"Well," she said, "we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he's been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can't bear to take it from him."

I listened, not sure where she was going with this.

"And he was recently diagnosed with diabetes, and he's now convinced he has bad luck, and finding the camera was good luck, and so we can't tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card..."

I was incredulous. "This is an expensive camera, you know."

"Oh, we know, we looked it up."

Thank you for being a loyal consumer of Miller Brewing Company. As one of our VIP consumers, you have likely received email communications from us in the past. Recently, however, we have not been able to deliver email messages to the address you originally supplied. We have performed an electronic change of address to update our records so that we can continue to send you special offers, promotions, and announcements via email.

Update: Brian McWilliams, author of the great book Spam Kings, has done more investigation into this pernicious spamming technique, "Turns out this spooky little spam was the work of Equifax, the big credit reporting agency that shut down its Boca Raton-based spam operation, Naviant, in 2003, due to the impending passage of CAN-SPAM."

As part of the experiment students had to complete the equation “7+6+5=?+5”. Teachers told the youngsters that they had to make one side of the equation match the other side.

The gestures simply duplicating these directions involved the instructors pointing to the left-hand and then the right-hand sides of the equation. When using complementary gestures, however, the teachers pointed to each of the numbers on the left and then signalled the subtraction of the five on the right side by scooping their hand away from the number.

Merchants basically have two rights covering people entering and exiting their stores. They can refuse to let you enter the premises and/or to sell you anything, and they can place you under citizens arrest for attempting to leave the premises with any property that you haven't paid for. But the second you hand over the appropriate amount of cash, they lose all rights to the items. They can't legally impair you from leaving the store with your property.

Apparently the employees of my local Best Buy aren't very familiar with annoying pedantic individuals who will choose principals over convenience when walking out with a shopping cart full of expensive home entertainment gear. I manage to get about 5 steps out the door before the door guard catches up to me and grabs my cart, with the "sir" in his "I need to see your receipt, sir" somehow not very complimentary. This is apparently a stalling tactic, as shortly a few more blue-shirted employees make a move to block me from making any more progress toward my car.

I ask, still calm, if I am being detained for shoplifting. This suggestion apparently shocks my captor into regaining some of his senses, and he lets go of my cart. I explain that unless he wishes to do so, he has no right to stop me.

Now the RIAA have begun to introduce private information about Patti's minor children into the case, apparently obtained by illicit means:

"As just one example, it was deeply unsettling for us to learn just how much personal, non-public information the RIAA had collected on Patti's children.

"All parents should be concerned and I think people have to know the implications.

"It's one thing to sue children directly. They get a lawyer, rules are established, the court might offer certain protections, etc, but when it's done through a back door - suing a parent to get information about a child - the child has no protections, especially when the plaintiff doesn't even have the decency to not publish personal information about the child.

"This, then, is going to become the new feeding ground for those who seek to exploit children, whether through improper contact or identity theft.

"This new class of child - scared and facing the federal legal system, with few protections and their personal contact and identification information, as well as their posted feelings, fears, desires and thoughts - is now exposed to the world for all to see.

"And exploit."

"This year I'm doing it with Jeff Pulver, Inc., with partnership of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, Tropos Networks, O'Reilly Media, Voxeo, Free Press, Public Knowledge and many other companies and organizations concerned about Internet Freedom.

"I'd like offer a special deal to friends of past F2Cs that does not appear on the official F2C website. It is about 50% off the standard early bird pricing, $295 vs. regular early bird at $595. Please use code FODC when you register before February 28." Link (Thanks, David!)

Update: Here's the video on YouTube -- thanks, Sergio!

Update 2 Here's the torrent -- thanks, Mike!

"We're sorry to report that despite our best efforts, the OSx86 Project has been served with a DMCA violation notice. The forum will be unavailable while we evaluate its contents to remove any violations present. We thank you for your patience in this matter," the posting read.

Win2osx.net, another Web site that hosts discussions related to getting Mac OS X onto chips with the x86 instruction set, was also down Friday. Earlier this week, Win2osx.net's discussion forums contained a posting from a hacker known as "Maxxuss," who made a patch available on his own Web site that would allow programming-savvy PC users to put a recent version of the Mac operating system on their x86 systems.

snow crystals | ice | tall tales | camera mail | fire escapes | abandoned bikes | abandoned theme parks | floating logos | age | time | human clock | thoughts | unphotographable

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Major reform is afoot! Two bills were introduced on Friday that would radically improve unlicensed wireless access. Both bills would greatly improve the general public’s access to the public airwaves. The first bill, “The Wireless Innovation Act of 2006,” is a major bi-partisan effort to line up Senators to support Community Wireless.

The second, “The American Broadband for Communities Act,” is lead by Republican Senator Stevens and does much the same. While many will argue that the two bills don’t go far enough, they are a giant leap (not a baby step) forward towards reforming spectrum policies to make more efficient use of computer technology. I don’t know if the drafts are public yet, but will post the texts once I get confirmation.

Both bills would open up TV broadcast bands (as proposed by FCC proceedings 04-186) within the next 180 days. These bills are particularly important because of FCC proceedings 05-312 (read the wireless communities' concerns about the 05-312 proceedings here). The 04-186 proceedings are something that I and many other people have been actively working towards for quite some time. You can read our official comments on the 04-186 proceedings here. Obviously, it is fantastic news to see US Senators taking up the same position as we've been forwarding and I'm hopeful that we'll finally see some reforms to make more efficient use of the public airwaves.

Each morning at 6:54am I catch an hour-long bus from my house to my office. On this bus are two women (40-50's) who seemingly work all night in some sort of nursing capacity.

One of them, the one who sits across the aisle from me likes to open her window. Mind you, this morning it was 25F outside. From where she sits, she gets a light dusting of fresh air. From where I sit, it's an artic blast that a) farks up the newspaper I'm reading, b) throws my hair into my face and c) freezes my nose off.

Last week, as they did the little dinger thing that signals for a stop I got up and went across the aisle to close the window after they were out of their seats and towards the front of the bus. This act was met with a very loud and demeaning call-out peppered with phrases like:

* Who does she think she is?
* Look at Little Miss Thing
* Uhn-uh, she's closing the window again.

It's truly endless, and so far I haven't acknowledged any of it.

Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

Harry Whittington was shot at close range, between 15 and 18 feet, not the 90 claimed by Dick Cheney and the Secret Service. It is now clear why they refused to let Sherriff's Deputies interview Cheney for over 13 hours and why they claimed that Whittington's injuries were superficial when in truth they were grevious.

The mainstream media is ignoring this literal smoking gun evidence. Anytime they wish, the local police can conduct their own ballistics tests and they will have the exact same findings. The media can conduct their own tests. The ballistics of shotguns and birdshot is well known to tens of millions of Americans who hunt fowl.

We have now scientifically proven with an engineer and a police officer on-site conducting the test that the American people are being lied to and a cover-up is in progress.

Reader comment:RC reminded me that this video is the from the source that had the report claiming "RFID Tags in New US Notes Explode When You Try to Microwave Them." That makes the ballistics report less credible, in my opinion.

Reader comment: Matthew McCormick says:

Whittington was hit with shot from mid-torso to his face, right? If so, it's impossible for him to have been "fifteen to eighteen feet" from Cheney when Cheney fired. Shot simply does not spread that quickly. It's a common misconception that shotgun pellets spread quickly, such that one only has to aim in a general direction to hit a target-- this is quite incorrect. If Whittington had been hit from only 15-18 feet away, the mass of the shot would have still been quite concentrated, and he'd be dead right now.

http://www.firearmsid.com/A_distshotpatt.htm

Even from Wikipedia: It should be kept in mind that the vaunted "wide pattern" of a cylinder/improved cylinder choked shotgun is often much overstated. The typical home defense shot is seldom over ten or fifteen feet. At these relatively short ranges, the shot charge never expands to more than a few inches. The shooter should be within twenty to thirty yards of the target to take advantage of an expanded pattern. At fifteen feet, one must have the gun pointed accurately if he intends to hit his target.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun

Also, if you have access, you should be able to find this paper on JSTOR:

Look at the part of it that talks about the spread rate.

I'm by no means a fan of Dick Cheney, but this conspiracy theory is pretty stupid. It's starting to remind me of those who claim that Vince Foster was murdered. Rather than destroy the left's credibility by engaging in blatant character assassination and chasing nonsense conspiracy theories, how about we focus on finding out the truth about all the things that Cheney actually has done wrong?

"The term described the farm-raised quail released for the hunters to fire at.

"Somebody on the WELL expressed sadness that Wikipedia didn't show an entry for 'quailtard,' so I created an entry. And of course, the nannies immediately showed up to list it for deletion, on grounds that it's not significant enough.

This is one of the best coined words of all time! And it's got significant historic significance in this story. I think that more than qualifies it. After all, Colbert's 'truthiness' qualifies!"

Quailtard is a word combining "Quail," a mid-sized game bird of the pheasant family, and "tard," a contraction of the noun "retard," an often offensive word used to describe the mentally challenged, or retarded. First used on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart]. The word was used in humorous reference to the farm-raised quail released for hunting by Vice President, Dick Cheney, and others on Katharine Armstrong's south Texas ranch. On February 11, 2006, while hunting these quail, Cheney accidentally shot hunting companion, Harry M. Whittington, a lawyer from Austin, TX, with his 28 gauge shotgun from a reported distance of thirty yards.

Reader comment: Robert says: "Alas, the short happy life of 'quailtard' has already ended. Wikipedia has placed a redirect on the page to 'Dick Cheney hunting incident.'

"Of course, if everyone were to start blogging about quailtards and it enters the modern parlance, then Wikipedia would *have to* allow it, wouldn't they? . . .

a la 'santorum' . . . [insert evil laughter] "

Reader comment: Robert says: "I was wrong - it's back. A user just redirected it and it was promptly un-redirected. The quailtard is dead. Long live the quailtard!"

But in recent years, DNA tests have shown that Pacific Islanders and Native Americans are of Asian descent, not Middle Eastern descent, as claimed in the "infallible" Book of Mormon transcribed 175 years ago.

In this excerpt from the Times, it sounds like the Book of Mormon was written by a racist Harry Potter fan:

According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith in 1827 to a divine set of golden plates buried in a hillside near his New York home.

God provided the 22-year-old Smith with a pair of glasses and seer stones that allowed him to translate the "Reformed Egyptian" writings on the golden plates into the "Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ."

Mormons believe these scriptures restored the church to God's original vision and left the rest of Christianity in a state of apostasy.

The book's narrative focuses on a tribe of Jews who sailed from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 BC and split into two main warring factions.

The God-fearing Nephites were "pure" (the word was officially changed from "white" in 1981) and "delightsome." The idol-worshiping Lamanites received the "curse of blackness," turning their skin dark.

