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Thursday, June 30, 2005

Bootleg action figure gallery

The Bootleg Action Figure site features page after page after page of photos of crummy bootleg action figures -- this Batman knockoff is adorable. Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:42:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Synthesizer ads for nuns

The UK's Synthi synthesizers ran an old ad campaign, collected here, showing all the different contexts in which their gigantic electric keyboards were de riguer: picnics, Christmas, and nunneries. Link (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Image gallery of firecracker labels

Link. (Thanks, Devon)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:03:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sub-$20 Wonder Weapons

For less than one Andrew Jackson, you too can own any number of wack-ass scifi defense tools. Shown here, the dreaded Hypnodisk, guaranteed by its manufacturer to "Produce Weird and Bizarre Effects." Defense technology reporter Noah Shachtman says:

I believed all those government and scientific reports that laser rifles and hand-held force fields were decades away from reality -- if they were possible at all. Cloaked in the dull skepticism of a flat-earther, I naively thought that advances like "Electro-Hypnotizers" and "Ion Ray Guns" were the stuff of science fiction, or merely hoaxes. (...) Not only are these items for real, but a helpful Internet retailer -- "Information Unlimited," out of Amherst, New Hampshire -- has been thoughtful enough to sell them all under one electronic roof. Huzzah!

My only question is what to buy first. Should it be the "Telekinetic Enhancer"? The "Sonic Nausea Device" Or maybe I should go with the "Magnetic Cannon." Luckily, the plans for most of these projects are only $20. So I can afford to make some mistakes.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:43:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Strange World of Blogspot Spam Blogs

Spam blogs are phony weblogs designed to game Google's pagerank system. They are automatically updated by scripts.

Justin Baeder says: "Blogspot spam blogs have gotten a lot more clever in recent weeks. Today I found a one that purports to be maintained by a real person, but upon further examination appears to be run by a bot that posts links to actual news articles (complete with excerpts). The spammy links are hidden using CSS, so you can only see them when you try to leave a comment or view the source of the page." Link

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

646-lb catfish caught in Thailand, may be record

Fishermen in Thailand caught what might have been the largest freshwater fish known to man -- a 646-lb whopper of a catfish.

When wildlife officials caught wind of the catch they urged the villagers to release the adult male so that it could spawn, but it later died and was eaten, the groups said. They did not say when the massive fish was caught.

Link (thanks, Shawn!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:34:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Badonkadonk mouse, gangsta gadgets

This fanciful Sync mag roundup of gadgets for gangstas includes a number of chuckle-inducers -- such as the mouse shown here mit junk in trunk, and the Redman Redeye photo filter.
Link to the whole list. (via MeFi)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:15:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Lynch now does daily weather reports on the internet

The master auteur behind such works as Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, and Twin Peaks now reads you the weather, right here. It's strangely addictive! Well -- mostly just strange. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:02:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google Maps, Reloaded: Animated Mozillas and Gnus attack Redmond

Boing Boing reader paolo says:

Yesterday BoingBoing reported the Google Map hack "Star Wars Imperial ATAT attack on Palo Alto". Today I created an *animated* hack: invaders move around the map! And this time invaders are mozillas and gnus converging towards Microsoft Offices in Redmond! ;-) Here is the animated map: Link. Be sure to check the HTML code (with the Javascript code that moves invaders around). In the blog post I also ponder that "It should be very easy to create real playable games on Google Maps. Here are some ideas: - playing Risk on the real world map (with the ability to zoom in/out to combat at different scales). Extend Jrisk or JavaRisk (code available on SourceForge). - playing FreeCiv on real world maps. Modify FreeCiv source code. - driving a car race on streets of the real world. - much more I guess.

Link.

Previously: Google Maps API released / Star Wars ATAT attack on Palo Alto

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:38:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Darth Vader fetish chick on Yahoo! Korea website

Perhaps some Korean-speaking Boing Boing readers can tell me what in the Sith is going on here. Image found on Yahoo! Korea. Link
(Thanks, Swissfondue!)

Reader Comment: Random_Tangent says:

More in the Darth Vader fetish line. The model, Malady, decided to do her own homage to the release of Revenge of the Sith by wearing Thigh-high boots, a Vader mask and little else. A surprisingly disturbing combination of Geek Icon and sexuality. Twists the brain just to look at. Almost Safe for Work (that is to say no visible nipples). The photography is fairly boring and kind of flat, but the subject is enough to shine past the high key/Full Housian fill.

Link

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

Atari pr0n for sale on eBay

Snip from auction description:

Up for auction is the three adult games for the atari 2600 made by mystique..
1st game CUSTERS REVENGE...It comes in mystique plush box w/ inst. book game, box and inst are as new.. no flaws that i can see Both stickers are in great shape.. made in 1982
2nd game BACHELOR PARTY it comes in mystique plush box NO inst. Game and box are as new no flaws... both stickers are in great shape 1982
3rd game is BEAT EM and EAT EM... It comes in its plush box and it has its inst book.. game box and inst book are in great shape Both stickers are looking great 1982

Link (via Gizmodo and Fleshbot, by way of Violet Blue)

Update: Wil Wheaton sayeth:

The 2600 pr0n games you posted about today are available in ROM form at atariage.com, as part of their complete 2600 library. As a bonus, they have home pages for each game, most of which include screenshots, html manuals, and cartridge, box (and occasionally manual) scans.

Custer's Revenge: Link, Bachelor Party: Link, and Beat'em and Eat'em: Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:29:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Music video: "Reason" (dirty/hard bass + martial arts chic)

This looks pretty badass. "Reason" video by DJ Maxximus featuring Soom-t (mov file): high-quality, low-quality, zip file. (Thanks, DJ Maxximus!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:24:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pakistan's internet slowly returns after countrywide outage

Sean Bonner says,

The entire country has been without internet for the past few days, it's just now coming back, but VERY slowly

Link to Sean's blog post, Link to coverage on the Karachi metblog, and Link to related news coverage via Google.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:20:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PlayStation player zapped by lightning

David Robinson, 14, of Middleton, New Hampshire, was playing Grand Theft Auto 3 during a thunderstorm when he was zapped by lightning that struck outside his bedroom and traveled through his PlayStation controller. Fortunately, the shock only left Robinson exhausted and with a black spot on his left hand. From Foster's Daily Democrat:

"My TV went out a few seconds before I got a shock," Robinson said, adding the current traveled through the television, the gaming system and into him through his game controller.

Robinson said he doesn't remember what happened next, but believes the electricity traveled from his left hand and exited through a toe on his right foot, part of which he shot off with a .32 caliber rifle during an accident in October...

"I was shocked myself that it (the electricity) traveled through his whole body and didn't damage it," (his mother Wendy) Smith said, adding there was a distinct hole and black spot in Robinson's left hand where the electricity entered his body. His body was also severely stimulated to the point of exhaustion...

"I was worried my Play Station was broken," Robinson said, adding the television, the video game and the Play Station were undamaged, but the controller was fried by the charge.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:14:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DOJ "Operation Site Down"

Snip from United States Department of Justice press release:

Beginning yesterday morning, the FBI and law enforcement from 10 other countries conducted over 90 searches worldwide as part of “Operation Site Down,” designed to disrupt and dismantle many of the leading criminal organizations that illegally distribute and trade in copyrighted software, movies, music, and games on the Internet.

Link, and Link to report of one such bust on a local ABC affiliate TV station. (Thanks, Santos Halper)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:00:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What science knows it doesn't know

Scientific journal Science is celebrating its 125th anniversary by asking 125 big questions that science can't answer... yet. The ground rule in the selection process was that "scientists should have a good shot at answering the questions over the next 25 years, or they should at least know how to go about answering them." Here are the top 25:

What Is the Universe Made Of?
What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?
To What Extent Are Genetic Variation and Personal Health Linked?
Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified?
How Much Can Human Life Span Be Extended?
What Controls Organ Regeneration?
How Can a Skin Cell Become a Nerve Cell?
How Does a Single Somatic Cell Become a Whole Plant?
How Does Earth's Interior Work?
Are We Alone in the Universe?
How and Where Did Life on Earth Arise?
What Determines Species Diversity?
What Genetic Changes Made Us Uniquely Human?
How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved?
How Did Cooperative Behavior Evolve?
How Will Big Pictures Emerge from a Sea of Biological Data?
How Far Can We Push Chemical Self-Assembly?
What Are the Limits of Conventional Computing?
Can We Selectively Shut Off Immune Responses?
Do Deeper Principles Underlie Quantum Uncertainty and Nonlocality?
Is an Effective HIV Vaccine Feasible?
How Hot Will the Greenhouse World Be?
What Can Replace Cheap Oil -- and When?
Will Malthus Continue to Be Wrong?

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:49:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Junko Mizuno's illustrations

Roq la Rue gallerist Kirsten Anderson just turned me on to the amazing illustrations of Japanese artist Junko Mizuno. As Kirsten says, Mizuno's work is "pretty deranged... in a cute way." Mizuno's new book, Pure Trance, goes on sale tomorrow. Next weekend, she'll be signing books in San Francisco and Berkeley before heading to the Comic-Con in San Diego July 14-17! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:26:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crappy restaurant

A new restaurant in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung seats diners not at tables and chairs but rather toilets. Meals at The Martun ("toilet" in Chinese) are presented in toilet bowls of both Western and Asian styles. (Link to Mark's previous post with a close-up photo of the dishware.) From Reuters:

Manager Hung Lin-wen said the original inspiration came from a toilet-shaped spaceship in a Japanese cartoon. The theme has attracted droves of novelty-seeking young people who come to play with their food and gross out their friends...

But no matter how delicious, a few customers still find the combination a little hard to swallow.

"The taste is good, but I still feel disgusted when I look at it," said diner Lin Yu-may.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:10:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Government info APIs from Rhode Island

The State of Rhode Island is publishing large amounts of government data via an API that is easy to hack, and they're looking for feedback from developers on how to improve it.

It is simply unacceptable at this point in history that a citizen can use web services to track the movies he is renting, the weather around his house, and the books he's recently purchased but cannot as easily monitor data regarding the quality of his drinking water, legislation or regulations that will directly impact his work or personal life, what contracts are currently available to bid on for his state, or what crimes have recently occurred on his street.

As a step towards resolving this dissonance, the Rhode Island Office of the Secretary of the State has released GovTracker Services to provide RESTful access to public information. We hope that this set of web services is adopted by the developer community and is a step towards an era of community-developed applications that make it as easy for citizens to interact with their government as it is for them to interact with the rest of the networked world. With input from the developer community we look to add additional services and make the existing ones even better. You can reach us at rssonate@sec.state.ri.us.

Link (Thanks, Zack!)

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

Taiwan intros hip colored rice as cheeseburger alternatives

The Taiwanese government is pushing colored novelty rice as a means of luring teenagers away from burgers and pizza:

Yellow rice gets its hue from curcumin, an herb that's a spice in curries and is believed by some to be an antioxidant that may help prevent cancer. Green rice comes from the nutritious bitter gourd, often used in Asian soups and stir-fried dishes. Pink comes from tomato, and purple from a mixture of vegetables. "We hope to develop up to 14 colors so people can have a different color of rice every day for two weeks," Lo said.

Link (Thanks, Isaac B2!)

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

Mario and Goomba pixellated computer mice

This company sells computer mice shaped like pixellated Mario and Goomba sprites. Not very ergo, but very much teh sexy. Link (Thanks, Sphinx!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:10:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

eBay zen: photos from 19th c. Japan in cool lacquer case

Link to full-size image. Link to auction listing for "19th c. Japanese Lacquered Album w Albumen Photos -- Meiji Period - 50 Large Hand Colored Images of Japan". A blog should be so beautiful.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:39:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos: Abandoned sattelite devoured by earth

Boing Boing reader Josh says, "These are some very eerie photos of an abandoned Earth Satellite Station in Nova Scotia. Photographer Adam Graham shot the dish both before and after it was pulled down. Apparently the whole thing is now up for sale, and there's a lot of abandoned equipment there."

Snip from Graham's blog post:

I am constantly intrigued by the interplay between nature and technology. Which is partly why I love checking back in on the space station. As it falls more and more into abandon the signs of nature reclaiming that area become more evident. Grass encroaches more and more over and through the concrete and pavement, animals have clearly bunked down in some areas of the buildings, birds building their nests under disused walkways. Sometimes when I take a picture I'll try and eliminate the technological just to focus on the nature. Sometimes I'll try to show the interplay between the two. I know it can be a tired theme but it's one that grabs my brain.

Link to one series, Link to another.

Reader Comment: David Calkins says,

Someone posted your Nova Scotia Earth Satellite station for sale.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:23:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

National Security Service created by Bush; surveillance plan endorsed

Declan McCullagh writes:

President Bush on Wednesday announced the "National Security Service," to be organized under the FBI: Link

Also, at the same time, he endorsed this proposal: Link

President Bush supports extending the duration of electronic surveillance in cases involving agents of foreign powers who are not U.S. persons.

More details: Link

The President should seek to have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) amended to extend the duration of electronic surveillance and "pen registers" in cases involving agents of foreign powers who are not U.S. persons. Extending the duration of FISA orders for non-U.S. person agents of foreign powers will result in a substantial savings of resources and permit the Department of Justice (DOJ) to focus more time and attention on other FISA matters where U.S. persons are involved. DOJ has already proposed legislation that would extend the duration not only for electronic surveillance and pen register orders, but also physical search orders in cases involving agents of foreign powers who are not U.S. persons. This proposed legislation has been shared with appropriate Committees of the House and Senate.

Link. See also: FBI launches regional data sharing system

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:24:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notorious B.I.G. meets Frank Sinatra

Boing Boing reader John Mathot says,

Hip hop mixtapes are dead -- long live hip hop mixtapes! With the copyright powers-that-be cracking down on unapproved use of music on mixtapes (premier hip hop site Turntable Lab recently took down their mixtape listings), the ones that emerge these days are more brazen. Case in point: "Blue Eyes Meets Bed Stuy" from DJ Cappel -- a mash-up/remix/mixtape created with vocals from Biggie and tunes (breaks?) from Frankie. It's not as brilliant as "A Night at the Hip Hopera" by the Kleptones, but it's very much worth owning (which means get it while you still can). It can purchased at SandboxAutomatic.com and TurntableLab.com.

Link to MP3 audio snippets at djcappel.com. (includes sexually explicit language)

Reader Comment: Andrew Austin says,

Turntable Lab only took down their "Mixtape" section because people aren't doing mixes on cassette anymore - not because of any panic over the unauthorized use of copyrighted music. They still have plenty of mix CD's of all types for sale, they're just in the CD section, under "DJ mixes".

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:16:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-Japanese WWII propaganda posters

The Pacific University's Asian Studied program has compiled this jaw-dropping gallery of WWII anti-Japanese US propaganda posters. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:09:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Touch-up paint roller is clever way to store paint

These Rubbermaid Paint Buddies are amazingly clever. They're touch-up paint rollers. After you finish painting a room, you store the left-over paint in the roller-body, and when you get a scratch or a smudge, you just whip out the roller and give it a quick swipe over the spot. Link (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

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

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Declassified WWII sub manuals

This site hosts copies of WWII US military submarine manuals, now declassified:

Rapid search
1. From the bearing at which the hydrophone was left by the previous watch, sweep through 000 degrees and continue on to 180 degrees.

2. Then, reversing direction, sweep back around the full circle to 180 degrees. If no suspicious sounds are heard, shift to ...

Progressive search
Sweep forward two full turns of the handwheel and then one turn back. Continue up the same side, two turns forward and one turn back, until you have crossed the bow. Then train rapidly down the opposite side to 180 degrees. Reverse direction and train two turns forward, one back, two forward, one back, until you have crossed the bow again. Then train rapidly down the other side ... and so on. Continue this procedure for the duration of your watch, unless ordered to do otherwise.

Link (Thanks, MrBigStuff247!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Left Behind Christian sf novels spawn video-game

The Left Behind novels are a series of Christian science fiction books about the coming end-times, when all the saved Christians are whisked away to heaven, leaving the sinners to battle it out on Earth (Charlie Stross and I wrote a short novel in two parts called "Rapture of the Nerds" that's a piss-take on this, where all the geeks have ascended to the Singularity hive-mind, leaving Luddites and fundamentalists stuck on Earth). Now there's an upcoming Left Behind video-game:

Scheduled for release between Christmas 2005 and Easter 2006, Left Behind: Eternal Forces will put players in command of the apocalyptic battles raging in the streets of New York City between the angelic Tribulation Forces and the demonic Global Community Peacekeepers during the End of Days. Gamers will participate in events from the Left Behind book series in single player mode and battle to capture territory from other players in the multi-player online game mode.

The Left Behind game series will allow play in the same End of Days fictional world as the bestselling Left Behind(R) novels, which use the prophecies of the Book of Revelation as a framework. The first title, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, is set in the future when the faithful have been gathered up and ascended to Heaven during the Rapture. In the chaos that follows, the Antichrist has taken the reigns of power at the United Nations and is gathering the countries of the world under his banner. But a small resistance, the Tribulation Forces, have formed to oppose Satan's legions.

Link (Thanks, Zahn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Montreal free software/free culture event this Sunday

Next Sunday, the Université du Québec à Montréal is throwing a free software/free culture event with guest speaker Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, author of the GPL and of emacs. Sounds like a terrific event.

A dozen kiosks hosted by local and not so local Free Culture enthusiasts such as Debian, FreeCulture, KDE, île sans fil, Savoir-faire Linux; a press conference announcing the Semaine québécoise de l'informatique libre, a Free Software week; a Richard Stallman presentation on copyright; and finally, the answers to all your questions with Russell McOrmond (Flora), Daniel Pascot (Laval University) and Marcus Bornfreund (Ottawa University), responsible for the canadian adaptation of the Creative Commons licenses, Cyrille Béraud (Savoir-faire Linux) and Robin Millette (FACIL).

Sunday July 3rd 2005, from 13h until 22h
Université du Québec à Montréal
320, Sainte-Catherine east, room DSR 510
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Berri-UQAM metro

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:48:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In China, directors now developing films for phones

Snipped from Danwei blog (they cover media trends in China)

Meeting at the Beijing Film Academy yesterday, directors representing several generations of Chinese cinema discussed plans to shoot movies expressly for viewing on mobile phones. They believe that the time is ripe to take advantage of the technology, despite the graininess, high compression, and poor sound quality of most mobile phones. This follows the big cell-phone media story from last year, fiction serialized over SMS.

Link (Thanks, Tian)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:43:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Street Fighter II Themed Salsa contestants in SoKo

Boing Boing reader j rizzo says,

Footage of a salsa dancing competition in Korea. Hilarious because this couple's theme is Street Fighter II. They incorporate some key moves from the game as well as recognizable soundbytes.

Link (wmv)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:31:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wickerpedia

Boing Boing reader Emmett says,

wickerpedia is a parody of wikipedia.org, only with more of an emphasis on wicker (which is terribly represented by wikipedia). The site features a more wickercentric view of history, the news, and common wisdom, as well as a much improved searching engine.

Link

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

Rushkoff on Guruphiliac

In March, I posted about Jody Razik's launch of Guruphiliac, a smart and damn funny blog that rakes all kinds of spiritual scammers leaders over the coals. Now, Douglas Rushkoff, in his new column for freak mag Arthur, uses Guruphiliac as a launch pad to take a high altitude look at some of the reasons we seek gurus and why it's important to be your own leader, and your own devotee. From the column:

The path of devotion offered by gurus is also a natural fit for those of us who are fed up with the relativistic haze of a world where there are no discernible rules, yet equally disillusioned by institutional religions that appear to have sold out to American consumerism. The guru offers absolutism. Certainty. A point of focus.

As one slick guru, chronicled on Guruphiliac explains on his website: "When you meet a master, you have two choices. Transform or walk away. You cannot be in his presence and remain the same." Uh, yeah. In other words, conform to his reality or scram. The guru is the starting place from which all other decisions are to be made. You start with the guru as the one perfect point in the universe, and from there everything else can fall into place. If the guru has instructed you to eat a certain food or do a certain practice, then - according to the logic of gurudom - everything else you have to do for this to happen is part of the perfection. Slowly but surely, surrender to the guru requires you to reject pretty much everything that doesn't fit whatever model of the world he's offering you.

But, honestly, that's what the devotee was after in the first place. An excuse to do or not do all that other confusing stuff in life like encounter people with different ideas, wrestle with the questions of existence, and accept that nobody really knows what happens when we die.

Link to Rushkoff's column excerpt, Link to Guruphiliac

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:04:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nice illustrations from old papercraft book

No one at Wardomatic is sure who drew these illustrations for a kids' craft book, but everyone agrees that they are very good.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:07:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The art of Dan Krall

I don't remember how I stumbled onto Dan Krall's website, but his work is wonderful. He's the art director of Samurai Jack.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:01:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woman doesn't clean up her dog's mess — blog infamy ensues

In Korea, a woman's dog crapped on the train. When people on the train asked her to clean up the mess, she became belligerent.

Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Request for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying as well as her watch, clearly visible in the original picture.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:39:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on CNN Int'l: Grokster postmortem, Google vidplay

I'll be host Eunice Yoon's guest on CNN International at 740pm ET / 440pm ET today, for a segment on the Supreme Court filesharing decision and the news this week surrounding Google's open source video player. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:29:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lil' Markie: bizarre religious LP

Joe says he heard about this creepy LP on Howard Stern. There's one "song" available as an MP3, "Diary of an Unborn Child".

As far as bizarre Christian LPs, I gotta say, this is this most extreme thing I've ever heard. It's some full grown man with a munchkin voice, singing terrifying songs about drug use, abortion and being a fat kid and each fill me with a profound sense of dread, horror, and disgust.

Link (thanks, Joe!)

Update: I nosed around this site a little more and learned that it is chock full of nightmare-inducing religious LP covers. Highly recommended.
Link

Reader comment: Clara says: "the post about the lil markie record reminded me of little marcy. little marcy was an incredibly weird evangelical christian ventriloquist. there's a page of MP3s here.

the creepiest song is "devil, devil, go away" and the most unintentionally hilarious is "i love little pussy."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:38:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google Maps API released

Boing Boing reader Ben Metcalfe says,

Google have just launched their API to the fantastic Google Maps. There's some excellent thing people produced by hacking with pre-API Google Maps code. Let's hope the launch of the API opens the flood gates...

Link

Jeffrey Warren adds, "Following the release of the Google Maps API, we spent an hour or so and put together this map depicting Star Wars Imperial ATAT attack on Palo Alto. Yay for remixing." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:36:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Continental customer's letter lamenting Toilet Class seating

"I constructed a stink-shield by shoving one end of a blanket into the overhead compartment - while effective in blocking at least some of the smell, and offering a small bit of privacy, the ass-on-my-body factor increased, as without my evil glare, passengers feel free to lean up against what they think is some kind of blanketed wall. The next ass that touches my shoulder will be the last!" Link (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Reader comment: Erik says,

Snopes has this listed as "Undetermined" as to whether it's a hoax or not, but outlines some interesting corraborative info.

Link

Bill Simmon says:

My girlfriend Emily's dad gave us a copy of the note the other day. He's a pilot for Continental, based in Houston. He says he pulled it off of an internal Continental site. I thought for sure I had myself a metablog exclusive and quickly posted it to my own site (and sent in a BB suggest-a-site note), only to find that you had it up on BB hours earlier. I don't know if a pilot at Continental claiming the note is the real deal adds weight to the veracity of the claim, but there you go.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:17:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO make your Mac Y10K compliant

Snipped from Kevin Kelly's COOL TOOLS:

Reader Michael Hohl figured out this wonderful way to make your computer Y10K compliant. That is, how to set your computer so that it displays the 5-digit date it will need when we reach the years after 9999: that is 10000 and beyond. In anticipation of that time, you can set this year's date to 02005 if you have Mac OSX Tiger. Here are step-by-step directions. Be first in your neighborhood to have all your documents and files future-proofed.

Link

Reader comment: Patrick Gaskill says,

Maybe someone smarter than me can correct this, but I'm not so sure that this tip futureproofs anything -- think of that leading 0 as being hard-coded in. If your copy of Tiger makes it to the year 10000, it will just display 010000.

Sean Duffy says:

I read this article and Patrick Gaskill is correct. All this does is add a leading 0 to the Year, so if it were year 0, then the year would display as '00' instead of '0'. This does not prove whether your computer is Y10K compliant or not. Here is a short explanation about how the whole compliant thing works.

What makes a computer compliant is the number of bits the computer is running at. A 32-bit computer can calculate time (in seconds) of 2^31 (one bit remains for the return signal) or 2147483648 seconds or 68.04965 years. This means that a 32-bit computer can calculate time in seconds from its birth for about 68 years before this byte has to reset. Back when computers were first being programmed in 32-bit, programmers figured that by the time the year 2000 rolled around computers would be well past 32-bit and hopefully past 64-bits. So they set the computer's birth date to about 1932, therefore ending its life in the year 2000. So what did we do to fix this Y2K problem; well all we did was changed the computer's birth date to the year 1970 (since no digital data existed before this point in time). So therefore all we did was delay the inevitable with 32-bit computers. So in the year 2038 32-bit computers will believe the date is not 2038 but 1970. So what are we doing to fix this problem?

64-bit computers, as before 64-bit computers can calculate time in 2^63 (one bit remains for the return signal) or 9223372036854775808 or 292271023045 years. About 292 billion years after 1970 the byte will reset (as long as computers calculate system time in seconds). So if you have a 64-bit computer there is no doubt that it will be Y292271023.045K compliant.

Boing Boing reader Dan says,

Not to be a pedant, but I think Sean Duffy is conflating two issues. Y2K really *was* about the base-10 representation of the year, since programmers were using two integer fields to represent the year, rather than a single combined binary value as is done for Unix timestamps (seconds since epoch). In other words, it was just as the news described--YY rather than YYYY, where Y is a single 0-9 value. The *other* problem, the so-called 2038 problem, is what Sean is referring to with respect to seconds since a starting point ("epoch"). The problem there is pretty much just as he said, though I've never heard the terminology "return signal;" the 32nd bit is reserved for a sign bit (the bit is 0 for positive numbers and 1 for negative). As far as I know, but I may be wrong, there was never a prior "epoch" in UNIX timestampts of 1932.

So, in short, there are two distinct problems, and some of the trivia in Sean's explanation is slightly off. But the gist is right.

Josh says,

Adding a digit to your year is in line with the efforts of the Long Now Foundation [Ed. Note: the creation of Applied Minds co-founder Danny Hillis]. They count Brian Eno as a boardmember... and hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:55:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

'70s wallpaper

This German company sells groovy reproductions of 1970s-era wallpaper.
Link (Thanks, skg)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:41:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ad-stripped versions of Page Six and Gawker -- this'll last, oh, five minutes

Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:29:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Minor Threat vs. Nike

Earlier this month, Nike released a promotional poster (right) for their a skateboarding demo tour that appropriated text and imagery from seminal Washington DC punk band Minor Threat's 1981 self-titled album's cover art (left). Minor Threat front-man Ian MacKaye, proprietor of the Dischord record label, was none-too-thrilled. (Link to background at Sublimited blog.) From the Dischord Web site:

"To longtime fans and supporters of Minor Threat and Dischord, this must seem like just another familiar example of mainstream corporations attempting to assimilate underground culture to turn a buck. However, it is more disheartening to us to think that Nike may be successful in using this imagery to fool kids, just beginning to become familiar with skate culture, underground music and D.I.Y. ideals, into thinking that the general ethos of this label, and Minor Threat in particular, can somehow be linked to Nike's mission." Link

Yesterday, Nike issued a formal apology. (Could they have posted the apology letter as a JPEG as an attempt to discourage reposting?) From the letter:

Minor Threat's music and iconographic album cover have been an inspiration to countless skateboarders since the album came out in 1984 (sic). And for the members of the Nike Skateboarding staff, this is no different. Because of the album's strong imagery and because our East Coast tour ends in Washington DC, we felt that it was a perfect fit. This was a poor judgement call and should not have been executed without consulting Minor Threat and Dischord Records. Link

Dischord Records spokesperson Alec Bourgeois told MTV.com that MacKaye and the other members of Minor Threat are still planning to meet to consider their legal options. Link (Thanks, Dave Gill and Meri Brin!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:21:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DJ Carlito's roots freedom radio

My kid brother Carlito is a deejay, and he's posting podcasts of his sets. I'm biased, but I think they're awesome.

What you might hear -- reggae influenced punk (The Clash play Toots and the Maytals), a soul version of a rock and roll song (Wilson Pickett sings "Hey Joe"), a jazz rendition of a Spanish folk melody (Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain") -- they're all connected! Plus Japanese bluegrass, African salsa, French hip-hop, German reggae, Cambodian disco, and Colombian rock!

Link to download for the most recent show (which is kickass), Link to archives of some other recent sets.

