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Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Audioblogging manifesto

Maciej has posted an audioblogging manifesto that is really a hell of a thing. 4.1MB Link, Transcript Link (via Waxy) (Thanks, -d!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soros responds to drug-lord accusation

George Soros has responded to Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert's accusation that he is financed by narco-gangsters in a great, stiff letter that demands an apology:

You do a discredit to yourself and to the dignity of your office by engaging in these dishonest smear tactics. You should be ashamed.

For the Speaker of the House of Representatives, even in the midst of an election season, to descend to a level of political discourse where innuendo and slander replace reason, truth and argument is unacceptable.

This past Sunday, on national television, you suggested that I might be a criminal simply because I have exercised my First Amendment rights to dissent from the policies of the Bush administration...

I must respectfully insist that you either substantiate these claims -- which you cannot do because they are false -- or publicly apologize for attempting to defame my character and damage my reputation.

Go gettim, George! 52k PDF Link (Thanks, Raypride!)

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

Other Earths?

Two teams of astronomers announced today the discovery of a new class of planets that are tiny compared to the gas giants previously detected outside of our solar system. Indeed, one of the two Neptune-sized spheres they found may have a solid surface and temperature conducive to life. From a CNN report:

"We are closer to answering the question, 'Are we alone in the universe?'" said Anne Kinney, director of NASA's Universe Division, Science Mission Directorate. "We aim to answer that question by looking for planets, eventually imaging them and ultimately diagnosing the presence of life on those planets."

One of the planets is 41 light years from Earth and the other is about 33 light years away. UC Berkeley's star planet hunter Geoff Marcy was a member of one of the teams that revealed their discoveries at a NASA press conference this afternoon:

"If you look at the 135 or so extrasolar planets found so far, it's clear that nature makes more of the smaller planets than the larger ones," he said. "We've found more Saturn-size planets than Jupiter-size planets, and now it appears there are more Neptune-size planets than Saturn-size. That means there's an even better chance of finding Earths, and maybe more of them than all the other planets we've found so far."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:35:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bonus Zen of Death round: Tuscan deathblog from Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is cyberpunking it up around Tuscany, the bastard, and has been shooting some lovely images of funerary sculpture. Start here, move back for more: Link.
See also previous BoingBoing post: Zen of Death

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:43:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage Girly pinups

Why is it that the women in these oldschool cheesecake illos always appear shocked, surprised, and totally unprepared to perform even the most mundane of tasks? The expression is, like, "Heavens! Someone's just crammed a red-hot poker up my butt!" I mean, take the image shown here, from Art Frahm. Maybe she's a midcentury bimbo wearing loose drawers, right? OR, maybe she's an undercover leet hacker and card-carrying MENSA member. Having just finished a phone phreak session in this public booth, she disguises her sinister, geeky hijinks with a bag full of carbs and a sight gag to divert that sneaky federal agent in black. "Smile now, narq," reads her invisibly eeevil thought-balloon, "1 PWN3D J00!" Anyway, here's an extensive online gallery of digital babes from yesteryear. Link to "Painted Anvil" gallery (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:22:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PSAs for Google AdWords

Dave sez, "Designed for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, Google Grants is a unique in-kind advertising program. It harnesses the power of our flagship advertising product, Google AdWords, to non-profits seeking to inform and engage their constituents online. Google Grants has awarded AdWords advertising to hundreds of non-profit groups whose missions range from animal welfare to literacy, from supporting homeless children to promoting HIV education." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:00:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Trek's James Doohan gets star on Hollywood Walk of Fame

Blogger, photographer, and citizen geek Jason DeFillippo took photos, including the one shown here. He says, "I am really bummed I missed the [Trekkie] convention on Sunday but this made up for it. I'll remember it every time I walk by his star. Safe journeys Scotty..."

Mr. Doohan, who played the character "Scotty" on the famed scifi series, was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (Link to more info, thanks Paul)

Link to Jason's photo gallery, which includes some wonderful snaps of other Star Trek cast members in attendance

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:30:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dawn of the dead?

A fertility scientist at the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine, Panayiotis Zavos, claims to have taken cells from dead humans and cloned them. He stopped short of implanting the embryos, but the scientific community is in an uproar. According to New Scientist, one of three cases used DNA from a young girl killed in an automobile wreck. Apparently her parents kept the tissue in the refrigerator for a few days until sending them along to the maverick scientist.

“This man preys on the strong desires of the most vulnerable people in society - giving them false hopes,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research. Other scientists argue that, even if cloning a person were possible, the risk of major birth defects is huge.

Zavos's claims have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:50:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neuroscience of revenge

Researchers at the University of Zurich have shown that revenge is, well, sweet. Their experiment, described in Scientific American, was based on a game where one player was given the opportunity to punish another player for financially screwing him. PET scans revealed that when a player contemplated revenge, his striatum, a "reward center" in the brain, became energized.

This sort of causal relationship may explain why people are willing to discipline a stranger even when there is no immediate gain in it for them. "Emotions play a proactive as well as reactive role," remarks Brian Knutson of Stanford University who penned an accompanying commentary (to a paper about the study in the journal Science). He notes that "passionate" forces may need to be included in economic models because, as this research shows, “people show systematic deviations from rationality."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:38:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Zen of Death

streatham cemetary
death masks
blog of death
celebrity death beeper
dead or alive
who's alive who's dead
a strange ghost
ready teddy death
death clock
Image: The death mask of English poet John Keats. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

Update: Bonus round -- Tuscan deathblog from Bruce Sterling. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:13:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help name the 50 best sf films

John Scalzi (an amazing sf writer and the author of several great nonfic compendia of trivia) is doing a book on great sf films and he needs your help:

As some of you know, I'm currently writing The Rough Guide to Science Fiction Film, which will be a general overview of the history of Science Fiction in films, with chapters on some various themes (science in science fiction, SF film icons, crossover subgenres, etc) and so on. The heart of the book, however, will be the Science Fiction Film Canon: The 50 classic Science Fiction films. In my own brain, I see this list as the list of the most significant science fiction films, as opposed to the "best" or the most financially successful. This gives me latitude to, say, include films that are influential on science fiction filmmakers, but not necessarily the audience (or, vice versa, as the case may be).

(You rightly ask: And why do I get to choose the Science Fiction Film Canon? Well, because someone paid me to, basically. But also, I'm both a professional film critic of more than a dozen years standing, and I'm also a professional science fiction writer. If someone's going to compile this list, it might as well be me.)

I of course already have a preliminary list of 50 films ready to go. BUT! Even with my rather extensive knowledge of science fiction, film and science fiction films, I am more than willing to entertain the notion that my list has gaps: Films that should be on the list may not be there -- films that I have on the list may not deserve to be there.

So, this is where you come in: Suggest me some science films (one or more, as many as you like) which you feel are especially significant. If you want to jot down a sentence or two as to why you think they're significant, that'd be swell (to be clear, any comments you make on films are for my personal edification -- I won't cut and paste into the book. I do my own writing). Any films you might care to think of are appreciated...

Link

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

Keyboard with 512k of memory, 700h battery life

The AlphaSmart Neo is a full-sized keyboard with a little LCD screen on the top. It acts as a word-processor, letting you type into its 512k cache while it draws power from 3 AA batteries. When you get back to your Mac or PC, you just dump the text over USB or IR. The thing runs for 700 hours on a 3 AA batts and costs $250, and weighs about 2 lbs.

My only complaint about this thing is the storage: 512k? I know that's a whole novel and then some, but geez, flash-RAM is so cheap now -- why not just give it a SD slot and I could use an old 64MB card from my last camera? Link (via Engadget)

Update: Chris Taylor points out that AlphaSmart has a model that supports memory cards -- and it comes with WiFi and PalmOS.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's DRM talk in Finnish

Herkko Hietanen, Tero Tilus, Antti Vähä-Sipilä and Kuisma Lappalainen from EF Finland have translated my Microsoft DRM talk into Finnish, bringing the total number of translations up to 10 (with two more that I know of underway). Freaking cool. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:50:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free protest tune download from J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science

Om Records of San Francisco is offering up this dub-techno-protest soundtrack as a free download. Link to info and download for J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science "You're the Murdera."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:03:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US Secret Service "harassing" indymedia over RNC delegate data release?

The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation and is demanding records related to an indymedia.org post which expressed anti-RNC sentiment and listed the names of some 2,200 individual RNC delegates. More on indymedia's site here, and here's a snip from a related ACLU press release:

In a letter sent today in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by the Secret Service, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union said they are representing a web hosting service and administrators of an independent media website regarding the anonymous posting of publicly available information about delegates to the Republican National Convention. The groups said the investigation is but the latest example of government agencies using law enforcement powers to chill free speech and intimidate protesters. (...) Beeson added that the posting did not include anything remotely threatening, but involved political speech fully protected by the First Amendment.

Link to Declan McCullagh's politech law-tech resource, where this news item was first spotted. Link to Washington Post story, Link to CNN's, Link to NYT story.

Update: Micah of Indymedia says, "I'm one of the four system administrators for indymedia that is involved in this... The wonderful ISP we have -- who protects its client's privacy and rights without caving -- Calyx, was forced to turn over any contact information they had for Indymedia... turns out they only have our email addresses, so I expect an email from the SS (Secret Service, not Sicherheitsdienst) any day now. I thought I'd point out this url for more information (including a scanned copy of the subpoena). Link"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:53:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Valenti's magical DRM thinking debunked

Ed Felten picks apart Jack Valenti's Engadget interview (in which Valenti compares himself to JFK: "I was in Dallas in the motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, and I saw that day a brave young president murdered, and a new president take over. The president is dead, long live the president, the nation goes on. No one is indispensable, I learned that day in Dallas. My successor will come into this job and he won't be me, but he might do a hell of a lot better job than I'm doing.")

It may be possible to so infect a movie with some kind of circuitry that allows people to copy to their heart's content, but the copied result would come out with decayed fidelity with respect to sound and color. Another would be to have some kind of design in a movie that would say, 'copy never,' 'copy once.'

Even ignoring the technical non sequiturs ("stuff ... algorithms into a movie"; "infect a movie with ... circuitry"), this is wildly implausible. Nothing has happened to make the technical prospects for DRM (anti-copying) technology any less bleak. We can only hope Valenti's successor stops believing in "technological magic" and instead teaches the industry to accept technical reality. File sharing cannot be wished away. The industry needs to figure out how to deal with it.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Victoria's Secret Disney jammies

Victoria's Secret has released a line of saucy Disney sleepwear. Link (via The Disney Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:20:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paint a movie-screen on any wall

ScreenGoo is a paint-on movie screen compound that can turn any wall into a screen:

Screen Goo is a specially formatted, highly reflective acrylic paint, designed specifically for the video projection industry. Screen Goo acrylic paint allows one to transform any smooth paintable surface into a high performance projection screen.

Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

Update: Fred sez, "Sony has created a new black screen material that rejects ambient light other than red, green, blue. This means that the Achilles heel of front projectors -- rejection of ambient light -- may soon be eliminated. So before you go painting your room in reflective acrylic or blow dough on a plasma screen, you might want to wait until this hits the market. I'm guessing that within a year, you'll have 3 lb. DVD-quality projectors for sub-$1k capable of throwing 90in images onto your hot new roll-up black screen. The TV-in-a-box could well start disappearing from the American living room by decade's end if this technology works out."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:16:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MPAA bemoans inability to ban behavior and technology

Ernest Miller and Jason Schultz latch on to this great quote from MPAA hack Fritz Attaway:

"If we can't ban bad behavior and we can't ban bad technology, what is it we're supposed to do, stand back and let people steal our product?'' Attaway said.

Jason's response:

[T]he quote reveals the MPAA approach to every problem: either pass laws to ban behavior or pass laws to ban technology. Innovation, ingenuity, competition -- those are for suckers. More laws and more lawsuits, that's the Hollywood way. Cut past the consumer and go straight to Congress. Oh well, at least they're finally being honest.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

British Academy treats film judges as crooks

The British Academy of Film and Television (BAFTA) is treating all judges as criminals this awards season. They are supplying special lockware DVD players that can play back the "secure" DVDs that the Academy is distributing. My guess is that anyone elected to judge a film award has a highly tuned, specialised home-theatre setup and that this will represent a serious goddamned pain in the ass for them:

"We are very pleased to be working with Cinea to give our members the opportunity to receive secure screeners. The British Academy takes the threat of piracy very seriously, and we welcome any solution that can reduce the risk of unauthorized copying." said David Parfitt, Chair of BAFTA's Film Committee.

Variety is reporting that it will cost studios US$25,000 (€20,650) per film, plus a license fee to Cinea, to secure the screener disks with the S-VIEW system. Cinea will pay for the players and encoding themselves, and is in discussion with studios for further uses of the S-VIEW technology to secure the post-production process for film makers. It can be used for the secure distribution of dailies and other works in progress, ensuring that digital copies don't end up being leaked onto the internet. Something that was almost impossible with 35 or 70mm film.

Each sv300 player is individually addressable, allowing distributors to decide exactly who views their content, from large groups of thousands to a single individual.

Nice: if you can't sell DRM to users, you can convince paranoid studio execs to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to buy it and shove it down cinephiles' throats. Link (Thanks, Simon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:57:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Best short story collection of the year

Eileen Gunn, the editor of The Infinite Matrix, has published her first collection of short stories, Stable Strategies and Others. I was honoured to get an advance copy for a blurb ("Gunn's stories are in another league entirely -- like Sturgeon or Chiang, she's *sui generis* and anything but generic. Every one of these stories has a pleasing, sharp flavor unlike anything you've ever tasted. Especially the recipe for fruit crisp. Delicious.") and I was blown away by Eileen's fiction -- but don't take my word for it: see the glowing William Gibson intro to her collection gives you an idea of why you should be picking this up ASAP (“Eileen Gunn’s innate sensibilities and cultural smarts have designated her a nodal entity, one of those human intersections where people and ideas meet, and out of which things change.”). Eileen was in charge of MSFT's marketing for the first several years of the company's existence, and the deep geek cred and creativity shines through here.

“...And now, the man you loved to hate, the man you loved too late, the man everyone loves to second-guess, America's own Tricky Dick!” Applause, and the strains of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” A tanned, well-groomed man in a blue blazer and grey slacks walks between the curtains.

He raises his hands above his head in the familiar double V-for-Victory salute to acknowledge the applause, then gestures for quiet.

“Thanks for the hand, folks.” His voice is deep, quiet, and sincere. “You know, I needed that applause today.” A catch in his throat. “Right before the show, I was on my way down here to the studio...” He shakes his head slightly, as if contemplating the role that Chance plays in Life. “An elderly lady came up to me, and she introduced herself, and then she said, 'Oh, Dick, I'm so pleased to meet you, you know you were my all-time favorite presidential candidate...” He lets the compliment hang there a second, as if savoring it. “...after Jack Kennedy, of course.” The audience laughs, appreciating the host who can tell a joke at his own expense. When the laughter has diminished, but before it stops completely, he continues.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

House speaker: Soros is a druglord

The Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert has gone on record as suspecting that billionaire currency speculator George Soros (who made his money on currency speculation) is a drug kingpin. Soros funds a lot of progressive causes (including a lot of drug-law and copyright-reform stuff) and has pledged his financial support to overturn the Bush presidency, so this smear is clearly political in nature:

"You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: "Excuse me?" The Speaker went on: "Well, that's what he's been for a number years -- George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." Wallace: "You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?" Hastert: "I'm saying I don't know where groups - could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:36:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Skype beta for OS X

Skype is the voice-over-IP phone that the Kazaa people invented, eschewing the SIP-phone standards used by companies like Vonage. They've just shipped a Mac OS X beta (finally!). Link (via Joi Ito)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warren Ellis's device array

Gizmodo's done another of their "What's in your gadget-bag" features, this time with Warren Ellis, whose Transmetropolitan is the best science fictional comic I've ever read.

You just caught me. I'm off to Atlanta in 36 hours or so; jumping from British Summer Time to Eastern Daylight Time for something called Dragon*Con, where I'm a special guest (and also cultivating the Freak Vote in prep for my first prose novel, published next summer).

I travel light. I'm the guy whose bag hits the luggage carousel last. I'm the guy who's still there at three in the morning in an empty hall, with tumbleweed blowing past, sitting there next to horse skeletons and starving vultures, waiting for the airport workers to finish their smack break and grub around in the back of the airplane for my bag. Which usually comes out looking like they've been having group sex on it. So, five or six years ago, I decided that if it didn't fit into a carry-on bag, I wasn't taking it.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:31:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Love note to a cigar

Ben Hammersley -- gentleman adventurer, RSS hacker, dog-nut and committed smoker -- has taken on a cigar company as a sponsor on his blog, and is reviewing their wares, writing these over-the-top love-poems about cigars:

Lighting was smooth, though there was a little channelling (caused, I fear, by my own cackhandedness rather than any rolling fault, but easily rectified). Impressively firm ash, with the typical Nicaraguan whiteness to it, and solid to at least two inches. It’s a medium smoke, a good newspaper and coffee smoke, with non sense of bitterness at all. Indeed, once up to cruising speed, it’s rather blissful: it draws very well, doesn’t linger on the palate, but it calls to you from your hand. Fruity, perhaps, with a slight hint of spice, but nothing too post-prandial. The Sumatran wrapper gives some sweetness, and the ligero filler the complexity and the ummmph. In all, bloody nice.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friendster cans coder for blogging

Joyce Park is a coder who worked at Friendster, leading the charge to re-engineer the poky, Java-based back-end with fast PHP. She blogged about it, got slashdotted, got written up in the press -- and got fired. Even though there was nothing confidential in her blog posts, the new CEO shitcanned her.

[I]t's especially ironic because Friendster, of course, is a company that is all about getting people to reveal information about themselves...

Link, Link to Jeremy Zawodny's instructions for resigning from Friendster (Thanks, Jeffreyp!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:17:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Michael Moore at the RNC

USAToday has hired Michael Moore to cover the Republican National Convention:

Hanging out around the convention, I've encountered a number of the Republican faithful who aren't delegates. They warm up to me when they don't find horns or a tail. Talking to them, I discover they're like many people who call themselves Republicans but aren't really Republicans. At least not in the radical-right way that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Co. have defined Republicans.

I asked one man who told me he was a "proud Republican," "Do you think we need strong laws to protect our air and water?"

"Well, sure," he said. "Who doesn't?"

I asked whether women should have equal rights, including the same pay as men.

"Absolutely," he replied.

"Would you discriminate against someone because he or she is gay?"

"Um, no." The pause — I get that a lot when I ask this question — is usually because the average good-hearted person instantly thinks about a gay family member or friend.

Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:10:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bode's Cheech Wizard animated

Nigel Hendrickson, a professional computer animator, has produced a fannish animated adaptation of Vaughn Bode's classic "Cheech Wizard" comic. The movie is a little over two minutes long, and it's not only hilarious and raunchy -- as any good adaptation of Bode should be! -- it's also drop-dead gorgeous. Link (Thanks, Drewkeig!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Diebold voting machines vulnerability

Diebold's voting machines have a stunning security defect:

Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

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

UPS shirt appreciated

Darren Barefoot recently thrifted a UPS shirt and he's posted an annotated photo of him wearing it in which he marks up all the grace-notes in its design. Link (Thanks, Darren!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:00:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 30, 2004

Bogus-ify your outgoing caller ID

Ahoy, stalkers, crank yankers, and evil telemarketer scumbags! Beginning this Wednesday, September 1, US-based online company Star38.com will offer paying subscribers a Caller ID falsification service. Make-believe you're the White House! Or 1-800-CALL-ATT! Or, hell, get your '80s on and vamp out in 867-5309! Kevin Poulsen of SecurityFocus tried it out, and evidently the service checked out as providing what it promised. Users complete an online form with phone number, number they want to call, number they want to appear to be calling from; in a couple of seconds, the system rings back to patch them through to their call destination. But, like, in a secret numeric disguise: call recipients see the spoofed number displayed on Caller ID. Link to Register article (via /., which contains some interesting debate from readers over whether or not the system is a truly effective spoofing mechanism)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:33:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wikipedia proves its amazing self-healing powers

Phil sez, "Remember Al Fasoldt, the journalist who disparaged Wikipedia? He was challenged by a Techdirt writer to change an item and see if his change was found. While Fasoldt dismissed the idea, Alex Halavais thought it was an interesting idea. He made 13 changes to 13 different Wikipedia pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. He figured he'd give them a couple of weeks and then fix the ones that weren't caught. Every single change was found and changed within hours." Link (Thanks, Phil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:47:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RNC-NYC: Update on arrest of Joshua Kinberg, Bikes Against Bush

Snipped from MSNBC.com. Correspondent Ron Reagan was interviewing Joshua Kinberg when he was arrested yesterday (Link to previous BB post for story background):

Released from the "Tombs" after police arrested me (Joshua Kinberg of Bikes Against Bush) I'm now sitting in the MSNBC trailer at Herald Sq., NYC, with Ron Reagan and Joe Trippi after spending 24 hours in the "Tombs" with several hundred Critical Mass cyclists, who were arrested the night before.

Joshua Kinberg: I was arrested while Ron was interviewing me about my invention-- a bicycle that prints text messages on the street in water-soluble chalk. While we were conducting the interview, the police stopped me and asked for my ID. After I produced identification, the police waited for their sergeant to arrive before placing me under arrest without stating the charge. I was doing nothing more than describing my invention to the media and explaining my disagreements with the Bush administration.

When I arrived in the Tombs, I was placed in a cell with around 30 other cyclists. They had spent the previous night in a location they were affectionately calling "Lil' Gitmo," a makeshift detention center on the West Side piers converted from a former bus depot. Lil' Gitmo had cells sectioned off with chain link fence and razor wire, and a floor covered in motor oil, transmission fluid, and other toxic chemicals. The cyclists detained there were forced to sleep on this hazardous floor wearing nothing more than bicycling shorts and t-shirts. Consequently, several developed serious skin rashes the following day. After 36 hours most of the cyclists had been released with a pending court date. Several had been arrested when specifically following police directions to exit the peaceful bike ride. Others had not been part of Critical Mass, but had simply been on the streets with a bicycle at the wrong time.

I was released after 24 hours in detention with a court date set for Friday. Unfortunately, all my equipment-- bicycle, laptop, cell phone, and custom designed electronics-- has been confiscated. Thus, the Bikes Against Bush performance, where I would accept and print messages sent from web users, is likely to be cancelled. A volunteer lawyer from the National Lawyers Guild is confident that my case will be dismissed on grounds of the First Amendment, but we will have to wait until Friday to see. A video of the arrest recorded and edited by Yury Gitman has been posted online (BitTorrent), and the story of my arrest has already been blogged on SlashDot, BoingBoing, Kottke, and JuliaSet.

Link to MSNBC item, with link to video of Reagan's interview with Kinberg (in which he describes "what happened, and what The Tombs was like.")

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:09:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RNC-NYC: daily geek protest roundup

A slew of riot nrrd updates from BoingBoing readers about protest, art, and tech mixing at the Republican National Convention in NYC this week.

* Bunnyhero says, "The RNC mobile network, or RNCmobnet, is a moblog dedicated to utilizing the power of the collective cell network during the Republican National Convention demonstrations by enabling mobile postings by just about anybody with a properly enabled mobile device."

* Phil Haack points us to the image shown here, and says, "This is the geekiest protest sign ever -- photo taken by a friend in New York." Link to full-size.

* Reader Jeff McHugh loved that "‹/BUSH›" sign so much, he created a shop on cafepress where you can purchase bumper stickers, mugs, and the like. Link

* Eli says, "A group of us are using wearable computers, wifi, and souped up camcorders are doing an interactive web and tv broadcast tonight of the RNC. We have one crew inside MSG near the bloggers and three crews in the streets. We'll be broadcasting live from 7-7:30 PM EST on MNN in NYC and over the web at Konscious.tv. Participants can watch live streams and chat over the web with camerapeople live while they're shooting. More info here."

* Blogstar Anil Dash tells BoingBoing, "The Village Voice has got a number of new blogs they've been launching, but the most interesting one to me was the diary of a (clothed) cocktail waitress at a strip club -- Link. There's only one post up so far, but if she keeps updating, it promises to be the most compelling record of the convention that I've seen."

* And Jon says, "Found "Axis of Eve" via we-make-money-not-art.com be sure to check out this page for some hilarious underwear slogans!"

Axis of Eve, a women's rights group, is planning a 10-minute mass panty flash on Appointment on Wednesday, September 1 to protest the policies of the Bush administration. Over 100 women will flash panties emblazoned with anti-Bush slogans like "give Bush the finger," "cream Bush", "drill Bush, not oil", "Ballot Box," "My Cherry For Kerry," etc."

Fleshbot has more on that one: Link
Previous BB posts about RNC-NYC and protest tech: Barlow's dance protests. DIY coverage. Sterling's prediction. Nationwide scream 09/02. Robocops. Rooftop protest messages. Brooklyn Orgiastic Politics Collective. Bikes Against Bush arrest. First Amendment read-ins. C-SPAN protest video feeds. TXTmob. A TV network-er's photoblog. Protest videos.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:44:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The brain's own antipsychotic medication

Anandamide is a cannabis-like substance produced by the brain. Researchers at the University of Cologne and UC Irvine who observed that schizophrenics have higher adandamide levels than healthy individuals. The odd thing though is that within the group of people suffering from schizophrenia, the individuals with the most severe symptoms had the lowest anandamide levels. The new theory is that rather than causing psychosis, anandamide helps control it and that those with the worst symptoms might be producing too little of the substance in response.

At some point in their lives, between 5 and 30 per cent of healthy people have had symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations, which can be triggered by something as simple as sleep deprivation. "All of us are potentially psychotic," says David Castle of the University of Melbourne. So for the body to have a system that prevents these experiences getting out of hand makes sense, he says.

Link
Update: As our friend at root.cellar points out, ananda, the root word of Anandamide, is Sanskrit for "bliss." Appropriate! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:26:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Famous for 15 megabytes

I've always though that the people who hung out at Andy Warhol's 1960s Factory were probably more interesting than Andy himself. Warholstars is an amazingly comprehensive and searchable guide to the Factory scenesters, including bios, "whatever happened to" information, and current news of Warhol-related happenings. Link (via MetaFilter)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:08:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tortoise anatomical model

This curious tortoise skeleton, an antique veterinary teaching aid, is on eBay right now. The shell is hinged so that you can see the entire skeleton. I assume it's a model, but it's still quite amazing. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:30:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBEdit 8.0 is out

BareBones is a company that makes BBEdit, the most valuable piece of software on my Macintosh. BBEdit is a tool for writing and manipulating text, like vi, emacs, WordPad, and other editors. But while WordPad and TextEdit are underpowered and poorly thought-through and while vi and emacs are briliant but complex and hard to learn, BBEdit strikes the perfect balance between ease-of-use and power. All of my novels and every story I've written in the past eight years has been written in BBEdit. Every Boing Boing post I've posted (including this one) was written in BBEdit. I've had excellent support from them all along, and every so often, they ship a new version that inevitably fixes whatever minor annoyances I had with the previous version and introduces a few features that I hadn't thought of but which end up being indispensible to my workflow.

Today, BareBones shipped BBEdit 8.0, a $49 upgrade for BBEdit 7.x users, and I've just paid for it and downloaded it, on the strength of new features like Text Factories, a GUI front-end to regular-expression-based search and replace, so that you can do the kind of thing a perl hacker does in one inscrutable line with a series of easy-to-understand drop-down menus; the Documents Drawer, which fixes the slightly clumsy handling of multiple windows in the current BBEdit; and the newly integrated MacOS spell-checker, which fixes the sorely lagging BBEdit spell-checker.