According to the Book of Mormon, by 385 AD the dark-skinned Lamanites had wiped out other Hebrews. The Mormon church called the victors "the principal ancestors of the American Indians." If the Lamanites returned to the church, their skin could once again become white.

The latest scholarship, they argue, shows that the text should be interpreted differently. They say the events described in the Book of Mormon were confined to a small section of Central America, and that the Hebrew tribe was small enough that its DNA was swallowed up by the existing Native Americans.

"It would be a virtual certainly that their DNA would be swamped," said Daniel Peterson, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, part of the worldwide Mormon educational system, and editor of a magazine devoted to Mormon apologetics. "And if that is the case, you couldn't tell who was a Lamanite descendant."

(Isn't "delightsome" a great word?) Link

Erik Derr says,

I emailed you in the past to let you know about the Cafe Press shop I set up for "Goolag" parody products, with all proceeds going to Human Rights in China. I've now added products with parody logos for Yahoo!, MSN, and Cisco -- all companies grilled by Congress over their collusion with the Chinese government in suppressing freedom of speech.

"Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water," says Kamen. "The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns..."

Last year, Quadir took prototypes of Kamen's power machines to two villages in his home country for a six-month field trial. That trial, which ended last September, sold Quadir on the technology.

So much so in fact that Quadir's startup, Cambridge, Mass.-based Emergence Energy, is negotiating with Kamen's Deka Research and Development to license the technology. Quadir then hopes to raise $30 million in venture capital to start producing the power machines.

Three weeks ago, an internal camera captured an image of the nail during a routine doctor's office visit. But it wasn't in Hart's ribcage area as he'd always thought -- the object was actually in Hart's lung. As Hart and his doctors made plans to remove the nail once and for all, natural physiology took over.

Hart was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth last week when the 35-year partnership finally came to an end.

"I'd been having this tickle in my throat," Hart said. "Pretty soon, I started coughing. And it plopped right out...."

Hart keeps the nail in a small plastic bag but doesn't have any long-term plans about what to do with the strange artifact.

The swap, announced Friday and effective immediately, follows months of criticism of Lack's tenure as CEO, including investor discontent over spiraling fees paid to artists and a scandal over copy protection software in Sony CDs.

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

The investors were told that the U.S. government printed the bills in 1928 when Chiang Kai-shek was still in power in China to allow Americans to bring their assets back home, Asahi said.

The president showed them a thousand of the $1 million notes featuring a portrait of George Washington at a Tokyo hotel, according to Asahi. The investors were told the notes could be exchanged for smaller denominations in Hong Kong, but no exchange ever took place, it reported.

"We continued to fork over money because we were promised, 'You'll get several hundreds of millions of yen in three days,' or 'You'll get that amount in a week,'" one investor was quoted as saying.

Crazy, yes; delicious, no.

A source at YouTube informs BoingBoing that NBC recently sent the user-submitted video hosting site a nastygram over the Saturday Night Live "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video.

That's right -- NBC's lawyers are beating YouTube with a DMCA stick because the viral content distributor helped facilitate NBC's biggest viral hit, ever.

YouTube's blog states, "We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. You can still watch SNL's Lazy Sunday video for free on NBC's website."

But only Windows users can access the video on NBC.com -- the site in general is kinda buggy for non-Windows users. And the iTunes download costs $2 (see reader comments). Also, it took NBC a while to get the video there in the first place, and when the internet loves your work, it doesn't wait. That's why NBC should be sending flowers and chocolates to YouTube, not love notes from lawyers.

This isn't like another television network broadcasting the skit without permission. YouTube is a service through which individual fans can share stuff they're nuts about with others. NBC issuing a C&D to YouTube makes about as much sense as NBC sending attorneys to the homes of every blogger or Livejournaler user who posted a link to a torrent somewhere -- not to mention the fan-made AIM icons and web banners. Viral means the stuff has a life of its own, guys, and that's what made it a hit.

NBC, you can't have your cupcake and eat it, too.

Link to YouTube blog statement.

Previous "Lazy Sunday"-related posts on Boing Boing: Link

Reader comment: Cody "codeman38" Boisclair sez,

Actually, the thing that bugs me even more about this whole situation is that NBC's actually *cutting off* access to the video for a good 5 to 10 percent of viewers by referring them to NBC.com to view the Lazy Sunday skit rather than letting it stay on YouTube.

Why do I say this? I've been wanting to view NBC's Saturday Night Live skits on their site for a while, but it seems that they just don't want the patronage of Mac or Linux users. NBC seems to be under the delusion that Windows is the only operating system in existence (perhaps not surprising, considering their Microsoft partnership), so their video player site requires a browser with ActiveX support.

At least they've redesigned their site so that the actual URL of the Windows Media stream can be found in the source code, with a bit of concatenation, but even that doesn't help. Even then, trying to access the video stream specified in the ASX file to which the page refers gives me... zilch. They must be expecting some weird header from Windows WMP that my PowerBook just isn't sending.

And the skit's no longer a free download on iTunes, so that option's also out of the question unless you're willing to pony up the $2-- and even when it was free, it required either a US credit card or gift card thanks to the iTunes store's region-locking.

Maybe if this actually gets posted on BoingBoing, NBC will realize their mistake and actually make their video streams accessible on more than one OS, if they're going to force people to use them... that, or they'll tell me to load up Virtual PC, I'm not sure which. Probably the latter. ::sigh::

Reader comment: Bill Kinney says,

While NBC is now charging 1.99 for the video at iTunes, it was free a few months ago. Interesting...

Reader comment: Anonymous Coward says,

Wheres the nastygram for GOOGLE>?!>> HUH HUH ?!??!!

Reader comment: Chris Thompson says,

Xeni, I sent a letter to NBC and suggest others do the same. You can see what I wrote here.

Reader comment: Toca Loca Nation says,

I managed to find one feedback/comments link at NBC.com, though it was buried and i almost missed it: Link.

Lantos, to Yahoo: Are you ashamed?

Yahoo: We are very distressed about the consequences of having to comply with Chinese law...We are certainly troubled by that and we look forward to working with our peers.

Lantos: Do you think that individuals or families have been negatively impacted by some of the activities we have been told, like being in prison for 10 years? Have any of the companies reached out to these families and asked if you could be of any help to them?

Yahoo: We have expressed our condemnation of the prosecution of this person, expressed our views to the Chinese government...We have approached the Chinese government on these issues.

Lantos: Have you reached out to the family? I can ask it 10 more times if you refuse to answer it. You are under oath.

Seated in individual compartments, twelve chocolate bullets lay waiting to be bitten into. Although eleven of the sweet little slugs contain delicious praline centres, one conceals a seriously red hot chilli that's guaranteed to blow your head off - metaphorically, at least.

Here's a great short film of the great Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and his Quintet of the Hot Club of France performing J'Attenndrai ("I Will Wait" - download video, 12 meg, Quicktime file) A newsreel-style announcer introduces the band as they lounge around a room, smoking and playing cards while a young Django and Stephane Grappelli lightly jam. This is the first time I've ever seen Django play, after loving his music for 30 years. You can get a good view of Django's fret hand, which was missing two fingers from a fire he suffered when he was eighteen.

"What it lacks in elegant editing, it more than makes up in turning yesterday's breakup rumor into jolting good fun. (By sending this to BoingBoing, I'm secretly hoping that it will inspire other Oprah mashups - with her confronting, say, a not-so-contrite Dick Cheney over the shotgun affair.)" Link

Reader comment: sputnik says,

As you might know, that black latex outfit from the Gareth Pugh collection is a direct steal from the work of japanese latex fetish wear designers Karin & Wanco. (Relatively SFW) Link, and Link.

Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Police Detective Third Grade, United North American Trading Sphere, Third District, Fourth Prefecture, Second Division (Parkdale) had had many adventures in his distinguished career, running crooks to ground with an unbeatable combination of instinct and unstinting devotion to duty.

He'd been decorated on three separate occasions by his commander and by the Regional Manager for Social Harmony, and his mother kept a small shrine dedicated to his press clippings and commendations that occupied most of the cramped sitting-room of her flat off Steeles Avenue.

No amount of policeman's devotion and skill availed him when it came to making his twelve-year-old get ready for school, though.

"Haul ass, young lady - out of bed, on your feet, shit-shower-shave, or I swear to God, I will beat you purple and shove you out the door jaybird naked. Capeesh?"

The mound beneath the covers groaned and hissed. "You are a terrible father," it said. "And I never loved you." The voice was indistinct and muffled by the pillow.

"Boo hoo," Arturo said, examining his nails. "You'll regret that when I'm dead of cancer."

The mound - whose name was Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg - threw her covers off and sat bolt upright. "You're dying of cancer? is it testicle cancer?" Ada clapped her hands and squealed. "Can I have your stuff?"

Jack Boulware: "This wall over here? All UFO footage, car accidents, trepenation, dick torture, JFK, Bosnia, Gulf Wars One and Two. I'm still organizing it…"

Nearly every U.S. company with a Web site located in China will have to move it elsewhere or its executives would face prison terms of up to a year, according to proposed legislation expected to be introduced this week in the U.S. Congress.

A draft version of the bill reviewed by CNET News.com represents the first serious attempt to rewrite the ground rules controlling how U.S. Internet companies may interact with foreign governments. If enacted, it would dramatically change the business practices of corporations with operations in China, Iran, Vietnam and other nations deemed to be overly "Internet-restricting."

The highly anticipated proposal, created by Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) in response to recent reports about censorship in China by Google, Yahoo and others, also makes it unlawful to filter search results or turn over information about users to certain governments unless the U.S. Justice Department approves. It would also impose new export restrictions to those nations.

"For the sake of market share and profits, leading U.S. companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft have compromised both the integrity of their product and their duties as responsible corporate citizens," Smith said at a related hearing in the House of Representatives on Wednesday. Smith, chairman of a human rights subcommittee, likened that cooperation to companies that aided the Nazis in World War II.

Previously on Boing Boing:
Harsh words for US tech firms from House at China 'net hearings

Reader comment: Tian says,

that is a BIG mistake. If this law ever gets passed, that means China will have even less exposure to Western ideaology. Less American staff in China, less "grey information".

"Grey information" is a term I use to describe how a foreigner would influence the Chinese. When my father was in college (early 1960's), he was first exposed to the Beatles not from radio stations but his English lecturer by the last name "Fish" from Great Britian.

if there are more American firms station in China, democracy does not have be taught to the Chinese via political studies, but just listen to mix-tapes (or mix Cds, podcasts).