Link to his blog, with playlist info. link to info on one of his regular gigs in Richmond, VA, link to his radio show on WRIR in the same town, Sundays from 7-9pm EST (streamed online too).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:06:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Craig Venter's new company to engineer life

Famed gene jockey J. Craig Venter, whose company Celera Genomics completed a shotgun sequence of the human genome in 2000, will now use his deep DNA knowledge to build new organisms. Synthetic Genomics, launching today, aims to engineer modular genetic components that can be snapped together to build biological systems that don't exist in nature. (More about synthetic biology can be found in articles I've written here and here. Previous posts on the subject here and here.) The company's first applications will be in ethanol and hydrogen production. From the press release:

A host cell that has reduced and reoriented metabolic needs can generate biological energy applicable to a broad range of industrial fields including energy, industrial organic compounds, pharmaceuticals, CO2 sequestration, fine chemicals, and environmental remediation. "We are in an era of rapid advances in science and are beginning the transition from being able to not only read genetic code, but are now moving to the early stages of being able to write code," said Dr. Venter.

Link to press release, Link to Synthetic Genomics (Thanks, Xeni!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:47:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kids book about computers from 1971 scanned and posted

Liz sez, "This is a scan of an entire Ladybird kids' book on the wonders of computers from 1971 (alongside the 1979 edition for comparison). Ladybird were (and are) a fantastic publisher of slim childrens' books in the UK; thirty years ago, many of us were taught to read by Ladybird, and most of my childish impressions about Vikings, submarines and the baby Jesus were formed by them.

"How It Works . . . The Computer is really charming. Ladies with anachronistic hairstyles and elegant manicures are furiously inputting data and slotting tapes into readers, while men in suits and glasses hack, hack, hack the night away on machines you would need a small cottage to house." Link (Thanks, Liz!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-DRM badges

Here's a gallery of antipixel 80x15 badges on an anti-DRM theme. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Journalist's blog documents DEA's war on California

My friend Ann Harrison is covering the ongoing skirmishes in the drug war in California. The state of California has legalized growing and distributing pot to people who have medical marijuana prescriptions, but the DEA has begun to arrest these people on federal charges (despite the fact that federal laws only have jurisdiction over interstate matters, so pot grown and distributed in California is outside the DEA's jurisdiction).

The DEA is conducting this war like a guerrilla attack on the people of California. Private citizens who record their busts from public sidewalks are assaulted by DEA agents who try to erase their camera-memory. The press-conferences are closed to the public. The dispensary raids concentrate on computer records of patients and growers, and many of those arrested face ten-year minimum sentences.

Ann is bent on blowing the lid off of this. While the stories she files with newspapers get trimmed to "news haiku," on her blog she's publishing transcripts of the secret press-conferences, information on the use of local law to do the Feds' bidding, and the myriad ways that the DEA is cooking the process to wage its war on Americans.

Q: Does the California law that permits patients to use medical cannabis have any bearing at all on protecting the medical cannabis dispensaries?

Pena: Before I answer that question, one thing, and I think it is really important that I forgot to mention and I think it's a public concern. On these three grow locations that we visited, they all had illegal wires tapping into PG&E the outlets all over the houses, very unsafe. I'm sure that you have heard of the situations were houses have been burning down, this causes a great deal of concern for us.

Like I said once you see that CD which we are handing out you will see the wiring system which is what causes the fires that were all contained in the three different areas that we went to. So this is how some of our houses are getting burned down.

What is your question again?

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:27:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple adds DRM to podcasting -- UPDATED

With all the fooforaw about yesterday's update to iTunes, which incorporates podcasting, Ross Mayfield has pointed out that which everyone has missed: Apple has added DRM to podcasts for the first time:

Isn't anybody else concerned that Apple has introduced DRM into Podcasting? Adam Curry's headline PodFinder show is in ACC format! (and I can't link to it).

Link

Update: Kirk sez, "I just checked my copy of Adam Curry's podcast from iTunes. It's standard AAC -- m4a. It's not the secure m4p format, and it lists no FairPlay information anywhere in the metadata for the file. Unless the simple fact that it's AAC is "DRM," there's no DRM here.

"In fact, several of the podcasts are in AAC (m4a) format -- it seems that all the ones made on Macs are AAC, as would be expected. Since Apple is linking to the original source servers for these files, not hosting them in house, unless the original producers of the podcasts are adding DRM, there's not going to be DRM on these podcast files."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:32:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Papercraft Enigma machine to assemble at home

The Nazis went to great lengths to encipher their secret messages, building mechanical scramblers. The most famous of these was the Enigma machine, which was secretly cracked by Alan Turing and his team of Bletchley Park codebreakers. Here is a functional papercraft Enigma Machine to print, fold and assemble. Link (Thanks, Zed!)

Update: Teece sez, "In reality, most of the credit for cracking Enigma goes to a Polish man named Marian Rejewski (Wikipedia article).

"He led the Polish team that cracked the early Enigma machine, using machines they called bombes. It's a fascinating story. The Polish shared their intelligence with the British when the German switched to a beefed up system, which they didn't have the resources to crack, as it required a bigger machine. And then, of course, Poland was invaded (which is another reason the Poles shared their info -- they knew it was coming, as they had been reading German messages)."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:30:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wil Wheaton's Slashdot interview

Wil Wheaton has done an excellent Slashdot interview that's pure Wil -- funny, savvy, and insightful:

It's tough to answer your question without coming off like a total douche, but I'll try: I think you see most celebrities carefully choosing who they talk to and what they talk about because a lot of their value is based on the mystique their publicists can create for them. In other words, some actors play a role when they're on the set, and another when they're talking to Oprah. I prefer to keep my acting limited to the set, and because I have a blog, I can speak for myself, so I don't really need or want to participate in the Mainstream Entertainment Media.

In real life (like, not on The Internets) I'm a very shy and private person. When I'm out with my wife, I really just want to be left alone, and I feel pretty uncomfortable when I get into big crowds and stuff. But I think I'd feel that way whether I was an actor, or not. I don't think of myself as a celebrity, either. When I hear someone called a celebrity, I think of someone who gets special treatment, never waits in line, and has had sex with Paris Hilton. And I wish my blog wasn't constantly framed as a "celebrity blog."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

DVD Jon cracks Google Video in <24h UPDATED

Boing Boing reader A.V. sez:

'DVD Jon" [Jon Lech Johansen] (known for his work on decrypting DVD security codes) has created a patch for the Google Video Viewer -- less than 24 hours after the search giant shipped the video playback plug-in, a tool based on the open-source VideoLAN media player. The patch, released on Johansen's 'So Sue Me' blog, effectively disables a modification Google made to the VideoLAN code to prevent users from playing videos that are not hosted on Google's servers.

Link

Previously on BB: DVD Jon creates DRM-free iTunes interface "PyMusique", Airport Express crypto broken by DVD Jon, Li'l Jon meets DVD Jon (OKAYYYYYY!)

Update: "Modifies" might be a better word here than "cracks." Let us not lose sight of what was "cracked" -- a version of the VLC open source player, released by Googlefolk who believe strongly in the value of free access to information. IMHO the original product was not fundamentally eeevil.

There are any number of reasons why the company might find it wise to restrict their in-browser player offering to videos hosted on their own servers. IANAL, and IANAE (I'm not an engineer), but what was "cracked" here is not a DRM scheme or something that limits enjoyment of the content offered. Nor did DVD Jon imply any of that himself.

Chris Wells says,

Hey Xeni, An interesting spin on this was pointed out in this slashdot comment: Link. Basically noting that all Jon really did was modify open source code put out by Google. Now, Yahoo (arguably Google's biggest competitor) has posted a news bit making it sound like some grand achievement and throwing in references to DeCSS, Apple's DRM and the AE encryption crack.

Only... no such "news bit" exists. There are news articles, none of which were written by Yahoo employees. I think some of the slashdot readers mistook news articles such as this one appearing on Yahoo News with press releases. Yahoo didn't do anything icky here.

An anonymous reader says,

The PC Magazine author didn't quite put this into the proper perspective. In fact, this is by far the simplest "crack" yet for DVD Jon. The source code to VLC (the basis for the Google video player) is already available online and Google had published their changes to it on code.google.com (Link). All that has to be done to remove the "feature" in question is to search for "video.google.com" and delete the block of code that surrounds it.

More...

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:50:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Old timey banjo instruction books released under a Creative Commons license

I promised myself not to buy a banjo, since I already have five ukuleles in the house, but these books could break my willpower.

Darel Snodgrass says: "Old-time music is a fast-growing segment of the folk music performance hobby (mostly because it's actually pretty easy to play, unlike, say, bluegrass). Old-time banjo enthusiasts often start with two modern seminal teaching works, "The How and the Tao of Old-Time Banjo" and "A Book of Five Strings" (check any book-sales site for rave reviews). These are best-selling, in-demand books, admittedly within the small world of old-time banjo instruction works. The author, Patrick Costello, has just released both books under a Creative Commons license, and made web versions of both available for free on the ezfolk web site." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:37:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Group proposes to build hotel on Justice Souter's house property

Following the Supreme Court ruling allowing private companies to seize people's houses and develop the land for business purposes, a private developer has asked the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire "to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road." That's the address of Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter's home.

The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Café" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."



Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.



"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development."

Link (thanks, davee!)


posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:30:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Computer key car mosaic maker speaks out!

Responding to some flickr and BoingBoing posts I did last week about a wacky car I saw covered with a mosaic of computer keys, flickr user jennybra says:

This is my car. For anyone wondering, it's a 1993 Subaru Impreza covered with around 100lbs of colored keys designed for old Telex (teletype) machines.

The keys were attached with silicon caulk over a period of 4 years, off and on (mainly off). Later, we had enough left over to do the much-improved D'Oh Mobile [ed note: the Homer Simpson car] that belongs to a friend of mine. That one sports several mosaic designs laid out thru Tile Creator software.

You can see other artcars at www.artcars.com.

Feel free to e-mail me with other questions or if you have a computer key car idea (and available car)--- we have lots of pink and white keys left.

Link.

Previously on Boing Boing: Homer Simpson Computer Key Car, phonecammed in LA: car covered in computer keys, Computer key stool

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:52:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bypass school web filter, become a felon

Thirteen high school students in Pennsylvania are up against felony charges for having tinkered with school-issued laptops.

According to parent testimony and confirmed by an otherwise vaguely-worded letter from the Kutztown Police Department, students got hold of the system's secret administrative password and reconfigured their computers to achieve greater Internet and network access. Some students used the newfound freedom to download music and inappropriate images from the Internet.

James Shrawder spoke on behalf of a group of parents of six of the accused at a June 20 school board meeting. He said the administration may have railroaded the process by not providing authorities with the whole story.

"That's absurd," Superintendent Brenda S. Winkler said after the board meeting, in response to Shrawder's allegations that the administration withheld information until the end of the school year.

Link (via Declan McCullagh / politech)

Reader comment: Genie Ogden says:

The article on the high school "felons" really made me angry. I went to the newspaper site and sent them a comment. Kids are really being charged with ridiculous stuff these days! Arrested for pointing fingers at other kids (in kindergarten), etc., - it's not like they're planning Columbine type actions. And there are adults doing much worse things and getting away with it - Enron, a war in Iraq based on lies, etc.

My middle school daughter was doing a report about slavery and couldn't get to the book she needed on the internet because it had the word "bondage" in the title. She could have used a password like these kids -- but now she'd be in jail.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:44:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

VoIP-in-a-can: Sysco IP Phone Model TC-04 by BubbaTel

eBay auction snip:

This model has the following features and capabilities:

* State of The Art Security - Almost Impossible To "Listen Into Encrypted Conversations"
* Optional On Hold System Can Be Utilized By Simply Hanging The Unit On A Nail In The Wall (Nail Not Included).
* Waiting On Hold Music Is Available By Placing Unit Near Radio or Other Audio Source (Radio Not Included).
* Beveled Edges To Prevent Harmful Cuts While Speaking Or Listening.
* Caller ID Could Be Possible, If Holes Were Drilled Into Each Side Of the Unit.

Link to BubbaTel (TM) auction. (Thanks, Oxblood Ruffin!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:38:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WSJ profile's inventor of mass bird-killing machine

Harm Kiezebrink, the inventor of a bird killing machine, has been hired by Asian countries that want to combat bird flu.

He has brought them some of his bird-slaughtering machines, such as the AED-100, which kills about 10,000 birds per hour, catching them by the feet and dragging their heads through an electrified pool of water.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:12:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of recursive movie - game - book adaptation zen

My NPR "Day to Day" colleague Nihar Patel says, "This is the weirdest adaptation…a movie adaptation of a video game based on a famous book. I can’t wait to read the paperback novelization of the movie."

Former BUFFY star SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR has moved on from slaying vampires to becoming the Queen of Hearts in a new movie adaptation of ALICE IN WONDERLAND. The actress will star in ALICE, a big-screen adaptation of a video game based on LEWIS CARROLL's classic tales, according to the trade publication HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. The popular electronic game, AMERICAN McGEE'S ALICE, has the famous fictional character returning to Wonderland as a troubled adult, seeking to confront her childhood fears and cope with her parents' tragic death.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:29:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photographs of pregnant animals

Lots of photos of pregnant dogs, cats, horses, livestock, apes, rodents, and other animals, arranged by category.

Welcome to my site! My name is Simon 'Skunky' Morrison, and I very love animals. Probably it looks bizarre, but I very much like to see pregnant animals. I very much love to look at their huge, distended bellys. I have female dog named Marta, and each year she becomes pregnant, and I very like to observe her and touch her inflated belly. It's great!

Link (thanks, Digitaler Lumpensammler!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:04:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whispering imp poster overdose

Here's a gallery of dozens of old magician posters all featuring imps whispering into the ear of the magician.

This image of the magician getting the "secrets" from these underworld demi-devils apparently started with Harry Kellar (on his 1894 poster). Leon Hermann (nephew of Alexander) who overlapped the career of Kellar seems to be the first who copied the whispering imps. Not only did the Great Hermann include them, he used more imps! Several of the imitators have been satisfied with a single informant but the standard seems to be two - one per shoulder."

Link (thanks, Digitaler Lumpensammler!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:00:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Empire's New Digs: George Lucas launches SF media center

I traveled to San Francisco this weekend for the launch of George Lucas' new Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio park. I interviewed Mr. Lucas, and filed reports for NPR's "Day to Day" radio show and Wired News. Both the radio segment and the online article include snapshots of the scene on opening day, and a view from inside -- an unusual mix of history and future is evident throughout the complex. Snip from Wired News story:

Technology may soon spell doom for the big blockbuster, predicted the king of blockbusters himself -- George Lucas. Speaking at the grand opening of his brand new Letterman Digital Arts Center here in San Francisco's Presidio national park, Lucas said the internet and digital distribution will force Hollywood to refocus on smaller projects.

Theatrical and licensing revenues from the six-part Star Wars series have topped $13 billion and continue to grow, but Lucas believes the days of such high-budget epics may soon be over. "I'm not doing $100-million movies anymore," Lucas said on Saturday. "I'm more interested in smaller ones. Each time you do a $100-million movie, the chances are greater that you're not going to make your money back."

He added: "Box office numbers have been going down since WWII. They're on a slide and will continue to be. The profitable areas are now television and DVD, and the entire paradigm is shifting dramatically," Lucas said. "People will always go to theaters, because they will always like a social experience, but I don't think it's going to be as big as it is now."

Lucas said he will not be alone in Hollywood. The growth of home theaters, new delivery mechanisms and alternative viewing devices like mobile phones will inevitably alter moviemaking. "The big tent-pole movies will be the first victim of the rapid technological changes we're seeing now," he predicted. "We're just not going to see those being made anymore."

Image: a statue of Yoda looks out over a courtyard between buildings at the LDAC complex (XJ).

Link to Wired News story with photos.

Link to NPR "Day to Day" radio segment, with additional photos -- "A Digital Film Studio on Prime S.F. Real Estate."

One thing that didn't make it in to either story: Senator Barbara Boxer's cellphone going off repeatedly throughout Lucas' speech to reporters at the press conference. It was kind of an obnoxious polyphonic ringtone of some awful song. She was right in the front row, like 5 feet away from him on the podium, so it was super awkward. Everyone else in the room heard it loud and clear, but she seemed to be having a tough time finding the device in her purse. Happens to the best of us.

See also Jessie Scanlon's Wired Magazine story, "The New Heart of the Empire": Link.

Reader Comment: Lloyd Fonveille says,

I heard your radio report about the opening of George Lucas's new studio in San Francisco and enjoyed it very much. I was surprised to hear Lucas blame the current decline in the box office on piracy. I have another idea about what's causing it, which the book The Experience Economy has helped me think about in a new way.

Link to Lloyd's blog post on the subject.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:05:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bill Cosby's lawyer nastygrams short film site channel101.com

BoingBoing reader Mack says,

Channel 101 is a website where people make 5 minute tv show pilots that compete against each other for 5 "prime time" slots. But you probably already knew that. The NEWS is that they just got a "Cease & Desist" nastygram from Bill Cosby's lawyer over their awesome animated series "House of Cosbys" which WAS awesome, but will be offline by 5 pm today. Someone should put torrents of these up now! To see the past episodes (before 5 pm) go here. The description for the last episode reads: "This special final episode, which, in compliance with a cease and desist order, was not created by Justin Roiland, screened at Cinespace but won't be hosted at channel101.com out of fear of being sued by the attorney who is absolutely NOT portrayed sucking dick in this video."

Link

Update: Reader Ed sez:

Channel101 seems to be suffering bandwidth issues. But the first episode of "House of Cosbys" is also up here in super-high resolution. I suspect it will also be removed soon. There are also some other really funny videos made by the same guys on there. I'd definately recommend "Hilarious Jokes" and "Documentary the Series."

And here is the .torrent: Link. Here's another: Link.

rwlange points us to another direct *.mov download link right here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:04:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Theatergoers revolt against "War of the Worlds" bag ban

Chris Null says:

Eric Myerson witnessed local critic Jan Wahl throw a hissy fit over having to give up her bag during last night's screening of War of the Worlds, attempting to get the audience to rebel against the draconian policy. The revolution was short-lived and, sadly, not caught on film. Here's the report.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:41:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian CC rockers come to Reading, England this weekend

Tom sez, "Remix Reading have partnered up with Fading Ways records, and are bringing a remix spectacular to Reading this Saturday. Featuring the best of Reading and Canada (because the two are on a par!), the gig should be both a great night of music, and a symbol of the ideals of the free culture movement." Link (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:41:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 27, 2005

Haunted novelty music MP3 blog

Sailor Martin sez, "Criswell-styled psychic Dr. Mysterian has changed his blog — he is now offering a song-by-song guide to popular music with a supernatural themes, including MP3 links. Of the first songs he has linked to, most are pretty obscure, although great, including The Coasters' 'The Shadow Knows' and, unsurprisingly, Mae West singing 'Criswell Predicts.'"

It is the same cackle that opens this song, which, with a vigorous, doo-wop melody and a muted, echoing chorus, tells an unexpectedly intrusive tale of sexual obsession. “You can’t even snap your fingers or wiggle your toes without the Shadow knows,” the singer informs us, and it’s meant as a warning to a straying girlfriend. Like many of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins recordings, the superficial occultism of this song is less interesting that the sense of sexual bewilderment and betrayal revealed by the lyrics. Here the singer expresses a rather queasy fantasy — that of being able to control, or at least omnisciently observe, his lover’s errant sexual behavior. This fantasy is made even more sinister by the band’s incessant chortling throughout the song and the lead singer’s audible mirth in explaining his extraordinary powers. “I know where you’re going, baby, long before you do,” he warns, and while the song is a fine one, with one of Lieber and Stoller’s catchier melodies, one can’t help but feel sorry for the girlfriend in the song, who is the victim of endless psychic stalking.

Link (Thanks, Sailor Martin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:39:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secret Congressional policy reports published

The Congressional Research Service (700 employees, $100 million budget) prepares reports on subjects like the impact of the PATRIOT Act and the Broadcast Flag and delivers the to Congress -- but not to the taxpayers who foot the bill for them. OpenCRS.com republishes all of the secret reports it can find and makes them available to the public. You can write to your elected rep and demand that she pressure the CRS to release its entire archive to the public. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:28:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will Google survive Grokster?

Siva Vaidhyanathan's editorial on the Grokster decision is up on Salon, and it considers the fallout from the vague new "inducement" standard that the court invented:

What about Google? Consider this: Google, like Grokster, is primarily a search engine. Its business model relies on advertisements. And the more we use Google, the more money it makes. Like Grokster, Google resolves communication queries. It generates a link from an information provider to an information seeker. And almost all of what it delivers is copyrighted.

The fact that no major copyright industry player has brought Google to court so far is merely a function of the fact that most copyright holders want Google to index and offer links to their materials. There is no explicit contract. You have to opt out of the Google world.

But there is one major difference between Grokster and Google. Grokster does no copying itself. It merely induces and enables.

If anyone infringes, it's Google: The company caches millions of Web pages without permission (again, giving copyright holders the option of protesting). And soon it will offer millions of copyrighted books in electronic form without payment or permission. How would Google fare in a post-Grokster world? The publishing industry no doubt wonders. And it just might sue to find out.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monkey bites drive-through worker

A monkey named Boo-Boo apparently bit a drive-through worker at the Viking BP Mart in Morehead, Kentucky. It seems that Ashley Rodgers was handing a customer a beverage when the monkey tried to grab the drink. (See image.) Rodgers says that Boo-Boo then bit her. According to WKYT 27 Newsfirst, Boo-Boo's human companion, Jamie Dehart, is paying Rodger's medical bill. The animal will eventually go to live at the Nicholasville primate center, a move Dehart says was planned before the monkey business occurred. Link to WKYT article, Link to WPVI article with security images (via Fark)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:23:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brazil to US pharma co: slash AIDS drug prices or lose patent

Brazil's going to break the patent on an AIDS drug unless the manufacturer slashes prices. The US spent its first 100 years as a "pirate nation," using every other country's patents, trademarks and copyrights without compensation as part of its efforts to bootstrap itself into an industrial power. Why the hell should Brazil be sending its GDP off to the US now, while it is a developing nation in desperate need of AIDS drugs?

Brazil's Ministry of Health has demanded that Abbott Laboratories cut the price of its AIDS drug Kaletra by 42 percent, threatening to break the company's patent and produce generic versions of the drug if it does not comply.

The Abbott Park, Illinois-based company has 10 days from the time it received Friday's ruling to agree to reduce Kaletra's price to $0.68 per pill from $1.17. If Brazil follows through on its threat, the move would mark the first time the country has adopted compulsory licensing.

Link (via Wired News)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Communist propaganda posters

Here's an amazingly massive collection of vintage propaganda posters from Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Cuba. "We will safeguard the peace on the Earth!" Link (via Drawn!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:51:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Don't like my driving? Call 1-800-flesh-eating-hemadrones

Snip from Court TV item:

A California man facing life in prison for crashing his car into a UPS truck will not dispute that his actions resulted in the death of the driver when his trial opens Monday in Nevada County Superior Court. Instead, Scott Krause's defense will argue that the defendant believed he was trying to escape man-eating subterranean beings when he ran into Drew Reynolds' truck on Jan. 6, 2004.

Krause has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to five felony counts, including first-degree murder, carjacking, and burglary, stemming from a string of alleged criminal activities leading up to the fatal highway crash. In three court-ordered evaluations, the defendant stated he was fleeing subterranean beings he called "hemadrones" when he carjacked a commercial vehicle near a Nevada City, Calif., gas station and then crashed into Reynolds' service vehicle.

"Everything had to do with his escape from the hemadrones," said Nevada County District Attorney Michael Ferguson. "According to the defendant, he was afraid they were going to put him in cargo and ship him to China to be eaten."

Link (via Warren Ellis)

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

Space Age Pop maestro Bob Thompson

Spenser says: "Over the past five years, I've been on a very small scale strange campaign to get my father a bit of the limelight for his very offbeat and colorful music career of the late 1950s. He made some wacky instrumental albums that were some of the first to employ the emerging technology of stereo sound and mix jazz, pop, and experimental titter-tats with playful pinache.

It has a kind of offbeat intellegence you readers would like, and his story crosses paths with everyone from Mae West to Van Dyke parks, with 3000 commercial jingles in between..."

For his final LP, "The Sound of Speed," and in a sort of orchestral punkish act of rebellion, Thompson made an album entirely based on the noises of modern transportation. But it would be many years before the album, filled with jazz harmonies and swing arrangements, would be fully appreciated and understood.

Thompson's most successful music was heard by millions of people every day, even though most of them never knew who he was. From 1961 to 1978, Thompson recorded the scores to more than 3,000 television commercials, from "Get That Great GM Feeling" and "Go-Go Goodyear" to "King Cobra -- Silver!"

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:54:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

2157 photos of the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island

Here are over 2000 Flickr photos tagged with "Mermaidparade" from the Coney Island event last week. Steve says: "It was hot hot fun, lots of booze and creative nudity. Best use of a lazy summer Saturday *ever*!"
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:03:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Estes announces Model Rocket to carry Sea Monkeys

While reading a copy of my new book, The World's Worst, Stefan Jones came across my item about Sea Monkey inventor Harold von Braunhut, who I described in my book as the "World's Creepiest Toy Maker."

Stefan says: "Estes, the model rocket manufacturer, has announced the 'Simian Space Transport' kit, a rocket with a water-tight aquarium payload section for launching . . . Sea Monkeys."

A new kit announced by Estes! Prototype rocket was shown at 2005 Las Vegas NRHSA Hobby Show, and should be released in late September of this year. The design is a payload rocket powered by an B/C engine. The unique payload section can be sealed to make an flying aquarium for the included payload of sea monkeys.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:33:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boy had fetus in stomach

After a boy in Bangladesh complained of a stomach ache, doctors discovered a fetus in his abdomen. Apparently, the 4.5 pound fetus was 16-year-old Abu Raihan's undeveloped twin. Physicians at Bangabadnhu Medical University surgically removed it on Saturday. From the BBC News:

"Apart from the head, all other limbs of the baby were developed," (said Dr. MA Mazid).

The condition is known as "foetus in foeto", or inclusion twin.

"In this case the foetus of the baby entered into the foetus of the boy and continued to grow like a tumour in the boy's abdomen," gynaecology specialists Nurun Nahar said.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:24:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's Grokster editorial for Popular Science

I have an editorial on Popular Science's website about Grokster:

This decision won’t kill P2P sharing. Engineering students write P2P software in 11 lines of code as class assignments. The majority of Internet users use file-sharing software, and that’s not going to stop, no matter how many lawsuits against customers and companies the labels win. P2P will outlast today’s generation of technophobic record execs who are steering their companies to slow, spectacular suicide.

But what today’s decision will kill is American innovation. Chinese and European firms can get funding and ship products based on plans that aren’t fully thoughtcrime-compliant, while their American counterparts will need to convince everyone from their bankers to the courts that they’ve taken all imaginable measures to avoid inducing infringement. This is good news if you’re an American corporate attorney worried about job security, but not if you’re about to invent a new way to enjoy content. Both sides went to the court hoping for clarity on what is and isn’t legal in P2P, and instead, the Court tipped a fresh load of claymores into the decade’s most perilous legal minefield.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:02:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster press-conference audio

Here's an hour-long MP3 of today's Grokster press-conference, held jointly by EFF, StreamCast/Morpheus, Grokster, Public Knowledge, Compter and Communications Industry Association, and the Consumer Electronics Association. 3.4MB MP3 Link (Thanks, Annalee!)

Update: here's a torrent

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:53:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIP voices of Tigger, Piglet

Two of the Disney Winnie the Pooh voice actors -- Paul Winchell (Tigger) amd John Fiedler (Piglet) -- died this weekend.

Winchell had a long career as a master ventriloquist, inventor and children's TV host, but he may be best known for his work as the friendly tiger in the animated versions of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh books. Winchell, who gave Tigger the trademark lisp, voiced him from 1968 to 1999.

The 82-year-old was also the voice of other animated characters for Disney and Hanna-Barbera, including the character of Gargamel in The Smurfs. He brought dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff to life on television.

Winchell also held 30 patents, including one for an artificial heart, a disposable razor and a flameless cigarette lighter. He donated his early artificial heart to the University of Utah for research. Dr. Robert Jarvik and other researchers at the university went on to construct the first artificial heart implanted into humans.

Link (Thanks, Josh!)

Update: Kat sez, "thought you'd like to know the voice of Gopher from the original Winnie The Pooh animations, Howard Morris, died on May 21st this year, just a couple of weeks ago."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:15:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes on RIAA/MPAA press conference

Ernest Miller has also liveblogged the post-Grokster press conference held today by the RIAA and MPAA: Link.

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

Retro CNN headline

Carlo Longino spotted this on CNN.com this morning. And no, it's not part of a "This Day In History: 1994" package. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:06:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hilary Rosen: Killing Napster didn't bring market control

Hilary Rosen -- ex CEO of the RIAA -- has an editorial on Grokster in which she cautions her ex-colleagues in the music industry that shutting down P2P services doesn't get rid of P2P, nor does it make your customers happy to come back into your grip:

But knowing we were right legally really still isn't the same thing as being right in the real world. We had that euphoria with the first Napster decision. I hope my former colleagues remember that. The result was lots of back and forth and leverage hunting on both sides and continued litigation and then a great service shut down to make room for less great services. And more legal victories didn't bring more more market control no matter how many times it was hoped it would.

