[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Monday, February 28, 2005

Hackery hoodie with "1337" embroidery

This embroidered 1337 (hacker-speak for "leet" or "elite") hoodie is just right -- an inside joke that looks like something from the school football team unless you're in the know, then it's all chess-club, baby. Link (via Preshrunk)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:57:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alien sculpture

A massive and intimidating Giger-esque Alien sculpture is up for auction on eBay. Starting bid is $3999:

This amazing ALIEN-like sculpture is made out of scrap metal and old auto parts such as nuts & bolts, connecting rods, motorcycle chains, gears, spark plugs, bearings, springs and whatever can be found in junkyards. Artists spent approximately 2 months to create this incredible piece of art by collecting different parts from the junkyards and welding them together piece by piece. It was polished and coated with lacquer to prevent it from rusting. This sculptre is about 7 feet in height, comes in 7 different pieces legs, body, left arm, right arm, head and tail with incredible details. Very easy to assemble just need some muscles. We never put him on a scale but the estimate weight is about 300-400 lbs. This will be a great conversation piece in any living rooms.

The same artists are also auctioning junkyard models of the USS Enterprise, Predator, Boba Fett, and Robbie the Robot. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:04:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Floppy disk among clues leading to BTK capture

Dennis Rader, the former ADT security systems worker alleged to be the BTK killer, was identified in part by "hidden" traces of data on a floppy disk.

Two weeks ago, BTK dropped off a package at Kansas television station KAKE, which included a floppy disk linked to a computer at Rader's church. "They asked me if I had a list of people who had access to our computer and I provided a list of people for them," said the Rev. Michael Clark of Christ Lutheran Church. "Yes, [Rader] was [on that list]."

According to reports, the disk had been used before. Investigators "electronically peeled it back" to reveal older data that had not been erased when the disk was written over with newer information -- a common digital forensics technique. A computer from a local library has reportedly also been seized. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:13:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Naked Sushi: just one more bite.

Link to full-size. Oh, (world-weary sigh), Boing Boing readers email us their unsolicited party photos constantly. I mean, grainy Nyataimori phonecam snaps are a dime a gig these days. But occasionally, some really good ones evade our jaded killfiles and overcooked-meme detectors. Link to gallery for someone's yakuza-themed soiree, which includes these lovely naked sushi shots (they're pretty PG-13, no full nudity): (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8) (9), (10), (11), (12). (Thanks, Poul, who shot 'em all).
Previously: Web Zen -- Sushi Zen. See also this fine series of snapshots on Siege's blog (site NSFW): Link 1, Link 2.

Update: Matt says, "I hope this doesn't come off as know-it-allish, but just FYI, the Japanese word for sushi served on a naked lady is not nyataimori but nyotaimori (女体盛り):

nyo (女) - woman
tai (体) - body
mori (盛り) - helping, plateful, serving, arrangement, etc.

I guess it's possible that nyataimori is some regionally-accented version, but I've never heard of it and Google doesn't turn much up. Incidentally the male version is 男体盛り, usually pronounced nantaimori."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:19:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mister T on a Microchip

Beats Jesus on a tortilla or Virgin Mary toast. This Mr. T image was found on a Dallas Semiconductor single-chip T1 transceiver integrated circuit. Similar finds are on display at Molecular Expressions.
Link (thanks, Matt). In related news, a new Mister T. comic is coming soon: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:28:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Awesome hip-hop flyers from the '70s, '80s

Link to full-size image. In. Fucking. Credible. gallery of early hip-hop flyers. Page takes forever to load, all of the images (dozens of 'em) are slapped on one endless static page. But what an amazing collection! Maybe someone with time, basic html skillz, and love for old-school will feel inspired to contact these guys and volunteer some web makeover services.
Link to image gallery (Thanks, Sean and Happy Birthday!).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:17:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Poison garden opens in UK

Barney Stephens says,

The Duchess of Northumberland's controversial poison garden has been officially opened. Cannabis, opium poppies, magic mushrooms and coca - the source of cocaine - all feature at the centuries-old Alnwick Garden.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:03:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stealth butt plugs and predigital dildonics of yesteryear

The Museum of Quackery is an interesting place. In their online collection, you'll find "The Recto Rotor," once touted as "The Latest and Most Efficient Invention for the Quick Relief of Piles, Constipation, and Prostate Trouble," and a "prostate gland warmer" which promised to "stimulate the abdominal brain." The latter consisted of a 4.25", um, probe, and a blue lightbulb on a 9' cord which lit up when, um, plugged in.
Link (Thanks, Bruce Sterling).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:58:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Proposed law: criminal background warnings for dating, networking sites

Declan McCullagh writes:

Herb Vest believes that true love should come with a criminal-background check. Vest is the chief executive of True.com, an online dating service that pledges to verify whether your dream date is a convicted felon or, worse yet, already married.

"Although criminal-background screening is not entirely foolproof, we owe it to our members to provide a truly wholesome environment for online courtship," Vest said last year.

This would be an engaging but otherwise unremarkable business plan, except for one twist. Instead of competing head-to-head with his rivals in the business world, Vest has veered into the political world by pressing for new laws that would put True.com's competitors at a severe disadvantage.

Vest has managed to convince legislators in states including California, Texas, Virginia, and Michigan to sponsor bills that would target rival dating sites like Match.com, Yahoo Personals, Spring Street Networks, craigslist and eHarmony...it would regulate far more than just dating sites. The California bill introduced last week covers any Web site offering "compatibility" or "social referral services"--a sweeping definition that encompasses everything from high-school reunion site Classmates.com to a matchmaking site for a tennis doubles tournament.

Under the California proposal, social referral services Friendster.com and Google's Orkut.com would be on the hook for fines of millions of dollars a day if they declined to post a warning similar to the one above on California members' ads or profiles.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:49:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Sushi Zen

* eating guide
* maker
* fugu
* kosher
* hello kitty
* chocolate
* twinkie
* candy
* more chocolate
* gifts
* wind up
* pillows
* clock
* usb
* which kind are you?
* table manners
* iron stomach
Image: sushi served on the body of a clothes-free hottie. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank). Previously: Naked Lady Sushi parody website from Japan, Naked Sushi Lady history. See also this FAQ/FQA on "Nyataimori": Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:30:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RES digital film screening in LA tonight

In LA tonight: This month's RES digital shorts screening features works RESFEST 2004 Audience Award winning works from Peter Cornwell (Ward 13) Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite), Olivier Gondry, and Michel Gondry (Walkie Talkie Man), whose Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind took home an Oscar last night. Videos to be screened include Shynola's latest for Beck, Death Cab for Cutie, Lemon Jelly, The Postal Service and more. More reasons to go: first 100 people in the door get free Converse sneakers, great deejays, and a number of the featured filmmakers will be present for the ceremonial rubbing-of-elbows and dropping-of-names. 8PM @ The Egyptian.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:43:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

National Geo goes Bollywood; Bollycat deja vu decrypter

Apul of indophile blog Sepia Mutiny sez:

The February issue of National Geographic Magazine has a comprehensive feature about Bollywood by "Maximum City" author Suketa Mehta. While he offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at the production of the hit film Veer-Zaara, the true gem of this package is a narrated photo essay by William Albert Allard. The magazine also delves into the Indian film industry's less-than-stellar counterpart in Pakistan, dubbed Lollywood.

Link to multimedia feature (Flash).

While you're at it, check out Bollycat. Apul explains: "Watching Bollywood films can often strike you with a maddening case of deja vu. You think you've seen the movie before, but you just can't identify the what, when and where of your suspicion. Enter Bollycat, a new web site created by a team of students at SUNY Rockland, which aims to link Bollywood films to their Hollywood 'inspirations.'"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:23:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SciFi.com offers free Battlestar Galactica download

BB reader Alfie sez, "SciFi Channel are offering the first episode in the remake of Battlestar Galactica free from their site, ad-less, uncut, and with deleted scenes. Not bad!" Link to show home page, and direct link to streaming video for episode "33" in entirety. See also: Battlestar Galactica Season 2 This Summer /. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:16:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese robo-mannequin

Image: A robotic mannequin named "Palette" strutting her stuff in Tokyo earlier today. Designed by SGI Japan and Flower Robotics for the fashion industry, she packs a motion detector sensor and the ability to memorize and pose dozens of motion-captured movements. She was born for the runway, and runs on blow and celery sticks goes on sale later this year.
Link to news story, link to image. This is the same team behind "Posy," the "flower girl robot" released in 2002: Link to Japanese press release.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:14:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Wars-themed handmade handbags

Purseuing, a blog dedicated to awesome handbags, points to several eBay listings for odd, Star-Wars-themed ladies' accessories. The Chewbacca neck purse and the Yoda Head coin purse auctions are closed, but bidding appears to be live for this handbag made from an old Entertainment Weekly magazine.
(thanks, Julie Hall)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:59:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of couture ad zen: Biasia "doll" spread

Kigurimi couture? Pierpaolo Ferrari's obliquely unsettling print campaign for the 2005 Francisco Biasia handbag collection. Click on bag names or "Season Campaign" for individual images.
Link. Worksafe, but obnoxious Flash interface with sound. (thanks, Philip)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:46:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

U2 vs. Negativland iPod

In December, artist Francis Hwang's prank auction of a parody "U2 vs. Negativland iPod" was shut down by eBay at Apple's request. (Previous post here.) Now Hwang is selling the iPod on his own site. All profits from the sale will go to Downhill Battle, an organization "working to break the major label monopoly of the record industry and put control back in the hands of musicians and fans."

In 1991, the experimental sound collage band Negativland released a single called “U2”, which extensively sampled both U2’s hit single “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and colorful studio recordings of Top 40 disc jockey Casey Kasem. This offbeat recording would have languished in obscurity if weren’t for Island Records, U2’s record label, which decided to sue Negativland and their independent label SST Records for deceptive packaging and copyright infringement. After a protracted legal battle, Negativland’s legal funds were exhausted and they settled out of court. Today, it is illegal to produce the “U2” single in the United States. (U2, on the other hand, would go on to use unauthorized samples of appropriated satellite video in their Zoo TV tour.)

Now you can commemorate this ignoble episode in intellectual property history with the Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition. From its packaging to its pre-installed content, this unauthorized iPod modification is an artful mash-up of the forces of corporate megarock and obscure experimental music, and a provocative symbol of the ongoing struggle between those who would confine culture and those who would free it.

Link to auction, Link to Wired News article

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:43:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Punk rock accoutrements for kids

Online shop "The Cradle Rocks" sells punk stuff for angst-ridden toddlers -- like the skull and crossbones kiddie plate set, shown here, plus some crazy two-headed mutant rag dolls and baby's first combat boots.
Link

Update: Damon Bacheller says,

I'm the web person for www.thecradlerocks.com. I noticed it appeared on boingboing today. There is an issue with the shared SSL, and getting the host to fix this problem. We're working on it, and hope to have it fixed asap. In the meantime, users can be assured their information is in a safe place, and orders can be placed securely.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:35:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cosplay art in NYC

"Cosplayers," a video by Guangzhou-based photographer, videographer, and performance artist Cao Fei, will be on display from March 4 through April 9 at Lombard-Freid Fine Arts in New York. Shown here, a screengrab from the 8-minute piece.
Link to gallery of 18 video stills.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:23:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Mac father" Jef Raskin: in memoriam

Personal computing pioneer Jef Raskin passed away this weekend.

Raskin is best known for starting the Macintosh project at Apple in the late seventies, though his later career as an expert in computer interfaces was overshadowed by controversy over who 'fathered' the Macintosh. Though Raskin conceived of the Mac, he was usurped by Steve Jobs, who put his own distinctive mark on the machine we know today.

Link to obit post on CultOfMac.

Update: BoingBoing's founder Mark Frauenfelder says:

This is really sad. I saw Jef last fall, and he seemed to be in good health. Jef wrote many wonderful ideas for me when I was an editor at Wired. He also wrote some really funny (and true) stories for the print edition of bOING bOING under the nom de plume "El Jefe." He was a wonderful artist, musician, and inventor. He'll be missed.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:12:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Funny typo on Air Canada sticker

Are airport security workers putting their no-longer needed pornographic materials in passengers' suitcases? This Air Canada luggage sticker reads: "THIS BAGGAGE HAS BEEN X-RATED AT POINT OF ORIGIN."
Link (Thanks, Greg!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:58:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Jim Woodring print: "The Confidence Bird"

Pressure Printing is selling a 12" x 14" print of a Jim Woodring illustration called "The Confidence Bird." It costs $200 and is limited to 100 signed copies. (Tiny detail shown here.) The included frame and corner mounts are beautiful, too.
Link (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:47:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Python in a toilet

A man in St. Petersburg, Florida lassoed a snake that was poking its head out from his toilet. It turned out that the snake was a six-foot-long African rock python. Link (via Fortean Times)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:18:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO curse in Yiddish -- WARNING

Swearasaurus is a directory of curses in languages other than English. The Yiddish curse section is stupendous. I'm taking notes.

He should give it all away to doctors...
He should crap blood and pus...
He should have a large store, and whatever people ask for he shouldn’t have, and what he does have shouldn’t be requested...
All his teeth should fall out except one to make him suffer...
I should outlive him long enough to bury him.

Link (via MeFi)

Update: Some readers report that this site trips their anti-spyware software. I use Firefox and OS X, so I am immune. You may not be so lucky. On the other hand, the anti-spyware could just be overzealous. Who knows?

Update 2: Ed Bott sez, "I am the author of the best-selling books Windows XP Inside Out and Windows Security Inside Out. I can tell you for a fact that this site offers to install a known piece of deceptive software (aka spyware) on the computer of anyone who visits. It uses social engineering techniques to trick the visitor into accepting the installation. In my opinion, you should remove this link as a service to your readers." Forewarned is forearmed.

Update 3:Ran Li sez, "The Alternative Dictionaries provides a similar service, with entries sorted alphabetically, PDF versions (the whole thing or for individual languages), and no spyware."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:09:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage PC magazine ads

1000bit has a jaw-dropping gallery of scanned in vintage magazine ads for old computer systems. Link (Thanks, Olli!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Graffito of a dog humping R2D2

Found via the Flickr graffiti tag RSS --deepwarren's photo of a fantastic stencil of a doggie having its way with R2D2. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:13:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Learn German from Deutsche Welle

Paul sez, "For years Deutsche Welle, Germany's government-run international shortwave radio station, has been broadcasting German language lessons in English, for their worldwide audience. Now, the audio lessons are available for download from their website, along with the accompanying text (pdf). It appears to be quite comprehensive, too. I'd love to see other countries setting up similar courses on the web, for their respective languages." Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Update: Bug sez, "the BBC also does this. They have English, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic, along with French, German, Italian and Spanish and a whole bunch of others at a variety of levels."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:21:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brain-pacemaker show great success in treating depression

Researchers in Toronto have had success with direct brain stimulation of mood-controlling areas as a means of treating depression -- they liken it to a pacemaker for the brain.

Four women and two men had electrodes planted deep into their brain to stimulate one of the areas involved in mood control.

Each underwent local anaesthetic before doctors drilled two small holes in their skulls. Then, using magnetic resonance imaging to guide them, doctors inserted two thin electrode wires into the brain area. The other ends of the wires were threaded under the scalp down to the lower neck area.

Next, the patients underwent a general anaesthetic to have a pulse generator implant, the "pacemaker", sewn in under the skin of their chest. The wires were hooked up to this to provide constant brain stimulation...

All six volunteers reported acute effects once the current was switched on. These included a sudden brightening of the room and a "disappearing of the void".

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:20:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Does Google complain if you reformat its pages? Nope

Yesterday, I posted a link to Yoz Grahame's rant on Google Toolbar, a service that lets you change the webpages on your screen so that things like ISBNs and addresses are automatically linked to database entries on various services.

One question that arises from this is: how would Google feel if you were to provide a service that reformatted its pages for others to use? As it turns out, Google routinely allows it. Here are three examples:

1. W3C HTML Validator: Scrapes Google and reformats it, commenting on its use of html, linking to relevant elements of the spec
2. Bobby Accessibility Validator: Scrapes Google and reformats it, commenting on its adherence to accessibility guidelines
3. For Me To Poop On: Scrapes Google and reformats it with a large, floating pile of dogshit drawn over the screen

Update: Phil adds, "don't forget GooglePreview, the Firefox extension that adds dinky thumbnail views of websites directly onto the Google search results page."

Update 2: Nearly forgot my favorite: The Internet Archive scrapes Google, reformats it, and replaces all the links with links to cached historical versions of Google's pages.

Update 3: Two more gooduns: Scroogle "scrapes Google, discards the ads, removes cookie, and has access log deleted after 7 days" (Thanks, Philip!); and Gizoogle "scrapes Google entries...and reformats them from Snoop Dogg's internet perspecizzle" (Thanks, J!).

Update 4: Not always, though: George reminds us that "Julian Bond wrote a PHP script to reformat Google News searches as RSS and Google had him take it down. He was simply aggregating data from Google News, which is exactly what Google News does to other sites."

Update 5: Christoph sez, "Marcos Weskamp's excellent newsmap is remixing Google News for quite some time now and it's still running. Perhaps he has reached some agreement by now, but when he presented his project at Ars Electronica last year he mentioned that he's scraping Google News."

Update 6: Google Mirror scrapes Google result screens and reverses them (Thanks, John!).

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:25:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Halle Berry accepts "Razzie" for Catwoman, calls it a "piece of shit"

The Razzies are joke awards given for actors and filmmakers who produce crappy movies. It's rare for a Razzie "winner" to make a personal appearance at the awards, but Halle Berry gets my vote for coolest person in Hollywood for not only showing up to get a Razzie for Catwoman, but also making a very funny speech:

Berry was named worst actress of 2004 by the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation for her performance in "Catwoman" and she showed up to accept her "Razzie" carrying the Oscar she won in 2002 for "Monster's Ball."

"They can't take this away from me, it's got my name on it!" she quipped. A raucous crowd cheered her on as she gave a stirring recreation of her Academy Award acceptance speech, including tears.

She thanked everyone involved in "Catwoman," a film she said took her from the top of her profession to the bottom.

"I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit," she said as she dragged her agent on stage and warned him "next time read the script first."

Link (via JWZ)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:53:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big Media's anti-pay-TV campaign from 1967

The proponents of the loathsome Broadcast Flag, which seeks to limit your ability to freely manipulate, archive and move the TV shows you record, weren't always opponents of freedom and television. Back in 1967, the TV broadcasters and the movie studios ran a propaganda campaign to defeat the early Pay TV systems. Here's a wonderful old video clip from that era, a bumper that was shown before movies urging Californians to sign a petition against Pay TV.

In 1967, when one of the first pay TV services was preparing to launch in California, Hollywood and the networks helped defeat the service because they didn't want the competition. Theater owners organized a KEEP TV FREE campaign, with PSAs like this one running in movie houses before feature films.

Though this particular campaign was limited to California, the advertising industry and television networks have long argued a similar case. When Vance Packard, Ralph Nader, Peggy Charren, and other critics attacked advertising in the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s (respectively), defenders of industry often cited a common refrain: "advertising provides free news and entertainment."

In other words, the major networks (in conjunction with the ad industry) have promoted the idea that television is free for decades. Now that viewers have taken their word for it by recording and sharing TV shows freely, the industry only has itself to blame.

Link (Thanks, Carrie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:13:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Why John Gilmore won't show his ID at airports

Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette has an amazing, balanced, in-depth profile on John Gilmore, the guy who Sun hired to write their first code, the guy who co-founded EFF, the guy who won't show ID to get on an airplane:

In post 9/11 America, asking "Why?" when someone from an airline asks for identification can start some interesting arguments. Gilmore, who learned to argue on the debate team in his hometown of Bradford, McKean County, has started an argument that, should it reach its intended target, the U.S. Supreme Court, would turn the rules of national security on end, reach deep into the tug-of-war between private rights and public safety, and play havoc with the Department of Homeland Security.

At the heart of Gilmore's stubbornness is the worry about the thin line between safety and tyranny.

"Are they just basically saying we just can't travel without identity papers? If that's true, then I'd rather see us go through a real debate that says we want to introduce required identity papers in our society rather than trying to legislate it through the back door through regulations that say there's not any other way to get around," Gilmore said. "Basically what they want is a show of obedience."

Link (Thanks, Brad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paying Canadian telco an extra $50 makes IRC and ftp secure, somehow

Simon sez, "It was reported in Vancouver that Canadian telecom giant Telus has outlawed home servers for its customers with residential highspeed service. Ports used by such ftp, telnet and IRC servers, among others, have been blocked. According to Telus, 'These security measures are designed to reduce illicit traffic.'

"But if home users upgrade to a business account (for $84.95 a month, rather than $29.95) the blocked ports magically become unstuck. There's no mention, however, of increased security measures in the upgraded business accounts. Interpret this how you like." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:47:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stanford's anti-diversity agenda: No astrologer professors!

Aaron Swartz's Stanford diaries -- basically, the ruminations of a sharp university student's first year in the hallowed halls -- are tremendous reading. Today, he's posted a response to the talking-point that Stanford anti-intellectual-diversity because 13% of Stanford profs are Republicans, but 51% of voters in the last election swung GOP.

Scary as this is, my preliminary research has discovered some even more shocking facts. I have found that only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as "communication between minds without using the traditional five senses"), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe "people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil", compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower. And while 25% of Americans believe in astrology ("the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives"), I could only find one Stanford professor who would agree. (All numbers are from mainstream polls, as reported by Sokal.)

This dreadful lack of intellectual diversity is a serious threat to our nation's youth, who are quietly being propagandized by anti-astrology radicals instead of educated with different points of view. Were I to discover that there were no blacks on the Stanford faculty, the Politically Correct community would be all up in arms. But they have no problem squeezing out prospective faculty members whose views they disagree with.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:46:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World's oldest Sunday paper goes gonzo for the Web

Last weekend, I stayed on the remarkably comfortable sofa of Ben Hammersely and his fantastic wife Anna Söderblom, in Florence, Italy. Florence has lots to recommend it, but possibly the most fascinating thing I saw that weekend was the project Ben was working on for the Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world. Ben has helped the Observer web-ify itself, with a vengeance.

The weekend paper is now supplemented by a daily blog, with podcasts and moblogs. The RSS is fulltext (crap, no it's not -- this is such an important detail, Observer -- get it right!). Trackbacks and comments are on and unmoderated. Keywords are tracked and displayed in a "folksonomic zeitgeist." Headlines from competing papers and Technorati link cosmoses are pulled in and displayed on the front page. No paywall. No adwall. No wall.

That's just for starters. We spent many exciting hours sitting in cafes, talking about what comes next -- conversations I'm not at liberty to repeat. But basically: put together a wish-list of features for a clued-in media organization to embrace, then square it and square it again in a relentless pursuit of Web-gonzoism. That's what's coming down the pipe.

I read a lot of newspapers on the Web, and this is something new and wonderful. Check it out. Link (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:38:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Subscribe to monthly, grotesque remixed stuffed animal service

Nick sez, "For $39 a month, you can receive remixed stuffed animals: bunnies with three ears, animals wrapped inside other animals, furry things that talk, packed in leaves or string or paper or whatever's on Morbid Tendencies' living room floor.

"Every animal is custom made, and you can also buy art made from real dead animals. Each page on this site is a Poe-like joy." Link (Thanks, Nick!)

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

HOWTO break HP printer cartridge DRM

A reader writes, "The CoCo blog has uncovered two ways to keep HP from using its forced-obsolescence-for-profit 'empty' ink cartridge trick on you:"

1) Remove and reinsert the battery of the printer's memory chip

First, I disconnected the power and the printer cable, just to be sure. Then, I reached inside and carefully removed the battery. I waited for about an hour, and then reinserted the battery and plugged everything back in. Viola! I was able to make a copy. Tried printing -- that worked too.

2) Preemptive: Change the parameters of the printer driver

Search for hp*.ini and edit the ones with the latest dates. If you configure the printer driver first, see below, the file date should read today.

In it there is a parameter something like pencheck. It is set to 0100. I think this is a boolean because I tried other values without effect. Set it to 0000 in the file and save the file and REBOOT.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beautiful and ugly photos of London

JenH sez, "I'm heading to London soon and decided to peruse some Londonblogs, and came across some incredible photos of London and environs by a Flikr user named StefZ. Since Cory is Brit-centric these days, I thought you'd all enjoy the odd, ugly, strange and beautiful photos - amazing work." She's right -- this stuff is gorgeous. Makes me glad all over again to be living in London. Link (Thanks, jenH!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:24:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science fiction can make you a better Unitarian

Will Shetterly, the genius author of Dogland and many other fine novels, has written a fantastic article for a Unitarian magazine, explaining how reading science fiction and fantasy can make you a better Christian, by providing a framework for understanding how to digest and comprehend parables and fables.

These implicitly spiritual stories, just as explicitly spiritual ones, can be divided into parables and fables. Mysteries and romances, like Jesus' stories about servants, are meant to be plausible. Because the stories could be true, we can learn from Sherlock Holmes, Scarlet O'Hara, or the Good Samaritan. But fantasy and science fiction, like the stories about Jesus' miracles or divine birth, are meant to be implausible. By asking us to consider something outside our experience, like traveling in time, becoming a monster, or turning water into wine, they ask us to throw off our preconceptions and see the world as if we had never seen it before. Because it's impossible for a story to occur in our world, we know that it's about something more than its details, and we can learn from Santa Claus, Superman, or the Son of God.

As they do for many adolescents and adults, fantasy and science fiction gave me fables that were spiritual and fables that explored the desire to be spiritual. I appreciated the personal and public difficulty of promoting a faith by reading about Paul Muad'Dib in Dune and Michael Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land. Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light made me think about the nature of pantheons. As an atheist who yearned for meaning, I saw my struggle in Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, the story of a time traveler who goes back to meet Jesus. I found answers to questions that traditional religions are reluctant to pose: James Morrow examined the literal death of the conservative Christian God in Towing Jehovah and Jesus' second coming as a woman in Only Begotten Daughter.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Update: Medievalist writes " in mind that Unitarian Universalism is a non- creedal religion, and that most UUs are not Christians. Thus Shetterley is writing from the perspective of a minority within both Unitarian Universalism and Christianity."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:22:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Furniture made from books

Second Editions is a Berkeley-based business run by Jim Rosenau, a software developer and carpenter. He builds furniture out of books -- mostly books ("I remove some of the paper and replace it with a sturdy armature of salvaged lumber."). The idea is to produce an urban version of the rural crafter's twig-furniture ("I envied rural craftspeople who could spend time in the woods, gathering elegant natural materials for their work. I was relegated to what I could find on the sidewalk and in Dumpsters, my head swiveling as I passed each pile of discards."). The furniture itself is gorgeous, witty and bloody useful, and produced with an eye to archiving ethics ("I research all apparently valuable books and try to place them with dealers but rarely succeed."). I want all of this. Link (Thanks, Robin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Listening to stalactite isotopes: a cousin to acoustic iPod hack

Yesterday, I posted about the amazing iPod acoustic hack: a hacker who wanted to deconstruct his iPod's locked-down firmware tricked the iPod into playing out the firmware through the headphones as though it were a song: then he wrote software that analyzed the "music" and turned it back into firmware.

Now, L Perg writes, "'Acoustical graphing' of 1D data streams can be very useful in scientific applications, since auditory processing is multi-channel. For example, in mass spectroscopy, an ion beam that is operating at safe levels can be represented by a low hum; as the beam strength increases -- approaching the point it will damage the detector -- the pitch and volume can increase, alerting the operator to the problem. Just think of how insanely boring and inefficient it would be to watch the same data wiggling on a computer screen.

"Of course, auditory graphing is also used to represent 1D graphs for people with visual processing disorders (vision impairment and dyslexia).

"...[I]n a moment of serendipity, I opened my email to find information on the translation of geochemical signals into music posted to a paleoclimate mailing list. As cave stalactites grow, they record changing oxygen isotope values, which correspond to the growth and decay of ice sheets. The isotope record from the Frasassi Cave in Italy has been recorded as 'Geophonic music,' available in the book and CD set 'The Drops of Time' (Gocce di Tempo) (ISBN: 2-911762-51-7)." Link (Thanks, L!)