Marc "guiding light of the geek cuisine movement" Powell IMmed me the other day:

(14:31:50) Marc: In the Pyrenees sometimes they bury a raw chicken in the ground after stuffing it with truffles -- the truffles keep growing and releasing their flavor throughout the chicken meat
(14:33:41) Xeni: omfg weird!!!
(14:33:21) Marc: it's aged in the ground then they poach or roast it afterwards
(14:34:04) Xeni: ewww!!! but doesn't raw chicken rot when it sits around in a grave for weeks?
(14:33:55) Marc: yah that's aging beef rots too when they dry age it

Previously on Boing Boing:
"Xeni Tech" on NPR: Food Hackers make high-tech geek eats

Macro photos of tiny human figurines atop edible items transformed into landscapes. My favorite, cropped above, is a hazmat team on the scene of a crème brûlée spill.

BoingBoing reader Yana, who submitted the link, says -- "Most are Russians doing what they (we) do best: working. From sweeping up a sugary dish, to surveying a crevice in an eclair, to mowing the furry lawn of a kiwi skin." Link

Correction: while the photos may have been re-posted on a Russian-language blog, BB reader Marc Huneault explains:

Those wonderful images of tiny people on food are not Russian at all, but are the work of culinary photographers Akiko Ida And Pierre Javelle: Link

SG's very own Daniel Robert Epstein spoke this morning with acclaimed filmmaker Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and got a juicy tidbit about his upcoming film, Master of Space and Time, based on the novel by [former BoingBoing guestblogger!] Rudy Rucker and set to star Jack Black. According to Gondry, Daniel Clowes, the master behind such screenplays and graphic novels as Ghost World and Eightball, will pen the script. Clowes' involvement with the project had not been previously announced.

Reader comment: Stefan Kuligowski says:

I'm not sure if Rudy Rucker intended this in naming his novel but the title is remarkably similar to that of Mike Jittlov's 1989 bit of brilliance The Wizard Of Speed and Time. WoSaT is a criminally underrated gem whose whimsical, reality-bending style oddly enough reminds me of Gondry's work. It's a crying shame that the film is not only out of print but actually unfinished according to Jittlov, and all because of the machinations of their evil producer (who coincidentally plays the evil producer in the movie). Maybe in some way this movie getting made will bring some much-deserved attention to WoSaT so it can get the finishing funds and DVD release it so rightly deserves and help the world realize what tremndous talent and imagination Mike Jittlov has to offer!

Here are some pertinent links: Mike Jittlov's website: Link. The most detailed making-of/general information site I've found about WoSaT: Link.

Reader comment:Peter Hollo says,

I may not be the first to point this out, but where Stefan Kuligowski says:

I'm not sure if Rudy Rucker intended this in naming his novel but the title is remarkably similar to that of Mike Jittlov's 1989 bit of brilliance The Wizard Of Speed and Time.

he may not be aware that Rucker's novel first came out in 1985, so it's rather unlikely the causality was in that direction! Is quite possible on the other hand that Jitlov was inspired by Rucker(?)

The sonic equivalent of a unicorn chaser. Link.

Cuppycake.com (a site that predates ytmnd's remix, as does e-thug) has more on the history of the recording and the child who performed it: Link. What's that? You want to know the lyrics? Got some Cuppycake Comments you're dying to get off your chest? It's also available as a wingtone for your tewephone.  (Thanks, Bridget and Mike D, and Mike Atlas !)

Reader comment: Cody "codeman38" Boisclair says,

Wikipedia, as usual, has the scoop on the origins of the cat-loaf-- or 'Nekopan', as it's known in the original Japanese: Link. It's a character created by illustrator Hirose Takuro, whose home page can be found here. Sadly, there's not a whole lot on either the character or the illustrator on the English-language web; I could no doubt find a lot more relevant info if I knew more than just a few words of Japanese...

Update: Here's another animation take on Cuppycake: Link (Thanks AC)

On the bus this morning I saw a San Francisco gov't ad that said something like "Is tagging ruining your neighborhood? Stop the tags!"

I totally forgot the graffiti connection to the idea of tagging until I saw the ad. Did some Google-ing. Check out this page, Vandal Watch: Stopping Vandalism in Your Neighborhood.

Scroll down to the Tagging FAQ and read the sentences as if they're talking about del.icio.us or Flickr. Pretty funny.

Why Do Taggers Tag?
Recognition
Low self-esteem
Peer recognition
For recognition; a distorted view of "fame"
See it in the community and want to try it too

Earlier this week, the Australian public broadcast network SBS aired more than 60 previously unpublished photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, in 2003. Today, Salon.com has republished these -- and released still more photos not aired on SBS Dateline.

Link to Salon.com report, link to an explanation of why they're publishing the photos, link to the photo gallery (NSFW, extremely disturbing images with violence, nudity, and sexual acts.)

Image: "An unknown detainee with women's underwear on his head, strapped to a bed frame. Photo taken at approximately 1:53 a.m. on Oct. 20, 2003."

In related news:

A United Nations report today called on the United States to immediately close the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to either release its inmates or bring them before an impartial tribunal.

The report, by a team of five inspectors for the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, blasted the American government for a litany of abuses, and said that certain practices at the prison camp "must be assessed as amounting to torture."

Link to NYT report by John O'Neill (via IHT).

Previously on Boing Boing:
New Abu Ghraib torture photos from Aus. TV report: torrents

Japan's obsession with camera-equipped mobile phones has taken a bizarre twist, with mourners at funerals now using the devices to capture a final picture of the deceased. "Some can't grasp 'reality' unless they take a photo and share it with others ... It comes from a desire to keep a strong bond with the deceased," social commentator Toru Takeda told the paper.

Reader comment: ScottG In NYC says,

The piece on Japanese funeral phonecam photography hit an interesting note w/me on several personal levels. This sort of thing's been going on for years Down South, and the tradition's still still quite alive - folks did it at the funerals of both my grandmas in North Carolina last year and almost nobody batted an eye...save for my Queens-born fiancee! :) The same concepts and taste complaints the Japanese funeral directors stated in the piece have been echoed here in the US, as evidenced by these two informative articles: Link, and Link. And remember, in the days before photography, people made death masks of the deceased, so the concept of wanting to keep a last remembrance of a loved one's face has been around literally for centuries - this Japanese version is simply another update. Next thing ya know, it'll be 3D holograms and/or animations until we get that whole Kurweilian body-replacement-via-Singularity thing figured out.

Reader comment: Patrick Kubley says,

A few minutes after my father passed away last year, a couple of nurses came into the hospital room, slathered ink on his left hand and made an imprint of it onto five pillows that were to be given to immediate family members. Something my mom wanted to do for the grandkids who are too young to really remember my dad. It seemed weird and creepy to me, but I said nothing.

My pillow is packed away and I don't plan on bringing it out anytime soon. My sister, on the other hand, has hers displayed on a shelf in her living room, so whenever I'm over at her house I make it a point to keep my back to that pillow as much as possible. Don't know if it's because the pillow creeps me out a little, or if it's because seeing my dad's hand emblazoned is emotionally difficult to handle.

I realize this is probably mild compared with photographs and death masks, but from what I hear hand impressions of deceased persons is a common practice at hospitals.

They grew slime in a six-pointed star shape on top of a circuit and connected it remotely, via a computer, to the hexapod bot. Any light shone on sensors mounted on top of the robot were used to control light shone onto one of the six points of the circuit-mounted mould – each corresponding to a leg of the bot.

As the slime tried to get away from the light its movement was sensed by the circuit and used to control one of the robot's six legs. The robot then scrabbled away from bright lights as a mechanical embodiment of the mould. Eventually, this type of control could be incorporated into the bot itself rather than used remotely.

(University of Southampton researcher Klaus-Peter) Zauner believes engineers will need to look towards this type of simple control mechanism, especially as components are scaled down. "On the nanoscale, we have to learn how to work with autonomous components," he says. "We have to let molecules do what they naturally do."

There are two directories, "names" contains samples of about 15,000 names. "sounds" contains elmo spoken phrases in audio files. The audio extension is "rbf". I have not been able to determine this file format. I have tried to import it as a raw format using a-Law, u-Law, etc. but no luck. There are strings of zeros in the audio files, so I suspect that if compression is actually used, its some sort of ADPCM variant. Without being able to convert these files from a usable format, we cannot create new files just yet -- but keep practicing those Elmo voices, i'm sure its format discovery is just around the corner.

Another file of interest is temp.inf. This contains a sort of scripting file that defines what audio files are played in what order. It also has variables, various groupings to handle games and songs, and a memory map at the bottom of the file.

Update: Zan sez, "The Lilly Belle was never actually Walt Disney's private car, as it wasn't built until 1974, 8 years after his death. "

Officers stumbled onto the operation when they responded to a break-in at vacant house on Sundale Avenue on Feb. 8, (police chief Paul) Toth said. The adult and one teen were cutting counterfeit bills from sheets of paper.

Toth said officers obtained a search warrant for the house next door - the residence of the 16-year-old alleged ringleader - and found the computer and paper being used to produce the fake money.

The boy's parents apparently were unaware of the counterfeiting, Toth said.

The computer was used to produce images of older bills, so they wouldn't have to deal with water marks on the newer bills, said Toth. They were then run in a washing machine or dishwasher to give them a used look.

"They were good enough you would not have felt the difference," Toth said.

China needs to learn that it is not a special case, and that it doesn't always get special treatment. Public hectoring isn't the way to go. Quiet, firm, consistent, and respectful criticism of Chinese political policies is what we expect of our leaders. The boundaries have to be set, which of course should be lots of fun because they've already been trampled on. But maybe, just maybe, some political leader, or leaders, will have the sack to take a stand. One can only hope.

In the meantime, we expect a lot of pious arm waving and finger pointing at the Gang of Four. It wouldn't be right otherwise. But at the very least, we expect the press to look into this issue more closely. Freedoms are eroding faster than the ozone layer. The press will be the first to melt if this heats up any further.

LG Electronics, the world's leading air conditioner maker, said on Thursday that it will start selling air conditioners that prevent avian influenza with a special filter coated with a substance extracted from a fermented kimchi. The new air conditioners target Southeast Asian countries affected by bird flu and will be marketed this year. The new products, nicknamed ``Anti-A.I. Aircon,'' have a filter covered with an anti-bacterial substance extracted from kimchi, South Korea's spicy fermented cabbage dish, the company said in a press conference.

Reader comment: Curt Hibbs says,

Isn't the bird flu a virus? If so, an anti-bacterial agent will have no effect whatsoever!

LG is actually exploiting a popular belief that kimchi cures the bird flu. Snip from a wapo article: "given the work of Kang Sa-Ouk of Seoul National University, who took 13 chickens infected with avian flu virus and a couple of other diseases, fed them kimchi juice and found that 11 of the birds recovered." This report plus internets plus Korean nationalism/entreprenurial instincts plus widespread fear and superstition and you get kimchi-air. I grew up on the stuff and it's beyond me why anyone would want to breathe this stuff on a daily basis.

