruses

This new scale can detect mass differences of an attogram (10^-18 grams)

"The nanoelectromechanical device used by Craighead and colleagues consists of an oscillating cantilever made from a small wafer of silicon 4 microns long and 500 nm wide. When a small particle is absorbed onto the wafer, it alters the frequency at which the wafer vibrates. The team was able to monitor this change by measuring laser light reflected off the wafer, which then allowed the mass of the particle to be calculated."

Link (Via ZZZ)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:58:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

It's a computer case and a hamster cage

"The PC HabiCase allows your gerbil, hamster or mouse to live INSIDE your computer. Ample room is provided for climbing, or your pet can hang out in one of the two "play pods" located at the front and top of the case. Heat from your CPU ensures your rodent will be warm and comfortable in a climate controlled environment." Cost $149. Motherboard not included. It's an April Fool's Joke. Link (Via World of Wonder)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:47:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transexual Korean pop singer stars in sanitary napkin commercials

Harisu, a famous transexual pop singer in Korea, will appear in TV commercials for menstrual pads.

"Harisu, who's hit song "Foxy Lady" has made her quite busy lately, will return to Korea on Friday. She is currently in the United States, where she will perform a concert after being selected as the "Korean Artist We'd Most Like to See" by the LA Korean Chamber of Commerce. Harisu, who's hit song "Foxy Lady" has made her quite busy lately, will return to Korea on Friday. She is currently in the United States, where she will perform a concert after being selected as the "Korean Artist We'd Most Like to See" by the LA Korean Chamber of Commerce."

Link (Via World of Wonder)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:43:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Forget Alvin and the Chipmunks

Here are the Hamsters! A graduate student at Cornell University built a MIDI sequencer controlled by six hamsters:

"The MIDI sequencer intelligently produced melodies by manipulating the musical elements of rhythm and note-choice. Guided by inputs based on hamster movements, Markov chains were used to perform such beat and note computations. In culmination, 3 simultaneous voices were produced spanning 3 octaves and 3 rhythmic tiers. Each voice was controlled by two hamsters: one that was responsible for adjusting the rhythmic qualities of the melody and another that modified the note sequence. With all of these elements in combination, an output was produced with very musical qualities."

Link (Thanks, Nick and Morris!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:03:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Make a USB turd

Instructions on how to make your very own USB-powered hunk of faux feces. Why anyone would want to, I cannot fathom. Link (Thanks,JL). And when you're done, you can print out this uttery non-worksafe coprophilia coloring book, and frolic away merrily in the land of poo. Link (Thanks, Manuel Wanskasmith, via Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:34:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Green Freezers for Ben and Jerry's

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

In order to boost its environmental image, Ben & Jerry's teamed with Penn State University to build 'green'-technology freezers which will replace existing ones inside its stores. These new greener chillers use sound waves for cooling instead of environment-damaging chemical refrigerants linked to global warming. In this article, the Wall Street Journal (sorry, paid subscribers only) reports that Ben & Jerry's invested $600,000 in the project and that the first acoustic chiller will be installed in New York next week. And these sound waves will really 'scream for ice cream': they will be attached to amplifiers generating 183 decibels, a sound level thousands of times beyond rock concert levels. This overview contains other details and references about the 'green' chiller.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:26:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eglu and Urban Chicken Chic update

Boingboing reader Shelly Rae Clift read yesterday's post on fashionable iMac-like poultry housing and says:

Not only is Chicken Keeping allowed in the fine city of Seattle but you can have up to three (as long as they are hens that is)! (And yes, hens lay eggs just fine without roosters). The City Chickens phenomenon has sparked some creative coop architecture and an annual tour of City Chicken Coops. Now I wonder how I can get an Eglu of my own...?

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:24:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos of water throwing festival in Thailand

Boingboing reader Ron Morris says:

Songkran - the water throwing fesitval in Thailand. A series of photos that shows what it is like to be in the middle of the water-throwing frenzy on Khao Sarn Road in Bangkok.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:20:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Free Audi for best Bowie mashup

David Bowie recently cut an Audi commercial that mashes up his classic "Rebel, Rebel" andhis new "Never Grow Old." Now Audi and Bowie are holding a competition to see who can do the best new mashup of any two Bowie songs, with a new car to the winner. Link (via Copyfight)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:48:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Redrum, Redrum

I just returned from a conference in Estes, Colorado at the Stanley Hotel. Built in 1909 by the inventor of the Stanley Steamer, the hotel is apparently quite haunted. In fact, the spookiness so inspired Stephen King that he spent five months there in 1973 pounding out The Shining. Stanley Kubrick's version of the film wasn't shot at The Stanley, but much of the 1997 TV remake was filmed at the hotel. Unfortunately, I didn't see any ghosts during my stay, but I did see The Shining. The Kubrick version plays around the clock on the hotel TV channel. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:38:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fools think Bill Gates is reading about their pleas for money

Gadgetopia's Deane Barker sez: "Check out the comments on this thread. I posted this note about Bill Gates' philanthropy. There are dozens of comments from people who apparently think Bill Gates posted it and will give them money. It's fascinating to read -- what are these people thinking? I thought about shutting off the comments, but I have this perverse desire to read them. Every couple of comments I have someone leave their phone number and/or home address that I have to go edit out."

i was defrauded from my life savings, by a firm called financial asvisory consultants. the president of this firm had a ponzi scheme going for 20 years, and many investors lost thier life savings. its been all over the papers here in los angeles...if there is anything that you can do to help me out of this situation, i would be forever in your debt. please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, or need additional information in regards to this matter.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:21:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unreal 3's amazing detail

Here's a 12 MG Windows Medis video clip of Unreal's fantastically detailed world. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:45:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dry water

"Sapphire" is a sythetic liquid that doesn't get stuff wet.

Pelton submerged several items into a tank of Sapphire that was on the Good Morning America set. Books did not get wet. Electronics were not be destroyed. Items that were submerged in the liquid were dried in a matter of seconds, and showed no ill effects according to Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer and other members of the Good Morning America staff who saw items plunged into it.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:44:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Message from Weird Al Yankovic

Comedian/musician "Weird Al" Yankovic lost both his mother and father this weekend in an accident involving carbon monoxide poisoning. He's posted a message on his website expressing thanks to fans for their kindness and support in his time of need, and he corrects errors in media coverage on the tragedy. Condolences, and much admiration and respect to Al and his family. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:01:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A9: Amazon's new search engine

John Battelle breaks the news on Amazon.com's new search engine.

A9, Amazon's much discussed skunk works search project goes live today, so I can finally write about it. I saw it last month (caveat: unbeknownst to me until recently, Amazon targeted me as their conduit to break this news - I think they wanted it to move from the blogosphere out, as opposed the WSJ in) and had to keep the damn thing to myself, it was hard, and here's why: On first blush it's a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google - and more broadly, the entire search-driven world - react?

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:40:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bowl made from melted toy soldiers

Neat looking bowl made from partially-melted plastic soldiers. Reminds me of the wonderful Mattel Strange Change machine from back in the days when toys that got hot enough to melt plastic were considered a good thing. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:23:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Every night, five mysterious thuds wake up neighborhood

It's been six months since the residents of Manor Green Road in London have had an uninterrupted night's sleep. "[T]hey have been hearing five repeated thuds in the middle of the night and cannot trace the source. Double-glazed windows and ear plugs have been no match for the tumult." Link (Via Fark)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:06:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: Larry Flynt and Online Porn Crackdown

Today on the NPR program "Day to Day," a report on the debate over government regulation of online pornography and how veterans of such debates -- like publisher and Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt -- plan to weather the storm.
Link to archived online audio. Read a related interview with Larry Flynt on Wired News.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:41:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FTC: Pr0n spam must be labeled

Spam containing pornographic text or images will be required to bear a warning in the subject line for easy filtering, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said yesterday. This is gonna solve the problem? I'm not holding my breath.

Starting May 19, sexually explicit e-mail will have to bear a label reading " Sexually-Explicit:" and the messages themselves will not be allowed to contain graphic material, the FTC said. Outrage over unsolicited pornography and other forms of junk e-mail spurred Congress to pass the first nationwide antispam law last year, which required the FTC to develop labels for smut.

Link to Reuters coverage, Link to AVN coverage.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:11:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chicketecture? Chicken Chic? iCluck?

You won't find any subservient chickens in these poultry housing units, which were thought by some to have been an elaborate April Fool's joke -- but were printed as the real deal in the Times of London, The Register, and elsewhere. Designed so that city-dwelling humans can add a little bokbok to their daily lives, the iMac-like eglu may just be "the world's most stylish and innovative chicken house and [a] perfect way to keep chickens as pets."
Link (Thanks, Giordano!)

UPDATE: Erin says, "A fresh-egg-lovin' pal of mine showed me the Eglu last week. It's no hoax, but it isn't designed for "city-dwellers" as such - most cities prohibit keeping poultry for health reasons, but there are a lot of little hamlets (omelettes?) in England where it would be perfect. Apparently their design was inspired by the iMac. Perhaps this heralds a new era in chicken coop fashions? :D"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:27:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eisner Award noms announced

Nominations for the 16th annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards have been announced. BoingBoing pal Warren Ellis received no fewer than three four (thanks Rui Soares!). Link (Thanks, Susannah!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:18:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rave for the Deaf

BoingBoing reader Charles Vestal says:

A East London dance club held an all-deaf rave, featuring signing-karaoke, deaf rap, a standup comdian, and all the pumping basslines they could handle. Problem was, the lights were flashing so much, no one could chat with each other at the bar. Perhaps they should hook up with this guy to get a more moving experience.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:39:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons-licensed phonecam blogging service

Alfie Dennen of the phonecam blogging service Moblog UK says:

We operate the site code on a copyright commons basis, and with users like Warren Ellis (who want to retain control of their images/video/audio), we urge people using the site to do the same. The fact that Textamerica and mblog etc own your content once it hits their servers got us so angry we felt we had to make an alternative.