Update: Blue Boar sez, "The iPod acoustic hack doesn't use the headphone jack, which would mean programming the sound hardware. Last I checked a few days ago, they still don't have that bit finished on the 4G and later iPods under Linux. Instead, they used the built-in piezo. This is the device that "clicks" when you are scrolling the wheel. If you hadn't noticied it before, unplug your headphones, and hold the iPod up to your ear while you scroll through a long list."

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

Archiving every Podcast

Jason Scott is the archvist whose textfiles.org contains copies of every text-file that circulated on massive world of BBSes in the pre-Internet days. He's launched a new project: archiving every single Podcast ever made. It's only 75GB so far, but growing fast. Jason's explanation of why he's decided to do this is inspiring, a call-to-arms to preserve digital culture.

Obviously, I need some space to store all these podcasts, but space, these days, is very cheap. I watch sites that provide specials for hardware, and can purchase a 250 gigabyte hard drive for $100. It's a drive type that is prone to failure, so I buy two. At home, I run these drives on USB2 enclosures, on two separate machines, and I use a program called rsync to keep them synchronized. I download podcasts using a program called doppler, which has several advantages to its approach that are useful for archiving. I have the podcasts on a network drive, so I am not beholden to a specific machine to download the podcasts. I found very quickly that Doppler Radio didn't check to see if you had pointed it to multiple copies of the same feeds (it assumes you're using such a small amount of feeds, that you would always notice the doubles yourself), so I wrote a perl script that yanked out doubles. This has held up for the time being, and while I don't have firm numbers on how much disk space per day this process is taking, I'm not too worried about it...

Podcasting certainly has its roots in zine culture, home-brew tapes, BBSes, carbon-copy SF fanzines, and telegraph. If that's too high-minded and artsy-historian, then I could point to the direct event of the fad of "Push Technology" that infected a number of companies in 1998 through to 1999. Microsoft and Netscape both claimed that Push technology would change everything, and Pointcast tried to build a business on it. Really, it was all a fine idea, but the order of the day was to claim that not only was a good idea good, but it would actually turn dog poop into solid gold, so the actuality had issues with the (stock-driven) promises.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why you should love Google's toolbar

Many web people have been critical of Google's new Toolbar, which allows its users to choose to have the pages they view parsed for things like ISBNs and have them auto-linked to Amazon, or have Vehicle Information Numbers auto-linked to a VIN registry.

It's not a service I'd use, but I believe that it's the kind of service that is vital to the Web's health. The ability of end-users to avail themselves of tools that decomopose and reassemble web-pages to their tastes is an issue like inlining, framing, and linking: it's a matter of letting users innovate at the edge.

I think I should be able to use a proxy that reformats my browsing sessions for viewing on a mobile phone; I think I should be able to use a proxy that finds every ISBN and links it to a comparison-shopping-engine's best price for that book across ten vendors. I think I should be able to use a proxy that auto-links every proper noun to the corresponding Wikipedia entry.

And so on -- it's my screen, and I should be able to control it; companies like Google and individuals should be able to provide tools and services to let me control it.

(Of course, this isn't to justify fraud or passing off, as when linking, inlining, copying, proxying or other munging of pages are used to deceive end-users or remove their freedom of choice. But fraud isn't bad because it uses proxying, or deep-linking, or inlining: fraud is bad because it's fraud, no matter what tools it employs.)

Yoz "Perl is Internet Yiddish" Grahame has posted a good, apoplectic, funny, point-by-point refutation of the major objections to the Toolbar. It's a clear-eyed explanation of why, even if you don't use the Toolbar yourself, you should support it and tools like it.

"The issue for authors and publishers is whether readers know they're reading text that's been modified."

And it's so ambiguous! Admittedly, in order for the web page to be altered by the Google toolbar, an "AutoLink" button needs to be pressed every time (it doesn't do it automatically), and the first time you press it this pop-up window appears which explains everything. Personally, I don't think that's nearly enough! A large claxon should sound, the screen should flash, and the user should get a phone call from a Google employee explaining the incredibly ambiguous and possibly-accidental button press. After all, the user might not realise that they had altered the content of the page if they were incredibly forgetful or stupid.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:58:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO get a CD, DVD or book listed on Amazon

Kevin Kelly has posted a detailed explanation of the process by which you can get your self-published DVD, CD or book listed on Amazon. It's a great idea for those evangelical, get-the-message-out micro-publishing projects that have more than 10 or 20 potential customers -- you can print a couple hundred media objects at your local print-shop for a fraction of what a vanity press will charge, and then turn over all the post-office and payment crap to Amazon.

1 Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89.
2 Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC.
3 Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year.
4 Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside.
5 Ship two copies to Amazon
6 Send cover scan
7 Track sales
8 Resgister it (optional)

Link (via Paul Boutin)

Update: Jim Cowling sez, "Canadian publishers, including self-publishers, can get ISBNs for free by going to the Library and Archives Canada website."

Update 2: Viveka sez, "people in any country can find out how to get an ISBN through the alphabetical list on this page at the ISBN international site. For example, ISBNs in Australia are administered by Thorpe, and cost $33 each once you pay a usury of registration and block-allocation fees. I'm using 'usury' just as a collective noun for fees here, not as any imputation on the fine people at Thorpe, who must be paying their database admins by the keystroke."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:47:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

America's dumbest laws to be violated all summer long

Two British students have researched America's stupidest laws and are spending this summer travelling from state to state, violating them.

Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course.

In the far more conservative - and landlocked - state of Utah, they will risk the penitentiary when they hire a boat and attempt to go whale-hunting.

If they manage to outwit state troopers in Utah, and perhaps federal agents on their trail, they will be able to take a deserved, but nevertheless illegal, rest when they have a nap in a cheese factory in South Dakota.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:21:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why Wikipedia works, and how the Britannica bully got it wrong

Robert McHenry is the former Editor in Chief of the Encylopaedia Britannica who gained notoriety when he wrote a self-service, virulent attack on Wikipedia called "the faith-based encyclopedia." McHenry's claims were ludicrous, pejorative and childish, but they captured the imagination of a lot of people who were drawn to believe that if the EiC said that Wikipedia didn't work, it must be true, even if Wikipedia did, in fact, work.

Now Aaron Krowne has written a stunning refutation of McHenry's piece and published it in Free Software Magazine. This thoroughgoing debunking not only shows how shoddy McHenry's reasoning is, but it actually goes some way toward a general theory of why and how Wikipedia-like projects fail or thrive. Best article I've read all week.

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him...

What would McHenry’s metaphor apply more fittingly to?

Why, a traditional print encyclopedia, of course. If I wanted to analyze an arbitrary Britannica article’s evolution over time (for example), I’d have to somehow acquire the entire back catalog of the Britannica (assuming older editions can even be purchased), presumably reserve a sizeable warehouse to store them all, and block out a few days or so of my time to manually make the comparison.

Even the electronic forms of traditional encyclopedias are sure to be lacking such reviewability features. This makes sense, as public reviewability would be embarrassing to traditional content creators.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:19:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hugo Gernsback: father of sf and early WiFi nut

Hugo Gernsback, who published the first science fiction magazine, got his start publishing radio and electronics hobbist mags. Glenn Fleishman has been researching the history of unlicensed radio and has discovered that ole Hugo was an early unlicensed radio/open spectrum advocate! I've co-written some sf about this, and I've got a novel coming out in May that's all about open wireless -- good to see that I'm part of a literary tradition in the field!

Gernsback published an early magazine on the topic, “Modern Electrics,” imported European electronics gear for amateur radio builders, and organized the Wireless Association of America in 1909 that had 10,000 members within a year. Gernback estimated that 400,000 amateur radio aficionados were at work in 1912.

Does this all sound a bit familiar? Working with cheaply available equipment, clambering on roofs, and working inside the law while not being subject to regulation, these amateurs—largely boys and young men—spent countless hours messing with technology to extend transmissions. It was some kind of combination of instant messaging, phone phreaking, and Wi-Fi with a distinctly modern flavor to it.

Link

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

Science fiction radio show booted for being popular -- help get it onto sat radio

Mur sez, "The Dragon Page is a 2 hour sci-fi fantasy talk show out of Arizona that was broadcast on AM radio (and subsequently put out on the internet over podcasting). The Live Fire show was just cancelled because they were too popular and were making the other shows on the station - all conservative talk - look bad. We're trying to get the show back on the air, either on another local Arizona station or over satellite radio." Link 1, Link 2 (Thanks, Mur!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ten million CC licenses in a pie chart

Creative Commons has published a fascinating pie-chart showing the frequency with which each CC license appears appears in the wild, drawing on 10,000,000 CC licenses that are discoverable with Yahoo. Link

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

George Lucas and Jedi Mickey in Disney World

When George Lucas holidays in Disney World, he gets to hang with Jedi Mickey. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:21:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod acoustic hack: what it means

Some months ago, an enterprising hacker accomplished a key hack in the eventual opening of the iPod: Nils Schneider reverse-engineered the iPod's firmware. This means that hackers now have the means to move data off of and onto the iPod at will, but more interesting is how he accomplilshed it. He figured out how to get the iPod to convert its firmware to a series of squeaks (essentially, to play it like a piece of music) and then converted the music back into software. My cow-orker Seth has written a fantastic piece on the creativity involved in this ingenious hack:

Schneider's ingenious approach shows several important virtues:

* User innovation and the lack of passivity. Apple didn't intend for third-party software to be used with the iPod; not only was Schneider unconcerned with this, he ended up using the iPod in a way that its developers wouldn't have anticipated (and, if they've heard about it, are probably amused or startled by). He certainly refused to limit his thinking to what the original manufacturer had in mind; he insisted, on, well, thinking different.

* Consciousness of history. This problem was solved before in an earlier generation of technology. As Dave Farber has often pointed out, it's tragic that computer scientists and programmers working today are often thoroughly ignorant of what earlier generations have already invented and implemented. Even more than other fields, computing may be repeating and duplicating effort all the time. The notion of modulating digital data as a waveform at audio frequencies has been deeply important in digital communications, but it's easy enough for people who don't use a modem any more to forget it -- never mind people who (like myself) have never had to use an acoustic coupler.

* An appreciation for the universality of the machine. The idea that data is data and that representations and encodings of it are merely accidental goes back, depending on how you want to count it, decades or centuries. (See, e.g., Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), for some antecedents of this idea in the days before Shannon, Turing, and von Neumann.) But even so, we can get stuck in what cognitive psychologists call "functional fixedness" and refuse to think about data outside of its current representation. We can refuse to think of some signalling method or storage medium as capable of representing any data, of communications media and computing devices as genuinely universal. We can say that certain outputs were made for certain purposes and stubbornly refuse to consider that there are other outputs, even outputs that may be a problem for somebody's security policy. We can read Shannon, or anything after Shannon, and still not know in a practical sense that any data can be encoded on any channel. But Schneider thought with an abstraction and generality that befits an "information age"; he knew that bits are bits, from a communication engineering point of view, and meaning comes after, at another layer.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:19:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, February 25, 2005

Jerks goad collector into shutting down his site

A Boing Boing reader says: Your post about the collector evidently inspired some criticism of his collections. See his website now.

"My Collections Page...

...has been withdrawn since being flooded with unkind and rude emails as a result of the link and unfounded, un-called for comments at B3TA.

I have put a lot of effort into my site for the benefit of everyone and don't expect to receive abuse in exchange.

For the time being I am not prepared to share my collections.

For the record, having a butterfly collection does not automatically make one a butterfly killer and I am most certainly not obsessed. I have many hobbies and I have other pursuits in life, which obviously some people do not.

At least I can say, I am never ever bored."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:57:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stance Angle chair

This ultra sci-fi computer chair shifts from a normal seated position all the way to "reclined standing," with several other points in between. Meanwhile, the computer monitor and keyboard positioning unit moves vertically so that your whole workspace is ergonomically optimized no matter if you're up, down, or somewhere in the middle. Ambience Doré, the designer office furniture company that Xeni co-founded, is a distributor of the Stance Angle Chair and Plasma2 positioning system. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:12:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Videos of people being zapped by tasers

Here are a bunch of QuickTime videos of people (and in one case, a bull who was minding his own business) getting shot with taser guns. Ouch. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:52:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hi-Fructose: more songs about monsters and food

A new magazine about candy, toys, and monsters launches in Spring, 2005:

"Hi-Fructose Toysploitation Magazine is your entry into the exploding Toy Arts Revolution. From Urban Vinyl, limited run, and artist centered toys to abandoned theme parks and Japanese monster Wrestling, Hi Fructose provides a cross section of the best and bizarre of the Under the Counter Culture."
Looks awesome. Link (via cephalablog)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:29:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gummi roadkill offends the humor impaired

This just in: "Animal rights activists say that Trolli Road Kill Gummi Candy -- in shapes of partly flattened snakes, chickens and squirrels -- fosters cruelty toward animals." How utterly unsurprising that news is.

I can't wait to buy my daughter a five-pound bag of this stuff. Hope the gelatin doesn't have mad cow prions in it.

(Related: I think the article that was the most fun for me to ever write was Gross National Product, for Wired in 1999. It was about weird and gross candy design.)
Link

UPDATE: Stefan reports that Kraft foods has caved into pressure from animal rights activists who claim children exposed to this candy will grow up to become sadistic animal-runner-overs. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:39:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dukes of Hazzard Institute seeks blogger/"good-ole-boy"

This reads like a trailer park wet dream: Get paid $100,000 to blog for one year about the Dukes of Hazzard.

The job responsibilities for the Vice President, THE DUKES OF HAZZARD INSTITUTE are:
-- watch THE DUKES OF HAZZARD every weeknight on CMT
-- know the words to THE DUKES OF HAZZARD theme song, Good Ol' Boys, written and performed on the series by the legendary Waylon Jennings
-- serve as media expert on THE DUKES OF HAZZARD for the CMT DUKES OF HAZZARD INSTITUTE: must be available for TV, radio and newspaper interviews to share his or her expertise and passion for THE DUKES OF HAZZARD on CMT
-- write THE DUKES OF HAZZARD INSTITUTE online blog for www.CMT.com
-- be passionate about THE DUKES OF HAZZARD on CMT

Questions candidates will be asked include:
-- If you, Bo, Luke and Daisy took off in The General Lee, what would happen next?
-- If Waylon Jennings had written your theme song, what would be the title and chorus?
-- Which character on THE DUKES OF HAZZARD do you most identify with and why?

Link (wait -- there's a "Dukes of Hazzard Institute"???)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:27:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orphan Works

Donna Wentworth sez,

When you can't find copyright holders, copyright becomes a quagmire. Let's fix it. For designers, academics, artists, musicians, and filmmakers, using copyrighted works can be a huge headache. It can be impossible to find out if a particular work is still under copyright or not. And even when people would happily pay to use a copyrighted photo, passage, or video clip, it's often impossible (or extremely costly) to find the copyright holder. When this happens, everybody loses. Artists can't realize their creative vision, academics can't clearly communicate their ideas, and copyright holders don't get paid. Even worse, important pieces of our culture get needlessly locked away.

Right now, the US Copyright Office is asking for public comment on the "orphan works" problem, so now's our chance to make the system work better. The Copyright Office has specifically asked for comments from people who have run up against the problem of trying to clear a potentially copyrighted work -- either for use in a new creative effort or simply to make the work available to the public once again.

If you have a story like this, it's essential you make your voice heard. Use the form on your right to submit comments directly to the Copyright Office -- you type, and we'll take care of the formatting and submission.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:24:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The (Hooters) Gates

Link (Thanks, mahalie).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:21:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPods and MRIs

UCLA radiologists Osman Ratib and Antoine Rosset developed an open source iPod app to manage and move medical imaging data. Around 6,000 radiologists, surgeons, and cardiologists are now using OsiriX. From Technology Review:

It automatically recognizes and lists the medical images stored on the iPod. Now, iin much the same manner that people scroll through a playlist, radiologists can scroll through a list of patients or view their records through iPod's iPhoto application....

But it's not just a novelty, a one-time joyride for medical hackers. Thirty-seven percent of the respondents say they use it every day, and 24 percent say they are likely to develop plug-ins or other upgrades to better serve their needs.

While critics have leveled criticism about the iPod application, Ratib says that the patient's personal data is stripped out and assigned an anonymous identification during transport.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:31:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Christo "Gates"-inspired porn

Had to happen. The Gates Gaytz: "“This 23 mile long orange hanky in the back pocket of New York City announces to all the universe that Central Park is once again the place for ‘anything anytime’." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:21:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stop child exorcisms

A BBC investigation claims that churches may be physically and emotionally harming children they believe are possessed by demons. That's a new spin on satanic child abuse. According to the BBC's Newsnight program, most London authorities aren't doing anything about it either. From the BBC News article:

Afruca (Africans Against Child Abuse) spokeswoman Debbie Ariyo said she was not surprised by the findings because the driving out of demons was known to be a widespread practice within the African churches.

"It's part and parcel of what churches do in terms of freeing people from what they see as the stranglehold of the devil.

"But it does worry me that local authorities are not making the effort to link up with the churches in terms of their practices regarding child protection," Ms Ariyo said...

The Newsnight investigation comes on the fifth anniversary of the death of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie, killed by carers who claimed she was possessed by the devil.

Link (via Fortean Times)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:59:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cephaloblog

BB pal Scott Beale is the proprietor of the excellent Laughing Squid Web hosting service (home to xeni.net and pesco.net) and also the Squid List, an online clearinghouse for information on avant-garde events in San Francisco. Now, Scott has started Cephaloblog, a wonderful blog chronicling high weirdness in the Bay Area and beyond. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:45:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Radical pen redesign

I have no idea if this "ergonimic" pen design is any better than plain old stick-pens, but it sure looks cool and intuitively useful. Link (Thanks, Ronny!)

Update: Modesty sez, "I makes no sense at all, until the moment you figure out how to hold it, at which point it feels like the most natural thing in the world, it just kinda sits there being useful. I write with it all the time now (well when I write and not type anyway)."

Update 2: Rachel sez, "I've had one for a while and while it's a neat concept I don't find it that comfortable and it's pretty much impossible to write quickly with it. What's interesting, though (at least to me) is it comes with an interchangeable PDA stylus point and (more interesting to me) the inventor went to my high school (Paly in Palo Alto, Aalifornia). My understanding is he came up with the pen concept while in detention there."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:17:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pratchett's Lords and Ladies adapted to feature-length fan-film

A group of German Terry Pratchett fans have spent the last nine months producing a feature-length adaptation of his wonderful novel, Lords and Ladies, for a total cost of 300 Euros. The trailers are online now, and you'll be able to buy the DVD in May, with proceeds to the Orangutan Foundation. Link (via /.)

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

Douglas Adams's game-developer pals in London next Thurs

Next Thursday, Londoners can meet and hear Steve Meretzky, the guy who brought the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy interactive text game to life, also responsible for such other classics of the genre as Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Zork Zero. He'll be talking games with another king-hell games guy, Michael Bywater, who worked on Starship Titanic, and who is a prolific author.

Date: Thursday 3rd March, 8:00pm
Price: £4 on the door - all proceeds go to Save The Rhino and The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
Venue: The Brockway Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL (map)
Any questions: yoz@yoz.com

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:04:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transparent toaster "celebrates toasting"

This transparent glass toaster "celebrates toasting in a glowing and shining way that makes us look forward to enjoy a fresh piece of toast." Also, it is really cool-looking. Frustrating Flash-site Link, scroll all the way to the right and curse artsy web "designers" (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Christo "Gates" parody leads to absurd, Simpsons-esque burst of fame

It began during a bored night of TV-watching. Then-unknown internet dude Geoff Hargadon was zoning out on the sofa, watching the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show with his wife, marveling at the hype around Christo and Jeanne-Claude's $20 million "Gates" installation in Central Park. Just $3.50 in art supplies later, a cat-scaled masterpiece was born.

He is on his way to a reception hosted by the mayor. His lunch at a Cambridge restaurant was free, after the man behind the counter recognized him. And his phone rings constantly with people calling to congratulate him. ''It's just so amazing that I know this man," gushed a co-worker at his office yesterday.

Geoff Hargadon -- Hargo, now that he's a star -- is the creator of The Somerville Gates, a micro sendup of the saffron extravaganza now in New York's Central Park. And he has become almost preposterously famous. After he posted photos on his website of his 13-gate installation -- made from stuff he picked up at Home Depot that he glued together and painted orange -- Hargadon received more than 4 million hits, so many that he had to take it down yesterday because his Internet service was charging him for every visit. He owes thousands, he says.

Museums across the country are after him. Manhattan's Pratt Institute wants a Somerville Gate for its permanent collection. Ditto, the Browne Popular Culture Museum in Bowling Green, Ohio; the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; and Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C. Someone from Tufts University invited him to display the work in a juried art show.

Link.

Previously: Christo "The Gates" parodies: "The Crackers", Christo "Gates" parodies: Batman and Andy Warhol, and Christo's "Gates": let the internet parodies commence.

Update: Eric Marcoullier sez:

Re: Hargo's sudden burst of fame (Christo "Gates" parody leads to absurd burst of fame), is anyone else reminded of the Simpsons episode "Mom and Pop Art" where Homer tries to build a grill and gets labeled as an outsider artist? One minute you're sitting on the floor making 4"-high gates as a joke, the next minute you're judging art competitions at Tufts University. Awesome! And come to think of it, Christo was even mentioned in the episode: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:59:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

'05 Oscars and animated shorts

BB reader Shannon Clark sez,

Canada's national film board has made Ryan and a preview of Hardwood -- two films from Canada nominated for Oscars this year -- available online. Ryan is specifically notable for BoingBoing readers, it is an animated short but feels more like a biography. It depicts Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who was nominated for an Oscar himself in 1969 but is now a panhandler in Montreal. See also Salon.com which includes Ryan in a day of oscar shorts they are making available today.

Link

Update: BB reader steef says,

As a follow up to Xeni's post about Oscar-nominated shorts Ryan and Hardwood, the Animation World Network has a showcase of all 5 nominated shorts, with links to the complete films or clips, without having to sit through Salon's one-day advertising extravaganza.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:44:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Maxim art directors = Creative Commies in hiding?

Boing Boing reader Capn says, "Looks like a graphic designer snuck a little bit of CopyLeft propaganda into the latest issue of Maxim."
Link. Previously: Bill Gates: Free Culture advocates = Commies, Creative Commies, More Gates "Copyleft = Commies" propaganda

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:45:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Xeni Tech" on NPR: Sterling on Christie's "Cyberspace" auction

An auction of rare documents and artifacts related to the evolution of computer technology and the Internet was held at Christie's Auction House in New York on Wednesday. The report I filed for NPR's "Day to Day" show includes a rant from Bruce Sterling on the conspicuous absence of any William Gibson books -- the writer who invented the word "cyberspace."

Link to archived audio for this story with expanded online coverage. Link to "Xeni Tech" archives on NPR's Day to Day. See also this CNET wrap-up of the auction, which brought in less money than anticipated (because, duh, anyone nerdy enough to want to buy this stuff is probably hoarding their cash for pocket protectors): Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:01:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites wins WIRED Rave Award

Exactly two years ago today, I emailed Kevin Sites to ask if he'd ever considered doing a blog. My friend John Parres had been forwarding me copies of Kevin's incredible first-person accounts of life as a front line war reporter for CNN, which he'd been sending to friends and family. They were evocative and eloquent, they told stories none of us were hearing through conventional news sources, and they belonged on a blog where more people could read them. A blogosphere barn-raising began -- geek pals including John Parres, David Ulevitch of everydns.net (who's been generously hosting the blog for *free* since day one), Noah Glass of Audblog, Evan Williams (then of Blogger), David Weekly of CCCP, and others joined forces to build the blog, which was up in a few short days. Kevin Sites maintained his new online journal through exceedingly difficult conditions and personal challenges; he chronicled what he saw and experienced at kevinsites.net, and he changed how we saw the war -- and how we viewed news about the war. Our respect for the man and his work has only grown since then, so it gave us all great pleasure to see Kevin win Wired Magazine's award for Blogger of The Year at the Rave Awards earlier this week. Congratulations, Kevin. A rough road, and a well deserved honor. Link to SF Chronicle story, Link to AP. A very special thanks also to Anil Dash, who served an invaluable role on Kevin's blog project during a particularly tough time.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:55:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Scanner Darkly trailer

The trailer for the Richard Linklater-directed adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel is now online. Link (Quicktime), more on the Philip K. Dick website, and link to IMDB listing. (Thanks, suz) Previously: Sneak peek at images from A Scanner Darkly, Erik Davis consults on A Scanner Darkly

Update Boing Boing Sean Hyde-Moyer says, "I just watched th PK Dick Scanner Darkly trailer, and thought folks might be interested in another vision. My friends Dan Thron and Brian White of Rustmonkey Productions put together a trailer for Scanner a couple of years ago when the project was first making the rounds. It's in pretty stark contrast to the Linklater approach. The Quicktime of their pitch is here: Link I love Linklater, but man, would I have liked to see Rustmonkey's Scanner."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:31:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Italy runs out of wiretaps

Italy's TIM mobile carrier is drowning in wiretap requests from prosecuters, and its equipment can accomodate no more taps until some of the old ones are complete:

The Italian mobile operator TIM, one of the largest mobile phone companies in Italy has issued a unique warning that the number of wiretaps has reached the limit. In a fax sent to all Italian public prosecutors they say that they have already over-stretched their capacity from 5.000 to 7.000 simultaneously intercepted mobile phones. New requests now have to be processed on a 'first come first serve' basis, they write.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:31:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Online anonymity

My cow-orker Fred von Lohmann's latest Law.com column is a stirring call-to-arms in defense of online anonymity: "...your Internet Service Provider knows you're not a dog. And it knows your name, address and telephone number."

In one recent case, the lawsuit and subpoena were issued in response to someone opining on an online message board that the president of a corporation had "a Napoleon complex." In another, the lawsuit was based on a statement that the company's executives were getting rich while the stock price was in free fall. Each of these suits was dropped once it became clear that the anonymous speaker was going to court to protect his identity, suggesting that the real purpose of the litigation was to discover whether the statements were made by employees so that the company could retaliate against them. The lawsuit was mere pretext for extra-judicial punishment.

Though these two suits were dropped, there was a sad postscript: postings to both of the message boards involved dropped off dramatically once word of the lawsuit got out, and still haven't returned to their previous levels.

Courts across the country are beginning to develop some basic rules about when the anonymity of an online speaker should be protected and when it should be breached. Specifically, the emerging test, best articulated in a New Jersey appellate decision called Dendrite, holds that when a court is faced with a subpoena aimed at identifying an anonymous speaker, the court should (1) provide notice to the potential defendant and an opportunity to defend his anonymity via a motion to quash; (2) require the plaintiff to specify the statements that allegedly violate its rights; (3) review the complaint to ensure that it states a cause of action based on each statement and against each defendant; (4) require the plaintiff to produce evidence supporting each element of its claims, and (5) balance the equities, weighing the strength of plaintiff's evidence and the potential harm to the plaintiff if the subpoena is quashed against the harm to the defendant from losing his right to remain anonymous.

Link (via Copyfight)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:49:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Voodoo knife rack in shape of a person

This "voodoo" knife rack, which depicts a human form pierced by your knife collection in many strategic locations, is the best kitchen thinggy I've ever seen. They should make custom head-shaped ones with the face of your choice, so you can start your day by stabbing your least favorite person in the world in the face repeatedly as you make breakfast. Link (via JWZ)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:46:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink

I finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Blink, which is about the ways we make split second decisions, and why snap judgments sometimes works and sometimes don't work. The entire book is a goldmine of delightfully non-intuitive surprises (I mentioned one of them, the triangle test in another entry about Gladwell's talk at PopTech), but the standout chapter for me was about the work of Silvan Tomkins, a psychology professor at Princeton and Rutgers.

Tomkins was an expert at studying facial muscles and what they revealed about people. His theories bordered on phrenology:

[Tomkins] could walk into a post office, it was said, go over to the "Wanted" posters, and, just by looking at mug shots, tell you what crimes the various fugitives had committed. "He would watch the show "To Tell the Truth,' and without fault he could always pick the person who was lying and who his confederates were," his son, Mark, recalls.