BBEdit upgrades are like Christmas for me. More than any tool on my computer, I live in my text-editor. These upgrades are major quality-of-life enhancers for the likes of me. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:52:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT pro-P2P editorial

A New York Times editorial today praising the recent appeals court decision on P2P services Grokster and Morpheus:

[T]he broader issue is the distribution of information. Software like Grokster creates a network of independent Internet users who can access one another's computer files without going through a central server. (Napster maintained a central server, which made it legally liable in very different ways.) Grokster can certainly be used to swap music illegally. But it can also be used to exchange electronic copies of books already in the public domain, transcripts of Congressional hearings or any number of other legitimate types of information. Much like a VCR that does not distinguish between a pirated tape and one legally acquired, the technology does not care what is shared. It is impossible to strike down software like Grokster for its use in illegal file-sharing without also destroying its capacity for legal and socially beneficial activities.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:40:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RNC-NYC: more art-tech-protest videos

BoingBoing reader Dave Pentecost says,

Two clips on my site related to the RNC protests. First, caricature as protest: the Billionaires for Bush. Among their rallying cries - Lower the Minimum Wage! No Justice, No Problem! In this clip they urge watching more Fox TV, chant "This is what plutocracy looks like!" and thank the other 99% for their tax dollars. The other clip is a protestor's eye view of the day. A short montage of protest signs, and a wide shot of the march on Seventh Avenue, full of peaceful folks as far as you can see.

Link.
Previous BB posts about RNC-NYC and protest tech: Barlow's dance protests. DIY coverage. Sterling's prediction. Nationwide scream 09/02. Robocops. Rooftop protest messages. Brooklyn Orgiastic Politics Collective. Bikes Against Bush arrest. First Amendment read-ins. C-SPAN protest video feeds. TXTmob. A TV network-er's photoblog.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:36:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

protest tech: TXTmob and other mobile update services

BoingBoing reader Chris says,

The TXTmob service came into force at the DNC protests, and has really taken off so far this week at the RNC protests, helping organize and coordinate events in real time. Here's a sample of some of the messages that were sent yesterday (there's a full archive on the site, but it requires registration:

15:51:05 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Over 1000 protesters have gathered in Central Park, seems calm at this time.
16:00:30 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Police are not allowing bicycles to ride on the streets in the Times Square area.
16:11:56 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Update: police have closed 6 Ave and all streets west of 6ave from 34 St to 59 St to bicycles
16:14:56 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Kiss-in in progress! 5Ave @ 41 on the steps of the library
16:23:38 Sun, Aug 29 morgan The crowd on the Great lawn of Central Park is growing, police seem calm
16:37:07 Sun, Aug 29 morgan The Kiss-in is marching toward Times Square, and the mouse-bloc actions in that area are begining

Link, and more info on smartmobs blog

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:33:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FashMobs

Yesterday, Parisian blogger Alex Boucherot of Fluctuat.net and I were discussing how some flash mobs have a (hopefully unintentional) fascist undertone, depending of course on who organizes the particular gathering, their motivation, and even the phrasing of the announcement. After we hung out, Alex stumbled on Christopher Bruno's recent net artwork where historical figures are "reincarnated as... artists." The entire series is excellent, but A. Hitler's FashMobs is particularly relevant to our discussion. From the Fashmobs "artist" statement:

"I created a website where people can leave their mobile phone number. The idea is that when the number of people is large enough, a SMS instruction is sent to all of them simultaneously by the server. When they receive it, people have to perform the instructions. The instructions are simple ones, like raising an arm, but the effect is amplified by the fact that many people do it in the same place, at the same time, as in a symphonic orchestra."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:55:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos from Cory's travels

I've been travelling nonstop for a couple years now, shooting pix of various amusing, pretty or outre things as I go. I find myself with hundreds of photos that I took basically because I thought it'd be funny to show them to friends, but I never do.

This morning, I used Flickr's Uploadr tool for OSX to upload about 160 of them, tagging them with some metadata as I went. It was a pretty neat experience, reliving all those moments. I'm gonna try to keep my public Flickr library up to date on this stuff from now on. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:25:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Election-related Daily Show clips

Lisa Rein has posted a bunch of election-time Daily Show clips -- the fourth one listed, on the GOP hacks who are trying to get Nader on the ballot to split the left-wing vote, is fantastic:

The Shrub Killing Time On A TV Fishing Show

An Interview With Maureen Dowd

Robert Novak Being a "Douchebag For Freedom" (Again)

And a really important report from Ed Helms about the organization making calls on behalf of Ralph Nader in order to re-elect George Bush. (CSE)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:24:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, August 29, 2004

RNC-NYC: a TV networker's photoblog

BoingBoing reader Vidiot works at a television news network. He points us to his photoblog -- a collection of snapshots in and around the RNC site, from a media worker's POV. "So far, I've got some pix up of RNC preps at Madison Square Garden, some of the media compound, and some of the media party last night." Shown here: media trailers along 33rd Street in Manhattan. Link

Previous BB posts about RNC-NYC: Barlow's dance protests. DIY coverage. Sterling's prediction. Nationwide scream 09/02. Robocops. Rooftop protest messages. Brooklyn Orgiastic Politics Collective. Bikes Against Bush arrest. First Amendment read-ins. C-SPAN protest video feeds.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:29:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos: "The New Mechanical Sexual Revolution"

Photographer Timothy Archibald's portraits of garage-geek inventors -- and users -- of large-scale sex machines. The aesthetic of the images is not prurient; it's clinical, clean, and removed. That distance lends the images a compelling twist, given the topic at hand. I hatehatehate the site's 1.5MB gorilla Flash interface, which prevents my pasting some of the project notes for you to read here. But the images and the subject matter they detail (online communities that connect people who imagine, build, and use these machines) are fascinating. At left: "Scott at his kitchen table, Sex Machines Unlimited," which made me laugh out loud. Link (NSFW). (Thanks, alfie)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:17:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Treat British Airways as damage and route around them

I was trying to buy a one-way ticket from Brussels to London in September, and I ran into the weirdest, dumbest thing: British Airways won't sell you a ticket over the Web if your credit-card isn't billed in the same country the flight originates in (Er, hello? You're an airline -- that means you deal with people who are traveling, sometimes to countries other than the one that they reside in).

So I called BA and was told that the same ticket would cost 400 percent more if bought over the phone. So I went to a BA counter in Boston and was quoted a fare that was 200 percent more than the Web-fare.

I tried booking through Expedia, but they wanted to mail me a paper ticket. Since I rarely touch down in any city for more than a couple days, intersecting with a postal-delivery system for time-sensitive materials is pretty tricky.

Then I gave up on the Web and went to SN Brussels Air, a little carrier whose website has never ever worked for me. I called the London reservations desk and booked a ticket for exactly what BA charges via its website.

That's no surprise: as it turns out, the flight is operated by British Airways. It's the same goddamned plane.

So that's the point of this post: if ever you want to book a ticket on BA from Brussels to London, book it through SN Brussels Air (by phone -- the website will probably remain busted for all eternity), and you can circumvent BA's dumbass ecommerce policies and extorionate phone/counter prices. Link

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

RNC-NYC: CSPAN showing live protest video feeds

BoingBoing reader Cheeken says, "Just thought people might like to know that CSPAN TV is showing live, uneditied feeds of the protestors marching around NYC. I've spent the last three hours just reading all of the signs!" Link to CSPAN website with video streams.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:10:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RNC protests: Bikes Against Bush organizer arrested

A post on an indymedia website says activist Joshua Kinberg -- inventor of a wireless, bike-mounted, dot-matrix printer for spraying protest messages in the street -- was arrested yesterday at the RNC in NYC. At the time, he was reportedly being interviewed by Ron Reagan, covering the convention for MNSBC.

Kinberg's invention allows users to spray messages transmitted to the bike-printer by way of the 'Net or SMS. They're painted in a water-soluble chalk solution that washes away with water (not spray-paint, as misreported elsewhere). Link to indymedia post, Link to previous BB post about Bikes Against Bush, Link to August 02 Wired News story with background on Kinberg's invention, Link to yesterday's NYT piece on Bikes Against Bush, and link to a torrent identified as video coverage of the incident, via DV Guide. (Thanks, Patricia and el norm)

Update: BoingBoing reader Paul says, "It seems he didn't even get a chance to use his invention, save the demonstration for MSNBC which resulted in his arrest. Snip from report: "When Kinberg showed the police sergeant how the bicycle used a non-permanent spray chalk, the sergeant seemed to agree that it wasn't defacement, at which point Kinberg asked, 'Am I free to go?' After conferring about it, officers decided to call superiors, then came back moments later to place Kinberg under arrest and confiscate the bicycle."

And BB reader yatta says, "Joshua was released at 11:00 AM Sunday morning after being charged with vandalism. His bicycle, laptop, and cell phone have all been confiscated and are being held until his court hearing. A lawyer from the National Lawyer Guild believes that the case is a clear violation of the first amendment (Houston v. Hill). In the meantime, the likelihood of his getting the bike back to use during the RNC is pretty much nil. (The court date has been set for Friday, 9/3, after the RNC ends.) Link to details."

Reader Mike Harris says, "The New York Post is reporting that it was spray paint, instead of a water-soluble chalk mixture. Users might want to ask that they correct their reporting. The online edition/news editor's name is Chris Shaw, at cshaw@nypost.com."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:22:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RNC protests: Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective

Color me jaded, but this call for citywide deployment of orgone cloudbuster machines to induce a "quivering saturnalia" inside the RNC walls sounds more like parody, and less like actual protest. But, hey, what do I know about Reichian energetics? Fleshbot says,

If the skies are dark over New York City next week during the Republican National Convention, it may be due to the cloudbusting efforts of the Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective, who plan to combat the "Deadly Orgone Energy (DOR)" of Dubya and company with ... uh, something based on the theories of Wilhelm Reich ("Metaphorically speaking, our September 2nd project will be an attempt to give the sky a blowjob... Imagine the Republican delegates so consumed in fucking and sucking that they forget to nominate Bush.")

Link. Don't forget to wear your tinfoil beanie thong.

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

RNC protests: First Amendment read-ins

BoingBoing reader Dave says,

Reverend Billy [from the Church of Stop Shopping] leads the faithful in rousing choruses of the First Amendment. A Quicktime clip shows one chorus and the hallelujahs leaving St Marks church in the East Village, New York, a center for organizing this week's demonstrations. (more clips from the street today will be posted this evening). Rev. Billy has been staging public readings of the First Amendment in smart mobs at Ground Zero and other locations, exercising the rights to free assembly and speech.

Link to Dave's blog post, more on Smart Mobs. The read-ins with Reverend Billy continue today.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:09:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UPS deploys fuel-cell-powered trucks

BoingBoing reader Jim says:

"According to this article in Fleet Owner, UPS has deployed three fuel cell-powered trucks, a first in the US. "Our test programs showed the on-road reliability of fuel cells is excellent, equivalent to our current fleet," said Chris Mahoney, UPS senior VP of global transportation services in a press release. "But what's truly exciting is how fast the technology is progressing."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:07:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tabloid T&A and politics in Murdoch's Sun newspaper

BoingBoing reader Rod says,

In the UK, Rupert Murdoch's "The Sun" tabloid -- famous for it's topless models on Page 3 -- has decided that merely displaying a couple of boobs to increase circulation is not enough. Now, accompanying the lady proudly displaying her knockers, is a small snippet of right-wing Murdoch-approved propoganda, purporting to be the opinion of the Page 3 Girl. Tim Ireland's gathered together some prime examples from the last 8 months.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:02:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NROjr website: Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be spooks

Joi Ito stumbled on a website of the US government's "National Reconnaissance Office" designed for kids. Snip from NRO website copy:

The NRO designs, builds and operates the nation's reconnaissance satellites. NRO products, provided to an expanding list of customers like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD), can warn of potential trouble spots around the world, help plan military operations, and monitor the environment. As part of the 14-member Intelligence Community, the NRO plays a primary role in achieving information superiority for the U. S. Government and Armed Forces.

Joi asks:

So what is NROjr? It's a "A fun site to engage children in the wonders of science, math and space in a fun and interactive manner," brought to you by the NRO. (Make sure you have your sound turned on to enjoy the full experience. And all this time I thought Ernie actually worked for Sesame Street... although I guess he was recently heard singing Orkutworld.)

Link to Joi's blog post

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:00:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Justice Dept censors Supreme Court ruling

Becky sez, "The Justice Dept. blacked out (censored) the part of a Supreme Court decision that calls into question the willy-nilly use of the vague notion of 'domestic security' to suppress dissent. Oy."

Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent).

Link (Thanks, Becky!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:26:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

General Barlow's dancin' platoons planning to boogie at the RNC

General John Perry Barlow continues to plan his mad protest of the RNC in which hundreds of secret agents dressed like civilians will converge on a public, off-limits-to-protestors space, turn on a boom box, and DANCE LIKE HELL:

2. TEXT MESSAGE COORDINATION

I have created a text-message "loop" for us on the Ruckus site. It's called "dancemob." This will enable all of us to receive cell phone text messages from one another, noting current platoon location, likely eruption zones, police movements and temperament, etc. In order to participate, you will need to do the following:

-- Send the text "join dancemob" to 8762.

-- Once you are joined, you can send messages up to about 150 characters to your loop by texting dancemob: [your message here]" to 8762. For instance, if there were a loop named "PeaceMakers", you would text "PeaceMakers: meet now at 32nd and 6th".

In addition, I recommend that at least some of you in each platoon register your phone to receive bulletins from Ruckus with breaking news and logistical updates from the streets of New York City during the RNC.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:24:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY coverage from the RNC

Metafilter Matt has written a great roundup of DIY coverage of the RNC event in New York:

all Flickr photos tagged with rnc, rncwatch.typepad.com, Technorati search for New York City ("rnc" was too short to search), Buzznet's No RNC photostream, rnc convention bloggers, WeSeeRNC moblog, Indymedia's RNC coverage, and Google News search for rnc.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:23:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turn Gmail storage into a mountable filesystem

What to do with all that extra, network-based storage that comes with your Gmail account? If you're using Linux, you can turn it into a mountable filesystem with GmailFS.

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-pod t-shirt

French company LaFraise.com sells some very fun riot nrrrd t-shirts, including this "T-pod" design, screeprinted with a pair of iPod earbuds. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:29:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toast the aliens

For four years, Dudley Cates Jr. of Southampton, NY has tried to market his Crop Circle Beer. The beverage is based on barley taken from an English grain field where crop circles have mysteriously appeared. Now Blue Point Brewing Company is brewing the amber ale, for sale in the Hamptons, Manhattan, and Long Island.

"Crop circles carry an aura of mystery," said Cates... who first became intrigued with the legends behind the designs while living in Aspen, Colo. "I thought to myself, this phenomenon is real."

Also, said Cates, "I love beer."

Link (via Fark)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:12:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, August 28, 2004

RNC protests predicted by Bruce Sterling story

Jonah sez, "I've written an essay that compares the planned RNC actions, technologies and protests next week to the Wende in Bruce Sterling's short story 'Deep Eddy' and the Wende period of the falling of the berlin wall. It's also a piece that speculates whether the actions and technologies employed in the streets will produce any results. Just thought you and your readers might be interested."

And so the stage has been set. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions will be arriving in a city full of citizens already hostile to the political party that has chosen to hold it’s National Convention in their city for reasons of emotional manipulation. The police and city officials have set up a number of strenuous and overly aggressive methods of control.

That this event will be anything less than similar to Sterling’s description of the Wende is doubtful. At the very least a very large number of protestors will participate in one of the most varied, vocal and interesting political protests in American history. At the most extreme, the massive disturbance will awaken a number of American citizens to what the Bush administration is really up to and set off a sequence of events that will alter our political landscape.

Link (Thanks, Jonah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:22:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bea Arthur's fight against the Transport Security Agency

Bea Arthur forgot to take her pocketknife out of her purse last week at Logan airport and when the TSA found it, she ran around screaming, "The terrorists! The terrorists put a knife in my purse! We're all doomed!" She was being funny -- it's what she does. She's the funniest of all the Golden Girls, that's for sure.

The TSA didn't take it well.

Kur5hin has an appreciation of Ms Arthur and her sense of humor today:

It should be obvious to us that an 81-year old woman committed a crime by making a snide remark when hassled for carrying a pocket knife? I'm just glad that she had the guts to call the security guards out for their ridiculous behavior, even if most Americans think she's crazy for making a joke.

As such, I present a simple proposition: Bea Arthur for President!

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti Game Piracy ads from olden times

Great collage of old UK "Piracy is Theft" anti-software-piracy ads. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:17:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Public's Right to Know video censored by Justice Dept

Michael filed a Freedom of Information Act request the the Justice Department to get it to release a movie called "The Public's Right to Know." The Department released part of the video, but redacted sections of it, claiming that since the video had been produced by a private contractor who hadn't assigned copyright to the feds, they didn't have the right to release it to him. How convenient. There's a reason that the feds aren't allowed to copyright the stuff they make with our tax dollars: it's stupid and dirty and irresponsible as hell to circumvent that duty to make the public's bought-and-paid material available to the public by failing to negotiate the rights when contracting out to the private sector. Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:15:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Executed Italian blogger and journalist's last wishes

Following up on this post about Enzo Baldoni, the Italian journalist and blogger who was executed in Iraq this week, BoingBoing reader Alessandro Burato says: "Hi. There's an important update on Baldoni's death -- his testament, posted by italian journalist Pino Scaccia."

27.08.04 - Enzo's Testament

"[At my funeral] I want people to smile -- did you notice? Funerals always end up with someone smiling: it's natural, it's Life taking over Death. And let people smoke freely anything they like; I'd also be pleased if new love stories would come out, and I'd even consider some aloof sex as an offer to Life rather than an offense to Death.

At about eight-nine o'clock, with little or no cerimonials, bring my coffin silently to the crematory, while the party and the music should last until late night.

About my ashes... throw them into the sea, I'd say. Or do as you want, who fucking cares."

Link to original version in Italian.

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

Incredible String Band reunion tour

Seminal UK avant-folk group the Incredible String Band is preparing to tour the US for the first time in three decades. The group melds sitars, guitars, banjos, and ouds with bluegrass, Celtic melodies, and classic 1960s psychedelia. Founding members Mike Heron are leading the band stateside. From publicist Howard Wuelfing's email list:

Many of the artists that comprise the current wave of “experimental folk” consider the Incredible String Band as a crucial inspiration and influence.  Devendra Banhart says (in typically Banhartian fashion) “Happy Birthday! not noodlemisters but Epic lizard man songs traversing the new universe holding sarods, our old hopes tightly, fiddles, chimes, udes, bagpipes, baby boars, banjos, mead, invisible ropes and on and on OH in this sweetcheese pond lies a perfect reflection of trueTRUE love! Happy Birthday Old Baby!"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:24:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Broadcast Treaty status-report in Wired News

Wendy Grossman has written a good overview of the Broadcast Treaty proceedings at WIPO for Wired News -- this is a treaty that EFF is fighting, which would allow broadcasters to control what you and others do with their broadcasts regardless of whether those broadcasts contain public-domain or uncopyrightable material:

Cory Doctorow, the London-based European Affairs Coordinator for the EFF, highlights two additional sources of worry. First, the US, represented in Geneva by the Patent Office, is demanding that the treaty include webcasting. If that proposal should pass, broadcast rights could apply to anything downloaded from any Web site, making it impossible to be sure whether even open-source software wasn't covered.

Second, Doctorow said, one proposal in the draft treaty requires that receivers, defined as any device that can decrypt broadcasts, must incorporate technology to protect those broadcasts. As currently drafted, he believes that would include general-purpose computers.

That clause in the draft treaty echoes recent US legislation that introduced the "broadcast flag," a technical control that must be implemented by July 1, 2005 for all devices for sales in the US that receive television signals.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:29:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moore Guevara shirts

The good people at Designed by Monkeys are selling this spiffy Michael Moore/Che Guevara mashup t-shirt for fifteen bucks cheap. Link (via A Copyfighter's Musings)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:27:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Journalist: Wikipedia is "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous"

A Techdirt writer sent a note to Al Fasoldt, a "journalist" with the Syracuse Post-Standard who wrote an editorial telling his readers that Wikipedia couldn't be trusted and should be avoided ("Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials").

Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous," insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff.

My main problem was that he seemed to write off Wikipedia based solely on how it was created and maintained, and not at all on the actual content. Along with my post, I sent an email to the writer, Al Fasoldt, giving him some additional information about Wikipedia, and wondering why, after telling us how you can't trust any random info online, he trusted the email from a random librarian claiming Wikipedia was somehow untrustworthy. The ongoing discussion with Mr. Fasoldt has been quite a lesson in watching how a journalist (a) continues to make unsubstantiated allegations (b) seems to prefer insulting me and putting words in my mouth to actually responding to my points or questions and (c) sticks steadfastly to his belief that only "experts" can be trusted with information -- and, in his case, only experts that he chooses. Yet, somehow, we're supposed to find him more trustworthy than a self-correcting community. Figuring he might appreciate the views of others in his profession (you know, "experts"), I sent him links to Dan Gillmor's article on Wikipedia and Steve Yelvington's recent realization of the power of Wikipedia. However, rather than actually look at that information, Mr. Fasoldt accused me of wanting "students to trust a source that's not trustworthy." After some back and forth of this nature, where Mr. Fasoldt responded to my request that he do a little more research by saying: "I'm glad you're not the publisher of a newspaper" (apparently, his publisher lets him do no research at all) and then telling me that anyone who wrote for Wikipedia obviously knew nothing (his phrase was: "100 times zero is still zero"), I suggested an experiment. I pointed to the Wikipedia page on Syracuse, NY where he apparently lives, and suggested he change something on the page, to make it provably, factually incorrect -- and see how long it lasted. Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was "outrageous," "repugnant" and finally (in another email) "dangerous," and therefore he refused to take part in my experiment.

Link (via EvHead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:22:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, August 27, 2004

Nationwide scream when W speaks at the RNC

Al Franken wants you to holler on September 2 when W takes the stage at the RNC.

On September 2nd, 2004, at approximately 10 pm, George W. Bush will appear on television screens nationwide. For some of our fellow citizens, this will be a moment of joy. But for most of us, it will be the low point of an incredibly exasperating week.

Until now, there have been only two options: miss the speech (either by screaming at the television or turning it off), or bottle up the frustration within us, causing irreparable psychological harm. The first option is unbecoming of citizens in a democracy. The second option is just terrible. But now, for the first time, we have a better way. At the moment we see the president on our television screens, we will rise. We will throw open our windows. And, as George W. Bush moves to the podium in New York City, we will send him a message about his bid for reelection: we will yell, "fuggedaboudit!"

This will be a peaceful, non-disruptive protest. We will stop yelling before the president starts speaking. Our goal is not to drown him out, but to communicate. (And vent.)

Link (Thanks, tpy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:29:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Candy with 9-11 attack toys recalled

"Small toys showing an airplane flying into the World Trade Center were packed inside more than 14,000 bags of candy and sent to small groceries around the country before being recalled." Link (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:44:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shane Glines' Cartoon Retro

My friend Scott has been telling me to check out a new subscription-based website published by Shane Glines. Glines is an animation character designer and one of my favorite illustrators. He worked for Spumco (the studio that made Ren & Stimpy) and on the Batman animated series.

Glines describes his new site, Cartoon Retro, as being "devoted to celebrating and exploring the largely forgotten work of great artists, cartoonists, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, actors, musicians and industrial designers from what, in my opinion, was the peak of American culture: approximately 1925 through 1939." In addition, Shane posts some of his own work on the site, too

I just signed-up, and am blown away with all the great stuff available. If you are at all interested in the art from this era (like I am), the $5 / month fee is well worth it. I hope enough people sign up to convince him to keep up the great work. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:08:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More shaving news from C-Lo

Carlo Longino is experimenting with different shaving products. Yesterday, he didn't have anything good to say about the battery powered vibrating M3Power Razor. Today, he tries Kid Glove Shave Gel and thinks its a swell gel.

Tried it in the shower this morning, and the stuff is awesome. It's not foamy, which is kinda cool, and you put a thin layer on your face and let it sit for 30 seconds, generating a sensation toeing the line between tingling and scorching. But then a zero-resistance shave that is far, far closer than the Gillette foamy gel stuff I've been using for a long time.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:38:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iraq blogger, photographer, journalist Enzo Baldoni executed

Update here Italian freelance journalist and weblogger Enzo G. Baldoni has been executed in Iraq. Link to RSF report. His weblog, Bloghdad, included beautiful photographs and compelling narrative about the people of Iraq. The final post on this self-described pacifist's blog: an incredible image, shown at left. Link. Italian and Arabic-language media are reporting that he tried to defend himself from his captors just before they shot him. A spokesperson from Al-Jazeera, the TV network which has been criticized in the past for airing Iraq hostage execution footage, was quoted as saying that video stills released by his executioners were "too cruel" for broadcast. If any Italian-speaking BoingBoing readers care to translate this final 08-26 text post from a ghost-blogger at Bloghdad -- it's about Baldoni's kidnapping -- I'll post it in English on BoingBoing. I don't want to just dump this in Babelfish. Translation of the final text post on his blog follows, thanks to BB reader Gianluca of KZSU radio, Stanford:

With respect, we maintain silence.

When he left for Iraq, Enzo left us in charge of Bloghdad and of all the articles and images he'd send from there. When he disappeared we wondered what to do. We knew Enzo well enough to realize he would have wanted us to continue to report the news of what was happening, and so we did until the truth of what had really happened to him surfaced.

Now we know that even after the kidnapping, Enzo is doing well and everything is being done to resolve the situation. There's little more to say: the situation is at a delicate and important stage and we fear that anything new posted on Bloghdad, both in the posts or the comments, might hurt Enzo. Out of respect towards Enzo and his family we feel that the best thing to do know is to keep silent.

We wish to thank all the people that have helped, criticized and encouraged us. Posts and comments will open again only when Enzo himself will do it. We hope it's going to be soon.

What a sad thing, that the war continues to take so many beautiful souls like this man from the earth.
(Thanks, Jean-Luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:32:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Excellent animation blog -- Cartoon Brew

I can't believe I didn't know about Cartoon Brew until just now. It's a blog maintained by animation insiders Amid Amidi and Jerry Beck. Today's entry is a great interview with John Kricfalusi, who finished up six new episodes of Ren & Stimpy for Spike TV.

[John Kricfalusi]: Well I love extremes in different mediums. The extreme of a cartoon is surrealism, that cartoons can do anything. A character can explode, can fly into pieces and come back together, can have their heads blown off, squash into a pancake, turn into an erection, I love all that stuff. But that's not all I love. To me, if I make the character so real, so believable, and then do wild stuff with it, it puts you in a whole other world. It makes the weird stuff even more believable. Like in STIMPY'S PREGNANT the whole opening, after the puke stuff's over, turns into this realistic drama. Then when all the intensity is released and Ren accepts that he's going to have the kid, it's all happy and light-hearted. All the birds and squirrels show up, and then it goes right into gags. So it's about contrast.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:05:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser"

Wired News reviews a book about technology going awry. It's called Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser, by Rick Broadhead, and it sounds excellent. I've had so many bad experiences with technology-enhanced customer service departments that I can relate to these examples.

Published in May with little fanfare, the 315-page paperback is a compilation of more than 100 true stories of technological blunder and misfortune. Some of the stories are bizarre, some are pathetic -- but all are highly entertaining.

Take, for instance, the case of the Ukrainian businessman who put 50 new pagers -- a gift for his employees -- in the back seat of his car and then promptly crashed into a lamppost when they all began beeping at the same time. The culprit? A welcome message sent by the pager company to each of the pagers.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:13:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Old-time Japanese radio exercise show MP3

Joi Ito has written about Radio Taiso, an old-timey Japanese radio exercise show that was banned after WWII for being too martial. He's posted an MP3 of one of the shows, which is great -- an insanely cheerful Japanese announcer counting repetitions overtop of Mr Rogers-style tinkling piano music. 4MB MP3 Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US gov't secrecy wastes money, erodes security, and locks up nonsensitive info

The OpenTheGovernment.org report on US government secrecy has just been published, and boy are its conclusions harsh: the US government is $6.5 billion/year keeping stuff secret (not counting the CIA budget, which is another secret), 90% of those documents don't contain anything particularily secret, and the result is that government agenciies and the public have their effective operations hamstrung because critical parts of the information needed to get by have been classified.