We carry no advertising, and are donation supported. In terms of the code itself, we support multiple image posts, multiple audio and image posts, in pretty much every format that phones can produce. The site is very malleable, if you can make a css style sheet, you can make the site entirely your own look, still hosting it with us. We are a community that consists partly of a lot of artists who want to make sure they keep some ownership of their work.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:36:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Music industry smears file-sharing research

Koleman Strumpf, the co-author of the first-ever empirical study on the impact of file-sharing on record sales, has found himself on the receiving end of a withering attack from the music industry who argue that their bought-and-paid-for, non-empirical "research" trumps his analysis, attacking his conclusions.

Two years ago, Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee set out to research the matter. Strumpf's interest was piqued by the Napster trial, where the recording industry alleged copyright violations that led to the demise of the pioneering Web site in 2001. In the testimony, experts argued that music downloads had to be the cause of slumping sales.

Strumpf read the studies they cited. They were horrible, he said.

"I was like, 'Boy, this is pretty amazing,' " said Strumpf, a Philadelphia native. "Nobody has done a serious study."

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:57:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Underoo gallery: knicker nostalgia

Retrocrush has put up a marvellous gallery of scanned vintage Underoo packaging -- they're looking for more. Can you fill in the gaps in the collection? Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:01:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Onion stories reported as fact

The Onion's deadpan satricial news-stories, musch-forwarded and chuckled over, have frequently been reported as fact by variou snews agencies, law-enforcement departments, and pressure groups.

[T]he Branch County sheriff's department in Coldwater, Michigan, which had been investigating telemarketing scams targeting the elderly, issued an urgent press release.

"In the course of this investigation, it was learned that this is going on throughout the United States, and some of these telemarketing programs are believed to be operated by al-Qaida," the release stated. "The CIA has announced that they acquired a videotape showing al-Qaida members making phone solicitations for vacation home rentals, long-distance telephone service, magazine subscriptions and other products."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:34:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fibonacci MIDI

If you play the Fibonacci Sequence through a MIDI engine, you get something eerily Philip-Glass-like. Link (Thanks Quinn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:06:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stock footage film-fest

Great Wired News piece on the Stockstock film-festival, where footage from the Prelinger Archive of ephemeral films is used as the raw material for a festival's worth of short movies.

Festival operators pore over films in the online Prelinger Archives and choose a mishmash of films that are then combined and pared down to a 40-minute tape. Entrants must create a short film, limited to three minutes, using the footage provided. They can manipulate the films however they like and add dialogue, titles and music. All that's required is a computer with video-editing software and the $20 entry fee.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:21:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Ecto for Windows launches, BoingBoing now a 100% Ecto blog!

The popular blogging-aid software Ecto -- once only offered for Mac -- is now available for Windows users. With today's launch of Ecto for Windows, BoingBoing officially becomes an all-ecto blog! My BoingBoing co-editors all use it to make blogging with Movable Type more friendly and efficient. I'm the only PC-afflicted blogger in the bunch. TypePad, MovableType, Nucleus, and Blogger users: rejoice. Ecto creator Adriaan Tijsseling says:

Joi and me are very happy to announce the release of a beta of a Windows port of ecto, thanks to a unique collaboration with Alex Hung. It is our hope that with this collaboration the ease of use and features of ecto will now be available to the Windows users. The beta trial will last one month, during which we hope to find bugs and improve on the product with the help of user feedback. Any information about this beta will be on the ecto for Windows webpage as Alex will be the main responsible person for this Windows version.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:38:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What's up with DoubleClick's Google AdWords-like ads?

Rupert Scammell tells BoingBoing:

On Gawker tonight, I noticed that DoubleClick now uses banners which look like Google AdWords ads. In a similar manner to their infamous fake Windows error dialog banners, DC seems to be capitalizing upon the now familiar look of Gooogle's advertising to up their click rate. I wrote a quick weblog entry up about it, which features a screenshot of the advertising in action.

Link

Jon Gales tells BoingBoing: "That's not quite true. They are teamed up with Google. They take a bet that they will be able to beat the CPM they pay (which is quite low). Check this Webmaster World forum for more discussion on the topic." (NOTE: forum appears to be for paid members only. --XJ)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:54:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AmEx's dumb-ass trademark threats

Brad Templeton -- the long-time moderator of rec.humor.funny and host of the rhf archives -- has received a cease-and-desist notice from AmEx's lawyers over a 13 year old joke called "American Expressway." Brad, being fully aware of the Constitutionally protected right to parody and how that trumps trademark, has posted a link to the joke, the C&D, and his response, which pokes vicious fun at AmEx's lawyers at the firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe:

hould you ever feel your reputation lost or stolen by free speech and satire, just one call gets LVM to write a threatening cease and desist letter -- usually on the same day -- citing all sorts of important sounding laws but ignoring the realities of parody. Most innocent web sites will cave in, not knowing their rights. LVM will pretend it has never read cases like L.L. Bean, Inc. v. High Society and dozens of others. There's no preset limit on the number of people you can threaten, so you can bully as much as you wish.

After all, Being Giant and Intimidating has its Privileges.

American Express Lawyers: Don't leave your home page without them.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:51:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MoSoSo

New jargon from Quake legend Alice Taylor: "MoSoSo." Social software for mobile phones. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:26:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cattle rustling on the rise -- blame Atkins

Ten of millions of low carb dieters have created such a demand for beef that cattle rustling is getting popular again. Link (via Carbwire)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:22:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Giving up on email folders

Rael Dornfest says he's going to stop filing his email messages into different folders. Instead, he's going to put all the messages he wants to keep into a single folder and use his email programs search and sort functions to retrieve messages he wants to re-read. I'll be interested to see how this works for him. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:06:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BoingBoing tribe on tribe.net hits 700 members

The Boingboing affinity group on tribe.net, created last year by a group of readers, just welcomed its 700th member. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:24:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cosplay community site "Cure"

Joi Ito writes:

The Japanese "sort of equivalent" of SuicideGirls is Cure, a cosplay site. The biggest difference is that the sexy pictures are not allowed. It's quite an amazing community. There are 5000 layers (comes from Cosplayers) and 30,000 cameko (comes from camera kozo or "Camera Boys"). The layers can be sorted by ranking or by the characters they play. The cameko are otaku who spend their lives taking pictures of the layers and giving beautiful prints of their photos to the layers and sharing them online. The site lets you send these photos to or view them on your mobile phones.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:19:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LiveJournal image zeitgeist

This page contains a scraping of the most recent couple-dozen images included in LiveJournal posts (which often includes some NSFW stuff, wage-slaves be warned). Link (Thanks, Singularity!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:16:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CD and DVD cover-art archive

Damien sez, "these incredible guys have created an online archive of the front and back cover art of almost every compact disc album and DVD release ever, freely downloadable as a jpeg. of course, the linear shelf space of any decent DVD movie collection is enormous if actually stored in those over-sized black plastic boxes..." Link (Thanks, Damien!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clear duct tape

3M has shipped tranparent "Scotch" duct-tape. Kevin Kelly's been playing with it and he says it holds up as good as the silvery stuff, but strong uptake would obviate my favorite Star Wars joke: "Duct tape is like The Force: It has a dark side and a light side and it holds the Universe together." Still, we could sub in "Duct tape is like the good government: It is perfectly transparent and it holds the nation together." Link (via Cool Tools)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:22:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sniper rifle shoots RFID chips into people?

This is probably phony, but it seems like something that might actually be used: The ID SNIPER rifle implants "a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis." Link (Thanks, Thorzdad!)

Steve Lawson sez: The ID Sniper Rifle is indeed a fake. The NPR show "The Next Big Thing" did a segment on it--the guy made a mock poster, business cards, etc. and took it to a weapons convention where he got serious interest from the Chinese. See http://www.nextbigthing.org/ and scroll down to the story "High Tech High Art"

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:45:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart and Al Franken on Air America

Here's Matt Haughey's 66MB Zip of Jon Stewart being interviewed on Al Franken's Air America show last night. 66MB Zip Link (via Whole Lotta Nothing)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:48:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Streetside trompe l'oeil

From Gizmodo: beautiful trompe l'oeil paintjobs on streetside transformer boxes. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:38:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why national ID cards make us less safe

Bruce Schneier has written an amazing editorial on the security risks inherent in instituting a national ID card.

Not that there would ever be such thing as a single ID card. Currently about 20 percent of all identity documents are lost per year. An entirely separate security system would have to be developed for people who lost their card, a system that itself is capable of abuse.

Additionally, any ID system involves people... people who regularly make mistakes. We all have stories of bartenders falling for obviously fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government buildings. It's not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures. Biometrics such as thumbprints show some promise here, but bring with them their own set of exploitable failure modes.

But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.

Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:35:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Report from Yale's Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment

James Grimmelman has written up a witty and marvellous con-report from Yale's Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment, wherein a bunch of Internet law-enforcement theorists and practicioners chewed the fat with civ-lib types:

Phil's Commandment Five -- "Criminal sanctions should where necessary deter costly anti-social conduct." -- sounds an awful lot like Bentham's "The general object which all laws have, or ought to have, in common, is . . . to exclude mischief." Similarly, Phil's Commandment Three -- "When traditional crime presents a greater harm to society because it is committed online, that crime should entail a heavier punishment, where possible through neutral means such as measuring the actual damage done" -- has a close resemblance to Bentham's "When two offences come in competition, the punishment for the greater offence must be sufficient to induce a man to prefer the less."

Now, this is all well and good, but Dan Solove then undermines these simple utilitarian calculations, in exactly the way that two centuries of law and economics have undermined Bentham's calm confidence. It turns out that optimal deterrence is indeterminate: it doesn't spit out clear answers all the time, because you can often make good deterrence arguments for lower punishments. This is what Solove is getting at when he says that constructing identity theft as "theft" undermines the importance of building secure architecture. Dan sees creating vulnerability itself as a harm that needs to be redressed: perhaps the people at "fault" are as much the people using social security numbers as database primary keys, as much as the crackers who steal those numbers.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:31:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chat, copy, paste, prison

Via Declan McCullagh's politech list:

You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail.

New Hampshire is "two-party consent state" -- one of those jurisdictions that requires all parties to a conversation to consent before the conversation can be intercepted or recorded. The decision is the first of its kind to apply that standard to online chats, and the ruling is clearly supported by the text of the law. But it marks a blow to an investigative technique that has been routinely used by law enforcement, employers, ISPs and others.

Link to Security Focus story

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:52:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GIs in Iraq tote in digital pop culture -- and share it

Fascinating piece in today's NYT about digital media sharing among enlisted personnel in Iraq. Would entertainment industry groups -- or at some point, our government -- prosecute these soldiers for piracy?

At the Kirkush Military Training Base in the eastern Iraqi desert less than 15 miles from the frontier with Iran, an hour's wait for a helicopter was spent listening to Marilyn Manson, Eminem and Shania Twain before the Black Hawk fired up its turbines and somebody back in the barracks, as if on cue and with a dark sense of irony, cranked up Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." The songs came from a European satellite music channel and a communal computer where 12.8 gigabites of tunes had been downloaded for sharing on MP3's. The rule was simple: Take some music, add some music. "Any time anybody on the team gets a new CD, they load it in, so we stay pretty current," said Sgt. Thomas R. Mena.

As the new CD from Tool blasted in the barracks, Sergeant Mena scrolled through the computerized music library, which ranged from Abba and AC/DC, through Limp Biskit and Metallica and on to Van Halen and ZZ Top. Emigres from West Africa who joined the Army for citizenship and career training arrived with the latest Nigerian pop CD's. Chinese-Americans hauled along hot Hong Kong video imports.

Link (site registration required (Thanks, JP)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:23:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MP3: Don't Stop 'til you Get to Bollywood

A few days ago, Jonno pointed me to a Bollywood-flavored remake of Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough," which he found on a sekrit MP3 blog that shall remain nameless. This track is phat. This track is funky. This track makes me want to do a little dance in my ergonomic chair. A little google-digging reveals the song is by a group called the Bollywood Freaks, and came out on a limited edition red vinyl 7" in the UK. I want to send them money for the funk they provide. I want more of their music. If anyone has info, cough it up.

But for now -- look! Someone dumped a copy of said funky track on a server somewhere. Download the MP3 while it lasts. Link

UPDATE: Stephen VanDyke says, "The name of the artist is James Hy-man, you can find all of the tracks at Boomselection (Link, alternate link). You may also be interested in Get Your Bootleg On (GYBO), which is where a lot of the bootleggers post new mixes."

And Charles Vestal says, "The mix posted on boomselection is a DJ set James Hyman did. While it's wikked awesome, very little of it is actual work he's done, save beatmatching the tracks and adding his name from promos over the intro track. I believe he has done some great mashups in the past, like the Slim Shady / Rockafella Skank mashup from so long ago.

Also, have you seen neverfollow.com? Audi's giving away a TT Coupe for someone who does a mashup of a track off Bowie's new album, Reality and any other Bowie track. Go Home Productions already did this, at the request of Bowie for the new single (featured in a new Audi commercial), mixing the new rocker Never Get Old and Rebel Rebel from Diamond Dogs. So much newness with a little bit of old, and Bowie's still ahead of the curve, embracing mash-up culture when the rest of the industry is scared of it. Dig out your sampler and get to work!"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:10:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dustindiamondsucks.com

Ripped from the headlines of Gawker:

Last week, Dustin Diamond -- once known as Screech on the TV show Saved by the Bell -- apparently failed in an "internet court" arbitration to procure dustindiamond.com. (Yes, I know: I'm still having a hard time believing this isn't an elaborate joke.)

At legal issue in ownership of the domain name: just how famous is Screech these days? In the response to complaint, Max Goldberg, the operator of dustindiamond.com, says:

"Mr. Diamond's attorneys have sadly overstated the extent of their client's renown and the value of his 'brand.' This becomes embarrassingly clear when they attempt to support their claim by pointing to their client's video, Dustin Diamond Teaches Chess. Their Exhibit H shows an advertisement for the video on a nonexistent web site [EXHIBIT G]. Their Exhibit I shows a listing (not an advertisement, as they claim) for the video on eBay from February 3, 2004, shortly before the complaint was filed. It is very possible that the eBay offer was posted by Mr. Diamond or his representatives. Apparently Mr. Diamond's legal team can find no evidence that Dustin Diamond Teaches Chess is anything but a self-published vanity project, one that does not support the claim that the name 'Dustin Diamond' has acquired secondary meaning."

Harsh, dude. This is a clear wake-up call for C-list actors and reality stars everywhere: sock that money away, because your future is fucked.

Screech v. Goldberg [Dustin Diamond Sucks] | Response to Complaint [Dustin Diamond Sucks] | Dustin Diamond dot com

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:52:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LA art show: moonboots and barrettes, elves and cigarettes

If you're in LA this Saturday evening, check out this new show opening at sixspace -- new works by LA artists Megan Whitmarsh and Rachell Sumpter. If you're not in LA, dig the preview online. I'm particularly fond of the images form Whitmarsh (detail at left) -- gallery co-founder Caryn Coleman tells me they're the result of a dream the artist had that Kermit the Frog was in her house, hanging out and doing origami. The pieces depict -- well -- Kermit the Frog hanging out in someone's house, doing origami. Snip from press release:

"Whitmarsh will present her exquisite embroidery on fabric pieces that combine this traditional medium with depictions of elements in pop-culture such as yetis and battling elf girls. While the size of her work ranges from small to large, her characters remain tiny and detailed, forcing the viewer to literally peer into her worlds. Sumpter, part of the new school of illustration, will be exhibiting paintings on paper using gouache, ink and watercolor. Her work has been described as '...delicate ink lines, and subtle attention to detail complement and subvert the lightness of her drawings' and her 'icon-like imagery resembles... children's books found in antique stores, but with a modernist composition and adult subject matter'."
Link to press release, show images up later this week.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:30:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Highgate Cemetery photos

I spent some of yesterday's holiday at Highgate Cemetery in North London. Best known as the burial place of Karl Marx, Highgate is a magnificent, decrepit (many of the crypts were damaged in the Blitz) boneyard, and the tours offered on the west side are spectacular (despite the notably unfriendly demeanor and shrill demands for donations from the woman who was working the gate -- I'm happy to donate money to the charitable trust that maintains the place, but I'm not thrilled about having my arm twisted, nor about being made to physically show that my cellphone has been switched off before I was admitted past the gates).

I took some photos that really turned out well. I've put up a gallery. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:14:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, April 12, 2004

Boing Boing add Technorati support

Check out the "New! Other blogs commenting on this post" at the bottom of our posts -- this is a link to Technorati's index of all the blogs that have linked to each of Boing Boing's posts. It's not quite a Discuss link, but if you have a blog and you post a comment about one of our posts to it, Technorati will find it and index it. Just make sure that your blogging tool is pinging one of the major pingsites, like blo.gs, weblogs.com or Technorati's own pinger (if you're using TypePad, Blogspot, Livejournal or one of the other major hosted services, this is already the case; most host-your-own tools like Blosxom, Movable Type and Radio have a setting for this). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UnAAmerican: American Airlines firehoses customer data at TSA, Lockheed Martin

Remember when JetBlue and Delta got caught firehosing their customers' data all over the place in the name of "national security?" Well American Airlines just got caught doing the same thing.

Anyone who flew American Airlines during June of 2002 should assume that all information given by them to American Airlines, including credit card numbers, is in the possession of both the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the following TSA subcontractors: HNC Software; Infoglide Software; Ascent Technology; and Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as the passenger records were used to test the CAPPS II passenger profiling system, it should be assumed that the Social Security number, date of birth, as well as the associated credit histories and law enforcement records of many of the 1.2 million customers affected were combined into a single file and are now in the possession of the above-named companies as well as the Department of Homeland Security.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shelf filled with ivy

This living shelf from Mosley meets Wilcox is made of transparent plastic with ivy growing in it. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Controvery brews over Suicide Girls-branded print zine

Fleshbot points to some hoo-ha around the yet-to-be-launched print magazine (sneak peek at the cover) bearing the Suicide Girls brand:

Will the new Suicide Girls Magazine be over before it even begins? We've just received a copy of a legal notice signed by nine writers whose work was supposed to appear in the debut issue denying the magazine the right to print any articles submitted by them; according to our tipster, "The writers, who are all without contract, lost interest in the magazine when it became clear that it would be little more than a hipsterized Maxim with nipples." (Hmm, "a hipsterized Maxim with nipples" ... doesn't sound so bad to us, actually.) We'll keep you posted.