Anti-bacterial agents won't affect H5N1, but a study was recently published in which infected chickens were fed kimchi - 11 out of 13 of the chickens showed improvement. Link. Not that one study is overwhelmingly convincing.

For living in an amazingly technologically advanced culture, (The UN refers to it as "The most wired nation in the world."), they will sometimes laugh at their own almost-unanimously-held beliefs that completely contradict science. For instance, Kim-Chi has not only been "proven" by Seoul National University, (epicenter of the recent cloning fabrication scandals), to be effective against bird-flu... But has also been touted to prevent: cancer, mad-cow disease, SARS, tooth-decay, the common cold, and all forms of the flu. Keep in mind, this is also the home of "fan-death": Link. Another "proven" theory that claims rooms with no open windows or doors can kill their occupants--if they fall asleep with a fan running.

Just as roses remain lovely a day after Valentines' has passed, so too does this photoshoppery still strum our frayed heartstrings. Link (Thanks, Jen Collins!)

As part of the on-going DMCA rule-making proceedings, the RIAA and other copyright industry associations submitted a filing that included this gem as part of their argument that space-shifting and format-shifting do not count as noninfringing uses, even when you are talking about making copies of your own CDs:

"Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use."

For those who may not remember, here's what Don Verrilli said to the Supreme Court last year:

"The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."

Update: AV points out that the RIAA website contradicts this: "If you choose to take your own CDs and make copies for yourself on your computer or portable music player, that's great. It's your music and we want you to enjoy it at home, at work, in the car and on the jogging trail."

Who didn't love the Harlequin Golf when they came out? It was like the Swatch watch of automobiles. Each Harlequin was a random assemblage of colors to create a goofball color combination that was unlike any of the few other super rare Harlequins. Under 500 made, this was a car developed by Volkswagen when they are at the absolute peak of their game.

I have been spending lots of time investigating vehicle wrapping as I am working on an article for a special Make magazine issue. Not surprisingly, it is a complicated endeavor to wrap flat sheets around compound curves with a heat gun.

Any Hooptyriders work/own a large format printing and vehicle wrap shop in Los Angeles? Want a co-writing credit for a super cool Make article? Email me pronto fast.

Reader comment: eDave says: "The photo is of the original Trinity Test explosion, not an H-Bomb. I know this for a fact because I got to see some of the original slides in MIT's Strobe Photography Laboratory, taught by the current director of the Edgerton Center at MIT. Another interesting note is that Doc did not use one camera, as many people believe, but several cameras, all chained together to trigger after one another."

Update: A reader sez, "There's been an actual countdown there for this moment along with all the photos at the different 'million' marks."

Today's House hearings on the ethical responsibilities of US internet firms operating in China are reportedly the first such hearing to be open to bloggers. Any bloggers there, and filing posts? Let us know.

Update: watch the live webcast here: Link to stream.
Notes at bottom of this post.

Snip from NYT report by Tom Zeller:

In a crowded House hearing room, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, unleashed a scathing condemnation of four American Internet and technology companies — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco — for a "sickening collaboration" with the Chinese government and for "decapitating the voice of the dissidents" there.

Mr. Smith's statements opened much anticipated hearings aimed at getting executives of the four companies to give a more complete accounting of their business dealings in China, and to air the concerns of critics who say the companies do business in China at the peril of human rights. Among the chief issues is the alteration of online products in the Chinese market — from search engines to blogging tools — to conform with the repressive requirements of the government there. Also of concern is the sale to China of Internet hardware that the Chinese government has been able to deploy in the surveillance of its online population, as well as the role American companies are being forced to play in the undemocratic imprisonment of Chinese citizens for online behavior that in the West would be considered simple free speech.

Executives on hand to testify today before the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations on behalf of the four companies include Jack Krumholtz, managing director of federal government affairs and associate general counsel for Microsoft; Elliot Schrage, a vice president for corporate communications at Google; Mark Chandler, general counsel at Cisco Systems; and Michael J. Callahan, Yahoo's general counsel. Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat whose own Congressional Human Rights Caucus was snubbed by all four companies when it invited them to speak two weeks ago, had sharp words for the executives.

"I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night," Mr. Lantos said.

Recently on Boing Boing:

# NPR "Xeni Tech": Yahoo may have aided in jailing of second China writer
# Battelle's analysis of Google, Yahoo, MSFT, AOL and China
# US State Dept. launches "Global Internet Freedom Task Force"
# China Communist party official: our net censorship modeled on West

Update -- live notes from a portion of the hearing:
Just tuning in to a portion of the hearing at 2PM PT, a panel with Libby Liu, President, Radio Free Asia; Qiang Xiao, Director, China Internet Project at University of California-Berkeley; Lucie Morillon, Reporters Without Borders; Harry Wu, China Information Center; Sharon Hom, Human Rights in China

China human rights activist Harry Wu, testifying about Cisco's involvement in aiding censorship with the sale of hardware to the PRC:
Wu says the money Cisco made from this transaction "smells like blood."

Lucie Morillon:
"One of the most disturbing arguments from companies is, either we comply or leave China... there is another choice, to negotiate. They need to gather as a united front and negotiate with Beijing.... longterm goal of PRC is not to have American companies be leaders in this market. China still needs them, or they would long ago have kicked them out of the country."

Sharon Hom:
"Yahoo sold Yahoo China to Alibaba, but retains significant ownership stake... board of directors of Alibaba is small... Yahoo can exercise shareholder rights and influence decisions, the argument that they have no control is disingenuous... PRC government's press conference yesterday shows that this hearing matters... Chinese government is paying attention, matters to them very much what this committee decides and what followup happens. You are being watched."

Qiang Xiao:
"Control of the internet in China does not only happen on national level. 14 government ministries in China can issue mandates to control what is available online, local governments exert control as well."

Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-NJ):
"Democracy doesn't happen like magic. Countries are transformed into democracies because individuals pay a penalty to get there."

Harry Wu:
"The Cisco issue is not only an ethical or moral consideration, Cisco is violating American law. Congress has to look into it... Cisco documents show how to train the Chinese police. China only has one million policemen, that's not enough to do what they need. If you use our products, Cisco says, you will effectively have more police work. They are selling a security product to China to subvert the people. Shi Tao -- one individual -- was jailed because Yahoo offered IP data to the court. But how many other people have been jailed because Cisco trained the authorities there?"

Update: hosting help sought for video files referenced in this post. Contact Mark Pesce (mpesce AT gmail DOT com) to assist.

Mark Pesce says,

On Wednesday 16 February 2006, Australian public broadcaster SBS current affairs program DATELINE telecast a segment featuring 60 new photos of the torture inflicted on prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These photos were secured by court order - the ACLU figures prominently in the report - but these photos haven't yet been shown in the media anywhere in the United States. Because of the broadcast on SBS, you now have access to both Web-downloadable versions and BitTorrent file-sharing network versions of the broadcast on this site.

THESE PHOTOS ARE VERY DISTURBING. Please do not view this video if you are easily disturbed by graphic imagery of torture and death.

These files are all hosted on a server located in the United States to speed access for US viewers. If you do know how to use BitTorrent, please download the appropriate BitTorrent file and use that.

HIGH torrent: Link, MEDIUM torrent: Link, LOW torrent: Link

High download: Link, Mirror

Medium download: Link, Mirror

Low download: Link, Mirror

Link to more info on the SBS broadcast at Mark's site. Thanks to Quinn at ambiguous.org  and Sammy at psydesigns.com for hosting help.

Many websites are publishing the photographs as stills. Here is one link, and here is another, both on non-US-hosted websites. (NSFW: contains taxpayer-funded nudity, sexual acts, and explicit violence)

Link to Reuters UK report, and here is a related report and photo series at the UK Guardian.

Reader comment: tian says,

i have uploaded the new Abu Ghraib video to Revver. it is Quicktime format. Link

Reader comment: General Cucumber says,

I've posted a streaming version of SBS segment of Abu Ghraib at my blog. You can view it here, or directly here.

I get e-mail, occasionally weird e-mail. Every once in a while I get an e-mail from someone who needs a handwritten real-world cryptogram solved. This one is from 2004, and involves a multiple murder and suicide. The cryptogram was left by the murderer, and is on my blog. Take a look, at the note and the comments, if you are interested in trying to solve the mystery. But please be respectful of the relatives and friends of the victims; they're also following the progress on the blog.

The enclosure is a floss container. Consumer products have a lot of interesting plastic enclosure styles, and so cheap! This one was something like $2.49. A little time with the diagonal cutters and soldering iron allowed the board to fit.

Next up in the series of craft projects I create for the kids section of Starwars.com: Make Your Own Yoda Felt Doll. It's easy to make, plus it's fun! Just print out the pattern and follow the simple instructions!

Money is a form of computation: As money is transferred from one eager owner to another, it computes the value of goods and services. At its best, the machine automatically arbitrages the value of goods and services between different monetary systems. Money fluctuates in value against other currencies, sometimes wildly. We cannot invent a stable money any more than we have ever invented a fully stable computer operating system. Why? Because we don't want fully stable computers. Only boring people with no sense of invention or enterprise would use them. Money that worked perfectly would lack all entrepreneurial opportunity. We don't use money merely to generate wealth. We use money to create new methods of generating wealth.

Reader comment: Newsarama's Matt Brady says,

The Batman/al Qaeda thing is kinda inaccurate - Miller's working on a graphic novel that he's been "120 pages" into for at least six months now. There's no release date, and he's gung ho about it, but swamped with other work. I'll have a full transcript of the Miller panel where he talks about it, in context, up in the next couple of days. I'll have one with Grant Morrison up as well soon, which will blow people's socks off!

In the write-up, you say the "next edition"… in the zany world of comics, there's 5 different monthly batman books. None of them will have this story? What the linked article refers to his longtime cartoonist Frank Miller (and creator/co-director of Sin City) referring to an upcoming miniseries with no announced release date. He's been talking about this since 9-11, but no firm details on when it comes out. I'd hate for BoingBoing readers to knock down comic stores when they don't have this book ASAP.

Comics has a rich, and sometimes overlooked history, at confronting political things like this. Captain America fought Hitler & the 3rd Reich for years (jpeg link) back in the 1940s.. even pre-dating the U.S.'s involvement in the war.

December 26, 2005: Sony store still selling rootkit CDs

A Consumerist reader discovers Sony rootkit CDs still on sale at the Sony Store in Westchester, NY, despite Sony's assurance that it has withdrawn the CDs.

December 30, 2005: EFF and Sony BMG Reach Preliminary Settlement on rootkit

EFF brings Sony to heel on its illegal practice of sneaking malicious software onto your PC.

January 1, 2006: Sony may be liable on federal criminal statutes

Ed Felten has posted about the question that must scare Sony the most: have they committed a criminal act by distributing music CDs with spyware and rootkits on them?