Link (Thanks, Jim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art of Science gallery

Pinceton University asked the university's scientists and engineers to collect and submit images "produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science." The resulting gallery is mind-boggling. Seen here, Purkinje Neurons by physicist Dmitry Sarkisov:

This is a composite image of five Purkinje neurons from the rat cerebellum, in the back of the brain. Each has been filled with fluorescent dye through a glass pipette, shown touching the cells. Images were taken on a two-photon microscope. Each Purkinje cell receives hundreds of thousands of inputs through its dendrite, the elaborate tree-like structure seen emerging from the cell body.

Link (via MAKE: Blog)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:46:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster decision in .torrent

Here's a link to a BitTorrent distribution of the decisions in Grokster, today's Supreme Court decision that established a new copyright thoughtcrime: "inducing" your users to infringe by failing to employ restrictions that you believe will reduce copyright infringement. BitTorrent is a P2P software application that was not designed to reduce infringement. Many BitTorrent users use it to pass around infringing copies of movies and music. Many also use it to distribute Supreme Court decisions. Torrent Link (Thanks, Thad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:13:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Censorware site blacklists Boing Boing

Surfcontrol.com is a censorware site that blocks parts of the Internet that it considers to be offensive, of an adult nature, or "inappropriate" for some reason or another. They have currently listed this site as an "adult website." I just got off the phone with a manager at SurfControl, who assures me that they've corrected the error, but that it will take 24h for the fix to take hold. During that period, users of Surfcontrol's paying customers will be walled off from Boing Boing the same way that Chinese and Iranian citizens are prevented from seeing parts of the Internet due to the judgements of unaccountable authorities in those countries.

We have fallen afoul of censorware companies before, but they've always been able to remove us from their blacklist in a few minutes. SurfControl is the first one in the industry that we've encountered whose technology is so sub-standard that it takes 24 hours to correct their careless errors. Our apologies to the users who can't see Boing Boing right now. If you'd like to talk to SurfControl about this, you can call their customer service numbers:

US Support
Hours of Operation: 8:00 AM - 8:00 PM (EST) Monday - Friday
(831) 440-2700

European Support
Hours of Operation: 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM (GMT) Monday - Friday
+44 126 029 6259

Asia Support
Hours of Operation: 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM (Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, GMT +8) Monday - Friday
+65 6549 7613

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:48:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pro-Grokster press conference notes

Ernest Miller liveblogs the conference just held by Grokster supporters:

# Richard Taranto, Farr and Taranto, argued the case before the Supreme Court
A few words, two different aspects to think about this case. What this means for the future of this litigation and how Grokster and Streamcast will fair under the remand directive. The decision is multi-faceted and the evidence burden is unclear so that it We think we will have the evidence to dispell the inference that the entertainment companies have the right to prove that there is sufficient evidence for liability. We were not in the Supreme Court of the unavailability of a theory of inducement for copyright liability.

The second and much more important aspect of what the courts did today was to write a set of standards, the most notable feature of which is the lack of clarity. Promoting infringement and knowledge of how technology will be used. The Court has provided a very difficult roadmap to follow. We have a multi-factored standard that you can't be sure how will be applied to you. The immediate impact for technology industry will be a ... one?

# Fred von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney for EFF, with Cindy Cohn
Will unleash an era of legal uncertainty for America's innovators. When we see the evidence in District Court, Streamcast will not be held liable. There is a new theory of copyright liability. Didn't clarify Betamax, didn't clarify vicarious liability. It will take courts some time to clarify this. By focusing on intent, the Supreme Court has opened the door to see the notes of engineering meetings, marketing plans, emails of executives. This is a high burden for technology companies.

# CEO of Streamcast
Another hurdle for this company. We are confident that Streamcast did not go beyond the letter of the law. We look forward to our day in court. We're staying in this fight.

# Gigi Sohn, President and Co-Founder of Public Knowledge
I see positive things for technology companies and consumers. The court reaffirmed the basis for the Betamax case. P2p as a technology can be The court focused on affirmative acts. We will see if there is enough evidence to prove viability. Sony has been preserved. There has been a lot of debate as to whether Congress will have to act to protect Hollywood's rights. It is clear that there is no need for Congress. There is nothing that Hollywood should want or need for Congress. Technology and consumers can be somewhat optimistic about this decision.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:06:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogs on today's SCOTUS rulings; Xeni on Grokster on NPR, CNN

A number of blogs are providing coverage and analysis of today's Supreme Court decisions, which include the closely watched MGM-v-Grokster case. The court ruled unanimously in entertainment companies' favor, saying that makers of filesharing technologies can be held responsible for infringing uses of their products. Snip from opinion by Justice David H. Souter (Link to 24-page PDF of opinion):

We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.

My blog-mate Cory will no doubt have more to say on that case, but for now, here's a quick batch of a few relevant links:

* Copyfight
* How Appealing
* SCOTUSblog, and here's their Grokster post.
* Ernest Miller's blog, where you'll find several posts: Wall Street Journal Roundtable on Grokster, Grokster Loses - Unanimously - Inducement Test?
* Freedom to Tinker

Link to the full text of the Supreme Court's Grokster ruling (PDF, 55 pages).

For today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I spoke with host Madeleine Brand on the Grokster ruling and what it means for the future of tech development. Link to today's edition, archived audio will be available online after 12pm PT.

I'll also be talking with hosts of CNN's Showbiz Tonight later today about today's tech law rulings. The show airs at 4pm PT and 7pm ET.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:52:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

London Underground disruptions as a time-lapse movie

Stef sez, "For 15 days, I've been grabbing the London Underground realtime disruption map every few minutes. I've just glued them all together into a three minute Quicktime, so you can visualise just how bad London's subway system is. My calculations indicate that the system is only fully operation 22% of the time!" Link (Thanks, Stef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:46:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toilets of gamespace gallery

A gallery of captured stills from games, collecting practically (?) every scene in which a toilet has appeared in a video-game. Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show political clips from last week

Here's a collection of political clips from last week's Daily Show, hosted on the CommonBits BitTorrent site:

FBI incompetence, CIA gardening and the hunt for Bin-Laden
* Rob Cordry on Global Tourism
* Bush on Iraq and Downing-gate
* Congress as a Reality Show
* Interview with Bill Moyers
* The Republican's Big Pornographic Tent
* Flame Retarded Republicans
* Interview with Howard Dean

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:20:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 26, 2005

David Byrne mops up the world.

I caught an incredible performance by David Byrne at the Hollywood Bowl in LA tonight. Backed by the Texas-based Tosca Strings. Impassioned, funky, magnificent. Arcade Fire opened, and Byrne teamed up with them during his set -- then unleashed San Francisco's Extra Action Marching Band on the crowd and jammed with them for a few numbers towards the end. Closed with a samba-tinged cover of Beyonce's "Crazy" that climaxed in a squirming heap of dry-humping, baton-twirling, bethonged marching band members, center stage. The show heads to San Diego tomorrow night (with the marching band!), and NYC on the 29th. If you're in either city, consider it unmissable.
Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:33:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google to launch online video playback on Monday

From John Battelle's Searchblog:

I've confirmed that Monday Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. This is the logical next step for Google's video search and upload function, which began taking uploads from anyone who cared to submit back in April. Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged as "free" available for real time streaming through the VLC player, which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

Now, before we start discussing how this represents the Death of Comcast/The Networks/Windows Media Player et al, this is not quite that, but it is the start of something big. For one, it's clear this will be integrated with the Google payment program which was revealed to be in process last week. Plenty of folks uploaded video to Google with a payment option, and that has yet to roll out, but you can expect that it will.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:58:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HyperSonic Sound device on eBay

We've heard a lot over the last two years about HyperSonic Sound, a cool system for focusing audio and "beaming" it directly at someone, sort of like a spotlight for sound. (Link to Mark's 2003 post about a New York Times article profiling the inventor. Link to 2003 Popular Science article.) Someone is now auctioning off one of the HyperSonic units on eBay. The auction ends tomorrow and has a starting bid of $800. From the listing:

DO NOT BID on this auction if you plan to do the following:

- Use the unit for abruptive advertising (to traffic or people passing by your store / billboard / etc)
- Use this unit for malicious purposes (as a weapon or to make people think they're going crazy)

This technology has some amazing uses that will benefit it's users greatly, but all power requires responsibility and maturity. So please, do not bid on this auction unless you have a scientific or productive use for the technology...

Q: I know this device is near impossible to own, how did you get a hold of it and why are you selling it?

A: I am an audio researcher and sound technician for a variety of corporations, including my own. I recieved this unit about a month ago to test direct vibrations used for convolution and reverb impulse sampling in various places (in other words, advanced noise/echo reduction). However, this specific unit does not create extremely low frequencies, so I'm selling it and buying a much much more expensive one. It was used probably 3 times, and comes with original box and manuals.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:39:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Survey to help Blogdex creator finish his PhD

The MIT Media Lab's Cameron Marlow, creator of the excellent Blogdex service, is in the final throes of his PhD, and as part of his project, he's conducting a survey of bloggers:

This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

Link (Thanks, Ivy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:22:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage Computer Bowl videos on Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has a gigantic collection of old Computer Bowl programs online, including a special in which the West coast's Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Jeffery Kalb, David Liddle and Harry Saal battled the East coast's Mitchell Kapor, Bob Frankston, Pamela McCorduck, David Nelson and Neil Colvin, with Andy Grove acting as Guest Questioner. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:42:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tit of justice reinstated by Supreme Torturer Gonzales

The US's new Supreme Torturer Alberto Gonzales has removed the $8,000 drapes that his predecessor, John Ashcroft, caused to have hung over the bare tit of the statue of the Spirit of Justice in the DoJ's Great Hall.

The drapes, installed in 2002 at a cost of $8,000, allowed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to speak in the Great Hall without fear of a breast showing up behind him in television or newspaper pictures. They also provoked jokes about and criticism of the deeply religious Ashcroft.

Link (Thanks, monobrau!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:26:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toilet-wall graffiti from 18th Century London

Bog House Miscellany is a large collection of 18th Century toilet-wall graffiti from the coffee- and ale-houses of London. Funny, raunchy, and often clever:

If Kisses were the only Joys in Bed,
Then Women would with one another wed.

At the same Place.

Let Jove his Juno, and his Nectar boast,
Champain's my Liquor, and Miss K---g my Toast.

Rumford on a Window.

When full of Pence, I was expensive,
And now I've none, I'm always pensive.

Underwritten.

Then be at no Expence And you'll have no Suspence.

If Smell of T---d makes Wit to flow,
Laud 1 what would eating of it do.

From the Temple Bog-House.

If you design to sh--te at Ease,
Pray rest your Hands upon your Knees.
And only give a gentle squeeze.

Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:09:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What tomorrow's Grokster Supreme Court ruling will mean

Supreme Court watchers tell us that we can expect a judgement in Grokster tomorrow. This is the case where the Hollywood studios are suing to require everyone who builds technology to anticipate all the copyright-infringing ways it could be used and design against them, setting up a test that many common apps couldn't pass: Web browsers, email clients, MP3 players, etc. EFF won the case in the lower court, and the sore-loser moviecrats got the Supreme Court to hear an appeal.

When the judgement comes down tomorrow, whichever way it goes, there will be a lot of fooforaw about What It All Means. Here's EFF's pre-emptive crib-sheet, written by Fred von Lohmann, our Head IP Attorney, who won the initial Grokster case:

# It's not about P2P. The P2P genie is irreversibly out of the bottle, with the software already installed on hundreds of millions of computers and developers in countries beyond the reach of American laws. It's the rest of America's innovation sector that will be living with the Supreme Court's ruling. So, as you read what they have to say, ask how it will affect not just Apple, HP, and Intel, but also the next "genius in a garage," like Sling Media or the kids developing urban vehicular grid technology.

# No matter what, we've won. From the beginning of this lawsuit, the entertainment industries pushed the lower courts to adopt extreme, outlandish interpretations of copyright law. For example, they argued that the Sony Betamax decision doesn't apply at all to Internet technologies, and that simply knowing that somebody is using your technology to infringe triggers an obligation to redesign it. No matter what the Court may announce on Monday, it will not be adopting this extreme position. So remember what we've already won.

# Main Event #1: Sony Betamax. In 1984, the Supreme Court rejected contributory liability for Sony because the Betamax was "capable of substantial noninfringing uses." Everyone will be watching to see what this Court has to say about that phrase. What does "capable" mean? What does "substantial" mean? What role, if any, does the proportion of infringing and noninfringing uses play?

# Main Event #2: Vicarious liability. The Supreme Court has never spoken on the doctrine of vicarious copyright liability, which lower courts have applied where a defendant has the right and ability to control an infringer and receives a direct financial benefit from the infringement. Will the Court endorse, modify, or reject what the lower courts have fashioned?

# Main Event #3: Inducement? There has been much talk about whether any such thing as "inducement liability" exists in copyright law and, if it does, what its scope might be. Justices Ginsburg and O'Connor asked several questions about the idea during the oral argument; Justice Scalia expressed skepticism. Don Verrilli, arguing for the entertainment industry, said that inducement liability would not be enough to address the concerns of copyright owners. What will the Court have to say about this uncharted territory?

# Next Bout: Congress. The Court's opinion will set the stage for the inevitable fight on Capitol Hill. A big victory for either side will be characterized as an "extreme" result, potentially strengthening the hand of the opposite side in Congress. An intermediate outcome, on the other hand, may lead Congress to "leave well enough alone."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:56:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Helsinki's Lehtovaara: Crappy service and a bullying owner

Herkko Hietanen, a Finnish copyfighter, blogged a letter about the rotten experience he had eating in Lehtovaara, a fancy restaurant in Helsinki. The owner of the restaurant, who is a member of the Finnish bar, has sent him a threatening letter demanding €80,000 in damages!

Reklamaatio, Ravintola Lehtovaara

Tarkoituksenani oli tarjota Lehtovaara ravintolassa 19.12.2003 kahdentoista hengen seurueelle pitkän kaavan mukainen illallinen. Olin varannut pöydän viikon etukäteen ja odotin voivani jakaa ystävieni kanssa Lehtovaaran kuuluisan tunnelman. Seurueeseen kuului asiallisesti pukeutuneita ja käyttäytyviä alle kolmekymppisiä akateemisesti koulutettuja kauppatieteen ja juridiikan ammattilaisia. Ilta ei kuitenkaan mennyt suunnitelmien mukaan. Minä ja seurueeni toistuvasti jouduimme ihmettelemään salihenkilökunnan palvelualttiutta ja käyttäytymistä. Seuraavassa tekemiäni huomioita illan varrelta:

Pöytämme ei ollut valmis seurueen saapuessa 19:55. Etujoukon päästessä pöytään istumaan heiltä ei kysytty tilausta. Tarjoilijan saapuessa hän ensi töikseen tylysti pyysi joukkoa näyttämään paperit. Joukon ihmetellessä tällaista menettelyä tarjoilija sanoi, että heidän pitää poistua ravintolasta, ellei henkilötodistuksia löydy. Joukon nuorin oli avovaimoni, joka on 26 vuoden ikäinen. Eteispalvelu oli moitteetonta.

Link (Thanks, Herkko!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:22:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video art at home

The New York Times has an interesting article about collecting video art and displaying it at home. For example, Pam and Dick Kramlich's San Francisco house contains one of the largest private collections of video and time-based art in the world, from the likes of Matthew Barney, Bruce Nauman, Dara Birnbaum, and Bill Viola. Seen here, Birnbaum's "Tiananmen Square: Break-in Transmission." (photo: Ethan Kaplan for The New York Times.) From the article:

When all the art is activated, the house hums, thrums, squeaks and squawks, gibbers, moans and shouts. In fact, the effect is so overwhelming that the Kramlichs are more or less forced to leave most of their expensive, impeccably chosen collection turned off most of the time. But when the pieces are on, as they were during lunch, Mrs. Kramlich says she savors the cacophony. "I enjoy having these works on," she said. "This is fun. It's playtime..."

When the Kramlichs buy a video installation, say one of Bill Viola's - they own several - they are typically buying one of an edition of anywhere from 3 to 10. They'll receive a master copy of the piece, in digital Beta or the highest-fidelity format available; a DVD home-viewing copy; the equipment needed to show the piece; and an archival box that includes setup instructions, blueprints and a signed certificate of authenticity.

It's only the box and its contents that they will save. The rest of the piece is essentially disposable, because it will probably grow obsolete over time and have to be replaced. "The work of art is the information," said Mr. Viola, 54. "That is what you own."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:22:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese bullet train with retractable cat-ears

This new Japanese bullet-train design is intended to go 360kph, and use reetractable cat-ear-shaped air-brakes to slow itself. The nosecone and color scheme are intensely manga-esque, the kind of thing you expect to see in a collectable toy. Link (Thanks, A little yellow bird!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:10:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 25, 2005

Locksmith makes key from X-ray

Last week, Arthur Richardson of Denver, Nebraska was teasing his buddy Andrew Allen by putting the key to Allen's new 1977 Chevy truck into his mouth. The joke ended as soon as Richardson accidentally swallowed it. After being unable to vomit the key, even with the aid of Milk of Magnesia, Richardson visited a physician. The hospital took an X-ray and apparently told him he'd have to wait a few days for the key to emerge from the other end. So the two took the X-ray to John Somers of Al's Lock and Key. From The North Platte Telgraph:

Somers said the X-ray was unlike anything he had ever seen. The key was clearly outlined in the picture, located just to the right of the spine.

"I've seen all kinds of things. This is the most bizarre," Somers said Thursday afternoon as he held up the X-ray to the light.

"It's a perfect silhouette."

Using the image, Somers made two new keys in just a few minutes, based on the visible notches in the original key and the type of keys used for the vehicle.

Allen grinned as he fit the first key in the ignition and started up the pick-up truck.

"I can drive my truck," he said, gleefully.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:00:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brian McCarty's art toy photography

I love Brian McCarty's photography of art toys transported into real-life settings. Some of his more whimsical shots remind me of Gina Garan's photos of Blythe while others are magnificently creepy like Frances Glessner's crime-scene dollhouse work. A McCarty photo graces the cover of the first issue of new art/culture mag Hi Fructose and he's interviewed inside. Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:10:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Napoleon-era island for £150k

This Napoleon-era island fort off the British coast is for sale at a modest £150k, though it's not a super-practical place to live, if it had broadband and decent postal service for Amazon shipments, it'd be pretty well-suited to my needs.

The 19th Century fort - complete with a couple of cannons - dates back from the time of Napoleon, when it was initially built as a defence for the river Haven.

But it has nowhere to sleep at present, and the new owner will have to sort out sewage, water and power.

Link (via Fark)

Update: Some more photos of the fort here and here (Thanks, Lazarhat and Jesse!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Atari joystick USB hub mod

Brendan hacked a USB hub into this old Atari joystick, and now he's got a stylish "hubstick" on his desk. Link (Thanks, Brendan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eco-hipster bunny game

Honda's latest ad is a fun, eco Flash game where you play a hipster bunny rabbit bent on improving a Teletubby- esque countryside by eliminating trash. The sound-effects and art are triffic, and the message is, as Alice at Wonderland notes, a lot smarter than would be imparted by yet another motorcycle-racing game. Link (via Wonderland)

Update: Douglas sez:

So, I was wondering just what the heck motivated Honda to do this wonderfully surreal game, and did some digging. I learned that:

1) Those are actually ear protectors the bunny is wearing (from having to deal with nasty old diesel engines), not headphones, as some people have posted. This explains why they are burned up in the BBQ at the end of the game. (I initially thought perhaps he was giving up recorded music on some sort of principle.)

2) It's part of a Honda campaign for a new, improved type of diesel engine. There's an ad that goes with it featuring Garrison Keillor, which is every bit as surreal as the game (and with better production values).

3) The theme of the game and the lyrics of the recurring song (hate something/change something) comes from the backstory Honda is promoting about how their chief engineer hated diesel engines, and refused to consider using them unless they could be vastly improved.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:02:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alarm clock with bacon-cooking aroma module

The Wake n' Bacon is a prototype for an alarm clock that wakes you to the smell of cooking bacon. It accomplishes this by means of a computer-controlled homemade EasyBake lightbulb oven, into which you load a slice of bacon in a pan every night before bed. Twenty minutes before your alarm goes off, the oven begins slow-cooking the pork-product. Great idea, but there are two critical flaws: it's probably not sanitary to leave bacon sitting at room-temp overnight; and now that I use my mobile phone for an alarm clock, this kind of thing is too bulky to consider as a practical add-on for my wake-up system. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:47:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT endorses Bugmenot

The New York Times, whose odious reg system requires you to personally identify yourself in order to simply read the news, publishes an endorsement of Bugmenot, an excellent service that circumvents registration for websites like nytimes.com.

STOP BUGGING ME If newspaper marketers think they are receiving reliable user information via those annoying site registrations, they should run their Web addresses through bugmenot.com, which offers quick user names and passwords to people who click on a link only to be confronted by a mandatory registration page. Some examples of usernames: thisisannoying; iwantnews; thisisjustsilly; whydoyoudothis. DAN MITCHELL

Link (Thanks, Bugmenotter!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:43:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Katamari Damacy fans in costume

This gallery, entitled "Private Photoshoot of Liddo and Sarah's Katamari Fantasy Night," features two Katamari Damacy (stupendous, mind-bending console game) fans having a little KD cosplay session dressed up as little princes and prancing around. Fantastic. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:32:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Illegal space-race through Los Angeles, June 25

Monochrom, the crazy Austrian net-artists, continue their tear through the West Coast. They're holding an "illegal space race" through Los Angeles:

LA is big. Big enough for an "illegal space race". We will place the planets true to scale (sun, 4 meters in diameter, Pluto, one centimeter in diameter, about 20 miles away) throughout the LA cityscape. Then we will conduct a car race. The team that makes it through 'LA space' fastest wins the interplanetary trophy. In conclusion, of course, the speeds of the cars will be calculated, for example, how much faster than light they were. Patrick Dondl of Caltech will be on hand as astrophysical guest commentator to comment on the events.

June 25, 2 PM @ Machine Project

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Traditional publishing and CC licensing go hand-in-hand

The Book Standard has a great article on the use of Creative Commons licenses for electronic distribution of commercial print books, and the growing schism between the kinds of publishers and authors who complain about Google and Amazon's services for searching the whole text of books and the kinds of publishers and writers who celebrate it.

"I don't want to condone piracy," says Hayden of Tor Books. "But in general I find it not so much appalling as encouraging. We're the genre that the readers care enough about to be this obsessive about. I want to do something with this, not fight against it."

Doctorow agrees. "Think about the care that goes into pirating a book!" he says. "That person has not done that because he hates the author and wishes to do the author harm, but because he loves the work and loves the author. Calling that person a thief is about the most suicidal thing you can do." And, as Stross points out, "the availability of a free e-book actually undercuts the profitability of pirate paper or electronic editions."

Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, the leading publisher of computer books in America, says his company certainly does encounter piracy, the more so since their work attracts the most technically savvy people in the world. The books of theirs that sell the best are the books that are most often pirated (and the most shoplifted, incidentally), but this doesn't stop those books from selling well. "I'm sure there are people who pass around the links and use the pirate links," says O'Reilly. "But in our experience they're not the people who are likely to buy the books anyway."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:55:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dear PeerImpact: Your DRM cost you my business

Ryan was about to sign up for PeerImpact, a P2P service that distributes authorized, royalty-paid music, when he discovered that the company wraps all its media in restrictive DRM. Instead of sending them some money, he sent them an email explaining why he wouldn't use their service:

I'm all for buying music, making sure the artists are compensated and the major labels get their cubic meters of money to continue suing their customers. What I (and everyone else O know) will not stand for is a product that uses a protection scheme that ruins the experience. If the service used standard compliant MP3 files, I'd have signed up and filled my 2 gigs of storage on my handheld, yes it's a windows mobile device, it has mobile media player 10 that can handle the crippled files you hare selling. The fact is while my device can use your DRM, I won't. Simple as that.

Thanks for the attempt, man you guys almost have the ideal business model, once you support a non crippled file format, Holy smokes, you guys will be huge.

Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:48:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Overview of indy content distribution services

Jeff from CommonBits -- a BitTorrent distribution service for indy media -- has published a good overview of all the services out there for distributing rich, massy indy video, audio and other files, like Broadcast Machine, We Media, and many others.

CommonBits and Broadcast Machine are both excellent platforms for delivering the coming wave of citizen media content. And there are others.

Prodigem offers a BitTorrent hosting service that allows people to sell their content. OurMedia and Archive.org offer a similar hosting service without BitTorrent but neither service has a particular community focus e.g. politics or music. Al Gore’s new company Current.TV is also making an effort to involve citizen media producers albeit more commercial.

The community aspect of these sites is important. CommonTunes was created to support the online music community and CommonFlix to support video sharing. OurMedia has a lot of community features as well.

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:46:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO cast a silver bullet

Noting that casting one's own ammo is becoming a dying art, and that this might mean the extinction of silver bullets, this article describes the process required for casting your own werewolf-slayers:

To create the mold, I first had to construct a bit. I used a lathe to turn a steel rod into a bulletlike shape, then used a milling machine to cut away a quarter-circle wedge of the rod, leaving a sharp cutting edge. Basically I had built a router bit shaped like a bullet. (I've fabricated bits like this freehand with a file; which works fine, it just takes longer. Much longer.) After using the bit to machine the graphite bullet mold, I used an electrically heated graphite crucible to pour in 0.999 fine liquid silver at about 2,000*F, which is 230*F above its melting point. The mold must be preheated with a blowtorch to keep the silver from solidifying before it fills the whole cavity. One of the benefits of using graphite is that it keeps the silver from oxidizing, so bullets come out bright and shiny.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:42:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Live video from gamespace

Ernest sez, "Second Life has launched a live video stream from their virtual world that you can watch on their homepage. Click on the television set labeled 'live video' for a random look into the world of Second Life ... also be prepared for loud music that cannot, apparently, be turned off. Very, very cool. I WANT MY SECOND LIFE TV!" Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:38:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

All of Ibsen coming to the Internet

Forteller sez, "A project led a professor at the University of Oslo (UiO) is working on publishing all the works of Henrik Ibsen, perhaps Norway's most famous author/playwright/poet, for free on the internet. His most famous works include Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, Brand and The Wild Duck.

"All his notes, manuscripts, speeches, letter, and all his published works are included in the project which is supposed to be finished in 2008, it will also be added a lot of comments to his works. Before they are published on the net, it will all be printed. The printed version of the Ibsen compilation will fill up 31 books! The texts will be coded by the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative to make it easy to search through." Link (Thanks, Forteller)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:36:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 24, 2005

Tim Biskup show in Los Angeles

The amazing Tim Biskup has a slew of new paintings on display at Billy Shire Fine Arts in Los Angeles. Titled "The Push Over," the show opens tomorrow and runs until July 30. Seen here, "White Dragon" (Gouache On Paper, 12" x 9"). Link (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:35:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dianne Feinstein on the Broadcast Flag: Idiot or liar?

Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote back to constituents who complained about the Broadcast Flag with this amazing, disingenuous note:

Thank you for writing to me about the digital broadcast flag. I appreciate hearing from you.

I feel strongly that we must prevent the theft of copyrighted works, and that includes digital television (DTV) programming. As we move forward in the digital age, it is increasingly easy for unauthorized copies of copyrighted works to be made and illegally distributed. Over-the-air digital content is the easiest to pirate.

As we contemplate the use of new technologies to protect copyrighted works, we must pay careful attention to ensure that a balance is struck between competitive protections and individual consumer interests. It is important to allow for the continued fair use of copyrighted material, even while we seek to stop unauthorized reproductions from being illegally distributed outside the home and over the Internet.

Again, thank you for writing. Please know that as the Senate considers legislation of the broadcast flag, I will be sure to keep your views in mind. If you should have any questions, please feel free to contact my Washington, DC staff at (202) 224-3841.

Practically every sentence in this letter is a lie:

As we move forward in the digital age, it is increasingly easy for unauthorized copies of copyrighted works to be made and illegally distributed.

Lie: Steps needed to put analog-broadcast video on your computer: 1. Install capture card; 2. Press record. Steps needed to put digital-broadcast video on your computer: 1. Install capture card; 2. Press record.

It is important to allow for the continued fair use of copyrighted material

Lie: TiVo's TiVoToGo service -- designed to comply with the broadcast flag -- limited the number of devices you could watch your recorded videos on to a set number. Nothing about fair use says that n devices is permissible, but n + 1 isn't. TiVoToGo was one of the more permissive services -- systems like 5C and 4C have no consideration for fair use (for example, you can't tell a 5C device that you need to the ability edit a show that you plan on using in connection with criticism or classroom use).

even while we seek to stop unauthorized reproductions from being illegally distributed outside the home and over the Internet.

Lie: because the broadcast flag does not restrict analog outputs, there is nothing about the broadcast flag that prevents Internet redistribution of digital television (steps needed to put broadcast flag content on the Internet: 1. Connect tuner to PC via analog cables; 2. Press record.)