I've seen a copy of the letter. I'm told by writers and photographers involved that none were being paid; all were said to be contributing gratis to get a cool, underfunded project off the ground. Link to previous BB post on SG's print plans. Suicide Girls online? Alive and well, and apparently not as directly involved with the magazine as many had assumed.

UPDATE: Suicide Girls founder Sean tells BoingBoing: "SG Pin-up (that's the official name of the mag, advertisers don't like the name Suicide in the title - shocking, no?) is a licensee of SuicideGirls. A company in New York is creating the magazine, which Missy and I get to approve. It is my understanding the Publisher and the editor had some disagreements about the direction of the mag and the editor is pissed off with a capital P and is throwing some kind of fit. I'm sure the publisher will work it out and get us an issue to approve, everything I've seen so far has been really good, but I'm not involved in the production of the magazine so I don't know if the stuff I've seen will be in the final first issue or not. In any case, news of our magazines demise has been reported prematurely, I hope. I think they're just going through the kinds of things you go through when creating a new magazine. Although honestly, I have no idea, as I've never worked in publishing and my only contact has been with the publisher and the art director, both of whom I think are doing a great job with everything they've shown me. I sent them the link and I'm sure they'll respond to you as well, but feel free to print my comments."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:46:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hot pepper spray reverses "permanent" loss of smell

The cold remedy Zicam (which I swear by) has been under attack for possibly causing permanent anosmia (loss of the sense of smell). But a new product on the market called sinus Buster, made from capsaicin (the ingredient that makes chili peppers hot) might reverse anosmia when you squirt it up your nose.

"When my husband ordered the sinus buster over the internet I was skeptical. But I said okay I’ll give it a try. As soon as we got it I used it that night and the next day I noticed I could smell certain odors. I couldn't believe it. The first thing I smelled was my daughter coming home after a night of partying, and I could smell cigarette smoke all over her. I had to bring her coat out to the garage because the smoke odor was so strong. Then my daughter told me that’s how she always smells after going out, but I never smelled the smoke before. It's absolutely amazing," Anderson added.

I've always had a pretty bad sense of smell. Maybe I should give this stuff a try. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:48:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

H is for Hentai: Jlist founder talks about Japan pop culture

(Some links in post not worksafe.) In today's Wired News, I interview Peter Payne, founder of J-list. They sell products for all ages, but in their adults-only section you'll find everything from "Cup o' Pussy" sex toys to "Poop Aid" and "Kanji Quiz" toilet paper to adult computer games to porn DVDs that combine the time-honored themes of bukkake and car-racing (cover snapshot below). Along the way, Payne offers some insights on why Japanese pop culture is so delightfully wacky. Oh, and he schools us on the history of bukkake. Hint: It's all Macarthur's fault. Snip:

It's hard for non-Japanese to understand why something becomes popular, or is perceived as delightful or funny in Japan. In the Japanese language, describing the color green -- a green stoplight for instance -- they say "blue." Looking around this country through the eyes of a gaijin -- a foreigner -- things are just different.

Take the bad words, for instance -- even the letter "h" is loaded. If a guy grabs a girl's breasts in a Japanese porn video, she might say "H!" with a Japanese accent -- like, ACH-ay. That's because H is for hentai, sexually explicit comics. It's like saying, "Pervert!" So, "H-suru" in Japanese means "to have sex." You don't want to actually say "have sex," so it's like saying, "do it."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:20:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Felten's Grand Unified Theory of Filesharing

On "Freedom to Tinker," Ed Felten writes:

Recently we've seen several studies of the impact of filesharing on CD sales. We have enough data now to draw some (very) preliminary conclusions, assuming the studies are correct. Despite the apparent contradictions between the various studies, I think there is a plausible theory that can explain them all -- a Grand Unified Theory of Filesharing.

Link

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

Persian blogger Hoder on how to build a blogosphere

Hossein Derakhshan publishes this insightful post on how to foster the development of "a local blogosphere in a community, based on the experience of Iranians." Link

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

Sex and gravestones

Online photo gallery exploring the sensual female form in cemetary memorial markers.
Link (Via MeFi)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:38:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: US government crackdown on P2P

Today on the NPR program "Day to Day," I talk with host Alex Chadwick about recent actions in Congress and the Department of Justice to crack down on filesharers, and new studies that show a rise in P2P popularity. Link for today's show, scroll down for online audio of "Peer-to-Peer File Sharing On the Rise"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:23:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Killer mutant staph infection on the rise

Scary Business Week article about an anti-biotic resistant strain of staph.

For the past 30 years, hospitals have been battling a mutant form called methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) that is resistant to penicillin-related antibiotics and is especially lethal. Now this drug-defying strain is showing up in the general population. It can be deadly if it enters the blood stream, heart, or lungs, killing anywhere from 25% to 43% of its victims. For years, the best treatment for MRSA was the powerful antibiotic vancomycin. But even this weapon has failed against new strains of staph that have emerged. Some infectious-disease experts predict that by 2010, 40% of staph infections will be vancomycin-resistant.

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:09:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canned beverage chiller

This infomercial-ish device uses water an ice to quickly chill a can of beer (or soda). It works by spinning the can in a bath of very cold water. The can also wobbles slightly, to push the layer of warmed water away from the can. Link (via ZZZ)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:06:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trip Hawkins starts a game company for mobile phones

Here's an article I wrote about Electronic Arts and 3D0 founder Trip Hawkin's new mobile games company, Digital Chocolate. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:00:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prehistoric cat people

Archaeologists have found 9,500-year-old cat bones on the island of Cyprus, where felines are not native. The cat was buried beside a human skeleton, suggesting that it was a pet. Previously, historians though that the Egyptians were the first to domesticate cats about 4,000 years ago. According to the researchers, the eight-month-old cat may have been put to sleep so it could be buried with its caretaker. Poor kitty. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:39:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites in Iraq -- "Toppled"

Blogger and MSNBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites has returned to assignment in Iraq after a short break home in the US. A year ago last Friday, the famous statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad was toppled; Kevin has posted a new essay about the state of Iraq since then. But in light of the multiple hostage situations in Iraq right now, I want to mention one thing that he does not. This also marks the one year anniversary of his capture and subsequent release by Iraqi Fedayeen soldiers. We're glad that this story ended with Kevin free and unharmed. Snip from his latest post:

How did things turn so bad so quickly--in which a scattered insurgency gains broader support and the coalition Shiite alliance begins to crack? Some critics say it's a combination of a year of mismanagement by the Coalition Provisional Authority in which the lives of most Iraqis have not improved much since the reign of Saddam Hussein and the hardball tactics of occupation military forces that are alienating the people they were intending to help.

One member of a Ramadi-based Sunni insurgent cell who calls himself "Continuous Jihad" says the Coalition hasn't delivered on anything. "They break into houses in the middle of the night and arrest innocent people," he says, "and they've given us less then we had under Saddam. People are jobless, they distort our religion, and they're taking our oil and living in Saddam's palaces. Nothing has changed. They've become like him, yet they pretend they're here to help us."

Link to "Toppled", blog post from Iraq by Kevin Sites, Link to discussion forum.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:33:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New book from House Industries

House Industries, the world's greatest typeface designers, have published a 240-page book chronicling their work. I haven't seen the book itself, but the sample spreads shown here are stunning. The $69 book has a 32-page section on House's design process and it comes with four fonts.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:32:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Classifying blobs as faces

MIT researchers report in the journal Science that the brain relies on context to compensate for images that are noisy or degraded. For example, if you look at a person from very far away, their face may look like a blurry blob with no discernible features at all. Still, thanks to the contextual cues (in this case, the attached body), you still can classify the blob as a face. That seems obvious, of course. What's novel about this work is that the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to actually show that "the specific brain region known to be activated by clear images of faces is also strongly activated by very blurred images, just so long as surrounding contextual cues are present." Of course, surrealist artists like Rene Magritte have known this for years. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:14:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wax museum of country music stars on eBay

BoingBoing reader kowgurl says, "About 50 wax figures--all your favorite country and western stars. I saw it this weekend--they are creepy as hell. The sets are not 'museum quality' by any stretch. I would love to bid on it!"
Link. Beware the evil audio soundtrack! Almost as evil as the satanic grin on Minnie Pearl's waxen visage.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:53:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mysterious power outage KOs casinos in Vegas

Our pals at Gawker forward this tip from reader Audrey Bath about a bizarre power outage affecting casinos and hotels in Las Vegas for the past couple of days -- sounds uncannily like a scene from a recent movie filmed at the affected property:

I thought you might be amused to learn that Las Vegas' premiere hotel, the 5-star Bellagio Hotel, lost all power at 2:30am Sunday (Easter) and power has not yet been restored. As of right now, there is no access to their website, and no updated information. It is THE big story in Las Vegas.

No definitive word yet on why no power, but it appears a truck hit a transformer behind the hotel, on the new Frank Sinatra Drive. The hotel is said to have been 2/3 full (2,000 guests) and thousands of employees have not been able to go to work. All of the hotels' restaurants are closed, every gaming table and slot machine is dark, even the fountains are not operating. There are no elevators, no escalators, no Cirque du Soleil. Only the Bellagio Hotel is affected by the outage, and generators have not kicked in. (It's eerily like "Ocean's Eleven" which was filmed in part at the hotel 3 years ago.)