January 1, 2006: Texas sues Sony over spyware as well as rootkits

Texas's Attorney General has announced that he will expand his existing lawsuit against Sony to include damages for CDs infected with Sunncomm's MediaMax spyware.

January 4, 2006: Florida may sue Sony, too

Florida's attorney general opens an investigation into Sony's DRM shenanigans.

January 5, 2006: Law student files rootkit small-claim against Sony

Mark Lyon, the law student who runs SonySuit.com has filed a personal small claim against Sony for the damage done to his PC when he played one of the company's audio discs.

January 5, 2006: Sony sued for spyware and rootkits in Canada

Three class actions against Sony start in Canada.

January 25, 2006: Graphic of Sony sinking its roots into your life

Metin Sevin produced a lovely CGI image of Sony's malicious software sinking destructive taproots into your PC

January 26, 2006, How the malicious software on Sony CDs works

Princeton's Ed Felten and Alex Halderman begin the premlinary publication of a major paper on the Sony DRM Debacle, seeking comment on each section before final publication.

January 28, 2006: Can DRM be future-proof?

Another installment in Princeton's Felten and Halderman's ongoing draft publication of their white-paper on the Sony DRM debacle.

January 29, 2006: How DRM tries to resist uninstalling

Another installment in Princeton's Felten and Halderman's ongoing draft publication of their white-paper on the Sony DRM debacle.

January 30, 2006: How do music CDs infect your computer with DRM?

Another installment in Princeton's Felten and Halderman's ongoing draft publication of their white-paper on the Sony DRM debacle.

January 31, 2006: CD DRM software players are amateurish and easy to trick

Another installment in Princeton's Felten and Halderman's ongoing draft publication of their white-paper on the Sony DRM debacle.

February 1, 2006: Sony-BMG chairman giving public speech in London tomorrow

A chance to heckle the chairman of Sony-BMG's board for Londoners!

February 2, 2006: Canadians suing Sony some more for infecting music CDs

A Canadian class-action suit against Sony launches, alleging that Sony gave Canadians an even worse deal by not withdrawing its products form the Canadian market at the same time that it recalled them in the US.

February 4, 2006: Sony CD spyware vendor caves to EFF demands

SunnComm, the vendor who supplied Sony with the dangerous MediaMax spyware, has complied with all the demands set out in EFF's open letter to the company.

February 6, 2006: Settlement details for people infected by Sony DRM CDs

Here's the details of the class-action settlement that you can opt into if you were infected by Sony's DRM.

February 8, 2006: Court asked to overturn Sony's DRM class-action settlement

An appeals court has been asked to overturn the Sony class-action settlement on the grounds that some of Sony's victims want the chance to sue separately right away.

February 14, 2006: Princeton DRM researchers release Sony debacle paper

Princeton's Ed Felten and Alex Halderman have published the final version of "Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode."

February 15, 2006: Bruce Sterling on Sony DRM debacle

Bruce Sterling's Wired editorial raises the key question: what gives companies the right to install remote-control software on our PCs?

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup:

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

Speakers:

* Paula LeDieu, iCommons
* Cory Doctorow, Writer and Campaigner
* Tom Chance, RemixReading and Free Culture UK
* Jennifer Rigby, BBC Creative Archive

* When: Wednesday 22nd February 2006, 7-9pm
* Where: Stanhope Centre, Marble Arch, London, W2 2HH. (Directions) (Map)

Imagine the mayhem if this kind of attitude were to become widespread: Coca-Cola would use your desktop to propagate spam about its latest bottle-cap sweepstakes. Vonage would keep Skype offers from reaching your inbox. Samsung would make sure that, when your browser tried to load Sony.com, it reached a fake Sony site where nothing worked. Companies would compile vast archives of customer data merely because they could, hoping they'd stumble on a revenue model.

It's time for lawmakers, trade groups, and public-interest organizations to get down to the hard work of hammering out standards for what businesses can and can't do to customers' computers. Such an effort will need to be international, because the Net knows no bounds. It will need to come up with simple, understandable language for end-user licensing agreements. It will need to draw red lines around unacceptably invasive hacks and map gray areas between spying and market research.

I'm not holding my breath, though. After all, we asked for this. We didn't want to ruffle the feathers of the goose that laid the golden egg of technological progress, so we allowed manufacturers to claim more and more control over the ways we use their products and what they can do with our information. It should come as no surprise that they're using that power as a cover for bigger, possibly more lucrative schemes.

You may not be interested in the digital rights war, but that doesn't mean you'll have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines. Because the other side is very, very interested in you.

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

While the grammatically-impaired emailer responsible for the missive below didn't signal or indicate or announce himself, "I'm pretty positive this is him," Drew tells Boing Boing, The I.P. belongs to Paramount Studios, and he's writing about a story we linked about him and Katie splitting up."

Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 19:29:52 -0500 (EST)
From: fark off farkers
To: drew@fark.com, mike@fark.com, meg@fark.com
Subject: FARK : Error report from fark off farkers (204.110.112.2)

The following was submitted:

Login : (not logged in) (0)
Name : fark off farkers
Type : (error) Report some error message
-----
I can't believe that people actually read and or believe this bull shit that is posted on fark.com. This is the first time I have been to fark.com and definatly the last. Considering I am witness to a lot of shit that goes on in hollywood, its hard to post some complete bull shit rumor say about tom cruise and katie holmes breaking up when they are sitting in front of you acting completely normal and sane. You guys must have small penis's since you have to make up shit for people to notice you. Hate to be with you in bed. Dumb shits! You may think I am, at least Im getting rich off being honest and not lieing to everyone in the fucking world.
-----
Remote IP: 204.110.112.2
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

Experts familiar with the actor's prosaic style definatly agree -- it could be him. And in a gesture of solidarity with Fark.com, I am -- no lieing! -- at this very moment wearing a CafePress wifebeater that reads, "Silly tom cruise, all bloggers have small penis's."

Link to the Fark.com thread that started it all, "Amusing: Tom and Katie to split. Next time make sure she's OT III before implanting a thetan."

We’d love to believe that Cruise spends his downtime lost in vanity Google session and firing off unhinged missives about the health of his relationship [Ed.note: Tom: call us!], but we have a hard time picturing the Scientology Information Officers letting him anywhere near a computer, for fear the rest of his life would be consumed by a crusade to wipe out the unchecked negativity of the internets. And with so many people on the Paramount lot (where his production company is housed) whose jobs are dependent on Cruise’s career, the message really could’ve come from anyone. So as long as we’re taking guesses as to the angry writer with the disabled spell-checker, we might as well finger a far more likely suspect: Paramount Emperor Brad Grey. It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?

Someone from the same IP address as the Tom Cruise email to Fark.com has been busy on Wikipedia trying to make the college of William and Mary look good. Link

There's a story that ENIAC dimmed the lights in Philadelphia when it was in use.

That story is total fiction, dreamed up by some journalist. We took power off of the grid. We had voltage regulators to provide 150 kilowatts of regulated supply.

Did the military guys working on ENIAC salute the machine?

Another ENIAC myth...

What's the zaniest thing you did while developing ENIAC?

The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch of mice to see which insulation they did not like. We only used wire that passed the mouse test.

Recently, I was asked by a visitor to the Archive what relevance half century old cartoons and magazine illustrations have to the current animation scene. Well, this question is best answered with an example... Look at these amazing designs by Boris Artzybasheff originally published in the 1950s, and look at this clip from Fleischer's 1937 cartoon "Lost And Foundry" (Quicktime 7 / 10 megs). It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to be able to picture what a sequence in a current CGI film would look like if it had designs like Artzybasheff's and animation like the Fleischers'.

LED Throwies are an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood. A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together. Throw it up high and in quantity to impress your friends and city officials.

Reader comment: Jason Gill says:

I saw your new post on boingboing about Kleer Drain's new product and it reminded me to email you; over the weekend, I picked up the Kleer Drain at Home Depot, remembering your positive review from a year or two ago. I used it on my master bathroom sink which has been draining slowly for months, after reading all of the instructions. Much to my dismay, the sink in my guest bathroom in the hall must have been affected by the force of the Kleer Drain, as not only was I and the master bathroom now covered with the contents of the sink and drain, my guest bathroom sink had spewn water and drain much all over the second bathroom. Now, the sink is 100% clogged and the water level hasn't gone down at all since the weekend, and I'm waiting on a plumber to come fix the problem.

I guess this experience goes to show that sometimes, no matter how smart it may sound to use explosive force on your home plumbing, it's best to leave the job to a professional.

Be careful with the new Kleer Drain unit -- I'll let you review that one before I go buy it.

Reader comment: Jason Gill says in a followup:

I had a plumber come and fix the clog. He reported to me that the master bathroom sink and the guest bathroom sink were actually connected together (ie, sharing the same drain exactly like a his-and-hers sink would be) despite the fact that they are in physically separate bathrooms. Unfortunately, there was no way for me to know this, but the house is quite old and the plumbing was apparently poorly designed. Why the Kleer Drain actually exacerbated the clog still remains a mystery, but I suspect that the fact that the two sinks are connected resulted in some sort of loss of suction or pressure.

That being said, I don't think that the Kleer Drain is a bad product -- I'm sure if I had more "standard" plumbing, I wouldn't have had any issues at all. You may want to consider adding a warning regarding plugging other sinks in older houses (much like the warning to put a rag in the other side of a his-and-hers sink), and it would be nice if you offered some sort of money back guarantee as there are no refunds for the product after use from Home Depot.

Reader comment: Jenny Tsai (a spokesperson for Kleer Drain) says:

Jason, I'm glad to hear you got down to the root of the problem. I never heard of this issue before with Kleer Drain so it is a concern for users who have similar situations. Bad piping design is an unknown factor, especially for those of us who aren't plumbing experts.

Reader comment: Chris says:

Thanks to your old BB recommendation i got one of those CO2 powered clog busters today... worked like a dream (on a toilet... ick) -- just to let you know they now ship with a "splash guard" which is a thin piece of plastic wrap with a hole in it. didn't really help... the bathroom was pretty nasty afterwards... but the drain is flowing nicely.

(Amazing illustration shown here by John MacNeill) This two-football-fields-long concept airship is the brainchild of Igor Pasternak, whose privately-funded California firm, Worldwide Aeros Corporation, is in the early stages of developing a prototype and expects to have one completed by 2010. Pasternak says several cruise ship companies have expressed interest in the project, and for good reason: The craft would have a range of several thousand miles and, with an estimated top speed of 174 mph, could traverse the continental U.S. in about 18 hours. During the flight, passengers would peer at national landmarks just 8,000 feet below or, if they weren't captivated by the view, the cavernous interior would easily accommodate such amenities as luxury staterooms, restaurants, even a casino.