Compounding the problems is the fact that the government can't seem to let go of secrets that just aren't valuable any more. It took the CIA 20 years to declassify the fact that Augusto Pinochet, Chile's dictator, had a taste for distilled wine. Overall CIA budgets from decades back are still kept under wraps. And the pace of declassification has slowed since 9/11: 43 million pages in fiscal year 2003, as opposed to 100 million in 2001, according to the ISOO. Not surprisingly, the amount of money spent on releasing information has also slipped, from $231 million in 2001 to $54 million last year.

At the same time, the public thirst for government information seems to have risen. More than 3.2 million requests for federal documents were made under the Freedom of Information Act last year. That's about 1 million more than in 2001.

The cost of keeping secrets, according to OpenTheGovernment coordinator Rick Blum, comes largely from maintaining the patchwork of databases and networks that hold the government's sensitive information. Physical security of classified information has also been a major cost -- and a major concern. The repeated misplacement of secret disks at Los Alamos National Laboratory has shut down the nuclear weapons center for the last six weeks. That means a big chunk of the lab's annual budget of $2.2 billion has been devoted to the security lapses, so far. Those figures weren't included in the OpenTheGovernment report card.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:47:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Decaying images via RSS

I just signed up for the RSS Feed for the keyword "decay" on the Flickr image-sharing site. That means that my RSS aggregator gets a steady stream of photos tagged by their uploaders with the word "decay." Over the course of just a couple days, I've seenn some beautiful photos, but this rotty staircase is the best so far. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr) Link (via Gomi No Sensei)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:27:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phone exec: "People don't want open Internet access"

The COO of 3, a European 3G wireless company, has uttered one of the stupidest things ever said by a phone company executive (there's a field with some stiff competition!). In justifying his company's decision to censor the Internet services delivered over its wireless link (they're only allowing customers to access certain, selected services, rather than providing a fast wireless pipe that customers can use as they see fit), this loonytune has this to say:

'People don't want open access, that's not what our customers tell us they want,' he said. 'Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts.'

Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:16:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robocops in beta at the RNC

If you're in New York City when the Republican National Conventions kicks off next week, watch for police officers watching you with extra sets of megapixel peepers. The Federal Protective Service has outfitted patrol officers with helmets embedded with wireless video cameras. The images from the helmet-cams and traditional surveillance cameras mounted in federal buildings are streamed to a headquarters-on-wheels where deployment decisions can be made.

"This is an added bonus," the service's regional director, Ronald Libby, told New York Newsday. "I want to know what he [a patrol officer] sees to make a decision. ... This takes the guess work out of it."

More in a brief article I wrote over at TheFeature. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:15:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nightmarish, genuinely scary photoshopping

Worth 1000's nightmare-themed photoshopping contest has yielded some genuinely scary images. Link (via ftrain)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nutrition labels for games

Alice Taylor, who is researching games at the BBC, has a great blog post pondering the question of why our society values play but disdains games ("...this paradox of 'play' being seen as a fundamental good, and of high value, and 'games' as frivolous and time-wasting, therefore of low value"). She half-seriously proposes a nutrition-facts label for games to describe their constructive value. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:04:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How long can America stay scared?

Bruce Schneier, America's sanest security expert, has just posted a slew of new articles, including this one, called "How Long Can the Country Stay Scared?"

A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA's major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.

European countries that have been dealing with terrorism for decades, like the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain, don't have cute color-coded terror alert systems. Even Israel, which has seen more terrorism -- and more suicide bombers -- than anyone else, doesn't issue vague warnings about every possible terrorist threat.

Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mummified corpse lay in bed for two years while bills were auto-paid

Pat York sez, "A guy gets his pension cheque automatically deposited into his bank account. Then he authorizes automatic withdrawals to pay his condo fees, phone, etc. Then he dies in bed. How long does it take for someone to notice that he's checked out? Two years. Even Canada Post missed it." Link

Update: An anonymous reader sez, "In year 2000 they found this old guy in Helsinki who had been dead 6 years! Neighbours didn't noticed anything. All bills paid automatically."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Swedish BitTorrent site cusses at nastygramming Dreamworks lawyers

A group operating a BitTorrent tracker in Sweden got a takedown notice from Dreamworks, citing US law. Their response is priceless:

As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats.

It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Link (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Accidental real estate porn

Look closely at the third photo from the bottom on this realtor's website promoting a home for sale. Either the snapshot-taker failed to notice two dogs humping sur l'herbe, or this is an example of highly sophisticated subliminal advertising strategies in the real estate industry. BoingBoing reader and punster Mike Ransom calls this a "Real estate fo' paw."
Link (Thanks, Manero)

Update: Ah, what a pity. Someone at the realty website got wind of the fact that this was blogged on BoingBoing, Fark, MeFi, and everywhere else today -- and deleted the image. Good thing BB reader Andreas spotted the url to the jpeg itself (Link), and another copy is here (Link). Heh. Actually... stick this jpeg in a fancy frame, tack it to a wall at MoMA, call it a postmodern statement on the commoditization of the pornographized American id, and nobody'd know the difference.

Update 2: Reader Paul Camp alerts us to the fact that the realty website has now replaced the XXX photo in the original link with a Photoshop hack job that makes clumsy, guffaw-inducing use of the "blur" tool: Direct link to their revised image.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:39:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy 40th Birthday, cubicle!

Metropolis' Yvonne Abrahams profiles Bob Propst, inventor of the office cubicle. A great example of a neat idea morphing into its opposite.

So, in 1964, Herman Miller's Action Office system was born. It started with a huge open area, sectioned off to give workers completely enclosed spaces if needed, or semi-enclosed spaces for a more social kind of privacy. Offices were arranged in such a way that workers would be likely to have plenty of contact with each other and with management.

...

Propst's forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system's huge potential for savings and tax breaks ... "Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places."

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:32:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Betting on the big questions of physics

British bookmaker Ladbrokes is now accepting wagers on the future of physics. They've opened a book on:

* Understanding the origin of cosmic rays by 2010 (4/1 odds)
* The ATLAS experiment at CERN finding the Higgs Boson by 2010 (6/1 odds)
* The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) detecting gravitational waves by 2010 (10/1 odds)
* Building a fusion power station by 2010 (100/1 odds)

Anyone can place bets on these breakthroughs during the next two weeks. Apparently, New Scientist magazine is also involved in the gamble, dedicating ten pages to it in the print edition.

“I’d be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs at 6-1,” says Brian Foster who heads the particle physics group at the University of Oxford in the UK. “I’ve been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers’ money on us finding it, so I’d better put my money where my mouth is.”

Link to New Scientist article. Link to Ladbrokes.

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:28:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Un Blagueur

My wife and I are now living in Paris for a few months. To help us learn French, we subscribed to French Word-A-Day. Today's word was tres drole.

une blague (blag) noun, feminine
1. a joke; a practical joke, a trick
2. a tall story
3. a blunder, a silly mistake
4. a tobacco pouch

Also:
blaguer (verb) = to joke
un blagueur / une blagueuse
1. (adj) ironical, teasing (look)
2. (noun, m/f) = a joker

And I know that the pronunciation isn't the same, but it's still funny. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:11:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dress code at the mall

The conservatown that spawned me--Cincinnati, Ohio--now boasts a mall with a dress code. Rent-a-cops at Cincinnati Mills mall hand out yellow code of conduct slips to those violating behavior and, amazingly, clothing policies. For example, Miami University sophomore Donnie Jefferson was "cited" two different times for sporting a sideways baseball cap. On another occasion, he says, a group of his friends who were wearing white t-shirts and jeans were escorted out. Hmmm... I wonder if it's because Donnie and his pals happen to black. No, it couldn't possibly be that. Not a chance.

"We have to be consistent across the board with the cap issue... There are, unfortunately in these days and times, groups that would mistake that as a different message and we don't want that," Jim Childress, Cincinnati Mills general manager, told WCPO. "In our business a customer is a customer. There is no distinction among age, religion, ethnic background."

I'd love to send a middle-aged white guy in there rocking a sideways Reds cap and see how he's treated. Link (Thanks, C-Lo, my Censornati homeboy!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:50:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ebooks doing well sans DRM

CNet reports that ebook sales topped 3 million last year, and that publishers are slowly coming around to rejecting DRM. The best part is that famous writers like JK Rowling are rejecting ebooks, a courtesy that leaves the field open for struggling midlist writers (ahem).

Bad experiences with heavy-handed DRM have soured many potential customers on e-books, said Mike Violano, vice president and general manager of eReader, which equips its titles with a security key based on the credit card number used to purchase it. The approach give wide latitude to the original buyer while effectively thwarting illegal copying, he said.

"There are far too many standards and ways of doing things now, and that's a source of frustration for customers," Violano said. "If they have a bad e-book experience the first time, where they have trouble reading something they've paid for, it's hard to get them back."

Analyst Bedford said nervous publishers have emphasized security over opening new markets.

"There's no good DRM, period," she said. "Publishers all want heavy-duty DRM, but the problem is that anything you do gets in the way of buying and using e-books. My bias is to use a lot of psychological DRM. You put a price on it; you have statements...making it very clear you can use this as you would a print book, and you rely on the fact that by and large, most people aren't out to break the law."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:22:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Funny-sarcastic stick-figure online RPG

Kingdom of Loathing is a wildly sarcastic, web-based videogame that uses stick-figure artwork to very good effect. It's in free open beta right now, and I found myself snarfing my morning beverage on more than one occasion in the course of a few minutes' play (the Booze Giant! The Meatloaf Helmet! The Misspelled Cemetary!) Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:18:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Black Rock City countdown

Heard from three friends today who are each driving out to Burning Man within the next 24 hours. Two out of three will place key in ignition after midnight; likely way-jacked-up on Red Bull and 500bpm trance mp3s, or some equally potent cocktail for scaring away sleep on the six+ hour drive. One packs a sousaphone. Another, a stepson. The third, his weight in explosives -- enough firepower to earn him a Guantanamo one-way, were he to absentmindedly cram it in an airline carryon with a suspect sticker.

I won't be following them. Not for lack of wanting. Miss the mess, just can't this year. Another friend who wouldn't be caught dead in glitter or elwire asked for words of advice to give his kid sister, a first-timer. IANAHCB (I Am Not A Hardcore Burner), or particularly clever. All I could come up with was this.

Do not drink the chocolate-marijuana absinthe. Do drink water until your gag reflex is triggered, then drink some more. Keep your hands off the bike seats on which sans culotte hippypersons have planted their naked nalgas. At least once, hit the Pancake Playhouse camp for breakfast, and raise gooey fingers in the air ("when soft rock is heard, pancakes will be served.") Pack extra copies of your Burning Man Bingo card.

Don't try to see or do everything, or think you're going to be able to find specific friends at specific places at specific times -- doesn't work like that. Be cool. Be prepared. Avoid hurting yourself, or anyone else, or that wide, white, alkaline ocean of old dust. Enjoy.

The best lesson of this thing? Joy need not be deferred.

(Snapshot at left from a bunch I shot last year: Link. There are better photos shot by other people here: Link. Previous BoingBoing post -- Book / This is Burning Man: Link. Thanks for the Burning Man Bingo reminder, kowgurl!)

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

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Aussie politician's incestuous spam scam

BoingBoing reader Matt in Australia says:

Apparently our Australian PM - little Johnny Howard - has exploited a loophole in recently introduced anit-spam legislation which exempts charities and - wait for it - political organisations. So he's spamming the hell out of voters in his electorate with party propaganda. And it seems he's somehow managed to tie email addresses to first names, resulting in *personalised* spam and some pretty ticked off voters. It get's better - he's paying his son's company to do the mailing! (SMH is behind a subscription wall as of last week but bugmenot will sort you out - I had a running argument with a philosophy colleague about registration requirements on my blog last week here)

Link to news story.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:13:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mach 3 Turbo vibrating shaver disappoints

My buddy Carlo Longino tried the battery-powered Mach 3 Turbo razor. He says it's not worth the $15. Too bad, I was going to buy one.

I switched to this from the Mach 3 Turbo, and frankly, I can't tell any difference between the shave I get with the two. Certainly not enough to justify the difference in price. I guess I've got loyalty to Gillette since they sent me a free Sensor razor on my 18th birthday or something (that ploy worked, eh?) and I've generally been pretty happy with their products and the results. But their constant need to find some reason to jack up the already-high prices of their razors is starting to wear thin.rally been pretty happy with their products and the results. But their constant need to find some reason to jack up the already-high prices of their razors is starting to wear thin.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:37:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The art of Ray Caeser

I love it when an artist jumps to a new level. It looks like Ray Caeser has done just that. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:33:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of self-Googling zen

WTF is this? Shouldn't I be getting royalties? Or at least, like, foot massages from these bare-chested, Flash-animated hunkazoids? I am sooo calling my bare-chested, Fabio lookalike attorneys right now. Link to www.xeni.jp

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:18:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Backbiter

BoingBoing reader Stefan says, "A German man who lost his jawbone to cancer enjoys a brautwurst sandwhich after receiving a replacement... grown from his own cells on an artificial scaffolding implanted in the muscles of his back." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:17:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Computer Hooligans" stage SFX psyops protest in Russia

BoingBoing reader Steve Portigal says, "Protesters in Georgia (formerly of the Soviet Union, not Hot'Lanta) are staging a demonstration outside the Russian embassy using loud music (of course) and a laser show projector that is putting slogans and images of explosions on the windows of the embassy." Link to BBC News story.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:16:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A day in the blog of an erotic photographer. And, China Nympho Cream.

Nerve.com recently launched "The Daily Siege" -- a blog-oid daily feature from fashion and erotic shooter Clayton James Cubitt, aka Siege, who's been the subject of numerous BoingBoing posts in the past. Some of the UI and access decisions the Nerve.com guys made, I'm not nuts about. But the content here -- both the images and the first-person narrative -- includes some real gems. For instance, this stream-of-consciousness post in which Siege explains how he went through a series of editing decisions that took a shot from its original raw state to an edited, reimagined, and dramatically richer state for publication. Very few personal blogs dig inside the creative process of working artists with this level of intimacy. Cool stuff. As Siege says here, it's like math class -- where you show your "dirty work" to your classmates, and share all of the details, both flattering and otherwise. Right, and then, well, there's the "China Nympho Cream" post. Quick snapshots (1, 2, 3) of an erotic-enhancement ointment of dubious origin, tucked inside ultra-bizarro packaging. Link to Siege's blog. Temporary access for this paid-subscription-required site is username: cheapass, password: cheapass. (NSFW)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:39:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paper pixelart Transformers

Paperformers are print-and-cut-and-fold pixelart paper Transformers that turn into actual, transforming pixelart robots! Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:54:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marvelous molecular model kits

Howard Lovy's NanoBot points us to a site selling plastic model nanotube kits. They sell other fun molecular model kits too, including cocaine, caffeine, THC, and, of course, lysergic acid diethylamide.

"LSD is a strong hallucinogen. A rough form, ergotamine, which can occur in stored rye grain, is believed to have been the cause of the odd behaviour which triggered the Salam witch trials. This model of LSD can be used in conjuction with molecular model kits of other street drugs as part of drug awareness programs."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:51:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In-theater protests of MPAA "anti-pirate" ad campaign: Just Say Arrrrrrrr!

Following up on yesterday's BoingBoing posts (one, two) about opposition to the MPAA's ridicule-inspiring "respectcopyrights.org" ad campaign, we have an update from blogger provocateur Defamer -- in-theater civil disobedience!

Yesterday's "call to arms" to resist the MPAA's cloying "Respect Copyrights" PSAs is off to a great start. In fact, some readers took the protest to the next, completely awesome level, leaving us somewhat ashamed that we didn't think this up in the first place. Pirate taunts! [One reader says:]

"So we took the 'put an end to piracy' portion of the Manny Perry ad and ran with it..... Imagine twenty coeds and their gentlemen friends standing in their seats hurling archaic curses and 'ARRRRRRRR's at the screen for the duration of the clip. Surprisingly, we drew chuckles, not Diet Cokes to the head, from our fellow patrons. Viva La Resistance!"

Link to Defamer's update.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:13:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: MP3 blogs

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I explore the odd universe of MP3 blogs with with host Noah Adams. On these personal websites, music lovers trade and comment on rare finds, mashups, and unusual twists on familiar favorites -- and recently, major record labels have been taking notice in an unexpected way. During the radio segment, we'll play a few funky tracks scraped from the blogs, should be fun. Link to online archive for today's NPR "Day to Day" segment on MP3 blogs.
(Thanks to BoingBoing reader Skye Ashebrook for pointing me to tons of great, lesser-known MP3 blogs, and to Jason Schultz of the EFF who provided astute tech law insight for this story.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:57:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Induce Act Draws Support, Venom

In today's Wired News, a story I filed on the state of the Induce Act, with comment from a number of groups opposed to its passage.

Until recently, much of the discussion among tech enthusiasts about a controversial anti-piracy bill known as the Induce Act has focused on the proposed law's improbability. Put forth by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the bill has been ridiculed by techies as so poorly written that it could unintentionally ban an infinite range of everyday tools -- iPods, DVD burners, even paper and pencil.

But since its introduction, nine co-sponsors have signed on, both Democrats and Republicans. And significantly, that list of co-sponsors includes two of Congress' most influential members: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota).

Also known as the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560), the bill would punish tech companies and consumer electronics makers who develop tools that could "induce" or encourage users to make unauthorized copies of copyright material such as music, movies or software. With the present congressional session due to end in October, time for debate is running out. The coming two weeks may be the last chance for both proponents and opponents of the bill to make their voices heard.

Link to Wired News story.

Update: Opposition to the Induce Act is coming from many points along the political spectrum, from left to right. Heritage Foundation senior writer Andrew Grossman says with tongue planted in cheek: "You might be interested to know that '...even the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation has concerns.' (...) We have no position on the bill itself, of course, but we do think it's bad policy." Here's their study and statement regarding P2P, filesharing, and the Induce Act. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:15:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DoJ raid on file-sharers

A Washington Post article covering yesterday's DoJ raids on fileswappers:

Federal agents yesterday took their first steps to go after individuals who illegally trade copyrighted music and videos over the Internet, seizing computers, software and related equipment at five homes around the country. After a months-long sting operation, FBI agents raided residences in Texas, Wisconsin and New York where people were suspected of operating "hubs" of file-sharers that were part of a system called the Underground Network. About 7,000 users connected to the network via file-sharing software known as Direct Connect, according to law enforcement officials. (...) No arrests were made yesterday, and no charges have been filed. But the raids for the first time throw the weight of the Justice Department behind what has been an intense campaign by the music, movie and software industries to curb online file-sharing that millions of computer users around the world use every day.

Link (Thanks, Thomas)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:45:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Kerry on Daily Show

Waxy has posted a Quicktime of the entire John Kerry interview on the Daily Show (Kerry proposes to hold the inauguration on the Daily Show!). 9MB Quicktime Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:25:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Insane plan to let military to vote using insecure email

An anonymous reader sez,

The Secretary of State announced a program in conjunction with the Department of Defense whereby Missouri military voters will be sending in their absentee ballots via email.

Increasing voter turnout is always a good idea, but this is a dangerous way to go about it. E-mail is not secure. E-mail is not reliably from the person named on the "from" line. E-mail is subject to all kinds of tampering. Every week we learn about new ways to hack into computers, and spammers know all sorts of tricks for forging e-mail headers. A common Internet worm trick is to send emails from hacked computers, or to pretend to send emails from other computers.

An e-voting system like this is an invitation for fraud, and sure to be a point of contention when the votes are counted. With this election so close and Missouri one of the major swing states, Missouri is setting itself up to be this election's Florida: the laughing stock of the nation.

If you remember, the SERVE Internet voting project was suspended because of security issues.

Someone snuck this one through. I am involved with two different groups of security experts who are dealing with voting machine and e-voting issues, and no one heard about this. There have been no public hearings on the issue. There has been no public selection process of vendors. There are no security or reliability constraints on the vendor. We don't even know who the vendor is!

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space toilet turns waste to water

Purdue University researchers are designing a system to recover water from human waste. Funded by NASA, the aim of the project is to devise a way astronauts on a Mars mission to produce their own water. The prototype bioreactor is based on certain plants that thrive when fed sewage collected in a $49,000 toilet.

"We shovel the processed waste onto the plants, almost like a mini-marsh," he said. "Then we use the plants to filter water out. We'll recover the water in the atmosphere above the plant by running it through a 'cold finger,' much like pipes sweating in restrooms. Using something cold condenses the water so that it can be captured."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:54:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

George Lakoff on how to argue with conservatives

Last year, BB pal Bonnie Powell conducted a staggering interview with cognitive linguist and cultural commentator George Lakoff about why the Democrats need a lesson in language. In these days just before the Republican National Convention, Bonnie sat down again with Lakoff to discuss his forthcoming book, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, and why it's important to think before you speak:

You've said that progressives should never use the phrase "war on terror" — why?
There are two reasons for that. Let's start with "terror." Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the "terrorist." The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The "war on terror" is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:29:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schwarzenegger's "CA Garage Sale" on eBay

The state of California is holding a yard sale to sell off surplus junk -- office equipment, computers, cars, espresso machines, gadgets, and weird crap accumulated over time. The selloff was proposed by governator Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 2,700-page California Performance Review he ordered. Some items will sell at public auctions (i.e., in meatspace), but others will sell on eBay (online). It's my understanding that this is a list of all the CA state surplus items currently for sale on eBay: Link.

If so, there's no shortage of wacky stuff for sale. Among my favorite items: Two Tanita Pocket/Mini Digital Scales, 1479 & 1479V: "they would be great scales for measuring precious stones and metals or for laboratory use." (precious rocks like, oh, crack cocaine?) And, 75+ Money Clips, Lots of Logos & 1 Diamond.: "there is even one money clip that has a real Diamond mounted in it."

There's also no shortage of irony in the "seller feedback" section -- among the entries, what may be some of the sweetest praise ever heaped on California's action-hero-cum-Republican-spokesmodel:

# Very Professional !!!!!! Packed with OVERKILL !!
# GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD SELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLER
# Bogus deal will never buy from them again very ticked off.
# Great Leatherman tools!! Will keep all the men in the family HAPPY!! THANKS!!
# Thanks for the Great deal. Good luck on your new Job.
# THEY'RE ROUND AND SMELL GOOD! I AM BIDDING ON MORE! GO TO SACRAMENTO WAREHOUSE!!!

Link to SF Chronicle story. Link to State of CA surplus property program website, where you'll find this PDF doc with details on the "Garage Sale." Link to current eBay auctions of californiagold2000. (Thanks, John)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:57:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Cory's DRM talk in German

Sven Flesch has translated my DRM talk into German! 143k PDF Link (Thanks, Sven!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-RNC messages on rooftops near LGA

New Yorkers who live on the flight-approach to Laguardia are covering their roofs with anti-Bush messages in protest of the Republican National Convention in NYC, so that RNC delegates get a cold welcome to the city.

Bright blue tarps, painted with glaring yellow letters, are going up on dozens of rooftops in Brooklyn, under the flight paths into busy New York airports. Thousands of delegates and convention guests peering down at the city might see messages like "No more years" and "Re-defeat Bush."

"We just hope that they'll look down and ask themselves, 'Why, why do they feel so strongly? Why is it that New York feels this way?'" said Genevieve Christy, who has painted more than 80 banners since thinking of the idea a few weeks ago.

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:58:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Killer audio file of killer lawyers talking Grokster

Ernie Miller sez, "I've started a new audio show on IT Conversations, where I'll be discussing issues of law and technology with many of the leaders in the field. You can stream the audio or download it either directly or via RSS enclosures in MP3 or AAC format. My first show is on the Grokster decision and features a panel including Fred von Lohmann, who argued the case, Denise Howell and C.E. Petit, two attorneys in IP law practice, and law professor Tim Wu of the Univ. of Virginia." 12.4 MB MP3 Link (Thanks, Ernie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC staging unannounced flashmob operas

Flashmobs meet opera meet public transit: the BBC is staging unannounced flashmob operas at train stations.

[T]he BBC has announced that next month it will surprise commuters by staging an opera at an unnamed London rail station, without any warning.

The 65-strong orchestra and three opera singers will swoop in unannounced, with selected members of the public joining in as a chorus after being contacted at the last minute by mobile phone text message.

Link (Thanks, Pat!)

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

Best digital camera introduces zooming 3MP model

Casio's Exilim cameras are the best digital cameras I've ever used, period. Great form-factor, great size, great -- fantastic -- UI, and great-looking piccies. Now Casio has announced a new whisker-thin credit-card-sized three megapixel Exilim with an optical zoom built in. I'm using the non-zooming 3MP and I've nearly beaten it to death (the Exilim is the first camera I've used that's small enough for me to carry 24/7): now I know what my next camera will be. Link (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:50:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to keep logs without endangering user privacy

There's a temptation, when you run an online service, to keep your logs forever. Storing text is cheap and easy, so why not? Well, if you're storing the personally identifying info of your users, you risk compromising their privacy in the event of a hack-attack, a lawsuit, or a PATRIOT-style sleazeball no-due-process investigation. EFF has produced a white paper with many recommendations for online service providers who want to log enough data to troubleshoot tech problems, but not so much that you risk your users' privacy.

As an intermediary, the Online Service Provider finds itself in a position to collect and store detailed information about its users and their online activities that may be of great interest to third parties. The USA PATRIOT Act also provides the government with expanded powers to request this information. As a result, OSP owners must deal with requests from law enforcement and lawyers to hand over private user information and logs. Yet, compliance with these demands takes away from an OSP's goal of providing users with reliable, secure network services. In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users’ privacy and civil liberties.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Superhighspeed broadband wet dreams

Drool. Swedish high-speed broadband provider Bredbandsbolaget sells 100-megabit-per-second service for 595 Swedish crowns ($79.49) a month in areas where the state of wiring infrastructure permits. Over 1,500 households have already signed up. In the US, $79 might buy you, say, a 3.0 Mbps DSL connection. Higher-speed forms of connectivity are available in many parts of the US, but that's a common speed-per-buck equation. And it compared to Sweden, it blows.

For Rainer Kinnunen, life has been a bit of a blur since he signed up for a superhigh-speed Internet service three years ago. The 31-year-old Swedish student's computer has supplanted the television as the most vital link between his home and the outside world. He watches television shows and movies, makes phone calls, surfs the Web and plays multiplayer shoot-'em-up games through his high-speed connection -- often doing one or more activities at once.

His 10-megabit-per-second service from telecommunications company Bredbandsbolaget is up to 20 times faster than conventional cable modems, enabling a user to download a two-hour movie in a matter of minutes rather than hours. For Kinnunen, the result has been a lifestyle change that, though not revolutionary, is certainly noticeable. "If my child wants a movie, I can download it instantly," he said. "And I haven't been to the neighborhood music store in years."

Since going superhigh-speed, Kinnunen has set up two computer servers in his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Eskilstuna. One supplies his digital photos to friends and family. On the other, he duels it out for hours a day with other players of the "Half-Life: Day of Defeat" online war game. And he has enough bandwidth and server space left over to broadcast his DVDs from his apartment to his friends' computers in case they want to watch along from across town.

Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:13:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Olympic gadget lust

Snapshots of all of the different sorts of crazy cool digital SLR gear used by photographers during one event at the Athens Olympics. Link (Thanks, Rob Galbraith)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:39:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Parody of MPAA "Click but you can't hide" poster

(Update here). Following up on a previous post about the MPAA's "Respect Copyright" campaign, cheeky monkey Trevor Haldenby points us to his parody of the MPAA's campaign poster (Link to PDF original).

Link to parody poster, cropped and thumbnailed at left (220K jpeg). Mirror 1, Mirror 2.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:32:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MPAA's latest in-theater "respect copyright" spots inspire ridicule

(Update here). Defamer says:

Recently, we were respecting the entertainment industry's copyrights in a $14 Cinerama Dome seat when Hollywood stunt coordinator Manny Perry began his impassioned plea for us to further respect copyrights by visiting the MPAA's scary website after leaving the theater. A chorus of groans rose up from the audience as the dreaded words faded into view: "Manny Perry Makes Movies." We don't personally blame Manny Perry for his misguided participation in the MPAA propaganda, as we assume that Jack Valenti was holding his wife hostage at gunpoint while threatening to feed his infant daughter to a poorly-bred pit bull in Manny Perry's ranch-style home in Chatsworth, but that doesn't mean that others are so understanding. Here's a representative sample of our readers' frustration...