This leaves us with only one question: is DiFi stupid, or is she a liar? Either way, Feinstein should be ashamed of herself. (Thanks, Mark!)

Update: Erik sez, "The TV/music/movies sector is the 4th highest contributor to her campaign, with lawyers being number 1 (two bad tastes that go great together!). Maybe that's why Feinstein is so willing to disregard the opinion of 2600 of her constituents and toe the MPAA's line."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photographer's Railroad Page

My uncle Kevin Scanlon is one of the railroad junkie photographers behind this site.

One of my earliest memories of my uncle, whom I love very much, is through his photographs -- haunting images of historic railways and elegant old trains throughout Appalachia and Pennsylvania. Documenting these endangered machine beings is his lifelong passion, so he's launched a gallery with words and images on this subject from various shooters.

Uncle Kev sez: "I've been trying to encourage photographers to do a little writing to give a backstory on their images. So far I've had a pretty good response from a wide range of people. Make sure you check out the Archive page for M. Ross Valentine's and Mel Patrick's photos, my favorites so far."

Link to The Photographer's Railroad Page. Above: Pure Serendipity, by Mel Patrick: Link.

Previously on Boing Boing: Kevin Scanlon's heavy industry photography

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:27:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secret CIA conspiracy revealed on abandoned car

Indisputable proof of clandestine government hijinks are all over this car. An encrypted moblog of sorts. "My stolen documents. My stolen art. CIA criminales kill my brother last week and sended terrorista to hit my car."

Start here and work back. (via Warren Ellis)

Previously on Boing Boing: Homer Simpson computer key car, Car covered in computer keys

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:18:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sweaty men like Men's Health

A new study reports that the smell of male underarm funk makes men dig Men's Health magazine. In experiments run by researchers from the University of Ulster and University of Vienna, male and female subjects wore masks sprayed with either androstenol--a pheromone in men's underarm sweat--or a "control solvent." They were then shown issues of Allure, National Geographic, and Men's Health magazine. From New Scientist:

The male participants exposed to androstenol rated Men’s Health as significantly more masculine and more appealing compared with the control group. They also had a higher tendency to report that they might buy the magazine. Women appeared to be completely unaffected by the pheromone...

“This opens up the possibility of using odours to give specific emotional meaning to products – and creates ethical issues about whether this should be done if they are used at imperceptible levels,” (says University of Ulster professor Michael Kirk-Smith).

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:04:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homer Simpson Computer Key Car

Following up on an earlier post about a neat car I spotted in LA covered in a mosaic of computer keys -- a Boing Boing reader sends better snapshots of that car, and of other keyboardmobiles by the same creator. One of them bears Homer Simpson's mug on its front hood. Link to flickr gallery. J-Walk blog phonecammed some of these cars in LA, too: Link. (Thanks, Sean Bonner, and fattymarmot!).
Previously on Boing Boing: Car covered in computer keys

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:00:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Clickwheel brings comics, animation to iPod

William Simons of Clickwheel says: "We've just created the world's first and only desktop application for downloading digital comics to the iPod photo. It's currently available as a demo version, which you're free to download from www.clickwheel.net."
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:53:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daniel Clowes on NPR

Comix artist Daniel Clowes of Eightball and Ghost World fame was on National Public Radio's Fresh Air yesterday talking about his new comic strip novel, Ice Haven. It's loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb murders of 1924. Clowes also rapped about his latest collaboration with director Terry Zwigoff, the filmic adaptation of the comic Art School Confidential. The interview is archived at the NPR site. Link

UPDATE: If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, Clowes is signing books tonight at the Booksmith on Haight Street at 7pm. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:21:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dead frog found in salad

Karpar says she found a small frog in her salad on Wednesday.

[T]oday, I found a frog in my salad from the company cafeteria.  Rest assured, I did not eat any of the frog, but it certainly was...erm- startling to say the least.  I returned the lunch to the cafeteria and got a refund.   The general manager will be contacting me later (he was not there when I returned the lunch).  My co-workers have reminded me that I have totally blown it since I could have sold it for big bucks on eBay to some casino.  Anyway, beware of the "organic" salad greens from Bon Appetit! 

Link (thanks, Jean-Paul!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:19:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Protecting yourself against moving company scammers

More than a few people I know have told me horror stories about moving companies ripping them off when they've moved to a new house or apartment. Their stories are similar: the moving company loads your stuff on the truck(s) and then it tells you to pay a lot more money than the written estimate. Movingscam.com is an information clearing house about moving company scammers, with tips for finding honest movers.

One thing I should point out, is that the bids from these companies that I have seen often quote you by cubic footage not by weight. If you get a quote that is priced by cubic footage, that should raise a red flag right away. The reason for this is that if they charge you by weight, they have to provide proof of the weight of your belongings at no charge to you. Current laws regarding the moving industry do not cover moves based on cubic feet.

Once the movers show up and most or all of your things are in their truck, they will hit you with the real price of the move. By then it's too late. Your things are on their truck, and they won't get anything off of it without full payment in cash. They will tell you that if you don't pay up, that they will take the truck and sell everything you own to cover the contract. In my case, I put down a $150 deposit, and was told before the movers showed up that the rest of the $1869 would be due on delivery. When the movers showed up, the price jumped to $5012.50, and the movers demanded half of that on the spot or else there wouldn't be a delivery!

Link(via Sensible Erection)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:14:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NES misbegotten tchotchkes

This gallery of misbegotten Nintendo Entertainment System schwag features NES cologne, soda pop, novels, and underwear -- and that's just for starters. Link (Thanks, Jake!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bluetooth pistol mouse

A hacker gutted a Targus wireless mouse and installed the Bluetooth board into a Monster Gecko PistolMouse for cord-free firing fun. DIY details embedded in this Flickr photo set. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:08:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USB-powered mini lava-lamp

Thinkgeek is selling a miniature USB-powered lava-lamp for $10 -- now that's a good buy! Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web zen: TV zen

test cards
vanity cards
canadian tv themes
rainbow
the adventures of superpup
grover is bitter
law and order plot generator
super doppler
tv squad
trio
concrete tv web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:29:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chocolate sneakers

An anonymous reader sent this image, identifying it as the creation of some dude named Al Cabino. It is said to be a sneaker constructed from pure Swiss chocolate. This blog posts the same info. It's either a silly hoax, or a brilliant exercise in choco-licious but impractical footwear.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:21:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kickass Kung Fu: Like Dance Dance Revolution for martial artists

Kickass Kung Fu is a video-game in which you use real martial-arts moves to control an on-screen kung-fu fighter in order to best both human and AI opponents.

The game takes place on a 5 meter cushioned playfield suitable for martial arts and acrobatics training. Using custom computer vision technology, you are taken inside an artificial reality where the normal laws of physics no longer apply. Your movements are exaggerated so that you can easily dodge your opponent's bullets by jumping five meters in the air and landing behind his back. Using the dual projected screens, one at each end of the playfield, you can also continue by counter-attacking your stupefied enemy from the behind.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:50:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Queen Liz: Sony remotes are too hard to use

The Queen met with Howard Stringer, the new CEO of Sony, and told him off for designing remotes that are too hard to use:

According to Stringer the Queen told him: "I have a lot of trouble with your remote controls. Too many arrows."

Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:42:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gummed magnetic tape on rolls

This catalog company sells rolls of adhesive-backed magnetic tape in traditional sticky-tape dispensers. Link (via Red Ferret)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:41:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scientology's E-Meters reviewed

Gizmodo has an hilarious, in-depth story on the history of the E-Meter, the "religious artifact" used by the "Church" of Scientology to detect and clear "engrams" -- negative energy left behind by unhappy events in this life or lives gone past.

The Cadillac of current official offerings, the Quantum Super VII is the ultimate in e-meter artifacts, priced at over $4,500 new. From e-meter.org.uk's Quantum Super VII page, which may or may not be an official outlet of the Church: "Using the meter, the auditor ensures the process covers the correct area in order to discharge the harmful energy connected with that portion of the preclear's reactive mind. When charge lessens, the person heightens his ability to think clearly in the area being addressed and his survival potential increases proportionately. As a result, the preclear discovers things about himself and his life – new realizations about existence, the milestones that mark his gains."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:39:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lost malls of the 50s and 60s

Malls of America is a blog that lovingly documents the lost shopping mall glory days of the 1960s and 1970s. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:35:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory speaking at MacHack Detroit, July 27-31

I'm delivering a midnight keynote at this year's ADHOC conference (ADHOC is also known as "MacHack") in Detroit, July 27-31. Hope to see you there!

The Advanced Developers Hands On Conference (ADHOC) is an annual event that provides a unique environment for computer programmers, engineers, students, and technology enthusiasts. At ADHOC they learn the cutting-edge technologies of the day not only from experts in classroom and conference sessions but also from each other in intense coding marathons. The conference is well rooted in the Macintosh platform - it is also called MacHack - but over the last few years the conference has grown to encompass other technologies, such as UNIX, open source, mobile devices, and more...

The showcase is an intensive, multi-day contest where you try to make something to impress everyone else at the conference. Ideally, you start it when you arrive, and you finish sometime before you go on stage to show it. Many of the coolest bits of software that came out for the Mac started in the Showcase. And, because everyone wants to see something cool, if you need the help from a programming expert who just happens to be at the show, you can ask them, and you'll learn what you need. You can learn more about the Mac OS in a very short amount of time just by trying to write a showcase entry.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:58:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heinlein's house

The Heinlein Society has a collection of photos of the groovy, circular California home of Robert A Heinlein, legendary science fiction author. Pictured here: Heinlein's groovy rec-room. Link (Thanks, Kirby!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:50:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vertical Farming: High-rise urban mass agriculture

This well-developed project from Columbia University walks through the realities, possibilities and constraints of multi-storey, urban, high-rise farming:

What is proposed here that differs radically from what now exists is to scale up the concept of indoor farming, in which a wide variety of produce is harvested in quantity enough to sustain even the largest of cities without significantly relying on resources beyond the city limits. Cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and other large farm animals seem to fall well outside the paradigm of urban farming. However, raising a wide variety of fowl and pigs are well within the capabilities of indoor farming. It has been estimated that it will require approximately 300 square feet of intensively farmed indoor space to produce enough food to support a single individual living in an extraterrestrial environment (e.g., on a space station or a colony on the moon or Mars)(35).

Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:46:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sat photos document razing of 200k person shantytown in Zimbabwe

If you had any reason to doubt that Robert Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe, is a malign thug, here's more proof: a before-and-after pair of satellite photos showing the destruction of a 200,000-person shantytown on the outskirts of Harare. Link (Thanks, Toni!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:37:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lego journal launches

The Brick Journal is a new independent magazine for Lego junkies, featuring HOWTOs, reviews, history and interviews with Lego engineers. It's like a very, very, very specific version of MAKE! Link (Thanks, Bill!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:24:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Banned Nepali radio station transmits via megaphone

A Nepali radio station that has been banned under the new, post-coup regime has gone back on the air. Every night, a commentator stands on the roof of his now-useless radio-station and reads the news over a megaphone to an audience of hundreds.

Every evening, about 300 people gather on a roadside in Biratnagar, 500 kilometers (310 miles) east of Katmandu to listen to Keshav Bhattarai read out the news from an open air studio on the roof of a narrow, three-story building.

As well as spreading the news, the service stands for a free media, Bhattarai tells his audience, a motley collection of politicians, teachers, students, traders and anyone who just happens to be passing.

Link (Thanks, Kyle!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:19:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Futuristic 1960s Lambretta ad

This 1960s Italian Lambretta scooter ad is fantastic: it features a cast of "scientists" in a futuristic, Tomorrowland sort of labratory, doing a musical number about the Lambrett Twist, the dance inspired by the Labretta's steering mechanism. 35MB MPEG Link, Mirror (Thanks, Julian!)

Update: Cristian sez, "The scientists are the Quartetto Cetra, an italian famous vocal quartet established during 1940. They were famous too for their spoof of musical hit singles of 50/60, in RAI (italian Broadcasting Television)."

Update 2: Cristian has graciously provided a mirror of the file.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:14:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Xeni on NPR: SAG rejects video game industry's contract offer -- UPDATED

For today's edition of the NPR radio program "Day to Day:

The Screen Actors' Guild has rejected a work agreement with the video game industry -- but its sister union, AFTRA, has accepted. I talk with host Alex Chadwick about the contentious relationships between both unions and game publishers, and the debate over whether voice actors are entitled to a share of electronic game profits. What will SAG's rejection mean for actors? What effect will the dispute have on next year's crop of games?

Link to archived audio. Link to more archived "Xeni Tech" segments on NPR. (Special thanks to Wil Wheaton and Lazlow)

Previously on Boing Boing: SAG nixes video game work contract, SAG/AFTRA video game strike on the way for Hollywood?, Strike Looms Against Game Makers, Game biz coders want fatter paychecks, too

UPDATED: Not so fast. The Screen Actors Guild just issued this surprise announcement:

SAG President Melissa Gilbert and National Executive Director/CEO Greg Hessinger will convene a special meeting of the national board on Wednesday, June 29, to consider the tentative Interactive Media Agreement with video game companies that was rejected this past Tuesday by SAG’s National Executive Committee.

“When the NEC rejected the tentative contract earlier this week, we said we’d explore all our remaining options,” said Hessinger. “Since then, we have received feedback from enough of our membership to conclude that this matter must be brought before the full board for its consideration.”

The previous three-year agreement with video game companies expired this past May 13 after several months of bargaining with the companies. Over the course of the subsequent weeks, SAG issued a strike referendum to its affected members, before reaching a tentative agreement on June 8, which is set to expire next Thursday, June 30. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which negotiated jointly with SAG, approved the agreement last week and it will go into effect for their members on July 1, 2005.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:09:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

R.I.P. Bennie Schriever

Charles Platt says: "Few people outside of the military-industrial complex know the name 'Bennie Schriever,' but it's quite likely that if he hadn't been in the right office of the Pentagon at the right time, Soviet missiles would still be based in Cuba and the United States would have been a distant second in the race to the Moon. One can even argue that the Soviet Union would have had such an advantage in its strategic arsenal during the 1960s, the United States would have been unable to maintain a balance of power and would have been at a hopeless disadvantage during the mad years of Kennedy/Khrushchev brinkmanship.

Schriever was the primary architect of U.S. strategic capability, for better or worse. He was a radical force in government at a time when intercontinental ballistic missiles seemed farfetched and manned spaceflight was a fantasy. He died on June 20th yet no obituaries have appeared in any general-interest publications. A well-balanced tribute is here: Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:29:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dock Ellis, psychedelic pitcher

During the late 1980s in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, there was a cool band called Dock Ellis. Their music was good but I liked their name even better. Dock Ellis was a player for the Pittsburgh Pirates who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter while tripping balls on LSD. The Dallas Observer just profiled Ellis and retold the psychedelic sports tale of the century:

Thirty-five years ago, on June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate and future Texas Rangers pitcher Dock Ellis found himself in the Los Angeles home of a childhood friend named Al Rambo. Two days earlier, he'd flown with the Pirates to San Diego for a four-game series with the Padres. He immediately rented a car and drove to L.A. to see Rambo and his girlfriend Mitzi. The next 12 hours were a fog of conversation, screwdrivers, marijuana, and, for Ellis, amphetamines. He went to sleep in the early morning, woke up sometime after noon and immediately took a dose of Purple Haze acid. Ellis would frequently drop acid on off days and weekends; he had a room in his basement christened "The Dungeon," in which he'd lock himself and listen to Jimi Hendrix or Iron Butterfly "for days."

A bit later, how long exactly he can't recall, he came across Mitzi flipping through a newspaper. She scanned for a moment, then noticed something.

"Dock," she said. "You're supposed to pitch today."

Ellis focused his mind. No. Friday. He wasn't pitching until Friday. He was sure.

"Baby," she replied. "It is Friday. You slept through Thursday."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:44:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The girl with the DVD face

They call her "Chatty."

Fantasies about chatting up legendary figures have come closer to reality in Japan where researchers have developed a mannequin with a built-in projector that can resemble a face of one's choice. The life-size, made-to-order (...) mannequin [has] a face that is an empty screen until turned on to play DVD images from inside the body. If one is in the mood for conversation, sound can come from a separate speaker. "It is a device that can show a person's face, looks and mouth movements," said the developer, Ishikawa Optics and Arts Corp. of Tokyo. "It forms realistic images as if he or she were really talking to you."

Link to news item. (via Warren Ellis)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:33:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fight for your right to tentacle porn

Los del Fleshbot dicen:

While porn producers (and audiences) in the US have been gearing up for the new 2257 regulations that go into effect next week, fans of Japanese erotic art have an additional thing to worry about: a Tokyo court upheld a conviction yesterday against a publisher found guilty of distributing a comic title found to be obscene in what Japan Today calls “the first major case in some 20 years in Japan to focus on printed pornographic material”. Better stock up on all those tentacle porn hentai while you still can, folks.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:23:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

All 4000 issues of the New Yorker on DVD set: $100

The New Yorker is selling a limited edition set of 8 DVDs containing every page of the magazine from its inception in February 1925 to February 2005: "from full-color covers to spot drawings, from poetry to Profiles, from cartoons to advertisements -- on reader friendly and highly searchable DVDs." It'll be available in September, and will run on Windows and Macs.
Link (via Darren Barefoot)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:06:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Body Area Networking

I can hear it now: "Nonono, we weren't sleeping together -- just a routine system backup." Snip from a press release for a short-range networking technology demo that took place at a research institute in SoKo (not the first time this sort of thing has been demoed, despite what the press release claims).

Digital Human Body Communication was first unveiled to the public. It is also called as BAN(Body Area Network), as it handles communication between devices using the human body as a medium.

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said that although only a small amount of data, such as information on a name card, can be transmitted at the moment because the data transmission speed is just to be 2.4Kbps, the speed will be improved to 1MB within the yearend.

ETRI explained that BAN can be utilized in numerous ways, such as touch based authentification service, electronic payment service, e-business card service, and touch based advertisement service.

Link (Thanks, Brian Baglow, via unwired)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:02:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beast Blender

The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists created a fun Flash site where you can visually collage body parts from an assortment of animals like alligators, ring-tailed lemurs, and muskellunges. The gallery displays some great virtual taxidermic mash-ups. Seen here is Bryan's "Finger Sucker." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:42:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boing Boing "suggest a site" reminder

Thanks so much to all of you who submit links to Boing Boing! Remember, if you'd like to turn us on to something, please use the "suggest a site" form linked to at the top of this page instead of emailing us directly. We read every suggestion submitted using the form! We really appreciate your help in growing the cabinet of curiosities that is Boing Boing. Thanks again! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:56:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Supreme gives companies the right to bulldoze homeowners' houses for minimalls and the like

Cameron says: "In the 1890's the US government would use the 5th Amendment and eminent domain to seize the native american lands for 'public good' and give them to the railroad companies to build on.

"Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of loosening this law and extending the definition of 'publlic good' allowing local governments to seize private property for private companies to build on.

"Yet another example of corporate gentrification with those who cannot afford proper protection susceptible having their homes condemned and seized. This is one of the few times I actually agree with Justice Scalia and Thomas." (Me, too. -- Mark) Link

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

Cracking the Flag-Burning Amendment

John Scalzi explains how to get around the Flag Burning amendment: by desecrating flags that are similar but not identical to the real US flag. (Scalzi says: "Please note I don't encourage flag-burning. However, I don't encourage banning flag-burning more.")

An American Flag? Hardly. It has only 49 stars! There's a circle where a star should be. Certainly an American Flag had 49 stars, but it didn't look like this (it looked like this).The true 49-star flag would likely be covered by the Amendment, but this one, not so much. Use it for kindling!

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:32:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TSA confiscates folding car key, calling it a "switchbalde"

Dan says: "The Transportation Security Administration confiscated this man's folding Audi car key ($300 replacement cost) at Dallas/Ft. Worth. They claimed it was a 'switchblade.' If he hadn't had a spare key, he would have been stuck upon arriving with no car keys." (I have the same type of key for my car, and have brought it on planes dozens of times with no problem. -- Mark)
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:58:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rosey Grier's "Needlepoint for Men"

Former pro-football player turned minister Rosey Grier wrote a book in 1973 called "Needlepoint for Men." Designs in the book feature sports equipment, explosives, hunting dogs, Samurai warriors -- macho stuff. Here's a Flickr gallery of some scans from the book.
Link (thanks, Garth!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:50:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Portable urban hideout

"City Hideout" is a foldable metal box that you can quickly set up and sit inside whenever you want to temporarily stop dealing with people. When deployed, the box looks like ordinary equipment housing found on city sidewalks. The vents in the box allow you to see the world outside without being seen yourself.
Link (Thanks, Clive!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:13:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smugglers conceal heroin "mini bricks" inside bricks of cocaine

"The Microgram Bulletin" is a monthly web-based newsletter published by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The April 2005 edition has a short item about 17 bricks of cocaine that were intercepted by the DEA in Nogales, AZ. Upon inspection, agents discovered a surprise inside the cocaine:

[E]ach brick was also found to contain a second, internal brick, wrapped in brown tape and cellophane, which contained an unknown, compressed, tan colored powder. Analysis of the white powder confirmed 85 percent cocaine hydrochloride adulterated with caffeine, while analysis of the tan powder indicated a mixture of 72 percent heroin hydrochloride and 7.2 percent cocaine hydrochloride. This is the first submission of heroin mini-bricks inside cocaine bricks to the Laboratory.

The DEA believes the smugglers hid the heroin inside the coke to "deceive mid-level transporters, who charge higher rates for heroin shipments versus cocaine shipments." Link (Thanks, Amy!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:00:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Philip K. Dick robot

An android embodiment of surrealist SF author Philip K. Dick will be demonstrated at Wired's NextFest this weekend in Chicago. The Dick bot is a collaboration between Hanson Robotics Inc, the FedEx Institute of Technology's Institute for Intelligent Systems, the Automation and Robotics Research Institute at UTA, and Dick's friend Paul Williams. From the Hanson Robotics overview:

The robot will portray Dick in both form and intellect through an artificial-intelligence-driven personality. The hardware will manipulate Hanson's proprietary lifelike skin material to affect extremely realistic expressions with very low power. Cameras in the eyes will allow the robot to perceive people's identity and behavior through advanced machine vision and biometric-identification software. The robot will track faces, perceive facial expressions, and recognize people from the crowd (family, friends, celebrities, etc).

The visual data will be fused with some of the best speech recognition software, advanced natural language processing, and speech synthesis in the world. All of this will run in sync with Hanson Robotics' highly expressive robot face to emulate a full human-conversational system.

IIS will create the artificial intelligence personality of the robot by mathematically deriving it from Dick's life and works in a manner very similar to that described by Dick himself in his book We Can Build You (published in 1964).

Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:30:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Zombie meister George Romero profiled in the LA Times

The zombie flick Land of the Dead opens in theaters tomorrow, and the LA Times interviews its maker, George Romero, who made Night of the Living Dead 37 years ago. Land of the Dead is his fourth zombie movie, and like all his movies, it's loaded with social criticism (which, in my opinion, is what zombie movies are all about.)

"Night" evoked Vietnam-era bloodshed and, with its black male lead trapped in a farmhouse, echoed civil rights hysteria. "Dawn" poked fun at soul-deadening consumerism. And "Day" addressed ethics in science. With "Land," Romero tackles issues of safety and boundaries, showing a community fortifying itself against a murderous horde while its wealthiest keep alive class divisions separating them from the powerless.

"It's the folly of saying, 'Everything's OK, don't worry about it,' " says Romero, who wrote "Land" before the events of Sept. 11. Its focus then was about "ignoring social ills, setting up a synthetic sense of comfort."

He says he didn't have to tweak it much to reflect new fears of terrorism. When told that it's hard not to think of Iraq watching an armored car of trigger-happy humans roll through a zombiefied suburb shooting anything they see, Romero smiles. "That's one of the things I put in there afterward."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:20:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Poisson on the purpose of cameraphones

For TheFeature.com, I interviewed John Poisson, former head of Sony's mobile media research and design groups. Poisson is now focused on how cameraphones could revolutionize photography and communication -- if people would only start using them more. He and human-computer interaction researchers Chris Beckmann and Scott Lederer are developing cameraphone software and services they hope will get the world snapping and sharing.

TheFeature: What have you learned over the course of your research?
Poisson: People think of the cameraphone as a more convenient tool for digital photography, an extension of the digital camera. That's missing the mark. The mobile phone is a communications device. The minute you attach a camera to that, and give people the ability to share the content that they're creating in real time, the dynamic changes significantly.

TheFeature: Aren't providers already developing applications to take advantage of that shift?
Poisson: Well, we have things like the ability to moblog, to publish pictures to a blog, which is not necessarily the most relevant model to consumers. Those tools are developed by people who understand blogging and apply it in their daily lives. But it ignores the trend that we and Mimi Ito and others are seeing as part of the evolution of photography. If you look at the way people have (historically) used cameras, it started off with portraiture and photographs of record -- formalized photographs with a capital "P." Then as the technology evolved, we had this notion of something called a snapshot, which is much more informal. People could take a higher number of pictures with not so much concern over composition. It was more about capturing an experience than photographing something. The limit of that path was the Polaroid. It was about taking the picture and sharing it instantly. What we have today is the ability to create today is a kind of distributed digital manifestation of that process.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:15:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Single brain cells tied to specific celebrities

Scientists report that a single neuron in your brain responds when you see a specific person. The controversial notion is sometimes jokingly called the "grandmother cell," meaning that your brain has one cell that recognizes your grandmother. Cal Tech computational neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and his colleagues suggest that this may not be too far from the truth. In a series of recent experiments, they showed subjects a series of snapshots of animals, buildings, objects, and celebrities. The subjects were epileptics who had already been implanted with sensors to monitor brain-cell activity. From News@Nature.com:

Various pictures of Jennifer Aniston elicited a response in a single neuron inside the medial temporal lobe of another patient. Interestingly, images of her with her former husband Brad Pitt did not sway this cell, the authors of the paper report...

Quian Quiroga also found that a lone neuron in one subject responded selectively to various pictures of the actress Halle Berry - as well as drawings of her and her name written down. Other cells were found to respond to images of characters in The Simpsons or members of The Beatles.

The team thinks that these brain cells probably respond to a range of different items, but that this limited study didn't include all the various pictures that might make a particular cell light up.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:55:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Home made stuffed animal every day

This extreme crafter makes a new stuffed animal every day -- link goes to a giant gallery of the output. Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:16:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Japanese girl subculture: Decorer

Apparently this new Japanese girl subculture is called "Decorer" (one who decorates, or is decorated). A little candy-raver, a little kinderslut, a little goth lolita, and a little Cindy Lauper. Pretty amazing. Link (via Wonderland)

Update: AV sez, "The site is going really slowly and feels like it is about to crash so I made a Coral Cache mirror here.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:20:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian True Crime mags from the golden age

During WWII, there was a prohibition in Canada on importing luxury goods from abroad -- particularly the USA. This included a ban on pulp magazines and comics (but not on highbrow titles like Harper's, natch -- those were essentials!). This led to a made-in-Canada pulp-publishing boom, during which Canada spawned dozens of True Crime, sci-fi, romance, western and other pulps, and put hundreds of Canadian writers to work on them.

This site is dedicated to the glory years of Canadian True Crime magazine publishing in Canada -- lovely stuff. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rotten.com: our gapingmaw.com and other sites shut in anticipation of 2257

Amended Section 2257 recordkeeping regulations go into effect at midnight tonight. The federal law requires website owners to keep records documenting, among other things, that "every performer portrayed in a visual depiction of actual sexually explicit conduct" is over the age of 18.

In anticipation, porn sites and others that offer adult content are preparing to make their sites compliant -- or taking them offline. Today, several sites in the Rotten.com family are going dark for that reason, including ratemyboner.com (like amihotornot for amateur snapshots of a particular male anatomical part in a particular state) and gapingmaw.com (which you could call an industrial-strength grossout blog).

Section 2257 is ostensibly aimed at preventing the exploitation of minors in pornography. However, some free speech advocates argue it provides the conservative Bush administration with the power to silence other websites deemed offensive. Here's the full text of the law: Link to U.S. Code : Title 18 : Section 2257.

And here is the full text of the enabling regulations which are more widely contested than the US code itself: Link. The amendment was signed into law last month by US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

A message on gapingmaw.com -- which wasn't a porn site, per se, but did include some sexually explicit images -- says:

CENSORED BY US GOVERNMENT 18 USC 2257

Yes, that is correct. The things that used to be here, the very funny things that you want to read, have been made retroactively illegal by the US government, in a side-handed attack on the pornography industry.

We might mention that the material here isn't even pornography as you normally think of it -- this site is just adult humor, in essay format, with some illustrations. The government is mandating that we meet certain bookkeeping requirements, ones impossible to meet for this site. Never mind that those requirements do not actually gain the public anything. This is the strongest attack on free speech since the passage of the CDA, and oddly, the media seems to have hardly noticed. The penalty for not abiding by these bookkeeping requirements is five years prison.