Some guests have insisted on remaining at the dark hotel; all others have been transferred to the "sister properties" like the Mirage, Treasure Island and MGM Grand. My husband is a chef at Picasso, the top restaurant in Las Vegas, located at the Bellagio, and he was told not to return to work tomorrow because power will not be back on. Power is not expected to be restored until possibly late Monday night. It's a very weird scene.

Link to story in Las Vegas Review-Journal

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:46:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tracking campaign contributions online

Great piece by Joanna Glasner in today's Wired News about a number of websites that help you track campaign contribution history of US politicians. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:24:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT pays $440MM to settle DRM patent dispute

Microsoft has settled its patent dispute with Sony/Philips, who acquired a company called Intertrust solely for its patent on DRM, which conflicted with the patent that Microsoft got when it took a controlling interest in another company called ContentGuard.

Microsoft is paying $440m to settle its long-running digital rights management (DRM) patent infringement dispute with Intertrust. The one-off pay-out means that Microsoft customers can use their software "as they are intended to be used without requiring a license from InterTrust".

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:08:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Remembering gopher

Lore "Brunching Shuttlecocks" Sjöberg has turned in a lyrical reminiscence about the glory days of gopher, the Web's predecessor. My first net-job (after the CDROM crash in the early 90s) was as a commerical gopher developer, and it turns out that were are lots of gopher sites still online:

Despite its relative obscurity, gopherspace is accessible to many more Web users than people realize. Gopher support is built into Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox, most versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer up to version 5, although the degree of support varies. People who want to stick with the familiarity of http can use the public gopher proxy at Floodgap.com, which translates gopher pages into HTML.

Visitors to gopherspace will find a piece of the Internet's history, some of which, Goerzen says, isn't available anywhere else. They will also find The Gopher Manifesto, a document praising gopher's simplicity and elegance.

The Gopher Manifesto describes gopher as "a hypertext Eden" that existed before the clutter and commercialization of the Web. "Is it time for a new Renaissance on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years?" it asks.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big name VC gets into microfinancing

Amazing NYT piece on Vinod Khosla, a partner at Kleiner Perkins and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who is now devoting part of his time to trekking rural India, making micro-loans to entrepreneurs starting home-based businesses.

"I was completely blown as I listened to the stories of these tenacious women," Mr. Khosla said. "I started crying." In his view, the microfinance initiatives he visited in India and Bangladesh in February ran more efficiently than most Silicon Valley organizations. "They have sophisticated credit algorithms," he said. "Does the woman own a buffalo? Some chickens? Does she have a toilet in her home? What kind of roofing material does her home have? Does she bring a shawl to the village meeting?"

In India, microloans are usually disbursed to poor women whose total family assets are less than 20,000 rupees ($459) and whose monthly income is smaller than 350 rupees. Yet microfinance initiatives have a phenomenal repayment rate averaging more than 95 percent, better than the best commercial banks in the world. Many of the programs are highly profitable, Mr. Khosla said, adding that "microfinance is one of the most important economic phenomena in the world in the last 50 years."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:39:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, April 11, 2004

New Viridian Design contest -- Aromatizer

Mr. Bruce Sterling just dreamed up a new Viridian Design contest. Here's what it isn't:

"Smell- o-vision" has already been suggested. Smell-o-vision is a dead medium, however, and the addition of smell to computer games seems corny and too limited.

Here's what it is: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:48:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Would you erase me?

I just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and liked it rather a lot. If you are a geek, there's a high probability you will too. It's Michel Gondry's second feature-length film, and it's been out for about a month. Here's what Elvis Mitchell says about it in the New York Times. Check out the trailer here.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:35:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Museum of Unworkable Devices

Nice site covering a bunch of inventions that won't work because they go against one or more laws of physics. It also looks at impractical, but interesting inventions, like this water fountain that squirts water out of a replica of a woman's head. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:11:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dr. Seuss' "Gerald McBoing Boing" on MP3

Delightful MP3 of a 1951 children's record about Gerald McBoing Boing, a boy who spoke in sound effects. Link (Halfway down page)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:32:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Collected toilet walls

Writings on the Stall is a site that collects bathroom graffiti -- they want your submissions. Link (Thanks, Jonathan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:56:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sweet Daily Show video clips

Lisa rein has posted a bunch of great clips from recent Daily Shows to her blog, covering spam, Tyco's birthday party write-off, Richard Clarke's appearance, and the GOP response to the Clarke testimony. Link

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

Weirding-edge fetish vocab from Japan

Here's a great glossary of outré kinks exemplefied in cuttin-edge Japanese pr0n.

chin chin kenkyu - (literally "study of the penis"). Chin-chin is a cute, childish term for penis. In chin-chin-kenkyu videos, average women on the street are given a lecture about the penis by some porno actors. The 'professional' will measure the penis, and describe how to make it stand up. there's lots of reaction shots of the embarrassed average women. it's kind of Benny Hill.

Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Collaboration across 120 years yields "oldest" movie ever

In 1882, astronomer David Peck Todd shot 147 consecutive plates of the transit of Venus across the sky. Now, two modern astronomers at the Lick Observatory have scanned them and turned them into a Quicktime movie -- a film "shot" years before Edison made his first moving picture. This makes me wonder if we'll be able to pull off neat tricks like improvising stereoscopic, moving, and/or panoramic images of the present at some time in the future, say by pulling thousands of moblogged images of a single event off the net and using software to interpolate and assemble them.

Spurred by a reference in one of Todd's letters in Lick's Mary Lea Shane Archives, Bill Sheehan and I found all 147 negatives, still in good condition, at the observatory. To our knowledge, this collection of photos constitutes the most complete surviving record of a historical transit of Venus.

As we looked at Todd's extensive sequence of images, we realized we could turn them into a movie. A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself, for a number of his contemporaries were already making the first forays into chronophotography — the recording of sequential motion and the forerunner of cinematography. Indeed, Pierre Jules Janssen invented his famous photographic revolver to capture the 1874 transit of Venus.

Link (via /.)

Update: The Slashdot discussion points to even older examples of this, like animations of Galileo's 1613 sunspot drawings, not to mention this 1865 QTVR (Thanks, Ardes!).

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Down with my Peeps

Online gallery of Easter-themed diorama art created with Marshmallow Peeps. What are Peeps? Well, the Washington Post says they're "the chick-and-bunny-shaped marshmallow treats that have become America's best-loved harbingers of the season". You might call these images of winning art contest entries -- yes, yes -- a PEEP show. Huhhuhhuh. I think my favorite is this Mel Gibson homage, The Passion of the Peeps.

Snip from the show review:

"Another religious entry could be described as Memorable Moments in Marshmallow Martyrdom. Created by two Catholic school girls, it depicted four saint scenes, including John the Baptist beheaded, Joan of Arc being burned at the stake, St. Peter crucified upside down on Pop-sicle sticks and St. Stephen being stoned to death by jelly beans."
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:42:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hip hop Man of Constant Sorrow

This is Battlestar America's pretty cool hip-hop remix of Man of Constant Sorrow. 1.4MB MP3 Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:30:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

London's ghost tube-stations

This site is devoted to the 40-some abandoned and ghost tube stations on the London Underground, including accounts of guided tours. Link (via Pirotcar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:27:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Distributed Proofreaders pass 4,000 ebooks

An anonymous person writes:

Distributed Proofreaders is a volunteer driven website that is committed to putting Public Domain books online. OCR generated text is reviewed online and compared to page scans. Once the book has completed the proofreading process it is posted to Project Gutenberg where the ebook is available to the world for free.

On April 6th Distributed Proofreaders posted it 4,000 ebook: "Aventures du capitaine Hatteras" by Jules Verne. Yes, it is in French. Come help us produce more free ebooks in more languages at Distributed Proofreaders. Proofread a page a day, that's all we ask.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:21:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

eBay listings by RSS

Create your own RSS feed for your favorite eBay search. Link (Thanks, Chris Pirillo!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:21:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Remix of W's WMD joke

This remix of George W's WMD joke at the White House Correspondants' Dinner is vicious, brilliant and true. 3.6MB QuickTime Link (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:20:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New short from Susannah Breslin

Former BoingBoing guestblogger Susannah "Invisible Cowgirl" Breslin celebrates a birthday today. She also a new short story out in Ducky Magazine. Dig the phat cover art. Excerpt:

One morning, she woke up and discovered that her head was gone. She had reached up to pat her hair, or rub the sleep from her eyes, or scratch her ear, and she had realized that her head was nowhere to be found. Where, she wondered, had it gone? She had no idea at all. She could not recall, in fact, very well what had happened the previous evening. She had been at a bar, and she had gotten drunk, and then she had come back home. From what she could remember, her head had still been sitting squarely on her shoulders when she had climbed into bed. Perhaps, she considered, her head had run off at some point during the night while she lay sleeping.

Link to "The Woman Who Lost Her Head".

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:39:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Implicit ideology in video games

From Reason Magazine, an article analysing the ways that video games influence our politics and world-view.

So implicit politics might be the better way to influence player opinion. But as a political vehicle, games may have an inherent bias. Bridging an ideological chasm, libertarian Iain Smedley and socialist Julian Stallabras agree that computer games possess a native individualism. Writing a decade ago, Smedley noted the "heroic and individualistic philosophy" of video games, in which the player "does not merely cheer on the hero in [his] struggle; the player’s actions determine the outcome." Writing contemporaneously in New Left Review, Stallabras concurred: In games, "the passivity of cinema and television is replaced by an environment in which the player’s actions have a direct, immediate consequence on the virtual world." For Stallabras, this makes computer games "a capitalist and deeply conservative form of culture."