Link to complete Defamer post, and a subsequent update about Manny Parry, the star of one spot. Link to Low Culture's post on the "incredibly annoying respectcopyrights.org ads that run before the trailers at movies lately." Link to the MPAA's respectcopyrights.org, which boasts what may be the ass-suckiest, most uberbloated Flash interface on the entire intarweb. The campaign's happy happy joy joy slogan? "YOU CAN CLICK -- BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE." Link to poster bearing said slogan (PDF). Link to IMDB entry for Manny Perry, arguably the most copyright-respectingest man in Hollywood. Astute BoingBoing readers will note that the very first line of this IMDB listing reads "Trivia: Appeared in a commercial to battle the internet movie pirates." Aye, with his bare hands he did, matey! Arrrrrrrrrr!!!

Links to *.mov video files of the latest trailer: low, med, high.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:56:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tricks used by different kinds of workers

Fascinating article that lists a bunch of tricks used in different types of work.

Piano Salesman: If you see a potential customer eyeing a piano, estimate their age and calculate what year it was when they were 18 years old. Play a big hit from that year on the piano they’re looking at. With a lot of preparation and a little luck, you might play the exact song they were listening to when they lost their virginity, got married, or drove their first car. The emotional resonance will overcome sales resistance and even open their wallets to a more expensive piano.

Nurse: Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find them out is to pick up their hand, hold it above their face, and let go. If they smack themselves, they’re most likely unconscious; if not, they’re faking.

Link (Via Gadgetopia)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:26:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pictoplasma conference on character design

Kevin Slavin emailed me about a "Pictoplasma, an archive of nearly six thousands of character designs, "including those very much like the neo-kaiju work (most of them are included in pictoplasma)." Kevin says, "the guy who runs it is the closest thing we have to a character-design scholar. He's also hosting a conference on this very subject, in Berlin, next month. Gary Baseman will be presenting there, for example, but the amazing part is the less famous people doing amazing work." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:38:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Porn Law Draws Adult Sites' Ire

In today's Wired News, a story I filed about a new Department of Justice proposal to require more stringent record-keeping of pornstar identities. The move is drawing fire from adult webmasters. If enacted, they say the new regs may make it tough for adult sites to stay in business.

"The internet is an international entity. This could be yet another incentive for websites to set up business elsewhere," said [business partner of veteran erotic photographer Suse Randall] Humphry Knipe. "This isn't a big deal for Hustler or Playboy, but what about some guy who operates a website out of his basement? Will he have to let agents into his home?"

Another requirement raising the ire of porn webmasters is a clause requiring that a statement regarding the location of the custodian of records be published in a typeface at least as large as that in which performers, producers, directors or company owners are displayed.

"If 'Playboy' is printed in 180 point type on a magazine cover, the 2257 disclosure would also have to be displayed in 180 point type," says DeWitt. "If you keep names in smaller size type, the law says it can't be smaller than 11 point type -- how does that work on websites or videotape, where font size is measured differently?"

"I could make a good case for the idea that these regulations are designed to harass people in the adult industry. We already have tough anti-child-porn laws," says DeWitt. "I see no good reason for many of these conditions, other than imposing an unnecessary harassment for people in a business which is a stated enemy of the Bush administration."

Link to Wired News story "Porn Law Draws Adult Sites' Ire".

A BoingBoing extra: First Amendment attorney and AVN columnist Clyde DeWitt, who I interviewed for this story, submitted an extensive set of opposing comments to the DoJ yesterday. You can read them here Link (PDF, 37 pages, 216K)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:34:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New art-toy line by STRANGEco: Neo Kaiju Project

Scott sez: "STRANGEco of San Francisco has taken the art-as-toy revolution one step further with The Neo Kaiju Project. These new mini figures feature original designs by Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Seonna Hong, Kathy Staico-Schorr and Todd Schorr. Each artist has created two original figures each; one an homage to classic Japanese monsters (kaiju), the other a figure of their own original design." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:56:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bad moods boost memory

A new scientific study shows that people who are in good moods tend to have unreliable memories. According to the press release, researchers at the University of New South Wales "put different subjects in a positive (happy) or negative (sad) mood state." (Creepy!) After the subjects experienced "eyewitness events" such as a staged purse-robbery, their recall was rated. The individuals in negative moods provided more accurate accounts of what happened.

""The finding makes sense in evolutionary terms," says Professor (Josephn) Forgas. "Animals that are wary of their environment are more likely to perceive threats to their survival."

In another experiment, subjects were asked to write an argument supporting a specific proposition. Apparently, grumpy individuals expressed better critical thinking and communication skills. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:42:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space House for Earth

The European Space Agency is designing a terrestrial house based on technology like ultra-light carbon fiber-reinforced plastic developed for space-based structures.

"The (house) design that engineers and designers came up with is a sphere-like structure - one of the most stable self-sustained shapes. As it stands on legs it is isolated from any movements underneath it as it basically glides on top of the Earth. In its current design the SpaceHouse can withstand vibrations from earthquakes of up to 7 on the Richter scale, wind speeds of up to 220 km/h and up to 3 metres of flooding – specifications that came out of discussions with the insurance industry for a typical European location. The house is designed to be autonomous. It uses energy-efficient solar power as well as advanced systems for recycling and cleaning water. Another idea, now on the drawing board, is to include a system to remove pathogenic particles in the sub-micron range from the air."

The bummer is that you'll need to make quite a move if you want to live in SpaceHouse. The model home will likely be occupied by German scientists at the Neumayer Antarctic Research Station. In the meantime, maybe the Taschens might consider selling their ultra-spacey Chemosphere house in Los Angeles. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:01:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This Land is Your Land is actually in the public domain

JibJab's hilarious election-year parody of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" has been spared from death-by-litigation thanks to the efforts of my cow-orkers at EFF and the Internet's outraged musicologists. It turns out that Woody Guthrie's initial publication of This Land is eleven years earlier than previously thought, which means that the copyright renewal filed by Ludlow, the carpetbaggers who bought his estate's publishing rights, was eleven years too late.

That's right: as my cow-orker Fred "Total Grokster Victory" von Lohmann notes, "So Guthrie's original joins the Star-Spangled Banner, Amazing Grace, and Beethoven's Symphonies in the public domain. Come to think of it, now that 'This Land is Your Land' is in the public domain, can we make it our national anthem? That would be the most fitting ending of all."

The most delicious aspect of this is that Ludlow could have gone on treating Guthrie's song as a copyrighted work, collecting licensing fees from anyone who was not making a fair use of the song -- say, someone making a [puke] car commercial -- had they not decided to pull a Lord Vader on JibJab, the poor, abused parodists. Reminds me of when Sony sued an Aussie dictionary for defining "walkman" as a generic personal stereo, which resulted in the court finding that the dictionary was correct, Sony was wrong, and walkman is generic. If they'd just kept their lawyers in their pants, they'd still be sitting pretty. Link (Thanks, Donna and Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online toilet paper holder treasure hunt

Why I love BoingBoing readers: Youssef writes --

I conducted a quick (3 hour) safari on the internet looking for odd and quirky toilet paper roll holders. The results are summarised in this blog entry. Really weird what you find sometimes... I'll do toilet brushes next!

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:36:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Craig of Craigslist interview

Wired Magazine ran an interview this month with Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and an all-round mensch:

Google's touchy-feely corporate mantra is "Don't be evil." What's yours?
Give people a break.

A break from what?
A break from how difficult our lives are. It's like, if you're walking out of your apartment building and somebody is coming the other way with an armful of groceries, you hold the door. It feels good - it's the neighborly thing to do. And our species survives by cooperating.

What poses the major threat to that survival?
Kleptocrats and sociopathic organizations that have the almighty dollar as their only goal.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:42:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gamespace protestors disappeared by Star Wars Galaxies cops

After a bug allowed some players to coin counterfeit currency in Star Wars Galaxies, which they spread around through gifts and tips, the SWG management responded by banning everyone with fake money -- including players who had received such in good faith. The banned players' friends gathered in protest and were told to leave or face server-shutdown. The protestors stood their ground and found themselves randomly teleported across gamespace -- and one player kept a running account going of the official response:

This is Allehe reporting live from a staged protest outside Theed Starport. Just a few moments ago protesting cartoons went suddenly missing -- warped outside our great galaxy. Where have they landed? This we do not know. What we do know is people are angry...and showing their support in banning CREDIT Dupers...also known as cheaters. It appears the Great SOE GODS are favoring the cheaters over the fair and honest gameplayers. I will remain here until there is no news...

This is Allehe
Reporting live from Theed Spaceport, Naboo, Intrepid.

Back to you Dan.

Link, Star Wars Galaxies management response, Penny Arcade editorial cartoon (via Lawmeme), (Thanks, Allen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:39:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

80s Gamer flashback: Billy Mitchell and Mr. Awesome.

Following up on this earlier post, BoingBoing reader Richard says,

"Please, the focus of your post on 80's era video game heroes should have been Billy Mitchell. In addition to being the goofiest of all the LIFE magazine participants, Billy still organizes video game contests, runs the primary video game record site and is apparently in a heated (and ongoing) fued about who holds the all-time record on Missile Command.

The man who claims to hold the record? Roy Shildt -- aka, "Mr. Awesome." This website is all about the dispute. Check out the circa-80's picture of Steven Spielberg kicking it in front of a Missile Command machine about 1/3 of the way down as well as the pics of Billy getting some video game award from a group of fawning Japanese people. If you want more on Mr. Awesome, here's the webpage where he sells his book on how to meet ladies. I only WISH I were kidding.

Link to previous BoingBoing post on leet arcade gamers from the '80s.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:04:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bjork hearts filesharing

Bjork shares her unorthodox views on filesharing in an interview teeing up her next release, Medulla, slated for formal worldwide launch in a week:

Q: So Bjork is not superstitious then?
A: "You know, its ironic that just at the point the lawyers and the businessmen had calculated how to control music, the internet comes along and fucks everything up." Bjork gives the finger again, this time waving it into the air. "God bless the internet," she adds.
Q: And what about you, then?
A: "I'll still be there, waving a pirate flag."

Link (Thanks, Dav)

Update: BoingBoing reader Josiah says, "The new album is on sale now at One Little Indian (two weeks before the official release). There was a 'secret' (but public) link sent out to members of her email list. The CD comes from the UK so it equates to between $24 - $30 per CD with shipping to the US, but for people in the UK it's regular price. Link."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:34:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Book: "This is Burning Man"

With less than two weeks to go before the annual beglittered bacchanalia in Black Rock City begins, BoingBoing buddy Scott Beale says:

This is Burning Man is a new book about Burning Man written by our good friend Brian Doherty, who is based out of Los Angeles and is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

This is by far the most extensive historical account of Burning Man in print, as well the first book distributed through a major publisher (Little, Brown and Company). If you are on your way out to Black Rock City this year or even if you no longer attend, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the origins of Burning Man, the people involved and how the event is organized, operates, survives and grows.

Link to This is Burning Man website, which includes Brian's ongoing book-blog. I've received a review copy, and thoroughly enjoyed it from cover to cover. Required reading for any BoingBoing readers heading to the playa -- or wishing they were, or wondering what the hell all the fuss is about.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:41:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY hamster-powered Night Light

What the title says, folks:

"'Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on it's wheel?' That was enough inspiration for us to start the project, and we soon added Skippy the Hamster to the Otherpower.com payroll. He's a Syrian Hamster, and we chose that breed since they are nocturnal and like to run on the exercise wheel.

Link (via MeFi)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:37:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Irate tree-owner burns voracious caterpillars

Photographic evidence of tree-denuding caterpillars and their painful death by fire. Link (Thanks, smllpx!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:53:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reason magazine on John Gilmore vs Ashcroft

Sun Microsystems millionaire John Gilmore is suing the Justice Department because it has secret laws requiring people to show ID when flying on a commercial domestic plane. Here's a good Reason article about it.

But as Gilmore has argued, real security doesn't often have a great deal to do with knowing who someone is, or who a card says he or she is. (Even the most biometrically sophisticated of modern ID documents will be potentially forgeable for those with a strong incentive to do so.) Real security has much more to do, in Gilmore's airline context, with making sure people, whatever their card says, don't bring weapons or bombs on planes—or making sure that trustworthy people on planes, whether pilots or air marshals, are empowered to resist miscreants. (After 9/11, normal citizens have almost certainly gotten the message to resist at all costs.) The government still doesn't want to allow the good guys to defend themselves on planes effectively, and thus are all the more insistent on the security theater of showing an ID card.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:11:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Planet of the Apes as a Twilight Zone episode

Gerry sez: "While searching for something entirely unrelated, I came across this: the original Planet of the Apes movie, reedited and reimagined as a thirty-minute episode of the original Twilight Zone. Black and white, commercial breaks, Rod Serling narration and everything.

"*Extremely* well done. I'm pretty floored. It really is a perfect fit." Link

UPDATE Cliph sez: "That fan re-edit of Planet of the Apes is excellent. The site was a bit slow to serve the file when I tried so I've made a torrent. "

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:04:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to make 3D photos with an ordinary camera

On Engadget, Phillip Torrone provides step-by-step instructions for creating 3D photos (the kind that can be viewed with red and blue glasses) using an ordinary camera and photoshop. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:20:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Motherlode of century-old postcards

Huge online collection of old postcards from the late 19th century and early 20th century. I spent hours last night noodling through the ones from Guatemala, Nigeria, Hawaii, and Tahiti -- but the gallery includes many more countries. Looks like they're for sale, too. In the "Guatemala" batch, I found three Mayan girls from the early 1900s; I love this postcard of two Mayan men from Solola, from the same period. Then, there's "Visiting a Vietnamese Penal Colony, Wish You Were Here!" How cool is it that the site allows you to search by topical themes like dromedaries, chiromancy, and prostitution? In the latter, I found this totally bizarre image of a sex worker's flea-bitten thighs, and the haunting postcard portrait of an anonymous Algerian prostitute, shown at left.
Link (Thanks, Carl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:57:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Silberman's "The War Room" in WIRED

WIRED contributing editor Steve Silberman says his new story, "The War Room," is a first look inside "a new Pentagon-sponsored training program for soldiers headed to Iraq and elsewhere that immerses them in highly realistic virtual environments designed by Hollywood special effects artists.... Interesting, troubling."

This is the new way soldiers will train for battle. In September, a select group of Army infantrymen, Marine corpsmen, Navy sailors, and Air Force pilots at Fort Sill will become the first military personnel to learn the art of combat and the rules of engagement from surround sound action movies starring themselves. The installation is the brainchild of the Institute for Creative Technologies, an Army-funded R&D group at the University of Southern California. ICT brings together videogame developers, f/x artists, research scientists, and Pentagon experts to create faster, cheaper, and more effective ways of preparing recruits for their jobs on the front lines. If all goes well, similar facilities will go up at bases from Fort Bliss to Fallujah.

The military has been using flight and tank simulators for decades ("War Is Virtual Hell," Wired 1.01), but the installation at Fort Sill is the first attempt to duplicate battle conditions for troops by combining wartime science and theme-park showmanship. The Joint Fires and Effects Trainer System, or JFETS, is the product of an unprecedented level of cooperation among the Pentagon, film and gaming companies, and Silicon Valley - a synergy that Stanford history professor Tim Lenoir calls the military-entertainment complex.

Virtual war will never fully replace the mainstays of boot camp life: live-fire exercises and ass-busting field training. But as weapons systems grow smarter, they become more expensive to deploy in real-world war games. Now that consumer gaming engines like Unreal are able to render cinematic-quality graphics in real time, even big-ticket munitions are trivial to simulate.

Link to Steve's article released earlier this month in WIRED.
Also of note: a story on the Institute for Creative Technologies from this Sunday's New York Times: Registration-required Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:36:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gamer flashback: 1982 LIFE Magazine arcade contest photo spread

This LIFE Magazine spread -- "Video Game VIPs" -- celebrates leet arcade gamers at the height of their early '80s glory. Someone should do a "where are they now?" piece!

The group included Ned Troide, best known for having played DEFENDER for 62 1/2 consecutive hours on a single quarter. The games have their critics, of course. Physicians claim that maneuvering a joystick too many hours can lead to "video elbow" and "arcade arthritis." The mental side effects can be equally serious, according to U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. "There's nothing constructive in the games," says Koop. "Everything is kill, destroy, zap the enemy." Retorts TEMPEST virtuoso Leo Daniels, "I think Koop is a quack."

Link (Thanks, Macki!)

Update: BB reader Andy Thomas says, "I Googled Leo Daniels and this is what i found. Watch out, the lion really roars! God bless him."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:29:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iran web censorship update: admins detained

Persian blogger Hossein Derakshan says Iranian officials recently detained several staff and web technicians who worked on banned reformist websites, in order to gain control of the sites. They have now reportedly taken control of the servers, shut them down, and deleted all of their content. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:17:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Baltimore Book Thing charity needs warehouse space

The Book Thing is a Baltimore charity that gives away thousands and thousands of books. The basement they operate out of has been sold and they may lose their lease, and they need new space. Amy, a Book Thing volunteer, has blogged a request for help -- check it out and let her know if you've got a big empty space in Baltimore they can have.

But now we realize we have it pretty good, since it looks as if we may lose our space at any time. The building that has housed TBT for all this time has been sold to a new owner, and we haven't the foggiest idea whether or not he'll let us stay. If we can't find a new location, we'll have to close. It almost brings me to tears to think about it. We touch so many lives... our customers range from middle class parents bringing their children, to college students bringing themselves, hoping to save on textbooks, to schoolteachers from impoverished schools, to the curators of prison and homeless shelter libraries. Quite a number of our 'patrons' ship books to their homelands, the Philippines and South Africa (for example), because books are hard to come by there. And we are touched, as volunteers, because we get to do something good for the world—and it's an indescribable feeling that you can only get through exchanging your hard labor for others' happiness and well-being.

Help me find a new location, and save this dusty Baltimore jewel for everyone's sake!

We need, basically:

* 4,000 sq ft+
* heat
* ideally, a/c as well
* a bathroom
* handicap access
* free or very cheap

Link (Thanks, Amy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:31:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jar-topper counts coins and displays total

This $15 jar-topper senses and counts the coins you deposit into your coin-bank and displays the outcome on a little LCD. Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:19:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tell an AI where you've been for a month and it'll guess where you're going

Jefferson sez, "This paper won the Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI-04 (Amer. Assoc. for AI's National Conf.) in July. In a nutshell, they took the trace from a person carrying a GPS unit around with him for a month. With no hand labelling of the data, they were able to build a model of the person's travel behavior including frequent destinations (work, home, grocery friends homes), and modes of transportation (bus vs. walking). With new data, the model can predict, on-line, the traveler's most likely destination, and detect 'unknown activities' (e.g. strange behavior)." 144k PDF Link (Thanks, Jefferson!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:18:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-shirt with hidden sternum pockets

The BlackCoat Tee is a t-shirt with a zipper over the sternum that connects to hidden celphone/walkman/etc pouches. I'm a pocket-junkie: my device array makes it really tricky to get by with just jeans and a t-shirt -- I end up with the bulging-est pockets evar. Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:17:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harvey Comix's Seven Deadly Sins

Mike Sterling has chosen panels from old Harvey comix that illustrate the seven deadly sins -- Richie Rich was an obvious one for "Greed" but Wendy the Witch was a gutsy choice for "Lust." (Reminds me of the Seven Castaways as Deadly Sin Embodiments: Skipper=Wrath, Professor=Pride, Thurston=Greed, Ginger=Lust, Gilligan=Sloth, Maryann=Envy, Lovey=Gluttony?) Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:16:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Doom 3 teenagers freaking out

This is a video of two teenaged boys playing Doom 3 -- you can't see the game, just their reaction. As Joey notes, these kids are screaming like hyenas as the boo-scareys lurch out of the Doom 3 shadows and leap on their characters. One of the kids actually gnaws a pillow when it all gets to be too much for him. Pretty cool endorsement for a game, actually. 7.8MB WMV Link, Mirror Link (Thanks, Quentin!) (via AccordionGuy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:11:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Organizr: like iPhoto for your browser

Ludicorp has just shipped a Flash-based iPhoto replacement called Organizr, a front-end for its Flickr photo-sharing service. It lives in your browser and does for photo-organizing what gmail does for email: seamlessly merges your mail with your browser. But unlike gmail's closed interface, Flickr has a gloriously open API so that you can build your own apps on top of theirs. iPhoto has reached the meltdown point for me -- nearly 10,000 photos, and adding new ones and marking up my old ones takes so long I've actually gone and cooked dinner while waiting for the beach-ball to finish spinning -- and I'm seriously considering moving all my images to Flickr. Check out the movie. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Organizr). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:06:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

San Francisco's best-and-worst for cameras

Thomas Hawk, a dedicated amateur photographer who has been shooting around San Francisco, has found himself increasingly confronted with goons in shops and museums who tell him to put his camera away. He's written an essay with a hall-of-shame for San Francisco businesses that are cam-unfriendly, and a hall-of-fame for businesses that encourage picture-taking:

San Francisco Giants (SBC Park): The home of the San Francisco Giants has one of the most accommodating policies regarding camera usage around: "All cameras still and video are permitted into SBC Park for Giants games. Tripods are permitted, but may only be set up in areas where they do not obstruct walkways or other guests' view of the game action." According to Rick Mears, Vice President, Guest Services, "if there isn't a very good and demonstrable reason (guest safety, or for the greater good of all guests' ballpark experience) for having a restrictive policy on our guests we won't have the restrictive policy. We want our fans to feel like honored guests when they visit SBC Park because that is precisely what they are."

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:02:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Archive and analyse LiveJournal

ljArchive scrapes LiveJournals and builds searchable indexes, which it then analyses for things like psych profiles -- it also reads entries aloud, plots post frequencies and comments, and so forth. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:58:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ScienceMatters@Berkeley

Please check out my latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley. This month, read all about:

* The Tale of the Otter and Abalone--a story of counter-intuitive evolution

* Boundaries Unbounded--the mathematics of inkjet printing, MRI brain scans, and microchip manufacturing

* The Evolutionary Secret of Body Segmentation--the odd anatomy of arthropods

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:58:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Formaldehyde find

Someone on eBay is auctioning a fine-looking old collection of biology specimens in jars from Denoyer Geppert Science Company. "Purchased from a high school," the lot includes 48 pickled organisms of an unknown vintage. UPDATE: (fixed link) Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:34:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 23, 2004

Virtual cellular girlfriend

Hong Kong-based AI development company Artificial Life is launching a sort of persistent, quasi-reality game in which a virtual girlfriend appears as an animated figure on your phone display. Kind of like a tamagotchi with tits. There is a direct correlation between her level of romantic activity output and the amount of money you spend on her. Actually, my people have a word for this sort of creature: ho.

(BBC News story says:)
But there is a downside to the virtual girlfriend - she will require more flowers and gifts than many real women. Artificial Life is hoping to launch the new game later this year, on the latest 3-G mobile phones. All virtual girls will look the same - but each girl will behave differently - depending on how much money is spent on her. On top of a general subscription, men will be charged a fee to buy flowers and gifts for the virtual girlfriend. In return, she will introduce them to different aspects of her life, like letting them meet her female friends - also electronic images.

(Press release says:)
The behavior of the virtual characters is based on scientific principles and algorithms inspired by the computer related artificial life sciences and is using artificial intelligence technology to achieve human like behavior and responses.

The algorithm of bling, I suppose. Link to BBC News story on the Hong Kong mo-ho, and Link to press release. A Virtual Boyfriend version of the game is slated for release in February 2005; Fleshbot imagines he might be satiated instead with "unlimited supplies of beer, porn, and blowjobs." The company touts itself as a provider of "mobile solutions." This is a mobile solution to what problem? (Thanks, Pimp Daddy Lappin)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:28:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mosqueclock.com

Clocks in the image of mosques. They play Azan (the Islamic call to prayer) for an alarm. Link (via memepool, thanks Scott)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:08:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mineralarianism food movement

Atkins is for pussies. Raw Foodism, Zen Macrobiotics, Fruitarianism -- hell, Breathtarianism -- they've all got nothing on this most extreme of dietary philosophies. Adherents of Mineralarianism nosh on nothing but rocks. Snip from the manifesto:

We are scarcely less related to the wheat or the yeast in a loaf of bread than we are to our fellow animals. We can no longer hide behind the idea that these life forms are not our kin, nor can we rationalize our mistreatment of them by saying that plants, fungi, and microbes are incapable of suffering...

If we refuse to eat our relatives, what CAN we eat? Fortunately, the same sciences of chemistry and biology that reveal our kinship to all life have freed us at last from the need to kill. Although most people are suprised to hear it, it is possible to live and thrive on a diet consisting entirely of foods of mineral origin. This is because every one of the several dozen nutrients the human body requires - carbohydrate, amino acids, fats, vitamins, and of course minerals - can be synthesized or extracted from air, water, and rock without the involvement of any life form, aside from the chemists who perform these miraculous transformations. The Mineralarians are an international association of people, diverse in other respects, who share the common determination to subsist on foods of mineral origin, thereby sparing our fellow beings the victimization that has been their lot, at our hands for the last million years, and before that at the claws and jaws of previously dominant species.

Link to the Mineralarianism movement website. (Thanks, Rudy)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:39:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indian retro comics and ephemera

Straight outta Bombay, a cool collection of strange and unusual artifacts from Indian pop culture. Much of it from the '80s, and much of it far from the Bollywood mainstream. Strange comics, TV shows, bubblegum wrappers. Latest entry is a bunch of kids' ads from '80s comic books. Bonus round: IM transcripts of the site's creators posing as a 24-year-old Indian female cyberhottie among vast legions of horny web-men, to greatly humorous effect.
Link to www.vishalpatel.com.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:11:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update on pink meth story

Here's some feedback on my post about attempts to prevent meth makers from stealing fertilizer by staining it pink:

Anonymous BB reader sez: "I've got 10+ years clean & sober now, but I can tell you that crystal meth already comes in almost any color you can imagine. Most of it is the same pale yellow or translucent, but there used to be several "neon" colors that were quite the novelty.

"The part about hard to dry might be a deterrant, but the second part about wanting a clean looking drug? HAHAHAHAHA just like you said, it's not going to make one bit of difference. Have you seen tar heroin? That stuff is like pure thick gooey oil, who knows what they cut it with? and as far as the 1000's of varieties of meth, there are very very few speed freaks who can afford to care what the drug looks like. It's cut with all manner of nasty, dirty junk.

"If anything, the dealers will say it's stronger, cut back on the filler for a few weeks, and people will pay a premium for it. I'm not an expert or anything, never did make a drug, just used them a bunch. But like I said, 10+ years clean."

UPDATE A BB reader sent in this odd story about pink speed:

I live a ways outside Ft. Lewis in Washington state, and the following happened a few years back.

I was at a large, mostly punk house-party when a nervous-looking kid with a flat-top showed up. The party immediately became quiet because he was utterly vanilla-looking and built like a brick shithouse. He then began to ask quietly if anyone "wanted some drugs." He was laughed out of the house, pegged as an undercover cop. A while later my friends and I were sitting on the front porch, in the dark, when the kid reappeared. He asked some other people on the porch, again, if they wanted some drugs. He then insisted that he had to get rid of it quickly, which caused pretty similar reactions to the first time he offered. For some reason we started asking him a lot of questions, and point blank told him that we pegged him as an undercover cop. The resulting story was pretty strange.

He told us he was in the Army and then produced his military ID. It looked pretty real and put him at 20 years old. He told is that he was assigned to the infirmary as an assistant when he entered, and he did so well the first year that they started letting him do more on his own. Long story short, he discovered that the Army was packing it's own gelcaps with "supplements" to distribute to the troops, and he had access to the bulk packages of those "supplements." Well, it didn't take him very long one night to test the "energy supplements" with a military grade urine-analysis kit for drugs, resulting in a definite positive for methamphetamines. We all laughed at his story, since of course the military is jacking everyone up with speed, and then the kid dropped this bomb: in a recent shipment, there was an unaccounted for unit of the "energy supplements." He stole it.