The official, Liu Zhengrong, who supervises Internet affairs for the information office of the Chinese State Council, or cabinet, did not dispute charges that China operates a technologically sophisticated firewall to protect the ruling Communist Party against what it treats as Web-based challenges from people inside China and abroad. But he sought to place the massive Chinese efforts to control the Web in the best possible light, stressing repeatedly that Chinese Internet minders abide strictly by laws and regulations that in some cases have been modeled on American and European statutes.

"If you study the main international practices in this regard you will find that China is basically in compliance with the international norm," he said. "The main purposes and methods of implementing our laws are basically the same."

The briefing was one of the few times any senior official has spoken in detail about China's management of the Internet. Officials assigned to enforce the government's media controls operate behind closed doors and rarely make public statements about their work.

BTW: Take a look at the video of Steve Lodefink's water bottle rocket, the cover story of Make Vol 5.

Link

More photographs have been leaked of Iraqi citizens tortured by US soldiers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. Tonight the SBS Dateline program plans to broadcast about 60 previously unpublished photographs that the US Government has been fighting to keep secret in a court case with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Although a US judge last year granted the union access to the photographs following a freedom-of-information request, the US Administration has appealed against the decision on the grounds their release would fuel anti-American sentiment. (...)

Some of the photos are similar to those published in 2004, others are different. They include photographs of six corpses, although the circumstances of their deaths are not clear. There are also pictures of what appear to be burns and wounds from shotgun pellets.

The State Department announced plans Tuesday to step up a campaign to combat efforts by foreign governments to restrict use of the Internet. At a news conference, Josette Shiner, a top State Department trade expert, called the Internet "the greatest purveyor of news and information in history" but said too often the flow is blocked by government censors.

Shiner announced the formation of a task force that will consider, among other issues, the foreign policy aspects of Internet freedom, including the use of technology to restrict access to political content. (...) Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky said a U.S. team was en route to China on Monday to discuss the issue with Chinese authorities.

Greg Walton says,

Earlier today, Secretary Condoleezza Rice announced the Global Internet Freedom Task Force in order to ensure "a robust US foreign policy response" to the international issues and fundamental human rights concerns inherent in the expansion of the Internet including: "the use of technology to restrict access to political content and the impact of censorship efforts on US companies; the use of technology to track and repress dissidents; and efforts to modify Internet governance structures in order to restrict the free flow of information..."

Link to On-the-Record Briefing by Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs Josette S. Shiner and Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky.

Here's more on the State department's announcement -- and word that this will be the first congressional hearing open to bloggers. Link

Brown vines dried and crumbled along the village Refojee-Ten’s edges. Everything thirsted for the impending rainy season: the dry jungle, the hard-packed dirt roads winding through the village, the two wells, and the drooping emerald ears of corn.

Wiry elders sat hunched over rickety tables outside playing cards, their eyes scanning the late-afternoon sky as they shuffled and dealt. In the distance over the green fringe of the treetops, the hazy Wicked High Mountains cut and shredded dark clouds, forcing them to release sheets of rain several days’ walk away from Refojee-Ten. The elders flicked their cards, flashed their gums, and licked lips as they eyed the pictures in their cal- loused hands.

Rainy season tugged at their joints. It made them feel older, creakier, and yet thankful life was about to return because soon the jungle air blowing into the streets would be wet, the roads muddy, and the corn so fresh you could hear it grow at night in the fields.

Yes, rainy season would burst in any day now.

So no one jumped when the thunder cracked the sky. They looked up and nodded, wise to the land’s regular cycle proving itself for yet another year, as it had all the many years of their lives before.

Made with "5 scoops of the richest Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream infused with Madagascar vanilla and covered in 23K edible gold leaf, the sundae is drizzled with the world's most expensive chocolate, Amedei Porceleana, and covered with chunks of rare Chuao chocolate, which is from cocoa beans harvested by the Caribbean Sea on Venezuela's coast. The masterpiece is suffused with exotic candied fruits from Paris, gold dragets, truffles and Marzipan Cherries. It is topped with a tiny glass bowl of Grand Passion Caviar, an exclusive dessert caviar, made of salt-free American Golden caviar, known for its sparkling golden color. It's sweetened and infused with fresh passion fruit, orange and Armagnac. The sundae is served in a baccarat Harcourt crystal goblet with an 18K gold spoon to partake in the indulgence served with a petite mother of pearl spoon and topped with a gilded sugar flower by Ron Ben-Israel."

Update: Not so fast -- this cake is worth 1.65 million dollars -- thanks, Rohin!)

(Thanks, Mark Hurst)

If you read Chinese, and you spend time on sites like Baidu and Yahoo.cn, please roll your eyes and skip this post -- nothing here will be news to you.

I do not read Chinese, though, and I've never clicked around much on the big Chinese portals -- so when I spent some time poking around this weekend, I was surprised to see that at least two of the biggest ones offer "MP3s" as a top-level tab. If you're a non-Chinese-reader, run Yahoo China's "MP3" tab through Babelfish, and you'll see that it offers a ton of bootlegged hit songs in various DRM-free file formats (Jeremy Zawodny has a post about this here).

In the "MP3s" section of Baidu and Yahoo China, I stumbled on  Taiwanese pop star Jay Chow (aka Zhou Jie Lun)'s  theme song for Fearless (Huo Yuan Jia), the new Jet Li action movie about 19th-century martial arts hero Huo Yuan Jia. Here's one ripped MP3 of the song, here's another -- it's wicked catchy. Sort of hiphop meets backstreetboys meets chinese opera (sung in falsetto by a dude). After I listened about forty times, I found the movie's official site (gah, no US release dates! I'd gladly pay to see it!), and the music video: high, low.

I like the part in the music video where the dude is being such a hard-ass rapper and he punctuates the end of a line with the FAN. Like, "BLAYUMM--how you like me now, with my figgidy-FAN?!" I give Jay-Z like five minutes to rip this off cover this.

Incidentally, the little popup media window that appears when you select an MP3 on Yahoo China says (via Babelfish), "The force recommendation use fart fart dog (PPgou) downloads acceleration software high speed downloading, the speed multiplies!" Whatever fart fart dog is, it's nice to know that The Force believes it's helpful. (Thanks, Jen Collins!)

Previously on Boing Boing:
# Battelle's analysis of Google, Yahoo, MSFT, AOL and China
# NPR "Xeni Tech": Yahoo may have aided in jailing of second China writer
# Yahoo logo parodied over China: what's good for the Goolag...

Reader comment: Tian says,

Your post about Huo Yuan Jia has brought some early childhood memories back. When I was growing up, there was a TV show based on Huo Yuan Jia (a famous martial artist). My parents never let me to watch it claiming the show promotes violence (they sounded like a certain American attorney we know that wants stop violent video games). But the irony is that I was allowed to go watch live executions! Yes, paramilitary policemen carry out orders for the court. I never understood their logic.

Last year you linked to my reports on pirate DVDs in China (hilariously bad english.) Well, it's a fetish of mine, and I'm back in the mainland writing and taking tons of pics. Sometimes you find it on a product, or a store's name will reach out and grab you. A caution sign will confuse to all to hell, a menu will cause you to laugh out loud, and occasionally, you'll have to interrupt someone's meal in Cantonese and ask to take a picture of their 13-year-old's t-shirt.

Previously on Boing Boing:
# Moment of pirated Chinese DVD zen
# Engrish hilarity on badly bootlegged Star Wars DVD
# Eternal Engrish of the Bootleg DVD
# The Loin King II
# flickr pool: Crappy Bootleg DVD covers

Rothko's death changed everything. It transformed the meaning of his work, gave every encounter with his painting a terrible gravity. It fooled the cursory eye, putting Rothko's motivation so apparently on the surface, so visibly in the public domain, that it made it hard ever to think about him again with any subtlety.

His death also ensured that a puzzle at the heart of his painting would never be solved. For Rothko's contract with society was not torn up that day in 1970, but a decade earlier, in 1959. That was when Rothko suddenly and unexpectedly repudiated his agreement to provide 600 square feet of paintings for the most exclusive room in the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York - the most prestigious public commission that had ever been awarded to an abstract expressionist painter, a tremendously lucrative and enviable chance to take his work to new heights of ambition.

No British men's club ever enjoyed a more masculine atmosphere than the Trophy Room. And the stories spun here are likely to be taller by far than those that fill a big game hunter's den.

The walls of the Trophy Room (the rich wood look and touch of natural finish cypress) are lined with samples of the hunter's skill. Over a period of years, friends of Walt Disney had given him a prize collection of princely value: African antelope, mountain goat, native spears, masks and plumes. And the room's most valuable decorative showpiece, a nine-foot long, solid ivory mammoth tusk.

Forty-two guests dining at pub-like, natural oak tables will find their attention drawn not only to these treasures, but to several other seemingly passive birds and animals around the room. Above the fireplace, an owl and two magpies. Nearby, a raccoon. Across the room, a leering, hungry vulture.

This is no ordinary menagerie. For when the feathers begin to fly, and the tall tales are spun back and forth across the Trophy Room, the voices may not be those of your luncheon companions alone. To the contrary: these Audio-Animatronic performers are as talented as the marvelous Macaws in the Enchanted Tiki Room, and as talkative as "mother" in the General Electric Carousel of Progress. And the wise old owl on his fireplace perch has one more extraordinary talent; for a tuppence or two, he can talk directly for you. He may even know your guests by name!

Just in time for Valentine's Day: Boing Boing pal and Texas-native-songwriter Ned Sublette shares news that Willie Nelson has recorded Ned's ode to Dorothy-befriended cowpokes, "Cowboys are Frequently Secretly." The song is available on iTunes, and a ringtone's on the way.

"There's going to be a Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly ringtone, and I'm told there is also a video, though I haven't seen it.," says Ned. "It was covered by the queercore group Pansy Division, who changed it from a waltz to 4/4. I tried to place it in Brokeback Mountain, but the word I got was that it was too funny for a tear-jerkin' movie."

Snip from lyrics:

There's many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas
There's many a young boy who feels things he don't comprehend
Well, the small town don't like it when somebody falls between sexes
No, the small town don't like it when a cowboy has feelings for men.

Now I believe to my soul that inside every man there's the feminine
And inside every lady there's a deep manly voice loud and clear
Well the cowboy may brag about things that he does with his women
But the ones that brag loudest are the ones who are most likely queer.

In related news, Nelson has launched "BioWillie," an eponymously-branded, clean-burning fuel made from soybeans.

BioWillie went on sale Wednesday at an alternative fuel station in San Diego where the 72-year-old singer filled his tour bus from a pump emblazoned with a picture of himself strumming a guitar.

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

But the venerated Americans never came back, except as a dribble of tourists and veterans eager to revisit the faraway islands where they went to war in their youth. And although almost all the cargo cults have disappeared over the decades, the John Frum movement has endured, based on the worship of an American god no sober man has ever seen.