His ability to figure out the lifestyles of people just by looking at their faces is astonishing:

[Tomkins pupil, Paul] Ekman had just tracked down a hundred thousand feet of film that had been shot by the virologist Carleton Gajdusek in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of the footage was of a tribe called the South Fore, who were a peaceful and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, who were hostile and murderous and who had a homosexual ritual where pre-adolescent boys were required to serve as courtesans for the male elders of the tribe. For six months, Ekman and his collaborator, Wallace Friesen, had been sorting through the footage, cutting extraneous scenes, focusing just on close-ups of the faces of the tribesmen, in order to compare the facial expressions of the two groups. Ekman set up the camera. Tomkins sat in the back. He had been told nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins looked on intently, peering through his glasses. At the end, he went up to the screen and pointed to the faces of the South Fore. "These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful," he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the Kukukuku. "This other group is violent, and there is lots of evidence to suggest homosexuality." Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot get over what Tomkins did. "My God! I vividly remember saying, "Silvan, how on earth are you doing that?" Ekman recalls. "And he went up to the screen and, while we played the film backward, in slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the face that he was using to make his judgment. That's when I realized, 'I've got to unpack the face.' It was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see it, maybe everyone else could, too."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:35:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

House loaded with collections

Tony's house has many collections in it. He's done a good job of setting up the displays.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:48:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiny library in a one woman Nebraskan town

Next time you're in Monowi, Nebraska (Pop. 1) be sure to visit the picturesque library.

The people of Monowi have died or moved — all but one: Elsie Eiler. Brisk and unsentimental at 71, she lives in the one home still fit for living in, a snug trailer with worn white siding. She runs the one business left in Monowi, a dark, wood-paneled tavern, thick with smoke. She also runs the library. The sign outside is painted on a section of a refrigerator door. The floor is bare plywood. There's no heat. But there are thousands upon thousands of books.

Link (via, Give, Get, Take, And Have)

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

Would-be kidney transplant recipient denied because of website

Alex Crionas needs a kidney, and his friend Patrick Garrity would like to give him one. But the transplant was recently blocked by a coordinating group because Crionas published an account of his need for the procedure on a personal website. The group said Crionas' online outreach gave him an unfair advantage over other candidates who may not have internet resources.

They went through rigorous blood and tissue testing last month at LifeLink HealthCare Institute, which coordinates the transplant program for Tampa General Hospital, and say they were declared physically compatible for the operation. But the hope of a new life for the 28-year-old Crionas didn't last long. Crionas got a letter earlier this month from LifeLink, a Tampa nonprofit that links patients and donors, telling him his request for surgery was rejected because Crionas had a Web site seeking a donor. "I was dumbfounded," Crionas said. "We didn't even meet through the Web site."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:28:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elvis has left the Death Star

Boing Boing buddy Scott Beale says, "I shot a few photos at last weekend's WonderCon 2005 [comics convention in San Francisco]. This image is by far my favorite of the set and I thought that Boing Boing readers would particularly appreciate it. The pop culture convergence is near perfect." Here's the full WonderCon 2005 set: Link.

Jeff "Koganuts" Koga says, "I spotted the same guy at last summer's San Diego Comic-Con: Link to image, and link to blog post. He also wore a Ghostbusters uniform, complete with backpack, at the convention that weekend... and the nametag, a la Venkman, Stantz, Spengler, and Zeddemore, naturally said 'Presley.'"

Michael Kuker says, "The Elvis stormtrooper is a regular at a lot of cons. He's known as 'Elvis Trooper' and he has a website." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:51:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Wars knock-off toys (and predecessors)

Gallery of vintage starwarsploitation products from the '70s and '80s. The pics are great, but it's a pity the Flash UI is so teh suck and there's no background information on the products depicted. Link (Thanks, pj). Boing Boing reader jonathan says,

One of the toys in the "Star Wars" knock-offs -- specifically, the one you actually pictured on Boing Boing -- is not actually a cheap rendition of a Lucas copyright. It's just a cheap toy from the Micronauts line, which came out a year before Star Wars. Check it out. I know this because, as a kid, some of the only comics i could afford were 25 cent back-issues of, well, the lame comic book inspired by these rather boring toys. Wheeeeee!

Link

Chris Eng says,

Check out how bad-ass Baron Karza looks when he's not all small and sad and blurry! Cone missiles! Magnetic scowly-head! Intense! Link

Xogij says,

"Baron Karza and Andromeda were based on these Japanese toys 'Kotetsu Jeeg.' Link 1 Link 2."

EFF legal wizard Fred Von Lohmann says, "Cheap Star Wars knock-offs?! I still have both my Force Commander and Baron Karza micronauts. They were totally my favorite toys as a kid, and they rock, even 25 years later!" Link to snapshot of Micronauts in Fred's office, fighting for your right to download.

Looks like there's a new version of the Micronauts due out in mid-2005. Link to details, and more about the toy line's Japan roots.

Update: Why I love nerds, part umptybillion. Kirk Demarais, creator of the "Secret Fun Spot" site originally linked in this post, submits this heartfelt mea culpa -- er, mea Karza...

Hey Xeni, Thanks for linking to the "Fake Star Wars" page of my site "Secret Fun Spot." I'm sorry to offend so many by including Baron Karza of the honorable Micronauts, and I just wanted to explain my actions. I made the faulty assumption that they were rip-offs because...

1. They showed up in stores (and in the 1978 Sears wishbook from which the image originated) after the historic 1977 summer of Star Wars. From innerspace online... "Much like Series 1, this section entitled "Series 2-1977" actually came out about 1978, but the toys bear a 1977 copyright."
2. In color and robot-ness, they vaguely resemble Darth Vader and a Stormtrooper.
3. They shared the page with various Star Wars knock-offs.

That said, I'll remove the offending image from the gallery as soon as I am able.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:46:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hamster-powered MIDI sequencer

Cornell student Levy Lorenzo built a three-note polyphonic MIDI sequencer controlled by hamsters. Two critters per channel: one controls melody, the other rules the rhythm. Link to story and audio files. (thanks, Stef)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:39:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SeXBox: Using force feedback signals for sex toys

X-Box controller modded with a vibrator. "The second you start playing with this while on XBox Live, it turns into teledildonics!"
Link (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:31:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beatallica.org shut down, more Sony nastygrams fly

David Dixon, "Webmaster of Puppets" for Beatles/Metallica parody-mashup act Beatallica, says:

Beatallica.org has been taken down by our ISP:

"Even though we have received your counter notice, we are required by law to disable access to the infringing material. However, we are going to restore that in 10 business days from the date we received the counter notice (February 24, 2005) unless required under the DMCA to do otherwise."

Andy Baio (waxy.org) and Matthew Haughey (music.metafilter.com) both still have Beatallica mp3's up on their sites. I've emailed them to get their okay on linking them up, as they'll likely be getting a ton of traffic (and possible Sony C&D's) as a result.

Also, I just received, via Certified Mail, a cease-and-desist letter of my own! It's directed at me personally, not the website or the band. It basically says the same things as the one our ISP got last Thursday, but also that I must *immediately*:

- cease exploiting Sony/ATV Compositions and all derivative works thereof;
- provide Sony/ATV with information regarding any and all audio and audio-visual product, merchandise and written material (electronic and otherwise), and any other product that incorporates or uses Sony/ATV Compositions yadda yadda
- provide Sony with an accounting of all sums received or earned in connection with the exploitation of the Sony/ATV Compositions... as well as the operation of the Sites
- compensate Sony/ATV in an amount to be discussed

I have ten (10) days to comply. By the way, our message board is still active, as is the online petition (now up to nearly 3000 signatures), if Boing Boing readers want to send some kind words our way.

Previously: Sony nastygrams Beatallica.org, Beatallica fans respond to Sony nastygram, Lars Ulrich of Metallica steps in.

Update Scott Matthews says:

Regarding Beatallica:

1) their site is still available via Archive: Link

2) Matt Haughey is running the audio here: Link

Song titles include "Blackened the USSR," "Got to Get You Trapped Under Ice," and "The Thing That Should Not Let It Be."

And BB reader andy points us to this torrent of the whole heap of Beatallica tunes: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:22:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WIPO pulls out dirty tricks to kill participation from consumer groups

EFF and its friends are making amazing progress at the World Intellectual Property Organization: we've got dozens of non-governmental organizations in the pipe to attend the meetings in Geneva, and it's clear that the rightsholders are scared. At the last meeting we attended, our documents were stolen and dropped in the trash in the toilets. Now, with a meeting coming up to discuss the "Development Agenda" -- a catch-all term for WIPO initiatives that make new copyright and patent rules that try to help developing countries, rather than exploit them -- the International Bureau is cooking the process. They've decided to exclude "ad-hoc observers" (the category that nearly all of the copyright reform groups fall under) in favor of "permanent observers" (a category dominated by motion picture studios, broadcasters and other gigantic rightsholder interests). Check it out:

Right-owners are now in FULL MOBILIZATION on the WIPO development agenda. The only thing I have seen like this are the campaigns relating to the 1998-1999 WHO resolution on trade and public health and the 2001 WTO Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health. Like then, the right-owners effort is closely coordinated behind the scenes, with enormous cooperation and pressure from the US and other developed counties. The US has formed an inter-agency task force to attack the DA. It would be good to have some details on the EC organization on this. I assume the worst, but there is a new Commission, so we need to check. Note that the US, the EC and European governments will put huge pressure on developing country governments to abandon/isolate Brazil or India on this, which is exactly what happened on the WTO negotiations over paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration, and which was a disaster.

It appears as though the WIPO secretariat is entirely committed to defending corporate right-owners and entirely trying to undermine consumer interests. I would love to be wrong about this, but one has to face the evidence we have seen so far, including for example the recent USPTO and Casablanca meetings, and the rejection of applications for ad hoc observer status to groups like ICSTD and others, and the lack of a real dialogue with civil society NGOs.

Ten year ago, WIPO nearly killed the net with its destructive "Internet Treaties." These treaties are the reason that Dmitry went to jail, that 2600 magazine was censored, and that Verizon got thousands of bogus subpoenas demanding that it turn over customer info. These treaties are why the Church of Scientology and Diebold are able to censor their critics by calling them infringers. They're why WIPO has the same relation to bad copyright that Mordor has to evil.

Now that we're on the verge of reversing some of that harm with a rational treaty that treats the Internet like a solution, not a problem, they're pulling out all the dirtiest tricks they can think of. If I were you, I'd be mad as hell. I know I am. Link (via Copyfight)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:31:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hilarious romance-novel cover remixes

This page of remixed romance-novel covers is snarfingly funny -- GIMME MY SHIRT BACK, LORD OF THE TUBE SOCKS and many more. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:21:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help rescue orphaned works from copyright

Larry Lessig sez,

Thanks to some prodding by a couple of great US Senators, the copyright office is currently considering whether to recommend changes to copyright law that will make it easier and cheaper for you to use "orphaned works" -- works that remain under copyright but whose "owner" can't be found. As many of you have written me, this is a real problem that affects thousands of innovative people every year. But the copyright office still needs some convincing.

To convince them, we need your help. If you have a relevant story, or a perspective that might help the Copyright Office evaluate this issue, I would be grateful if you took just a few minutes to write an email telling them your story. The most valuable submissions will make clear the practical burden the existing system creates. (One of my favorite stories is about a copy-shop's refusal to enlarge a 60 year old photo from an elementary school year book for a eulogy because the copyright owner couldn't be found.) Describe instances where you wanted to use a work, but couldn't find the owner to ask permission. Explain how that impacted your ability to create. Or pass this email on to someone who you know might have a useful story to add.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:01:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How should democracies respond to terrorism?

Bill Thompson sez,

March 11 is the anniversary of the bombing of ten commuter trains in Madrid and the Spanish government is going to commemorate it with marches and speeches. In the days running up to the anniversary a bunch of politicians and academics will be meeting to discuss and announce something called the 'Madrid Agenda' - a set of recommendations and proposals for how democracies can deal with threats of terror. The process is being lead by the Club of Madrid, a group of former world leaders (Clinton, Gorbachov and that sort).

But the big thing is planned for March 11 when we want people around the world to sit down with friends or family, talk about democracy and terrorism and think about what they want their political leaders to do about it - then tell us so we can make sure their views get taken into account. We're calling it Meet on March 11 (original, huh). We've got around five hundred people signed up, and people are starting to publicise their own meetings.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tonight's JG Ballard event in San Francisco

Just a reminder that the JG Ballard event at City Lights Books is tonight at 7pm. RE/Search Publications' V. Vale spoke with Ballard today and will play a tape of the conversation this evening. If you're not in San Francisco, you can of course still order a copy of the JG Ballard Quotes book. It's a pocket-sized arsenal of mindbombs sure to blow the mind of any happy mutant. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:44:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK Labour MP flays govt over terror laws - incredible speech!

UK Labour MP Brian Sedgemore has given his last speech in Parliament, and it's a doozy: he excoriates -- nay, flays alive -- the Blair government and Labour's tame backbenchers for collaborating to turn Britain into a police state in the name of fighting terrorism.

How on earth did a Labour Government get to the point of creating what was described in the House of Lords hearing as a "gulag" at Belmarsh? I remind my hon. Friends that a gulag is a black hole into which people are forcibly directed without hope of ever getting out. Despite savage criticisms by nine Law Lords in 250 paragraphs, all of which I have read and understood, about the creation of the gulag, I have heard not one word of apology from the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary. Worse, I have heard no word of apology from those Back Benchers who voted to establish the gulag.

Have we all, individually and collectively, no shame? I suppose that once one has shown contempt for liberty by voting against it in the Lobby, it becomes easier to do it a second time and after that, a third time. Thus even Members of Parliament who claim to believe in human rights vote to destroy them.

Many Members have gone nap on the matter. They voted: first, to abolish trial by jury in less serious cases; secondly, to abolish trial by jury in more serious cases; thirdly, to approve an unlawful war; fourthly, to create a gulag at Belmarsh; and fifthly, to lock up innocent people in their homes. It is truly terrifying to imagine what those Members of Parliament will vote for next.I can describe all that only as new Labour's descent into hell, which is not a place where I want to be.

Link

Update: RpR sez, "This is the link to Hansard - the UK's parliamentary reporting and has the full text of the speech by Brian Sedgemoor."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:13:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Finnish blogger faces disgraceful, bogus libel charge

Visa sez,

A blogger in Finland has been sued for libel by a school headmaster (or actually the headmaster has asked the police to investigate if the blogger can be charged) after he wrote harsh words about the headmaster's questionable schooling methods.

The first thing police did was to ask the blogger to remove all posts about the headmaster, even though this is clearly unconstitutional. Later, the police instructed the author to remove the offending material from the website according to the ".fi top level domain rules", which state that the police can ask for a suspension of a domain, if it's suspected to be used in crime. However, the blog is under the .net domain and not .fi!

The problems with this headmaster have been publicly discussed in the newspapers, but there is no knowledge about any criminal investigations except against this blogger.

Link (Thanks, Visa!)

Update: Visa sez, "The blogger who is being intestivated for libel has written his story in his own words."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:08:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stylized, cartoony tiki mugs

Muntiki sells beautiful, stylized tiki mugs and vases that are like nothing I've ever seen -- the kind of thing Ren and Stimpy would put in their tiki bar. Unfortunately, they're expensive as hell, but I think if I had space for these, I'd spring for them. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Public Hotspot, Public Vulnerability

My latest article for TheFeature.com is about a new security protocol that seeks to expose the evil twins and dodgy middlemen lurking in the shadows of wireless access points:

Phishers use technical spoofing and social engineering to trick potential victims into thinking that they're interacting with a legitimate Web site. For example, you've probably received at least a few e-mails purporting to be from PayPal and asking you to change your password because your account may have been the victim of a cyberattack. Of course, the reality is that the e-mail is itself an attack. Following the link takes you to a page that looks just like PayPal, but in reality is a phisher's net.

"Phishing exists in both wireless and wired settings," says cryptographer Markus Jakobsson, a professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics. "But it's a bit more difficult to protect against when you're using a public wireless access point and you can't be entirely sure of its identity."

According to his bio, Jakobsson "teaches cryptography, security, protocol design, and likes to cheat." The combination of his professional practice and, well, appreciation for a good con helps him stay one step ahead of the phishers.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:19:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nessie down under

A giant eel is freaking out fishermen at a trout farm east of Melbourne, Australia. Eyewitnesses say the animal is several meters long and may weigh more than 200 pounds. The farm's owners are offering $1000 to anyone who can catch the eel, believed to have washed in from the nearby Yarra River. From the Herald Sun:

"The trout have been spooked by the monster and they have gone into hiding at the bottom of the ponds," (the farm's operations manager Gary) Wales said.

"I had to give refunds today to people who couldn't catch a fish.

"And I have had a few cancellations as well -- people are too scared to bring their kiddies in case Nessie jumps out and starts chomping on them."

Link (Thanks, Loren Coleman!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:06:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Psychedelic medicine

New Scientist has a long article about the renewed interest among scientists in the possible medical uses of psychedelic drugs like LSD, Psilocybin, DMT, and Ketamine:

Since 2001, psychiatrist Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona in Tucson has been testing psilocybin as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psychotherapy and antidepressants such as Prozac help many patients, but some have such severe symptoms and are so resistant to treatment that they turn to electroshock therapy and even brain surgery. As with the work on cluster headaches, Moreno's study was motivated by reports from people with OCD that psilocybin relieves their symptoms.

So far, Moreno has given both sub-psychedelic and psychedelic doses of pure psilocybin to nine treatment-resistant OCD subjects, in a total of 29 therapy sessions. His preliminary findings suggest firstly that it is safe to ingest psilocybin, which was a primary concern of the trial. Beyond that, Moreno calls his results "promising", but won't discuss them further, since he plans to submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal this year.

Link (Thanks to Nick Philip for the link and the illustration!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:25:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Talking dolls for Japanese senior citizens

As Japan's population gets older, there are fewer young people to take care of the older people. The money to be made in this situation is talking dolls, designed to sleep next to seniors and tell them that they love them.

Talking toys have become such a hit that some elderly people have embraced them as substitutes for the children who have grown old and deserted entire neighborhoods in the rapidly greying country.

"I feel so good, g-o-o-d n-i-g-h-t," the doll says before falling asleep if the owner pats it on the chest gently.

Or Yumel may ask, "Aren't you pushing yourself too hard?" when it judges the owner has been going to bed too irregularly or not spending enough time playing with it.

"If you lead an orderly life, Yumel will be in a good mood, singing songs or pleading with you to do something like buying him toys," Kiriseko said.

Link

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

Four-storey Mario mural made from Post-Its

These Post-It note haxx0rs celebrated National Engineering Week by making an enormous, four-storey mural depicting exciting Super Mario scenes in pixellated glory. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:35:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Freedom to Connect pass auctioned to EFF's benefit

David sez, "I've donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation two admissions to F2C: Freedom to Connect, March 30 & 31 in Washington DC. EFF is auctioning these on eBay, one now and the other after March 1, when the F2C price goes up. All proceeds of these auctions go to EFF; in return F2C gets an attendee who clearly knows which orgs it is important to support! I stole^H^H^H^H^H remixed this idea from this BoingBoing post, where somebody auctioned tix to Shmoocon to EFF's benefit. Good thing Shmoocon didn't file for a business methods patent :-)" Link (Thanks, David!)

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

Tiki-shaped USB enclosure

This bus-powered USB 2.0 enclosure is shaped like a 4" high tiki god, and comes in sizes ranging from 256MB to 4GB. Link (Thanks, Kip and Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:29:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pam Bricker, R.I.P.

Very sad news: our dear friend, Pam Bricker passed away on Sunday. Pam was an accomplished jazz musician and sang for many years with Thievery Corporation.

I met Pam for the first time on Nantucket Island. She and her ex-husband, bOING bOING senior editor Gareth Branwyn, and son Blake invited Carla and I to stay with them at an inn there where she was singing. I loved her performance and became an instant fan.

We will miss her very much. Goodbye Pammy!
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:10:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Classic cartoon themes as MP3s

Mike's Classic Cartoon Themes and Images has downloadable music from cartoons old and new -- just snagged Doug, Josie and the Pussycats in Outerspace, Jabberjaw, Star Blazers and several more! Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Building an ice tower in Alaska

The Alaska Alpine Club in Fairbanks decided to build a 132-tall ice tower. They used a rotating nozzle that sprayed water, making a kind of giant, upside down icicle. The pictures of the tower are neat, but I was even more impressed with the photos of the home made nozzles they used to make the tower.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:35:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO rotosccope a bad-azz realistic light-saber effect into your movies

Lots of companies sell replica light-sabers that light up and stuff, but none of them look particularly convincing when you film yourself swinging them around like an out-of-control Star Wars Kid. That's because the actors in the Star Wars movies don't actually have buzzing wands of light in their hands while they're shooting: instead, they swing sticks at each other, and later on, effects people matte in a rotoscoped beam of light.

This website explains exactly how to matte in your own light-saber effects on your homemade movies, from how to construct an easy-to-rotoscope saber right up to using video-editing software to add the light-beam. Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:29:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pogo-stick design based on composite bow

The Other Michael sez, "Those wacky kids at Carnegie Mellon have created a souped-up high-soaring Pogo Stick, that appropriates design elements from a compound composite bow." Link (Thanks, The Other Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:08:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Wall cutup album made by Negativland mailing-listers

Phineas Narco sez, "This is a web-album compilation that experimentally recompiles samples from Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'. It is made by many of the members of Negativland's mailing list 'Snuggles' and is hosted on the National Cynical Network's site." The tracks I downloaded were a little minimalist for my taste -- I'm more into Luther Wright and the Wrong's stupendous country and western version of The Wall, "Rebuilding the Wall." Link (Thanks Phineas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:06:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC has Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Ajit Monteiro says: "At the BBC they have the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, Infocom game from 1984, written by Douglas Adams. Its a text based adventure game, reminiscent of games from way back when. The two episode game works pretty well even ported to flash."

In the '80s, I spent many hours playing this game. It was a lot of fun, but I got stuck (I think I was trying to convince the depressed robot to open a spaceship door for me) and never finished it. The BBC version I'm playing comes with graphics (created by people who entered a BBC contest to port the game to Flash), which might make it a little easier to solve the puzzles this time around. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:01:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

JG Ballard event tomorrow in San Francisco

To celebrate the publication of the excellent JG Ballard Quotes book, RE/Search Publications and San Francisco's City Lights Books are hosting an event tomorrow night. I'm honored that I was invited to read my favorite Ballard quotations along with SRL's Mark Pauline, former BB guest blogger and hacker Karen Marcelo, research scientist/artist Eric Paulos, Counterculture Through the Ages author RU Sirius, photographer SM Gray, and writer Joe Donohue. The event takes place at 7pm on Wednesday Thursday, February 24. Please stop by and say hello if you're in the area!

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:25:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Designy, witty insiders' guide to Barcelona

The LeCool guide to Barcelona is a tremendous book -- made by soliciting information from locals on their favorite undiscovered, insider spots, and beautifully laid out in a great, designy, lush edition. I've got a copy and it's a terrific read: witty and exciting, makes me want to get back to Barcelona! Don't be put off by the Flash site with the tiny, hard-to-read samples; this is really a fine guide. Link (Thanks, Rene!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Multimedia's early history documented

Dave Groff, co-founder of the legendary pioneering multimedia firm Mackerel writes, "A biased history of interactive media. We've recently finished the first 2 chapters of this history, covering the late 1980's to about 1993. Filled with ancient screen samples and downloadable goodies, including the original virtual bubblewrap circa 1993." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tennis court laid out on a helipad

The Dubai Duty Free Men's Open match between Roger Federer and Andre Agassi will be conducted is being promoted via a special tennis green that's been laid out on the 7-star Burj Al Arab hotel's helipad. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Update: Peter sez, "don't forget the earlier Boing Boing post about Tiger Woods being paid $1M to hit golf balls off the same helipad!"

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Parents want cartoon-free cereals

A survey of British parents finds that the presence of cartoon characters on junk-food cereal boxes makes it very hard to say no to kids -- this has led to calls for an end to cereal and cartoon cross-promos.

Among the culprits named by the report was Nestlé's Golden Nuggets carrying a picture of Disney's Incredibles, which contains an extremely high amount of sugar.

Kellogg's also came under scrutiny for Frosties, which contains more salt and sugar than the Food Standards Agency recommends.

Some of Kellogg's' cereals include promotional offers linked to gadgets featuring branding from DreamWorks's Shark's Tail film.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Novelist's bitter, abusive father posting neg reviews on Amazon

Stephen Elliott is a successful novelist whose books are consistently ranked at four or five stars in their Amazon reviews. The sole exceptions are those reviews posted by his bitter, crazy, abusive father, who makes a point of slamming his son's books with bilious online reviews:

The book has scenes like the one where he kisses the hand of the man who abused him. Most normal people will find this nauseating. The book is for wanna-be masochists who enjoy perversion, and people with strong stomachs. Perhaps that's who the author sees as his audience? The book has little plot, and seems like one vaguely descriptive scene after another. The reader is left with a bad taste in his or her mouth. I hear the author's father is preparing a website to show that his background is totally fabricated. That will be an interesting blog.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fake astronaut scams all of India

Anil sez, "A 17-year old boy and his family took an entire nation for a ride this month when they announced that the boy had topped the 'International Scientist Discovery' exam conducted by NASA. News agencies picked up the story and pretty soon the boy became a national hero in India with legendary tales appearing in every newspaper. It was even written that the President had taken the exam in 1960, and so had astronaut Kalpana Chawla! The state legislature decided to 'honor' him, and every legislator decided to donate a month's salary to him. The hero's bubble was burst when reporters tried to get more details from NASA (days after the story broke) and discovered that no such exam existed." Link (Thanks, Anil!)

Update: Mark sez, "The legislature wanted to give a day's salary to the boy, not a month's salary. I thought it sounded too generous!"

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:09:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO turn a hard drive into wind-chimes

This HOWTO walks you through a rather secure means of disposing of an old hard-drive: turn it into a set of windchimes. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:13:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Get paid to write code for Downhill Battle!

Downhill Battle -- my favorite gang of take-no-prisoners copyfighters -- and the Participatory Politics Foundation are looking to hire a coder for a hot, s33krit new project -- this is a dream-gig for the right person!

The Participatory Politics Foundation and Downhill Battle are looking to jointly hire a full time web developer for a variety projects. We need someone who has serious commitment to what we're doing and professional or pro-level experience.

Requirements:

* Real world experience coding original PHP/MySQL. This means professional work or major open source experience.

* You must be comfortable investigating, understanding, and working with other people's code.

* Drupal/CivicSpace experience is a plus, but not required if you're a fast, flexible learner.

* Living within an hour of Worcester MA is a plus (Boston, Providence, Springfield, etc).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:40:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kiwi Health and Safety manual for prostitutes

New Zealand has legalized, regulated prostitution, and so the NZ Occupation and Health Service has produced a safety manual for sex-workers that talks about all the usuals (how to unionize, smoking in the workplace, handwashing, repetitive strain injuries) as well as prostitution-specific issues. The juxtaposition of dry governmental prose in use of discussion of sex-for-hire is disorienting and interesting:

In situations where more than one worker is providing service to a client (e.g. threesomes) it is necessary to ensure that equipment such as vibrators and dildos is not used by one person and then another without being cleaned, disinfected and having a new condom put on first. Ideally each worker should have her/his own toys and equipment, which are not used by other workers. Each worker may choose to use a condom of a different colour in order to identify who has used the dildo last.

408K PDF Link (Thanks, Derek!)

Update: Michael sez, "the Australian Capital Territory (the DC equiv) has had one since 1989. The Aussie/Kiwi rivalry goes way beyond cricket and rugby."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:21:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ad for security glass uses real money

According to 37 signals, the money sandwiched between the shatter proof glass in this bus stop ad is real.
Link (Thanks, Itchy!)

UPDATE: Gerald says: a note on that bus ad; it's in downtown Vancouver and the top layers of money are actual Canadian $20 bills and the rest are fake, like the ones in movies. There's still a hefty chunk of cash in the ad and the bus shelter is actually monitored by video by the ad agency (which is conveniently located across the street).