I'm not generally a sucker for stories like that, but he seemed to be, at least, truly nervous about something. One of my friends asked "So where is it?" and the kid produced a small packet of *neon pink* crap, this strange, slightly damp, almost granular powder that smelled like poison. He said they dyed it pink so that it was readily identifiable, and so that no one would use it for any method but oral. He said the remainder of the *pound* was in his car, and he'd go get it if we wanted to buy it. He then asked us how much meth went for. Well, we were stumped, not being connoiseurs ourselves, and said thanks but no thanks. He left.

A few days later, talking to some friends of mine that had been at the party, he said that they had actually *purchased* some of the meth and had done it and, indeed, it had been the cleanest, most frighteningly powerful speed they had ever taken, but it had dyed their fingers and noses pink, so they had tossed it. I was baffled and delighted at the same time (wowee, conspiracy theories!).

So imagine me reading the link that they want to "start dying" the fertilizer. It's been done for a while now, it appears, and with some success, but not for civilians. Also, in the case of my associates, the drugs being pink was a deterrent. Then again, they were never addicts.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:12:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lazyweb request: Removing anti-theft devices still attached to purchased clothing

Does anyone know how to remove plastic anti-shoplifting devices from clothes? My wife came back from the mall on Sunday with some new school clothes for our daughter. The clerk forget to remove the plastic anti-theft clip from all the garments. You've seen these things before. They have a pin that attaches to a gum-pack-sized bar of plastic, which contains something that's supposed to make an alarm go off if you take it out of the store.

For some reason, the alarm didn't go off when my wife left the store, which is too bad, because I ended up trying to take one off using the tools in my toolbox. I thought I would be able to easily pull the pin out with a couple of pairs of pliers. Turns out it was very hard to take the pin out (I ended up using a pair of wire cutters to chew away bits of the rock-hard plastic until I could get a screwdriver inside and pry the pin off) and I made a little hole in the shirt. I'm too lazy to take the clothes back to the mall to have them remove the devices on the other garments, so I'm asking the readers of Boing Boing to help me out. How do you get one of these things off without mangling my daughter's clothes? Email your solution to me. I'll publish the best one.

UPDATE Most people suggested using a magnet, which did nothing. Another large group of people said take it back to the store and have them do it. Screw that; it's more fun to try it myself than to give up and drive to a loathsome mall. Some people told me to try putting a rubber band between the two pieces and twisting more and more loops around the the pin. That didn't work either. Other people suggested pinching the "nose" part of the clip on both ends with two pairs of pliers, and then pulling out the pin. Nope. Finally, I tried one guy's suggestion to hit the button with a hammer, which would cause it to split the clip open. The only thing that did was pinch the button down against the shirt. Since I already had the hammer, I hit the side of the clip, along its seam. After a few whacks, it split open. Here's what the innards look like. Nothing magnetic in there. I think the people who suggested pinching or bending the clip were on the right track.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:47:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video game vampire to go topless in October Playboy

Ernest Miller sez, "Videogame character BloodRayne (a red-headed 'Dhampir' who hunts supernatural baddies for the 'Brimstone Society') will be topless in October's Playboy. According to her creators, 'This is a first in videogame history and trust us when we say that Rayne does not disappoint.'" Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bugmenot's new host: we're free speech advocates, not racists/fascists.

If you missed Friday's BoingBoing installment of "As the Bugmenot Turns," I'd recommend you read that post before continuing with this one. Following up on that post about the death and subsequent resurrection of registration-avoidance-helper Bugmenot.com, Jeff Wheelhouse of NearlyFreeSpeech.NET -- the service's new webhost -- says:

"Regarding that post, I want to clarify a couple of potential misunderstandings that could arise based on feedback you received from a reader.
- NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is not a racist/fascist organization.
- The bugmenot.com site was probably *not* incorrectly filtered by WebSense.

Your reader is quoted below:

With regard to bugmenot leaving a host that sold racist paraphernalia -- their new web host provides service to a combat18 / redwatch site.

This is true. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a service founded on the principles of an equal voice for *all* people, without regard for their race, gender, religion, or beliefs. That still applies when the beliefs being expressed are antithetical to our own.

[If they moved because] they didn't want to be blocked by censorship software... Bugmenot had better hope they're not on the same server this time.

If I understand the situation correctly, the second host bugmenot tried, dissidenthosting.com forwarded www.bugmenot.com traffic to another established site with racist content. Presumably, it was *that* site that was blocked by web filters and not the bugmenot site. Ironically, if this is correct, it sort of means that the filtering did its job properly and blocked the racist content. I felt this might not be clear based on your reader's message. Makers of web filters long ago learned that blocking traffic by IP address was not a successful practice. There should be no danger of bugmenot.com, or any site hosted by us, being filtered except upon its own merits (or lack thereof). Of course, some clueless sysadmin somewhere will prove me wrong, but if I am only wrong once today, it will be a good day. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET never redirects 404 errors or offline sites. Again, quoting from your post:

[Ed note: a banner ad on Redwatch plugs a hosting service identified as "Nigger Free Hosting," but the site does appear to live at nearlyfreespeech.net.]

I have long hoped that the 'Nigger Free Hosting' site is some sort of puerile racist joke; the site hardly appears developed enough to be a real hosting company. But whether it is or not, we are not affiliated with it in any way. We are thrilled to have bugmenot.com hosted with us. As you can see, we don't always get to say that. It's clever, it's useful, and it's one guy making a difference. I don't know what happened to the first hosting company to get the site shut down. Probably we're going to find out, and there's a good chance it's going to suck. But we will not go down without a fight, and we will never go down quietly. Not when sites like bugmenot are the whole freakin' point of our service. Thanks!"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:03:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pills and water in single package

Pills to Go is a package concept design that includes space for two pills and a little swallow of water. Link (via Cool Hunting)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:44:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vote on your favorite beginnings to novels

Opening Hooks is a site/database of opening sentences to novels. You can contribute your favorite book beginnings to it and rate (from 1 to 5) the books already in the database. There are about 20 book beginnings up so far. Of the ones offered so far, my favorite is from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (but I'm a sucker for last-man-on-earth books):

“On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn't work. That's why he chose to stay near the house on those days.”

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:08:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Former Soviet Weapon Designers Take On Wind Power

WorldChanging has a short item about a home-use electricity-generating windsail designed by engineers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US and the Makeyev State Rocket Center in Russia. Unlike a horizontal-axis wind turbine, this one is supposed to be quieter and less hazardous to birds. As you can see from the table below, you need a pretty brisk wind to keep even one light bulb burning.

Condition	Turbine Output (watts)	Annual KWh
<5 m/s wind	negligible	negligible
5 m/s	87	764
8 m/s	358	3130
10 m/s	700	6113
12 m/s	1209	10564
Class 2; 30M AGL	281	2457
Class 3; 30M AGL	401	3500

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:56:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ken Goldberg's telerobotic take on Berkeley in the 1960s

BB pal Ken Goldberg and his collaborators have launched a new and timely telerobotic project that provides a breathtakingly high-res view of UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, the fiery focal point for free speech in the 1960s.

"On the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, in the context of the PATRIOT Act, advances in technology, and the Presidential election, Demonstrate provides 24 hour public access to UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, where the student movement originated. The installation combines the world's most advanced networked robotic camera, a visual database, and a mathematical model of socio-ocular behavior. Beginning September 1, Demonstrate will be featured on the Whitney Museum of American Art's artport website."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:44:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eight-foot-tall statues of Cthulhu for sale

For $3900, you can buy this 7'8", 200 lb statue of Cthulhu for your garden or dungeon. Lots of other outsized nerd-pleasing statuary and sculpture also for sale on the Nethercraft site. Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Li'l Jon meets DVD Jon

Step aside, Dave Chappelle:

dvd jon: Is that a Battle Royale DVD?
lil jon: YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!
dvd jon: That's the Chinese flick with Go-go from Kill Bill?
lil jon: YEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!
dj: You can't watch that here.
lj: What?!
dj: You can't watch it.
lj: What?!?
dj: It's "region 3"?
lj: What?!
dj: It won't work in your player.
lj: What?
dj: Give it to me. I'll fix it.
lj: OKAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!

Link (Thanks butter!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:48:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Police procedural for digital evidence forensics

The National Insitute of Justice has published "Forensic Examination of Digital Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement" -- a 91-page PDF to help computer-illiterate cops not screw up evidence collection and help cyber-cops make use of materials.

-Perform a controlled boot to capture CMOS/BIOSinformation and test functionality. * Boot sequence (this may mean changing the BIOS to ensure the system boots from the floppy or CD-ROM drive).
* Time and date.
* Power on passwords.

- Perform a second controlled boot to test the computer’s functionality and the forensic boot disk.
* Ensure the power and data cablesare properly connected tothe floppy or CDROM drive, and ensure the power and data cables to the storage devices are still disconnected.
* Place the forensic boot disk into the floppy or CD-ROM drive. Boot the computer and ensure the computer will boot from the forensic boot disk.

- Reconnect the storage devices and perform a third controlled boot to capture the drive configuration information from the CMOS/BIOS.
* Ensure there is a forensic boot disk in the floppy or CD-ROM drive to prevent the computer from accidentally booting from the storage devices.
* Drive configuration information includes logical block addressing (LBA); large disk; cylinders, heads, and sectors (CHS); or auto-detect.

660K PDF Link (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:24:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OnStar's less-savoury customers

Great Morning News humour: OnStar conversations that didn't make the commercials:

Customer: Hey, so, I got an important package in the trunk, but I think I locked my keys in with it when I was dispatching...er...loading it.

OnStar: Not a problem, sir, I'm unlocking the trunk now.

Customer: [sound of trunk opening] Whooo...Jesus, that stinks!

OnStar: Are you OK, sir?

Customer: Yeah, yeah. I just got to get rid of this package as soon as possible. Say, can you give me directions to an abandoned quarry, or maybe some remote wooded spot where I could leave my package?

OnStar: Sure thing. I'm showing that there's an empty shaft at an old silver mine three miles southwest of your location.

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:23:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cartoon characters taking tremendous dumps

My friend Karin Frank is a Viennese visual artist whose trademark is clay sculptures of sight-gags of cartoon characters wanking and having tremendous poos. Possibly NSFW Link (via Monochrom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:22:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shifted Librarian unpacks free CDs from the RIAA

As a requirement of its price-fixing settlement with the Feds, the RIAA is obliged to give thousands of CDs to public libraries. However, as has been noted, the CDs they're sending around are worse than shit: hundreds of copies of the years-old Whitney Houston single of the Star Spangled Banner, that species of kidney.

Jenny Levine (AKA the Shifted Librarian) works at a library where the RIAA care packages have started to come in. She reports on the contents thereof:

Several of the boxes are literally cut on the side, and the cut goes into the jewel cases themselves. Hence my declaration that we received a ton of "cut-outs." Some of the boxes even have dates of 2001 and 2002 posted on the labels, which I hope doesn't mean the date they were boxed up and put into storage. There is no way these boxes were packed by mistake as the result of a computer glitch. Some of the labels very clearly say 30 copies of this or that title, and I highly doubt the labels were supposed to cut the boxes after boxing and labeling them.

Link

Update: Thom sez, "Since the feds were notified that the RIAA was sending out boxes of crap there has been an effort to ensure that the shipments were indeed relevant. I work for a public radio station and we received well over a thousand CDs in boxes last month as a part of our end of the settlement. I was expecting to unpack Whitney Houston, but was shocked to find tons of great jazz, opera and classical. There was about 7% crap, but hey it's free crap."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:21:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling does a public interview on The Zenith Angle

Bruce Sterling's doing a virtual public interview on the WELL this week about his new technothriller, The Zenith Angle. I really liked this -- the blurb I sent Bruce went "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."

The thing that always intrigued me about technothrillers was that technicians are support staff rather than protagonists. I mean, who makes a worse enemy -- James Bond, with a "license to kill" -- or H. Ross Perot? Perot's a weedy-looking Wally Cox mainframe nerd, but he doesn't hesitate to hire ex=Special Forces types and conduct private black-bag operations in Iran.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:19:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toronto pumps near-freezing lake water into its summer office-towers

A MetaFilter post links to several information resources on Toronto's new innovative downtown cooling system, which pumps near-freezing water from Lake Ontario's deeps through the city's office-towers, eliminating 40,000 tons of CO2 pollution per annum (no word on whether there's an environmental impact to pumping the atmosphere-warmed water back into the lake). Toronto's had centralised steam-heat for decades -- a system where steam radiators in the city's office-towers are all filled with hot vapour from the same centralised plant, a curious species of public utility that truly makes all of the office towers (which contain bitter rivals and competitors) into a single, linked, cooperative system.

As I type this (but not as you read it -- this is being posted on a several-day delay), I am sitting just a few metres from the Toronto Island Water Filtration Plant, where the water-pumping takes place. The plant has a lot more barbed wire and fences than it did this time last year: I guess I know why now. Link

Update: Michael Kalus notes, "the way this system works is that the water is pulled out of Lake Ontario, then at the John Street pumping station is fed through a head exchanger that cools the office building. The "warm" water is then cleaned and used as drinking water in Toronto, not just merely dumped back into the lake.

"In essence nothing has changed from before, only that the water is now pulled out of a deeper part of the lake and I am no environmentalist, but I would guess that the impact on the lake is neglectable as there is already a huge volume of water taken out of the lake anyways."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:18:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alice as illustrated by dozens

This amazing Alice in Wonderland site collects versions of Alice as drawn by dozens of illustrators (including a wonderful page of Alice avatars). I'm very fond of the Mervyn Peake interpretations.

Alas, the site-author, who has appropriated hundreds of images from various artists, has decided that s/he should be immune from this treatment: right-clicking on many of the links and images yeilds an insulting Javascript popup that says, "Please don't take my images." Er, your images? Link (via The Disney Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:17:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickr RSS highlights

Ever since I signed up for some Flickr photo RSS feeds with keywords like "Graffiti" and "Tokyo," I've gotten a steady stream of pix taken by folks around the world. Some days, there's a serious jackpot, as today, with all these great pix of graffiti in Manhattan by someone called "Ninjin" and this sweet Tokyo skyline photo. Producing these little highlight posts is slightly labour-intensive, so I dunno how often I'll do them, but today it was worth it. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr).

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:14:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heart-stopping sandwich of the year

Maxim Magazine has selected its sandwich of the year: the Fat Darrell (invented by Darrell Butler during his sophomore year at Rutgers University) contains chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks and french fries. Maxim lauds it for its "drunken ingenuity."

"So, I'm standing there eating it, and all of a sudden the guy standing behind me says, 'That thing that guy's eating looks pretty good, can you make me one of those?' And, it was like a movie scene, the next 10 people order the same thing. So, I'm like, 'Whoa!' like I think I might be onto something. And the guy is like, 'Hey, man, this is cool.'"

That guy who assembled the sandwich was Abdul Eid, working in an R.U. Hungry food truck, parked in a campus lot in New Brunswick, catering to beer-soaked undergraduates with the late-night munchies.

Eid now runs R.U. Hungry Grill & Pizza, a store he was able to open in part due to the success of the $4.75 Fat Darrell, the flagship of R.U.'s "Fat" line.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Keyboard optimised for BabySmash and its ilk

This $60 strap-on baby keyboard is a pretty cool idea -- basically, it's a hardware adapter for BabySmash-style software. Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:12:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Records from the trash: rescued audio

Great LiveJournal post about one person's garbage-picked record-album habits:

And if something is not my cup of tea, I try to pass it on. For example, I'm not a huge fan of hip-hop, though I certainly like some of it. Whenever I show up at my local with a pile of records I've scavenged, Andre, one of the barmen, will probably say, sounding genuinely offended, "How come you never get any for me?" A few months ago, I spotted a gigantic stack of mostly hip-hop 12-inches awaiting the Sanitation Dept. I grabbed a gigantic pile, as many as I could carry, and made my way back to the bar, where I'd just seen him. "Hey, Andre, I got a present for you…" I said, and dropped the discs on the bar. "I'll be right back--there's more." It was worth it just to see the startled look on his face. (Out of the whole bunch of maybe 250 I kept about 8 or 10.)

And then there are 78s, which most people don't have the machinery to play. I've become interested in old 78rpm records ever since my father gave me his collection of jazz records--as well as a turntable to play them on--not long before his death. While there were some LPs in the bunch--and some of those were amazing ones--the majority of the collection consisted of jazz 78s, mostly from the 1940s, but some dating back as early as 1929, which means I'm the third generation to own them, since my father was only 15 that year and obviously acquired those records secondhand.

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:10:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese rubber bunny desk accessories

I'm completely swooning for these Japanese desk-accessories made out of multi-coloured rubber bunnies -- there are cable-stables, CD-holders, whisks, stress-squeezums and more. If only I lived in Japan, I'd be on these like cute on Sanrio. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:07:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Converted toilet contains world's smallest brewery

A Welsh brewery in a 5'-square former toilet has reopened, brewing beer for the pub next door: it is the "world's smallest brewery."

Margaret and Mark Phillips, who own the Tynllidiart Arms and the brewery, said the beer had a secret recipe.

"The previous owner of the pub moved out two years ago and up until two weeks ago the pub was closed and the brewery was too," said Mr Phillips, who moved in just two weeks ago.

"We thought it would be nice to brew our own local beer and luckily we had a brewer living a few doors down who was able to help.

Link (via Fark)

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

Campaign ads (1952-) remixed into crazy techno music

The Integral is a pseudonym for an anonymous Congressional staffer. S/he's released an album of remixes of Presidential campaign ads from 1952 to the present, and placed it all online under a Creative Commons license. Link (Thanks, the integral!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Music labels should be celebrating the Grokster decision

Jim Griffin, founder of the Pho music/tech mailing list, weighs in with an impressive and passionate email about the P2P-legalizing Grokster decision and what it means for music labels.

Here's why you should applaud today's decision: It brings us closer to monetizing peered sharing and putting real money in the pockets of artists, labels, publishers, and other rights holders. How? Because it moves them one step closer to the correct judgment, which is that it is now impractical and inefficient to control the quantity and destiny of digits -- especially so those that carry mass media like music -- in the increasingly friction-free world of digitization. When that judgment is drawn, service licensing begins. Until that judgment is drawn, product-based control continues in vain. Publishers long ago accepted technology and license it today -- they licensed Napster -- and their revenues are climbing; sound recording companies continue to resist every new technology and refuse to license, and their revenues are falling. This decision will benefit the music business the same way getting arrested for drunk driving benefits an alcoholic, summoning forth the day of reckoning and hastening rehabilitation.

This judgment doesn't destroy distribution -- it enables licensing. How? It reminds one of the parties in the licensing battle that one of the vines it was relying upon to to cling to the past will no longer be viable. Hyper-efficient delivery destroys distribution, meaning that the just-in-time delivery of digits will eventually destroy their distribution entirely. That is a ways off, but from what I'm hearing back-channel it is not too far off, as Apple prepares its tiny wireless iPod with no hard-drive but enhanced Wi-Max (metropolitan-wide high-bandwidth wireless) connectivity; it won't destroy downloading over night, but it will take a whack at its market share, and slowly but surely shift the market away from distribution/downloading and towards delivery/streaming.

Link

Update: John Parres notes "Actually *I* am the founder of the pho list and Jim is the founder of the pho brunches so we round it off and call ourselves the co-founders of pho."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:52:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Constitutional rights for RNC protesters factsheet

Pat sez, "Cryptome is hosting a copy of The Center for Constitutional Rights 'Know Your Rights' fact sheet for those planning on being near the Republican National Convention in New York City. Included are handy tips such as what to and what not to bring and who to call in case you get arrested. Always handy to know..." 344k ZIPped PDF Link (Thanks, Pat!)

Update: An anonymous tipster sez "this pamphlet was done by the wonderful Katya Komisaruk over at the Just Cause Law Collective. At her site, lawcollective.org, there's the pamphlet and tons of other info about how to not lose your rights when dealing with the po. (Including Komsiaruk's book, set up much like the pamphlet, 'Beat the Heat.' Komisaruk applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School while in federal prison for anti-nuke demonstrations. She went to HLS while on parole and graduated with honors. Now she's one of the most active anarchist lawyers in the U.S."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rogue cop invents anti-WiFi laws, shakes down man-of-cloth

A copper outside of the Athenaeum in Illinois Nantucket shoook down the Reverend AKMA -- the bloggin' theologian -- who was using the library's WiFi from out front of the building. The incident that unfolded is flabberghasting, with the cop inventing whole new laws and then insisting that AKMA was violating them:

"Sir, you can't use the Internet outside the library."

I said, "What?" (I'm pretty clever under pressure.)

The officer in question (whose conduct was entirely professional, firm, and calm behind those mirrored shades) solemnly assured me that in order to use the library's open wireless signal, I had to be seated within the library. The officer then wandered on back to the nearby police station.

I dutifully, if reluctantly, turned off the power to my Airport card and, since I had only been on the bench a few minutes, began working -- offline -- on what turns out to be this post. I had noticed two other weak but open signals in the area, and I figured that I could post this perplexing moment via one of the other open signals, then scuttle back to the studio. As I was writing, the officer returned and -- as the officer walked straight for me -- I held up my TiBook, pointing to the zero lines in the Airport icon, and showed the officer that my card was off.

"Why don't you just close that up, sir, or use your computer elsewhere?'

I closed the computer in order not to constitute a threat to established order, but engaged this peace officer in a discussion of the complexities of the topic. "I did notice several other open signals in the area -- am I allowed to connect to them?"

"Maybe if you had permission it would be all right, but it's a new law, sir; 'theft of signal.' It would be like if you stole someone's cable TV connection."

Link (Thanks, AKMA!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:33:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese cop on window ledge shoots kidnapper in head

Amazing photos of cool-looking Chinese cop dressed in black shooting a kidnapper who was sitting on a windowsill. The kidnapper, who probably died from two slugs to the head, fell five stories to the ground. If this happened in the US, that cop would be talking with Hollywood agents by now. Link

UPDATE Zoodle sez: "Guy shot buy Chinese cop found alive in coffin."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:44:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Augmented reality Halo derivative goes nutso

Pablos sez, "This I Love Bees thing seems to be getting out of hand. It is some kind of massive alternate reality game that may be related to Halo 2. The site has been counting down to August 24th and now it looks like it is heading into meatspace. Now there are all these GPS coordinates where people are planning to go to all over the U.S. on Tuesday. There's all kinds of speculation about it on these forums and in #beekeepers on irc.chat-solutions.org. Anyway, the gargantuan scale of this thing makes me want to check it out if only for the bizarre flashmob appeal." (Thanks, Pablos!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:07:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fluorescent pink dye in fertilizer designed to discourage meth-maker theft

Farmers are hoping that a pink-colored stain, called GloTell, will prevent speed chemists from stealing their anhydrous ammonia, which is used as a crop fertilizer. It's also a critical ingredient in methamphetamine manufacture.

The visible stain, even if washed off, was still detectable by ultraviolet light 24 to 72 hours later....

"Most people that are drug users, they like a clean-looking drug if they are going to ... put it in their body," Clements said. "We know the end-product is not pretty at all."

Snort it, and it turns the nose fluorescent pink. Inject it, and the telltale pink shows up at the injection site, he said.

I'm guessing this will fail. Speed users would rather have pink noses than no speed. Adding green food coloring to beer doesn't stop people from drinking on Saint Patrick's Day. So why would speed users turn up their nose at a line a pink-colored crystal meth? Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:07:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Munch's "The Scream," "Madonna" stolen from art museum

In Oslo, armed robbers stole one of several known versions of "The Scream" along with "Madonna" (Caution! This art is totally NSFW!). These two iconic works by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch are considered impossible to sell because they're so well-known. In other words, odds may be high that they'll end up destroyed. One of the paintings was the subject of an earlier failed ransom demand. Snip from Reuters report:

Two masked robbers ran into the Munch Museum, threatened staff with a gun and forced people to lie down before taking "The Scream", an icon of existentialist angst showing a waif-like figure against a blood-red sky, and "Madonna". They escaped in a black Audi A6 driven by a third man. The pictures, worth millions of dollars and among Munch's best-known works, were later cut from their frames which were found in another part of the city.

Link to news story with highly suspect product placement for the Audi A6. What? You thought international art thieves drove art cars?
(Ed. note: Any resemblance between Munch's Madonna and the SG ads in upper right hand corner of this blog is entirely coincidental; besides, the SG ads are cropped for modesty. )

Update: This analysis piece in the London News Review has more background:

The Scream is not only Edvard Munch's most famous work, it is also his most stolen. A different version of The Scream (having more than one version helps) was purloined in 1994 during the Winter Olympics, and recovered after 3 months. This fact -- that The Scream is forever being stolen -- has added a new layer of meaning to the original. The sickly fear, the angst which radiates out from the ghoulish face of the screamer, is now shot through with the uncertainty that at any moment the canvas might be wrenched from the wall and shoved in the boot of an Audi. The scream is as much a cry of help as a cry of anguish. The strange stretched lips twist to form the plaintive words: "Please stop stealing me" -- but in the empty eyes you can see the dreadful certainty that the theft will take place.

Link (Thanks, Yoni)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:57:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crossbow for paralysed people

Great photogallery of a TenPoint Crossbow that has been retrofitted to be mounted on and fired from a powered wheelchair. The paralysed owner of the bow "bagged two deer on his first evening hunting." Link (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:38:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-BitTorrent snake-oil

Akonix, a "security firm" has a new product that lets corporations block BitTorrent packets (Q. Er, like a firewall rule? A. Yeah, like that, except more expensive). In order to promote it, they're telling lies about BitTorrent, telling their customers that BitTorrent users can "inadvertently share files containing sensitive information, and the P2P application installer may automatically share files or folders -- including password files -- without the user's knowledge," which is simply untrue. What this "product" does is block access to a file-transfer protocol that is widely used in many different fields, from providing Congressional hearings footage to delivering urgently needed software like the Windows XP Service Pack 2, to shipping entire operating systems like the many Linux distros that circulate via BT.

"In today's corporate environment, there are very few legitimate business uses for consumer P2P file sharing," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "Unauthorized activity within an enterprise network creates situations in which companies run the risk of security leaks or illegal activity. Products like Akonix Enforcer allow IT departments to block and monitor all P2P activity, removing another security concern from IT managers and freeing up network bandwidth for legitimate business communications."

"BitTorrent is a growing and popular P2P file-sharing network, particularly for movie files. In addition to the risk of music copyright violation, disclosure of corporate data and potential virus infection, BitTorrent users expose their company to potential legal action from organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America," said Francis Costello, chief marketing officer at Akonix Systems. "We are continuously working with more than 250 customers, including three of the largest global media companies, to address the latest security threats from file sharing. Blocking users of the BitTorrent network provides our customers with the most complete solution for managing P2P available."

Companies like this are the reason so many enterprise users treat corporate IT as damage and route around them. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:37:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Take the Klansmen bowling, er, Ferrising

This 1924 photo from the archive of the Canon City, Colorado library archive shows a whole troop (gaggle? fewmet? murder?) of Klansmen riding a Ferris-wheel. 32K JPEG Link (Thanks, horhayole!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:36:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DropCash: instant fundraising sites

DropCash is a new service from Jason Kottke and Andre Torrez, two of my favorite Web-dudes. DropCash has the ingenious simplicity of all of Torrez's projects: sign up, enter your TypeKey identity and a fundraising target and click "create" and hey-presto, you've got a fundraising site where anyone with PayPal and TypeKey can contribute -- and watch the progress-bar move toward your money goal. Boogah notes that you could use this to coordinate buying someone a birthday gift, but it'd also be great for Back to Iraq-like stunts, where a blogger raises some bread to go do something and chronicle it on her site. Link (via Gomi No Sensei)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:35:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In-game Ponzi scheme

This is a stunning, lengthy personal account of a gamer from Eve Online, a space-trading game, who decided that the game-masters had tipped the scales in favour of pirates and sought revenge by raising a half-billion credits in a Ponzi scheme that destroyed the morale and fun of every non-pirate victim. The fake syndicate the player raised involved massive impersonation and all the typical techniques of a Big Con. Unfortunately, the author's got a propensity for gratuitously racist similes that really detracted from the story, but this is still a gripping read.