Stallabras’ wide-ranging indictment of computer games is remarkable for its combination of savvy ("in Doom...all the corpses of a particular monster always look exactly the same") and pessimism ("The defining image in all this comes, not from any game, but naturally enough from a blockbuster film, Terminator 2; it is the jarring crunch of human skulls under the bright chrome of a robot foot"). Stallabras contends that many offensive traits of games are concealed by "chrome," by which he means slick user interfaces and graphical eye candy. What would he think of the recent release whose title is Chrome? Probably the same thing he writes about the video game as a medium: that it tricks players into imitating idealized markets and sweatshop labor through repetitive manipulation of game objects and numbers, that it is shaped by "the parameters of the computer industry’s links with the military," and that its innate objectification "leads to...an ever greater blurring of the use of people as instruments in the world and the game." But he might appreciate the irony that Chrome developer Techland is located in Poland.

Link (via Terra Nova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:14:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nevermind broadband -- many First Americans don't have phone service

Comments from an NPR listener who heard a segment I did for "Day to Day" on the president's promise to make broadband accessible to all Americans by the year 2007. Eric Martin says:

Phone penetration on reservations just passed the 50% mark within this decade and even where there are phone lines on US reservations a lot of them are old copper lines that can't handle dial-up. So before Bush goes and gets the rest of the country hooked up with high speed, he should make sure that all Americans, including Native Americans, have basic phone service. John Edwards wasn't lying when he was talking about two Americas.

There are some interesting stats on the lack of phone penetration in "Indian Country" on this FCC website.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:53:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To Do in LA: Glenn Tillbrook doc film free preview

Friend o' BoingBoing and rock-n-roll legend bassgoddessgreta (Moby, Debbie Harry, The Nuns, etc.) sends word of an offbeat new documentary film starring former Squeeze frontman Glenn Tilbrook. Twenty years ago with Squeeze, touring meant 18 wheelers, hotel suites and police-escorted limos. Now Tilbrook's music now finds its audience through a more independent route -- which involves a big mobile home and lots of open highway.

In November 2001, to support the release of his debut solo CD, The Incomplete Glenn Tilbrook, Glenn embarked on a different kind of independent route as he took to the road in America: One man, two guitars and a mobile home. Glenn Tilbrook: One for the Road follows him on every step of that journey: arriving in the States; picking up his mobile home; performing the shows; meeting the fans; packing away his guitars; camping at campgrounds; traveling in the RV: All access, all of the time. It's an intimate look at how an established musician adjusts to his new independent surroundings. It's a commentary on the current state of the music industry. But, most importantly, it's a human interest story that transcends its musical base.

Link to movie homepage, and check it out in LA at a free preview screening on Tuesday, May 11th, 8:00pm at CineSpace, 6356 Hollywood Blvd. 2nd Floor. 323 817 3456.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:35:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen -- Music Zen

midisko
8bitpeoples
opaquechannel
gameboyzz orchestra
bent2004
jump around mp3
robot soul mp3
mame jump
titanium rhapsody
kohina radio
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:25:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To do in LA: Living art from Mushrooms, Oysters

Artist Philip Ross makes sculpture out of living oysters and mushrooms. A show of new work launches in Los Angeles this weekend.

Machine Project announces the opening of "Organized" by artist Phillip Ross, on Saturday April 10th from 5-8 pm. Mr Ross will give a talk on his work at the gallery the following Sunday, April 11th at 3pm. Artist, amateur bio-engineer and member of the San Francisco mycological society, Mr. Ross uses living organisms as the inspiration and means by which he makes his work. Through the design and creation of highly controlled environments, Mr. Ross manipulates, nurtures and transforms a variety of living species into sculpture.

Mr. Ross's work lies at the disparate intersection of homegrown technologies, folk art, materials science, and D.I.Y. cultivation techniques. The show includes a series of Reishi mushrooms grown into highly artificed forms, the aforementioned sculpture grown out of oysters, and a self-contained survival capsule for one living plant. These sculptures are at once highly crafted and naturally formed, skillfully manipulated and sloppily organic.

Link (Thanks, Mara!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:21:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help Monochrom do something weird and funny with text and images

Past guestblogger Johannes writes, "Cartoons often consist of two parts ... the graphical element and the text below the drawing (example). We need around 300 such text elements, ... only the text elements. We need JPEGs, maximum width 300 px. Please send the files as attachments. Thanx a lot in advance! We'll keep you updated!" Mailto Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:08:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wild west themeparks kicking ass in Bavaria

Steve sez, "It's not quite a fetish but clearly 'wild west' life is big and serious in parts of German and Czech life..."

Main Street features covered plank sidewalks, double-decker railings and cutout clapboard facades. Outside the sheriff's office, the town marshal, Big Joe - a Turkish-born character actor little more than three feet tall - obligingly poses for photos, pointing his six-gun at guests and ordering "Hände hoch!" ("Hands up!")...Pullman City, in fact, is one of more than a dozen Wild West theme parks and similar attractions in Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia. I visited several others, including two parks in the Czech Republic and one near Vienna.

They all form part of a multifaceted Wild West subculture in Europe that includes everything from country music festivals and cowboy saloons to an established rodeo circuit. Tens of thousands of Europeans study (or even live like) trappers, American Indians or other frontier archetypes as a hobby. They join clubs, dress up in elaborate costumes and often take to the woods on weekends to live in tepees or sleep "cowboy style" under the stars. "People dream of a free, beautiful country, of romantic campfires and heroes in the saddle," said Detlef Jeschke, a Nuremberg-born former champion European rodeo cowboy who is Pullman City's program manager.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:36:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mynah bird "boing boing boing" clip

Ian Brown found this weird clip of a mynah bird saying "boing boing boing." 17K WAV Link (Thanks, Ian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:49:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC tries DRM-free distribution

Dan sez, "The BBC is putting it's annual Reith Lectures online in DRM-free mp3 for download, for the first time ever. May not seem like a big deal, but it's the first time we've managed to do something like this. It's a trial to test public reaction (in terms of downloads and public opinion) - if successful, it's likely to make it more likely for the BBC to offer more programmes for download like this. It'd be great if Boing-Boingers could check it out and tell the BBC what they think of all this..." Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Playmobil Porn Intro

Apropos of the Playmobil TSA Playset, Hubert sez, "Another favourite is this bedroom set, which threatens to erupt into Playmobil porn at any second. I think the woman is holding a hookah and the guy's moustache is... just... inappropriate." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:09:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kosher for Passover circus

Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey threw a Kosher-for-Passover circus at Madison Square Gardens for 19,000 orthodox Jews, selling bun-less hot-dogs and hiding the female performers.

The Greatest Show on Earth had its ethnic flourishes. The band started the afternoon by playing "Dayenu," a rousing song at the Passover Seder that children love. And David Larible, the master clown they call the Prince of Laughter, wore a yarmulke to perform a miracle that more than one youngster must have thought was right up there with the parting of the Red Sea and the Ten Plagues: he turned another performer into a goat for several heart-stopping seconds.

Link (Thanks, Rose!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:46:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Playmobil Airport Security playset

Get your kiddies started on a career with real growth potential with this Playmobil airport security playset. Link (Thanks, Armand!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:41:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lessig's Free Culture Chinese fan-trans

Kevin sez, "Some Chinese bloggers have recently launed a collabrative transaltion project to translate Lessig's Free Culture into Chinese, Create a Wiki page in SocialBrain. So far, 21 people have joined this collaborative project, memes appeared in lots of blogs. 12 chapters were assigned by contributors to translate." Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:35:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF on Gmail

On EFF's Deep Links blog, some preliminary analysis of Google's Gmail terms-of-service:

"People are entitled to know what kind of information Google will pull from email, whether or not it logs this information, and for how long," said EFF's Kevin Bankston. "Can your Gmail address or any other personal identifier be linked to those logs, or to your Google search history?"

"Gmail's privacy policy states that 'Google welcomes feedback on this document and policy as the Gmail service is currently in an early testing stage.' While that's a nice sentiment, we can't give meaningful feedback until we have all the facts."

The remedy to the situation is obvious: Google needs to let us all know precisely what the privacy/convenience trade-off is for using Gmail, and soon.

Link (Thanks, Inder!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:33:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hugo ballot online

The 2003 Hugo Nominees have been announced:

Best Novel (462 ballots)

* Paladin of Souls -- Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos)
* Humans -- Robert Sawyer (Tor Books)
* Ilium -- Dan Simmons (Eos)
* Singularity Sky -- Charles Stross (Ace Books)
* Blind Lake -- Robert Charles Wilson (Tor Books)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:30:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TTY services used by Nigerian credit-card scammers

TTY relay services are phone-banks staffed by operators who take text messages from the TTY terminals used by deaf people and read them aloud into telephones. This lets deaf people order pizzas, and otherwise interact with the hearing telephony world.

Recently, TTY systems have gone web-based: instead of using specialized TTY hardware, deaf people can use a chat interface in a browser window to interact with the operators.

This fact has not escaped Nigerian credit-card scammers. These folks are piping the output of Babelfish and other machine-translation services into the chat interface and directing the operators to place calls to merchants, directing them to ship goods paid for with stolen credit card numbers to mail-drops.