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:37:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interesting Hunter Thompson obit

I liked this HST obit, and the picture that ran with it.

The story goes that, while covering the Kentucky Derby on assignment for Scanlan's Magazine, mentally spent and under deadline, Thompson ripped pages from his notebook, numbered them and sent them off to the printer, certain that it would be his last article. The piece, however, proved to be a success, and Thompson realized "if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like The New York Times?"

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:20:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HP faces lawsuit for inkjet cartridges with expiration chip

I'm happy that a woman is suing HP for making inkjet cartridges that stop working past a certain date, even if they are full of ink. It's pretty obvious that HP does this to prevent people from refilling the cartridges with 3rd party ink and re-using them.

As part of a book I've been writing, I've been reading up on the history of HP. It seemed like a cool company back in the old days. What a shame it's now making equipment designed to malfunction on a certain date.

H-P ink cartridges use a chip technology to sense when they are low on ink and advise the user to make a change. But, the suit claims, those chips also shut down the cartridges at a predetermined date regardless of whether they are empty. "The smart chip is dually engineered to prematurely register ink depletion and to render a cartridge unusable through the use of a built-in expiration date that is not revealed to the consumer," the suit said.

Link (Thanks, Amber!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:12:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More Bossa Nova goodness from Sabadabada

Peter says: You were nice enough to link to my page several weeks ago. I have updated my library with over 100 more MP3s of classic bossa, balanco and Samba songs. Including 8 full LPs. I would very much appreciate another bump because I'm trying to get donations to pay for the enormous bandwidth excesses I had to pay. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:52:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mule vs mountain lion

Amazing photos of a mule giving a mountain lion the business.
Link

UPDATE: D. Christian Quezada says: "the recently posted photo of 'mule killing mountain lion' is likely a deceptive description. The Urban legends site has a breakdown of the various narrative incarnations these photos have been accompanied with through their adventures in and out of inboxes. Most likely its a mountain lion killed by gun, then toyed around with 'post mortem' by mule. No genuine ass kicking involved." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:49:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microphone museum

Here's an oddly-engaging gallery of vintage (and new) microphones, including samples of how some of them sound and photographs of celebrities with their mics. At left, Willie Nelson. Link (via Near, Near Future)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:16:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Drunk pill

The same California company that sell RU-21, the anti-hangover pill allegedly synthesized for the KGB, have developed a pill they say enhances and prolong drunkenness. From the Telegraph:

The new pill, which contains grapevine extracts intended to slow down the oxidation of alcohol and keep the user drunk, has been criticised. The weight of criticism means the company may now reconsider introducing it to the market.

(Spirit Science co-founder Emil) Chiabery, who was born in what was then the Soviet republic of Georgia, said: "I'm not sure I'm going to market it in the USA. I don't want it to become a party drug. We are for responsible drinking."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:57:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool Tools as a color PDF

Last year, Kevin Kelly printed up 1000 or so copies of his terrific book, Cool Tools, which reviews tools, services, software, books, gadgets, and so on. If you remember the Whole Earth Catalog, then you have a pretty good idea of what Cool Tools is about. Now he is offering a PDF version of the book for only $3.50, which is a great bargain.

[W]ith a copyright date of 2003, some reviewed items are now stale, outdated or obsolete. However, many more -- probably most -- remain the best things to use and won't be easily superceded. I still use the book myself. If you want a black & white version you can order one from Amazon (below).

But I have a better offer: a digital download. Halfway between a book and a website, PDF digital books are pioneering a third way. With this Cool Tools PDF you get several things the printed version does not have (but the web does): an index, clickable active hyperlinks in the text, and glorious full-color. At the same time the PDF version retains the easy to browse design and rapid navigation of a book, which the web does not have. And it is a lot cheaper than a book, immediate in its delivery, and smaller to store. I find myself reading a lot of PDFs and growing comfortable in their habits.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:58:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Landspeeder built out of modded Harley on eBay

Gary is selling his custom-built Land Speeder replica on eBay:

This Landspeeder is built on top of a three-wheel Harley Davidson golf kart and seats two; there's room for you and your droid, Wookie or Jedi Master. This Landspeeder is perfect for driving around the local golf course or your lot. You could also take it to Burning Man 2005! It's loaded with features!

* Built in talking car alarm with remote (says "System armed"; "System dis-armed" and "I've been tampered with!")
* Built in PA system for yelling out things like "This is not the vehicle you're looking for, officer!"
* Built in 70 watt audio amplifier and forward-facing 6 X 9 speakers for hooking up your MP3 player to blast out John Williams' excellent "Star Wars" theme!!
* 350 watt - 110 volt AC Inverter! Perfect for plugging in a laptop in so you can surf the web, on the golf course!
* Headlights, LED rear lights and incadescent side marker lights!
* Animated engines pods containing hundreds of LED and incadescent lights!
* Rope lighting!
* Comes with handy "drink and drive" ice chest which fits behind the seat!
* Powered by a 2 cycle Harley Davidson engine! Has forward and reverse!
* Comes with gas can and 2 cycle oil
* Comes with Two (count 'em) TWO animated light sabers!
* Comes with spare tire and extra Drive Belt
* includes loads of bumper stickers which say things like "Ewoks - it's what's for dinner" and "My kid light-sabered your honor student at Jedi Academy"

Link (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:31:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Wars Episode 3 as a fotonovela

Scott sez, "The entire story of Star Wars: Episode 3, laid out in about 80 screenshots from the film. Hurry and check it out before LucasArts sues the poor guy. Warning, the page contains about 6 MB of images." Link (Thanks, Scott!)

Update: Here's a Coral cache of the site.

Update 2: Lowbot provides this mirror.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogging the Broadcast Flag hearings

Luminous sez, "I'm a law student at GW that attended this morning's broadcast flag oral arguments (FCC v. ALA). I took notes during the argument and put up a play by play on my blog. I've made sure to keep my analysis to a minimum, so that more skilled commenters can weigh in, but I particularly liked the end:"

"The argument concluded with J. Edwards making the point that if it is the view of Congress that the law gives the FCC ancillary authority over these devices, then the FCC will be able to very quickly get legislative authority to make this rule if the courts don’t find it in the current statute."

Link (Thanks, Luminous!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kottke blog goes full-time

Jason Kottke has quit his job and decided to blog full-time, earning his living off of donations from his readers:

I've been self-publishing on the web for almost 10 years now, first with a little site on my school's web server, then on various ISP accounts, then 0sil8, and finally kottke.org for the last 7 years (almost). Looking back on it all, this little hobby of mine has been the most rewarding, pleasurable, maddening, challenging thing in my life. I've met so many nice, good people, formed valued relationships with some of them, traveled to distant lands (and New Jersey), procured jobs & other business opportunities, discovered new interests, music, movies & books, and lots of other stuff, all for putting a little bit of me out there for people to see.

And yet, I almost quit last spring. The site was getting out of hand and wasn't fun anymore. It was taking me away from my professional responsibilities, my social life, and my relationship with my girlfriend. There was no room in my life for it anymore. As you can imagine, thinking of quitting what had been the best thing in my life bummed me right the hell out.

After thinking about it for a few weeks, I had a bit of an epiphany. The real problem was the tension between my web design career and my self-publishing efforts; that friction was unbalancing everything else. One of them had to go, and so I decided to switch careers and pursue the editing/writing of this site as a full-time job.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley

My latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley is online. I hope you enjoy it! In this issue:

* Boning Up On Human Evolution: Tim White and his "planetary missions" to Ethiopia

* Mining for Microbes: the environmental nightmare of acid mine drainage

* Dealing With Cloudy Data: spotting clouds from space

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:42:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Broadway musicals blog

Blogway Baby is a blog in which my pal Suzy Conn -- who writes musicals -- talks about Broadway musicals. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:19:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clueless SMS.ac spammers nastygram Joi Ito; Joi ridicules them

Joi Ito tried out a crappy service called SMS.ac that immediately spammed his whole address book. So he quit the service and posted a public apology on his blog. Now the company that makes SMS.ac is threatening to sue him for libel and for infringing their trademark (e.g., mentioning the name of their product). As is right and proper, Joi has posted a copy of their stupid letter so that these dorks can be held up to ridicule. Link (Thanks, danah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:17:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Penis models wanted

My friend Richard Hansen, a talented designer in San Francisco, is seeking volunteers for his latest project:

Seeking men of all sizes, shapes and colors to model their penis for an upcoming art photography book project. This creative project seeks to show what men really look like down there--how we're so very different, yet somewhat the same. This is a documentary-style book project and not porn related whatsoever. The images will ONLY show your pelvic region - no faces revealed. We want to represent the widest array of men possible.

We will be shooting March 6-10 in San Francisco in a private studio. All models will be shot one at a time, with total privacy and discretion.

All models must be at least 18 years of age.

Compensation: All published models will receive a copy of the book.

Please call to schedule your time slot: 415-378-4936

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:16:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, February 21, 2005

Today is Free Mojtaba and Arash Day

IZ sez, I wrote a story on the Free Mojtba and Arash Day organized by the Committee to Protect Bloggers. Here's the interview with Curt Hopkins, one of the founders and director of the committee.

The Committee's first campaign is 'Free Mojtaba and Arash Day' to be held today. And it is getting a lot of publicity. "Overwhelming, between PRI's The World, BBC, Slashdot, BoingBoing, we have over twice as much traffic as usual, halfway through the day. People are planning to do the day by the score," said Curt. When asked if this campaign will work and if the Iranian government will listen and release both Mojtaba and Arash, he told me about Sina, a freed Iranian blogger, "Sina credited the attention of the blogosphere for making the Iranian authorities extremely uncomfortable and letting him go. We're hoping the same thing will happen here."

Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coffee Pod vendor sells DRM-free coffee-machine consumables

Dave sez, "Cafepods do a wide range of coffee pods, including ones which they claim to be compatible with the notoriously DRM'ed Senseo (click on "Coffee pods" in the top bar, then page 2, and "Dark Roast double pods NEW!" and details). I've been buying their double espresso pods for my Gaggia machine for a while, and they're pretty good - individually foil wrapped." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

Update: Erik Olson sez, "I don't think describing the Senseo pods as DRM'ed hardware is fair. There's nothing stopping you from using whatever pods you want -- I know of at least three vendors selling them, and the only sensor in the pod compartment is the 'compartment closed' sensor -- a good safety to have, given the temps and pressures involved.

"The Senseo now is how inkjet printers used to be -- you could buy the manufacturer's cartridges, third party carts, or even refill them. There are reusable filter pods for the Senso that let you use your own coffee -- the coffee maker doesn't stop you from using any of them.

"DRM, in hardware, is best shown by current inkjet printers, where there's hardware that keeps you from refilling the carts or buying third party cartridges. The only punishment for not using Senseo pods is the possibility of a high-pressure coffee shower."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:03:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New BlogTorrent client adds OS X support

A reader writes, "There's a new version of Blog Torrent (0.9) and it now supports OS X for download and upload. The new version also has optional MySQL support for high-traffic sites." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:01:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woz speaks out against Apple's lawsuit

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak -- as well as 25 other Apple luminaries -- have commented on Apple's ongoing campaign against a student who shared a developer release of its next operating system. He doesn't like it:

I was shocked reading the interview. Everything fits into place that this is an unintentional oversight and the interviewed student appears to be one of the most honest people on this planet. I have to question who is most right in this case.

I wish that Apple could find some way to drop the matter. In my opinion, more than appropriate punishment has already been dealt out. In this age of professional spammers and telemarketers making fortunes, we're misusing our energies to pursue these types of small time wrongdoers. I will personally donate $1,000 to the Canadian student's defense."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Updated etext about lone pacific islander

Vincent Spicer, who runs pacificislandsinfo.com let me know that the free download of his etext copy of An Island to Oneself by Tom Neale has been update with new color photos.

As I wrote on the Island Chronicles, in the '60s, Tom Neale was the sole inhabitant of Suwarrow, one of the northern Cook Islands. His ghostwritten book (based on his journals), An Island to Oneself, is an amazing read.
Link (click on the E-Texts link)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:57:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"My dad was a Swift Boat Vet For Truth"

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," my pal Jim Ruland offers commentary on a recent reunion of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group organized to discredit John Kerry during last year's presidential campaign, and recently met to disband at Walt Disney World in Florida. Jim learned some months ago that his dad was one of the SBVFT, and the two traveled to the event together. Link, audio will be online after 12p PT. Previously: Popeye: New short story from Jim Ruland.

See also: Xeni Tech radio archives on NPR's Day to Day. In related news, The NYT reports that the PR consultants behind Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ads are now setting their sights on opponents of Bush's Social Security proposal. (Thanks, David Isbister)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:16:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seabird skulls

Dutch bird watcher Edward Soldaat has created an amazing online gallery of seabird skulls. (Pictured here, a Razorbill from Ameland, The Netherlands.)

Petrels, albatrosses, cormorants, frigatebirds, gulls etc. are mysterious and inspiring birds: often the subject of poetic stories and lots of myths around the world. Albatrosses as the incarnated souls of drowned seamen following ships on motionless wings were a bad omen to many living sailors. The horrifying screams of petrels and shearwaters coming to their burrows after sunset have given rise to all kinds of superstitions.

The coastal species are often well known, but many stay out of sight and are seldom seen by most people. In many cases only known when found dead on the beach. And then there is often not much left of them because of their scavenging fellows. Luckily the skull or at least a part of it is often still present.

Link (via MetaFilter)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:48:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Collage as Cultural Practice conference, Iowa, March 24-27

Lloyd sez, "Kembrew McLeod, together with Ruedi Kuenzli are organizing a conference called 'Collage as Cultural Practice' at the University of Iowa from March 24-27. The roster of speakers includes a hoarde of copyright-busing cultural practitioners, including a performance by my own indermedia performing group The Tape-beatles." Link (Thanks, Lloyd!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

King of Swaziland bans photography of his cars

Swaziland's King Mswati, the only absolute monarch in sub-Saharan Africa, has issued a royal edict banning photos of his many luxury cars. In December he bought a $500,000 DaimlerChrysler Maybach 62, and BMWs all around for his 10 wives. He issued the edict after buying a more expensive car on Friday -- a stretch Mercedes S600 limousine -- in order to drive up to the newly opened parliament last week.

Mswati was forced to shelve plans three years ago to spend $45 million on a new royal jet, but has shown little inclination to rein in other royal spending projects which include a $15 million project to build individual new palaces for his growing retinue of wives.

[Swaziland, a] "tiny, impoverished kingdom, suffers frequent food shortages and one of the world's highest AIDS infection rates."

Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:54:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian music industry claims to love "free market," but sucks greedily at govt teat

The Canadian music industry's mouthpiece has a real hate-on for "alternative compensation schemes" -- systems that legalize filesharing through flat fees paid by Internet users. In fact, he implies that the proponents of these systems are Communists (amazing how Red-baiting is back in vogue these days, between Bill Gates and these guys), and wraps himself in the Free Market Flag, calling for music that's free from "government intervention." This week, Michael Geist picks up the story in his Toronto Star column, and neatly dissects the music industry's claims of hating government intervention and loving the free market.

Since a market-based approach to music would presumably lead to no government funding, the industry has unsurprisingly ignored its own advice and sought millions of dollars in taxpayer assistance. For example, at last November's music lobby day on Parliament Hill, the industry urged the government to expand its scope and funding of the Canada Music Fund, calling for at least $35 million in annual support.

Not only does the industry rely heavily on government financial support, it also looks to government to intervene in the marketplace by establishing new rules that provide protection against upstarts that threaten longstanding business models.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:35:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

South american ISP blocks all P2P content

Blogger Eduardo Arcos of ALT1040 says:

I just published an article which might interest boing boing readers. It is written in spanish but it's about the biggest ISP in Ecuador (south america) blocking all P2P ports and programs.

More important than the fact that users are not getting what they paid for, is the fact that they are censoring and blocking internet contents. They also blocked some sites (ALT1040 among them).

Link. BB reader Martin Cortez offers this English translation: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:54:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HP BIOS locks out all cards save those on a whitelist

Ian Hogben discovered that his HP laptop stores a whitelist of allowed Mini-PCI cards in its BIOS. If the WiFi card you buy isn't on the whitelist, your laptop won't boot. The anticompetitive implications for this are stunning: if you don't go to HP on bent knee before shipping your cards, they'll lock them out of their hardware and none of their customers will be able to use your card. Not to mention what happens when new cards are invented after your laptop leaves the factory: sorry, no modern hardware for you, your laptop only works with museum pieces. Link (Thanks, Ian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:45:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of cellphone nightmare zen

I had a panic dream over the weekend in which I was stuck in a scene of apocalyptic chaos, trying to call for help on a cellphone -- but I couldn't place the call because the keypad was badly designed. Each key was flat and inoperable, and would not respond. The numbers were all mushed together, and they shrank as I struck the keys, frantically trying to dial my mom or 911 or Batman, in alternating sequences, over and over. The keypad panic feeling was the same as when you're being chased in a dream and you run and run and run but you're still in the same place. Then I woke up.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:29:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tomorrow is "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day" for two imprisoned Iranian bloggers

Tomorrow is "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day," for the sake of two bloggers imprisoned in Iran. The organizers are asking bloggers around the world to post about their plight and raise awareness of it.

The month-old Committee to Protect Bloggers' is asking those with blogs to dedicate their sites on 22 February to the "Free Mojtaba and Arash Day".

Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad are both in prison in Iran.

Link (Thanks, Raanan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:52:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tsunami relief "hacker" pleads Not Guilty

The guy who was arrested for using a nonstandard browser to make a donation to a tsunami-relief charity after his obscure technology usage was mistaken for intrusion has pled Not Guilty. Link (Thanks, Elodie!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:15:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Freedom of Expression(R): new CC-licensed book about the copyfight

I've just started reading the free Creative Commons licensed PDF of "Freedom of Expression(R): Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity," a good, easy-to-read book on the copyfight by Kembrew McLeod, a university prof. It's very sharp -- I just read the chapter on how Happy Birthday To You ended up belonging to Time-Warner, a hair-raising and vile little story that should be required reading for everyone who argues that copyright is here to serve creators:

Roy Harris,a twentieth-century composer ofclassical music,got into trouble when he used part ofthe song in his "Symphonic Dedication," which honored the birthday of another American composer, Howard Hanson. Variety reported, "Keeping the occasion in mind, Harris brought his composition to a climax with a modern treatment of'Happy Birthday.' After Harris' piece had been introduced by the Boston Symphony he was compelled by the copyright owners to delete the 'Happy Birthday' passage from his score." P.D.Q. Bach, the "Weird Al" Yankovic of the classical-music world, avoided using any strains of "Happy Birthday to You" in a birthday ode to his father because he was afraid of being sued. Instead, he based it on a traditional German birthday song.Even Igor Stravinsky was slapped on the wrist when he cited a few bars of "Happy Birthday to You" in one of his symphonic fanfares (the composer reportedly assumed it was an old folk tune).

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:12:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyright Criminals: trailer for a doc on sampling

Copyright Criminals is a new, CC-licensed documentary on sampling, copyright and music. The movie's in progress now, and they've just posted an amazingly great trailer that features world famous Hip Hop artists, activists, academics, cut-up artists and others cogently and persuasively discussing the case for sampling. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:45:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Red guerrillas in Phillipines perform gay marriage

The Phillipines' communist New Peoples' Army, a guerrilla rebel group, has sanctioned same-sex marriage and officiated the first gay marriage in the force:

On Friday, under a romantic drizzle in a muddy clearing in Compostela Valley province in Mindanao, Ka Andres and Ka Jose exchanged vows in a heavily guarded ceremony before local villagers, friends from the city and their comrades in arms.

They are considered the first homosexual couple in the New People's Army (NPA) who were wed by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

Link (Thanks, Winston!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Katamari Damacy reenactment in Play-Doh

This enterprising Katamari Damacy fan made her own Little Prince and Damacy out of Play-Doh and then rolled up lots of wee household objects with it in a splendid reenactment of a deeply weird video game. Link (Thanks, Kris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Virtual wunderkammer

Ben Osto has started an online cabinet of curiosities. You can submit photos of unusual items in your posession, and if Ben deems them interesting, he'll include them on his site. He says: "We have entries coming from all sorts of folks, history writers, magicians, comedians, museum curators, polka bands, sideshow proprietors, scallywags, and a few street thugs. It will be officially launched in March (domain to be determined.) Each image item will have the owners name and a link to their site of choice."

ITEM: Pro Gang of Four Porcelain
This statue, my wife and I found in Shang Hai, while traveling, and we know very little about it, except the obvious, which is that the porcelain is pro – “Gang of Four”. The man in the back is twisting the arm of the kneeling man in the dunce cap with the sign around his neck, who we assume is a teacher or some other intellectual type.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:07:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005)

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."-HST

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:51:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Intelligent Design's idiotic designer

A fantastic editorial in this weekend's NYT shreds the idea of "Intelligent Design" (a pseudo-scientific, crypto-Christian-fundamentalist way of talking about Creationism without mentioning God) by taking apart the incompetence and foolishness of the supposedly intelligent designer.

In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist...

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:24:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cremated remains of 5,000 mental patients discovered in old Oregon sanatorium

Cicolini sez, "Someone was cleaning out an old insane asylum and found the cremated remains of over 5000 people tucked away in a closet. Here are some former patients of the hospital who are trying to tidy up this huge PR mess."

Over the next few months we will hold listening sessions with former and current patients of the hospital, their chosen friends and family members, caregivers and neighbors, to begin to design and site the memorial. The dates and locations of these sessions will be posted on this web site—you can attend and make your voice heard. You're also welcome to write to us via mail or email.

Either way, you will be heard.

We are working to find a ceremony to bring peace and sanctuary to the cremated remains. The ceremony will help us remember the distance we have come in providing care for people with mental illness and addiction in Oregon.

Link (Thanks, Cicolini!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:06:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Baby's second head surgically removed

Ten-month-old Manar Maged is in stable condition after surgeons removed her parasitic twin yesterday at a hospital north of Cairo. From Reuters:

Manar was born with a rare condition known as craniopagus parasiticus, which occurs when an embryo begins to split into identical twins but fails to complete the process. One of the conjoined twins fails to develop fully in the womb.

As in the case of a girl who died after similar surgery in the Dominican Republic a year ago, the second twin had developed no body. The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said.

Link (Thanks, Soupie!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:21:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony v. Beatallica.org: Lars Ulrich of Metallica steps in

In our continuing coverage of Sony's recent legal threats against Beatallica (which began soon after the band was blogged here on Boing Boing a few weeks ago,) Webmaster of Puppets David Dixon sez:

A short update on the Beatallica C&D situation: Lars Ulrich contacted the band earlier today to offer his support. He will be contacting his people in the biz to get in touch with Sony, and he'll let us know if anything transpires. Jaymz Lennfield (Beatallica's lead singer and co-songwriter) discussed the situation Saturday night on "The Classic Metal Show".

Previously: Sony nastygrams Beatallica.org, and Beatallica fans respond to Sony nastygram.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:40:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chocolate handbags

Boing Boing reader Aliya says, "I make tiny stylish handbags out of chocolate." Shown here, a bite from ChocoChocoHouse's "Pravda" 12-piece collection -- which, at $17.95, is a steal when compared to its likely namesake.
Link. Previously: Chocolate Sushi, Chocolate Solar System, More twinkie-oid food and sushi-esque chocolate.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:40:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Brekkie Zen

* cereality
* cereal box archive
* cereal character guide
* breakfast scramblers
* eggs benedict
* i love egg
* and the classic: all day brekkie
Image: I love egg. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:33:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Christo "Gates" parodies: Batman and Andy Warhol.

Boing Boing reader Jake says, "I built this 5" replica of The Gates using an actual piece of the Gates! How meta is that? But then my cat knocked it down."

Not before Batman, Famous Bear, and Andy Warhol paid a visit, though.
Link. Previously: Daily Show On The Gates, The Crackers, The Gates of Hargo.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:29:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spazzstick caffeinated lip balm

From the website:

Spazzstick is a high quality lip balm that contains caffeine, which absorbs directly through your lips as you use it. It was developed by an Alaskan Police Officer, who needs both quality lip balm for the cold and the ability to stay awake during long shifts. Spazzstick is made in a beautiful little Eskimo Village called Kaktovik, AK, by the inventor of Spazzstick and his hoards of worker trolls in a vast underground volcano lair.

Link (thanks, emmy)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:21:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of Japanese Lego signage zen

Here is a Japanese warning sign executed in Lego, complete with a drunken lego businessman. "A warning. Don't cross the yellow line! Or you become food for the shinkansen [Ed: Japanese bullet train] ." Link (Thanks, brenda vonahsen).
Previously: Japanese Warning Signs, Lego Abu Ghraib

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:10:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Diary of a testosterone experiment

My friend Heathen is experimenting with taking testosterone shots to see what happens to her. She's livejournalling the output -- which is fascinating, funny, and slightly disturbing.

1. all my muscles ache, as if i have been working out. i have not been working out.

2. so hungry, all the time. yesterday i ate four full meals and still found myself in the kitchen at 4am stuffing dry cheerios into my mouth-hole. i thought that maybe this would cause me to chunk up a bit, but was surprised while checking myself out in the mirror that i can see *all* of my ribs and the outline of my pelvis in places. something needs to be done about this.

3. had a fit of anger in my closet this morning that nearly took out my clothes rack. i couldn't find anything to wear.

4. grumpy as fuck.

5. interesting data point: my hand therapist recorded that i have gained ten pounds of griping strength in my left (good) hand in the last week. i did not tell her why i thought this was so.

6. actually watched basketball last night for the first time in my life. how is it that i've never noticed what a dramatic, amazing, balletic sport this is?

Probably NSFW Link (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First-ever newspaper scanned and posted

Hans sez, "today i scanned the first newspaper in Northern Europe and published it on my blog. I have translated some of it from Gothic Danish to English. I found the newspaper after long research in a privately owned library. It has been kept there for more than 250 years. This is the first digital copy of the first real omnibus newspaper in the world." Link (Thanks, Hans!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hand-charger for Nintendo DS

The most frustrating thing about handheld devices with integrated batteries is that when they run out of juice you can't just run out to the shop and get a couple of AAs -- you need to have a highly proprietary charger and a wall-socket. That's why this hand-cracked Nintendo DS charger is such a cool idea. No idea whether it's available outside of Japan yet. Link (via Waxy)

Update: Robin provides this Babelfish translation of the Japanese

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:35:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Maoist video game reviews

The website of the Maoist International Movement is posting reviews of popular videogames from a Maoist perspective:

"Sim City" has completely bourgeois assumptions, which is why it is not MIM's favorite economic strategy game. The mayor has the power to set tax rates and this influences the level of development. There is no option to nationalize factories. The whole assumption of the game is that private enterprise will create everything in the zones legally established by the mayor.

"Sim City" as such is about the world from the urban administration's point of view in a capitalist city. Cities compete and cooperate with each other. People who believe the mayor set taxes too high may leave the city. "Sim City" tracks population, tax revenue and expenditures. In this particular version of "Sim City," the mayor has a few more political options than in previous games. For example, s/he may opt to spend the city's money on becoming a "nuclear-free zone," which advertises that a city has no nuclear plants or weapons. Advisors to the mayor explain their opinions of the impact of each of the mayor's decisions. Mayors will necessarily have to ignore citizens and advisors from time to time. Earlier versions of the game had especially dim views of the intelligence of city residents. The 3000 edition continues that tradition with stereotypically stupid looking people petitioning the mayor for their idiotic causes.

Link (via Waxy)

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

Strindberg and Helium: Depressive playwright and ecstatic balloon sidekick

August Strindberg was a 19th Century depressive Swedish playwright who now stars in a series of convulsively funny Flash movies called Strindberg and Helium. In Strindberg and Helium, Strindberg has a little pink floaty balloon chum called Helium, who wheedles out happy messages. The plot goes like this: Strindberg sits somewhere and repeats gloomy, dull lines from his miserable plays. Helium floats around his head and repeats his phrases in a happy little voice, "Miiiiserrrry!" This is a lot funnier than it sounds. Link (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:24:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY science toys for kids

Amara sez, "Using a CD to demonstrate light spectra is a simple way to show to anyone the basic principles of light. I learned of that trick from my colleague, but here in this web site we have a collection of toys like the CD trick to make at home to demonstrate simple science principles. Science principles that might seem at first, too complicated to understand, but in fact, are simple enough for kids."