Trazir would fly around the Minmatar newbie sectors, offering 10,000 credits to anybody who would join our corporation. All they had to do was click on "accept" when Trazir made the offer, and they became a part of our corporate family. Since many of the people he encountered were only days, hours, or even minutes new to Eve, a great deal clicked "accept" and were subsequently given 10,000 credits. I did the same in the Caldari newbie regions, and within a couple days, ZZZZ Best was burgeoning at the seams with 18 clueless members. We had to act quickly and peddle our deal, as well as maintain member numbers, because there would no doubt be a good deal of turnover as people realized that they belonged to a corporation which did nothing for them and which they did nothing for.

Link (via Terra Nova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:34:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent

Whil I was on holidays, I read Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent. This is the sequel to "Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box," and like the previous volume, it consists of short stories written by extremely talented hackers in which the computer bits are reported so faithfully that the books can be thought of as especially colourful HOWTOs, technical documents dressed up with narrative.

As such, they are terrific. I would much rather read a Stealing the Network volume than any hundred HOWTOs and Anarchy Filez: STN has the tone of a really good bullshitting session at a DefCon or Hackers on Planet Earth, hackers spinning war-stories about hacks they've pulled off, or have conceived of. Make no mistake, these are imaginative and brilliant technical people.

As stories, these pieces are sometimes clumsy. The prose rarely rises above journeyman level (it's at its best when the authors stick to declarative, Hemingwayesque sentences, but too often they stray into "colourful" similes and descriptive phrases that can be cliched and even unintentionally funny), and there's not a lot of characterization to be had, and virtually no character development. That said, the book is still a rip-snortin' read, mostly because while it's not the best fiction ever written, it is some of the best, most engaging technical nonfiction you're likely to find.

A couple of the stories are very funny -- I'm particularily fond of the "A Real Gullible" piece, which is an homage to one of the great hacker farces of all time, Real Genius. There's a lot of that kind of nerd humour and nerd folk art sprinkled throughout this volume, and for that alone, it's worth reading.

It's a good formula and a smart one, too: how else could you produce a tech book that was still worth keeping in print 18 months later? Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:33:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Half Life 2 graphics are unreal

This gallery of Half Life 2 screenshots comes from a Siggraph presentation by Valve's Viktor Antonov called "Next Generation Game Visuals." These are totally unreal. My spare time in doomed. Someone give that guy a halo. Link (via Pirotcar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:32:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster argument, the electronica mix

MLFG, a techno artist, has set the good guys' closing arguments in the Grokster case to music. This is the dancing-est legal argument I've ever heard: pub-pub-pub-pub-pub-pub-public domain materials. Seriously, this rocks. Part 1, 1.5MB MP3 Link, Part 2, 970k MP3 Link (Thanks, Shawn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:31:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Battening down Disney World for Charley

Caines sez, "A guest at Walt Disney World on 8/13 and 8/14 snapped these shots of the MAgic Kingdom being prepared for Hurricane Charley. Signs being secured and kiosks being tethered. He was staying at the All-Star Sports Resort and his pics of some of the characters that were sent, guests swimming, and shots of the rain/wind from his hotel window. The last of the shots are trees and signs blown away." Link (Thanks, Caines!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:29:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Forward-looking defense policy from Fafblog

Fafblog -- the best political satire on the net IMO -- just keeps hitting them out of the park, as with this post on Bush's characterization of those who oppose the missile shield as living in the past (and his implication that he is living in the future):

Giblets is living even farther into the future, in a time when terrorism and pinko-tyranny are both irrelevant! Giblets demands that we spend 1.8 trillion dollars on an array of massive space lasers pointed outward to defend Earth against the onslaught of immense insectoid invaders who will strike from beyond the asteroid belt! Giblets will not allow the tyrant Bug Emperor to lay its death spores in our atmosphere - and the whiney pleas of those stuck formulating "today's" foreign policy to secure the former Soviet nuclear stockpile will not get in his way!

Once more Giblets outdoes George Bush at every turn! Whose vision is grander? Who not only bypasses today's wars to fight what we think are tomorrow's, but gives tomorrow a pass for sometime next week? The answer is clear: Giblets!

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:28:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Imagineering's decline and fall

A new columnist at SaveDisney.com (a site backed by ousted Disney Board members including Roy Disney, Walt's nephew) is chronicling the decline and fall of Imagineering, attempting to answer the question, "How is it possible that the same people who created EPCOT Center, Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure and Tokyo Disney Seas, also created Disney's California Adventure, Walt Disney Studios Paris, DinoRama, and Journey into YOUR Imagination?"

Paul Pressler had convinced everyone on the Parks & Resorts team that Disney's California Adventure would be an unparalleled success. In the days leading up to the opening of California Adventure, the Director of Attractions at Disneyland, Paul Yeargin, openly discussed his concerns that Disney's California Adventure would fill to capacity every day. He thought the resort's biggest problem would be disappointed guests, who, after traveling a great distance to see California Adventure would have to settle for Disneyland instead. Yeargin and other Disneyland executives made decisions based on this premise. Including a now infamous decision by Disneyland Resort President, Cynthia Harriss, to restrict Annual Passholders from using their passes at Disney's California Adventure for the first few months after opening. This decision only served to anger the already disgruntled 400,000 passholders who provide a significant amount of revenue for the resort. Harriss and Yeargin, like many of the Disneyland executives, had followed Pressler over from the Disney Stores and had no previous theme park experience.

Then in February 2001, the world saw what had been festering behind closed doors at WDI for the past several years. Disney's California Adventure opening in the old Disneyland parking lot. It was a mix of off-the-shelf carnival rides and film-based attractions. When Walt's close friend and long-time Imagineer, John Hench, saw the park for the first time he said, "I liked it better as a parking lot." WDI would try to fix California Adventure any way they could. They threw attractions at it left and right...Who Wants to be A Millionaire, a bug's land, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, even the Main Street Electrical Parade would come out of moth balls. None of it worked, of course.

Link (via The Disney Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:27:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whuffie's mathematical failings

Interesting paper evaluates the mathematical flaws in reputation systems: if the right thing to do would seem suspicious, then reputation systems encourage you to do the wrong thing, to enhance your reputation.

Recall that an action is vulnerable to a temptation if when the short-run players participate, the temptation lowers the probability of all bad signals, and increases the probability of all others. In this case the bad reputation result requires the exit minmax condition, as demonstrated by the example in Section 4.4. Notice, however, that in the example the relative probability of g and r is changed by the temptation. If the temptation satisfies the stronger property that the relative probability of the other signals remains constant, then we can weaken the assumption of exit minmax. In this section we develop this result, and give an application to games with two actions.

(If the math is too dense, there's a good lay explanation here) Link (via Smartmobs)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:26:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why the Supreme Court will hear Grokster

Over on Lessig's blog, Tim Wu has enumerated 10 reasons that the Supreme Court is likely to hear the Grokster case:

1. These is a stated legal conflict on the Sony standard as between the 7th and 9th Circuits;
2. The 7th and 9th Circuits disagree (albeit in partially in dicta) on the relevance of willful blindness to secondary liability;
4. The Court has these matters in hand: it has granted cert. in many similar cases historically (Sony, 1980s, White-Smith (the Piano Roll case) 1909, Teleprompter and Fortnightly (Cable / Broadcast, 1960s & 1970s);
5. The Court has a vague sense that some far-out stuff is going on in the field of “Computer Law” that maybe it should check out;
6. Law clerks use KaZaA & BitTorrent to plan basketball games;
7. Stevens and Breyer deeply dig this stuff;
8. Scalia likes anything having to do with property;
9. Souter got his first computer last week.

And most importantly,

10. The Court loves to be the center of attention, and this would make it so.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:25:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Movie theater repurposed as Xbox arcade

A cinema operator in a small town in Utah has started running Friday night gaming tournaments in which Xboxes are connected to the big screens and sound-systems.

Theater managers took four video projectors, set one up in each of four theaters with a Microsoft XBox video game system connected to it, and then let the fun begin for more than 60 people.

"Tonight blew our minds," theater co-owner Calvin Timothy said afterward. "We're definitely going to keep doing this."

The game Friday night: "Halo" -- a first-person shoot-em-up game in which four people can play on a team against four others. The evening was set up in a tournament format where 16 teams battled each other until the wee hours of Saturday morning to find out who the kings of gaming are in the valley.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:23:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lying Swift Boat Veterans for Bush

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a gang of liars who ran a thoroughly debunked TV ad in which they lied about serving with John Kerry in Vietnam and lied about his service record. Then the Bush campaign disavowed any connection to the Lying Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

It was lying.

This New York Times infografic traces the financial connections between the organization and the Bush administration's staff, financiers, and cronies.

It also delves into the Lying Veterans' own on-the-record statements, like George "John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam" Elliot's 1996 statement that "The fact that he chased an armed enemy down is not something to be looked down upon, it was an act of courage. And the whole outfit served with honor." Link (Thanks, bomark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:21:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK institutes ridiculously difficult English-proficiency test for English-speaking immigrants

Immigrants to the UK from English-speaking countries such as Canada and Australia must pass an English proficiency test in order to gain UK citizenship. The test is apparently very stringent:

According to one report two Australians, including a knight who has lived in Britain for 44 years and a writer with a degree in English, have been rejected under the new rules.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:20:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stick-on effects lenses for cameraphones

Brando is selling self-adhesive cameraphone lenses with a variety of filters -- soften, magnify, distort, etc. Link (via MobileWhack)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:19:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vapourised vodka inhalers come to NYC clubs

Alcohol Without Liquid (AWoL) is the trade-name for a vapourised vodka product that's dispensed through a portable booze-bong that has become trendy in London clubs. Now NYC meatpacking district clubs have taken up the craze and are selling booze-inhalers to their customers.

AWoL users pour a shot of their favorite spirit into a diffuser capsule, which is connected to an oxygen pipe.

Oxygen bubbles are pumped through it, absorbing the alcohol and creating a smoky-looking vapor, which is then sucked through a tube and inhaled.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:17:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New, unpatched Windows XP will be wormy within 20 minutes of being connected to net

The Internet Storm Center has published a chart showing the historical trends in probes from Internet worms. The frequency is up to about 20 minutes, which means that if you connect an unfirewalled, unpatched new Windows XP machine to the Internet and start downloading the patches to protect you from worms, you will be infected before the patches have downloaded and installed. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:16:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

You don't own your iTunes, they 0wn you

Good blog post on why Apple iTunes DRM -- and other DRM systems -- that convey the message "you don't own the music you buy, you merely license it," make for such unsatisfying experiences.

We are outraged at the theft of a bicycle. We would be astonished to find bank executives having lunch on our patio, (“actually, if you read the contract, you will see we own this part of your house-the whole yard actually. Hank's gone to get his barbeque.”) We would be unhappy to get a note from J. Crew telling us that the expiry date for your new shoes has been moved forward and that we must cease and desist in their public display. No, as we understand and feel it, we own these things as if ownership were outright and in perpetuity.

Ownership has this quality in part because the things we own are part of what Goffman would call our identity kit--they help define who we are, both inwardly and outwardly. Strip us of these things, and our lives become, as Lear put it, “cheap as beasts.” Naturally, we regard the most “telling” of our possessions as if they were strategic resources and we defend them as governments do. Our security depends on their security.

Link (Thanks, Manish!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:15:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, August 21, 2004

Survival Research Laboratories new DVD, new baby

The Bright Lights Film Journal reviews "Survival Research Laboratories: 10 Years of Robotic Mayhem," a documentary chronicling the first ten years of the pioneering machine art/performance group founded by Mark Pauline in 1978. SRL is an ad-hoc collective of brilliant engineers, including former BB guest blogger Karen Marcelo, who stage mind-blowing mechanized spectacles where "humans are present only as audience or operators." Check out the Bright Lights Film Journal article here.

Boing Boing offers our congratulations to dear friends Mark and Amy on the birth this week of Jake Edward Pauline, a feat of biomechanical engineering. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:50:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese children's books from 1920s

Click image for full-size. Browsing through this beautiful gallery of children's book illos from the '20s, I keep thinking about the fact that these were all created during a period just before Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a period of dramatic cultural change. If the people who read these books as children were around my own age group -- twenty or thirtysomething -- when the bombs dropped, maybe a hundred years from now, some young person will stumble on an "Electric Company" episode and think, "Wow, that's what the 9/11 generation was watching in their diapers" -- or whatever it is they'll call this current chunk of history. Some interesting analysis on this site. Snip:

"The children in Kodomo no kuni seem to be enjoying the pleasures of modern city life. There are Western-style houses, trains and cars running along busy streets, airplanes flying in the sky, and subways passing beneath a townscape bristling with skyscrapers. What is different from now is the energy and cheerfulness with which people seemed to be looking forward to the happy future that materialistic prosperity would surely bring."

Maybe those people 100 years ahead will look back on our enthusiasm for technology the same way. Someone in 2104 will take a break from watching Olympic nanorobotic doping scandal coverage on their ocular implants. They'll blink "pause," browse the BoingBoing archives, and think, "How quaint, how naive... If only those poor fin-de-siecle suckers had stopped at Perl."

Try opening two browser windows, side by side -- one with these amazing images, the other with some contemporary manga graphics -- and consider the strands of aesthetic DNA they share. Link to Kodomo no kuni (via MeFi)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:35:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Designer Zen

stream of consciousness
logo graveyard
bootleg objects
day60
nl design
the apartment
we fail
canon digital creators
bd4d
k10k

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

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:41:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Child Pimp & Ho Costumes"

Some company is selling "pimp" and "ho" costumes for kids. "Our child pimp daddy suit comes with panne jacket & matching pants. Pimp hat is sold seperately." Link (Thanks, Howard!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:41:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, August 20, 2004

No Waste, a booklet about Cuban recycling

Bruce Sterling sent me a copy of No Waste, a free booklet published by Pentagram Design about the ingenious re-use of stuff by Cubans. In a country where new appliances and vehicles are unheard of, resourceful people are turning soda cans into mousetraps, glue bottles into toy cars, plastic jugs into taxi lights, and fumigator engines into motorcycles. These "objects of necessity" are works of wonder. You can get a free copy of the book by emailing Pentagram. (They're out of copies!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:38:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bugmenot.com returns, spokesbugperson says some news sites trying to block it

Following up on the mystery surrounding Bugmenot.com's disappearance, Mr. Bugmenot himself delivers the following message to Boingboing readers via encrypted carrier pigeon:

"Our stinkin' host pulled the plug on us without notice (pretty obvious they were pressured somehow). But everything is sweet again- I've been in talk with our new hosts nearlyfreespeech.net -- they are very sympathetic to the cause and won't be pulling the plug on us again. Thanks for your support and concern but they are going to have to pry this site from my cold, dead hands :)

Also; this may be of interest -- evidence that some [registration-required] news sites are starting to use scripts to auto-disable accounts. The numbers in the column on the left represents the number of seconds since the last query."

Data: [ Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3 | Link 4 ]

Within minutes of reading this message, we learn that the site is once again online. Link (Thanks for spotting that, Jean-Luc.)

Update: An anonymous BoingBoing reader writes, "With regard to bugmenot leaving a host that sold racist paraphernalia -- their new web host provides service to a combat18 / redwatch site. combat18 is a british neonazi group. Redwatch is their hitlist, a site containing photos and addresses of people who have opposed them in the past including (bizarrely) internet mogul Danny O'Brien. [If they moved because] they didn't want to be blocked by censorship software... Bugmenot had better hope they're not on the same server this time." [Ed note: a banner ad on Redwatch plugs a hosting service identified as "Nigger Free Hosting," but the site does appear to live at nearlyfreespeech.net.]

Bugmenot responds to the BoingBoing update:

"1. Bugmenot was with our original hosting company. They pulled the plug.
2. Decided to move to dissidenthosting.com, redelegated.
3. Two days passed and I still couldn't access the dissidenthosting account + bad vibe so I redelegated again to nearlyfreespeech.net
4. Dissidenthosting decided to take advantage of the situation by redirecting traffic to a neo-nazi site of their choice while the redelegation took hold to nearlyfreespeech.net
5. Things have just about settled down now at our new host (nearlyfreespeech.net) and everything seems to be working out.
Personally, I don't care if I'm sharing a server with neo-nazis. I might not agree with what they have to say, but the whole thing about freedom of speech is that people are free to speak."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:11:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Appalshop: digital music for wired hillbillies

Earlier today, I was over at the NPR studios here in Los Angeles taping a segment for next week's "Day to Day" -- a conversation about MP3 blogs, with show host Noah Adams. He's an amazing newsman -- the former long-time co-host of All Things Considered -- and the author of Far Appalachia (read an excerpt).

We were talking about all of the ultra-obscure sorts of niche-niche-niche music that online services like MP3 blogs help people find, and he shared a story about an independent community media organization in eastern Kentucky devoted to serving the coalfield communities and the Appalachian region. Their radio station, WMMT (which streams online) specializes in bluegrass and oldtime. Evidently, one deejay there was well-known for maintaining an extensive collection of rare oldtime music -- on his iPod. He'd drive three hours to get to the station -- with his iPod -- and play material from it on-air. Kind of funny when you think about the nature of the music (by definition, old), and the nature of the medium (new). Sure beats lugging heavy crates of vinyl all around the mountains, though.

The media organization has a website, and a name: Appalshop (appal = short for appalachian, has nothing to do with Apple Computers). Plenty of interesting stuff there, including some documentary film projects.

And on a related note, Noah did an incredible segment not too long ago on Day to Day. Remember the story about "Dan," the homeless man in San Francisco who became a philanthropist after inheriting $200,000 from his mom? Turns out Noah tracked the guy down and had a series of conversations with him, which you can listen to here. It's nothing short of great radio.

Update: BoingBoing reader Steven Villereal says, "Funny that you posted that -- Anthology Film Archives in New York has a folk film festival, starting tomorrow, which features a lot of Appalshop stuff [as well as probably totally awesome Alan Lomax stuff]. Link."

Mec says, "I was a volunteer dj for WMMT a few years ago. We live in a commercial radio wasteland but WMMT is a bright shining light because they encourage individuality. Where else could you find a program entitled, Ralph Stanley, Time-Traveler? Heh."

And Petra says, "If you'd like a specific example of one of Appalshop's programs, check out Howard Berkes' feature on 'Holler to the Hood,' which brings rappers to Whitesburg to help the local kids learn to rhyme (full disclosure: I was his producer on the piece). Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:10:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russian sex doll rafting tournament

Saturday is the second annual inflatable sex doll raft race (aka Bubble Baba Challenge) in Russia. English story from Mosnews: Link. Photos from last year: Link (Thanks, Rob!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:09:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mmmmm... baby, you smell like Hummer.

What is the scent of a Hummer? Gasoline? Freshly detonated bombs plopped on an oil-rich country on the other side of the world? You'll find out soon -- the maker of supersized combat-cum-luxury vehicles is licensing the Hummer name to a line of mens' fragrances. Body wash, aftershave, and deodorant. Link (Thanks, Steve)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:04:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Guantanamo, New York

BoingBoing reader Jeremy says,

I was surprised to learn that a small Guantanamo-style detention center run by the Wackenhut corporation is in place mere blocks from my home. Somewhere around 200 detainees are housed in a non-descript warehouse somewhere in Springfield Gardens, Queens. I find it disturbing and distressing, especially now that they've gone on hunger strike, which is the only reason that I've learned that they are there.

Link

Update: Reader Chuck Welch says, "This isn't the first hunger strike at the Wackenhut Detention Center. You can find some information on last year's strike here: Link. The latest hunger strike has some information here: Link. And here's a good article about life at "Hotel Wackenhut": Link."

Update 2 BoingBoing reader David says, "I found more information about the Queens facility (pic, address, contracts, etc.) and some other history (articles) about the company, including a history of cases brought against them. In one of thier other facilities, a guard was charged with raping a young girl on a nightly basis. Link."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:03:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Senator Kennedy on "no-fly" list

Senator Ted Kennedy says he was denied boarding on three shuttle flights in one month, because he's on the federal "no-fly" list of terrorist suspects.

His aides had to call Tom Ridge three times to get taken off the list. Imagine how hard it would be for one of us lesser human beings to get taken off the list.

A Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman's explanation makes me even more nervous about the way things are being run be the feds. She "insisted Kennedy 'is not on the list, not now or ever. His name was similar to someone else's alias.'" [italics mine] Is it supposed to make us feel better that innocent people can be denied boarding for having a similar name to a suspected terrorist's alias? Link (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:48:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bugmenot "racism and hate" update -- and they'll be back

Following up on yesterday's post that corporate 'Net filtering service Websense was blocking the recently departed Bugmenot.com as a "Racism and Hate" site, BoingBoing reader Scott Lindsey says:

"I'm pretty sure I know what's up with that. Currently, bugmenot.com resolves to 69.93.251.37, which is probably an ISP server, with multiple sites. Reverse DNS results in ns2.dissidenthosting.com, which redirects http to www.micetrap.net (same IP address). It's a mail-order house for skinhead music and related paraphernalia. Also, according to the mozillazine forum originally linked to, bugmenot will be back up in a few days, now hosted by nearlyfreespeech.net."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:36:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ismyvirginmaryhotornot.com

Interesting OC Weekly story about censorship allegations surrounding an artist whose work sexualizes the Catholic icon of la Virgen de Guadalupe.

The controversy started on Aug. 1, when Ernesto Cienfuegos, editor of the Chicano nationalist website La Voz de Aztlan, attacked Fullerton Museum Center Director Joe Felz for including "decadent lesbian artist" Alma Lopez in a exhibition titled "The Virgin of Guadalupe: Interpreting Devotion."

Lopez has been the subject of outrage before. Her mixed-media effort Our Lady -- a piece re-imagining the Virgin as a sexy Chicana, roses strapped across her breasts and pelvic area, legs and a firm abdomen exposed for all her children to see -- provoked demonstrations when it debuted at a Santa Fe art gallery in 2001.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:06:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update: Iraq atrocities, medical professionals, and prisoner data

Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, reader Damo says,

A related editorial by Robert Jay Lifton entitled "Doctors and Torture" appeared in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the world's preeminent medical journal. In one passage, Lifton describes how military interrogators were given access to detainees' medical records, which were then used as tools in the interrogation process. He also discusses how doctors "brought a medical component to what I call an 'atrocity-producing situation...'"

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:04:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYC bash 09/21: Wired + CC + Byrne + Gilberto Gil

From the Creative Commons blog, news of what sounds like a very fun event next month in New York:

On Tuesday, September 21, 2004, Wired Magazine will throw a benefit for Creative Commons featuring a concert by David Byrne (with the Tosca Strings) and Gilberto Gil. It will take place at 8PM at The Town Hall in New York City. Proceeds from the concert will go to support the non-profit efforts of Creative Commons.

Tickets are available now from Ticketmaster or, after September 1st, at the Town Hall box office. If you're in NYC and want to help support the work of the Creative Commons, come on out and enjoy a great concert.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Public domain art contest from Duke University

Duke University Law School's Center for the Study of Public Domain is running a video contest with some cool prizes, and a nod to Creative Commons. The contest invites artists "to create a 2-minute moving image that explains to the public some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing particularly on either music or documentary film." Entry deadline is November 1, and some tasty, gadgety prizes are offered. Link (Thanks, Yo Vinny)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:49:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, August 19, 2004

Medical professionals complicit in Abu Ghraib torture, says bioethicist

Dr. Stephen Miles wrote a scathing editorial for UK medical journal The Lancet which says that U.S. military medical personnel were complicit in detainee torture incidents that took place in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to the University of Minnesota bioethicist, "The US military medical system failed to protect detainees' human rights, sometimes collaborated with interrogators or abusive guards, and failed to properly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings." Based on data gleaned from government documents, he details cases of alleged abuse participation by medical personnel, and calls for a formal inquiry.

There are isolated reports that medical personnel directly abused detainees. Two detainees' depositions describe an incident where a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to suture a prisoner's lacertation from being beaten. The medical system failed to accurately report illnesses and injuries. Abu Ghraib authorities did not notify families of deaths, sicknesses, or transfers to medical facilities as required by the Convention. A medic inserted a intravenous catheter into the corpse of a detainee who died under torture in order to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital. In another case, an Iraqi man, taken into custody by US soldiers was found months later by his family in an Iraqi hospital. He was comatose, had three skull fractures, a severe thumb fracture, and burns on the bottoms of his feet. An accompanying US medical report stated that heat stroke had triggered a heart attack that put him in a coma; it did not mention the injuries.

Death certificates of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq were falsified or their release or completion was delayed for months. Medical investigators either failed to investigate unexpected deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan or performed cursory evaluations and physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke, or natural causes without noting the unnatural aetiology of the death. In one example, soldiers tied a beaten detainee to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated that he died of "natural causes . . . during his sleep." After news media coverage, the Pentagon revised the certificate to say that the death was a "homicide" caused by "blunt force injuries and asphyxia."

Link to Miles' editorial in the August 21 edition of The Lancet (registration required; o bugmenot, where foreart thou?). Link to Washington Post story with partial synopsis of the report. Link to Miles' home page at the University of Minnesota Bioethics school, and Link to his latest book, The Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine, which looks like a worthy read.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monkey portrait photography

BoingBoing reader Darren says:

"Jill Greenberg is an accomplished celebrity photographer. Recently, though, she's turned her attention to another biped: monkeys. She discovered her affection for monkey portraits on a commercial, and started renting various species of trained primates and taking their photos as if they were A-list celebrities. The portraits express an amazing range of emotion, and are way more interesting that your average celebrity pic."

Link to Jill's website, with photos of monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates. You may also recall that totally gorgeous cover she shot for Wired Magazine's September, 2003 issue (The New Diamond Age): Link. LA-dwellers: the monkey images and other new works will be on exhibit starting October 23 at Paul Kopeikin Gallery on Wilshire.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:47:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gmail notifier helper-apps

"Gmail Notifier" is a downloadable Windows application from Google that alerts Gmail users to the presence of new incoming messages. The app displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets -- without your having to open a web browser. Link (Thanks, ritilan)

Update: BoingBoing reader Oscar Bartos says, "There's an freeware program for Macs that acts like the Gmail notifier, Gmailstatus. Personally I'm fond of Gmailto, which redirects "mailto:" links to Gmail. It's available in PC and Mac flavors: Link, and Link 2. " And BoingBoing reader Nate says, "This site has a Gmail notifier extension for Mozilla/Firefox: Link" And an anonymous reader points us to yet another Gmail helper app -- Gcount.

Update 2: Hey, you know what I could really go for right now? Some Gmail helper apps! BoingBoing reader Mincus says, "Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader has more -- Link. And there are still more at Gmailwiki.com"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:45:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of super-weird Australian rock band zen

BoingBoing reader Mike says:

Aussie band Regurgitator ("the 'gurge") are planning to record their fifth full-length album locked inside a plastic bubble in the middle of Melbourne's Federation Square. The stunt is to be broadcast and webcast from August 31 to September 21. Hopefully it will be a return to form from the band who gave the world such classics as "I Sucked a Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am" and "Blubber Boy".

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:34:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF wins Grokster! Software doesn't have to be easy for Hollywood to wiretap!

I'm supposed to be on holidays from blogging this week, but this is too important not to blog RIGHT NOW.

EFF has won its Grokster case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- this is the case that establishes that if you make truly decentralized P2P software -- like Gnutella -- you can't be held liable for any copyright infringement that takes place on their networks. This is the "Betamax principle," from the famous Supreme Court case that established that Sony wasn't responsible for any infringement that its customers undertook with their VCRs.

The Studios' argument was that people who make P2P software should be obliged to build it in such a way as to make it easy to police -- i.e. not on Gnutella-like lines -- an idea so sickeningly dumb that it's a tremendous relief that the court refused to buy it.

Now is a good time to download the 16MB MP3 audio of EFF IP Attorney Fred von Lohmann's oral argument in the appeal -- he was nothing less than brilliant (and it didn't hurt that one of the shmendricks representing the rights-holders kept forgetting the judge's name). This is some of the best courtroom drama you'll ever hear, and when you're done, download the PDF of the decision below and rejoice in our freedom.