The regulations were promulgated by Alberto Gonzales, US Attorney General appointed by George Bush. If you voted for Bush, this is your fault. If you think this country is free, you are sadly mistaken. No nation has freedom when it is run by religious zealots.

Link to gapingmaw.com article (note: statement is actually dated tomorrow, June 23).

The adult biz advocacy group Free Speech Coalition (FSC) filed a lawsuit last week challenging 2257, and AVN has more on that: Link. Here's an article on adult news site XBiz about last-minute compliance preparations in the porn world: Link

Previously on Boing Boing: Porn Law Draws Adult Sites' Ire

Reader comment: Race says,

In terms of the bookkeeping requirements for Adult film distributors -- each distributor has to keep records on site. That includes social security numbers, driver license scans and other personal information. So lets say you're Paris Hilton (in red light's "one night in Paris"), your personal information is then has to be carried by every distributor that carries that film ( which could be hundreds if not thousands of locations, increasing the likelihood of identity theft, etc -- and not to mention privacy issues). It used to be that the studio producing an adult film would carry that information at their studio. (...) This law is a way for the goverment to control porn.

Mark Haas says,

I'm just coming up to speed on this whole 2257 issue, but I just read the full text of the enabling regulations, and concerning who must keep these records, the text clearly states: "The record-keeping requirements apply to ``[w]hoever produces'' the material in question ... but ["produces"] does not include mere distribution or any other activity which does not involve hiring, contracting for[,] managing, or otherwise arranging for the participation of the performers depicted.'' And so it seems to me that if you are not directly involved in the actual "creation" of the work -- i.e. a web site that displays images someone else created, or a film distributor -- then the record keeping requirements do not apply to you. Am I missing something?

Bad Penny says:

Mark is right that the only ones responsible for keeping the records are those who produce the material, but this amendment makes it unlawful for anyone to "knowingly sell or otherwise transfer" any pornographic material made after the effective date in 1990 without being able to show where the records are held. So while websites with such material are not required to have the records, they are required to know where they are.

Section 4 of the amendment contains the relevant text on this issue:

(4) for any person knowingly to sell or otherwise transfer, or offer for sale or transfer, any book, magazine, periodical, film, video, or other matter, produce in whole or in part with materials which have been mailed or shipped in interstate or foreign commerce or which is intended for shipment in interstate or foreign commerce, which -
(A) contains one or more visual depictions made after the effective date of this subsection of actual sexually explicit conduct; and
(B) is produced in whole or in part with materials which have been mailed or shipped in interstate or foreign commerce, or is shipped or transported or is intended for shipment or transportation in interstate or foreign commerce; which does not have affixed thereto, in a manner prescribed as set forth in subsection (e)(1), a statement describing where the records required by this section may be located, but such person shall have no duty to determine the accuracy of the contents of the statement or the records required to be kept.

Tom Adams says,

There's an aspect to this I haven't seen discussed. Immediately after the Patriot act was in force, there were uses of its provisions against criminals other than terrorists. John Ashcroft defended this, saying that "prosecutors should use all the tools available to them." It seems a small stretch to argue that these new regulations could apply to p2p transfers of adult material. This would open the door to morality based prosecutions of individuals. The Government's Bible Belt equivalent of RIAA suits.

A Rotten.com spokesperson responds:

You are missing the part where "distributor" is redefined to include posting on an internet web site. Re-read the enabling regulations more closely. Yes, it really does that. Specifically the term "secondary producer" is defined to include anyone who posts a digital image on an internet site, under 75.1 (c)(2). Secondary producers are the ones who are now being required to maintain this information. It is no over-reaction.

Romanpoet says:

In addition to ratemyboner.com, another rotten site, ratemyboobies.com has also been censored. Of interest, a site generally considered to be in far worse taste, ratemypoo.com is excepted from the new porn regulations.

(Ed note: I'm told by a Rotten source that this is because "stray cunts" tend to show up on ratemyboobies from time to time. This creates problems with 2257 compliance. But ratemypoo tends to be -- well, pure poo.)

Joe says, "Annalee Newitz has a neat article on 2257... in her classic style."

But wait - there's more. Any site affected by 2257 must also publish a physical address that serves as its "place of business." Someone must be available at that address 20 hours a week just in case a law enforcement officer wants to gain access to those 2257 records. This doesn't seem too onerous if you imagine a Penthouse.com or Vivid Video type of operation. But consider all the mom-and-pop adult Web sites run out of private residences, or Webcam girls who don't turn the cam off when they take someone to bed. These rules mean that your local Webcam girl and our friends over at sex blog Fleshbot.com must publish their physical addresses online, thus leaving performers and writers vulnerable to stalking and harassment. But hey, it's a great full-access wank pass for cops who can't afford to pay for really primo porn sites every month.

Link to Annalee's article.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:46:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nazi sex doll story: das ist bogus

It appears that we must toss the previously-blogged tale of Nazi Sex Doll Borghild (Link) on the dungheap of internet hoaxdom. Boing Boing reader Rochus Wolff says of the fabled proto-robo-ho:

I came across the story about these dolls about a year ago after a Canadian researcher sent an email around asking whether anyone knew anything about this doll apart from what it said on the (now mostly defunct) site borghild.de.

After reading your post, i researched the matter a bit further. The origin of the information that led to your post (via Fleshbot and other blogs) seems to be an article by the widely read but often less-than-accurately-reporting German daily Bild. All the information given is what can be found on the rather odd website borghild.de - the "information" given there can still be found here in an English translation.

Independently of each other, Jens Baumeister and I have concluded from the information available to us, that the "Borghild" story is quite probably a fake. (The German posting on my research is here. Jens has posted his results here. Some of his findings are translated here: Link).
The main problems with "Borghild" are:

- There is no evidence that any of the documents the text talks about ever existed. The Deutsche Hygiene Museum says that of course most records were destroyed in an attack in 1945, but that still no one they talked seems to remember anything about this project. The photographs on borghild.de are clearly fabrications, and the site even acknowledges that.
- The author of borghild.de, "Norbert Lenz", claims to have worked for a number of German magazines - all of which claim not to know a journalist by that name. He is not listed in phone directories, and the only book currently available in Germany by a Norbert Lenz is a book about - ducks.

So in the end it seems like the Nazis were not, after all, planning to equip their soldiers with sex dolls. That hardly comes as a surprise.

Yours truly,
Rochus

Fine, Rochus. Go ahead. Defrag my Borg-hilda dreams with your merciless facts, your heartless "empirical evidence" -- call our lady of latex a lie. But borg love is TRUE. Die sexpuppen der Nazis are forever.

Previously: Nazi sex dolls

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:42:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos: NYC nightlife in the 1970s

A gallery of images by photographer Allan Tannenbaum documenting New York nightlife in the seventies. Many of these were featured in a 2003 book.

From the editorial summary: "The city was bursting with creative activity and things were happening all over. The Arab Oil Embargo was affecting the economy, and the Vietnam War was eroding respect for government." Huh. Wonder what that's like.

Shown here: Rules at the entrance to the orgy room at Plato Retreat's swing club. Link to gallery, contains sexually explicit images (via Fleshbot, where there's more background on where to buy the book: Link)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:41:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Baseball season opens with two innings of Xbox ball on jumbotron

Dan sez, "In a ridiculous publicity stunt, the first two innings of a minor league baseball game between the Kansas City T-Bones and the Schaumburg Flyers will be played 'virtually' -- two video gamers will play MVP Baseball 2005 on an Xbox while the game is broadcast over the video screen and play-by-play is called by the announcers. When the real teams take the field in the third inning, they'll start where the virtual game left off." Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:54:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Serpent handler art

Gary Monroe's charcoal drawings depict religious snake handling practices in Southern Appalachia. Monroe's work will be shown as part of the Big Rock Candy Mountain show opening next month at BB pal Kirsten Anderson's Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle. This piece is titled "Arthur Reaches Into the Deep Light."

From Monroe's artist statement:

An initial impression upon viewing the drawings is the realist documentation of the folk history of Southern Appalachia. Upon reflection however, the viewer discovers the interwoven influence and roles that serpents and snakes have played throughout the course of both Christianity and art history. This interaction is strikingly demonstrated by the use of classical and Renaissance poses for the contemporary realist figures in the drawings. Numerous allusions are made to famous Renaissance and classical works which depict scenes in the history of Christianity and mythology in which serpents played a predominant role. Images and poses of the snake handlers were appropriated from works by Michelangelo, Rubens, Titian, Bronzino, Caravaggio, as well as the sculptors of the Laocoon group. Adding to the eclectic nature of the drawings are the subtle influences of Jackson Pollock, Kasimir Malevich, and Hopi Indian culture.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:38:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BitTorrent web-service launches

Gary sez, "Prodigem (the BitTorrent web service) has opened its doors to the public. Previously you needed an invite to get an account and even then the Marketplace area which we created which allows you to sell your content (if that's your thing) was only open to a limited set of those people. No more. Now anybody can sign up." Link (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog from Antarctica

Simon Coggins has been living in a research station in Antarctica since November 2003. Today he wrote about a Midwinters Day celebration he and his colleagues held. They gave each other some wonderful handmade gifts.

I received an incredible working steam engine, made by Jamie our plumber, which was not only spectacular to watch in action but a work of art too. I made a brass weather vane for Steve which powered a moving figure digging the melt tank. It took a lot of polishing but I'm pleased with the result!

Link (thanks, Tom!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:48:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bollywood album cover gallery

A collection of rare Bollywood LP cover art from the 60's, 70's, and 80's. We've blogged this before in a Web Zen edition, but you can never have enough of this sort of weirdness. I don't know what "Dariya-Dil" means, but it looks infringalicious! Link (thanks, Recon)

Update: Reader Ashfaq Talajawala says, "Dariya-Dil means big-hearted or generous. Literally, Dariya means a river (signifying big) and dil means heart."

Raja Sen says,

The Dariya Dil cover you feature is an awful b-movie with a song called Too Mera Superman (You are my Superman), which features the leading pair, hero Govinda thrusting pelvis in Supe-suit, and 'heroine' Kimi Katkar dressed as (sacrilege!) Spidey. The song takes them from the typical running around trees to a supermarket and finally to a dance floor, with a lot of very badly chromakeyed flying thrown in. Grotesque.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:42:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snapple floods Manhattan with 17.5 tons of frozen kiwi-strawberry slurry

Snapple tried to erect a world-record-breaking 17.5 ton popsicle in New York's Union Square, but the pop suffered a meltdown and flooded Manhattan with tons of sticky frozen slush. On Making Light, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has done an admirable job of collecting quotes from the best of the coverage of the debacle:

In a brave attempt to surpass a Guinness record--"The World's Largest Popsicle"--Snapple mixed and froze a gargantuan icy doppelganger of its new kiwi-strawberry flavored Snapple on Ice. Then the frozen treat was hauled by freezer truck from Edison, N.J., and raised with an enormous crane in Manhattan.

Alas, like James Arness in the 1951 alien thriller "The Thing From Another World," the giant Snapsicle began to melt. Soon pedestrians were fleeing in not-quite terror, fire trucks were converging, and the police were closing off streets to contain the publicity stunt gone wrong.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:14:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slashdot the vote: We're beating back the Broadcast Flag!

Donna sez, "EFF Activism Coordinator Danny O'Brien shares inspiring stats from the 48-hour campaign to stop the Broadcast Flag:

At the beginning of this week, we learned that a Broadcast Flag amendment might slip past the gates in an appropriations bill. It's easy to see how this could happen. Despite strong opposition to the flag in the Internet community, in many circles it's still considered "non-controversial."

But that was Monday evening.

Within the space of a few hours, the committee was Slashdotted, BoingBoinged and Instalanched.

By 6 p.m. on Tuesday, the 27 members of the Senate Appropriations Committee received more than 11,000 emails and faxes. That's nearly 500 faxes an hour. Dianne Feinstein alone received more than 2,600 messages in her inbox. Kay Hutchison, the senior senator for Texas, received 1,441 letters.

And these are just the numbers EFF has. We don't track telephone calls. But we do know that many of you listened when we joined Public Knowledge in urging you to call your senators directly. If you tried to call and the line was engaged, it was likely occupied by someone else griping about the same amendment. Staffers say they were "swamped."

Today, the phone calls, email messages, and faxes continue to flood in. This is a mass protest even without voices from many of the more populous states, which don't have senators on the committee.

Suffice it to say that you don't get that kind of reaction except for very controversial bills. You did it. You got the attention of every senator on the Appropriations Committee.

And so far, it's working.

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:08:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

phonecammed in LA: car covered in computer keys

I drove by this guy on the way to the gym today. His car was covered in a mosaic of little teeny computer keys. It was really neat. You know what would be funny? A bumper sticker that says, "my other car is a keyboard."
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:48:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Massive chair and table public artwork

This 30-foot-tall sculpture, titled The Writer, is currently on display in London's Hampstead Heath. Italian artist Giancarlo Neri, a former pro soccer player for the New York Apollos, says the sculpture is "a monument to the loneliness of writing." Link to BBC News article, Link to press release

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:12:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lions rescue kidnapped girl

Three lions reportedly rescued a 12-year-old girl from her kidnappers in Bita Genet, Ethiopia. The girl had been held captive for seven days by men who intended to force her into a marriage. Police say the lions scared off the kidnappers and stayed to protect her. From the Associated Press:

"They stood guard until we found her and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest," (police sergeant Wondimu Wedajo) said, adding he did not know whether the lions were male or female...

Stuart Williams, a wildlife expert with the rural development ministry, said that it was likely that the young girl was saved because she was crying from the trauma of her attack.

"A young girl whimpering could be mistaken for the mewing sound from a lion cub, which in turn could explain why they (the lions) didn't eat her," Williams said. "Otherwise they probably would have done."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:44:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microsoft vs. Sony at the laundry

Over at AEIOU Excuse My French!, my Parisian pal Alex Boucherot reports on a bit of corporate promotion warfare that took place after Sony opened a PSP showroom called The Factory at Place de l'Etoile. Apparently, Microsoft responded to the opening of the PSP Factory by paying a laundry across the street to display a massive Xbox 360 ad, emblazoned with the phrase "Gardez vos forces pour cet hiver. English translation: "Keep your forces for Winter." (Image left.) Of course, that's when the Xbox 360 is slated to launch. After a day, the stickers came down. (Image right.) "No lawsuit, no scandal, just a big cheque from Sony" to the laundry, Alex writes. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:34:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beloved Toronto singing cowboy/mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, RIP

Sarah sez, "Ben Kerr was a Toronto legend, an elderly busker who stood on the downtown corner of Yonge and Bloor Sts nearly every day, rain or shine, crooning into a karaoke machine and wearing a yellow sweatshirt that said 'Better than Viagra!' Every civic election since 1985 he ran for mayor, and usually grabbed a respectible chunk of the popular vote. He died at his home on Friday." Link (Thanks, Sarah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dear Kansas: Why stop at "Intelligent Design?" What about Spaghetti Monsters?

This open letter to the Kansas School Board takes it to task for teaching "Intelligent Design" (Biblical Creationism tarted up in scientific dress) in schools. The author points out that there are several compeeting theories that Kansas could teach its students, including the popular thesis that the universe was created by a "Flying Spaghetti Monster." There are pictures, too.

I'm sure you now realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory. It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming to long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don't.

Link (Thanks, Susan!)

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

Vintage telephone ad gallery

This gallery of vintage phone ads spans the decades from the 1910s to the 1970s -- the wartime ads of the 1940s are particularily tasty. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pac Man electric guitar

This homebrew Pac Man guitar was built on a dare, but it includes loads of grace-notes: "A variable-speed knob is located on the eyeball so you can synchronize the blinker to the beat." Link (via Make Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:11:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WIPO Development Agenda meeting docs photographed and posted

My cow-orker Ren Bucholz is at the WIPO Development Agenda meeting in Geneva (see yesterday's post), where developing nations like Brazil are attempting to convert WIPO into a humanitarian agency. In addition to taking exhaustive notes on the process, Ren has been photographing the literature handed out by the delegations (shown here: Brazil's list of concrete proposals for reforming WIPO) and posting them -- this is the first time in the history of WIPO that all the handouts at a meeting are being made available to the general public! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:09:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Claim of P2P's demise highly overstated, thoroughly debunked

Entertainment Media Research's bogus study on music downloading concluded that "35% of music listeners are using legal download services, and that the percentage will soon surpass illegal downloads, currently at 40%." A Slashdot reader trashes the bad statistical comparisons here, with remarkable acuity:

This is a classic example of bogus statistics. The two figures have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The 30% of people using legal downloads might be mutually exclusive or totally overlapping with the 40% that use illegal downloads. The numbers need not total to 100% (and could total to more than 100%). At best we can conclude:

1. No greater than 70% of music listeners download music (legal or illegal) -- i.e., as much as 30% of music listeners simply don't download music.
2. No fewer than 40% of music listeners download music (legal or illegal).
3. At most, 30% use both legal and illegal downloads.
4. It's possible (based on this limited data) that no one does both illegal and legal downloading.

In next month's survey, both numbers could go up or down since the survey does not ask "do you ONLY download music from legal/ illegal sources." Moreover, the survey provides no estimates of volumes -- illegal downloaders could be downloading 10X or 10X less than their legal-downloading counterparts. Or people that download legal music could be the biggest "pirates" and this survey would be none the wiser.

Link

Update: More dodgy stats! AV says, "the MPAA released an annoucement about how they, along with a 'California High Tech Task Force' shut down a Southern California DVD processing plant seizing $30 million worth of DVDs.

"However, the processing plant issued its own press release showing how everything was exaggerated.

"The plant claims that the DVDs taken were worth a grand total of $10,540. The DVD copying equipment seized was worth about $15,000. In other words, MPAA's claim of $30 million worth of product seized was exaggerated by a mere 2,000%."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:24:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science booklet for kids teaches copyright instead

Matt picked up a National Geographic science booklet for kids and discovered that it contains subtle propaganda for copyright maximalism:

"Suppose you have permission to photocopy the picture of Paramecium, and you enlarge it to twice its size. Would the magnification of x110 still be correct? Explain."

Note how it says, "suppose you have permission to photocopy the picture," instead of, "suppose you photocopy the picture," or even, "photocopy the picture."

Derrrrrr. Somehow the issue of copyright infringement has made its way explicitly and incongruously into a children's science booklet.

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:58:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disneyland Club 33 1967 prospectus

Check out this scanned-in 1967 prospectus for membership in the then-new Club 33, the secretive exclusive members' club over Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean.

High above the streets and courtyards of New Orleans Square, hidden from public view and the bustle of a typical day at Disneyland, is a page out of old New Orleans that even the proud Creole society might have chosen and cherished as its own.

Here French doors open onto balconies that overlook Disneyland's own muddy Mississippi, the Rivers of America. Here, in the tradition of the good host, Walt Disney and his staff planned and executed Disneyland's most exclusive setting - part elegant dining room, part relaxed refreshment center, part distinguished art gallery, part meeting room and part private showplace.

Everything - from plush furnishings to crystal chandeliers, from original paintings and sketches to a personalized Audio-Animatronic show for members and guests only - has been chosen or specially created for Club 33, by the staff of WED Enterprises and by other Disney artisans.

Here, away from the general public, adult beverages will be available, including the finest of wines to match the food specialities of the house.

Link (Thanks, Kirby!)

Update: Jen points out the club33 Flickr tag for photos of the contemporary Club 33.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:55:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Citizen Journalists' pledge

Dan Gillmor's visionary, compelling Citizen Journalism experiment continues. He's created a sign-up for citizen journalists who want to participate in Bayosphere that is as sweet a code of citizen journalist conduct as you could ask for:

I report and produce news explaining the facts as fairly, thoroughly, accurately and openly as I can.

* Fair: I'm always listening to and taking account of other viewpoints;
* Thorough: I learn as much as I can in the time I have, and point to original sources when possible;
* Accurate: I get it right, checking my facts, correcting errors promptly and incorporating new information I learn from the community;
* Open: I explain my biases and conflicts, where appropriate.

a href="http://bayosphere.com/cjregister">Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:50:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science fictional edition of The Onion

The Onion has posted a science fictional edition from the year 2056. There are some fantastic gags here, a few that fall flat -- by and large, though, this is some funny futurism ("Abraham Lincoln's DNA now available over the counter!" "47th Amendment grants iPod Sufferage!") Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Software patents are bad for coders like literary patents would be for writers

Richard Stallman, creator of the Free Software movement, has written a tremendous essay for the Guardian on the risks of software patents. Richard undertakes a gedankenexperiment about "literary patents" and the impact they would have had on Victor Hugo as he sat down to pen Les Miserables.

Now consider this hypothetical literary patent: Claim 1: a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and subsequently changes his name...

These patents would all cover the story of one character in a novel. They overlap, but they do not precisely duplicate each other, so they could all be valid simultaneously - all the patent holders could have sued Victor Hugo. Any one of them could have prohibited publication of Les Misérables.

You might think these ideas are so simple that no patent office would have issued them. We programmers are often amazed by the simplicity of the ideas that real software patents cover - for instance, the European Patent Office has issued a patent on the progress bar, and one on accepting payment via credit cards. These would be laughable if they were not so dangerous.

Link (Thanks, Phil and Eloisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:35:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's DMCA dissected

On the heels of the introduction of Canada's Bill C-60, a Made-in-Canada version of the DMCA, Michael Geist has posted several long, thoughtful blog posts about the bill's effects on different interests: search engines, ISPs, and P2P users:

While Bill C-60 therefore contains extensive provisions to cover uploading, downloading on peer-to-peer systems remains largely untouched (with the exception described above). Many experts believe that peer-to-peer downloading is covered by the private copying levy, though CRIA disputes that interpretation.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:19:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DRM apologist circumvents DRM

Ernest sez, "DRM proponent and Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg has grown so frustrated with the DRM on Microsoft Reader files that it would appear he has violated the DMCA in order to strip the files of DRM. He only wanted to read the files he had legitimately purchased. 'Our research shows clearly that DRM is only an issue to consumers when it's technology they keep bumping into.' What does that make the DMCA?" Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:12:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Heather Gold on Pride 2005

With San Francisco Pride 2005 coming up this weekend, geek comedian Heather Gold has written an essay about her sense of pride and Pride:

Pride is traditionally the day queer folks take a break from designing and catering other people's parties to have a party of our own. I'm still debating whether I’ll go to the Gay Pride Pride Parade this year. I usually go, but I'm a little hesitant this year. I think it’s because I'm reaching gay middle age, which can begin as early as 25...

Stand proud Gay Parcheesi Players with Hay Fever! You are not alone. Soon, you too will have a float in the parade. And a special flag. This is how we got the new acronym GLBTIQQ. We used to be the gay community. Now, we are the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual, intersex, queer and questioning community. If we really want to be genuinely inclusive, we should add FSP for friendly straight people. And then add some vowels, because they're feeling oppressed and excluded from the acronym. Then add T for Tired, because you're exhausted by the time you get to the end of it. GBLTIQQUOEFSPAT. This is how the Parade got so long.

No one will be left out! Except the numbers. Maybe the genderqueer folks can be the numbers. Or maybe we can just use ?. The Parade is now as long as ?. They should have a halftime break. They can have straight men come out and play football for us.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:11:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

X-37 first flight at Mojave (on SpaceShipOne's anniversary)

The first test flight of the X-37 went off without a hitch today at Mojave airport/spaceport in the California desert. Mojave aviation author and photographer Alan Radecki took some great photos, including the shot here.

At the crack of dawn this morning, Mojave witnessed yet another First Flight, this time of the Boeing/NASA/DARPA X-37 ALTV (Approach and Landing Test Vehicle) carried on a captive-carry flight by Scaled Composites' White Knight. It was exactly one year ago that we were gathered here to witness the first space launch of Scaled's SpaceShipOne. What a way to celebrate an anniversary! The morning started spectacularly, and just as the sun cleared the horizon, the engines started on White Knight. Chase service was performed, as on the SpaceShipOne flights, by Robert Scherer's Starship and Chuck Coleman's Extra 300.

Link to entry on Radecki's blog.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:58:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SAG nixes video game work contract

The Screen Actors Guild's National Executive Committee has voted to reject a new agreement with electronic game publishers. Snip from SAG press release, in which CEO Greg Hessinger is quoted as saying that the union will "now explore [its] options."

SAG's current three-year Interactive contract expired on May 13, 2005. SAG's National Executive Committee had been designated by the Guild national board to consider the tentative agreement, which was reached on June 8. The agreement had been jointly negotiated with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). AFTRA's National Administrative Committee approved the deal last week, and it will go into effect for their members on July 1, 2005. (...)

Negotiations on new Interactive Media Agreements began between the unions and video game companies in February 2005, before breaking off on May 13 when a strike authorization vote was called. Before the authorization vote tally was concluded on June 8, a tentative agreement between the producers and unions was reached. That tentative agreement would have covered the next three-and-a-half years, and included a 36 percent increase in minimum pay over the term as well as increases in benefit contributions. However, the producers refused the unions' demands for implementation of a residual model that would allow actors to share in the enormous revenues generated by the video games they perform in.

Link

Previously: SAG/AFTRA video game strike on the way for Hollywood?, Strike Looms Against Game Makers, Game biz coders want fatter paychecks, too

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:16:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Most shoplifted items

The Food Marketing Institute has ranked the fifty most frequently shoplifted products snatched by organized retail thieves. Organized retail theft (ORT) is "separate and distinct from petty shoplifting in that it involves professional theft rings that move quickly from community to community and across state lines to steal large amounts of merchandise that is then repackaged and sold back into the marketplace." The Top 10 shoplifted items:

#1 Advil tablet 50 ct
#2 Advil tablet 100 ct
#3 Aleve caplet 100 ct
#4 EPT Pregnancy Test single
#5 Gillette Sensor 10 ct
#6 Kodak 200 24 exp
#7 Similac w/iron powder - case
#8 Similac w/iron powder - single can
#9 Preparation H 12 ct
#10 Primatene tablet 24 ct

Link (via Fark and Mahalanobis)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:06:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How long before perishable products pass their prime

Real Simple provides a useful guide to how long dozens of products last. Some examples:

• Ketchup
Unopened: 1 year (After this time, color or flavor may be affected, but product is still generally safe to consume.)
Opened or used: 4 to 6 months (After this time, color or flavor may be affected, but product is still generally safe to consume.)

• Pickles
Unopened: 18 months
Opened: No conclusive data. Discard if slippery or excessively soft.

• Tabasco
5 years, stored in a cool, dry place

• Batteries, alkaline
7 years

• Lipstick
2 years

Link (via MAKE: Blog)

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:48:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anesthetics spur sex dreams

The American Society of Anesthesiologists is warning physicians and nurses that patients might experience intensely vivid sex dreams while under anesthesia. From the Arizona Daily Star:

"Most physicians are not aware of this potential aspect of sedating drugs and anesthetics," said Dr. Robert Strickland, anesthesiologist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. "In the patient's mind, such hallucinations can seem very real upon waking from sedation. In several recent, well-documented cases, physicians have been accused by patients of sexual misconduct, even though witnesses were present throughout the entire procedure."

Although it is almost impossible to verify how often sexual hallucinations occur, some studies indicate it happens in 1 percent to 3 percent of anesthetized patients, Strickland said. With some anesthetic drugs - such as ketamine or propofol - the incidence is up to 5 percent...

(Steven Barker, head of anesthesiology at the University of Arizona Medical Center,) was not alone the day he put a female patient under moderate anesthesia for a minor surgical procedure. He wanted her deeply sedated, but not completely out, so he could maintain verbal contact to check her breathing and other signs.

"At one point, I asked her if there was anything I could get for her, and she said, 'Yeah, a man,'" Barker said. "She then proceeded to describe the sexual characteristics of what she wanted, in a pretty direct way.

"I knew it was the drug, so I just sort of tried to change the subject. We all know these things can happen."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:25:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FCC: NBC's "Law and Order" shoot was out of order

Boing Boing reader Ralph says,

The FCC has busted NBC for unliscensed radio transmissions. NBC was using transceivers that were broadcasting on New York's public safety frequencies while filming an episode of Law and Order.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:23:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Traffic signal prankster

A prankster in Sunnyvale, California has been toying with traffic lights across the city for three months. Police say he or she has turned them to face the wrong way, altered the timing, and made them flash red in all directions. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

"There is evidence that whoever is doing it knows what they're doing," (city spokesman John) Pilger said. "The evidence suggests they're an electrician or have that background. This isn't a high school prank."

Further puzzling investigators is the fact the traffic trickster used a cherry-picker truck to reach an overhead signal spanning a busy intersection -- apparently without anyone being any the wiser, Pilger said. What's more, the practical joker has effortlessly opened the control boxes that contain the signals' electronic guts.

Link (Thanks, Dr. Maz!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:49:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Finkabilia discovered at swap meet by Coop

I was browsing Coop's website in search of devil-babes with which to anoint my eyeballs after today's evangelical sandals and holy snackage -- and stumbled on this. Snip:

Some cool early color Roth waterslide decals that I hadn't seen before. If the '63 copyright is to be believed, these are some early stuff, and definitely pre-Ed Newton art work, too. (...) Most of the catalog is devoted to pages of T-shirt designs, juxtaposed with goofy pictures of The Man hisself.