Our spectroscope has three main parts. There is a slit made from two razor blades, a diffraction grating made from a CD disk, and a viewing port, made from a paper tube.

To make sure that all three parts are lined up properly, we will use the CD disk as a measuring device, and mark the spots where the slit and the viewing port will go.

Set the CD disk on top of the box, about a half inch from the left edge, and close to the box's bottom, as shown in the photo. Use a pen to trace the circle inside the CD disk onto the box. This mark shows us where the paper tube will go.

Link (Thanks, Amara!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:15:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Daily Show on The Gates

Here are a couple of Daily Show clips pillorying The Gates of Central Park, also courtesy of Lisa Rein. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:58:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shining hotel replicated as a Duke Nukem level

This fan of The Shining has replicated the Overlook Hotel -- in which Jack Nicholson went spectacularily nuts -- as a Duke Nukem level. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:57:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show on Howard Dean winning the DNC

Lisa Rein has posted two Daily Show clips on Howard Dean winning the head of the DNC. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This year's robot toys

I'm working on a novel right now in which scroungers build exciting new devices out of really high-tech toys that failed to sell -- the favorite being an Elmo doll from 2008 called "Boogie Woogie Elmo" that can learn to dance by watching you (this turns out to be a great tool for clustering: install Linux on five or ten of them, teach them to speak and hear several rudimentary commands, and they can drive a car as a cluster of homeostasis-seeking cellular automata).

The Associated Press has an article on this year's robotic toys -- new Furbies and Elmos and such -- imagine what a boon these things will be to assemblage sculptors in five years when they can be had for a nickel apiece and when someone's standardized a GNU/Linux distro for each.

Pixel Chix from Mattel. The handheld gadget in the shape of a house lets a child interact with an animated girlfriend and will retail for $30.

Winnie the Pooh or Elmo Knows Your Name from Mattel's Fisher-Price. A doll that can learn a child's name and other personal details, such as a birthday and favorite games, is programmed by the parents. Using a cable connection and a CD-ROM, parents can download information into the characters, which will be priced at $40.

Furby (a new version) from Hasbro. The toy's new technology is called emotronics, which supposedly brings the plush toy more to life because it speaks interactively with the child and reacts to words like "hungry." All this for a mere $40.

Amazing Amanda from Playmates Toys. The 21-inch doll can recognize her "mommy's" voice and respond after hearing it just three times. The doll should cost around $100.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:52:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Darling You Shouldn't Have

I really like the vintage illustration style of Darling You Shouldn't Have, a line of t-shirts and baby bibs(!) that my friend's sister recently launched. Some of the drawings remind me of old editorial cartoons or Rich Uncle Pennybags from Monopoloy. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:17:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clickthrough licenses considered harmful

My cow-orker Annalee Newitz has just published a white-paper on End User LIcense Agreements (EULAs) -- those long screens of legalese you don't ever read before clicking "I Agree." What are you agreeing to? Basically, you're agreeing to get royally screwed:

The Windows license, however, is less invasive than the terms of Pinnacle's Studio 9 movie-making software. See the DRM-related provisions in Section 6 of the Pinnacle EULA8 :

"You acknowledge and agree that in order to protect the integrity of certain third party content, Pinnacle and/or its licensors may provide for Software security related updates that will be automatically downloaded and installed on your computer. Such security related updates may impair the Software (and any other software on your computer which specifically depends on the Software) including disabling your ability to copy and/or play ‘secure' content, i.e. content protected by digital rights management."

Clicking through this EULA appears to allow Pinnacle to install software automatically from third parties onto your computer – software which the vendor admits may "impair" the program ("the Software") you have just purchased, as well as "any other software on your computer which specifically depends on the Software."

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:51:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO defeat the DRM on your coffee-maker

If you've got a Senseo coffee maker -- the kind that takes little proprietary, pre-measured coffee "pads" and converts them to hot mud -- then you've got a DRMed kitchen appliance. Those little pads contain countermeasures to keep them from being refilled and/or replaced by third-party coffee delivery-systems. This HOWTO explains how to circumvent your coffee-maker's DRM and roll your own pads.

Step 1: find the right glass
You’ll need a glass with a round bottom that’s just the size of a Senseo coffee pad. This shouldn’t be too difficult.
Tip:It doesn’t really have to be a glass, but it helps if you can see what you’re doing. Go out and buy a glass of the just right size if necessary.

Step 2: draw the filter shapes
Lay the tea filter bag flat on the surface. Place the Senseo-sized glass on top. Use the pencil to draw a circle on the filter. Read step 4 to help you decide where to place the glace and draw the circle.
Tip: Do not substitute a pen or marker instead of a pencil. You do not want ink or mystery chemicals in your coffee. Even so, use a soft pencil to avoid ripping the fine filter fabric and don’t push too hard. You do not want graphite in your coffee either.

Link Link to commercial refillable compatible pad (via MAKE Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:42:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New NeoFiles

RU Sirius's latest issue of NeoFiles is online, including interviews with transgenic art provocateur Eduardo Kac, creator of the green flourescenet rabbit, Howard "Lucifer Principle" Bloom whose latest book is the Global Brain, and psychedelic spiritualist Jonathan Bethel. RU says:

"Start the universe with a few rules. Watch it iterate and accumulate complexity over billions of years. Add in some nanotechnology, robotics, and super-chemistry. Now, take the transgenic bunny rabbit and put it in Professor Schrödinger’s box. Wait several decades … stirring frequently. If things work out, you will have a perfectly divine singularity … to serve up to family and guests. If not, you will have an entertaining read, to be savored until we issue again."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:22:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More Koko nipple love

Yesterday's post about the lawsuit tied to Koko's nipple fetish reminded many readers about Koko's guest starring role on Monster Garage that could possibly be used as evidence for the claimants. Link (Thanks, Michael Golamco and Jonathan Hendry!)

And this from another reader who says that in the 1990s he worked on a video involving Coco:

One day our editor had a mad case of the giggles when we came into the room and we couuldn't figure out why, until he showed us a clip of Koko's 'sign language.'

Over and over, she kept making the motions for the phrase 'Koko nipple love."

...Keep me anonymous please. I don't want Koko coming over to my house and giving me a titty twister.

UPDATE: Readers Jean Dudley and Suebob Davis point out that Koko's trainer, Francine "Penny" Patterson, has claimed for years that Coco "uses nipple to refer to people." Link to Penny's Team Journal, Link to Straight Dope column

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:00:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ikea's Ayn Rand rung

Ikea is selling a rug called the Anja Rand -- for the objectivist crank libertarian in you. Link (Thanks, Simon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:22:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Classic Disneyland promo movie from 1956

Kirby sez,

Our friend "waltsentme" over at webjay links us to the 1956 film "People and Places - Disneyland U.S.A.". A Disney made film to promote the less than one year old park!

Part one starts with a flyover of the park that is fascinating in what is NOT there. The film is narrated by the laconic narrator that Disney used a lot then. The hill they eventually built the Matterhorn on is clearly visible. Visit the Disneyland MOTEL. No tower. A trip up Main Street on a streetcar, America at the turn of the (20th) century with lots of people in the fashion of 1956. After a brief stop at the hub we visit Frontierland. More aerial views of the newly planted Disneyland. Tom Sawyer's Island had just opened in 1956. You could fish and "keep what you caught". That didn't last long. Gunslingers in Rainbow Ridge threw the perspective of the buildings off. (These buildings are still visible in the queue of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.). There is some footage of "The Indian Village is a permanent and popular attraction here". How many times did they move that?

Part 2 starts in Adventurland and has footage of the Jungle Cruise when it was serious and populated with very primitive animatronic figures. No "back side of water". They do shoot the hippos, though! Tomorrowland in 1956 was mainly Autopia. You can see the short lived Phantom Boats in an aerial shot. Fantasyland has no footage of the interior of the dark rides, but lots of reaction shots of people entering and exiting them. Storybookland had just opened when the film was made. Long section of footage of it. The footage of the Disneyland Band in the Mad Tea Party is classic. "Tempo in a Tea Cup". Views of various parades end the film, including Walt and Fess Parker on horseback.

Be aware that both videos are over 77MB in size. No slow connection here.

This is an absolute classic. I don't know how long it will last a boingboing hit, so grab it now.

Link (Thanks, Kirby!)

Update: Lucas Emery's got a torrent of these up.

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

Pirate captain will sue ninjas for you

This Flash video is a commercial for a pirate captain-cum-lawyer who will help you sue ninjas who have injured you through kicklash, elbow face, or medical malpractice. Link (Thanks, Mark LL!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:10:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

$150 for a Mickey Pez covered in Swarkovski crystals?!

This iced-out $150 Mickey Pez-dispenser is covered in hand-applied Swarkovski crystals, glued on by "artisans" at a shop in Beverly Hills. Definitely the gift for the Disney fan who has everything and who you never want to have to speak to ever again. Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:08:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Broadcast Flag court date: Feb 22

The loathesome, unprecedented Broadcast Flag comes into effect this summer, and thereafter, the feds will be mandating DRM in all technologies that can interact with a digital television signal, forever driving a nail into digital television uptake in the USA.

There's a single ray of hope, though: EFF, Public Knowledge and several other public interest groups are suing the FCC over this, arguing that they don't have the jurisdiction to impose the Broadcast Flag -- the appeals hearing kicks off on Feb 22.

The oral arguments on the broadcast flag case in the U.S. Court of Appeals Court will be held next Tuesday, Feb. 22.

Public Knowledge and other organizations challenged the authority of the FCC to institute the broadcast flag rule, which requires consumer electronics and other devices such as TiVos, iPods, digital VCRs and cell phones to be able to block copying of over-the-air digital TV content at the wishes of content owners. Organizations including the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and several libraries said the FCC exceeded its authority to institute the broadcast flag rule.

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:03:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evil tech execs for this month

Danny O'Brien's "To Evil" column is a monthly salute to terrible behaviour on the part of tech companies and individuals. This month's is out, and contains a good rant on a subject near to my heart: secret spam-filtering rules:

The American ISP, according to several news reports, had decided a unique filtering technique for eliminating spam: banning email coming from countries outside the USA.

Given that most spam comes from American companies, this sounds a bit like fighting stings by locking yourself in a beehive, and smearing yourself with royal jelly. But mostly, it's odd because eventually those foreigners are going to find someone they *can* communicate with. And once they snap out of that crazy bloo-bloo language they all speak, and talk proper English to a journalist, Word Will Get Out.

What's really crazy, though, is that it's not entirely clear that cutting off the world is really was what Verizon is up to. Some European e-mail gets through; others do not. Strangely-configured SMTP servers are rejected; others slipped right by.

But when the world was reporting that Verizon was dropping mail, the company kept everyone in the dark, including their customers. They didn't tell them they were filtering; they didn't tell them how they were filtering.

People had to draw their own conclusions: and what they concluded is that Verizon hates foreigners.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, February 18, 2005

Christo "The Gates" parodies: "The Crackers"

The second installation in Boing Boing's coverage of works inspired by Christo's "Gates" installation in Central Park -- "The Crackers" is comprised entirely of orange cheese crackers.
Link. Previously: The Gates of Hargo.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:48:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A Day in the Life of Miss McDonald

A young woman in the Phillipines with a personal fixation on Ronald McDonald documents her life as his imaginary consort. On Miss McDonald's livejournal, we find pictures of the lucky lady doing laundry, hanging out at the beach, and cuddling up with the tall, red, striped one who has served so very many. Many of the image tags are broken -- a pity, because snapshot descriptions like "yeaaargh Alex and his Droogs from A Clockwork Orange VS. Miss McDonald" do sound enticing.
Link. (Thanks, Sho).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:40:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Christo's "Gates": let the internet parodies commence!

This parody of Christo's "Gates" art installation in New York's Central Park features "Gates of Hargo" placed in various places throughout a home. The "about" page includes some rip-snortin' comparisons between "Hargo's" gates and those of Christo. Highlights include "The Feeding Gates," featuring a fat tabby cat, and "The Poopatorium Gates," leading to you-know-where.
Link (Thanks, Pinato).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:28:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tattoo artist sues for copyright of NBA star's arm

The Oregon tattoo artist who inked NBA star Rasheed Wallace's arm is suing for copyright infringement because Rasheed's tatoo is featured prominently in a Nike TV and internet ad campaign.

According to the suit filed last week in U.S. District Court, former Trail Blazer Wallace approached Reed in 1998, saying he wanted an Egyptian-themed family design with a king and queen and three children and a stylized sun in the background. Reed researched the idea and came up with a design and put it on Wallace's arm. Reed said the $450 charge was a relatively small amount, but he expected to benefit from the exposure.

Wallace has one of the more distinctive tattoos in the NBA. Sports Illustrated for Kids used it in a feature asking readers to match each tattoo with the NBA player who wears it. But Reed claims he became aware last year of a Nike ad that centers on the tattoo and its creation. He claims the ad violates the copyright he holds to "the Egyptian Family Pencil Drawing."

Link (Thanks, tom brennan)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:20:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coop Sticker fiasco -- case dismissed

The Clovis resident who nabbed by cops for slapping a sexually suggestive Coop "devil-babe" sticker on his car is once again a free man. Link. Previously: Buy A Coop Sticker, Go to Jail

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:20:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phillipine-born mobile phone virus invades USA

"Cabir," the first mobile phone virus documented "in the wild" has now spread from its origin in the Philippines to the United States. It took eight long months to get here, so -- I'm guessing it traveled by way of the same shitty mobile carrier I use.

Cabir was found on Monday in a technology gadgets store in Santa Monica, California, when a passing techie spotted a telltale sign on the screen of a phone in the store.

Link (thanks, uh, "cabir"...)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:15:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart's production co. may develop shows for other networks

Busboy Productions, the production team led by "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart, just inked a deal allowing them to develop television projects for possible airing on networks other than Comedy Central.

Comedy Central has agreed to finance Stewart's Busboy Productions and its development of television projects, but part of the deal lets Stewart flirt with outsiders when looking for a home for those projects. The deal does give Comedy Central the right of first refusal on all Busboy creations, however

Link to story (via /.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:10:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Koko's nipple fetish

The Gorilla Foundation, home to Koko the gorilla who speaks sign language, is being sued for $1 million by two former employees. Nancy Alperin and Kendra Keller claim they were fired because they wouldn't show Koko their breasts. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

One example (from the lawsuit): "On at least two incidents in mid-to-late June 2004, (foundation president Francine) Patterson intensely pressured Keller to expose herself to Koko while they were working outside where other employees could potentially view Keller's naked body. ... On one such occasion, Patterson said, 'Koko, you see my nipples all the time. You are probably bored with my nipples. You need to see new nipples. I will turn my back so Kendra can show you her nipples.'"

...The suit, in any case, says that Patterson would interpret hand movements by Koko as a demand to see exposed human nipples. She warned Alperin and Keller that their employment with the foundation would suffer, the suit says, if they "did not indulge Koko's nipple fetish."

During at least three visits, the suit says, "Patterson communicated to Alperin that exposing one's breasts to Koko is a normal component to developing a personal bond with the gorilla."

Link (Thanks Casey, via Monkeys In The News!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:47:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MDMA for US soldiers

Richard Kadrey sez: "American soldiers traumatised by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:44:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Looney Toons characters in the 28th Century

Warner Bros. is "revisioning" WB cartoon characters for the 21st Century.

Warner Bros. has created angular, slightly menacing-looking versions of the classic Looney Tunes characters for its new series, dubbed "Loonatics" and set in the year 2772. Names for the new characters haven't been finalized, but they are likely to be derived from the originals: Buzz Bunny, for example. Each new character retains personality quirks of the original. The new Bugs, for example, will be the natural leader of the Loonatics' spaceship; the new Daffy will remain confident that he is the one who should be in charge.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:58:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art passports returned!

Federal authorities now say they will return the State of Sabotage faux passports confiscated last week on their way to Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center where they were to be exhibited. From the Associated Press:

...A reviewing office of the customs and border protection bureau, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, decided the items didn't fit the parameters for confiscation as immoral or harmful materials, customs spokeswoman Cherise Miles said in a telephone interview from Chicago.... The exhibit now includes a statement by (State of Sabotage artist Robert) Jelinek, along with the Department of Homeland Security's confiscation receipt.

"Who would think that the U.S. government has a pronounced interest in contemporary fine art these days?" the statement reads. "The homeland art obsession goes so far that our luggage and personal items were almost all damaged and all artistic materials were confiscated."

Link (Thanks, Mark Crummett!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:56:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cracking car keys and Exxon Mobil's SpeedPass

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and RSA Laboratories have demonstrated how too crack the encryption of a Texas Instrument RFID transponder used in many "immobilizer-equipped" car keys and ExxonMobile SpeedPass e-payment fobs. From the press release:

Security verification takes place through a procedure called a challenge/response protocol. When the key or tag is nearby, the reader transmits a random string of ones and zeroes to it. The transponder in the key or tag then processes these numbers in a specific way and sends a numeric message back to the reader for authentication.

The researchers from Johns Hopkins and RSA Laboratories were able to unravel the mathematical process used in this verification. They then purchased a commercial microchip costing less than $200 and programmed it to find the secret key for a gasoline purchase tag owned by one of the researchers. By linking 16 such chips together, the group cracked the secret key in about 15 minutes... The researchers had similar success with a chip-equipped car key.

Link to Johns Hopkins press release, Link to Science News article, Link to the technical report

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:45:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beatallica fans respond to Sony nastygram

Sam Harris sez:

Thanks for posting the "Sony Nastygrams Beatallica" story the other day. Us fans, known affectionately on the Beatallica message board as Beatallibangers, are rallying round to help the lads fight back at the bullies from Sony Music. To start with, we have an online petition asking Sony to basically get a grip and realise that the music Beatallica distribute is parody, and therefore legal.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:40:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More nudity news: Boise strip club hosts figure drawing nights

BB reader seays: "Strip club in Boise tries to get around nudity regulations by having 'art night' where customers can sketch 'models.'"

"As far as the Boise city code, it specifies it has to be a serious artistic manner and this is a serious artistic manner," said Chris Teague, Erotic City owner.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:27:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Top 100 gadgets of all time

My friend and editor, Chris Null, has written a fantastic piece for Mobile PC called "The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time." He includes gizmos from the early 20th century (Zippo Windproof Lighter, 1932; Master Lock Padlock, 1924) all the way up to 2005. The photographs of the gear are terrific. He obviously spent an awful lot of time researching this and tracking down the photos.

83. ACCUSPLIT MEMORY STOPWATCH, 1972
Before the digital stopwatch, when you timed something, you had to do it on a wacky round device that ticked and was just as hard to read as a wall clock. But in 1972, Accusplit introduced the digital stopwatch. Gone were hands and tick marks, replaced by easy-to-read numbers. Better yet, the thing expressed time in hundredths of seconds, a boon to athletes and scientists.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:16:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More art passports

Responding to my post about the State of Sabotage art "passports" confiscated from an artist's luggage on the way to exhibition, reader Jussica Hummel says:

Maybe the US Department of Homeland Security "State of Sabotage" passports knew about the use of NSK passports during the war in Bosnia.

In 1991 (Slovenian industrial musicians) Laibach and the (art collective) Neue Slovenische Kunst founded the state of NSK and published an official NSK passport, to be applied for at different embassies or consulates around the world. Link

In 1995 NSK passports made it possible for a group of people to leave occupied Sarajevo, according to a quote from a Laibach interview:

"So we decided to give away these passports, and in some cases, they were used in very different ways, in very creative forms. In some cases they were used in a very pragmatic way: many people were able to get out of Sarajevo while it was occupied and they couldn't get out with Bosnian passports. We gave them NSK diplomatic passports, and they went out with those. There was a French solider who just saw a diplomatic passport and let them go through. We are using it whenever there's a chance to cross other borders, sometimes successfully, sometimes with less success, but you know it actually works." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:06:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US artist sentenced to jail and censorship for PG-rated mural

Lauren Cerand says: "An artist in the Detroit suburb of Roseville was given 30 days in jail, two-years' probation, and a $500 fine for painting a bare-breasted woman and the word "love" in a classically-themed mural on the side of his shop. The whole affair sounds quite incredible."

[Judge Marco] Santia ordered Stross, 43, to serve 30 days in jail, do two years' probation and pay a $500 fine for violating a city sign ordinance. Roseville officials said letters were prohibited on the mural and Eve's exposed chest is indecent.

Besides jail time and the fee, Stross is to tastefully cover Eve's breasts before reporting to the Macomb County Jail on Monday morning, and to paint over "love" by May 1.

"Removing the work is the ultimate punishment. The jail time is nothing compared to removing what I painted," Stross said Thursday.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:01:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CBGB may close due to rising real estate costs

The legendary club that played a central role in careers of countless punk and new wave acts -- Blondie, The Ramones, Patti Smith -- may close. The culprit: rent hikes throughout the surrounding Bowery 'hood. I smoked many an unfiltered cigarette at CBGBs when I was a teen. We used to always try to exhale through our nose piercings. Good times. Link to blurb on aversion.com which references a Village Voice article I can't find. Here's a related story in the NYT (site reg required): Link.

CBGB, as The Village Voice reported this week, is facing a lease renewal in August, and its landlord has nearly doubled the rent, to about $40,000 a month, said Lisa Kristal, a lawyer and the daughter of Hilly Kristal, who opened the club in 1973.

(Thanks, Dusty)

Update: Andrew Raff sez:

Here's the Village Voice article you mentioned not being able to find: Link. It also discusses the other clubs in the East Village and LES closing, or threatened to close: Luna Lounge (at the end of Feb.), Fez (mid-March), and Tonic (currently having a fund-raising drive to keep its current location.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:30:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT buying About.com

Boing Boing reader Steve Waters says, "The New York Times is buying about.com! I wonder if I'll have to give personal information to look up info on the top 100 snow boots for under $100?" Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:24:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Municipal WiFi: What if the question was, "Should govts be in the electricity biz?"

There's been a lot of debate recently over whether governments should be allowed to get into the WiFi business -- whether Internet connectivity should be provided through municipal wireless networks. Glenn Fleishman has written a delightful satire of the debate, asking the hypothetical question: should municipalities get into the electricity business?

Electricity is too important a resource for America's future to be left in the hands of cities and towns, the council argues, which are inefficient enterprises that take profits from industry in their pursuit of ever-greater control of the flow of capital within their borders. "How big may these so-called public utilities grow in their efforts to stifle free enterprise and increase the size of government?" the report asks.

The report notes that 97 percent of all neighborhoods in the U.S. have at least one functional electric street lamp running built through private enterprises' effort, and that some urban areas have two electrical lamps on each corner, as well as lighting available at different times of the day and night both within and outside of homes and businesses.

The report dismisses the concern that in many areas, only a small percentage of all buildings are equipped with electricity and rejects the fact that private utilities in some municipalities only provide enough voltage and amperage to power a few dim lights.

His Honor, Mayor Charles Franklin Warwick of Philadelphia has recently said that he intends to provide universal electrical service, but critics argue that merely providing electricity will not ensure that the "electrical divide" will be bridged because poorer inhabitants of cities and towns will not use their hard-earned pittances to pay for electrical appliances, such as a motor-driven wringer or electrical lamp, much less power. And, in any case, most of them are illiterate and work 16-hour days, and thus have no need for the modern wonder of electrical lighting which would merely disturb their few hours of rest each night.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dead Parrot sketch turns real, ends up in court

Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch has come to life and moved to Israel, wehre it is the subject of intense litigation:

An indignant Israeli is suing a pet shop that he says sold him a dying parrot, reports the Ma'ariv newspaper. Itzik Simowitz of the southern city of Beersheba contends the shop cheated him because the Galerita-type cockatoo not only failed to utter a word when he got it home, but was also extremely ill. Mr. Simowitz adds that the shop owner assured him the parrot was not ill but merely needed time to adjust to its new environment.

Link (Thanks, Betsy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dear TV execs: You can't control the genie if you're throwing it out of the bottle at the speed of light

This post, made by "alexwcovington" in the Slashdot discussion of the fact that Brits lead the world in downloading TV shows, is a really pithy piece of advice that TV execs everywhere would do well to heed:

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but it's television. Signals broadcast through the air. Sorry to burst the bubbles of the folks in Hollywood, but you can't control the genie if you're throwing it out of the bottle at the speed of light. Accept the fact that people have the right to record their television shows, and don't complain when they trade them.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:29:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Everquest -- now with pizza

Everquest has added a simple in-game command to order pizzas while playing. I'm surprised that they don't pre-populate the pizza-ordering form with the info from your Everquest account -- usually games have such crazy, one-sided terms of service that the privacy implications of such a thing would shred like wet kleenex.

You're in luck - pizza is just a few key strokes away! While playing EverQuest II just type /pizza and a web browser will launch the online ordering section of pizzahut.com. Fill in your info and just kick back until fresh pizza is delivered straight to your door.

Link (via Foe Romeo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:43:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Walking robots

Several university laboratories introduced three new bipedal robots at this week's American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. While other mechanical bipeds like Honda's Asimo depend on a complicated system of motors and sensors in every joint under intense software control, these new robots employ much simpler techniques. (Unlike Asimo though, these bots can't yet climb stairs.)

"The walking looks more natural, because it is," says Richard Walker, who works at the Shadow Robot Company in the UK. "To get human-like walking, and then to go from there to more complex bipedal movements, this is the right approach."

The researchers took their inspiration from mechanical walking toys that automatically stroll down a slope in response to gravity. By attaching a few motors to such mechanisms they were able to make robots that will happily amble along a flat surface.

Two of the three robots, those developed at Cornell and Delft, are relatively simple, yet exhibit remarkable power efficiency. Whereas Asimo consumes about 10 times as much power as a walking human, these robots use about the same amount of energy as the average person.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:19:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jason Little's Bee comic

Cartoonist Jason Little is creating the best comic strip on the Web. The drafting style is very tight and reminds me just a tiny bit of Chris Ware. His sense of color is fantastic. In this interview from Fright X magazine, Little describes he first Bee story.

It's about a girl named Bee who works as a photoprocessing technician in downtown New York City. And weird people bring photos in to be processed. For example, on one day of work she prints a roll of film from this sorority chick [points at page] who has taken homemade boudoir photographs of herself as a Valentine's Day present for her boyfriend, who's a frat rat. Later, the boyfriend brings in a roll of film where he's barged into the bathroom and taken a picture of her on the toilet. There's a motorcycle outlaw who has taken pictures of strippers at a biker party…you get the idea. Licentious images. Later on, a mortician brings in before and after photos of dead bodies. Bee certainly finds this intriguing. So she sneakily presses the doubles button every time an exciting roll comes in. At one point this handsome fellow brings in pictures of a dead woman in a tub full of blood. So Bee follows him home and starts taking pictures of him through his windows and basically gets involved in his sinister activities. So, basically, it's a mystery story.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:14:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog for boomers with no money for retirement

Cliff Figallo says: "Being in my mid-50s and not being one of the fortunate few who hit the dot-com jackpot, I'm now blogging my attempt to plan a reasonably secure future with not much savings in "What Retirement?" It's a mix of scary Social Security news, potential job opportunities for the old and experienced, and future living arrangements that can help us avoid nursing home hell. There are about 30 million of us in the same leaky boat. We don't want to become a crisis." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:59:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A portrait of Michael Jackson executed in children's cereal.

The cover of the latest Seattle Stranger has a portrait of Michael Jackson made from kids' cereal bits. Yuks says: "My studio mate Jason Huntley worked on this piece for weeks, buying and then sorting all sorts of different children's cereals by color and hue. He then applied them using silicone glue. The smell of sugar, preservatives and silicone will be indelibly associated with Michael Jackson's mugshot in my brain forever." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:25:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Silent iTunes song stripped of DRM and given away

Naughty Scott Moschella of Plastic Bugs stripped the DRM out of an iTunes song he won from buying a bottle of Pepsi. He broke another law by making the song available as a free download on his site. The song is called "(Silence)" by Ciccone Youth. It's a silent song, like John Cage's "4' 33"," but it is just a little over a minute long. Grab it now before Apple shuts him down! Link (Thanks, Caines!)