I don't often shill for donations to EFF here on Boing Boing, but if there is one day this year that you make a tax-deductible donation to the organization that just won the right to write any software you damn well please, even if it's not amenable to being wiretapped by the record labels, today is it.

It's a good day.

"The Copyright Owners urge a re-examination of the law in the light of what they believe to be proper public policy, expanding exponentially the reach of the doctrines of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. Not only would such a renovation conflict with binding precedent, it would be unwise. Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the Copyright Owners’ immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context.

"Further, as we have observed, we live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation. AT&T Corp. v. City of Portland, 216 F.3d 871, 876 (9th Cir. 1999). The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well established distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player.Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.

"Indeed, the Supreme Court has admonished us to leave such matters to Congress. In Sony-Betamax, the Court spoke quite clearly about the role of Congress in applying copyright law to new technologies. As the Supreme Court stated in that case, “The direction of Art. I is that Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. When, as here, the Constitution is permissive, the sign of how far Congress has chosen to go can come only from Congress.” 464 U.S. at 456 (quoting Deepsouth Packing Co. v. Laitram Corp., 406 U.S. 518, 530 (1972))."

128k PDF Link

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

This is not a fetish post

To appease to the handful of BoingBoing readers who protested yesterday's overabundance of marginally worksafe gadget/girl fetish photo posts, I offer -- here it comes, folks -- a Japanese collector's huge, obsessively-organized gallery of backpacker cooking stoves. Guaranteed 100% babe-free. But it's a big internet; chances are that someone, somewhere is super-turned-on by this. Link (Thanks, jared).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:53:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bay Area UFO Expo

Tighten up your tinfoil beanie thong and lock up the kryptonite -- The 6th Annual Bay Area UFO Expo happens August 28-29 in Santa Clara, California.

Hot new reports on UFOs, ETs, Abductions, Encounters, Crop Circles, Earth Mysteries, Conspiracies and more! We wish to welcome all new-comers and for those who have been with us before, we want to thank you for your continued support. Joining us again this year with hot new data about Mars and the mysterious Coral Castle is Richard C. Hoagland who, in addition to his lecture, will give two amazing workshops. Jordan Maxwell, our guest of honor for the weekend, will share his knowledge on the ET presence dating back to the ancient world and it's implications for today's world.

Link (Thanks, Captain Todd Lappin!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:45:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ourTunes

A Java program intended to kick the proverbial ass of MyTunes. Its developers say, "If you like it -- give us beer money, we're broke college students." Released under GPL; sourcode and executable app are available for download here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:40:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Birthday, D&D

BoingBoing reader Ateo says:

Dungeons & Dragons turns 30 this year and tonight is the start of GenCon too. NPR did a story, and Gamespy is doing tons of articles on the history of the game this week as well.

Link to the official D&D site

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:29:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Deep Links - Hypocrite, Thy Name Is Real

Copyfight spokesmodel Donna Wentworth says:

RealNetworks put a link to Fred von Lohmann criticizing Apple's FairPlay on its "Freedom of Music Choice" campaign website homepage. But something tells me it may decide to veto Fred's response - a scathing critique of Real's miserable record for promoting customer choice via interoperability.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:25:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What happened to Bugmenot

As mentioned here last night, Bugmenot is now, well, not. A recent post on the MozillaZine forums by someone understood to be the admin for Bugmenot.com says:

"Our host pulled the plug. I reckon they were pressured. If anyone has got some secure, preferably offshore hosting in mind then please let us know so we can get the service back up as soon as possible."

Link (Thanks, Michael)

Update: Several BoingBoing readers wrote in to say something like this, from reader Bryan Swain: "I don't have the inside scoop on what happened to BugMeNot, but thought you might find this interesting. I've used the site in the past from work with no trouble, but as of today, it is blocked (our company uses WebSense filtering). I get a message saying that the site is blocked by the "Racism and Hate" category... figure that one out! The WebSense site has a section where you can see what sites fall into what categories and suggest changes, but, ironically enough, you have to register to use those areas. No thanks."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:15:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elmer Bernstein, 1922-2004

BB mourns the loss of soundtrack composer Elmer Bernstein, the artist behind the classic scores for The Magnificent Seven, The Man With The Golden Arm, The Great Escape, and even modern-day comedies like Airplane! and Stripes. Bernstein studied under Aaron Copland before relocating to Tinseltown in 1950. That same decade, his career was almost ruined during the Hollywood Red Hunt when a congressional subcommittee demanded that Bernstein, a well-known liberal, name names of film industry commies. Blacklisted from the big studios, he composed for B movies including Cat Women of the Moon and Robot Monster. Finally, Cecil B. De Mille gave Bernstein a shot at the score of The Ten Commandments when the original composer became ill. Bernstein earned his first Oscar nomination for that work.

"Film music, properly done, should give the film a kind of emotional rail on which to ride," Bernstein said in 2001. "Without even realizing that you're listening to music that's doing something to your emotions, you will have an emotional experience."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:50:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Painless prick

Approved by the FDA yesterday, the SonoPrep blasts the skin with painless ultrasonic energy to make it more permeable. The SonoPrep technology, developed by MIT researchers, uses low-frequency, ultrasonic energy to push open tiny channels in the skin for fluids to be extracted and delivered.

"A painless 15-second treatment by the new device, followed by an application of lidocaine cream, will anesthetize the skin in five minutes. By itself, lidocaine takes one hour to work...Because the method is simple and painless, and speeds up the action of lidocaine—a topical anesthetic commonly used in pediatrics and on critically ill adults and children who must endure repeated needle sticks—it could become standard procedure in doctor’s offices and hospitals. Another use would be before painful procedures such as angiography, balloon angioplasty, and the insertion of venous catheters."

The scientists predict that in the next five years, the same ultrasonic technique could be used to take the prickly pain out of routine vaccinations. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:28:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cobble-bone streets

When construction workers in Oslo dug a drainage ditch around a church in the "Old City" district, they uncovered a slew of skeletons little more than a foot below the surface. According to an Aftenposten Norway article, the skeletons likely belong to the former tenants of a Dominican monastery located in the area from 1240 until 1537.

"Before the Reformation the most blessed resting spots were awarded hierarchically and could be bought. The best plots lay under the holy water that drained off the church roof and dripped onto the ground below... The skeletons also bear witness to medieval times as an age of violence. Many of the bones reveal notches that must have resulted from brutal force."

Link (via Fark)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:12:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New eBay RSS Generator

Today, Chris Pirillo announces the launch of "a much-better eBay-to-RSS generator. Our exit strategy is to have one big code auction in a few years." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:35:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

RIP, bugmenot.com

Bugmenot appears to have been taken offline by its creators. The site served as a clearinghouse for shared passwords to registration-required websites. Subscription-based website owners despised it, hassle-hating 'net users loved it. No word on what happened (bugmenot peeps: talk to me, honey), but I'd bet dollars to downloads that lawyers were involved. (via MeFi)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:01:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stealth Lynndie-ing

In this warped variant of stealth disco, you strike the cigarette-dangling-from-mouth, finger-points-at-exposed-prisoner-genitalia pose made famous by Pfc. Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib torture photos. As a website devoted to Stealth Lynndie-ing explains, "The image has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women up and down the country who don't give much of a shit about anything."

I'm not sure what's more disturbing about this online photo gallery -- (a) the fact that people are sick enough do this, photograph this, publish it on the web, and think it's funny; (b) the fact that I'm blogging about it, or (c) the fact that Lynndie England bears a striking resemblance to the fellow in the photo at left. Photo gallery featuring dozens of anonymous people "striking a Lynndie": Link (Thanks, Doug)

Update: BoingBoing reader Dave says, "This picture taken by Kefin Smith during the production of the movie Dogma proves that the first true 'Stealth Lynndie' occurred years before the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Specifically, it occurred in the movie Dogma: here's the 'Buddy Christ' giving what appears to be a Stealth Lynndie to the camera. Link"
(Ed. note: Technically, He needs a lit cigarette in order for this to be considered an actual Stealth Lynndie -- but in light of the fact that the Lord prefers to smite instead of smoke, we will consider this an immaculate exception. Did we mention that as of 7:10pm PT, www.stealthlynndie.com remains available?)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:15:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yahoo launches a search blog

Following in John Battelle's footsteps (ripping off the title of his Searchblog?), Yahoo just launched "Search Blog," about -- surprise -- the business of search. Link to A look inside the world of search from the people of Yahoo!. (Thanks, jean-luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:58:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snapshots from Coop art show debut in LA

Images from a new gallery show at sixspace featuring underground art superstar Coop, whose work I was first exposed to in the form of a devil-babe tattoo on the back of an ex-boyfriend.

Parts with Appeal is Coop's first gallery exhibit in about five years. For the show, he constructed one contiguous acrylic canvas 78 feet long which contains four separate panels each comprised of a series of 6' x 6' paintings. The snapshots look fantastic, and I can't wait to see the work in person.

Link to images and more info on the sixspace show in LA, and link to more info and merch from the mighty Coop.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:31:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Freedom to Tinker Crypto Report

Boingboing buddy Eli the Bearded says:

Freedom to Tinker is reporting that two groups have signifcantly damaged the current leaders in cryptographic hashes. A French team has found collisions in a weakened form of the SHA-1 hash, which can probably be extended to the full SHA-1; and a Chinese team has found an out and out clash in MD5.

What does this mean? Well the hashes are digital abstracts from some input value (eg file) that are used to verify that the input value is unmodified. Due to the size of the hashes it has always been known that clashes would occur, but it was hoped that finding one would be impossible due to the large size of the hash space and the complexity of the generation process. Now that hope is shattered.

These hashes are used to verify integrity of downloaded programs, integrity of https site certificates, in pgp/gpg keys, etc. In other words lots of modern crytography is going to feel the waves from this.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:02:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spacesuit Fetish photos

See what happens when all of my co-editors go on vacation? There goes the bloggerhood. Here, I present to you obsessively-organized and allegedly arousing fetish galleries of girls wearing spacesuits.Link. From the same geek wacko perverts people who brought you two equally tittilating galleries of scuba fetish photos and deep-sea diving fetish photos, here. (Thanks, oscar)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:57:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Headphone Fetish photos

More sexualized gadgetry. For some very special people, photos of chicks wearing headphones are personally exciting. This online photo gallery features obsessively-organized pictures of mostly clothed girls wearing headphones and construction headsets.Link (Thanks, danski)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:54:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indian state rolls out wireless broadband

The Indian state of Kerala has launched a wireless broadband service that will provide rural residents with 'Net connectivity that would otherwise be impossible via landline or cellular services.

The community Internet kiosks, named Akshaya, have been set up by the Kerala State IT Mission Department. More than 550 of the kiosks have been opened in the Mallapuram district, spread over 3,500 square kilometers. The local government plans to introduce kiosks in other districts later this year. The centers will offer services such as Internet access, Net-based phoning and videoconferencing to state offices as well as private businesses. Five Wi-Fi hotspots have also been established around government offices and a tourist resort.

"This is the world's biggest rural wireless network," H.S. Bedi, managing director of Tulip IT Services, said at the launch. "The decision to provide a completely wireless solution was dictated by the Mallapuram's rugged terrain. Other options could have been leased lines or cable or fiber--all of which would have involved digging and would have been more difficult as well as more expensive to roll out."

Link to ZDnet story.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:34:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toaster Fetish photos

I can't tell whether this "Toaster Fetish" kitchen appliance porn gallery is parody or straightahead smut. Either way, someone out there in this big wide world is probably wanking off to it. Atkinserotica is so five minutes ago. Clearly, the hot-buttered temptation of Porn Bread has arrived. Who can resist her sultry, carb-hither gaze? Link to Fleshbot post, NSFW.

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

Hurricane Charley report from Q-Burns Abstract Message

Famed DJ and friend of BoingBoing Michael Donaldson, aka QBurns Abstract Message, had just returned from tour in Eastern Europe last week when the hurricane hit his home in Florida. Electricity is still out in many places, so he's hiding out in his recording studio with a dial-up connection and a hamster-powered laptop to e-mail us this report. Image: snapshot of a frightened cat coming out of hiding a couple days after the storm.

The winds here in Orlando were at about 90 MPH when it hit. The was a lot of destruction, but somehow my house and property ended up completely unscathed. The worst part lasted 45 minutes. I just sat in the dark with my cat and a bottle of wine watching the whole thing out the window. It was really crazy. Saw the trees flapping around and then I kept seeing flashes of blue and green in the sky ... I thought this was some strange lightning but found out later it was actually electrical transformers exploding across the neighborhood. Wow.

I've been through at least 3 hurricanes in my life and have never seen anything like this either. The city is like a warzone with debris and fallen trees and power lines everywhere. It was starting to get cleaned up as I left home yesterday, so hopefully when I return all will be back to normal. I can't even imagine what it looks like down south in the Ft. Meyers area, which received the full force of the storm. It actually weakened a bit before it hit central Florida.

My business partner has a 30 foot tree laying in his backyard. Another friend has a tree about that big in his swimming pool (no idea how he'll get that out). Yet another friend lives in a neighborhood that is in a 'dead end' road. A huge tree has fallen in the path of their only exit, and they can only leave by foot. I guess I got off easy. None of us have any power, though.

The storm was followed by eerie silence and the even eerier sight of my neighborhood residents walking the lightless streets, Night Of The Living Dead-style, surveying the damage. A friend of mine owned a bar that miraculously had power so after a few phone calls we convened there 90 minutes after the hurricane's end. About 60 people showed and I started playing records and doing vodka shots. This had the makings of a really nice party as a ton of frustration and stress was being expelled by all. We were stopped at about 1 AM by a number of cops who claimed the city was in a state of emergency and there was a curfew in effect all over the city. We either left the party or we were to be arrested. Thus we were ordered to tipsily navigate the darkened, traffic light-less, wreckage covered streets to our hot, powerless, and, in some cases, devastated homes. You think the 'man' would give us a break.

Photo galleries from the Orlando Sentinel: images part one, images part two. And here's a gallery of personal snaps from Maria, one of the "hurricane party" attendees (owner of the frightened cat above): Link. Bonus: a brand new Q-Burns Abstract Message DJ mix available for online listening and/or download -- Link

Update: an anonymous BB reader sends in this wmv file -- a composite of time-lapse stills of Hurricane Charley hitting Florida over the span of about seven hours. Link. And via Poynter, an interesting essay on the power of TV infographics in the eye of a storm: "Radar Love." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:50:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I F**CKED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A**: UPDATE

Recently on BoingBoing, I blogged about Hollywood space oddity Dessarae Bradford, spotted at the Erotic LA convention hawking a self-published book titled I FU*KED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S -- a first-person autobiographical account of an alleged starfucking incident. Flashback to the liner notes:

"In Sept. 2002, I fu**ed Alec Baldwin in his a** in a hot, sweaty, nasty sex romp. Read the story that will change lives. Be the first one on your block to have the nitty gritty about that night, that will be only told in my book. Grab the scoop before my story gets into the hands of the media, and they attemp to censor it. I had Alec Baldwin on all four's for me, and S/M was involved. Read the real story. Tell everyone you know about this site. Free Baldwin brothers, and family photos come with this book, and a free I FU**ED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A** bumper sticker too."

Ladies, gentlemen, and happy mutants, I'm now shocked -- shocked I say -- to share this e-mail from BoingBoing reader Karl Lautman:

"Yeah, well I got F**cked in the A**, too. I thought the book would make a great gift for a few people I know, though only for the title, so I ordered 3 copies @ $20 per. What arrived were 3 copies of My S/M Romp with Alec Baldwin, a title I find completely forgettable, and even these were crappy, spiral-bound, Kinko's affairs. I was very disappointed and e-mailed the author as much; haven't heard back, of course."

Sorry, Karl. To any other BoingBoing readers who may have been pondering this literary investment -- caveat online emptor, dude.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:31:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iraqi heavy metal band

Looks like they've found those weapons of mass destruction. WSJ article about Iraqi heavy metal outfit Acrassicauda, and what life is like trying to obliterate audiences with satanic soundwaves after the fall of Saddam.

The members of Acrassicauda honed their English by singing along to black-market Megadeth and Metallica CDs. They developed their stage moves by copying what they saw on pirated videotapes of American rock concerts. Now they're learning a different lesson: the difficulties of reviving culture and entertainment in a society ripped apart by war.

The four members of Acrassicauda, which means Black Scorpion in Latin, hope they can prove just as resilient. The young men -- Mr. Talal, bassist Faris al-Lateef, drummer Marwan Mohammad Riyak and guitarist Tony Aziz -- met as high-school students and formed the band, along with another member, in 2000. Scions of prominent families, they were drawn together by their love of Western heavy-metal bands like Slayer and Judas Priest, which appealed to their feelings of isolation and disillusionment.

"It's about feeling powerless and lonely and wanting to scream out because no one else is paying attention to what you're feeling," says Mr. Lateef, 23, who has spiky hair, a goatee and tinted sunglasses that he wears indoors. "The songs were sung by Americans but they could easily have been written by us as Iraqis."

Link, more here via Channel One News (Thanks, Ollie)

Update: BoingBoing reader Eric Eberhardt says, "There's a (slightly) more sensationalistic article about these guys in last February's Vice -- Link." Photo above by Gideon Yago, from the Vice article.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:17:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What are the cool kids in Harajuku wearing?

Glad you asked. Link to an online photo gallery with street snapshots from Harajuku station in Tokyo. (Thanks, Todd!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:16:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NFG Games' QR Code Generator

BoingBoing reader Lawrence says:

In Japan the QRCode is becoming wildly popular, for everyone with a celphone has a camera that can read these 2D barcodes and inst-o-magically input pre-formatted emails, contacts, URLs and even random text. I've put together a script, suitable for Mozilla sidebar or Opera panel fun, that generates QRCodes for any purpose, including Vodafone + DoCoMo (I-mode) formatted shortcuts. Create and share - they're like modern hieroglyphics!

Link

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

Antarctic blog picks, including South Pole co-ed Jell-o wrestling

BoingBoing reader and South Pole resident F. Scott Robert points us to some short story entries on his Antarctic weblog:

* Presumably crazed from winter darkness, the station manager at South Pole punishes crewmember for Photoshop know-how: Link
* Winter Jello-wrestling at McMurdo Station: Link
* The Antarctic Scurvy Awareness Program, in which I offer rewards to Antarcticans for contracting scurvy: Link

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:02:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Watchmen comic remixes

So wrong: Something Awful re-captions selections from Watchmen. Link (thanks, Zed)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:58:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Earthlink's crazy-talking support staff

It looks like Earthlink has hired performance artists to staff its live online help department. Look at the fine job "Val P" did in pretending to be a gobbledegook-spewing support worker. Matt, who only wants Earthlink to send him a modem, says he has read it twice and still can't make sense of it.

Val P: I am sorry, but the tracking number is not generated yet.

Matt: WHAT? Matt: This was supposed to have been shipped over a week ago

Val P: The tracking number available is 1Z6R1W530240197995.

Matt: and it says that it was shipped or billed on July 27

Matt: 2nd day air

Matt: it's Aug 9

Val P: Yes, you are correct.

Matt: well why hasn't it been shipped, this is getting ridiculous

Val P: But the tracking number for the new modem is not generated. As the shipping method is in 2 day, it should be generated in 2 days.

Matt: so it still hasn't been shipped?

Val P: I am sorry, it is not yet shipped.

Matt: why?????????

Val P: The request has been sent to the appropriate department to send you the kit. I request you to wait for 2 days.

Matt: this is getting ridiculous, it has now been almost a month since I had service and at least 2 if not 3 weeks since the new modem was requested and supposed to have been shipped out

Val P: I am sorry for the inconvenience caused to you in this regard.

Matt: are you able to look up the trouble ticket number on this complaint? i do not have it handy and would like to discuss this over the phone with someone

Val P: Kindly hold on, while I check it.

Val P: Thank you for being on hold.

Val P: I see that a new request has been sent to the appropriate department on 08/05/04 to send you the new kit. I suggest you to wait for 2 to 3 days until you receive the kit.

Matt: an additional 2-3 days? from today?

Val P: No, it is from the date the request has been sent.

Matt: today is the 9th

Matt: 8/5 plus 2-3 days would be the 7th or 8th

Val P: Yes, you are correct.

Matt: so why isn't there a modem here, or at the very least a tracking number?

Val P: I request you to wait for 2 days please as the request is already sent.

Matt: so not from the 5th but from today

Val P: Yes please.

Val P: Let me know if you have any further issues to help you with.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:30:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mary-Kate Olsen's "Crack-Man"

Link to Flash game by Liquid Generation (via Defamer)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:18:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Verizon customer sadism, how may I torment you?"

In his latest Good Experience newsletter, Mark Hurst describes his not-so-good experience with Verizon's customer service department:

Rep 1: "Uhh, Mr. Hurst, looks like there's a wiring issue. I'll connect you with the DSL Office." (put on hold)

Rep 2: "No, it's not a wiring issue. The problem is that there's someone else's name on your account, and we have to reset your entire account to clear it. I'll connect you with someone who'll do that for you." (put on hold)

Rep 3: "I have no idea what they're talking about. 'Reset your entire account' - what did they mean by that? I'm going to put you on hold..."

At some point during the interminable hold, the call was dropped (either by Verizon or my AT&T-powered cell phone) and I called back, starting over again. I explained my issue to the new rep (#4), and asked to speak to a manager. She agreed, and sent me to... a brand new service rep (#5), not a manager, who delivered the punch line: "I'm sorry, we have no record of your phone number."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:40:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why I love the intarweb, part umptybillion: pho soup blogs

A weblog all about the yummy Vietnamese soup known as pho. Meat, spices, noodles, fresh herbs, and magical broth. When it's really good, it's like an angel up in heaven just peed into your bowl. This foodstuff is so versatile and bitchin', you can even get your Atkins on by just asking your waiter to hold the noodles. Genius, I know! A Vietnamese-American software developer pal once tried to teach me how to say the word properly -- most Americans butcher the word into something that sounds like foe. He told me, "Just say 'fuck' without the 'ck,' but try sort of curl your voice up in pitch and tone a bit at the end." I never got the phonics right, but I still dig the pho. Link (Thanks, Joshua)

Update: BoingBoing reader John Horner says, "Whoever told you how to pronounce pho was making it all too difficult. The comma stuck in the side of the O makes it an ur sound and the question mark above it means it's pronounced as a question: fur?. Imagine yourself as an animal rights activist presented with a fur coat. My wife is Vietnamese, if that helps, and Vietnamese is a bit of a mess orthographically because it was translated from Chinese ideograms into French by a Portuguese guy."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:30:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to get something on Boing Boing

A quick reminder of two things:

1. I'm on holidays this week

2. I never blog stuff that's emailed to me. If you're interested in seeing something on Boing Boing, use the Submit a Site form.

Thanks!

Cory

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecam pics accepted as court evidence in China

It was inevitable:

Beijing Haidian People's Court yesterday held a session in a case that involves Mr. Wu Mingming, a furniture manufacturer, who had bilked two students' parents of about RMB180000 by pretending he was a secretary of an Education Minister in China. One of the students submitted a photo taken with a mobile phone as evidence. The photo is a small one, but it shows one of the parents handing money to the defendant, Mr. Wu. The parent said he took the photo because Mr. Wu refused to give him an invoice, and he was afraid he would be cheated.

So far, no judgment has been made in the case. This is the first documented time that mobile phone photos have been submitted as evidence in a court in Beijing.

Link (Thanks, James Tyre!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:57:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Warren Ellis moblogs from TV production set

Warren Ellis is blogging from the set of GLOBAL FREQUENCY. This graphic novel of Warren's is becoming a WB TV series; shooting is under way in Canada and the end result is slated to air in March, 2005. From time to time, he lifts his head out of that trough of cold Red Bull long enough to futurephone a blog entry about how bizarre the whole experience is. The result? A magnificently good online read. His permalinks are b0rked right now, and this may have something to do with the fact he's posting from his Treo -- so just go to the main page, find August 11's post, and work your way forward in time from there. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:38:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Breakdancing photos

BoingBoing reader Paul McEvoy saw this series of photos I shot for an NPR radio segment about urban dance competitions -- and points us to his own gallery of "pictures of breakdancers on the street in Boston and Cambridge." Nice shots, Paul! Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:56:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Stingray

Schwinn has re-issued its original Sting-Ray street bike. The 2004 models are available with the classic banana seat frame or in a new chopped Harley-esque low-rider design. Too bad they don't offer a sissy bar option, probably a safety decision to avoid encouraging Evil Knievel-style wheelies. Link (Thanks, C-Lo!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:45:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mexican cops get themselves chipped

The government of Mexico is RFID-tagging police in order to combat record high levels of kidnapping and disappearances. About 170 officers are said to have been subcutaneously tagged in their arms with microchips about the size of a rice grain of rice. The chip grants them access to a crime database and becomes a tracking tool in case they're kidnapped.

The first-of-its-kind step shows the lengths to which the Mexican government will go to try to bring safety to the streets. Crime - and how to fight it - has long been a challenge here. Kidnapping is spreading, reaching beyond traditional wealthy targets to the middle class. And in a country where only a quarter of all crimes are reported because of fear that bribed cops will expose informants, securing access to sensitive documents has become a priority.

The chip comes from VeriChip, a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions of Palm Beach, Fla. The device is nonremovable (though it can be deactivated) and is slipped under the skin in seconds via a syringe-like device. The chip costs $200, plus $50 a year, in addition to the scanner and software. The technology has existed for years and was originally developed to let pet owners identify stray animals.

The chip sits dormant under the skin and is only "awakened" by a scanner using radio- frequency identification, or RFID. The scanner emits a signal that powers the chip, allowing it to send its identification number. Then, depending on the configuration of the database that is hooked up to the scanner, a door is opened or a database unlocked, the way an ID card allows employees into the office.

Link to news article, and Link to Verichip home (via politech)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:41:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woodring animated

Ever since I interviewed artist Jim Woodring back in 1995 for the bOING bOING Happy Mutant Handbook, I've been enamored with his surreal comix inspired by his childhood hallucinations and "psychological malfunctions." Now, Taruto Fuyama has animated Woodring's Frank character in a beautiful piece that somehow manages to perfectly express the dreamy tone and emotion of the comic. (Someone else's attempt here.) Fuyama won a Prize of Excellence for the work in the Japan Media Arts Festival. The animation is online in Real format. From the "Reason for the Award":

"...the greatest appeal of this work is that it had successfully expressed unique "newness" by combining 3D-CG and classical cartoon-like design. Alien creatures created by pasting comic frames to 3D-CG in a Gothic manner generate uncomfortable feelings, and these uncomfortable feelings that color the entire work feature this work's contemporary sensitivity."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:33:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microbatteries for wireless sensor networks

My latest TheFeature article is about ways to make tiny batteries last for years.

At Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., researchers are trying to make a nuclear-powered battery with a very long life span. They've built prototype batteries that use a speck of nickel-63 (a radioactive isotope) to vibrate a tiny cantilever. The cantilever could be made from a piece of piezoelectric material, which could supply power to the sensor. Nickel-63 has a half-life of around 100 years, so it could provide power for several decades. Nukes make people nervous, but there's not enough radioactive material in the prototype to cause a mini-meltdown -- it's comparable to the amount found in a smoke detector. Still, researchers acknowledge that they have a perception problem to overcome.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:06:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness

Alex sez: [Here's] a site consisting of scans from "wacky, bizarre, surreal and otherwise strange examples of technical documentation". Submissions are welcome. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:43:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Carroll's Jabberwocky as ActionScript code

These enterprising geeks have translated Lewis Carroll's classic poem Jabberwocky (the first poem I ever memorised!) into ActionScript. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:26:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, August 16, 2004

Explosive sink and toilet plunger is a gift from the gods

I went to Home Depot over the weekend to buy two dollar's worth of hardware (pins for door hinges) and walked out with over $100 worth of stuff, of course. My prime pruchase was something called a KleerDrain instant drain opener, which combines the fun of explosives with the satisfaction of unclogging a sink.