Link to Coop's Rat Fink snapshots. He found something else at the swap meet, too...

Reader comment: Steve Smith says,

For more Finkabilia, check out the Ed "Big Daddy" Roth official site: Link. Rat Fink Lives!!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:15:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sandals write "Jesus Loves You" in the sand

Shoes of The Fisherman sandals have treads in them that leave the message JESUS LOVES YOU in the sand.
Link (thanks, Janet!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:27:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A solution for Hollywood cake crackdowns and piñata busts?

Among the many colorful solutions proposed by Boing Boing readers to reports of I.P. enforcements against small-time cake bakers and piñata stuffers who fashion kids' goodies without license:

Here's an idea for the Disneys of the world: include a single-use license coupon with every DVD/CD/stuffed animal/whatever sold to the consumer. They would give have this coupon filled out by the business that is making the potentially infringing item--cake, piñata, decoratively carved watermelon--which can then be sent in, just like your standard registration card.

Offer monthly drawings for prizes. Indemnify businesses for custom items thus licensed.

Offer special licenses for businesses with a high number of "referrals" by these coupons. Security features could include serialized bar-codes or RFIDs. Everybody wins. Kids get to eat (or bash) anthropomorphized fish; parents get to have some peace (though no necessarily quiet); small businesses can keep doing what they do without having to hire an IP lawyer for every other order; trademark holders get another means to track and target customers; and most importantly, trademark holders get to maintain, if not increase customer good will.

It's not rocket science. Sigh.

-- Paul TS Lee

Drop the piñata: Hollywood cracks down on unlicensed characters, Copyright cops crack down on cooks over cakes, Hollywood foots bill for LAPD spy cams

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:42:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Another thumb-shaped thumbdrive

Here's a more realistic version of a thumb-shaped thumbdrive, which Cory wrote about last November.
Link (thanks, Bonnie!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:17:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

People google "I am lonely" form a community on top result page

Randomly, the top Google result for "I am lonely" is a message board on a site for video codecs. People who typed "I am lonely" into Google have taken over the board and formed an ad-hoc community. Seven Sixty-seven pages of posts!

I too was a victum of google and got to this thread. I am not really lonely just wish I had better friends. one of my good friends told my x-girlfriend(we were still friends after we broke up) a lie that I cheated on her while we were together. the girl was pissed because I told my best friend (who she was dateing) about how she was bragging that they weren't dateing anymore. I turned out that my best friend thought they were still dateing and they argue. girl gets pissed. screws up my friendship with my x (who I had known and cared about for about 2 1/2 years) and now she never looks at me the same. Worst of all my best friend backed up her story (this is a week after I talked to my best friend abut his girl). so my best friend (who I was trying to help in the first place) betrayed me. Limp bizkit once said " it's all about the he said she said bullll sh1t." and now I beleive him.

Link (via Waxy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:57:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Treknologies: reviews of gear for travelers

Treknologies is a blog that covers equipment, books, and resources for amateur explorers. Recent posts include a round-up of portable solar chargers, and looks at GPS-based speedtrap detectors, travel guitars and ukuleles. The stuff they write about would be of interest even to people whose idea of an adventure is a walk around the block.

I run my equipment quite hard, and if you're like me then ICP's PowerFlex is the only solution that you should consider. It is constructed of lightweight, ultra-flexible CIGS solar cells and designed to take a beating. ICP produces 5, 10, 20 and 40 watt versions of the PowerFlex, all of which are capable of being daisy-chained together via plug & play side connectors. These would be great for draping over the rear of your backpack, providing you on-the-go charging of all your electronics or batteries.

[snip]

CVS has introduced a new single use DVD-quality video camera system. The innovative camera allows up to 20 minutes of DVD-quality video and sound recording, as well as playback and deletion of recorded clips via a 1.4" color screen. At $30 these little cameras could be indispensable to the average adventurer or traveler. The $30 price tag and one-time use means you don't have to feel bad about strapping it to the front of a car or motorcycle--or worry about the Vietnamese humidity ruining a nicer camera.

Link

Update: Treknologies publisher Beau Gunderson says: "I am talking to Erden Eruç tomorrow and would like to give boingboing readers a chance to ask him a few questions. Erden is the man behind Around-n-Over and the Six Summits project. He is using human power to cross six continents and the oceans between them -- and climbing the highest peaks on each of the six continents he will visit. I'm not sure how many I'll get a chance to ask but I will do my best to get the best ones answered."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:50:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots take over NYC deli

Gavin sez, "This group called LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots) took over an abandoned delicatessen and have installed lots of miniature musical instruments, all run by remote control from a laptop. Some of them are as simple as a mallet hitting a bucket, while others are more elaborate. Every few minutes, they spring to life, playing a really cool percussion symphony of miniature bot music. They have a lot of cool audio and video downloads, although they don't communicate the full flavor of walking around in an environment populated by these clattering bots. They've taken over the former MVP Deli in the financial district of New York City (43 John Street), and will have the display up through the end of the week." Previously on Boing Boing: GuitarBot Strums Classics at Juilliard Link (Thanks, Gavin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:47:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Biblically-themed snacks

When Linsday was at the Orlando airport on her way home from TechEd 2005, she took photos of some snacks featuring characters from the Old Testament. It's a pretty good idea. For one thing, I imagine Florida has a lot of fundamentalist Christians, and for another, the company doesn't have to pay anyone for character licensing fees. The products' names include Noah's Nuggets, Abraham's Bosom, Rachel's Delight, Sweet Shalom, and Bar of Judah. I suspect the manufacturer of these snacks has a pretty good sense of humor.
Link (thanks, TAD!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:36:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Trek pledge of allegiance gets kid suspended

A young Star Trek fan was suspended from school for reciting his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance, in which he pledged to the United Federation of Planets. His mom has posted the hilarious story:

"So, anyway. What did he do?" I picked at the hem of my sweatshirt, looked just to the right of her face. I couldn't meet her eyes. I felt nervous. I felt underdressed. I wondered where 8 was.

So she told me what he did. And as she told me, I started to laugh. I didn't laugh a little, either, but I belly-laughed and grabbed my stomach. My son stood with his class this morning, put small right hand over heart, faced the American flag, and recited his own personal pledge of allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.

"Mrs. Jaworski. This isn't humorous. The Pledge is an extremely important and patriotic moment each morning in the classroom. I am ashamed of your son's behavior, and I hope you are, too."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:35:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons celebrates FreeCulture.org's birthday with a song

In April 2004, a group of Swarthmore students got politicized when they were threatened with copyright lawsuits for posting a leaked whistleblower memo that documented Diebold's voting machine malfeasance. They founded the Free Culture movement, which is now a honest-to-goodness global phenom at campuses all over the planet.

As a birthday celebration, the Creative Commons folks have gotten copyfighters around to the world to sing Happy Birthday -- a song that is, incredibly, still in copyright and controlled by Warners -- created a techno-mix, and posted it.

Creative Commons wanted to find an appropriate way to celebrate. So we put together this version of "Happy Birthday," sung by, we might say, some of the leaders of the free world (The EFF Staff, Mitch Kapor, Dan Gillmor, Brian Behlendorf, Ian Clarke, Jimmy Wales, Brewster Kahle, and Gigi Sohn). Of course, to do this, we had to license the rights from Harry Fox (who represent Warner Chappell Music, the copyright owner of the composition) — yes, "Happy Birthday" is still under copyright — but the folks at Harry Fox were willing to give us a pretty good deal. Unfortunately, that deal does not transfer, so while you're free to download this version and play it "for personal use", and free to engage in any "fair use" of the song, the rights we have to give don't include much more than that.

Link (via Lessig)

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

Microchip pioneer Jack Kilby Dies at 81

Snip:

Nobel laureate Jack Kilby, whose 1958 invention of the integrated circuit opened the way for the microchips that are the brains of today's computers, video games, DVD players and cell phones, has died after a battle with cancer. He was 81. Kilby died Monday, according to Texas Instruments, where Kilby worked for many years.

Link (Thanks, Woozle)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:52:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joel on Software's favorite software essays in a book

Joel "on Software" Splosky put together a Best of Software Writing anthology filled with articles he's cadged from blogs and other web-writing (he kindly included my Boing Boing post on Notice and Takedown regimes in Canada). The contributor list is fantastic:

Ken Arnold, Leon Bambrick. Michael Bean, Rory Blyth, Adam Bosworth, danah boyd, Raymond Chen, Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi, Cory Doctorow, ea_spouse, Bruce Eckel, Paul Ford, Paul Graham, John Gruber, Gregor Hohpe, Ron Jeffries, Eric Johnson, Eric Lippert, Michael Lopp, Larry Osterman, Mary Poppendieck, Rick Schaut, Aaron Swartz, Clay Shirky, Eric Sink, why the lucky stiff

The book is out now -- I'm looking forward to getting my copy!

The software development world desperately needs better writing. If I have to read another 2000 page book about some class library written by 16 separate people in broken ESL, I’m going to flip out. If I see another hardback book about object oriented models written with dense faux-academic pretentiousness, I’m not going to shelve it any more in the Fog Creek library: it’s going right in the recycle bin. If I have to read another spirited attack on Microsoft’s buggy code by an enthusiastic nine year old Trekkie on Slashdot, I might just poke my eyes out with a sharpened pencil. Stop it, stop it, stop it!

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:48:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Winner of Second Life contest to design Cory's book

On July 24, I'll be appearing in the online world Second Life to do a book signing/launch for my new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. The Second Lifers have been conducting a contest to see who can come up with the coolest in-game programmed book-object to decant the novel into, and they've picked a winner:

Falk Bergman was the first to bring me by to have a look at his prototype in development, a giant book positioned next to a seat. Sitting on it automatically fixes your camera position in place, to give you the best possible view of the book.

"The viewer in-world itself is very simple," Falk tells me modestly. "It is basically a shopping agent with two displays that hooks into Page Up and Down [on the keyboards] for changing the pages."

Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

Update: Dragonpage radio have recorded a podcast with me about the book and it went live today. Here's the MP3 link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:36:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dubailand: world's largest themepark EVAR

Dubai, a city that is practically a themepark already, is building the world's largest, most expensive, most luxurious themepark, EVAR, called "Dubailand" (what else?). You can tell from the website alone that this is going to be something: vacuous, content-free Flash site, with all the major info hidden behind PDFs and (ugh-ptui!) a Real video. Now notice the "worlds" of Dubailand: "Downtown," "Eco-Tourism," "Retail and Entertainment," "Attractions and Experience," "Sports and Outdoor" and "Themed Leisure and Vacation." Retail and Entertainment? Now that's some forthright theming! Check out the bumpf, especially the FAQs!

Retail & Entertainment World will provide a critical mass of retail facilities providing a wide variety of global brands but also unique boutiques and discount stores, all within the biggest mall in the world - the Mall of Arabia. Entertainment and dining facilities will complement the retail facilities through encouraging tourists to extend the length of their stay at Dubailand, thereby creating further opportunities for purchases....

How many people would be working at Dubailand when it is fully operational?
Dubailand will seek to employ around 300,000 working individuals by 2018 from the various projects in it.

How many visitors a day are you expecting when fully operational?
At peak operational capacity, we have forecast a footfall of some 200,000 visitors a day.

What kind of per capita spend is projected for visitors?
The rates will be an average of USD 100 per day per person not including hotel stay.

Has any study been done on the environmental impact of such a large project in almost virgin desert?
The masterplan has been based on a philosophy of maintaining as much as possible the environmental integrity of the land designated for Dubailand’s development.

How will you maintain the law and order of large crowds?
Dubailand will be coordinating with Dubai Police on relevant security issues.

Link (Thanks, Neal!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:10:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ghanian popculture wax-print fabrics

Garth sez, "This a flickr photo set of wax-printed fabric that my girlfriend just brought back from Ghana. The Ghanaians that she bought the fabric from tended never to notice the objects that were printed on the fabric--they all served as abstractions. She wasn't able to track down her holy grail--a fabric printed with roasting chickens! You'll have to settle for batteries, umbrellas, lipstick...and a first aid kit." Link (Thanks, Garth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:58:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UPDATE: USA Networks "Dead Zone" screensaver not a keystroke logger

Allegations that a keystroke logger was embedded within the promotional screensaver for the USA Networks show "Dead Zone" have been debunked by a few knowledgeable Boing Boing readers who examined the code. Link, and a post-mortem is coming soon on why the code triggered a false positive. Special thanks to Dave Maynor of Internet Security Systems who completed the reversal.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:20:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Applied Minds Think Remarkably

I filed a report for Wired News today on the goings-on inside R&D firm Applied Minds, founded by former Disney Imagineers Bran Ferren (at right in the snapshot I took below) and Danny Hillis (left).

We walk through a series of curving white hallways punctuated with oddities -- remnants of spaceships over here, posters from turn-of-the-century traveling magic shows over there. We enter a dark room that vibrates with a quiet, electronic purr. In the middle stands a table covered with a vivid, full-color map bathed in light from an overhead projector.

"This is something I've always dreamed about," says Hillis, grinning widely. "I always loved big paper maps I could spread out on a table, but later I loved computer screens because you can make them dance for you. This combines both."

He taps the map surface and sweeps his hands apart, as if he's swimming. The Earth zooms closer. North America becomes California, then Los Angeles, then we see tiny parking spaces with human silhouettes. He drags a finger, and the map sweeps east; he drags it another direction, and the world follows.

Both hands scoop together, and we fly back out again. He squeezes the world into a ball and spins it. He pauses, and looks up at me. "Your mouth is dropping open!" he laughs.

A few paces away, Hillis demos another high-tech map table -- at the flick of a button, this one bursts into life. Mountains rise up, valleys drop down, seas flatten. Underneath the map's synthetic material surface, a system of pins raise or lower in groups to dynamically form shapes. I pet a mountain, then trace down a bumpy ravine with my index finger, and caress a smooth riverbed. My jaw remains open. The "Earth" feels alive.

Hillis explains that this device is called the 2.5-D display, and was developed with Northrop Grumman. "They've used the first ones internally," Hillis shrugs. "We don't know what we're going to do with it yet."

Link

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

Geek jobs open for open source TV publisher

Downhill Battle's Nicholas Reville sez,

We're announcing 3 new job openings at Participatory Culture to help us develop our video player application and the web applications that will dovetail with it. You'll be joining a small but awesome team of developers.

The other day we blogged about some early adopters of the platform that are getting video channels ready, including Current (Al Gore's new cable channel), Pancake Mountain (amazing DC kids show), and SEIU (fastest growing union in the US). There's a bunch of others under way as well. One of the channels we're most excited about is a new independent music video channel called telemusicvision that a friend of ours is putting together.

Link (Thanks, Nicholas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:07:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Notes from fight to turn WIPO into a humanitarian agency

Today, WIPO (the UN body in charge of copyright, patent and trademark treaties) met for the second time to discuss the "development agenda" -- a proposal to use copyrights and patents to improve the lot of developing nations. India, Brazil, Argentina and others have proposed substantive reforms to the organization, and the delegations spent the day wrangling over how -- or whether -- to tackle them. The proposal, called the "Friends of Development" proposal, is designed to put developing nations front and center at WIPO, but some countries (like the UK), are calling for this vital document to be buried in a committee that meets every two years, which lacks any read mandate. If the UK and its allies win, no progress will be made on turning WIPO into a real humanitarian agency until this moribund committee is brought back from the dead and made effective.

My colleague Ren Bucholz was there are took extensive notes. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robo-legs

A recent New York Times profile about a young man named Cameron Clapp. At the story link, you'll find photographs of the high-tech robotic prostheses that this teen amputee uses for greater mobility. Below, a photo I took of Cameron at Wired Magazine's NEXTFEST last year (more pics).

BLOND and buff, Cameron Clapp is a teenage star. Dressed fashionably in a faded T-shirt, baggy shorts and sneakers, he recently strolled the crowded sidewalks of Times Square. He walked confidently, flashing the megawatt smile that brightens his Web site and various photographs in newspapers and magazines that have chronicled his story as he travels the country.

Few, if any, of the onlookers had little idea that he is the poster manchild of a new generation of people who are not only embracing all types of breakthrough technologies but also incorporating them into their bodies. For people who see Cameron Clapp for the first time, he is an object of wonderment: a young man walking and talking tall on shiny robotic legs.

"I make it look easy," said Mr. Clapp, who is 19 and still shows flickers of the cocky skater boy he was before he became what he calls "a severe case."

Mr. Clapp lost both his legs above the knee and his right arm just short of his shoulder after falling onto train tracks almost five years ago near his home in Grover Beach, Calif. After years of rehabilitation and trying a series of prosthetics, each more technologically sophisticated than the last, he finally found his legs.

"I do have a lot of motivation and self-esteem," Mr. Clapp said, "but I might look at myself differently if technology was not on my side." In the last few years, technology has definitely been on his side, in the form of the C-Leg. Introduced by Otto Bock HealthCare, a German company that makes advanced prosthetics, the C-Leg combines computer technology with hydraulics. It literally does the walking for the walker.

Link to story, and here is Cameron's website. (Thanks, Berny Clapp, and Susannah Breslin!)

And a friend of the Clapp family shares this link to Cameron's newly-minted flickr account, where he'll be posting snapshots from all the places his "robo-legs" take him. Link (thanks, Richard Boult!)

Previously on Boing Boing -- Xeni on NPR: Computer limbs help trilateral amputee run again, and After saturation coverage of Olympics, why no Paralympics TV coverage in US?

Reader Comment: Kevin Cantrell reminds us that "Cameron was a major character in HBO's tragically cancelled Carnivale. Cameron played "management." Just another accomplishment for him. Link to show website, and it's also on his news blog." (Ed. note: why oh why oh why was that show nuked? ‹le sigh›.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:54:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hard drive case with USB hub and card-reader

This hard drive enclosure doubles as a USB hub and triples as a multi-function card-reader. If only it were about half the size and bus-powered, it'd go straight in my gadget bag.

MX-3 is a multifunction drive kit which works as USB2 Hard Drive/ 7in1 Memory Card Reader/ USB2 Hub in one unit.

It can read and write 7 types of memory cards including MMC, SD, MS, MS PRO, CF and MD.

You can use the extra USB port as a Hub connecting any kind of USB devices. As the USB port provides 5V- 500mA, you may use bus-powered USB devices without external power adapter.

Link (via Red Ferret)

Update: Stewart says that you can get cases like this in all shapes and sizes in Hong Kong, and provides a link to info about one he scored. Sounds like a sweet device: "Functionally, it couldn't be simpler: it displays the amount of free space on the hard drive when you press the On/Off button. Insert a card, and it displays the amount of data on the card. Press Copy and it copies the data from the card to the hard drive (note: it creates a new directory on the hard drive every time, so there’s no risk of filename clashes and unintended overwrites). It leaves the card intact, so I delete the photos off the card using my camera."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BitTorrent creator cuts up Microsoft's Avalanche paper

A couple days back, Microsoft announced Avalanche, a made-in-Redmond alternative to the wild-and-wooly BitTorrent, the protocol that now takes the lion's share of Internet traffic. Bram Cohen, BitTorrent's creator, has posted an in-depth debunking of the assumptions made by the Avalanche paper.

The central idea here is basically 'Let's apply error correcting codes to BitTorrent'. This isn't a new idea, everybody comes up with it. In fact I saw fit to mention that it's a dubious idea before. (Some people will point out that 'error correcting codes' isn't the right term for the latest and greatest of this sort of technology, to which I say 'whatever'.) The main reason that this is a popular idea is that recent work in error correcting techology is very cool. While it is very cool, and very applicable to sending information across lossy channels, the case for using it in BitTorrent is unconvincing.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:15:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Liveblogging from a paraglider

Eirik sez, "Gunhild Sørensen of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation just did a spectacular ride in a paraglider. All the way she posted directly to the blog at the Norwegian Broadcasting Coropration's web site." Link (Thanks, Eirik!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The art of Esao Andrews

I've never met a Flash website interface I liked — until now. Artist Esao Andrews' site is fast loading and fun. He's also a great artist.
Link (Here's an interview with Esao) (thanks, Angstrom!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:27:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dead online game resurrected by dumpster-diving its servers

Fans of Castle Infinity, an early, defunct massively multiplayer game, brought their virtual home back from the grave by sneaking into the company's dumpsters, rescuing the servers that the game lived on, and starting them up again. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:48:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fresh Daily Show clips

CommonBits is hosting a fresh bunch of Daily Show clips as torrents:

* Patriot Act Two and Debate on Gitmo Torture
* Interview with Flynt Leverett author of Inheriting Syria
* Bill Frist retracts his diagnosis of Terry Schiavo
* Jon Stewart on using Hitler to slam your opponents
* Interview with Kenneth Timmerman author of Countdown to Crisis, the coming nuclear showdown with Iran
* Interview with Larry Diamond author of Squandered Victory (you guessed it - about Iraq)
* Guantanamo Baywatch - more Gitmo Torture

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:37:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Combining US census and Google Maps

A reader writes, "Jimmy Palmer [ed: editor of the fine DRM Blog] combined 2000 census data with Google maps. The result is that you can now see how many people live in any area in the United States. You can even see how many people live on a single city block." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:34:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Darknet: How an Intel VP broke federal law to talk to Congress

JD Lasica is the author of Darknet, an excellent new book on the copyfight (the cover blurb I provided for it: "The entertainment companies are stealing your future -- robbing you blind with locks and laws and rhetoric that tunrs anyone who makes and shares culture without their permission into a crook. Get mad, get even, get on the darknet and *fight back*."). He's posting excerpts from the book on his site.

This excerpt deals with the presentation that Intel VP Donald Whiteside made to Congressional panels on the way in which copyright is limiting the technology industry, and how he had to break federal law to do normal, everyday things.

"I used a program to copy a few seconds from the DVD of the movie Rudy," he said. "It's the scene showing the final game of the Notre Dame season with Rudy's family in the stands cheering wildly when he got to play. I then spliced in some snippets of pro players doing a touchdown dance from NFL Films, and I overlaid it with audio from 'Who Let the Dogs Out?'

"I stitched this all together with video of my son, and it turned out to be the piece of home video that gets watched the most in our house. When relatives or members of the football team come over, we pop it in and we just laugh. The added scenes and music really bring it all to life."

There was just one problem. "It turns out to do this, I violated the DMCA. I used the DeCSS program to circumvent the encryption and access the movie clips on the DVD that I own," Whiteside told the aides. "The end product is a DVD that I don't sell or distribute but is considered a derivative work under copyright law."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:28:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's DMCA introduced

The Canadian government has introduced a Made-in-Canada version of the US DMCA, a sweeping copyright law that creates a thicket of new rights for entertainment companies, reserving precious little rights for the public.

There is simply no denying that the lobbying efforts of the copyright owners, particularly the music industry, have paid off as they are the big winners in this bill. The bill focuses almost exclusively on creating new rights for this select group including a new making available right, legal protection for technological protection measures, legal protection for rights management information, the ability to control the first distribution of material in tangible form, new moral rights for performances, a reproduction right for performers, and an adjustment in the term of protection for sound recordings. The bill also includes a statutory notice and notice system that will virtually compel Internet service providers to notify subscribers of alleged copyright infringements and to retain relevant personal information for 6 months.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:22:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory speaking in Cambridge, UK next Weds

Next Wednesday, June 29, I'm speaking on Europe's coming Broadcast Flag in Cambridge, England, at the Communications Research Network/Communications Futures Program Bi-Annual Conference. Attendance is free -- hope to see you there!

At the Plenary Day on Wednesday 28 June, delegates will hear the latest results from the CRN and CFP working groups on Broadband, QoS, Viral, DoS-Resistant, Core-Edge, Spectrum, Security and Photonics. The Plenary day will be of particular interest to CEOs, CTOs and board level decision makers, looking to get up to speed on the communication industry's cutting-edge in the shortest possible time.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:10:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 20, 2005

Accidental earwax sculpture

Jason Torchinsky was cleaning his ear canal with a twisted piece of tissue paper recently. When he pulled it out for inspection, he was surprised to see that the bits of earwax stuck on the tissue looked like a little man's head. So cute!
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:28:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ringtone of Philippine prez fixing election wildly popular

A ringtone featuring a clip of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo fixing her election is sweeping the Philippines.

Text message consumer rights group TXTpower said its site (www.txtpower.org) had been overwhelmed by demand for the clip taken from a recording at the centre of allegations Arroyo tried to fix the result of last year's election...

In the full conversation, which the government says was illegally wiretapped and then doctored, a woman who sounds like Arroyo asks senior election official Virgilio Garcillano whether she would win by more than 1 million votes in a southern area.

Link (via Smartmobs)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:26:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

URGENT: Call your Senator RIGHT NOW or live with the goddamned Broadcast Flag forever!

Danny sez,

We've heard rumors that the Broadcast Flag that Cory, the EFF, and a coalition of pressure groups have fought so hard against (and beat in the courts) will be sneaked back via an amendment to the giant Senate Appropriations Bill in a sub-committee at 2PM EST on Tuesday 21st. This week is Hollywood's last chance to ram the flag past Congress, and they're working hard to get it under the radar.

There's no time to write letters or start a media campaign: but folk in the states below have just enough time to warn their senators, who are all on the sub-committee. People of Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin - it's up to you!

There's a sample script after the phone list. Remember: be cool, collected and polite. Most of these senators won't know a thing about the flag, until one of them makes it a throwaway amendment tomorrow. Make sure their ears twitch when they hear "broadcast flag" today.

ALABAMA Senator Richard Shelby (202) 224-5744
ALASKA Senator Ted Stevens (202) 224-3004
HAWAII Senator Daniel Inouye (202) 224-3934
IOWA Senator Tom Harkin (202) 224-3254
KANSAS Senator Sam Brownback (202) 224-6521
KENTUCKY Senator Mitch McConnell (202) 224-2541
MARYLAND Senator Barbara Mikulski (202) 224-4654
MISSOURI Senator Christopher Bond (202) 224-5721
NEW HAMPSHIRE Senator Judd Gregg (202) 224-3324
NEW MEXICO Senator Pete Domenici (202) 224-6621
NORTH DAKOTA Senator Byron Dorgan (202) 224-2551
TEXAS Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (202) 224-5922
VERMONT Senator Patrick Leahy (202) 224-4242
WASHINGTON Senator Patty Murray (202) 224-2621
WISCONSIN Senator Herb Kohl (202) 224-5653

"Hello, Senator _________'s office"

"Hi, I'm a constituent. [Remember: Only say 'I'm a constituent' if you really are -- if you're calling the Senator from _your own state_] I'm registering my opposition to the broadcast flag amendment being introduced in the Senate Commerce Justice and Science Appropriations subcommittee mark-up on Tuesday, and in full committee on Thursday."

(*** You can give your own reasons for opposing the flag here. Here's a sample: ***)

"The Broadcast Flag cripples any device capable of receiving over-the-air digital broadcasts."

"It give Hollywood movie studios a permanent veto over how members of the American public use our televisions."

"It forces American innovators to beg the FCC for permission before adding new features to TV."

"It will prevent fair use of copyrighted works: critical review, and use of material in distance learning"

"This is an important issue which will affect all Americans, and should not be inserted in a large bill, at the last moment, with no debate."

"Please oppose the broadcast flag amendment. My name and address are ___________________."

"Thank you for your time."

Good luck!

Link (Thanks, Danny!)

Update: You can now fax and email appropriation committee members for free at the EFF's action center. Do it tonight, or live with the consequences of a Hollywood veto over your PC forever.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:08:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Screenwriter of cancelled, leaked Warren Ellis pilot marvels at his fanbase

Flynn sez, "The unaired pilot for the tv show 'Global Frequency' was leaked on the net. Global Frequency [ed: from the brilliant Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis comic] is an active 'smartmob' consisting of 1001 people organized through advanced cellphones who respond to global emergencies and phenomena ranging from Heaven's Gate-esque cults to rogue military operations."

Global Frequency screenwriter John Rogers has been posting a series of bittersweet and amazed entries to his blog about what it's like to have a burgeoning fan-base for a show that never got picked up, never aired, and only exists as illegal art:

I'd also like to remind you that illegal file-sharing is a bad, bad thing, and I in no way encourage it. All references to downloading sites will be immediately deleted from the this website. You, despite your enthusiasm, should be ashamed of yourselves. Ashamed.

Now, for a small sample for the suits (no links, and I think you know why) of responses from your emails, comments, and websites and messageboards around the world:

"one of the smartest and stylish pilots I've seen in all my years of watching the goggle box ... [If] the DVD comes out I'll have link to Amazon and a write-up on the show."

"Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank everyone for me, will you. Thank you all so much. Thank you. If you haven't noticed, I cannot stop saying this: thank you."