UPDATE: Alistair Twiname says: "Parallel to the post about the ripped silent track, New_Matt over at b3ta created the ultimate remix... using the gaps and pauses in many famous songs.. here's the subtitled flash version." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:03:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Famous cartoonists now and then

Here's a fun "now and then" gallery of famous cartoonist's work as adults and when they were kids. The fun is only slightly diminished by the use of a Flash interface. Artists include Jack Davis, Mitch O'Connell, Kirsten Ulve. (Shown here, Charles Burns.) Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:32:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bombmaking was not on the approved lesson plan

David Pieski, a high school chemistry teacher in Orlando, Florida, was arrested for allegedly teaching his students how to make homebrew explosives. From the Associated Press:

In Pieski's classroom in Orlando, authorities found a book labeled "Demo," which includes the chemical breakdown for a powerful explosive, the arrest report said....

Pieski told investigators he detonated chemicals in a coffee can by a ball field four times for his students, the sheriff's office said. He said he did this as a chemistry project to show a reaction rate...

School officials told investigators that Pieski previously had been told he was not allowed to have any form of explosive on campus.

I certainly would have benefited from Mr. Pieski's guidance in my high school years. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:44:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amy Jenkins opening tonight in NYC

Last year, I posted about video artist Amy Jenkins who was invited to create an artwork inspired by Salvatore Ferragamo's 5th Avenue shoe store. The company then decided that her artwork was "distasteful" because it showed Amy's daughter breastfeeding and then falling asleep. (More background here.) Now, using a plasma display loaned to her by a BB reader, Amy is finally showing the piece, entitled The Audrey Samsara, in NYC at her solo show at the Kustera/Tilton Gallery. The opening is tonight and the show will run through March 26. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:21:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Punk cover bands: Sony nastygrams Beatallica.org

David Dixon, "Webmaster of Puppets" for Metallica/Beatles parody/mashup site beatallica.org says:

Boing Boing recently linked to a site I administrate, beatallica.org, in your post about punk cover bands. I'm writing to let you know that today I received a cease-and-desist notice from Sony Publishing (via my ISP, ThePlanet.com), demanding that all music, lyrics, etc. be taken down immediately or legal action will commence.

You can read the C&D notice David received right here (PDF).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:24:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More on Chicago's crazy copyrighted park

Chicagoist has a good followup on the controversy around the public sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park (a park that cost Chicagoans $270 million) which photographers were being prevented from taking pictures of (earlier post).

Millennium Park security guards were told to look for "sophisticated equipment and/or tripods as an indication that a photographer might be a professional." And this is where the confusion seems to have begun. The guards, when stumbling upon such professional-looking folk, should have simply asked the photographer if they were a professional and, if the answer was "yes," directed them to the permit office. However, as just about every Web site in the Chicagoland area reported last week, some of them just plain kicked the photographers out with claims of copyrighted public works.

In light of this conduct, community concerns and an "increased understanding of how the public uses the space (including photographers)," the city has recognized the need to re-evaluate these policies. While they do so, they have stopped enforcing the permit requirement, and are focusing on improving their security guard training to ensure both complete understanding of the rules and better communication between guards and the public. City, Chicagoist appreciates your effort to get this situation resolved.

The write-up goes on to talk about how the copyright in the sculpture rests with the sculptor, which still makes no sense. My reading of copyright law says that statues on display in public parks have no copyright -- and even if it does, the city has the repsonsibility to clear the rights to the sculpture before putting it where it will get in the way of the photos that Chicagoans take of their public spaces -- whether for commercial or noncommercial use. Link (Thanks, Rachelle!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Euro software patents: dead again! w00t!

Aymeric sez, "I was at the Brussels demo [against software patents] today and the result, it appears, was slightly positive." That's an understatement: the software patent issue is dead again in the European Parliament and has to be rebooted from start if the other side wants to get it through!

The European Parliament has thrown out a bill that would have allowed software to be patented.

Politicians unanimously rejected the bill and now it must go through another round of consultation if it is to have a chance of becoming law.

During consultation the software patents bill could be substantially re-drafted or even scrapped.

Link (Thanks, Aymeric!)

Update: Tom sez, "the directive won't necessarily be rebooted, it depends on whether or not the Commission want to. They're free to ignore Parliament's request, and given their track record this may happen. Hurrah for democracy."

Update 2:Ronan sez, "The implementation of the directive at hand is governed by a process called codecision, meaning both the Commission and the Parliament have to agree on it; either can veto it. As such, if the Commission disregards the restart request, Parliament can simply vote the unmodified directive out of existence. Further detail on the processes of European legislation can be found at the URL (ok, so it's not a complete red herring) in a variety of languages."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wooden automata -- hand-crank animations

Dug makes "contemporary automata," hand-cranked robots carved from wood that perform animations when they're activated. They're gorgeous tchotchkes and the videos on his site are fascinating. Link (Thanks, Dug!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:24:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese warning signs

Boing Boing reader Willenberg says,

"Juergen Specht has a huge collection of Japanese warning signs online, and another with Hawaiian warning signs. It's an interesting comparison -- Japan is a mono-cultural country but the signs are pretty easy to understand and very international while the signs in USA require always English language skills."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:37:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO get something posted to Boing Boing

We depend on the suggestions we get from you folks for the raw fodder for Boing Boing. We get a lot of suggested sites. Here's an explanation of the best way to get a link published here:

Dos:

1. Do use the form.
   The Boing Boing suggest-a-site form gets sent to all four editors, quadrupling your chances of getting your link posted. It pre-formats your suggestion for easy posting. It helps us sort through and categorize our mail, ensuring your suggestion isn't lost in the shuffle. Half the time when we get a link suggestion by email, we can't figure out whether it's spam, a suggestion or just something the sender thinks we might want to look at. We never, ever post suggestions we get by email -- only stuff that comes in via the form.

2. Do describe the link
   This is the second most important thing to do if you want your suggestion to show up on Boing Boing. Tell us what the link is, and why you think we'll be interested. We get a lot of suggestions and we visit a lot of sites and life is too short to click on links that we've probably already seen -- if you can't be bothered to describe the link, we won't be bothered to look at it.

3. Do include your email
   It's optional, but if you send us a suggestion and don't include an email address, then we can't write back to you with questions and clarifications. (We don't publish your email address, we don't spam your email address)

4. Do include your URL
   If you have a URL that you'd like us to link back to in the attribution section, include it in the form, and remember the http:// !

Don'ts:

1. Don't submit links by email
   See Do number 1: we mean it. Sending stuff by the form is the only way to suggest a link for Boing Boing. No exceptions.

2. Don't follow up your submissions with email
   Don't send us emails telling us you sent us links -- we get thousands of emails and getting your suggestion and your reminder of your suggestion just adds work. We look at every submission we get.

3. Don't be cute in your description
   When we say "Describe the link," we mean just that: where does the link go, and why is it interesting? Don't be cryptic in your description, don't obscure it with humor, don't bury the description under paragraphs of preamble about something that's not the link.

4. Don't send in stuff without links
   If you saw something cool on TV or received something interesting in email, you need to either find it on the Web or publish it on the Web before suggesting it. Boing Boing publishes links -- so if there's no link, there's not much chance we'll link to it.

We know how much fun it is to share cool links with other people and we're really glad when you choose to share them with us. But when you send us links without describing them, or by email, or when you send in followups, or write confusing descriptions, you're wasting your time. The best way to get something on Boing Boing is to try to do what we try to do: find something interesting, write an informative blurb about it, and send it along. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:37:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BabyDisco

Guillaume Sorge and the folks at D-I-R-T-Y.com produce compilations and remixes that always prove to be a few steps ahead of everyone else's style radar. The stuff they plucked first, you'd hear all over clubs in Brooklyn or LA six months later. They used to release these long, luscious, free MP3 mixes at secret urls that would vanish without warning, like temporary speakeasy bars. Somewhere along the way, the French fashion/lifestyle store Colette began offering some of their work on on CDs. Here's their latest -- the soundtrack for an art installation which premiered at the Villa Noailles in France last December... Guillaume says:

Babydisco is an oneiric and playfull introduction to club land : children take possession of a reduced-scale entirely rebuilt club with strong design, where night-club clichés meet childlike universe in a soft jewel box. The discotheque becomes a free space, to which adults have no access, except for a minute glance through the door. This space is also an initiation to different forms of contemporary culture (design, video, music...). 10 to 12 children gather by appointment for a one hour session.

Like a pizza party at Chuck-E-Cheese, with better music and decor but no pizza. Link to project info and tracklisting, and link to QuickTime videos: lo (4MB), hi (12MB)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:15:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More "plastic surgery lifestyle" magazines: Kuala Lumpur

Jon says, "I found another plastic surgery magazine at the super market here in Kuala Lumpur. It's called Cosmetic Surgery & Beauty and it's tagline -- Because Nobody is Perfect - is pretty awesome. The contents, however, are pretty trashy; lots of huge, plastic breasts and what-not." click image for full-size.
Previously: New Beauty magazine launches in USA, Denmark's Plastique magazine

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:06:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show on Gannon blogtroversy

Boing Boing reader Kevin says,

It would appear that John Stewart has done another mention of the Blogosphere, this time covering the breaking of a Jeff Gannon media cover-up with ties to gay escort sites. Torrent links to last night's Daily Show appear in this entry.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:55:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why can't you fast-forward with a Comcast PVR?

If you own a Comcast PVR you may be in for a surprise when you record American Idol or 24. Some users of these boxes report that they can't fast-forward through their recorded episodes of the shows. While Comcast denies any shenanigans, I am confident that there is a flag lurking in the Comcast PVR's guts that lets broadcasters disable the fast-forward button, the record button and all other features. Another reason to build your own MythTV. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:08:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hand-painted movie posters from rural Russia

This small gallery of hand-painted rural Russian movie posters is fascinating (pictured here, poster for "50 First Dates"). Here's the story behind them: "the posters were made in response to a nascent form of mobile cinema - entrepreneurs brought the latest foreign videos and films to Russia's rural hinterlands where they set up make-shift movie houses and they hired 'professionals' to promote the films with outrageous naive paintings. some theaters even had in-house artists to keep up with the torrent of releases." Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:01:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Katamari Damacy hand-puppet

This Katamari Damacy hand-puppet is too cool for words: oh, to live in Japan! Link (Thanks, Stx!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:58:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Black & Decker jar-opener

This $50 Black-and-Decker special-purpose robot sits on your counter and opens jars of many sizes. Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

Update:: Jen sez, "This link is to a video of the 1999 early prototype of the Lids Off Black&Decker jar opener you posted today . I worked on this for my senior project in Mechanical Engineering at Yale University and won the BF Goodrich Collegiate Inventors prize for it. It was picked up by a group that looks for opportunities for products for the disabled and they pushed B&D to make it. Here's the story of the case study."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:55:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Mieville's 50 sf/f novels for socialists

China Mieville is a brilliant science fiction and fantasy novel who is also a second-generation Marxist. He's produced an amazing annotated bibliography of fifty sf/f novels for socialists.

Ayn Rand--Atlas Shrugged (1957)

Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive "objectivist" (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of "collectivism" is visible in this important an influential--though vile and ponderous--novel.

Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Own a Disneyland ride vehicle!

Disney is auctioning off Space Mountain and Sky Bucket ride-vehicles from Disneyland! Link (Thanks, Amanda!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:43:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Peter Jennings interviews Bill Gates on ABC World News Tonight

On ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings this evening, an extensive interview with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Among other things -- it's a long one -- they discuss security, outsourcing, and the Firefox browser (coincidentally, Firefox is the most popular browser among Boing Boing readers according to our server stats).

JENNINGS: I read an article coming up here on Firefox (Web browser) and its perceived ability to do this better than you. Is that fair?
GATES: Well, there's competition in every place that we're in. The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure Firefox has come along and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser — best in security, best in features. In fact, we just announced that we'll have a new version of the browser so we're innovating very rapidly there and its our commitment to have the best.
JENNINGS: Are you going to have to push your browser faster because of competition?
GATES: Well, competition is always a fantastic thing, and the computer industry?
JENNINGS: I knew you were going to say that (laughs).
GATES: (smiles) … is intensely competitive. Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

Link to transcript

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:01:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microbial life on Mars?

BB reader Matt Hamrick sez:

Looks like Space.Com has an exclusive story that two scientists are briefing NASA bigwigs that they've discovered the best evidence yet that there might be microbial life on mars. w00t!

Link (via linkfilter, thanks also, John Parres!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:33:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dance record labels without DRM

Boing Boing reader Adam Reeve says: "Just read your piece regarding allofmp3 & drm. I totally agree with the sentiments expressed about wanting to be able to pay for music, but not to be shackled with drm. One thing you might find interesting is that there are actually a reasonable number of sites which cater to the DJ community, which sell regular mp3s and which are fully licensed & legal. Unlike some of the indie/unsigned sites catering to other musical genres, these sites are dealing in the most popular records, and carry most of the top labels & artists in the scene.

"The dance/electronica/club scene has always been one refreshingly free of interference from the major labels, and so they have been free to strike up their own distribution deals. Dance labels have always been more liberal on issues of copyright too - with little or no advertising budget for your label the best way of getting the word out is to have DJs play your stuff in the clubs. So as a label boss I'd rather they played a bootleg than nothing at all! Selling on the web gets your stuff out to a wider audience of DJs, and the distribution costs are a lot less (vinyl costs a fortune to mail!). Anyway, check out some of these sites:

www.beatport.com

www.playittonight.com

www.audiojelly.com

www.yoshop.com

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:12:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

History of the Indian Rope Trick

This book review in the New York Times by magician Teller really makes me want to read Peter Lamont's The Rise Of The Indian Rope Trick: How A Spectacular Hoax Became History.

In 1890 The Chicago Tribune was competing in a cutthroat newspaper market by publishing sensational fiction as fact. The Rope Trick -- as Lamont's detective work reveals -- was one of those fictions. The trick made its debut on Aug. 8, 1890, on the front page of The Tribune's second section. An anonymous, illustrated article told of two Yale graduates, an artist and a photographer, on a visit to India. They saw a street fakir, who took out a ball of gray twine, held the loose end in his teeth and tossed the ball upwards where it unrolled until the other end was out of sight. A small boy, ''about 6 years old,'' then climbed the twine and, when he was 30 or 40 feet in the air, vanished. The artist made a sketch of the event. The photographer took snapshots. When the photos were developed, they showed no twine, no boy, just the fakir sitting on the ground. ''Mr. Fakir had simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but he couldn't hypnotize the camera,'' the writer concluded.

The story's genius is that it allows a reader to wallow in Oriental mystery while maintaining the pose of modernity. Hypnotism was to the Victorians what energy is to the New Age: a catchall explanation for crackpot beliefs. By describing a thrilling, romantic, gravity-defying miracle, then discrediting it as the result of hypnotism -- something equally cryptic, but with a Western, scientific ring -- The Tribune allowed its readers to have their mystery and debunk it, too.

Link (Thanks, Loren Coleman!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:13:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nigerian Scams Using IP Relay

Relay operators, who help the Deaf with phone calls, are required not to interfere with phone calls. People can even make drug deals on the phone, and the relay operator is not supposed to do anything but convey the information. Boing Boing reader deadmandancing reports that relay operators have their own forum to discuss situations in which they know one party in a phone call is being scammed. Some offer hints on how to get around the rules and report suspected fraudsters.

Deadmandancing says: "IP Relay is free to use, and is intended for the Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing/Speech Impaired to be able to comunicate through operators to non-impaired friends, family and businesses.

"The site is a forum for these operators, and boy are these guys PISSED at having to spend literally hours a day helping Nigerian scam-artists abuse the system to prey on businesses. The operators are required to remain 'transparent' -- they must repeat verbatim what is said by the scammer with no commentary, and are not allowed to disconnect even the most blatantly abusive calls.

"This form of the scam is harmful on many levels and endangers a useful, free service for the Deaf. Big Telecoms seem to have little interest in stopping these guys due to the $1.35 they get per minute per relay call.

"The forum has general ranting along with some interesting and inventive methods operators have devloped to try to put a stop to some of this, often with the real possibility of being fired."

Got a call that I wasn't sure about then found out it had to do with a flight to you-know-where.  Didn't have a whole lot of information from the call...at least not enough to make a decent report.  So, I got on relay and called the sugar mamma back.  She thought I was the perp the whole time and gave me all the information I asked for.  Reported to the credit card company and the airline.  The perp is going down hard.

In the last week, my reports have saved well over 10,000 dollars in fraudulent activity.  I'd say that was well worth it.  The confidentiality clause that you signed doesn't mean you should have to compromise your moral obligations.  I find it ethically and morally reprehensible that relay centers enforce rules that protect people who phone in bomb threats, discuss details of crimes, and prey on the innocent and I will not be bound by a contract that my conscience won't let me follow.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:36:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wil Wheaton: So, ASCAP to *license* podcasts? Readers respond.

Wil "now starring in CSI" Wheaton says:

Your post at Boing Boing about ASCAP licensing just made my blood boil.

Do I understand this correctly? If I love a band (let's pick The Shins, because that's what iTunes is playing right now) and want to share a great song (New Slang, for instance) to a large audience in my podcast, and talk about how much I love the album, and encourage all the listeners to go buy it . . . I have to *pay* ASCAP for the privilege? I have to *pay* them for exposing an enormous audience to the music? An enormous audience who may want to *buy the fucking record*?!

Are they out of their fucking minds? It takes me just as much time and effort to put a great song from a Comfort Stand artist into my podcast as it does to include a song from a Warner Brothers artist. Guess who gets the free airtime and publicity from me, thanks to ASCAP?

This isn't about "licensing" at all. It's about protecting the status quo (aka payola) for ASCAP and Clear Channel.

Fuck them. Fuck them in their greedy asses.

Link to Wil's blog, which includes lots of great audio content.

Update: Peter Kirn (composer/musician and contributor to Gizmodo, Macworld Mag, Keyboard Magazine, etc.) replies:

Saw your comment about podcasts -- I know some of the folks at ASCAP (I don't represent them), just thought I could clarify what the license means:

1. Wil, you WOULDN'T pay for an individual song. ASCAP licenses are blanket licenses, and the interactive minimum pricing they've set below $300/yr. Once you have the license, ALL ASCAP music is legal to play. (Some people might actually be making money from online distribution . . .)

2. ASCAP pays significant royalties to the bands; this is a way for musicians to get our stuff out there and promoted and still get paid. They're a far cry from Clear Channel -- which I agree is the devil incarnate. ASCAP was founded by musicians and composers and writers and continues to answer to a board elected by the membership.

3. ASCAP licenses are voluntary, not mandatory -- they're just an easy way of licensing music.

Of course, I agree that it's still not always beneficial to have to license music -- which is why artists should consider a Creative Commons license and self-published CD.

To which Wil Wheaton replies:

The way I understand this license, (and a quick scan of the Technoratti cosmos to Xeni's earlier post indicates that I am not alone in this), it looks like ASCAP doesn't understand the realities of podcasting. As far as I know, podcasts aren't making podcasters rich, and there's a world of difference between someone who includes a song in a podcast, and someone who puts the .mp3 of the same song up on a website for download.

Since I am an artist myself, I always support artists making royalties off their works. We obviously have no incentive to create and release our work if nobody ever pays us for it. Large-scale broadcasters who make money from advertisers or subscribers because they play music should share those profits with the artists who created it.

I have heard from several ASCAP members and it's pretty clear that I misunderstood who ASCAP is and what they do, so I'd like to apologize for calling ASCAP "greedy" and suggesting that they get the UFIA (I reserve that for the RIAA and the record companies), and I'd like clarify my comments:

My argument with this licensing scheme is that it seems to make it cost-prohibitive for someone like me (a small-scale hobbyist) to broadcast music I love to a small audience. I understand that it's a blanket license, and I don't have to reach agreements with each artist on a per-song basis. That's great. But if I'm not making a profit from my podcast, I'm not going to pay to include someone's music in my show. I'm not going to pay ASCAP so that I can provide publicity and exposure to an artist, and I can't imagine why artists would expect me to.

Isn't it the ultimate goal of an artist to have as many people as possible hear their music, and hopefully buy their albums and attend their concerts? Right now, Podcasters are passionate people providing all sorts of free publicity. We're not competing with any large-scale broadcasters, and we're not trying to steal music. I'm doing this as a hobby, and the more difficult organizations like ASCAP and the RIAA make it for me to just play the music, the less likely I am to jump through their hoops.

Why not work *with* Podcasters to develop an agreement? Why doesn't ASCAP create a license that allows zero revenue podcasters to play music in their shows for free? Think of it as free publicity. We sign an agreement that if we *do* make money from the podcast, we immediately are subject to the appropriate fee structure. My union, the Screen Actors Guild, has been doing something similar to this regarding low budget contracts for decades: actors can agree to work in movies for free, and if the movie is ever released and turns a profit, the producer agrees to retroactively pay the actors. Actors get to act, producers get to create, and if they make a profit from our work, we get to share in it.

I could be way off base here, but it seems to me that ASCAP is missing a golden opportunity to fully embrace podcasting. It seems like ASCAP is being pennywise but pound foolish. Thanks for the opportunity to have this dialogue.

BB reader Joe Gratz, Law Student and Copyright Geek, sez:

ASCAP members grant ASCAP the right to license their works for "non-dramatic public performance", and nothing else. And the license they offer for "pod-casting" grants only the right to make performances by way of internet transmissions.

Podcasting is not performance; it's the making of a physical copy. Podcasters know and intend that end-users will download the material to their iPods and listen to them in the car. I suspect that the inclusion of "pod-casting" in the description of the licensed activities springs from a misunderstanding of podcasting; they think it's just a transmission, like webcasting, and it isn't.

More from Joe here. Reader Matt May adds,

It's worse than Wil thinks. The ASCAP license is only the tip of the iceberg: there are also comparable licenses for BMI and SESAC, two other performing rights organizations; mechanical rights from the Harry Fox Agency, _and_ a "master use license" to be negotiated with the record labels for each track. The latter can be under any terms the label chooses, and they can refuse you outright. I wrote the above blog article to try to make some sense of it, but in the end, it's simply nonsensical, for those people who want to be podcasters or webcasters in their free time. Those who aren't playing CC-licensed music, anyway.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:02:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art "passports" seized

Last Friday, Austrian art group Sabotage was planning to distribute fake passports for its "State of Sabotage" as part of the opening of an exhibit at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center. Apparently, the "art critics" at the US Department of Homeland Security didn't like the idea and snatched the items out of Sabotage leader Robert Jelinek's luggage. From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Jelinkek... did not discover the items were missing from his luggage until it turned up Thursday, a day after his arrival here. Buried inside the luggage was a folded receipt from U.S. Customs and Border Protection for the missing items, which also included: seventy-seven brochures produced by the CAC and Sabotage, a container of glue, two ink pads, four "State of Sabotage" stamps, a camera and a bottle of Sabotage perfume called "Cash."

A spokesperson with US Customs and Border Protection said that the items were confiscated because the agent thought they could "in some way be harmful if imported into the U.S."

Link to Enquirer article, Link to the State of Sabotage where you can apply for a passport! (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:39:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Did you get one of the Choicepoint ID theft letters?

Are you one of the tens of thousands of people who received ID theft warning letters from ChoicePoint after a recent security breach?

In California, the only state that requires companies to disclose security breaches, ChoicePoint sent warning letters to 30,000 to 35,000 consumers advising them to check their credit reports (...) the company was still determining whether consumers outside California were affected, and declined to say whether it would notify them.

(Link to news story). If you received one of the Choicepoint letters, a television news producer would love to hear from you. Email me at xeni@xeni.net.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:11:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barnum's American Museum digitized

The Lost Museum is my favorite museum right now, even though it doesn't really exist. It's an amazing Flash-based recreation of PT Barnum's American Museum, lost to fire in 1865. Barnum's Museum was a tour-de-force of oddities, curiosities, and humbuggery:

P.T. Barnum's American Museum, located from 1841 to 1865 at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in lower Manhattan, has been long recognized by historians as a pivotal institution in the development of nineteenth-century urban culture. For a twenty-five cent admission, visitors viewed an ever-revolving series of "attractions," from the patchwork Fejee Mermaid to the diminutive and articulate Tom Thumb. But the Museum also promoted educational ends, including natural history in its menageries, aquaria, and taxidermy exhibits; history in its paintings, wax figures, and memorabilia; and temperance reform and Shakespearean dramas in its "Lecture Room" or theater. Foreshadowing trends in American commercial amusement, the Museum was the first institution to combine sensational entertainment and gaudy display with instruction and moral uplift.

The virtual reconstruction contains such gems as a complete scan of an 1850 guidebook to the American Museum, articles from the period about attractions like the FeJee Mermaid, and background on the eccentric characters in Barnum's living "collection."
Link (Thanks, Kirby Bartlett-Sloan!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:06:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fawlty Towers hotel bought by fans of the show

Torquay's Hotel Gleneagles used to be owned by Donald Sinclair, a rude hotelier who inspired John Cleese to create the character Basil Fawlty. The Hotel Gleneagles was the basis for Fawlty Towers. Now the hotel has been bought out by fans of the show:

The new owners are a family from Bristol who say they are "big fans" of the comedy, which ran for 12 episodes between 1975 and 1979.

Cleese, who stayed at the hotel with the Monty Python team in 1971, described Sinclair as "the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met".

Sinclair, who died in 1981, is said to have thrown Eric Idle's suitcase out of the window "in case it contained a bomb" and complained about Terry Gilliam's table manners.

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

freenepal.blogspot.com

Radio Free Nepal appears to be a collaborative blog penned by reporter/bloggers inside the country -- which recently went through a "bloodless coup" resulting in shutdowns of media, communication, and Internet connectivity with the rest of the world. The king booted the nation's cabinet members and prime minister, and civil war seems imminent. Tom at The Media Drop posts more background, and says "I have read that there are various 'openings' for Internet access and outside communication, and would presume that this was posted sometime during those opportunities." The site intro reads:

King Gyandendra of Nepal has issued a ban on independent news broadcasts and has threatened to punish newspapers for reports that run counter to the official monarchist line. Given that any person in Nepal publishing reports critical of "the spirit of the royal proclamation" is subject to punishment and/or imprisonment, contributors to this blog will publish their reports from Nepal anonymously.

Link to freenepal.blogspot.com. (Thanks, Jake, also spotted on Metafilter)

Update Tom Biro of The Media Drop tells Boing Boing:

I did an email "interview" overnight with the author of the site, and he's given me some more insights into what is going on.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:47:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's latest short story: I, Robot

Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives.

Today, Infinite Matrix magazine published the latest of these, a story called "I, Robot," which describes the police state that would have to obtain if you were going to have a world where there was only one kind of robot allowed and only one company was allowed to make it.

I'm really happy with how this story came out. I miss writing short stories -- they're so much fun to do, so great to create a pocket universe in thirty pages.

"Now, the latest stats show a sharp rise in grey-market electronics importing and other tariff-breaking crimes, mostly occurring in open-air market stalls and from sidewalk blankets. I know that many in law enforcement treat this kind of thing as mere hand-to-hand piracy, not worth troubling with, but I want to assure you, gentlemen and lady, that Social Harmony takes these crimes very seriously indeed."

The Social Harmony man lifted his computer onto the desk, steadying it with both hands, then plugged it into the wall socket. Detective Shainblum went to the wall and unlatched the cover for the projector-wire and dragged it over to the Social Harmony computer and plugged it in, snapping shut the hardened collar. The sound of the projector-fan spinning up was like a helicopter.

"Here," the Social Harmony man said, bringing up a slide, "here we have what appears to be a standard AV set-top box from Korea. Looks like a UNATS Robotics player, but it's a third the size and plays twice as many formats. Random Social Harmony audits have determined that as much as forty percent of UNATS residents have this device or one like it in their homes, despite its illegality. It may be that one of you detectives has such a device in your home, and it's likely that one of your family members does."