Merchants stand to lose big if they fall for the ruse - callers often try to order more than $10,000 worth of expensive equipment. People who legitimately use the service fear businesses will stop taking their calls, thinking they are fraud artists...

The only possible beneficiaries are the successful scammers - profiting from free phone calls intended for deaf people - and the four phone companies that provide Internet relay service. They are paid for the calls by the minute.

Link (via /.)

Glennf adds: The Nigerian TTY scam isn't new: bookstores have been experiencing this for quite a while. I started receiving queries about shipping books to Nigeria at isbn.nu, which is a book price comparison service, not a bookstore. I wondered why on my blog, and then received some startling news: Nigerians order books through TTY services and then resell them to Russia after stiffing the sellers. Wacked-out.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:28:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, April 9, 2004

CSS shakedown issues with Konquerer/Safari

There's some shakedown issues with the new CSS layout and Konquerer/Safari -- we're working on it. In the meantime, beware the quantities of whitespace. Aaaand they're fixed. Metafilter Matt, we owe you one.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:04:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Good time waster: simple sliding tile puzzle

My dad sent me the url to this java-based slider tile puzzle, and it has killed half my work day so far. He solved it in 48 moves. I guess 44 is the minimum. I can't solve it! If everyone who reads Boing Boing spends ten minutes on it, it will result in 312.5 man-days of wasted time! (It didn't work in Safari for me; I had to use IE) Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:03:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The $14 SteadyCam

Brian sez: "For less than 5% of the price of a real Steadicam (the ones made for small video cameras go for about $900), you can apparently build your own "Steady-Cam" for $14 with parts from a hardware store. The sample video makes it look pretty good. Great gift for the amateur videographer in your life who refuses to use a tripod, the bastard. (Oh, and stabilized images compress much better for the Web, too.)" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:52:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Owen Wilson's Celeb-Blog?

A sekrit source, who is a well-known entertainment industry journalist in LA, tells BoingBoing that the anonymous weblog of "Rance" is rumored to belong to Owen Wilson. Anonymous boingboing readers have since chimed in to suggest that it may belong to Benicio Del Toro, George Clooney, Mr. Potato Head, Osama Bin Laden, or Jeffrey "can of whupass" Skilling. Choire at Gawker weighs in, but I don't think he's being serious there. Who knows? Remember: rumors in Hollywood are a dime a dozen. Just like blogs.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:52:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photo of a male whale's reproductive organ

In the interest of zoology, here is a link to a photograph of a whale's penis. (Probably not safe for work) Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:52:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Promising anti-obesity pill

Rimonabant is a drug from a French pharma outfit whose clinical trials show remarkable results in controlling appetite with minimal side-effects. It's being hailed as a drug with the potential to practically address the obesity epidemic.

Dr. Despres led a trial of rimonabant in 1,036 overweight patients at high risk for heart problems. All patients were told to cut their food intake by 600 calories daily. Those who received a 20-mg dose lost an average of 20 pounds and trimmed their waistlines by three inches in one year. Those given placebos lost an average of five pounds.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:49:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

American "Japgrish" tattoos

It's all well and good to snigger at "Engrish" -- weird, random Englishoid phrases printed on Japanese garmets and packaging, but check this out: the Chicago Tribune went out and looked at the "Japanese" characters tattooed on five Chicagoans and had them translated, then compared the results with what the bearers thought their ink meant.

* What he thinks his tattoo says: "strength" and "courage."

* What it actually says: The left part of the symbol appears to say "dog," while the right part conveys something along the lines of "time moving into the past." Smushed together, the two symbols amount to gibberish.

Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:46:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's NDP leader endorses P2P

Jack Layton is the leader of the NDP, Canada's left-wing New Democratic Party, and is in the running for Prime Minister of Canada in the next election. On the heels of Canada's landmark court decision that essentially legalized file sharing, Layton has turned P2P into an election issue, endorsing file-sharing as a beneficial activity, a gutsy move, considering the Party's close ties with the arts (the NDP has traditionally endorsed strong arts-spending):

"I'm a holder of a copyright myself. But it's a book on homelessness and I don't mind if anyone wants to copy it," he says with a grin. "I'm still not so sure how (file sharing) impacts sales -- some studies even say it enhances them. I don't think the dust has settled on this yet. When I was at university there was a great fear that photocopying was going to destroy the publishing industry and that hasn't happened. It's sometimes best to muddle along, take things one step at a time and see what happens. Society can have a way of sorting things out."

Link (Thanks, Simon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:40:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Playfair bullied offline by Apple, reappears on Indian site

PlayFair, the free software project that allowed you to strip the copy-restriction wrapper off of your iTunes Music Store tracks, has been removed from SourceForge in response to a threatening letter, apparently from Apple. It has been relocated to a server in India, and development continues apace. Link (Thanks, Jonathan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple I clones for sale

This guy has built a working Apple I clone, which will run old Apple I software, and has posted PDFs of the original Apple I manuals. Link (Thanks, Ahm!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The truth about camel spiders

Here's the myth about camel spiders, the monsters of the Iraqi desert.

"Supposedly they leap onto the backs of camels and suck out the blood. I've been told that a couple of these things can kill a full grown camel."

Link

"Here's the lowdown on camel spiders, which aren't spiders at all:

In reality, camel spiders aren't some mysterious Arabian creature -- we have them in the United States and in Mexico, where they are called matevenados. They are slightly smaller than the human hand, and while they do run quickly, their top speed is 10 miles per hour, not 25. But they also make no noise, they excrete no venom, and although they can be voracious nocturnal predators, they don't eat camels. They eat delicious crickets and pillbugs, and sometimes scorpions."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:19:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Metafilter Matt CSSifies Boing Boing

Thanks to Matt Haughey, Boing Boing is now (mostly) CSS based! Still waiting to CSSify the guestbar, but that's gonna have to wait until after we've migrated it to MT. The rendering should be much faster (and more standards-compliant) now, though the bandwidth savings will be negligible, due to the fact that mod_gzip compresses redundant font, etc tags.

Thanks again, Matt!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Distributed audiobook for Down and Out

Jill Smith has begun a distributed audiobook project for my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, whose new, liberal Creative Commons license allows for exactly this kind of mishegas (see the distributed audiobook project for Lessig's Free Culture for an example of how well this can work). She's recorded a reading of the prologue and posted it to the Internet Archive's public submission area, where open-licensed material is hosted for free.

I'm immensely gratified by this -- audiobooks are my favorite nontextual medium for storytelling and I can't fall asleep at night without one. I would love for others to take Jill's lead and finish it out. Link (Thanks Jill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:59:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Computers, Freedom and Privacy reg is open

Reg has just opened for this year's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference (April 20-23, Berkeley CA), one of the world's oldest and most important tech-policy events (check out the program for items like this one:)

Wardriving, Wireless Networks, and the Law
Wireless networks are exploding in popularity, but are difficult to secure. Locating insecure networks & advertising their locations has become a sport known as "wardriving". We examine the Pen Register Act, the Wiretap Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act to evaluate criminal & civil liability which may apply to wardriving. Panelists: Steve Schroeder, CCIPS consultant; Simon Byers, AT&T; Kevin Bankston, EFF

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:51:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Battery recharges in 30 seconds

Details are sparse, but NEC Corp announced they've developed a battery that can power a minidisc player for 80 hours yet takes only 30 seconds to recharge! "The company will initially try to commercialize the technology for using the battery as an emergency power source for computers, according to sources at NEC." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:26:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spaced Out on the Interplanetary Internet

My latest article for TheFeature.com is online. It's about the Interplanetary Internet, NASA's effort to extend cyberspace into outerspace. TCP/IP co-inventor Vint Cerf is one of the project leaders. I hadn't heard much about InterPlanet since it was first announced in 1998, so I was surprised to find out that their open source architecture code had recently been publicly released. A ".mars" address is still quite a few years off, but the latest InterPlaNet research may have applications on Earth-based connectivity as well. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:06:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, April 8, 2004

Try your hand at balancing the federal budget

US Federal Budget sim created at Berkeley.

This simulation asks you to adjust spending and tax expenditures in the the 2004 budget proposed by the White House in order to achieve either a balanced budget or any other target deficit...According to the White House, the 2004 fiscal deficit is projected to be $307 billion. This does not include the costs of the Iraq War, so it has been increased by a base estimate of $50 billion for those costs in this simulation (which can be increased, lowered or eliminated depending on peoples views of the costs or likelihood of the war.).