Link (Thanks, Flynn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:05:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

War of the Worlds webcomic

Dave sez, "I'm an editor at Dark Horse Comics and I'm working on a free online adaptation of H. G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' by writer Ian Edginton and artist D'Israeli. When all is said and done the adaptation will be about 120 or so online pages. Right now the first twelve pages are up. We'll be adding new pages weekly." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:55:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Starbucks mermaid: from dirty 15th C engraving to sanitized logo

Deadprogrammer sez, "An illustrated history of the Starbucks Siren logo, from the original 15th century engraving with naked chest, fat belly and spread tail-legs to the current sterilized "family friendly" version." Link (Thanks, Deadprogrammer!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:50:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Squatter City blog

Robert Neuwrith, the author of the stupendous Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World has a blog where he documents his ongoing research on squatter cities.

Consider this: "As police in full riot gear moved in to torch shacks using petrol, many residents tore down their own homes to salvage some of the building materials." Victoria Muchenje, whose shack in Mbare, a densely populated township just outside Harare, was destroyed in the government pogrom, told the IWPR, "We are suffering, we have nowhere to go. Our children are not going to school, we are sleeping outside everywhere. If you walk, everywhere you see people sleeping in the road."

Link (Thanks, Simone!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:48:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CommonTunes: torrent hosting community for open music

Jeff sez, "CommonTunes.org, a community directory of freely distributable music, has been released to the wild as a beta this weekend. CommonTunes features music which can be freely redistributed. Users, bands and music bloggers can upload their own music for distribution via BitTorrent or link to legitimate hosted files on other sites and share the feeds as podcasts with friends." Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:44:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Self-gaming video

BB pal Eric Paulos points to an animated gif video of a guy who "games himself into himself." Link

UPDATE: Thanks to all the readers who informed me that this video is the work of David Packer. High quality versions of this piece, titled "FPS," and his other recursive masterpieces are available at his site. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:16:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Drop the piñata: Hollywood cracks down on unlicensed characters

Piñatas fashioned after popular cartoon characters and sold by small-time street vendors are the subject of a new legal crackdown by big entertainment companies including Disney.

The two men browsing in Benjamin Santoyo's downtown Los Angeles produce store acted like many of his customers, not so much interested in fruit and vegetables as in the enormous pinatas of Winnie the Pooh, The Incredibles, and an orange fish named Nemo, all bobbing from a string tied to the ceiling. But theirs was an undercover visit on behalf of Disney Enterprises Inc. and four other entertainment industry giants aiming to stop the sale of counterfeit pinatas just as the bust-it-up party activity has become about as mainstream at Southland kids parties as cake, streamers and tortilla chips.

Disney and the other companies, in what experts said was an understandable move to protect their popular cartoon and character properties, filed copyright and trademark infringement lawsuits against Santoyo and another nearby shop owner for allegedly selling the counterfeit pinatas.

Although Santoyo settled last month for an undisclosed sum, word of the legal action against these two small Los Angeles vendors — who peddle their wares in an informal pinata district centered along Olympic Boulevard and Central Avenue — has reverberated through the garages, backyards and warehouses of pinata makers as far away as Santa Ana, who worry that they too will be targeted. But will they stop making the images of Cinderella and Dora?

"Without that, we don't have much of a business," said South Los Angeles pinata maker Marta Garcia. "We need to be careful, but it's hard because the demand is for the characters on television and in the theaters."

Link. Previously: Copyright cops crack down on cooks over cakes, Hollywood foots bill for LAPD spy cams

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:52:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USA Networks' "The Dead Zone" screensaver logs keystrokes? Update: NO.

Update: no keylogger here, according to folks who've parsed the code. Details at end of post.

A sekrit Boing Boing source in Hollywood says, "A USA network show I used to work on has distributed a screensaver to fans of the show that secretly logs their keystrokes." Link to a discussion board thread in which fans of the show who downloaded the screensaver discuss this allegation. According to reports, the file has since been removed from distribution by USA. Anybody out there have a copy of the file, or have proof whether this is true or hoax?

Reader comment: Joe Moore says:

I downloaded the Season 3 screensaver from The Dead Zone show, and found something strange. I pulled the setup file for the Season 3 screensaver (available here) and ran it through a program called ICY Hexplorer, and saw something weird. There's a reference in the install file to a parody site of Marisleysis Gonzalez (Link), who is a cousin of Elian Gonzales, the kid a few years ago who was deported back to Cuba. Why was this site in the .EXE file for the install of The Dead Zone Season 3 screensaver, I have NO idea at all!!! You can see a screenshot of me having the file open in ICY Hexplorer here: Link. It lists the parody website, then her first name. Just strange! No idea yet on if there's a key logger or not, though.

Update: Dan Kaminsky is one of several Boing Boing readers who've taken a close look at the code and say there is no keystroke logger within. "Move along, nothing to see here," says Dan.

Special thanks to Dave Maynor of Internet Security Systems who completed the reversal.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:46:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World's Gayest logos

Snipped from Radar:

When MTV Networks’ new gay channel LOGO debuts this month, it will join a kicky set of companies whose trademarks — intentionally or not — are a little light in their serifs.

link (thanks Andrew)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:43:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Illicit Mickey Mouse Melon carving spotted

Mark Hurst says, "Spotted this past weekend at a Long Island wedding. I doubt if the venue paid the licensing fee." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:32:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jewelry from severed doll body parts

Necklaces, rings, bracelets, and brooches made from doll body parts. I'm partial to the chokers comprised of breasts in varied skin tones, and the and Barbie-ass armbands.
Link (Thanks, Violet Blue!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:24:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orgasms "turn off" part of female brains

Scientists report that parts of a woman's brain switch off when she has an orgasm, including regions involved with emotion. Neuroanatomists from the University of Gronigen ran PET scans on women as they were resting, getting diddled by their partner's fingers, experiencing the "big O," or faking it. From New Scientist:

“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,” says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands....

As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, compared with the resting state...

In one sense the findings appear to confirm what is already known, that women cannot enjoy sex unless they are relaxed and free from worries and distractions. "Fear and anxiety levels have to go down for orgasm. Everyone knows this but we can see it happening in the brain," (Holstege) explains.

From an evolutionary point of view, it could be that the brain switches off the emotions during sex because at such times the chance to produce offspring becomes more important than the survival risk to the individual. Holstege points to the extraordinary behaviour seen in some animals during the breeding season, such as March hares, when the urge to mate seems to override the usual fear of predators.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:52:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Portable rotary phone preview

Over at the MAKE: Blog, Phil Torrone says:

"I've been having a lot of fun with the Portable Rotary Phone from Spark Fun Electronics. It's a GSM cell phone built inside an old rotary phone. You pop your SIM card in, it dials out, rings and acts just like an old fashion phone, but it's now my full time cell phone. I'll have a full review of it up soon, and will be using it at Gnomedex this week in Seattle. For now- check out the photos and video I shot so far..."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:22:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

One puppy, six legs, two penises

A puppy with six legs and two penises was found on Thursday snoozing outside a Chinese temple in the Malaysian town of Pandamaran, south of Kuala Lumpur. Malaysian news service The Star Online reports that devotees at the Kwang Sung Temple have named the puppy Ong Fatt, meaning "Lucky One." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:12:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Cory's novel is out!

Last week, my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town started turning up in bookstores. It's another fine Tor hardcover, with jaw-droppingly beautiful cover art by genius Dave McKean to boot. This is a physical artifact worth owning. Hell, buy two.

As with my first and second novels, I've posted the entire text of this book online under a Creative Commons license that allows the unlimited, noncommercial redistribution of the text. You can send it around, paste it into a chat, beam it to a friend's PDA, or print out a chapter to hand out in the university common room. Like Woody Guthrie said, "Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

The whole point of giving away electronic books is to experiment with electronic text and spot where the new opportunities for earning a writer's living lie -- working with my audience, not against them. So with every release, I've tried some experimentation. This book is no exception.

This book is the first novel to employ the new Creative Commons Developing Nations License. That's a license that lets anyone living in a country that's not on the World Bank's list of high-income countries treat the book as if it were in the public domain. If you live in a developing nation, you can print your own editions of this book and sell them, you can make your own movies, radio plays, translations and whatever else you can think of, charge whatever the traffic will bear for them, and never give me a penny or ask my permission (though I hope you'll drop me a line and let me know what you're up to so I can keep up on the book's spread!). The only limitation on this right is that you may only export your works to other developing nations: the rich nations where my paying customers live are strictly off-limits.

I'm doing three signings for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in the first two weeks of July. The first two are in the Detroit region (I'm spending July 4 week in East Lansing, Michigan teaching at the Clarion Writers' Workshop), and the third is in Toronto, at BakkaPhoenix books, the oldest sf bookstore in the country, where I once worked. I hope to see you at these!

July 5, 7PM: Archives Bookshop, 517 West Grand River, East Lansing, MI, 48823, (517)332-8444

July 7, 7:30PM: Schuler Books and Music, 1982 West Grand River Avenue, Okemos, MI, 48864, (517)349-8840

July 11, 7PM: BakkaPhoenix Books, 697 Queen St West, Toronto, ON, M6J 1E6, (416)963-9993

Also, Second Life players can attend an in-game signing on Sunday, July 24 at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT/10pm London time.

Here's the spanking-new website for the book. I hope you'll spare a moment to take a look. This is the longest thing I've ever written, and the early reviews have been stunning. I'm as proud of this as I could be, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it:

SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you've ever read.

- Gene Wolfe

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

Mauritius to be fully unwired island paradise

Manish sez, "The island paradise of Mauritius plans on being the first island with end-to-end WiFi coverage. They just flipped the switch on the first phase."

The government "wants to create a cyber-island but they haven't changed their regulation and infrastructure enough to create the climate," Rahim said. If Mauritius doesn't act quickly, he warned, it may well see its cyber-island idea stolen by competitor countries...

Still, Mauritius' courts have shown signs of holding the government to its competitiveness policies, which may ease the way for future investors.

"If any investor had called me three months ago and asked about investing, I would have told them to go somewhere else," Rahim said. Now, he said, "you have to come in with open eyes and an African mentality of patience, but if you persevere you can get results."

Link (Thanks, Manish!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:51:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rotting Soviet buildings

Abandoned.ru has galleries of explorations of rotting Soviet-era buildings, from educational institutes to radio telescopes to cement plants in the Moscow countryside. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roy Lichtenstein's source material

Here's a gallery of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's paintings beside the original source images he culled from comics. Link (Thanks, Seth Benson!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:15:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Priest crucifies nun

Romanian Orthodox priest Father Daniel Corogeanu and four nuns have been charged with murder after ordering another nun who was "possessed by the devil" and "beyond salvation" to be crucified. The nun, Maricica Irina Cornici, was found dead and chained to a cross last Wednesday. A member of the Holy Trinity order in the village of Tanacu, Sister Irina reportedly was imprisoned after arguing with the priest during a Sunday mass. From the Telegraph:

During a short funeral service at the weekend attended by 13 nuns who showed no emotion, Father Corogeanu said: "God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil."

Romanian reporters present at the ceremony said strangle marks were clearly visible on the corpse, which lay in an open casket.

Claps of thunder were heard as the coffin was lowered into the ground, a sign "that the will of God has been done", Father Corogeanu said...

Sister Irina joined the order three months ago, after visiting a friend who lived there.

According to medical reports she had been treated for schizophrenia.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:57:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An $18,000 bar of soap

A bar of soap sold for $18,000 this week at Art Basel, a massive international art fair in Switzerland. Gianni Motti's soap artwork was purportedly fabricated from fat formerly belonging to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. From Ananova:

The artist said: "Berlusconi had face lifting and liposuction operations in a clinic in Lugano, where I have good connections that provided me with some of the fat. It was jelly-like and it stunk horribly, like butter gone off or old chip pan oil."

According to Motti, the artwork called Mani Pulite (which means "clean hands" in Italian) expresses opposition to corruption and mafia structures in Italy, as well as his personal opinion of Berlusconi's policies.

Link to Anonova article, Link to Reuters article mentioning the sale (with Motti's name misspelled)

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:12:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Twin artworks by Pilon and Biskup

The top painting, "Architeuthis Dux" by Mark Atomos Pilon, is currently on display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery. I showed it to Mark Frauenfelder and he instantly grabbed our fave illustrator Tim Biskup's Gama-Go 31 Postcards book and flipped it to the second image seen here, titled "Squid Attack." (Apologies for poor reproduction.) Jules Verne, meet the Pop Surrealists! Link to Pilon page at La Luz, Link to Biskup site

UPDATE: Mark Atomos Pilon sends us this email that he sent to Tim Biskup, a version of which he also posted on the Pig Work blog's comments area. (Mark says the misspelling of Biskup's last name in the Pig Work post was a spellcheck error.):

I agree that there is a grey line between lifting and inspiration. Having been a victim of this in the recent past I have to agree that it’s a painful discovery to find another artist lifting pieces of your work and moving it around in their own fashion. Myself, I firmly plant my feet in a stance of never sourcing other artists’ artwork for inspiration for my own work. I always draw blind when I work. In this case I drew this piece after seeing my friend Ryan Heshka’s painting of a “giant squid” at a recent art show. I promptly went home and drew the “Architeuthis-Dux” artwork. Not from a copy of a Tim Biskup postcard but from my own inspiration and my love of Jules Verne and science fiction. If you are familiar with my past work you would see that I have painted quite a few submarines in my 10-year history as a painter. Some of the subs bear resemblance to the Biskup submarine due to its long perspective. None of which I might add where based on Tim Biskup’s work. In this particular piece I simply added a squid to an existing sub to humor my own need for a variation on the submarine theme that I’ve already painted so often.

My apologies to Tim Biskup if he’s offended by the similarities in our work but I can only impress that there is a possibility of inspiration here, but it definitely was not copied directly from the Tim Biskup artwork. I’m trying my best to carve out a style that I can call my own. I think that’s all any artist can ever hope for.

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:27:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney's edible "tortilla decals"

CC sez, "This is the oddest Disney marketing I've seen yet. They apparently have a deal with Mission Foods (tortilla makers) where you can send away for EDIBLE TORTILLA DECALS depicting various Disney characters and landmarks. Mickey quesadilla, anyone?" Link (Thanks, CC!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:27:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disneyland's Happiest Lost and Found on Earth

Hilarious piece in USA Today about Disneyland's Lost and Found department, which turns up thousands of missing wallets, iPods, phones, cameras, pills, and even pets:

McFaul recalls a couple who had stored their caged canary at the park's kennels, which board pets -- most of them dogs -- while vacationers enjoy the park.

"At the end of the day, this dumb woman was so glad to see her little canary she took it out of the cage, and it went right into the trees of the Jungle Cruise," McFaul says. "I didn't tell them that hidden in the bushes -- and definitely in the Jungle Cruise -- are the most beastly cats. I thought, 'That poor little bird lasted that long,' " she says, holding her fingers an inch apart.

Gonzales says his department used a name and number on an expensive camera to contact a family in San Diego about the item. But they had reported the camera stolen three years earlier. "The thief brought it to Disneyland, and we reclaimed it for them," Gonzales says.

Link (Thanks, Officeslacker!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:24:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 17, 2005

Comix Ex Machina opens tomorrow in Queens

Comix Ex Machina is an exhibit where a bunch of cartoonists have built old-timey and unusual mechanical cartoon viewing mechanisms. Sounds wonderful. Link (Thanks, Charlie Ravioli!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:31:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex styles of musicians

Charles says: "An orchestral musician reveals that classical music is not very different from Hollywood when it comes to offering jobs-for-sex. From a review in the London Times of her recent book:

Blair Tindall, who played with the New York Philharmonic, offers an unseemly tour behind the scenes in a book entitled Mozart in the Jungle. . . .

Instrument players had a sexual style unique to their instrument, she writes. Neurotic violinists, anonymous in their orchestra section, came fast. Trumpet players pumped away like jocks, while pianists sensitive fingers worked magic. French horn players, their instruments the testiest of all, could rarely get it up, but percussionists could make beautiful music out of anything.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:39:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Finger Licking Chicken MP3

A great 45 cover and an even better song to start off the weekend.
Link (via Eye of the Goof)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:53:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Who should be blamed

Mari writes about an interesting incident that happened on a train line in Japan that points out more than one cultural difference between Japan and the United States.

This happened on the JR Chuo line this morning. A guy made a dash for the train door and the door almost closed but he pried it open. A train conductor announced "rushing to get on the train is dangerous so please be careful." This is the normal announcement. But then he went on to say: "You alone will be responsible if you are seriously injured".

Hmm a new comment was added today. Another customer who heard this announcement complained to JR and JR apologized: "We apologize for his inconsiderate comments". But the the train conducter in question said "His rushing was so bad, it caused me to make an emotional comment."

They sure are polite in Japan. If this had happened in the US, it's likely that a screaming match between the conductor, door-opener, and other passengers would have ensued. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:34:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Executive vs secretary in case of spilled ketchup

CNN reports that after a secretary named Jenny Amner accidentally spilled ketchup on a Richard Phillips, a senior associate at the law firm Baker & McKenzie, he sent her an email demanding £4 to pay for cleaning his trousers. His email:

"Hi Jenny. I went to a dry cleaners at lunch and they said it would cost £4 to remove the ketchup stains. If you cd let me have the cash today, that wd be much appreciated."

The secretary replied a about week-and-a-half later:

"With reference to the e-mail below, I must apologize for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother's sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4.

"I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary."

She then forwarded the exchange to her friends in the firm and the message was soon ripping like wildfire through London's law community.

She wrote that she had told various partners, lawyers and trainees about his e-mail and they had offered to "do a collection" to raise the cash.

"I however declined their kind offer but should you feel the urgent need for the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon."

Subsequently the e-mail exchange was forwarded across the legal world, with comments added questioning Phillips' generosity.

Link (via Gadgetopia)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:14:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World's Worst Excerpt -- The Least Healthy Diet: Breatharianism

For the next several weeks, I'm going to post essays from my new book THE WORLD'S WORST: A Guide to the Most Disgusting, Hideous, Inept and Dangerous, People, Places and Things on Earth. (See last week's entry: "The Least Adorable Pet: Miracle Mike The Headless Chicken")

"The Least Healthy Diet: Breatharianism

If you're a vegetarian, you might feel morally superior to meat eaters. If you're a vegan, eschewing all animal products, you most likely turn up your nose at weak-willed vegetarians who succumb to cheese. Fruitarians, who consume only fruit, nuts, and seeds, are haughtier still. But at the very top of the holier-than-thou diet list are breatharians, who claim to subsist on nothing but air and light. They don't even need to drink water.

The most well-known advocate of breatharianism is Jasmuheen (nee Ellen Greve), a former businesswoman from Australia who claims she hasn't eaten any real food since 1993. (Her last meal was a falafel ball.) In her book Living on Light, the Source of Nourishment for the New Millennium, Jasmuheen writes about how "Ascended Masters" speak to her via cosmic telepathy and how she is able to draw upon invisible "pranic energy" for her sustenance. She boasts of having more than 6,000 followers. Because she doesn't eat, she says, she excretes only "rabbit-type droppings every three weeks."

Skeptics abound. On more than one occasion, reporters have discovered that Jasmuheen's house has food in it. She explains that the food is actually for her husband, Jess Ferguson, a vegan (as well as a convicted felon who served time for fraud). In one instance, an Australian journalist who was on the same flight as Jasmuheen was surprised to see an airline attendant ask the cult leader to confirm that she'd ordered a vegetarian meal. After initially denying that she had, she said, "Yes, I did, but I won't be eating it." (Perhaps she only wanted to save the vegetables from being eaten.)

In a 1997 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a reporter asked Jasmuheen if she'd eaten anything at all since starting her diet. She replied, "Maybe a few cups of tea and a glass of water, but now and then if I feel a bit bored and I want some flavor, then I will have a mouthful of whatever it is I'm wanting the flavor of. So it might be a piece of chocolate or it might be a mouthful of a cheesecake or something like that."

The reporter then asked her if she'd be willing to take a blood test to back up her claim that her DNA was changing shape from 2 strands to 12, in order to absorb more hydrogen. Jasmuheen answered, "Oh that depends. What I'd rather do is people go and have a look at the work of the Dalai Lama for example. Like in 1991--" The reporter interrupted her, asking her again why she wouldn't take the blood test, especially since the Australian Skeptics organization was offering her $30,000 if she could prove her DNA had changed. She said, "For blood test for DNA, I don't know. I'd have to really think about that one. I don't know what the relevance for it is."

In 1999 Jasmuheen agreed to undergo a challenge issued by 60 Minutes in Australia. She was confined to a hotel room and placed under a doctor's care. When she showed signs of high blood pressure, dehydration, and stress after only two days, she blamed it on air pollution. The show's producers moved her to a mountain retreat, where she said the air was much better. But after another two days, it was clear that she was ill: her speech was slow, her pupils were dilated, her pulse almost double. The doctor said Jasmuheen was so dehydrated that her kidneys were in danger of being damaged. 60 Minutes called off the experiment. Jasmuheen said it was the show's fault for putting her in a hotel next to a busy road at the beginning.

To date, three of Jasmuheen's followers have starved to death. One of them, 53-year-old Lani Morris of Melbourne, was seven days into the breatharian diet when she lost the ability to speak and the use of one arm. When Morris died three days later, Jasmuheen suggested that the woman was "not coming from a place of integrity and did not have the right motivation."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:22:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Johnny Ryan in Mad

From Flog: Add JOHNNY RYAN to the list of genuinely funny cartoonists who are suddenly working for MAD MAGAZINE; PETER BAGGE is doing so as well. Johnny's first story should be in #456, a FANTASTIC 4 parody called "The FF Have A Bad Couple Of Weeks." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:09:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Engrish hilarity on badly bootlegged Star Wars DVD

Badly translated subtitles on a pirated copy of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith provide many happy moments of beverage-through-nostrils yukkage. Sample: Anakin to Obi-Wan --"I was just made by the Presbyterian Church." Link to "Backstroke of the West," as the movie's title is translated here. Hard to believe this is real, but even if the post were a hoax, it's a fun one. (Thanks, Bonnie)

Reader Comment: Paul Berger says,

I posted a similar story last week on my blog. Unfortunately I don't have a photograph--it came via an email from my mother-in-law, of all people. She wrote, "My first attempt brought up the subtitles, probably the funniest thing about the film. An attack from the rear is translated as 'he is coming into my behind'."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:45:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BadApple plugin: search and play any podcast in iTunes

A message on Badfruit.com proclaims:

Podcast support for iTunes is here! Download the free BadApple plug-in which expands the functionality and interoperability of iTunes software. (iTunes is music software which works with iPod MP3 players.) BadApple adds interoperability to view and download podcasts directly within iTunes software. There's no need to download and learn other software programs because everything happens right in the iTunes software.

After downloading and installing BadApple, you will have a "Podcasts" link you can click on from iTunes. You can use this to browse through categories to find the Podcast you want. Each podcast has a description. Once you locate a podcast you are interested in, double clicking on the podcast will load it to your library. When you plug in your iPod the podcast will be loaded to that depending on your settings.

BadApple is free software. There is no charge to download the software or use the software.

DISCLAIMER: BadApple is NOT from the Beatles. It's also not from Apple Computer Inc. It's definitely not endorsed or approved by Apple. In fact, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want you to use BadApple.

Link.

Update: Sean Bonner points out that the app is PC-only. Its creator says, "If there's interest, a Macintosh version could be made. Send me email and let me know if you would find it useful."

As regular BoingBoing readers will recall, Steve Jobs recently demonstrated a similar feature and announced that some podcast features will be offered in the next release of iTunes later this year. Perhaps a better title would have been "ImpatientApple"? I'm not yet clear on how this little rebel app differs from what the mothership has planned (other than the fact that whatever Apple does will also be Mac-compatible).

Boing Boing reader Chris Wells says, "I wanted to point out that I discovered this in the FAQ on BadFruit.com."

"Why was BadApple created? The goal is to make iTunes and iPods interoperate with other piles of media. I'm worried that when and if Apple adds podcast support they will only list a few podcasts that they approve. Remember this is a company that sues web sites that say good things about their upcoming products - bad Apple! Podcasts are significant because they offer a wide-range of diverse topics and ideas, not just those endorsed by one company. BadApple gives you access to all podcasts, - even ones which Apple might disagree with and never list in iTunes software. "

"I guess that would be how it 'differs from the mothership,'" says Chris. "We'll see how Apple feels about this plugin when they release the next version of iTunes, I'm sure (: "

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:00:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neal Stephenson: Why Star Wars doesn't suck

Neal Stephenson's NYTimes op-ed talks about how the Star Wars cycle -- in particular, the execrable first trilogy (Teresa Nielsen Hayden suggests getting the DVD, watching it in Italian and pretending it's opera, but that only works if you don't speak Italian, otherwise, you'll still have to suffer through the "dialog") -- is better than it seems, when taken as a whole with all the geeky supplementary material in the games, comics, TV shows, toons, and other sources.

The Internet, it seems, has made it possible to extract all the non-pablum elements from Hollywood blockbusters and stick them online, so that the movies are friendly to civilians, but geeks can enjoy them by logging in.

If you have watched these cartoons - or if you've enjoyed some of the half-dozen "Clone Wars" novels, flipped through the graphic novels, read the short stories or played the video game - you will know that the battle cruiser in question is owned by the New Droid Army of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, which is backed by the Trade Federation, a commercial guild that is peeved about taxation of trade routes.

And that is not the only aspect of "Episode III" that you will see in a different light. If you watch the movie without doing the prep work, General Grievous - who is supposed to be one of the most formidable bad guys in the entire "Star Wars" cycle - will seem like something that just fell out of a Happy Meal.

Likewise, many have been underwhelmed by the performance of Hayden Christensen, who plays Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Only if you've seen the "Clone Wars" cartoons will you understand that Anakin is a seriously damaged veteran, a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder. But since none of that background is actually supplied by the Episode III script, Mr. Christensen has been given an impossible acting task. He's trying to swim in air.

Link (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Red Cross wants all its volunteers' copyrights and patents

Every volunteer for the American Red Cross is required to sign on to an agreement that covers things like proper conduct, confidentiality, and includes a requirement for all volunteers to sign over all copyright/trademark/patent rights in any work-related writing, art and inventions come up with during their term, and for a full year afterward. Why the hell does the Red Cross need to own the copyrights in the work-related blog postings you make for a year after you stop spending your free evenings handing out cookies to blood-donors? If you write a novel and include some real-life details gleaned from volunteering in a disaster-relief efforts, does the Red Cross really deserve to take all rights to it?

Disclosure and Ownership of Intellectual Property. I (i) shall promptly and fully disclose to Red Cross any and all Intellectual Property, (ii) agree that all Intellectual Property shall be owned by Red Cross, (iii) agree to and do hereby assign, transfer and convey to Red Cross the entire right, title and interest in and to all Intellectual Property, (iv) will execute and deliver any and all documents, take all actions and render any and all assistance reasonably requested by Red Cross, during or at any time after Volunteer Service, to establish Red Cross’ ownership of, or to enable Red Cross to obtain patents to or register copyrights of, any Intellectual Property, and (v) acknowledge that all Intellectual Property that is copyrightable subject matter and that qualifies as a "work made for hire" shall be automatically owned by Red Cross. In the event Red Cross is unable for any reason whatsoever to secure my signature to any document required to apply for or execute any patent, copyright, or other applications with respect to Intellectual Property, I hereby irrevocably appoint Red Cross and its authorized officers and agents as my agents and attorneys-in-fact to execute and file any such application and to do all other acts to further the prosecution and issuance of patents, copyrights, or other rights with respect to Intellectual Property with the same legal force and effect as if executed by me. As a reminder, Intellectual Property shall only include intellectual property created by me (y) in the course of Volunteer Service or using Red Cross time, equipment, information or materials, and (z) within one (1) year after termination of Volunteer Service and relating directly to work done during Volunteer Service.

80K PDF Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:18:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Claymation as telepresence

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University believe that in a few decades, three-dimensional physical avatars of ourselves could be created for teleconferencing. A motion capture system on one end would control a nanotech-enabled telerobot on the other end. According to professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein, the idea was inspired by claymation. From the BBC News (photo with article is incorrectly captioned as Mowry but is actually Goldstein):

"When you watch something created by claymation, it is a real object and it looks like its moving itself. That's something like the idea we're doing... in our case, the idea is that you have computation in the 'clay', as though the clay can move itself.

"So if it was a dog, and you want the dog to move, it will actually move itself. But it is a physical object in front of you - it's not just a picture or hologram or something like that..."

Professor Goldstein has envisioned that, eventually, the objects will be built with "nano-dust" - tiny objects that can be programmed to bind to each other and move - but currently they are trying to build at a much larger scale, working with objects the size of table-tennis balls.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:53:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fantagraphics blog

Fantagraphics Books--one of the world's best publishers of comix including works by Jim Woodring, R. Crumb, Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Roberta Gregory, Johnny Ryan, and zillions of other greats--has launched a blog. Legendary Fantagraphics owners Gary Groth and Kim Thompson are contributing too! Flog is "is intended as a direct conduit from Gary and me (and Eric and Greg), of news, opinions, revelations, and whatnot." If you have any interest in underground comix or illustration, this is essential RSS. Link (via Drawn!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:26:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More copyright for records is bad: Times of London

James sez, "David Rowan has written a good op-ed piece in the Time arguing against the extention of recording copyrights in the UK."