He advanced the slide. Now they were looking at a massive car-wreck on a stretch of highway somewhere where the pine-trees grew tall. The wreck was so enormous that even for the kind of seasoned veteran of road-fatality porn who was accustomed to adding up the wheels and dividing by four it was impossible to tell exactly how many cars were involved.

"Components from a Eurasian bootleg set-top box were used to modify the positronic brains of three cars owned by teenagers near Goderich. All modifications were made at the same garage. These modifications allowed these children to operate their vehicles unsafely so that they could participate in drag racing events on major highways during off-hours. This is the result. Twenty-two fatalities, nine major injuries. Three minors -- besides the drivers -- killed, and one pregnant woman.

Link

Update: Aaaman has posted a great review of the story on his blog!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SHA-1 "hashing" algorithm broken

SHA-1 is a "hashing algorithm." Feed it a long string of digits -- like an MP3 -- and it will produce a supposedly unique "hash" of those digits that's much shorter. This hash can be used to determine, for example, whether a message has been tampered with: append a hash to an email message that's generated in combination with a PGP key and your recipients can repeat the operation and determine whether the message has been tampered with in transit. Or distribute a hash of the latest security update and your download manager can compare the hash with the value it gets when it hashes update and make sure you've got the real goods. P2P application designers use hashes in a number of ways: detecting spoof files and trojans, downloading the same file from many sources ("parallel downloading" -- a poor man's BitTorrent, essentially) and so forth. Spamfighters use hashes to spot spam -- it's a way to tell whether the message I've just received has already been flagged as spam by you, saving me the trouble of looking it up -- and proposals like LOAF use hashes to assemble lists of trusted senders by allowing friends to share contact lists without exposing the actual names of their other friends.

There are lots of ways to calculate hashes, but SHA-1 is one of the most widely used. Many SHA-1 applications rely on the absence of "collisions" -- that is, the ability to spoof it by having two files hash out to the same fingerprint. That's a key piece of any kind of digital signature system. But now, there's a break for SHA-1, a means that makes it relatively easy to find collisions in a relatively short time:

The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper announcing their results:

* collisions in the the full SHA-1 in 2**69 hash operations, much less than the brute-force attack of 2**80 operations based on the hash length.

* collisions in SHA-0 in 2**39 operations.

* collisions in 58-round SHA-1 in 2**33 operations.

This attack builds on previous attacks on SHA-0 and SHA-1, and is a major, major cryptanalytic result. It pretty much puts a bullet into SHA-1 as a hash function for digital signatures (although it doesn't affect applications such as HMAC where collisions aren't important).

The paper isn't generally available yet. At this point I can't tell if the attack is real, but the paper looks good and this is a reputable research team.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:06:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Goatse t-shirt design

Goatse.cx is a notoriously disgusting web image (link to work-safe Wikipedia entry) that has become an online legend. This t-shirt bears a fitting tribute to the legend. It's a design on Threadless, a site that solicits user-generated t-shirt designs and puts them out to vote, producing the most popular. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:00:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brain in a bubbling jar

The Think Tank is a 4' high, $225 model brain in a bubbling jar. If you've ever had an existential moment and wondered if you were possiblya brain in a har being fed an elaborate simulation, this is the gizmo for you. It also illustrates the key problem in DRM: software depends on getting reliable info about its operating environment (as when Microsoft DRM requires audio to be piped through a "secure" channel), but there's no way for a DRM to distinguish between being run on actual hardware, or on emulated hardware -- e.g. whether it is a "brain in a jar," being fed pretty lies by a simulation that is lulling it into giving up its secrets. I bet you could build one of these for a lot less than $225, though. Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

Update: JWZ sez, "I've had one of those things for a few years -- it's pretty neat, but the bubbles always get inside the brain and make it float up on its side. It's also very light and easy to knock over."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Ska for the Skeptical

Oh, this is quite some gem. A while back on Boing Boing, we pointed to "Bollywood for the Skeptical," a fan-built, online primer to Indian film music for the "Bo-curious," with MP3s, links, grammar, images, and a terrific tutorial.

Two months later, reader Hallie says: "In the vein of 'Bollywood for the Skeptical' created by David Boyk (a friend of ours), my roommate James has put together a great intro to ska."

It's a wonderful little site, and it includes lots of lo-res MP3s. Among them, one of the first ska songs I ever heard -- still a favorite. Sweet and Dandy, by Toots and the Maytals: Link to MP3. That song was part of the 1969 soundtrack to The Harder They Come, which I might just go buy on iTunes right now, come to think of it. I hate most the stuff that passes for ska now, so if this site helps to reclaim the genre's noble name -- well, right on.

Snip from the site:

The one thing anyone should know about ska is that it is the music of Jamaica. while the origin of the term "ska" is relatively uncertain, rest assured that the music is not principally represented by hyperactive groups of pre-teen children listening to Reel Big Fish and sometimes appearing in Capri Sun advertisements. ska is Jamaica's heritage, and more recognized types of Jamaican music (ie: reggae, rocksteady) are primordially borne of ska.

Link to "Ska for the Skeptical."

Image: Proto-ska superstar Prince Buster ("the Prophet") leading a block party in Kingston, Jamaica, back in the day. Maybe someone should put together a giant collection of fan-created, media-rich, music reference sites like this one, and the Bollywood primer, and others, and call the whole thing Funkipedia.

Update: Boing Boing reader Ryan points us to this archived NPR radio story on New York-based, 7 piece Jamaican Rocksteady Ska band, The Slackers. He says, "I make my friends who think Ska began with No Doubt and ended with Smash Mouth or Sugar Ray repent by listening to this several times a year." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:46:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More plastic surgery lifestyle magazines

Following up on a previous Boing Boing post about the launch of New Beauty magazine in the USA, reader Jens says,

Denmark has had a cosmetic surgery lifestyle mag for a couple of months now. The magazine has (as far as I know) no website yet, but here's a snapshot of this month's cover on a newsstand. Some of the headlines read: "Breast implants: Luxury or discount?," "Dr. Haushka: Ecological wonder or PR stunt," and "When everything goes wrong".

Link. "Plastic surgery lifestyle." <shudder>.

Update: Here's Plastique's website: Link (Thanks, Laurits)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:10:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex Gandams

Tokyo Damage Report is a site I visit often for kooky, kinky, geeky crap from Japan. This recent post about cartoonish DIY sex machines is all three of those things, to the highest imaginable power. Snip:

Japan is famous for all things small, plastic, shiny, and imitation. Miniature plastic food. Miniature plastic robots. Miniature plastic human generative organs. So naturally I thought, "Why not combine them?" The gun is a vibrator. arms and legs are from a Gandam. The body is the vibrator's control mechanism. Yes, it is fully functional.

Link to extensive gallery of "Sex Gandam" images and videos (Thanks, Nick Denton).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:02:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ASCAP licenses podcasting

This new licensing standard from ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) went into effect in January -- but I hadn't read it in entirety before. Included in the various web licensing agreements here, a reference to podcasting. Link (via pho list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:52:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More scary Estonian TV ads for otherwise normal products

You may recall this earlier post about a nightmarish, Soviet-era TV ad from Estonia promoting chicken meat. I can't read Estonian blogs, so I haven't been able to dig up more info about the prolific director of this ad and many others -- Harry Egipt. However, in this archive of Egipt's work, I found another equally disturbing gem which seemed worthy of Boing Boing notice. It's either an ad for vanilla soft-serv or blow jobs.

It's interesting to look at these ads as the product of a society which was just then, all of a sudden, opening up to capitalism, advertising, and private media production. Countries where such systems have been in place for longer also manage to stick sex in everything, obliquely or otherwise. But in these early Eastern European television ads, it's all clumsy and creepy. Even the color gamut is scary -- Egipt's ads all have the drab pallette of a vivid, bad dream.
Link to ad for "Pinguin," which apparently means in Estonian, "I'll have two scoops of bukkake, please." Over at StevenF's blog, the Harry Egipt remix competition is going strong: Link

Update: Boing Boing reader Gary Keltz says:

Don't Forget, Estonia is culturally closer to Scandinavia than Eastern Europe. It is only about 50 miles across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki. I know I hadn't realized that until it was pointed out by an associate of Estonian extraction at work.

Update: Estonian blogger Siim Teller says:

Hei, if your're from boingboing.net and having trouble understanding Estonian. Harry Egipt was one of the most productive ad-maker during the Soviet times in Estonia. He wrote the scripts, directed the things and edited as well. He's still in the ad business but his works look pretty dated to me. I'll do a rough translation from the text found on his "about" page:

"Harry Egipt has long time experience working in television and advertising doing various stuff: writing copy to radio, writing scripts to TV-shows and videoclips. He's taken the role of scriptwriter, director, editor, photographer etc. Worked 8 years in national television ETV and 11 years in Eesti Reklaamfilm (state run organisation whose goal was making ads during the Soviet times) where he made more than 80 ads. Now his retroads are regular part of local Night of the Ad Eaters."

I'm old enough to remember most of those TV ads from the 80s, but too young to put them into any kind of perspective. For example this ad for "Penguin" icecream is rather pervers by todays standards but perhaps it was not so 15 years ago because we did not have "necessary" background from porn industry. What I mean was that less people were familiar with blowjobs because there were no magazines or movies etc freely available (they were being smuggled from Finland but still hard to find). Perhaps someone older should fill me in here :-)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:30:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Retro bong designed and built in 11 minutes

Kaden Harris, maker of amazing and beautiful desktop medieval weaponry, sent me the following email, which he said I could share with the readers of Boing Boing.

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) So I had visitors last night...friends of a friend who wanted to "meet the freaky pirate guy"...Whatever... I'm busy...go sit in the lounge and watch the lightshow.

20 minutes later:

"Kaaaden...do you have a bong?"

Well, no, actually. Just give me a second and I'll make one.

Meet 'Herr Bong'... total elapsed time from concept to completion: 11 minutes

Valu Village cookie jar

2 doorknobs, a low pressure expansion fitting, a high pressure ball valve, a 3/4" pipe union, 3 chunks of brass tubing and some lamp bits. The screen is a piece of expanded brass from the inner core of a chunk of heat exchanger pipe.

It worries me that I had all the componenets not just on-hand, but in plain sight. And not in the shop.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:16:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Sterling's students imagine mag covers from 2010

Bruce Sterling's new design class in SoCal is having a blast creating magazine and newspaper covers from the year 2010.
Link, start there and work backwards -- and maybe forward, depending on whether or not more image posts are forthcoming. (Thanks, Stefan Jones).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:53:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robin Williams' anti-Disney, pro-Pixar "Song of Freedom"

During a press junket for the upcoming Fox CG film Robots, Robin Williams -- who plays robot "Fender" in the film -- burst into a hilarious impromptu riff about Pixar's departure from Disney. Yeah, I know. Everything Williams does is an impromptu riff. Anyway: Link to MP3, and link to post on Film Force. They'll be running more of their interview with Williams, including comments on his previous conflicts with Disney surrounding the "licensing, or over-licensing, of Aladdin." Beware of horrible obnoxious screen-consuming ad you must click through to get to the article or the clip.
(Thanks, daisy!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:41:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cute characters at a Japanese gravestone shop

Steve Portigal says: "Some sample gravestone carvings in Japan, including Doraemon, Godzilla, and Hello Kitty. By sample, I mean on display at a store, not in a graveyard (not yet, at least)." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:22:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rare holographic Atari console on eBay

In 1981, Atari built a handful of prototypes for a new game console called the Cosmos, which would display all its play elements on a holographic screen. They never went into production. Only two were built with electronics inside -- the other three were just shells. One of those shells is now up for sale on eBay, starting around £10,000 -- about $20,000 in devalued American pesos. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:17:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rock and Roll fonts

Great collection of free fonts inspired by rock and roll band logos.
Link (Thanks, phxartboy!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:11:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RadioShark

I absolutely love my new radioSHARK from Griffin Technology. It basically turns your hard drive into a VCR for radio. The USB device records any AM or FM radio broadcast directly to your computer (Mac or PC). The coolest thing is that you can program it to record any program automatically.

Of course, there's already plenty of streaming radio content available online and lots of good shows are archived for listening-on-demand. And you can use tools like Audio Hijack to digitally record them for portability. Even still, radioSHARK is useful for me. For example, last night my friend Loren Coleman was a guest on Coast To Coast AM, which airs here from 10pm to 3am. I knew I'd be asleep not long after the show came on. (The past 30 days of Coast To Coast are now available online, but you have to subscribe.) So in about 10 seconds, I programmed radioSHARK to turn itself on and record the show while I snoozed. When I woke up this morning, I loaded the audio file into my iPOD and I've been listening to it in my car. I also set radioSHARK to record at the same time each night so Coast To Coast will be waiting for me every morning.
radioSHARK also has a "time shift" feature to "pause" live radio à la Tivo. The one thing that annoys me about the radioSHARK software is that you can only record in AIFF or AAC formats. It's a hassle to convert those big files into manageable MP3s, especially when you're dealing with a several hour broadcast. radioSHARK isn't cheap at $69.99, but it's really easy to use and is sure to provide hours of aural pleasure. Link


UPDATE: BB reader Matt Hamrick says that some people, including himself, have been unable to get radioSHARK to work properly on their Macintosh G5 towers. Ars Technica discusses the problem in their review. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:10:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark Dery on toes

Inspired by a new Versace ad campaign featuring a barefoot Madonna, Mark Dery wrote a wonderfully-surreal essay about podpophilia. More specifically, he hyperanalyzes the fetishism of toes, particularly the big one:

So what does Madonna’s big toe mean, exactly? Sex, duh. According to the New York Post‘s "Page Six," Madonna wanted Mario Testino’s photos for the Versace ads to be "provocative and sexy," flaunting "how good she looks at 46." Groping for deeper meaning, we remember that Madonna is a lapsed Catholic, so maybe Anthony N. Fragola’s 1994 essay, "From the ecclesiastical to the profane: Foot fetishism in Luis Buñuel and Alain Robbe-Grillet" in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, can shed a little light: "Buñuel believes that sexual compulsions and deviations originate from the repressive teaching of Catholicism that equates sex with guilt," writes Fragola. L’Age d’Or is the cinematic equivalent of the 39 lashes, administered with relish by an ex-Catholic who devoted his creative life to scourging the church as well as the unblinking, ungulate herd that filled its pews. The movie is Buñuel’s mordantly anti-Catholic ode to l’amour fou ("mad love"), the libidinous frenzy the Surrealists prescribed as shock treatment for repressed, repressive bourgeois society; the infamous toe-sucking scene, still crazy after all these years, is its centerpiece.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:11:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gates: Denmark supports software patents or we shut down our Danish operation

Bill Gates flew to Denmark and told the Prime Minister that if he didn't support European software patents, Gates would shut down a Danish software company that Microsoft had acquired, costing Denmark 800 IT jobs.

The founder of the world's largest software company, Bill Gates, is now ready to shut down Navision in Denmark and move around 800 developers behind Denmarks biggest software success to the US.

The Microsoft leader made that clear, when he meet with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Economic and Business Minister Bendt Bendtsen and Science Minister Helge Sander in November.

The threat risks being executet, if part of the IT business manages to block the disputed EU directive on patenting software, that Microsoft wants so dearly, but time and time again has been postponed thanks to efficient lobbying by anti-patent opposition.

"If I am to keep my development center in Denmark, I must have clearity on the rights issue. Otherwise I will move to the US, where I can protect my rights," said Gates according to to Microsoft chief attorney Marianne Wier, who also attended the meeting with Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Link (Thanks, Everyman!)

Update: Microsoft denies this, "Contrary to reports in the Danish media today, Microsoft stated that there are no plans to close the Microsoft Development Center at Vedbaek, Denmark. Microsoft remains committed to Vedbaek as a development center, as evidenced by the appointment of Klaus Holse Andersen as leader of the Microsoft Vedbaek campus and the opening of the Microsoft Technology Center for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) ISV Development in November 2004. The campus at Vedbaek continues to thrive, and Microsoft expects to add additional developers in 2005." (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:11:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Support Bay Area Civil Rights Vets on Eyes on the Prize

Eyes on the Prize is the brilliant, seminal documentary on the civil rights movement that is no longer available for educators and public viewing because no one can figure out how to clear the copyrights to all the archival footage in it. Downhill Battle tried to rectify this by distributing copies of the series by BitTorrent with the idea that people who cared about the civil rights fight would stage viewings at home on Feb 8, in honor of Black History month. They were shut down under legal threats, as was at least one of the showings.

The Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement issued a public statement of support for Downhill Battle and its "Eyes on the Screen" campaign, saying in effect that they, as the "stars" of the footage in the documentary, took the incredible risks that they did in order to be remembered, not erased from history by Draconian copyright.

Now, Downhill Battle is soliciting signatures in support of the Bay Area Vets of the Civil Rights Movement: I've just signed on, and I hope you will, too.

We strongly defend the original purpose of copyright which was to protect creators, -- artists, composers, performers, photographers, writers, and others, -- from commercial theft of their work, and to ensure that creators could make a living from their craft. But today media conglomerates have imprisoned the copyrights that once belonged to the creators, seizing the income that rightfully belongs to those who did the work, denying access to those who cannot afford to pay their exorbitant fees, and sequestering information that runs counter to their corporate political agendas.

Information, -- and particularly history, -- is as much a necessity of intellectual and economic life as food is of biologic life. Not only is it morally wrong to deny people the necessities of life, it's impractical because when people cannot afford to buy food they steal it. As citizens we know that without full access by all to multiple sources of news and information, democracy itself becomes a myth. And as Toni Morrison told us in 1986, "Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:02:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's first novel is a Nebula finalist!

The final Nebula Award ballot is out and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a finalist! w00t! The awards ceremony is in Chicago on April 30th -- I'll be there with fingers crossed (check out the tough competition!)

Novels --

Paladin of Souls -- Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos, Oct03)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- Cory Doctorow (Tor, Feb03)
Omega -- Jack McDevitt (Ace, Nov03)
Cloud Atlas : A Novel -- David Mitchell (Sceptre, Jan 2004)
Perfect Circle -- Sean Stewart (Small Beer Press, Jun04)
The Knight -- Gene Wolfe (Tor, Jan04)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Artificial "eye" for fabric colors

A remote sensor developed for Earth observation is now being used to spot variations in dyed fabric in the textile production process. Apparently, the automated spectrographic system replaces expensive and less-reliable human quality control experts. (How nice.) From the European Space Agency News:

Using the space ‘eye’ for textile manufacture has improved the quality of textile production and lowered costs, as the amount of yearly waste is significantly lower. The 160 million metres of dyed fabrics discarded yearly in Europe correspond to a loss of €800 million and 8000 tonnes of dyeing agents and solvents that have to be ‘cleaned’, using costly procedures, to prevent environmental pollution.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:15:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Outsider art in France and England

By the late 1960s, French surrealist Jean Dubuffet had gathered a collection of 15,000 mind-blowing works of outsider art. He tried to donate his collection to France, but the government ignorantly passed on it. (Apparently, so did the US.) The collection ended up at the Chateau Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland. In a new article on the Fortean Times Web site, journalist Sean Thomas takes a look at the Dubuffet collection and the prestige now placed on outsider art in France and England:

The collection, which Dubuffet called “a pool of moral health”, has not, however, remained static. Like the genre of Raw Art itself, it has expanded and broadened to take in people who, while they may not be as ‘outside’ the art world as psychotics, prisoners or hermits, still have some disjointed relationships with the mainstream: artists like Gaston Chaissac, Rosemarie Koczy, or Albert Louden. Dubuffet termed these people the “Neuve Invention” – the Fresh Invention – but most art critics have since preferred to use the handy, catchall term “Outsider Art”, coined by British art writer Roger Cardinal in 1972.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:57:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USB hub/snowglobe

These snowglobes contain four-port USB hubs. Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microsoft's GhostBuster will sniff out trojans

Microsoft has created a promising-sounding app for finding and eliminating trojans and other malware, called GhostBuster. Bruce Schneier has a great writeup:

The user has the GhostBuster program on a CD. He sticks the CD in the drive, and from within the (possibly corrupted) OS, the checker program runs: stopping all other user programs, flushing the caches, and then doing a complete checksum of all files on the disk and a scan of any registry keys that could autostart the system, writing out the results to a file on the hard drive.

Then the user is instructed to press the reset button, the CD boots its own OS, and the scan is repeated. Any differences indicate a rootkit or other stealth software, without the need for knowing what particular rootkits are or the proper checksums for the programs installed on disk.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:23:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

United Media: reading our RSS feed violates our copyright

"Comics for Media Center" is a plugin for Microsoft's Media Center PC that pulls the RSS feed of United Syndicate's comics (Dilbert, etc) and displays them in the version of Internet Explorer that comes with a Media Center PC. In a moment of mindboggling, unreasonable blinkered pig-ignorance, United Syndicate has decided that this somehow constitutes an infringement of its copyright -- that's right, reading an RSS feed of their stuff, using Internet Explorer, violates their copyright. They've nastygrammed the creator of Comics for Media Center and he's shut his project down. Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

30,000 missing performers owed webcasting royalties

Last night's CBS news contained a piece about the royalty society that collects money owed to performers for the webcasting of their work. The society is currently holding money for some 30,000 performers who cannot be located. Good thing we extended copyright terms -- otherwise those missing performers would never have had the motivation to record their songs 50 years ago. 4MB Quicktime Link (Thanks, Baptiste!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:01:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple and Sony sued for non-interoperable DRM

A French consumer rights group has filed suit against Apple and Sony for making non-interoperable DRM:

French consumer association UFC-Que Choisir has launched legal action over the two companies' proprietary music formats, claiming that the respective DRM used by both Sony and Apple, which means songs bought from their online song shops can't be played on other manufacturers' media players, is limiting consumers' choice.

The consumer group announced it would be taking legal action against the pair after conducting interoperability tests last year between a selection of music download services and digital music players and criticising the lack of interoperable DRM.

"The total absence of interoperability between DRM removes not only the consumer's power to independently choose their purchase and where they buy it from, but also constitutes a significant restraint on the free circulation of creative works," the group said.

Link (Thanks, Stephane!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crick's first sketch of DNA

An archive of the papers Francis Crick -- one of the discoverers of DNA's structure -- has been digitized and put online. It includes this first sketch of the DNA molecule. Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:28:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, February 14, 2005

Coat with static quills that stand up and shoot lighting when wearer is threatened

A student at London's RSA has prototyped a coat with electrostatic quills that stand on end when the user triggers an "I'm-feeling-threatened" button, and shoot bolts of blue static lightning at those unwise enough not to back off.

The prototype design is a coat with warning strips of fur that become electro-statically charged in situations where the wearer feels threatened. When charged the fur begins to stand on end; a visual indication that the wearer is uncomfortable. If someone invades the wearer's personal space they will begin to feel a second warning; as they enter the coat's electrostatic field they will feel tingling skin sensations and their hair will stand on end. The fur will begin to twitch toward them and emit crackling sounds. If the 'threat' proceeds to touch the fur then 100,000 volts of electro-static charge discharges from the fur, into the offenderís body (non-lethal but definitely a bite).

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:56:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why is Google News carrying Power Line and not Daily Kos?

The excellent left-wing blogger Kos was dropped from Google News's list of sources last month, on the grounds that Goole seeks out non-partisan news sources. However, Google News is including sites that are just as partisan, but for the other side, like Power Line. A Kos reader is calling for a write-in campaign to Google News to address this.

A few months ago I posted a diary about Kos being dropped as a source from Google News, and the joy this brought to the right-wingers who claimed responsibility (having written Google to complain about its inclusion).

Well, imagine my surprise today when I discovered that Google News has added Power Line as a source.

In the spirit of "what's good for the goose is good for the gander", I propose that we all contact news-feedback@google.com and complain about Power Line being mixed in with legitimate sources.

Link (Thanks, Patrick!)

Update: Jake explains:

Kos has commented in the ensuing thread that they dropped it because he asked them to drop it, and he asked them to drop it because Google was picking up random entries that weren't

"it was pulling up random diaries and pasting them on the google news homepage, with the implication that it was 'sanctioned' content.

Given what's sometimes written in the diaries, I was uncomfortable with that. I don't mind taking heat for things I write, but for things that other people write? I didn't want to deal with that.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Non-human farmers in nature: fish, ants, termites, beetles and snails

Rajagopal has written a fascinating blog-post on "non-human farmers" -- animals that farm their food.

On a recent trip to the Galapagos Islands, I was astonished when our guide showed us how damselfish (family Pomacentridae) farm algae on their own. It was also amazing to see how aggressively protective they were of their farms. To demonstrate, our guide took a sea urchin and dropped it into the damselfish’s algae farm, and within seconds the damselfish pushed the sea urchin out of the farm. Some damselfish farm algae on coral heads and nip the coral to create cuts that encourage the algae to grow. Apparently, they are known even to attack human beings that swim near their farms. Fortunately, they are very small fish with small teeth, so death by damselfish is unlikely!

The damselfish inspired me to learn about other animals that farm their own food. It turns out that besides humans, four kinds of animal are known to farm fungi (fungiculture)—leaf cutter ants, termites, ambrosia beetles, and marsh snails.

Link (Thanks, Rajagopal!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

IDN domain spoofing: a much better answer

Last week, we had a number of posts about the "IDN spoof" vulnerability in which wily hackers could use "homologues" -- foreign-alphabet letters that look like latin equivalents -- to spoof domains and certificates like "paypal.com" by replacing one or more letters with lookalikes.

The solutions proposed were all pretty blunt: turning off international alphabet support in browsers, or warning users when non-ASCII chars showed up in domains. There is nothing inherently suspicious about domains that are in foreign alphabets and it would suck if browsers behaved as if there was. Some people even favored ordering Verisign to discriminate among people who try to buy certificates if they were for domains that were "too similar" to "famous" domains -- don't get me started! Who the hell would trust the ham-fisted thugs at Verisign to administer a blacklist of domains that aren't allowed to have certificates? Ugh, "I'm sorry sir, your application for a certificate for amazonriver.com has been turned down, as it is possible that it would be confused with amazon.com."

Paul Hoffman, who co-wrote the IDN standard, has an excellent post where he proposes a much more moderate and effective set of solutions:

Given that the problem is that domain names with more than one script can cause homograph confusion, the solution should highlight names that have more than one script and say what script the characters come from. This can be done with a hover-over pop-up that looks something like:

Note that the pop-up is not a warning, it is informative. There are zillions of valid names that have two scripts in them; there are many, particularly in Japan, that will have three scripts.

The difficult question is how to show the pop-up in a way that alerts about spoofing but doesn't get in the way of normal IDNs. One easy way to put an icon to the left of the "favicon" in the address bar...

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Valentine's Day: Everyone's having sex today but YOU

BB reader Apul Patel says,

It's Valentine's Day. Half of the country will be f--king like wild billy-goats. The other half will just be f--king bitter. The good folks at Durex have something for both camps. The former can indulge in the contraceptive concern's wide range of STD- and pregnancy-busting prophylactics. And for the latter, nothing less than an international-sized reminder of how much play they're missing out on. Durex, a subsidiary of London-based SSL International, recently released their annual survey of sexual behavior around the world. The "Global Sex Survey," now in its eighth year, polled more than 350,000 people from 41 countries, and is billed as the largest such study around. Among the 16 questions, the following six stood out to me (I only listed results for first place, Canada, global average, India, U.K., U.S. and last place)...

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:34:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Valentine's Day in hysterically misused Chinese

Tian runs a blog called "Hanzi Smatter" devoted to non-Asian people's unwittingly incorrect use of Chinese characters in tattoos, t-shirts, and the like. He spotted this tattoo and said:

"[W]hen I first saw this... I was stunned and speechless. It literally means "crazy diarrhea" in both Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji."

He invited readers to contribute Photoshop remixes. The results include this Valentine's Day chocolate wrapped with a message which would be very inappropriate, unless this is your kind of thing.