I was a little wary of spending $30 on this gadget, which looks like a cross-between a plunger and a pogo stick. But Home Depot had one of those videos running next to the set-up, which showed clogged sink after clogged sink giving up its precious bolus of greasy hair to the explosive force of a CO2 cartridge unleashing its entire payload at once. Watching the guy on the demo using the device, with its rifle-like kickback and puff of condensed carbon dioxide gas, mesmerized me. The next thing I knew, I was racing home with my new KleerDrain.

I could hardly wait to use it on a slow-draining sink in the bathroom. I duct taped the overflow drain on the sink, and inserted a CO2 cartridge into the Kleer Drain. I screwed on the rubber cone and then pressed it into the drain opening.

WHAM! A shower of gray grime flew out of somewhere and splashed against the walls, mirror and ceiling. I wiped the junk off my face and turned on the faucet. The water whooshed down the drain, ending with a nice sucking sound, like it was wishing there were more water it could dispose of.

I think I'm in love. Time to stock up on more CO2 cartridges. Link

UPDATE Chris sez: Just a quick note regarding your drain cleaning story. I own a device called a Profi Pipe Cleaner. It is basically the same thing, but you pump it up and pull the trigger to release the blast, rather than having to buy CO2 cartridges. It has much the same effect, as did watching the demo on QVC.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:02:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ticketek's PR blunder

Alan of halfpie.net slammed Ticketek's website ( a New Zealand company) and a Ticketek employee, posing as a semi-literate Ticketek customer, posted a note on Alan's blog, defending Ticketek. Alan exposed "Simone," who then quietly slithered away.

I have to disagree with u all i stumbled onto this website by mistake and i cant belive all the rubbish im reading ticketek is a great web site and service who have continued to give me great service over the years there is always somethinh for people like you to moan about so get a life!!!
- posted by Simone at August 10, 2004 03:28 PM

=====

Well of course you would say that, Simone - seeing as you work at Ticketek.

Everytime a comment is made on this site the IP address of the commenter is logged. Yours is 210.54.93.30, which by an uncanny co-incidence belongs to auck.ticketek.co.nz. Funnily enough it looks like you came to this site through "accidentally" entering "I hate Ticketek" into Google, the same search that has been used by you and your Australian counterparts to find this page several times in the past month.

Your ignorance in these matters is amusing and sad and unfortunately appears par for the course with your company. Your rather ill-advised comment further reinforces the lack of respect I have Ticketek and further demonstrates why your website - and your business - should be avoided as much as possible.

Have a nice day.
- posted by Alan at August 10, 2004 05:07 PM

Link (Thanks, Brett!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:40:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Peter Bagge on contemporary art

Peter Bagge's excellent 4-page comic strip rant on the state of contemporary art, in Reason. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:15:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boing Boing reader survey results

Thanks to the 3360 people who took our Boing Boing reader survey! We will use this information for good, not evil. Here are the results. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:07:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Sterling's keynote from SIGGRAPH '04

A BoingBoing exclusive: the full text of Bruce Sterling's brilliant keynote speech delivered last week at the 2004 edition of SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. Snip:

Steve Jobs is a pioneer of personal computing and the head of Pixar. Apple is the biggest vendor here. It's hard to get any more SIGGRAPH than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has neuroendocrinal pancreatic cancer. That's because, like everybody else in the world, like you and like me, Steve Jobs is carrying a load of carcinogens in his flesh. Silicon Valley, as an industrial clean-up site, is rather well known for its mutagens.

The disturbing substances that are in the body of this captain of your industry, they should not be in there. They are wasted resources, they are systemic inefficiencies, they are externalities. We need ways to keep these substances organized and contained, and, eventually, designed out of the production system entirely. Steve is sick for physical reasons, for metabolic reasons. We may not know the exact chains of cause and effect, but there is one; he's not sick because some dark angel blew on his dice wrong. He has effluent, byproducts of industry, inside his body.

It's painful. But we need to understand that our bloodstreams are our dumping grounds. So are our lungs and our livers. If we could visualize that, if we knew and could prove what had gone wrong inside of ourselves, if we could put a digital medical imaging screen on our bellies, our lungs and our livers, and make those invisible problems visible, then everything would become different. If that knowledge was attached to every object in our possession, the objects that were killing us would vanish quickly.

That wouldn't be easy to do. But in the year 2004 it is no longer unimaginable. It could be done. It's possible to live in a cleaner way. We live in debris and detritus because of our ignorance. That ignorance is no longer technically necessary. Those who know, know. Instead, our problem is becoming obscurantism, which is a deliberate hiding of the facts by vested interests who know they are injuring us. Such acts of evil must be combated. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Link to complete text. Photo at left from a series of snapshots I took of Mr. Sterling earlier this year in LA. (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:01:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I hate this digital video recorder: Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 8000

I can't begin to say how much I despise the Explorer 8000 digital video recorder made by Scientific-Atlanta. That's the system Time-Warner gave us when my wife signed us up for cable service a few weeks ago. I was out of town on the day they were scheduled to install it, so I told my wife to make sure the DVR was real TiVo, because I'd played with a TiVo belonging to my friend, and thought it was just about perfect. The service tech came and told her it was real TiVo. When I got back and saw that the ugly box didn't have a happy bipedal TV set logo on it, I was disappointed, but willing to give it a try. The first thing I noticed was the crappy user interface. Unlike TiVo, there's no audible signal when you press a button. And because it takes a couple of seconds after pressing a button for anything to happen on the screen, I often press the button twice, thinking the first press didn't go through. What happens when you press a button twice is that you see the result on the screen for a split second before it disappears, because the second press cancels the first press. That means I have to press the button a third time, and wait another mini-eternity for something to happen. So many other things suck about the user interface that I can't list them all. But the main UI problems include lack of keyword scheduling, way-too-slow fast-forwarding, no alpha character entry, and the inability to see how many hours of programming are available on the hard drive.

This last flaw hit home when the machine suddenly stopped recording shows. I tried everything I could to get it to work, including rebooting the system and calling Time Warner Cable customer service. They told me that they'd have to replace the unit, which would take five days.

Five days later a service technician came with a new box. I asked him if this problem was common, because Google returns a lot of pages from people who think the Explorer 8000 is a piece of junk. He said the system is fine as long as you didn't store too many shows on it. If you fill up the hard drive, the system freezes up, and there's no way a user can undo it. But how do you know when the disk is close to being full if there's no gage to tell you? The service tech's answer: "don't keep very many shows on the hard drive." That pretty much defeats the purpose of a DVR, doesn't it?

He also warned me not to put anything on top of it, as it was notorious for overheating and seizing up. I told him I was considering TiVo, but he insisted the Explorer 8000 was better than TiVo. How so, I asked? "We will give you a new one if it breaks," he said.

Our second Explorer 8000 is also a piece of junk. Like the first one, it regularly fails to record requested shows. But this one goes even further in its attempt to aggravate me by freezing up while playing back a show, and pixelating and jittering like a lost episode of Max Headroom.

Yesterday I was at Best Buy, and I noticed that 40-hour TiVos were on sale for $50 after rebate. I bought one and set it up. What a difference! If TiVo were a beverage, it'd be a tall glass of Jamaican ginger beer with chipped ice and a lime wedge, while the Explorer 800 would be a paper cup of warm fake lemonade stirred with the finger of a nose-picking six-year-old.

I can't wait to get the Explorer 8000 out of my house. Why did Time Warner make a deal with this company?

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:31:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oliver Sacks and his iridium ingot

George Lazenby wrote a must-read Live Journal entry about the famous neurologist/author Oliver Sacks and his iridium fetish. Sacks had several buttons of super-dense iridium that he wanted to melt into a single ingot. Iridium has a very high melting temperature (2,446 C), so Lazenby and Sacks went to a company that has an electron beam furnace. The "batsh*t insane Russsians" who worked there melted the iridium buttons while LazenbyTheodore Gray* shot video, which you can see at hisLazenby's site.

A few months ago, Oliver bought a kilo of these buttons, and kept them in, what was for a while, the heaviest 6 fl. oz. jar of current jam in the universe. While I was up there, he gave me one of these buttons, which I promptly nearly killed myself with. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So Oliver has these buttons in this current jam jar. The next logical step is to make the buttons one with each other, to get as close as possible to theoretical density. How to achieve this? Max's arc furnace can only fuse 5 gram buttons (poorly) into irregular buttons of about 50 grams. No, this project calls for industry, with its pumping pistons, its smoking smokestacks and desolated landscapes. Enter ********** [company name deleted]. Exeunt pumping pistons, smoking smokestacks and desolated landscapes. This, is in fact, the setting for the most advanced high purity metal processing plant in the United States.

UPDATE George sez: Thanks for posting the story to BB, there's just one thing, I didn't shoot video or take any pictures, that was all the work of Theodore Gray. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:40:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Gilmore vs. Ashcroft begins today

Bill sez: "On the 16th of August 2004, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals begins work on the Gilmore vs. Ashcroft case. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel freely in their own country -- and the exposure of 'secret law' for what it is: an abomination.

"The man who is fighting the good fight is named John Gilmore. John made his fortune as a programmer and entrepreneur in the software industry. Whereas most people in his position would have moved to a tropical island and lived a life of luxury, John chose to use his wealth to protect and defend the US Constitution.

"On the 4th of July 2002, John Gilmore, American citizen, decided to take a trip from one part of the United States of America to another. At the airport, he was told he had to produce his ID if he wanted to travel. He asked to see the law demanding he show his 'papers' and was told after a time that the law was secret and no, he wouldn't be allowed to read it.

"He hasn't flown in his own country since."

Another program which depends on showing ID is the Watch List and No-Fly List.  Airlines are issued these lists by the federal government and are required to request ID from their passengers in order to check them against the lists.  This has resulted in countless citizens with names similar to bad people being harrassed, arrested, or prevented from travelling by air—including every person named 'David Nelson'.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:12:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RoboPod

An iPod cradle in the form of a friendly robot. Link (Thanks, Scott!)

Update: BoingBoing reader Spencer Cross fact-checks our asses: "That's not just a friendly robot, it's actually in the shape of a Kubrick. Kubricks are highly collectible, Playskool-like action figures manufactured by a Japanese company named Medicom. They're usually licensed characters from cult film and comics. Toy collectors are crazy for them."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:12:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Helicopter Fuck

Please don't try this at home. You may have spotted Japanese web oddity Micky Yanai's -- um -- work on Rotten.com. Now, Fleshbot has more on "the most creative porn actor who invented 'Helicopter Fuck!'," as one fan-site enthusiastically proclaims. Male pattern baldness mullet. Bad '80s novelty sunglasses. Spandex. Sequined American flag codpiece. If that doesn't add up to buzzkill, I don't know what does. Link to Fleshbot item, which includes pointers to "Helicopter Fertish" (sic) galleries. NSFW, duh.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:00:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Another stimulating advertisement

BB reader Nate sends us another subtle advertisement for a sex lubricant. Unlike the KY Jelly ad I posted yesterday, this Manix print advertisement for the French market is real and an award winner. Link (via essays and effluvia)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:56:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GE's Fantastic Voyage

Over at the NanoBot, Howard Lovy writes about General Electric's new "Fantastic Voyage" television commercial:

"General Electric is working on real-life nanotechnology, but somebody in its ad department knows that lectures on the company's R&D in nanocomposites and nanostructured optoelectronics will leave viewers running for the fridge or the remote. Instead, it chose to try for the imagination, using cultural icons and humor."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:41:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stormtrooper Fairyland Robot Wedding

If BoingBoing had a society page, I suppose this would be it. An online photo gallery from the wedding of Robolympics founder David Calkins with Simone Davalos of the Long Now Foundation includes this surreal geek snapshot. Ceremonies took place earlier this month at Children's Fairyland, a park in Oakland, and a bevy of Stormtroopers were in the hizzouse. May the happy couple live long and prosper. Link to full-size image, and links to more more more photos.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:23:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Author accuses Shyamalan of plagiarism over "Village," audiences accuse film of sucking

Writer-director M Night Shyamalan (Sixth Sense, Signs) may face legal action over accusations that his latest project, The Village, was plagiarized from a children's book. The source in question: "Running Out of Time" by Margaret Peterson Haddix, published by Simon and Schuster in 1995. While the matter of plagiarism is open to debate, evidently the movie's suck factor is not. Last week, one blogger/culture crit pal was so distressed at the stinker he'd paid two digits to see in a Manhattan theater that he text-messaged me halfway through -- "OMG THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE EVER." He was not alone in this assessment. Link (via MeFi, which includes a handy list of other films accused of plagiarism in recent years)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:47:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Vacation Zen

1 minute audio vacations
entrances to hell
trips to blackholes
voyage to hollow earth
7 deadly sins nyc tour
rock 'n' roll holiday
ruins of detroit
postcards from the road
roadside america
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:31:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, August 15, 2004

Wiretapping the Web

A thought-provoking piece from Newsweek's Brian Braiker on the trend toward increased web surveillance:

[T]wo recent legal developments have raised further fears among Web privacy advocates in the United States. In one case, the Federal Communications Commission voted 5-0 last week to prohibit businesses from offering broadband or Internet phone service unless they provide Uncle Sam with backdoors for wiretapping access. And in a separate decision last month, a federal appeals court decided that e-mail and other electronic communications are not protected under a strict reading of wiretap laws. Taken together, these decisions may make it both legally and technologically easier to wiretap Internet communications, some legal experts told NEWSWEEK. "All the trends are toward easier to tap," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The FCC's plans to require Internet-based phone and broadband services to be engineered for easy wiretapping is a response to a request from the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies. The proposal would bring Internet-based phone providers in line with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires "telecommunications" carriers to make their networks wiretap-friendly. The FCC says the government must still go through all of the necessary legal steps to obtain the authority to wiretap; CALEA simply makes it technologically easier to do. "This will not have an effect on whether there is appropriate lawful authority -- that remains the same," says FCC spokesman Julius Knapp. "All this really is addressing is whether the carrier is required to have the capability to provide the information that's covered by a court order."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:11:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A good fit

BB pal Vann Hall points us to this brilliant KY Jelly advertisement that, unfortunately, is not officially sanctioned by Johnson & Johnson. It should be though! Link (via Adrants)

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

BSA mascot shares DNA with Disney "Beagle Boys"?

Oooooh, the [alleged] irony. Seth Finkelstein says:

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has announced an "anti-piracy" site, with a kids' mascot ferret, and a contest to call it a name.

The BSA weasel creature reminded me of something I'd seen before. Something shady, disreputable, criminal. Finally, I remembered! The BSA weasel looks like he's a member of a criminal gang in Walt Disney Comics, the "Beagle Boys".

Update: More unintended irony? BoingBoing reader Bitey says, "The scientific name for ferret, Mustela putorius furo, translates as 'little fur thief.' This references the animals love of stealing toys, socks, food and anything they can move themselves, and dragging them away to stash in their lair."

Link

Update 2: BoingBoing pal Gareth Branwyn says, "This ain't the first time that BSA's spokesbots have shared DNA with other people's intellectual property. See Bruce Sterling's WiredBlog posting about the uncanny similarities between Kata Sutra, Mark Frauenfelder's cartoon character that appreared in BoingBoing and Beyond Cyberpunk in the early '90s, and BSA's "Meg A. Byte:" If you saw the Beyond Cyberpunk comic book that Mark and I did, the similarities would be even more apparent. We're not accusing them of STEALING or anything, but still..."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:19:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Only 25% of condoms used "properly" in India

India's government began distributing free condoms in the '60s to stem population growth, and they're made available today for HIV/AIDS prevention. But according to a recently-released report, only a quarter of the 1.5 billion condoms manufactured each year in India are "properly utilised":

According to two university reports, rural villagers have used them as disposable water containers to wash, after relieving themselves in the fields. India's military have covered gun and tank barrels with condoms as protection against dust.

Of the 891 million condoms meant to be handed out free, a considerable proportion were acquired by road-building contractors who mixed them with concrete and tar and used the mixture to construct roads, rendering road surfaces smooth and resistant to cracks. Builders spread a bed of condoms beneath cement plastering on roofs, ingeniously preventing water seepage during the monsoon rains.

Weavers in Varanasi used around 200,000 condoms a day to lubricate their looms and to polish the gold and silver thread used to embroider the saris they produced. Sari maker Yusuf Bhai said they purchased the condoms from agents, who reportedly acquired them from agencies involved in family planning and AIDS prevention schemes.

Above, a Thai model "improperly utilizes" condoms in the form of a couture cap. Link to registration-threatening news article (Thanks, Darren)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:44:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Recycle your old electronics at Office Depot

Office Depot is doing a promotional event with HP in which the store will offer free electronics recycling through Labor Day for residents of the continental US. Drop off your old TVs, monitors, CPUs, printers, PDAs, etc., for no charge, and Office Depot will deliver the e-junk to HP for recycling. Link (Thanks, Matt)

Update: BoingBoing reader Jeff says, "People near Portland, Oregon have a better choice: FreeGeek is a not-for-profit promoting reuse and responsible recycling by refurbishing computers and giving them away, and recycling responsibly the ancient and the broken. OfficeDepot is just recycling, and it's unclear what percentage won't go into a landfill because it's not cost-effective to sell as material."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:34:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sweet new espresso machine. From outer space

The new "fully programmable" Granos espresso machine from Bodum looks highly badass. At US $499, it costs highly badass, too. (Thanks, Frank Ozaki)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:30:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, August 14, 2004

802.11n standard submitted for approval

A new Wi-Fi standard that promises faster WLANS is one step closer to becoming reality:

The WWiSE (worldwide spectrum efficiency) group said it has developed technology for review by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11n task group, which is overseeing a next-generation Wi-Fi standard capable of sustaining data throughput exceeding 100Mbps. The proposal is based on MIMO-OFDM (multiple input, multiple output-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) technology, which achieves higher speeds by employing two antennas at each end of the signal (one for transmitting, one for receiving) instead of one at each terminus.

Link

There is some degree of conflict over exactly how to approach developing the standard, though -- this BBC news story has more. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:38:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Battelle on Searchstreams

Great entry on Battelle's Searchblog about the value of recording the journey of finding information on the Web.

That's when I remembered As We May Think, Vannevar Bush's famous essay in The Atlantic. I had read it earlier in my research, and was struck not by the idea of the Memex, which is well understood, but by Bush's explication of the problem - that knowledge and learning has become so complicated, so layered, so inefficient, that it is near impossible for anyone to be a generalist, in the sense Aristotle was. Bush's answer to this problem was the Memex, of course, but what I find interesting is the mechanism by which the Memex is made potent - the mechanism for capturing the traces of a researcher's discovery through the Memex's corpus, and storing those traces as intelligence so the next researcher can learn from them and build upon them.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:01:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reviewers needed for Make magazine

As I announced a couple of weeks ago, I'm editing a soon-to-be launched magazine for O'Reilly Media called Make.

One section of the magazine will have users' reviews of tools, software, gadgets, and instructional books, magazines, websites, mailing lists, videos, etc. If you have come across something like this that you like a lot and are interested in writing about it for Make, please email me with the details.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:22:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, August 13, 2004

First cellphone-based porn mag?

While a host of mobile carriers in Europe already offer adult content to subscribers, Brit porn auteur Ben Dover (nee Lindsay Honey) and tech firm Symbios Group say the digital porn mag they're launching this month in the UK will be the first such publication designed specifically for mobile delivery. Link to AVN article, Link to press release, and Fleshbot has more.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:59:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple Tablet or something.... else?

Apple has apparently filed for a design trademark on a handheld computer resembling an iBook without the keyboard. From The Register:

"Hints that Apple might be working on such a product emerged in 2003 when a source close to Taiwanese contract manufacturer Quanta claimed that the company had been hired by Apple to build what was dubbed a 'wireless display...

The device is certainly a logical extension of what it's been doing with iTunes and AirPort Express. While its mini wireless access point is good for streaming audio from a host Mac to a hi-fi, it lacks a local control unit. It's tempting to view this latest design filing as the basis for just such a device.'"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:02:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ABC News story on Cryptome.org

John Young's Cryptome-- an online repository for publicly available information -- has long been on my short list of essential 'Net bookmarks. The site archives "material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents," among other things. This ABC News story details a recent incident in which Department of Homeland Security officials paid Young a visit, expressing concern about some of the content he'd posted online. It's not the first time he's been visited by federal authorities over that issue, and I'd wager it won't be the last.

Officials questioned Young about information he had posted about the 2004 Democratic National Convention, including satellite photos of the convention site and the location of specific police barricades referred to on the site as "a complete joke." In response to a complaint, two special agents from the FBI's counterterrorism office in New York City interviewed Young in November 2003. "They said, 'Why didn't you call us about this? Why are you telling the public?' And we said, 'Because it's out there and you can see it. You folks weren't doing anything,' " Young told ABC News.

The agents, according to Young, stressed they knew that nothing on the site was illegal. Young added: "They said, 'What we'd like you to do, if you're approached by anyone that you think intends to harm the United States, we're asking you to let us know that.' "

Link to news story, and did you know Cryptome is also served up in tasty RSS flavor? (via Joi)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:54:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Justice Dept. ignores fact that sentencing guidelines increase crime

Paul Cooper sez: "Robert X. Cringely discusses a study by Michael Block and Fred Nold commissioned by the Department of Justice in 1982 that found that the proposed sentencing guidelines would actually increase crime, not deter it. Of course, DoJ ignored the study, implemented the sentencing guidelines, and gave us the prison system we have today." Link

UPDATE Glenn T. Costello sez: "For completeness, you might want to mention that whatever the study projected, crime has in fact, fallen." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:51:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big Brother goes to the Olympics

New Scientist has an article looking at the US$312 million surveillance system installed for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The eyes and ears consist of 1,000 high-res and infrared videocameras peppering the city. Cell and landline telephone calls are being recorded, converted into text, and "scanned for phrases that could be linked to terrorist activity." The software's developers say it speaks Greek, English, Arabic, Farsi, and other major languages.

(John Pike, an analyst with the defence think-tank Global Security) believes other undisclosed measures are undoubtedly in place, such as face recognition from video footage. He says such surveillance technology has already proven its worth in intelligence gathering. "They're basically the sort of stuff the National Security Agency has been using for some time," he told New Scientist. "And they seem to place great faith in it."

The human security is massive as well--there are seven security people for every athlete. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:33:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hipseat

In response to my post yesterday about the how big backpacks are a real pain, BB reader John Watson says: "Carrying children around on one hip, very common among parents, can cause similar problems, spawning solutions like the Hipseat," essentially a cantilevered shelf worn on the waist. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:01:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Remember San Francisco's gay marriages? Forget it

Remember last winter's rush of gay marriages at San Francisco's city hall, following on from the mayoral decree that gays may marry? Remember the rock-concert campouts, the nationwide outpouring of support, the endless parade of joyous images of happily married couples?

Forget it.

The California Supreme Court has annulled every one of those marriages. From ephermal.org:

"Molly McKay is the Executive Director of Marriage Equality California. This is a photo I took of her at the release party for We Do. She's on page 23, wearing that same dress, getting married. "For years - years - she and her partner, Dr. Davina Kotulski, came to City Hall on Valentine's Day to apply for a marriage license. It was their own quiet protest. And every year they were turned away. Until this year.

"This year, six short months ago, she was finally allowed to marry Davina. And today, thanks to the fantastically stupid ruling of the California Supreme Court, that marriage is null and void." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dunhill's iPod case

The Dunhill cigarette company has made a cigarette-case-style case for the iPod, which, in classinc Dunhill hyperbole, they describe as "ergonomic and luxurious." One thing I've learned since moving to the UK: anytime something is described as "luxurious" (i.e. "Luxury hot cocoa") it is anything but. Nevertheless, the Dunhill cases look pretty rad. Link (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's WorldCon schedule

Well, I'm off for a week-and-chage-worth of holidays in a couple hours -- I really need it! I'll see you again in ten days or so.

Meanwhile, here's my schedule for the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston this Labor Day -- hope to see you:

* THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2:

4PM: Unlimited Access: Issues involving unlicensed access to spectrum. With Harold Feld from the the Media Access Project.

* FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3:

10AM: Group reading from The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

11AM: Locus Award ceremony

5PM: Drunk on Technology: With Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Charlie Stross

* SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4:

12PM: The End of Copyright: Can the Arts Survive the Digital Age? With Charlie Petit, Daniel Grotta, Steve Miller, and James M. Turner

1PM: Tradeoffs between Freedom, Security, and Privacy. With Joseph Lazzaro, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Don Sakers

2:30-3PM: Charlie Stross and I will be signing our new short novel, Rapture of the Nerds, just published in the new issue of Argosy Magazine, at the Borderlands Books table in the Dealers' Room

5PM: Postcapitalist Social Mechanisms. With M. M. Buckner, David Friedman, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Charlie Stross

* SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5:

10:30AM Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. A recapitulation of my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference

4PM: Reading

5PM: Sign at the Asimov's Magazine table in the Dealer's Room

* MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6:

11AM: Kaffeeklatsch

12-12:30: International Copyright Issues

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's DRM talk in Danish

Kim Pedersen has translated my Microsoft DRM talk into Danish. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:47:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Downhill Battle is raising cash

Downhill Battle -- the net-activist group that created Grey Tuesday, WhatACrappyPresent.com, Save the iPod and others -- are raising funds for the first time. They want to use the money to fund more ambitious campaigns, including creating PSAs that advocate increased media diversity and sending them on CD to independent radio stations and flyering concerts. I just gave 'em fifty bucks. Link (Thanks, Nicholas!)

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

Cussin'-est winnebago promo film, ever

This is a (not-worksafe) video of a guy shooting an industrial film promoting a winnebago. He can't remember his lines, and every time he blows a line, he curses like a sailor. I'v enever heard the eff-word used so much in the course of describing a wholesome family vehicle. Link (Thanks Joshua!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:41:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unbelievably obscure island has net-based newspaper

Ken sez,

Tristan da Cuhna is an island in the South Atlantic. It is a British dependency. At 37 degrees south by 12 west, with about 250 permanent residents who literally live on the side of a volcano, it is considered by many sailors to be the remotest town in the world.

The residents, about 100 households which may have any of seven surnames and who are all apparently related by blood, make a living from issuing exotic postage stamps which have a following in the collector market, and by lobster fishing. There is no access to the island by air, and only a few boats per year put into the notoriously dangerous harbor.

Tristan has an online newspaper now though!

Link (Thanks, Ken!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:38:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Frosted Flakes sugar dialed back to a mere 1/4

Kellogg's UK has responded to concerns about childhood obesity by reducing the sugar content in Frosted Flakes from 38% to 25%. So, like, a 500g box of frosted flakes is one-quarter sugar? And that's the new, improved flakes?

Aubrey Sheiham, professor of dental and public health at University College London said that products high in very refined starch were often just as bad on the index as those high in sugar.

Reducing the sugar from 38% to 25% was unlikely to help in terms of tooth decay either. "When you have very finely milled starch and sugar together the effect on teeth can be worse than sugar, perhaps because of the stickiness," he said.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:37:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boing Boing Needs Help!

Ever dreamed of working with the Happy Mutants at Boing Boing? Now's your chance. We are looking for two people to help us as we figure out the next step in our sponsorship model. First off, we're looking for a bookkeeper, ideally one who works they way we do - online and at odd hours.

Also, we're looking for a sharp office manager type who has a few hours a week to work with us keeping track of things, in particular the administrative needs of our wonderful sponsors. This is not a full time position, but a chance to freelance with us and help build out an even better Directory of Wonderful Things. If you're interested, email John at jbat at boingboing.net.

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

A Boing Boing reader survey!

As you've probably noticed, we started taking sponsorships at Boing Boing to cover the costs of hosting and help us grow and support the site. One of the things they really want to know is who our readers are, and while we think we have a pretty good idea, it's always good to go to the source. We also wanted to know what you think of our sponsor approach to date, and what we might do next. We created this little survey for those of you who want to help us and our sponsors out, by taking the time answer a few questions, you can help us ensure that the sponsors we select match your preferences. (We have a policy of only taking "wonderful" advertisers in any case!).

The final results of the survey will be published for all to see at the conclusion of the survey. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:01:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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