The music business, in the guise of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), has decided otherwise. The IFPI claims that the "huge disparity" in copyright terms with the US makes it "hard to do business" here -- funnily enough, Bono used the same argument when the old US system offered less protection than in Europe. You may have heard its heartfelt appeals for social justice: Kenney Jones, of The Who, protesting that extended royalties could usefully pay the school fees; Sir Cliff Richard, furious to be deprived of income "simply because I have outlived the copyright on my sound recordings".

Please don't tease. Such half-baked arguments owe more to the short-term financial pressures facing the perma-tanned hipsters running the record labels. They are wilfully ignoring the vital creative role of the public domain in reinvigorating our common culture. Had they been genuinely innovative over the past decade -- beyond discovering Crazy Frog and "girl power" -- the moguls would have noticed that their industry's greatest injections of energy have originated not within their own well-cushioned empires but in the public domain. Remember their aversion to MP3 downloads, now a vast corporate revenue stream? Or the copyright-breaching "mash-ups" -- unauthorised combinations of existing music samples mixed by DJs -- that first attracted music industry writs, and then were worked into Kylie's routine?

Link (Thanks, James!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage circus sideshow poster gallery

This is a spectacular gallery of vintage European circus posters -- dwarves, limbless people, hairy, tall, fat and thin people -- with gorgeous artwork and lettering. You can order prints, too. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:07:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disneyland rides must be as safe as buses

Ernest sez, "Disneyland (and other thrill ride providers) have been fighting being forced to meet the same safety standards as buses and trains. Yesterday, the California Supreme Court ruled against them."

The 4-3 decision, which found that thrill rides could be classified as common carriers,' said operators must use 'the utmost care and diligence' for the safety of riders rather than mere 'reasonable care.'

Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:55:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What book counterfeiting costs

With all this talk of ebook "piracy" it's pretty interesting to read about some of the nitty-gritty of actual book counterfeiting, the kind that results in high-quality copies of physical books that are easily mistaken for the authorized items:

After numerous calls to Kinkos and awkward conversations with vanity presses and POD publishers (kids, and adults, should not try this at home), The Book Standard staffers determined that a potential Potter pirate would have to team up with a particularly unscrupulous—or clueless—printer in order to produce a significant number of illegal copies of a book. One estimate suggested that 10,000 copies of a book about the expected size of Harry Potter—672 pages—could be printed for less than $30,000, which puts the cost per book at $3.00. Shipping and handling is another matter, but could be figured at 10% of the production cost. Sell each copy at $10, and your criminal entrepreneur is raking in approximately a 200% profit.

Link (via Make Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:34:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homebrew baby-wipes with your table-saw

For parents with table-saws: converting a roll of paper towels to a roll of baby-wiped through judicious application of shop tools and a water/soap/oil mix.

The first thing that must be done is cut the roll of paper towels in half. I've tried doing this with serrated knives or hand saws, but I've found that they either squash the roll or produce a very ragged, chewed-up end. The best solution I have tried is the table saw. A band saw would probably do as well, but I don't have one to test on. First, put on your safety glasses, then raise up the blade as high as it will go. Then, with the plastic wrapper still on the roll, cut the roll down the center. You will probably have to spin the roll to cut all the way through....

Now, a box of 384 premade wipes costs around $10. A bulk package of 8 paper towel rolls costs around $5, and makes somewhere around 900 wipes. So the former runs around 2.6 cents per wipe, while the latter is about 0.6 cents per wipe. Plus you have the intangibles, like a personal feeling of accomplishment and the fact that you get to use the table saw.

Link (via Make Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:31:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Mass-deletion art show on Saturday in LA

This Saturday, Monochrom (crazy Austrian net-artists) continue their rampage across the West Coast with "Experience The Experience Of A Magnetism Party" at Los Angeles's Machine Project:

Accompanied by contemporary alternative mainstream rhythms and using several heavy-duty neodym magnets, monochrom will delete all the data carriers that can be found. Naturally the public is invited to bring data carriers themselves.

The destruction of magnetic storage media is a form of destruction that can reasonably be called unspectacular. But it is important. Our society collects and collects and collects. The hard drives are full. However, we can also dispense with the bourgeois-humanist criticism of the "information flood", this maelstrom that is said to attack the printed word. The Magnetism Party is therefore an attempt to actively come to terms with one aspect of the information society that is almost completely ignored by our epistemological machinery.

Delete is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Time/place: June 18, 8 PM, Machine Project, LA Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO Stream from iTunes to your mobile phone (without Apple's permission)

DittyBot is a script for OS X that uses a clever combination of mobile email and VoIP to stream music from your iTunes collection to your cellphone. Using your phone, email the title/artist info for a song in your iTunes library to DittyBot, which is running on your Mac, pulling down mail every minute. DittyBot receives the request, calls you with Skype, and plays the song back to you over voice-over-IP using iTunes. Wow.

You send a text message from your mobile phone to your POP email account. Your text message should contain the keywords of a song title (and possibly an artist name) that you want to hear. DittyBot finds that email (he checks Mail every 45 seconds) and copies the song name into a text file. The song name is then copied into iTunes and a playlist is created from your search. Next, DittyBot loads Skype (the internet telephony app) and begins calling your mobile phone. Your mobile phone rings and when you pick it up, you should hear your song start playing in all its compressed glory. DittyBot will play your selection to you over your phone until you hang up. Mind you, this all should happen within 1 minute of sending your song request (depending on the speed of your POP server). Sometimes it's even quicker!

Link (via Make Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:50:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bacteria blamed for Bermuda Triangle

Scientists at Cardiff University are studying whether bacteria that thrive in the high pressures of deep ocean sediments could be a source of sustainable energy. Some of the bacteria spew methane that accumulates in massive fields of ice-like "methane hydrates." Methane hydrates might also be the secret behind an old mystery. From the press release:

One theory now suggests that when the covering of "methane ice" which exists over much of the seabed of the Bermuda Triangle becomes unstable; this causes instability of the sea and an explosive mixture of air and methane above. Any ships or planes travelling over the area could sink or catch fire.

"So ancient, deep-sediment bacteria may be a key to sustainable energy in the future and to explaining a few disasters," said Professor (R. John) Parkes.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:42:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bad grammar (and spelling) at Coney Island

Mark Hurst points us to this "crime spree" of bad grammar on the signs at Coney Island.
Link

Reader comment: "Don't forget fun for the 'hole' family."
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:48:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Battelle's FM Publishing closes funding round

_Wow_. There are angels, and then there are angels. Congrats, John!

I'm proud to announce that FM has closed an angel round of financing featuring an extraordinary lineup of investors. Omidyar Network led the round, with The New York Times Company and Mitchell Kapor, Andrew Anker, Mike Homer, and Tim O'Reilly also participating.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:39:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conspiracy theory of the day: Dell Laptop with built-in keylogger (Update: HOAX)

Reader comment: Marc Hedlund presents the best argument for this thing being a hoax: "A search for the name of the FOIA officer in the letter turns up this letter, which uses the same logo and the same address as the one in the 'keylogger' story. Note also that the 'file number' is the *same* on the two letters. It looks to me like the keylogger poster just overlaid new text in the body of the letter." Link

I'm not sure what to make of this, really. This website has a report by an anonymous person who says he bought a new Dell laptop and discovered what he claims is a "keyboard logger" -- a chip that stores keystrokes. He says he called Dell's tech support and asked them about it:

"they said, and I quote, 'The intregrated service tag identifier is there for assisting customers in the event of lost or misplaced personal information.' He then hung up."

He then call the police, who told him to call the Department of Homeland Security:

"they told me to submit a Freedom of Information Act request. This is what I got:" (Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

Is this a hoax? The page seems to be the only accessible page on the site (www.chromance.de), which has a German top level domain. Link (Thanks, Rev!)

Update: Phil Torrone says: "I did an investi-MAKE-ion. I think the keylogger thing is a hoax. the images from the site are from here. The memo/letter thing of course looks fakey too.

"I think this is far scarier." (This points to an article that says the U.S. Department of Justice is looking into making ISPs store "records of e-mail, browsing or chat-room activity months after ISPs ordinarily would have deleted the logs -- if they were ever kept in the first place.")

Reader comment: Tian says: "The letter accompanied with the story about Dell laptop's keylogger is fake as well. If you do a search for dept. of homeland security's logo, it is a blue colour circular logo with an eagle in it. The one on the fake letter is a five-pointed star, which is commonly used for Sheriff's office." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:25:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Earthquake in LA

Holy shiznit, I just felt a fairly strong quake here in Hollywood.

Update: here's the data: Link. Looks like there were actually several right after each other, one two point something, one three point something, the other 5.3, all centered roughly 70 miles east of downtown LA. There's been a lot of seismic activity buzzing lately, before / during / after the 7.0 honker that hit Northern California earlier this week.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:54:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Controlling cell phones with your mind

In TheFeature, I have a piece about a Silicon Valley startup that's working on a technology that allows people to control a mobile device using brainwave sensing.

One of the intriguing possibilities for NeuroSky's technology is a sleep detector. If you were driving a car and started to fall asleep, the system could sound an alarm and wake you up. NeuroSky is working with partners, most notably China's Ziyitong Technology to develop a sleep-detector as well as systems for gaming and Attention Deficit Disorder.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:53:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trying to go from Florida to Cuba in an outrigger canoe

Tim Anderson write the "Heirloom Technology" column for MAKE magazine. It's one of my favorite parts of the magazine, because Tim travels to remote locations with makeshift equipment and tries to learn how the locals have adapted to harsh conditions. In MAKE Vol. 3 (coming out in a couple of months), Tim writes about his experiences with "swamp technology" as he spends time exploring the Florida Everglades on a solo mission.

In 2003, Tim attempted to solo sail from Florida to Cuba in an outrigger canoe. After his rudder broke, he drifted off course and had a rough time. He started hallucinating -- the sails and the waves began speaking to him, offering useful advice to help him out of his predicament.

By this time I was pretty wiped out. I was seeing personality in everything around me. In my mind I asked the sails what they thought. 


"Well, you could try something different?" they asked.


"Such as?" 


"Moving around?"

I thought that was a little weird because I was already far back on the hull and that wasn't holding the bow up. I sat out on the beam, putting my weight on the outrigger. It made the bow pop up just a little bit and quit hitting the waves so hard. 


"What else have you got for me?" I asked.


"What else is there?" they replied. 


Me: "Two sails and an oar?" 


They: "What can you do with the oar?"


Me: "Pry on it? Watch it bend?"


They: "Just grab it at the thick part. See the difference?"


It was pretty amazing. Flex in the oar shaft was apparently a bad thing. Grabbing the thick part made a huge difference. The canoe went faster and didn't plow as much.


And so on. It worked so well I started paying attention to what the waves were saying too. I learned a bunch of new tricks. I pushed the outrigger down and that somehow popped the bow up. I bounced just before waves, and that popped the bow up. I held the oar at the thick part and worked it at an angle that pushed the stern down and that did the same thing. I worked the oar in time to the waves instead of just holding it steady, and the waves gave me a lot of help. Before long I was flying along toward shore.

His story is online and is a great read. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:54:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What UK's copyright industries are up to

The BBC's Matt Locke has written a great report on yesterday's meeting on copyright in the UK that was held by a minister who is reported to have called for extending copyright on performances to the performer's life plus one hundred years.

Adam Singer gave a response from the stage that was full of fantastic rhetoric, describing the emerging market for 3D printers as a harbinger of a world in which all creative IP is under threat from piracy: "It doesn't matter if the button says 'print' [in reference to 3D printers] or 'burn' - all design will become simply a file to be shared". He saw strong IP as the "intellectual hygiene of a networked world", suggesting that IP law should be taught as the "new domestic science" in schools, as it was the most important future skill for creative entrepreneurs. His rhetoric, although very entertaining, was from the dystopian end of the telescope - "each time bandwith increases, another industry will fall [because of IP theft]". You could try to unpick all the false assumptions in that last sentence, but frankly, its not worth it. Just sit back and bask in the warm glow of his fire and brimstone. In fairness, Adam Singer is far more measured and informed than the above quotes suggest (despite describing Lawrence Lessig as the "Martin Luther of copyright" that the music industry had failed to burn...), but he's a great public speaker, and it's his job to provoke.

I asked a question to the panel about the kind of industry trends that the DCMS were looking into when developing new IP models for the creative industries. Writers like Henry Chesbrough and Eric Von Hippel have documented trends in 'old' industries like Pharma and Engineering towards 'open innovation' models. Emerging best practise is to maximise your return from IP through a range of licensing models outside your own company, moving from old models of patent enforcement to open licensing models with peer companies and even Von Hippel's 'Free Revealing', where IP is given up in order to drive other competitive advantages.

Link

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

Copyright cops crack down on cooks over cakes

Clay Shirky says:

Here's the sign I saw yesterday morning when getting the daily bread at College Bakery, our beloved local purveyor of pre-Atkins goodies.

Now the decor and ambience of College Bakery are echt Old Brooklyn, so it's an unlikely front in the copyfight, but the staff said they had to bust out the magic markers because they'd been roped in as the front line of defense against non-licit images of Dora the Explorer® and Thomas the Tank Engine®. I was struck enough by the sign to Flickr it immediately, and it's stuck with me since then, for several reasons.

First of all, disappointing children is a lousy tactic for a media company. If a child loves Nemo so much she wants a clownfish birthday cake, it's hard to see the upside in preventing her from advertising that affection to her friends. Second, and more worryingly, this is the very sort of chilling effect that has always been recognized as a significant risk in First Amendment protections. How cool would it be to do a drawing with your kid and have it show up as a cake the next day? Well forget it.

What College Bakery is saying with that sign is "The risk of being sued is so high that we'll give up on helping paying customers create their own cakes." This is Trusted Computing for frosting.

Creativity, in this world, is for Trained Professionals, whose work is owned by BigCos. Loss of amateur creativity is a small price to pay for protecting commercial IP holders. Finally, and perhaps most revealingly, the industries fighting for encumbrance of digital IP have often raised the 'restoring analog balance' argument, which is, roughly: "The natural difficulty and generational loss in analog copying made cassette tapes and VCRs bearable. We just want to bring those checks to digital copying." And yet this case -- printing a digital image on a cake -- has exactly those checks, since the image is designed to be eaten by children within hours of its creation. No risk of unlimited copies. No longevity issues. No easy transition to other media. And what happens? The same grab for total control, and the same weak regard for side-effects on non-commercial creativity. The 'analog balance' argument is, of course, a lie. Those industries have fought for total control wherever they have been able to, questioning the very existence of core public rights such as fair use or limited copyright terms, and the magic-markered sign at College Bakery is yet another example.

As Cory said "There are days when the gormlessness of the other side of the copyfight generates a great deal of unintentional hilarity." Now this is more sad than hilarious, but when the control grab extends to the enlisting of neighborhood bakeries in disappointing children for the making of one-off and short-lived copies, the gormlessness quotient is running high.

Link

Counterpoint: Comments from Boing Boing reader Tshaka, who is a law clerk:

I am no fan of the RIAA, and some of the stances big companies take on copyright. With that said, I find a lot of the posts on copyyright issues to be myopic. Companies don't run around trying to enforce their copyright because it brings them joy, they do it because they have to. Once a company allows people to use an image or trademark without their permission, it can quickly slip into the public domain. If they allow this to happen, they lose all control over that image forever.

Companies spend a lot of money not only developing characters like nemo, dora the explorer and thomas the tank engine, they also spend a lot of money so that kids will want to put those characters on their birthday cakes.

I'm fairly sure that College Bakery wasn't giving away their cakes for free. They weren't just providing a nifty service to tykes, they were profiting on the efforts of others. I have serious problems with the Recording and Movie industry making it difficult for people to use their product fairly, but what you have here is one company (even though it is a small one) stealing from another company (even though it is a large one). Telling College Bakery to stop using their images without their permission isn't just an industry fighting for total control wherever they have been able to, questioning the very existence of core public rights such as fair use or limited copyright terms...,

College Bakery's use wasn't fair use. Conflating it with fair use doesn't help the argument. This isn't a creativity issue. I am sure College Bakery would be allowed to negotiate with each of the companies involved to pay for the right to SELL the image those companies created. Its called licensing, and companies love to do it, not just for the money involved, but for the extra goodwill it can create for their product.

(To put into context there are probably companies that paid a lot of money for the right to put those images on cakes, and by not paying for the right not only was College Bakery infringing on the copyright holder, it was unfairly competing with companies that obeyed the law.)

(An example of the effect of not enforcing your copyright is what almost happened to Xerox. For years everyone called a photocopy a "xerox copy." Instead of being a brand name, their name was turning into a generic term. If Xerox had allowed that to continue, it would have lost the right to enforce their copyright on the name of their corporation! All the time, money and effort spent building up whatever goodwill they had associated with their name would have been lost because of their lack of diligence. Companies can lose control of images in the same way.)

Boing Boing reader RYaN says:

Tshaka is wrong that companies "have to" defend copyright, or risk losing it. That's only true for trademarks, as the Xerox example illustrates. Xerox couldn't have "lost the right to enforce their copyright on the name of their corporation" because it's not possible to copyright a company name at all! That's a trademark, which is governed by completely different rules.

Ben Giddings says:

Trademarks must be enforced or they risk becoming generic, and not protected. This isn't the case with copyrights. The issue with the cakes is really a trademark issue, not a copyright issue. The cake-makers aren't copying a particular "Dora" or "Thomas" image, they're making original creations using that character.

An example is the common sight of Calvin (from the Calvin and Hobbes comic) pissing on various logos, etc. Bill Watterson never made any cartoons with Calvin peeing on things, so this isn't violating his copyright. It is, however, using the character he created (and presumably trademarked) to sell stickers.

There's a big difference between selling these Calvin stickers and selling cakes. It's really about who is choosing the images. On one side there's someone creating Calvin look-alike images and trying to sell them to everybody. On the other side there's a bakery that makes cakes to order, and is now being forced to judge whether or not the person asking for the cake has the intellectual-property rights to make that request.

And Tshaka replies:

RYaN is absolutely right. I have crossused terms that do not mean the same thing and possibly added to some confusion. (In my defense, it often appears that discussion in this forum generally refers to all intellectual property issues as "copyright issues," in deference to the discussion I didn't make a sufficient effort to discuss the difference for an audience that is probably not as interested in the minutia of legal terms of art as I or others might be.) As right as RYaN is, however, about my misuse of the word he has also entirely ignored the point I attempted to make. Whether trademark or copyright, College Bakery was taking the intellectual property of other people and selling it to gain a profit (I am fairly comfortable in asserting this because I am pretty sure that College Bakery wasn't offering to put any image you bring in on any cake you bring in for free, THAT would have arguably been fair use, if this assumption is wrong I would love to be corrected). Now that RYaN has so carefully addressed my poor (and arguably lazy) semantics, I would be pleased for him to address my arguments.

Glenn Fleishman says:

See also this Brad Templeton essay on copyright myths -- Link. It's a classic in that it exposes fallacies so completely that I often won't begin to discuss copyright without reviewing it and often refer those who want to make what appears to be a broken point (such as this law clerk--obviously not a copyright law clerk) to the essay without further comment. In this case, point 5 is the right one to read. Brad should be well versed on copyright as the founder of ClariNet, which brought us early Dave Berry over Usenet, and other wonderful informational services and ideas.

Patrick Fitzgerald says:

One simple workaround is to buy a plain white frosted sheet cake, have the photo frosting shipped right to your door, then lay it on top of the cake yourself. I don't know if they perform a copyright check (like recent reports of WalMart photo processing), but Club Photo is one Internet store that offers this service.

And a final reader comment in this looooong thread, from the EFF's Jason Schultz:

As an actual copyright and trademark attorney, I feel this sort of discussion highlights exactly where our notions of "property" and "culture" cause confusion and tension between what the law is, what our intuition is, and what we wish the world was like. Most of us probably wish that we could easily go into our local bakery with our favorite comic or cartoon character and have it put on a birthday cake for our child or best friend. Sure, we wouldn't mind paying a bit more, if it were easy and relatively cheap. However, because the copyright maximalists have been able to frame copyright in terms of "property", this reality is increasingly difficult to achieve. Property rights are generally thought of as absolute and impenetrable, e.g. my favorite San Francisco anti-parking sign that says "Don't even *think* about parking here!"

Yet kids love culture, as we all do. And their love of copyrighted and trademarked characters helps make those characters valuable, just as the creators' inspiration and skill have. Consider if no child loved Dora the Explorer; how valuable would the copyrights and trademarks in the character actually be? Not very. Yet the love and obsession of fans do not garner any "property rights" in the character or any rights at all, according the maximalists. Even those willing to pay to use their favorite characters are often chilled from doing so because the maximalists argue they must come and beg permission from the copyright owner or face up to $150,000 in fines for their sins and indiscretions.

Does this mean the creators of the character should have no rights?

Certainly not. But it may mean that they shouldn't have absolute rights. In theory, that is what "fair use" is for, to balance out the rights of the creator with the rights of the public to enjoy that creation, especially in a private world that does not compete with the creators' business. In the case of Dora, that is the making of commercial cartoons and books, not cakes. The fact that Dora is popular on cakes comes from her popularity among her fans, not the skill of the hand that draws her or the voice that speaks her words.

Finally, all too often, we see a perspective like Tshaka's, where the argument is made that if you don't enforce your rights, you lose them.

Nothing could be further from the truth in this context, even for trademarks (i.e. the only time you lose your trademark is if it becomes generic for the class of goods you sell; no one would ever start calling cartoons "Doras" and birthday cakes aren't even in the same class of goods). What Tshaka is really worried about, it seems to me, is a loss of *control* over the use of one's creations. The idea that someone other than the creator might actually make use of the character without permission is what drives copyright maximalist authors, owners, and advocates crazy, not loss of rights or even, often, compensation.

It is this battle for control that is at the heart of the copyright wars and little else. From the perspective of consumers and fans, characters like Dora have become part of our lives and we shouldn't be ashamed or intimidated from enjoying that fact, even if it involves putting their image on a birthday cake. From the perspective of the Copyright Maximalists, however, even a "Let them eat cake" policy is far too lenient and infringing of their rights.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:17:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

School made him sick

An Olathe, Kansas high school student was charged with battery against a school official for vomiting on his Spanish teacher. The boy's father said his son was just sickened by the stress of exams and didn't purposefully throw up on the teacher. An assistant district attorney said he has witnesses who say that's not the case. "I think a message is being sent by both the school district and the district attorney that this behavior will not be tolerated," the teacher told the Associated Press. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:07:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Half-male, half-female, all crab

Fishermen caught a crab in the lower Chesapeake Bay that's literally half male, half female. Among other differences, male blue crabs have deep blue claws while females' claw tips look like they were painted with red nail polish. The fishermen noticed that this particular crab had one of each. Researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science say that the condition, known as bilateral gynandromorphism, is caused by a "chromosomal mishap." Studying the rare animal could increase understanding of crab sexual development and breeding behavior. From the Washington Post:

Before turning over the crab to the scientists, (boat captain David) Johnson and other watermen conducted their own experiment into its sex life, with bewildering results. They dropped a female crab, which was just about ready to mate, into its tank.

First, the half-and-half crab cradled the female under his legs, as a male crab would do in preparation for mating.

Then, the crab seemed to lose interest in the female and let her go, Johnson said.

Then a day later . . .

"He ate half of her," Johnson said.

Link to Washington Post article, Link to Virginia Institute press release (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:54:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Office pranks

Pocket-lint has a small photo gallery of hysterical office pranks. Gizmodo, where I saw this post, is seeking reader submissions of other office prank photos and will post the best few. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:35:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paris Hilton burger ad: The thuper-thexy remix

A large gentleman takes the place of everyone's favorite upmarket ho-bag. Only. He's wearing. The same thong. Grinding to. The same song. Details and video linkage at Defamer: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:31:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stross's magnificent ACCELERANDO as a free CC download

Charlie Stross's brilliant novel Accelerando is available as a free Creative Commons download! This novel collects and bridges all of his Hugo-nominated Manfred Macx stories, published over the last several years in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Charlie is a wild talent, and he writes like the love-child of Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson and Hunter S Thompson. Once you start this book, you won't be able to stop.

Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.

It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it's going to be.

* * *

Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks – maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar – are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problems.

He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?"

He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance.

Link (Thanks, Charlie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti-aircraft apartment

German ad exec Christian Boros is transforming a WWII anti-aircraft tower in Berlin into an art gallery and posh penthouse apartment. I look forward to some before and after photos. From Reuters:

(Boros) told Bild newspaper on Wednesday he fell in love with the seven-storey building, with reinforced concrete walls up to 2.6 metres (8 feet 6 inch) thick, after visiting a former disco inside the eyesore...

"It'll be like James Bond -- very cool with exposed concrete and glass," Boros said.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:18:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Expose of Kabbalah Centre

The SPY-like Radar magazine has a great article about "Hollywood's Hottest Cult" -- Kabbalah Centre, the Los Angeles institution that Madonna has donated $18 million to. Plenty of juicy tidbits here:

The Bergs’ luxurious lifestyle, in stark contrast to the bleak four-to-a-bedroom conditions and $35-a-month stipend they offer the full-time volunteers who cook and clean for them.

The bizarre scientific claims made by the Centre’s leaders on behalf of Kabbalah Water, ranging from its ability to cleanse the lakes of Chernobyl of radiation to its power to cure cancer, AIDS, and SARS.

The Bergs have come a long way since 1971, when Philip, then known as Shraga Feivel Gruberger, began preaching his version of Jewish mystical enlightenment to a small group of students in Israel. A onetime insurance salesman who left his wife and seven kids to marry Karen, his former secretary, Berg has become a man so revered that some of his followers believe he has the power to resurrect the dead. In the process he has created a multimillion-dollar brand out of a bastardization of an arcane branch of Judaism, larding it with pricey accessories and bold-faced names. His followers have been promised that Kabbalah can find their lost children, cure their illnesses, replenish their pocketbooks, and bring them true love. Berg himself is so above it all that even his wife refers to him, at least to the press, only by an honorific. He is “the Rav.”

Link (Thanks, Nathan!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:39:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To do in Chicago: NEXT MUSIC curated by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy

Wired Magazine's NEXTFEST happens in Chicago next week. The two-day event is modeled in part on past World's Fairs, and presents glimpses of the future with experiential, hands-on exhibits from all over the world.

They're kicking it off with NEXT MUSIC, an evening of musical performances on Wednesday, June 22 curated by free culture advocate and Wilco founder Jeff Tweedy. SF Bay-Area harpist Joanna Newsom and Chicago's Handsome Family are among the acts. Here's what Jeff Tweedy has to say about it, snipped from the press release:

I love thinking about what the future holds, so I was thrilled to be invited to be part of WIRED NextFest and to share my vision of the future,” said Jeff Tweedy. “Which is not very futuristic really and admittedly a little bleak.

Honestly, I had a lot of trouble conjuring up a rose-hewn vision of our collective tomorrows. Instead I have focused my attention on music with the kind of sturdiness and self-sufficiency the post-apocalyptic lifestyle I’m anticipating might require. The kinds of artists making the kinds of music that won’t be interrupted or even miss a beat when the power goes out.

The kind that would be fleet-footed and nimble if the Man came crashing down in the middle of the night. In other words, I pictured folk music. All there ever was in the first place.”

God, I love this guy. You should too.

Link to NEXT MUSIC details, 6/22/05.

Previously on Boing Boing: Audio of Lessig/Tweedy/Johnson discussion in NY last month; Interview with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy: "Music is not a loaf of bread."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:25:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Pisa pushers" photos

Jim Hanas (co-conspirator behind Boring Boring, among other things), says:

"Some genius has started a Pisa pushers group on Flicker, featuring third party pics of tourists attempting to 'straighten' the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Since the shots aren't taken from the intended perspective, the people in them appear to be holding unseen objects in the air. Sublime."
Link to photo set, and here's an example of what these folks *hope* they look like.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:15:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mixtape Crackdown Sends a Mixed Message

Giovanni says:

This is the NY Times follow-up on Kim's Video raid by RIAA-influenced cops. In a refreshing move for a mainstream paper, it clearly shows the divide between musicians and the music industry and takes the side of the "pirates."

Here's a snip:

Late on the night of May 13, a hip-hop promoter named Justo Faison died in a car crash in Virginia. And last week, on June 8, the East Village record and video shop Mondo Kim's was raided by the New York Police Department. What do these two stories have in common? Here's a hint: it's cheap, popular and illegal.

Faison was the industry's most energetic promoter of hip-hop mixtapes, the unlicensed compilations (almost always on CD, despite the name) of unreleased new songs, current hits, never-to-be-released freestyles and unofficial remixes. To keep (or get) hard-core listeners excited, rappers are expected to maintain a mixtape presence by supplying DJ's with tracks and also by collaborating with them to release "hosted by" mixtapes. Thanks to Faison, the mixtape world even had its own annual ceremony: he created and produced the yearly Mixtape Awards