Link to Tian's explanatory blog post. (Thanks, Jared Mackay)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:09:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Liveblogging DEMO 2004 (Feb 13-15)

Here are some of the blogs offering minute-to-minute coverage of DEMO 2005 -- the 15th year of "the grandaddy of Show-and-Tell":

Jason McCabe Calacanis and crew: BloggingDEMO
Scoble: http://scoble.weblogs.com/
Gary Potter: http://www.acemakr.com
Don Cosseboom: http://jitb2.blogspot.com/
Jeff Nolan: http://sapventures.typepad.com/

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:59:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cowboy Gasoline - new excerpt, new format, and reduced price

One month ago today, I started selling a long article written by a friend of mine who described his adventures driving pickup truck loaded with all his worldly possessions from Arizona to Florida, encountering a storm on the way. Selling the article has been an experiment. We've sold about 50 copies at $2.50. To continue the experiment, I've dropped the price to $1.50. I'm also making a text version available, so you can read it on your PDA. I've also posted a new excerpt from the book. You can read the excerpt and buy a copy here.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:58:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Valentine's Day from Mars

From NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems:

"This Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows a heart-shaped hill surrounded by cracked terrain within a depression in far northwestern Arabia Terra, near the Cydonia region of Mars."

Link, and Link to Martian love from previous years.

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:20:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory speaking and reading at Oxford University Wednesday night

I'm giving a talk and a reading to Oxford University's science-fiction and computer-science societies Wednesday night. It's open to the public, though there's not much room, so you might wanna get in early!

What: Reading and speech by Cory Doctorow

When: Wednesday, February 16, 2005, 8PM

Where: Oxford University, Trinity College, The Arts Room. Staircase 7, front quad.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:05:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is it legal to buy songs from Russian MP3 sites?

The Russian e-commerce site allofmp3.com sells MP3s of all your favorite bands (icluding stuff that isn't on iTunes, like the full Beatles catalog) for about .20 a song. This WSJ article asks whether its legal or not.

[L]awyers say buying music from the sites is as illegal as downloading it for free over a file-swapping network. "It doesn't matter if somebody downloads in the U.S. and believes that it's legal because the site tells them so," says Evan Cox, an intellectual property lawyer at the firm Covington & Burling in San Francisco.

Link (WSJ article free today only)

But here's something from the Farber mailing list that goes into a lot more detail about the legality. It's not as clearcut as the WSJ article suggests.

There is a loophole in the Russian copyright legislation that makes services like Allofmp3 possible. Apparently this loophole cannot be closed easily.

...

The Music Industry claims that Allofmp3 is illegal but their own lawyers tell them "... the music industry doesn't have much chance in succeeding (if they attack these companies who are using music files on the Internet under current Russian laws)." Instead they are pushing for changes in Russian copyright law but progress is glacial. Chances that the loophole will be closed on short term are low and there is great resistance to changes.

Link

UPDATE: A reader says: "Please point out that, at least for me and I'm sure others, it is NOT about get music on the cheap - but rather, without DRM! I do not expect or want free music - I expect and want to be able to do with it what we have always been able to do - play it on any damn player I own whenever I want to."

Mark's comment: I couldn't agree with you more. I think most people are happy to pay artists for their work in order to get music that doesn't have DRM woven into it. Too bad most of the sites that offer DRM-free music also don't pay artists (exception: eMusic.com), because for a lot of people, getting music without DRM is more important to them than making sure the artist is compensated.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:39:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turning Napster's 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music

"Marv on record" provides the how to on some "Theoretical fun" for legally getting hundreds of Napster music CDs for the price of the blank CDs. Link

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

Little trains you can ride on in Los Angeles

On the Make weblog, I wrote about my visit to Los Angeles' Live Steamers club.

This was the best miniature train ride I've ever taken! We went through tunnels, over bridges, and through charming areas with little buildings and landscaping. Because the train was so small, and we were so close to the ground, and we were straddling the train, it felt like we were going fast. It was kind of thrilling!

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:07:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tsunami uncovered ancient artifacts

As a result of the December 26 tsunami, archaeologists have discovered stone structures from the 7th century AD off the coast of India's Tamil Nadu state. For three years, archaeologists have been conducting underwater expeditions to explore the remains of an ancient port city there. The latest finds, including the granite lion seen here, were partially uncovered after the tsunami caused the coastline to recede. The tsunami also desilted a mostly-obscured giant rock relief of an elephant on the nearby Mahabalipuram temple. From a BBC News report:

The myths of Mahabalipuram were first set down in writing by British traveller J Goldingham, who visited the South Indian coastal town in 1798, at which time it was known to sailors as the Seven Pagodas.

The myths speak of six temples submerged beneath the waves with the seventh temple still standing on the seashore.

The myths also state that a large city which once stood on the site was so beautiful the gods became jealous and sent a flood that swallowed it up entirely in a single day.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:22:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chupacabra? Unfortunately not.

Unfortunately, this strange dead animal discovered on Albuquerque's West Mesa isn't a chupacabra as some suspected. The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish report that it's an ocean skate. From KOBTV Eyewitness News 4:

(Albuquerque Aquarium manager Holly) Camain said the creature looks so different because a fisherman cut most of the meat off.

It’s not clear why the creature ended up on the West Mesa, but one theory says someone either caught it or bought it and dumped it on the mesa.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:05:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Melanie Griffith freaks out at LA Apple store

Wired News reports that Actor Melanie Griffith threw a fit when she wasn't given the star treatment at an LA Apple retail store.

Apple has four retail stores in the Los Angeles area, which give the sales associates ample opportunity to rub elbows with Hollywood celebrities. It isn't always pleasant. Melanie Griffith threw a tantrum when she was unable to buy a pink iPod mini early last year, according to the sales associate who tried to serve her. The associate, who asked to remain anonymous, said Griffith came right up to him and "pretty much demanded" a pink iPod mini. The mini was in short supply, and the associate told her there were none in stock. "She then proceeded to get pissed off at me personally because we didn't have any in stock," the associate said. "She said we have a special stock of iPods for people like her.... I hadn't seen any celebrities there up until then, so at first I was like, 'Oh wow, cool, Melanie Griffith.' But then she opened her mouth and used me as a doormat, and I was like, 'What the fuck is this shit? Milk Money sucked.'"

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

UPDATE: A longtime friend of Boing Boing who asks to remain anonymous says: "It's a funny story, but I spent a fair amount of time working professionally with Melanie back in the dotcom days... she was always really gracious and dealt with 'public stress' very well. The uncorroborated account of the store clerk in this piece is just that. The characterization doesn't jive with what I witnessed. Maybe she freaked inappropriately, maybe she didn't. But I'm sorry to see that lady trashed in the press, when she was always SUPER accommodating to fans in our presence... I watched strangers harass her beyond belief, and she was always very patient, very cool, very generous. She's a really cool lady."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:52:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Guide to underground Tokyo

"Tokyo Damage Report, the guy who did the Japanese fetish glossary, is compiling a 'wacky things to see in Tokyo' guidebook with address AND directions. Includes a gangsta barber, punk venues, a 'maniac bar,' and the advice: 'if there is a guy from Nigeria telling you about a sex-bar, it is not one. The real sex-bars have guys from Nigeria paid to keep your foreign ass out.'" Link (thanks, Sumana!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:37:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Private Eye covers from 1961 on

Andrew sez, "this has scanned images of all past Private Eye covers (a fortnightly UK satirical magazine). 1125 of them, going back to 1961. It's indexed by the people shown - you can call up a list of all covers featuring a given person, as well as the one for a specific date - although the indexing is less comprehensive as you get past the last couple of decades. But nonetheless, quite entertaining to flick through, and probably educational for those of us whose memory doesn't go back before Thatcher..." Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:36:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Miss Army Knife with perfume bottle, needle and thread, etc

These "Miss Army Knives" sell for $20 and contain: flashlight, screwdriver, keychain, needle & thread, perfume bottle, mirror, pill box, knife, safety pin, pen, tweezers and bottle opener. Link (via Red Ferret Review)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's copyfight explained, demystified

Michael Geist is Canada's leading copyfighting lawyer, a great speaker and thinker on the subject of copyright. He gave a very good lecture on Canada's "outdated" copyright law. In Canada, the entertainment industry has decided that Canada's copyright (which has been updated dozens of times since it was first introduced" is outdated and must be updated to look like American copyright law, but even worse. For example, Canada's rightsholders want to replace "notice-and-takedown" (an ISP has to remove material when someone complains that it might be infringing) with a "notice-and-terminate" regime (an ISP has to kick off its customer if anyone, anywhere accuses them of infringing). The speech is fascinating and long overdue: there is a wealth of material on the issues with American copyright, but precious little that's specific to the Canadian context. With Canada considering an ambitious overhaul of its copyright law, this speech is required viewing for everyone who wants to understand what's at risk in Canada. Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:54:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Funny, weird, sad send-up of DC Comics: Bizarro World

Bizarro World Number One is a collection from DC comics that asks an amazing array of writers to parody the DC stable of heroes in the tradition of Bizarro, Superman's inverted nemesis. The results are fantastic, MAD-Magazine-esque stories and artwork that expose the strange underbellies of the underwear-on-the-outside hero genre. Some real standouts here include Tony "Maakies" Millionaire riffing on Batman, Kyle "Why I Hate Saturn" Baker's look inside the life of Alfred, Paul "Ribofunk" Di Filippo's story of the afterlife, Jason Yungbluth's MAD-style sendup of the Green Lantern, Dylan Horrocks's haunting Dear Superman (which actually made me set the book down and say, "Wow," before going on), and many others. Link (via Wired Magazine)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:49:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hello Kitty crop circle near Stonehenge

Sanrio commissioned Surface to Air to make an artwork commemorating Hello Kitty's 30th birthday -- so they created this Hello Kitty crop circle near Stonehenge that's half a football field long on each side. Link (via JWZ)

Update:: Here's a link to the makers' site

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:21:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Images of animals in space

This gallery of animals-in-space images includes photos of fish and spiders in space, dogs and chimps who've gone to orbit, and this image of cats in "simulated spacesuits." Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:43:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Angry remix of "You can click, but you can't hide"

This angry website remixes Hollywood's "You can click, but you can't hide" campaign into something new called The MPAA vs An Army of Mice.

This website has been erected out of consumer outcry over the passing of sites that facilitate the downloading of perpetually copyrighted motion pictures. The unauthorized downloading of motion pictures denies thousands of dishonest, lazy executives of their crack smoking livelihood, and is the only way to bring an artistically bankrupt monopoly under control. Downloading movies without authorization violates laws distorted beyond their original intent, is not tangible theft, and is impossible to stop. You can't catch everyone. The only way to win is to stop waging war on your customers and accept the fact that we are in control, not you. You brought this on yourself.

Link (Thanks, XStylus!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Firefox extension displays whether Abe Vigoda's alive

b0bg0d sez "AbeVigodaStatus is a new Firefox extension that reports the living/dead status of Abe Vigoda in the status bar." Link (Thanks, b0bg0d!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:39:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Valentines with Mario, Zelda, Raisins and Turtles

X-Entertainment has a funny, raunchy critical retrospective of character-branded valentines-sets featuring Super Mario, Zelda, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the California Raisins. Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:12:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Every single MAD Magazine cover

This obsessive MAD Magazine fan has scanned in what appears to be every single MAD cover since October, 1952's issue number one and posted them, along with the table of contents for each issue. Pictured here, the cover of the MAD from July, 1971: the month of my birth. Link (Thanks, Greg!)

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

HR Puffnstuff-themed robot with slot machine in crotch for sale

This 10-foot-high robot with a HR Puffnstuff slot machine in its "belly" (uh, that's a little south of the belly, in my opinion!) is selling for $80,000: "Slots originated in the amusement park called: THE WORLD OF SID AND MARTY CROFT. The theme of the park was the popular H.R. Pufnstuff. Although the park was short lived in the mid 1970's, it was an amazing place to behold!" Link (Thanks, Reed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:56:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Valentines are tools for emotional distancing

A historian of Valentine's Day cards determines that the historical role of the valentine is to distance the sender from emotional intimacy.

Shank described valentines sent by a college linguistics instructor in the 19th century.

To "Susan" in 1849, the instructor handwrote, "While passions sigh and cupid's dart around us fly from heart to heart tell me, dear one, will love like mine be welcomed in a Valentine?"

Four years later, the instructor sent the exact same lines to another woman, "Catherine."

In 1850, he varied his passage for yet another woman. "This day let me on you impress how fond, my love, and true and ever will to you incline say shall I be your Valentine?"

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Savant with autism describes math as shapes and sounds

The Guardian profiles an autistic mathematical savant who is distinct in that he -- unlike many other people with autism -- can describe the thought processes he undergoes while perfoming amazing feats of mental calculation. These thoughts are synesthesiac, where numbers are represented in his mind as shapes and sounds.

Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn't "calculating": there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think..."

Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day". Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.

Link (via Foe)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:50:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Savile Row bespoke tailor's blog

Thomas Mahon is a Savile Row tailor who cuts suits for Prince Charles. He has started a blog that is part fascinating suit-nerd minutae and part sneer at lesser tailors. Since my job morphed into the kind of thing where I'm expected to dress like a grownup several times a year, for several days in a row, I find that I own more suits at this point in my life than I ever have -- three, plus a tux and a blazer -- but reading this started to make me yearn for another one, cut with Mr Sheppard's Shears and hand-canvassed.

Although first fittings are quite basic, they are popular, as they allow for more and larger inlays (seams) to be used.

This enables the cutter to check the basic fit of your pattern, and also allows more chances for later alteration, should he need to correct any major errors in the pattern.

Getting to this point can be done with the minimum of expense.

As I said, this stage is used by most tailors, especially for new customers. With older customers this stage can usually be skipped as the cutting pattern would have already been perfected.

Anderson & Sheppard , myself and a few other A&S expats miss out this stage altogether. We go straight to a forward (second) fitting.

Why? As my former mentor at A&S, Mr. Hallberry told me, “If you need the inlays, you don’t know what you’re doing”.

Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WriteToThem: FaxYourMP for all levels of government

Some of the folks who worked on TheyWorkForYou.com and FaxYourMP.com -- two of the most amazing civic participation tools I've ever seen -- have launched a successor to FaxYourMP called WriteToThem.com. WriteToThem is a tool for writing emails and faxes to British local councillors, city assembly members, Members of Parliament and Members of the European Parliament. What's more, the system's back-end is a generalized, Free Software-licensed program that can be readily adapted for other countries.

FaxYourMP was the grandaddy of British democracy sites, starting way back in the year 2000. Today it has been relaunched as WriteToThem.com - a total new-from-the-ground-up site allowing those lucky Brits to find out who their elected representative are, at all levels of government, and then get in touch with them. That's over 20,000 people in a mishmash of layered geographic constituencies enough to make a data-structures engineer weep for mercy. It has been built by a charitable project, mySociety.org, that is building four more projects in the same spirit this year. And because they know that foreign online democracy stories often send people to sleep, they've made a special page aimed at people outside the UK to describe why What They've Done Matters To You.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:35:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Manila transit cops confiscating all optical media

Security guards on public transit in Manila have been given instructions by the Video Regulatory Board to use their bomb-screening searches as an excuse to confiscate any home-burned CD or DVD, in the name of stopping "piracy" -- no matter whether the disc contains your own backups or photos or a bootleg movie.

I explained to her that the case held a CD-R containing files for work that I wanted to take home and work on overnight.

She then proceeded to inform me that she has been given instructions to confiscate the thing from me. But it's not a bomb, I insisted. A somewhat stupid thing to say, because, of course it's not a bomb. I hastily added that, No, it's not a pirated disc or anything illicit either. But she's started radioing the other guards to come over, and soon enough, there's a long line behind me (yes, I've stepped aside, but there was no one left to inspect bags and belongings, and the guards She-man called for back-up weren't exactly filling her post and were in fact curiously regarding me)...

The supervisor person apologizes, and returns me my stuff. He says that it's a new policy of theirs, imposed, if I understand correctly, by the VRB, to curb piracy. They're supposed to confiscate all recordable discs and especially obviously pirated purchases (which by the way could land you in jail for at least six months if you're caught selling them, but what the hey). So recordable discs including those that come from the workplace and are legit? I ask them, with an eyebrow raised. And he says flatly, yes, because, you know, how can we ever be sure?

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:30:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Napster-to-Go reviewed, math done

This WaPo review of Napster's new "all-you-can-eat" music subscription service sounds pretty craptastic:

For $15 a month, Napster To Go offers unlimited song downloads -- in a copy-restricted format that can be played only on Windows XP computers and some digital music players -- but these songs expire if you don't keep paying that fee each month.

For a moment, let's extend the thread of argument often used to justify criminal action against illicit downloaders -- digital files are the same as tangible goods, each download is a lost sale, unauthorized download is theft, fileswappers are thieves. What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for continually sprouting holes you have to patch on your own), and milk cartons vanish from your refrigerator shelf if you don't re-up your subscription? You'd get milk elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Napster's not alone: other pay-per-download services include similarly logic-deficient restrictions. What consumers of digital entertainment are expected to put up with is amazing.
Link

An anonymous reader says,

I'm with you on the idea behind this analogy, but the use of a perishable good as an example makes for a poor argument. Unlike a song one can buy, the milk would expire on its own whether or not it was sold based on a subscription model.

Another aspect of the Napster to Go model is that it shows that the RIAAs claims of a lost sale for every download to be demonstrably false. If you can download an unlimited number of songs via napster and play them for as long as you continue to subscribe, then the maximum loss the RIAA suffers from a single downloader cannot exceed $15/month no matter how many songs a person downloads.

Reader Uriel Klieger says,

I found myself both disgusted and amazed at the incredible marketing spin. I took a closer look at the EULA, and thought I'd like to share some interesting points.

1) "The Tracks and Materials are owned by Napster, its business partners, affiliates and/or licensors, as applicable, and are protected by intellectual property laws."

This is the technical way of saying that you own nothing at all, even though you're paying for it. You might notice that the Napster website is very good about avoiding saying that you are "purchasing" anything. Napster users can "find," "get," "transfer," and "listen to" all the music they like. (Purchasing of music is only explicitly mentioned under the Napster Light service, somewhere at the bottom of a page -- but the same EULA I just quoted applies to that service, also.)

2) "The Client will count the number of times that you play a Download, including while you are offline, for royalty accounting and analysis purposes.... Napster will track the Downloads that you so transfer [to a portable player] and the number of times that you play Downloads on such devices."

Napster users are paying $15 a month for the privilege of being a statistic -- and Music Player makers have to build the hardware to support this feature as well.

Napster's website tells users that they can now "get all the music you want in a whole new way." Indeed. Call me when Grokster wins.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:06:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Designer sex toys invade Fifth Avenue

This NY Post item is one of a number of recent news stories tracking the trend of sex toys aimed at upscale consumers.

There's more to this cute little rubber ducky than meets the eye. That makeup brush and lipstick aren't so innocent, either. Take a closer look, and you'll find that these new items from Henri Bendel are all actually well-disguised vibrators. The newly opened Rykiel Woman boutique, brainchild of Paris designer Nathalie Rykiel (daughter of renowned clothier Sonia Rykiel), is a saucy new section of Bendel's otherwise straight-laced third floor.

And its three sex toys in disguise — on display amid high-end lingerie, bustier-clad mannequins and garish pink lighting — make Bendel's the first department store on Fifth Avenue with a dildo display. Of course, they aren't exactly lowbrow. With prices ranging from $78 (for the duck) to $138 (for the brush), these toys are aimed squarely at the ladies-who-lunch set.

Link to NY Post story; Link to Rykiel Woman website (horrible, bloated Flash interface). See also this Canada Globe and Mail piece: Link; and this NYT story from October about erotic gadgets with designer labels: Link (reg-free).

Update: As an aside, the notion of rubber duckies and other bath toys as vibrators is hardly new, as patrons of "Big Teaze Toys" and fans of certain Almodóvar movies know. (thanks, Perian Sully)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:33:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charles Fort letter up for auction

A curious signed letter by Charles Fort (1874-1932), the "patron saint" of research into anomalous phenomena, is up for auction on eBay. The three-page letter from 1925 is "vintage Charles Fort, as he expounds his views on the stationary earth, visitors from outer space, farming ants, black rain, superstitious birds and more." The auction ends tonight and the current bid is above $300 right now. Link (Thanks, Loren Coleman!)

UPDATE: The hammer dropped at $966.96!

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:26:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Recipe Zen

collard patch
copykat recipes
utterly outrageous recipes
insect recipes
recipes of the damned
lunch at noon
cooking for engineers

Image: Cover of a WWII-era cookbook containing a number of recipes worthy of appearance on Fear Factor. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

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

Marlboro Lights iPod case

The must-have trash accessory for those who suck down their MP3s in a doublewide: a pack of cigarettes transformed into an iPod holder, now for sale on eBay. Its creator says:"I'm a pretty heavy smoker so the idea was perfect. It is not precisely engineered, but it holds the player snug enough that it won't slip out, but not too tight that you can't remove it... Two or more cigarettes hold the player so you can listen and smoke when out and about."
Link (Thanks, Charles Moore).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:54:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More ideology-driven colas

For my final update on ideological colas sold in France: Reader Stéphane Dreyfus points to Tikvacola (named after the Israel's national anthem and the Hebrew word for "hope") and ColaViv, both of which apparently donate money to Jewish charities and/or Israeli organizations.

Philip Rogosky informed me of Alter Cola, whose ad campaign, he points out, "suggested sending a pretzel to the White House."

Thanks to all who emailed. It's nice to know that you can beat the real thing, and that ideology adds life, and life tastes good, and... link to Coke's advertising slogans from 1886 to 2001.

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:53:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Collection of over 250,000 sf fanzines goes to U. of Iowa

Reader Edward Shreeves says,

Boing Boing had a couple of posts in December (one, two) about the Mike Horvat science fiction fanzine collection, the last one incorrectly indicating that it was going to the University of Oregon. In fact, it has gone to the University of Iowa, as described in this press release.

Link to a list of about 20% of the titles in this collection of more than 250,000 items. See also this biographical note:

Martin M. (Mike) Horvat is a printer and collector in Stayton, Oregon. His collecting focused on general circulation science fiction magazines and fanzines. Horvat founded the American Private Press Association and, during the 1970s and 1980s, published South of the Moon, a catalog of publications of amateur press associations. As a result, the Horvat Collection houses a vast archive of zines—such as NAPA, the long-running zine of the National Fantasy Fan Federation. The correspondence of fan editors Gertrude Carr and Richard Geis are also part of the collection.

Update: For the record, the institutional misattribution was through no fault of Jason Scott, who submitted the original news to Boing Boing. Jason explains:

That [information] came from a phone conversation I had directly with Mike Horvat, where I called him at his home. He quite clearly said University of Oregon. Part of the reason he is giving away the collection is because of failing health, so it's possible he just misremembered the place the professor was calling from. I know from the conversation that he had actually contacted a number of universities to offer his collection and had gotten no response from any of them, so it could be a case of combining details.

The most important fact, which is the relevant one, is that the collection is not being broken up and will be treated well in its new home. That's what ultimately matters to me; the reason I had called Mr. Horvat in the first place was to try and broker some sort of deal to contribute the collection (or purchase it) for the MIT Science Fiction Society, of which I'm a lifetime member.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:32:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"New beauty" mag: cosmetic surgery, c'est chic

Hack your face -- or your butt, your breasts, your wrinkles, or any other part that might feel inferior. "New Beauty" is a glossy publication devoted to the glories of cosmetic sugery, with articles on lipo, lasers, injectables, and new boob job technologies in the the premier issue.
Link to "New Beauty" website, link to Gawker's ripsnortin' pre-launch deconstruction from January, link to an Aspen Times review of the magazine, which is now on newsstands.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:12:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Jeff Gannon controversy, in pixels

(Thanks, Siege).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:41:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MUNI cops and SFPD enforce non-existent, unconstitutional photography ban

Steve, a freelance photographer, was stopped while taking pictures in a San Francisco MUNI station, told that he was breaking a post-9/11 law against photographing San Francisco's public transit. He challenged the MUNI cops to name the law he was breaking, aware that such a law was unconstitutional, and they -- unsurprisingly -- couldn't identify the law. That is because there is no law. They were lying.

So then they called the real cops, who proceeded to dress Steve down for breaking this nonexistent law -- for being a troublemaker who wanted to exercise his constitutional rights and ply his trade -- and threaten to trump up a trespassing charge and jail him for the weekend if he didn't meekly acquiesce.

Officer Primiano expressed extreme frustration with me as soon as I began speaking of my rights to photograph in public places. She wanted to debate the wisdom of my taking pictures and asserted that in the wake of the Sept 11th attacks on our country, I should be more interested in aiding officials in their efforts to increase security than my rights as a citizen or journalist. Despite my calm statement of my side of the issue, Officer Primiano waved her hands in the air, stated, "This guy is really pissing me off", and walked away, leaving Officer Ryan to talk to me. Luckily he exhibited a more rational, professional demeanor.

  However Officer Ryan was of the opinion that I should not be taking photographs. I explained to him that I didn't want to argue the wisdom of my taking photographs, or the efficacy of a ban on photography in the MUNI System should one exist. All I was concerned with was the legality of my actions. If I had in fact committed a crime by taking photographs, I should (and in fact wanted to) be cited under the relevant law so that I could then pursue the matter in the courts and assert my First Amendment rights. Officer Ryan told me in a very straightforward manner that he did not wish to allow me the opportunity to assert my constitutional rights in court.

After walking over to the group of Fare Inspectors and BART Police Officers, Officer Ryan returned to speak to me. He expressed his frustration at the situation and me by saying: "Would it have been so difficult for you to just stop taking photographs when these guys told you to stop? If you weren't on your soapbox, I'd be out fighting real crime rather than standing around here dealing with you." He expounded further, "Even if there is no law forbidding photography in the MUNI System, the Fare Inspectors have the right to refuse you service for any reason they choose, including taking photographs. Once they refuse you service they can swear out a citizens arrest for trespassing. I, or other officers, will book you and you'll spend the rest of your weekend in jail. It won't be for taking photographs, so your weekend would be ruined yet you'd never get a chance to argue the matter of taking photographs before a judge."

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

Update: Jen sez, "for photographers who don't know their rights (and there are a bunch of them!)"

Update 2: Tony directs us to this handy primer on California tresspass law, noting, "police would have to convince court of 'purpose of injuring any property or property rights or with the intention of interfering, obstructing, or injuring any lawful business or occupation.'"

Update 3: Niall sez, "here's a pdf guide to photographers' legal rights in the UK."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:12:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Handmade yarn Katamari Damacy hats

These handmade hats are inspired by the undescribably amazing, fantastically weird PS2 game Katamari Damacy. You can either bid for them on eBay or commission them straight from the maker. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tents with giant silkscreened cows

These tents camouflaged by cows silkscreened on their sides have just won the Parisian "Scènes d'intérieur designer 2005" award for their designer, Hervé Matejewski. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:54:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Measuring global consciousness

Excellent electronic music composer Kim Cascone points us to a new article about the Global Consciousness Project, an always, er, thought-provoking scientific experiment to determine whether digital random number generators located around the world can be affected by human consciousness alone. From the RedNova article:

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.

'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.

Link

UPDATE: Thanks to all the BB readers who emailed to express their skepticism about the Global Consciousness Project. For example, Shannon Larratt points to this 2002 article from the Skeptic Report that critiques some of the "global consciousness" speculations. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:31:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hoax email to RIAA: I'm a crooked cop and I wanna work for you

A Softer World is a blog that features a weekly fictional letter to a big corporation in response to a job posting. This week's letter: a cop offers his services to the RIAA.

So I laid it on thick. "Son, we're human beings, the same as you are. You can't paint a whole group of people with one big brush. I became a cop because I wanted to help. I wanted to make my father proud. He died in the line, trying to save a woman from a gang of attackers, and I..." this is when I start to cry.

He had no idea what to do. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I cried harder. Eventually I managed to pull him into a hug. While he was nervously patting me on the back, I stuck my finger in my mouth and got it real wet with spit. Then I stuck it in his ear and gave him the nastiest wet-willy anyone has ever given anyone.

He was like "WHAT" and I was laughing, man, because who would ever believe him?

"A police officer gave me a wet willy!" wouldn't last a minute in court. And people would think twice about pirating music if it called down the wrath of the RIAA in the form