* Nanodevices that self-assemble for use in plastic solar cells and flexible displays (image left)

* How environmental changes can affect evolution and extinction

* What climate models reveal about global warming today, and tomorrow

(Click on images for larger-size). Hacker and free speech activist Oxblood Ruffin says,

Today at 11AM in Dharamsala, India, the local chapter of The Students For A Free Tibet joined a global protest against Google. Nowhere is Google's evil more keenly felt than in Dharamsala. It is home to the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans who fled here after their country was invaded by China in 1949. Now, thanks to Google, any Chinese who wants to get information about the Dalai Lama, human rights, or Tibet will only get criticisms, official government policy, and lies, respectively. For Tibetans this isn't just a censorship issue. It's an extension of China's de facto practice of cultural genocide into cyberspace, and Google is part of that. For shame!

When the Cult of the Dead Cow launched its global "Goolag" campaign against Google, I never imagined that it would take off as quickly as it did. But nothing has been as meaningful as seeing stickers printed up and distributed in Dharamsala. Just before we launched, I circulated the logo to a mailing list of technical experts, almost all of whom live in Dharamsala. Feedback was quite positive, and we were joking that this would make a great t-shirt.

Well, thanks to the wonders of technology, now anyone can get a Goolag t-shirt from Café Press. Well, *almost* anyone. I got an email from Dharamsala this morning and am posting the relevant fragment:

"I am sure many people here would love to have a tshirt or other 'Goolag' item! It being seen here would have a big impact on tourists and others here. But very difficult to have one. The price of a shirt (not even counting shipping) is more than most people pay for their living quarters. Even for foreigners like me, rich by local standards but still on limited budget and no income - that shirt represents my food for a week."

I'm going to order a t-shirt and send it to the guy who wrote this email. At least one guy on the front lines can represent :-)

Matt Browner-Hamlin of Students for a Free Tibet says,

Phayul, the largest website for news about Tibet, has shut itself down in honor of SFT's protest against Google's censorship of search results in Tibet and China. The text of the site reads:

"Access Denied: We at phayul.com do not have the right to deny you our contents. But we commit this offence to help you realize a fact.

This is what Google has helped Chinese government achieve in China.

Phayul respects the right to information. People in China and Tibet are denied this basic right of an individual. And what more, the government that should be protecting it has itself violated it. And helping China in this serious offence is Google. Phayul condemns Google's censorship in China and Tibet. We close till midnight (IST) to express our solidarity and support to the Students for a Free Tibet in their campaign against Google. Click here to join us."

Click here to see a full size screen shot of Phayul's self-censorship.

After all, what's the big deal? Just like a sneaker company, Yahoo, Google, et al all have to play by Chinese rules in order to do business in China. If Nike can do it, why not Google?

Well, let's break that one down. What happens when Nike gets itself into a PR pickle over, say, child labor or issues of environmental degradation or fair wages? Why, Nike simply pledges to do better, to spend a bit more to nominally clean up the environment, or to pay its workers a living wage, or to not hire children. Such practices cost Nike a bit more money, but don't raise any eyebrows in Beijing. Nothing wrong with a US company spending more in China, after all.

But companies like Yahoo and Google don't traffic in sneakers, they traffic in the most powerful forces in human culture - expression. Knowledge. Ideas. The freedom of which we take as fundamental in this country, yet somehow, we seem to have forgotten its importance in the digital age - in China, one protesting email can land you in jail for 8 years, folks.

Previously on Boing Boing:
# Yahoo logo parodied over China: what's good for the Goolag...
# NPR "Xeni Tech": Yahoo may have aided in jailing of second China writer

Ferrigno began training to become a reserve deputy last September after passing a background check. He completed training in firearms, first aid, and high-speed driving techniques and was recognized as "an outstanding trainee" by Sheriff Lee Baca.

Ferrigno will serve at least 20 hours a month, help recruit new deputies and work with the sheriff's Youth Activities League and the Special Victims Bureau, which assists abused children.

YouTube users, through this promotion, are offered the MP3 “Nocturnal House” from the band’s upcoming album ‘Elan Vital’ to create an original music video for the band Pretty Girls Make Graves. The user will then have a chance to win $1,000 in cash and an all expenses paid trip to New York to hang with the band and to see Pretty Girls live in concert.

Link. Interesting to see labels reach out to fans in this way. More artists doing stuff on YouTube: MC HAMMER (!!!) , We Are Scientists, E-40, and Taking Back Sunday. (Thanks, Micah, and Simon!)

Update: Pretty Girls fans, do be sure to read the lawyerese before submitting:

Winners (or the parent/guardian if the Winner is a minor) will be required to sign a contract assigning all worldwide copyrights and unrestricted exploitation rights in perpetuity in their treatments and films to Matador, and in return will receive a production budget of $1000 and appropriate credit whenever the film is projected or otherwise displayed as full and complete consideration for all rights granted and any and all exploitations (if at all) of the film by Matador or its designees, it being understood that Matador will not be obligated to use the film in any manner. All entries and requests become the property of Matador.

Update: Philipp Seifried says,

You might like to mention that the contest is only open "to residents of the United States and the District of Columbia", as mentioned in the site's legalese.

cheers,
Disappointed in Vienna

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX. The UI Library Utilities facilitate the implementation of rich client-side features by enhancing and normalizing the developer's interface to important elements of the browser infrastructure (such as events, in-page HTTP requests and the DOM). The Yahoo UI Library Controls produce visual, interactive user interface elements on the page with just a few lines of code and an included CSS file. All the components in the Yahoo! User Interface Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

Update: Drew sez, "Bad news on those adjust-a-spoons. I've tried them before and while the theory is a good one, it just doesn't work in practice. The mechanism often slips so that the spoon adjusts itself to a different measurement mid-measure. Food particles tend to get stuck making it hard to clean. The worst part of the design is that the slide gets in the way of taking the back edge of a knife across the top of the spoon to ensure accurate measurement. Both Alton Brown and Cook's Illustrated (probably the two holy cooking sources of most BB reader food geeks) have complained about these spoons as well."

Update 2: Christopher sez, "To directly debate Drew's denigrating comment, I have owned these spoons for a few years and love them. The only time they slip is occasionally when measuring oil, and only when I hold it with thumb pressure on the sliding piece, which, I might add, detaches for cleaning (dishwasher safe!), so particles don't stay stuck when it is washed properly. As for knife-leveling, it's not hard to start the knife flush to the back edge and push excess across the top. These devices are every bit as wonderful as they sound."

Opponents of Google Book Search (GBS) argue that publishers should have been consulted before their works were scanned, but it's in the nature of fair use that it does not require permission -- that's what a fair use is, a use you make without permission.

They argue that GBS should pay some money to publishers because anyone who makes money off a book should kick some back -- but no one comes after carpenters for a slice of bookshelf revenue. Ford doesn't get money from Nokia every time they sell a cigarette-lighter phone-charger. The mere fact of making money isn't enough to warrant owing something to the company that made the product you're improving.

Google Video is a new video-search and video-sales tool, through which users can download videos that have been uploaded by their creators or by others who have the rights to them, either because the videos are in the public domain, or because they are used in a way that satisfies the "fair use" defense in US copyright law.

Part of the Google Video offering is a store that sells videos. Some of these are delivered in a locked format of Google's devising that restricts how Google's users can play and use the videos they buy. This Digital Rights Management system (DRM) is like many of those used by Google's competitors in that it doesn't attempt to model any copyright system in the world, but rather reflects a one-sided vision of how copyright should work and imposes that unilaterally on Google's customers.

Here's how the Google Video DRM works: when you download a restricted video from Google, it locks that video to your account and software player. Every time you want to play the video, your player has to communicate with Google to determine whether you are currently permitted to play it; if the player doesn't get the answer it's looking for, it won't play the video. The specifics of how this works aren't available -- Google hasn't published any details of how the security is implemented, committing the cardinal sin of "security through obscurity."

The video is encrypted (scrambled), which means that it is unlawful for competitors of Google (or free/open source software authors) to make their own players for the video, even if they can figure out how to decrypt it. Other DRM vendors, like Apple, have threatened to sue competitors for making players that can play their proprietary file-formats.

Why Has Google Done This?
The question is, why has Google done this? There's no Google customer who woke up this morning looking for a way to do less with her video. There's no Google customer who lacked access to this video if he wanted it (here's a tip: enter the name of a show or movie into Google and add the word "torrent" to the search, and within seconds Google will have delivered to you a link through which you can download practically everything in the Google DRM catalog, for free, without DRM -- although it may be illegal for the person you get it from to send it to you).

That's not to say that there's nothing problematic about getting your video through Google this way. But the problems of the inability of the entertainment industry to adapt to the Internet are the entertainment industry's problems, not Google's. Google's really good at adapting to the Internet -- that's why it's capitalized at $100 billion while the whole of Hollywood only turns over $60 billion a year.

Today's installment talks about his the "attention curve" of how many links point to which services has shifted, somewhat to the detriment of big media outlets, and to the benefit of blogs, including newer blogs, that have managed to slide up the curve:

With so may blogs and bloggers out there, one might think that it is a lost cause for new bloggers to achieve any significant audience, that the power curve means that there's no more room left at the top of the "A-List".

Fortunately, the data shows that this isn't the case.

Thanks to the Wayback machine, here's a look at the Technorati Top 100 as it appeared on November 26, 2002 (bear with me if the wayback machine is slow). Then look at it as it appeared on December 5, 2003. And again on November 30, 2004. And again on April 1, 2005. And now look at it today.

Let's take a few examples. Have a look at PostSecret. It is the #3 site on the Technorati Top 100 today, with over 12,000 sites that have linked to it in the last 180 days. It didn't even exist on the chart in April of 2005. Or look at The Huffington Post. It is #5 on the Top 100. It too, didn't exist on the chart in April of 2005. Or look at the #47 blog in April, 2005 Baghdad Burning. This blog still is regularly posting, but has fallen to #304.

Although some say Apple Computer defines high-tech style for the current age, IBM was the undisputed leader in the 1970s. It put color panels on mainframes as well as on this device, the IBM 3340 storage system in crockpot red. The platters, back in 1973, held 1.7MB per square inch, a record at the time. Companies shared these systems, leasing time and space when required. The going rate was $7.81 a megabyte, 38 percent more than the price of oil at the time.

"I found that 70-percent of the time, the ice from the fast food restaurant's contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurant's toilet water."

Roberts' graph shows the toilet water, shown in red, had less bacteria in most cases than the ice inside shown in blue, and the ice from drive-through windows shown in green. Roberts' teacher says he wasn't surprised either.