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:16:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Audio Interview -- authors of report about P2P's effect on CD sales

Alberto Escarlate of thep2pweblog points us to an audio interview with Koleman Strumpf and Felix Oberholzer -- the two economists who made headlines last week when they published "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis." Here's the interview: Link (in RealAudio only, ugh)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:12:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Subservient Chicken's X-Rated Bits Exposed by Code

Following up on the launch of Burger King's "instameme" promo -- background in this earlier BoingBoing post -- geek supersleuth NEMESIS reveals the Subservient Chicken's naughty little nuggets:

"By backwards engineering the API within the HTTP headers, you can un-censor the censored ones:
Link 1 (scratch, crotch, balls, nutsack, destroy tokyo, stomp, godzilla, jonny rotten, punk rock, fsu, fuck shit up)
Link 2 (rub, chest, breast, breasts, boobs, jugs, tatas, hooters, jugs, nips, burning man, mardis gras, girls gone wild, playboy, penthouse, barely legal, leg show)
Link 3 (give bird, give the bird, bird, middle finger, flipping, fuck you, fuck off, flip , flip me off, flip them off)
Link 4 (shit, ass , fuck, cock, pussy, motherfucker, cunt, piss , arse, suck, dyke, bitch, clit, cum , dick, dildo, feces, felch, foreskin, whore, jizz, jism, masturbate, jerk, anal, bastard, blowjob, butt, suck, choad, erection, fellatio, incest, semen, tit)
Link 5 (touch yourself, naughty spot , naughtyspot, private, privates, sore, nuts , testicles, balls, groin, crotch)
Link 6 (show breast, breasts, tits , titties, slut, whore, tramp , seduce, hooker, prostitute, tatas, jugs, nice rack, your rack, tatas, show yer tits, show yer breasts, show your breasts, show yer tis)
Link 7 (masturbate, masterbate, play with yourself, jerk off , take off mask, take off costume, take off your, streak , flash , strip , naked, nude, take it off , get naked, take it all off, nekkid, get nekkid, whip em out, show your tits, show yer tits, tits , take off your clothes, take off yer clothes, clothes, off like a prom dress, prom dress, do me , blow me, take pants off, take off your pants, mask)

But to paraphrase another fast food empire: Where's the bukkake? Link to copy of file with index of all Subservient Chicken Behavior commands, many of which would merit FCC fines, if they were -- I don't know, read aloud on the Howard Stern Show or something. (Thanks also to Josh Santangelo!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:07:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First malware for OS X?

One of the selling points of OS X has been, to date, the lack of any viruses, worms, or Trojan horses. Intego reports that it has identified a Trojan horse called MP3Concept.

Mac OS X displays the icon of the MP3 file, with an .mp3 extension, rather than showing the file as an application, leading users to believe that they can double-click the file to listen to it. But double clicking the file launches the hidden code, which can damage or delete files on computers running Mac OS X, then iTunes to play the music contained in the file, to make users think that it is really an MP3 file . While the first versions of this Trojan horse that Intego has isolated are benign, this technique opens the door to more serious risks.

Link

Meeroh sez: The Mac OS X mp3 trojan is being blown completely out of proportion. Quick review of facts so far:

1. It was pointed out in a Usenet thread that it is possible to embed arbitrary data in an mp3 2. It was subsequently suggested that the arbitrary data could be executable 3. An enterprising developer proceeded to then create a file which to any mp3 player will appear as an mp3 file, but the Mac OS X Finder sees it as an application 4. An anti-virus vendor published advertising for their product saying that it has a cure for this form of Trojan.

Some other relevant points:

1. This has little to do with Mac OS X vs. Mac OS 9. The exact same file will do the exact same thing on Mac OS 9 -- be playable by mp3 players, and act as an application 2. This has little to do with Mac OS X using extensions to identify file types. The icon shown by the Finder could be embedded in the file itself, in which case the file would look like an mp3 file regardless of its name. 3. This trick requires using the resource fork, and therefore the file has to be transmitted encoded. Any mp3 file that is transferred as a plain binary file (as opposed to a Mac binary file, with the resource fork), is harmless. 4. The fact that the file can be played in am mp3 player is irrelevant; if the trojan were malicious, the user would be doomed after double-clicking on it regardless of whether the file is a valid audio file.

To summarize, a Mac application can have any icon or name whatsoever, including a name and an icon that make it look like a document. Exactly what happens when you receive such an application (in email or by downloading it in your browser) depends on your settings, but I am not aware of any case in which it will be automatically launched.

Therefore, to activate this Trojan you have to either receive a Mac-encoded attachment and double-click on it in the Finder, or you have to download a Mac-encoded a file (which is then usually decoded to your desktop) and double-click it in the Finder.

The only reason that this is news is that a vendor of anti-virus software took it as an opportunity to generate some advertising, as far as I can tell.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:38:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Greenwich Park's sky to be turned into RF-driven balloon-art

Rupert sez, "On May 4th, above the Greenwich Meridian in Greenwich Park, London, a cloud of a thousand radio-sensitive glowing balloons will monitor the airwaves and respond by changing colour and brightness. Everyone's invited to bring their mobile phones and make contact with the cloud, which will also listen to atmospheric phenomena and the cackle of the rest of London's radio users." Link (Thanks, Rupert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Report from the spam/anti-spam summit

Danny O'Brien has written up one of the first summits between spammers and spam-fighters for the Guardian. It's a great piece.

Surprisingly, no such shootings occur. It's oddly intimate, watching the spammers and the anti-spammers mill around each other like this. It feels like a temporary ceasefire in a vicious war that to most of us seems to be a stalemate...

Over the past year, though, a series of meetings arranged by a trusted figure in the American anti-spam community, Anne Mitchell, have been slowly bringing the two sides together. These mini-conferences, held under the banner of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, have mostly been between the highest-ranking ISPs - MSN, AOL - and commercial email marketers of the most squeaky clean kind. Initially in secret, these days the meetings are more public.

Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:17:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mapping Scientific Topics With Social Networking Tools

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says,

In "Mapping the landscape of science," the National Science Foundation discusses the contents of a collection of articles published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Mapping Knowledge Domains." Basically, all these scientists are using software social networking tools to build graphical representations of scientific knowledge or science communities. [Please note that the full version of all articles is available.] This overview contains selected excerpts and illustrations extracted from some of these articles, like the top 50 highly frequent used in the top 10% most highly cited PNAS publications during the 1982-2001 period.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:15:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Electronic Man of Constant Sorrow

Electronica act Skeewiff has just released a free techno remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys's "Man of Constant Sorrow" as an MP3. It's pretty good! 7.1MB MP3 Link (via Crooked Timber)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:15:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Food Porn -- Burger King Subservient Chicken

BoingBoing reader aeon points us to a bizarre marketing move by junk-food empire Burger King:

...For when "your way" calls for an enslaved chicken, Burger King invites you to "have chicken your way" by offering you the newest in ads even veteran AdBusters won't want to bust: The Subservient Chicken. He "riverdances", he "throws pillows", he "builds forts" and he even takes "bonghits". He's technically a rooster, but let's not worry about that when we can tell him to "play air guitar", "moonwalk", or "grab crotch like michael jackson." The Subservient Chicken: more than a furry's dream come true, more than a timewaster for stoned college kids; this method of advertizing just begs to be copied like so many memes. Plus, you can tell him to "die".

How very interesting. I wonder if the ad execs who came up with this realize (a) the Internet is so weird that genuine furry submissive fetish poultry sites with live webcams already exist, and (b) (this is absolutely true) legendary porn magnate Larry Flynt claims to have lost his virginity to a chicken? If so, the new Burger King campaign is extra-creepy, hold the fries. And if not, they really ought to be reading more BoingBoing. Link to Subserrvient Chicken

Update: BoingBoing reader Bobby Martin says, "For the obsessive compulsive, we've started a list of things the subservient chicken will and won't do. It's on a wiki, so you can sign up and add your quirky/interesting/fucking weird discoveries to the list for all to see." Excerpts:
Will Do: poop | macarena | lol | fart | lay an egg | hokey pokey
Will do, sort of: flip me off | masturbate | get funky | tear the place up
Won't do: barf | hurtle the couch or jump over it | vacuum
Link

UPDATE HERE

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:10:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gilmore on Gmail's terms-of-service

John Gilmore has given me permission ot publish his very sharp analysis of Google's Gmail draft terms-of-service. As it stands, the ToS have some really objectionable elements. Google has a notation to the effect that this is a draft document and they are soliciting feedback on it to gmail-feedback@google.com. If these terms bother you, you could send polite feedback to Google about the parts that you find worrisome.

If they allege a "technical issue", including spam filtering, then they can access, read, preserve, and disclose anything in your mailbox. Since they probably do spam filtering for everybody (both for incoming and outgoing mail), then they have the right to read and disclose the contents of your email at any time.

Many spam-filtering services send copies of alleged spams to some central location. If they get N copies of similar messages, they declare it spam and publish the offending messages on the web. Google's right to send your spam to such services gives them the right to send ANY of your email to ANYONE -- for publication.

Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:28:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple Extended Keyboard re-created in modern USB flavor

Apple's Extended Keyboard was the keyboard that Mac enthusaists fell in love with. It had great action, a rattly, clackety hapticality that was poetry for the fingertips and wrists and forearms. Now a company has released the Tactile Pro, a modern USB keyboard that uses the same mechanism as the old Extended Keyboard, recreating that carpal nirvana in a package that will interop with your G5. Here's the ecstatic TidBITS review:

Where the Tactile Pro Keyboard really shines, though, is in its feel. The keys are decidedly "clickier" and more mechanical, and they have a slightly longer key travel when you push them. The end result is a much less mushy feel than on the Apple Pro Keyboard, but accompanied by much louder typing noises. When I'm typing fast, the Tactile Pro Keyboard almost clatters, and I can say with assurance that I don't mind one bit. The new feel took a little getting used to, but within a day, it felt quite wonderful.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:13:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, April 7, 2004

Naked Sushi meme hits China, everyone freaks out

Remember the string of earlier posts on BoingBoing about restaurants serving sushi on the bodies of clothes-free hotties? The owner of a Japanese restaurant in the Chinese city of Kunming had the same idea:

The Hefengcun Huaishi restaurant launched a promotional "feast on a beauty's body," for local journalists last Friday, hiring two attractive fair-skinned college girls to lie on tables, with sushi and other food and flowers placed on their bare bodies covered with thin gauze. The reports caused a firestorm in the local and national press with many readers slamming the novel dining trend as offensive and insulting to women.(...