The Mamido burger, for instance, which sells for ¥390 ($3.25 at ¥120 to the dollar), is a highlight of the menu. The "bun" is actually a sponge cake, the "patty" inside is chocolate cream, and the "pickles" are kiwis. The deep-fried fish burger, meanwhile, priced at ¥440 ($3.70), features a banana shaped like a fish fillet in sponge cake. It is topped with "tartar sauce," which is actually fresh cream. And the gratin burger, also at ¥440, is a sandwich with a cream cheese and fruit filling.

The side dishes are equally ingenious. The French fries look like the real thing but are actually custard cream covered in starch powder and deep-fried. The fries, diners are told, are delectable when topped with ketchup. Without exception, every item on the menu is a sweet of some sort.

The phishers sent out bulk spam purporting to be from a Utah credit-union, and asking Visa card-holders to sign up for a legit Visa program that protects credit-card use on the Internet. They made this scam more convincing by including the first four digit of the credit-card, e.g. 4512-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX which looks a lot like the standard way of masking card numbers on receipts, usually just showing the last four digits, e.g. XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-3212. The thing is, every credit card issued by a small bank will have the same first four digits and different digits at the end of the number, but at a cursory glance the fact that the email was sent by someone who "knows" your card-number is convincing.

The clincher was the domain of the site, which held a valid "certificate" that bore a cryptographic "signature" attesting to the fact that the site was indeed operated by the credit-union. This means that visitors to the site would get the green padlock in their status-bars, and clicking on it would verify that the site was indeed operated by the credit-union. The certs that make this possible are issued by companies that supposedly review each application to ensure that they come from whom they purport to come, but the company that issued this one, Geotrust, uses largely automated means that rely on misspellings and the like to trigger its anti-fraud alerts.

The scammers were also able to convince Choicepoint (the sleazy credit-reporting agency that leaked millions of customer records and is notorious for its unreliablity and lack of due diligence) that it was the bank, and they, too, issued an assurance that they were legit.

The problem with Internet trust mechanisms is that they're maintained by untrustworthy entities. Verisign broke the DNS system. Choicepoint's records are often works of fiction. Geotrust uses algorithms to evaluate its applications for fraud. All of these entities put profits before their obligations, and all of them fail at accomplishing the trust they exist to provide.

The phishing site, which is still up at the time of this writing, is protected by a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption certificate issued by a division of the credit reporting bureau Equifax that is now part of a company called Geotrust. SSL is a technology designed to ensure that sensitive information transmitted online cannot be read by a third-party who may have access to the data stream while it is being transmitted. All legitimate banking sites use them, but it's pretty rare to see them on fraudulent sites.

Geotrust and other SSL issuers are supposed to do some basic due diligence to ensure that the entity requesting an SSL certificate is indeed authorized to request it on the company's behalf. In this case, however, it looks like that process fundamentally broke down.

Link to photo gallery (Thanks, Siege!)

Reader comment: Mr Zounic says,

They are the work of Felice Varini ( ) • Some of them are visible in the "Société Générale" towers in La Défense, Paris. ( Link ) • More on this website and in this brochure ( PDF Link )

George Rousse (france 1947) has been working in that kind of images since the 80´s.
I don't know if the photos you link are his work, a fan of his or just an artistic coincidence.

"Found this morning in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper -- A German Guide Michelin star chef and restaurant owner in Rome asks for the invention of a copyright-like right on cooking recipes. Would that be a cookyright?"

Link

Marc "Celebrated Open Source Hacker Chef" Powell makes a raspberry sound with his mouth and scoffs,

Cute name! Of course the reason you cannot copyright recipes is because they are just an uncopyrightable list of ingredients. You can copyright the text of the preparation process, though.

But every chef rips off every other chef, so there's prior art EVERYWHERE -- and in this case, fair use propels the artform forward -- so that chef saying that cooking is a creative art form -- it wouldnt be so creative without ripping off Escoffier, Careme and all of the home cooks that cant afford copyright lawyers yet have created Italian cuisine, German cuisine, whatever!

Walking through Tokyo's Ginza district one Friday evening last month I saw an extraordinary sight that will soon become an ordinary one: A businessman was talking into his keitai (the Japanese word for cell phone), holding it out in front of him rather than to his ear. Suddenly, smiling, he raised the device to his lips and kissed the screen.

It wasn't hard to piece together an explanation -- the man was making a video call to his lover. His lover had asked for a screen kiss, or perhaps they'd synchronized one. It was my first glimpse of this behavior, and it happened in Tokyo, but I knew it wouldn't be my last. Soon enough we will see this scene repeated in New York, London, Paris, Berlin and San Francisco.

Previously on Boing Boing:
# Ginger the Cartoon Bear's adventures inside the CIA
# NSA kids' mascots: like Power Rangers for warrantless wiretaps
# DHS to kids: Ready for... Furries?

Oxblood Ruffin of cDc sez, "the Goolag graphic is now being used as as desktop wallpaper by most of the cybercafes in Dharamsala. There are a lot of very steamed Tibetan students living there."

Previously on Boing Boing:
Hacktivists parody Google logo for protest, China human rights fundraiser

Reader comment: Doug at iFilm says,

Funny you posted that picture. Here's a video of those guys in action. Whoever they are. (No annoying ads here, but it does require flash 8)

Reader comment: aragoto says,

The two comedians (they're Japanese, naturally) are Koji Higashino (in the blue) and Koji Imada (in the red). The sketch Doug links to is literally titled "The After-School Electromagnetic Wave Club", and involves them (this may be obvious, but the mini-tards are distracting) using their magnets to pull a groper away from his victim. I sense the humour is mainly to be had from the costumes. Link

Reader comment: Gwen in Oakland says,

That's the men's slingshot thong they're wearing, readily available online for the guys out there looking to surprise their loved ones, here's one for $25: Link. Unfortunately, my sister made her boyfriend wear one while DJing and showed me photos. I can't face him anymore.

Reader comment: justin says,

Here in Austin we are graced with the best movie theater chain in the world (well ok, they're spreading to other Texas cities too), The Alamo Drafthouse (link). The downtown theater does this show called "Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash" which features clips of random Japanese sketch comedy (many of which features those two guys in the thong/slingshot outfit) and Japanese TV commercials. Unfortunately there are no shows coming up, but you can get them on DVD. I found this, but don't know if it's endorsed by The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema or not: Link.

WINNING CAPTION: From Boing Boing reader Ben Bleiberg,

Together, we can finally defeat Chuck Norris.

But in news that many will not find as pleasant, Boing Boing reader B.D. says,

I was just uploading images to my Flickr account when I noticed a posting for new Community Guidelines. Amongst the Guidelines is the following "Don't":

Upload photos that include frontal nudity, genitalia or anything else that your bathing suit should cover in public areas of Flickr If you do we'll make your photostream private and remind you of this Guideline. If you don't heed our warning and continue to make similar content public, we'll terminate your account without warning. This applies to your Buddy Icon as well.

Presumably this guideline is designed to prevent pornography, which one can totally understand on a public site. However, it assumes that all nudity is pornography and in photography, as with all art, this is simply not the case. How will this affect sites that link to Flickr for nude photos? How will it affect access to such photos that a person wants to show publicly?

Link

Reader comment: Anil Kandangath says,

I believe that Flickr's policy might be to safeguard itself against any legal action since there is no age verification to prevent minors from viewing public photos. Having said that, photographs that are made 'private' are not prevented from being displayed publicly. It only means that the Flickr page for the photograph is unavailable. However, if you click on 'all sizes' and grab the link that Flickr provides you for displaying the photograph on external websites, you can easily display the photograph anywhere you please, irrespective of whether the photograph is public or private.

Internet hijinxor Ze Frank tells Boing Boing,

here's a new flick I made in response to bush's "america is addicted to oil" state of the union address.

The picture in paper indicates that the former residents are classy -- note the ukulele in the lower-right corner.

It wasn't the TV, VCR and DVD player hooked up to batteries in the drainage tunnel that had sheriff's Cpl. Troy DuGal shaking his head yesterday.

And it wasn't the homemade methamphetamine pipe or the improvised kitchen, complete with a pantry. It wasn't even the mirror over the bed.

It was what the homeless residents had built behind all that: a dam.

Having turned a storm drain into a two-bedroom apartment, they had erected a waist-high barrier of masonry and concrete to stop water from flowing through their makeshift home.

“It's really quite amazing to see what human ingenuity can come up with,” said county flood engineer Cid Tesoro.

About 50 teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals in the Bay Area have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 -- except food, health and safety items and underwear.

"We're people for whom recycling is no longer enough," said one of the members of the fledgling movement, John Perry, who works in marketing at a high-tech company. "We're trying to get off the first-market consumerism grid, because consumer culture is destroying the world."

They call themselves the Compact. They have a blog, a Yahoo group and monthly meetings to reaffirm their commitment to the rule, which is to never buy anything new."

"We had a little crisis when Matt and Sarah had to replace their shower curtain liner and we said no," said Perry, who lives in Bernal Heights. "But we put the word out and someone found one for them. It's like the Amish -- we help each other out. We raise a barn every week."

Several of them stand out: Married people are happier than unmarrieds. People who worship frequently are happier than those who don't. Republicans are happier than Democrats. Rich people are happier than poor people. Whites and Hispanics are happier than blacks. Sunbelt residents are happier than those who live in the rest of the country.

We also found some interesting non-correlations. People who have children are no happier than those who don't, after controlling for marital status. Retirees are no happier than workers. Pet owners are no happier than those without pets.

Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.

Dick Cheney, then [assistant] White House Chief of Staff to President Ford...was the reason my family had travelled to Wyoming where I endured yet another form of brutality - his version of "A Most Dangerous Game," or human hunting.... Dick Cheney had an apparent addiction to the "thrill of the sport." He appeared obsessed with playing A Most Dangerous Game as a means of traumatizing mind control victims, as well as to satisfy his own perverse sexual kinks.

A multipurpose eye massager from Neu-Vita, Ltd, England, marked with British patent 363101. Red rubber squeeze bulbs force a concave plunger against each eyeball when squeezed. When the thermoplastic eye cups are pressed firmly against the eye, releasing the bulbs will create a vacuum in the cup. The opposite end of the device is used to massage the eye by rotating each cylinder, thus twisting the eyelids.

For today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," I filed a report on news that Yahoo! allegedly gave information to the Chinese government which led to the imprisonment of a second Internet writer.

US-based China news website boxun.com (which means "abundant knowlege") last week reported that the personal data Yahoo supplied to Chinese authorities led to an 8-year prison sentence for 'net dissident Li Zhi. Reporters Without Borders says they've confirmed the claim. Yahoo says they are looking in to the matter.

These allegations carry more weight because last year, journalist Shi Tao was imprisoned for ten years for "divulging state secrets abroad" after Yahoo released info about his anonymous account to Chinese government investigators.

The ethical responsibilities of US internet firms doing business in China will be the subject of a house committee hearing this Wednesday, February 15, titled "The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?"

For today's NPR News report, I spoke to Yahoo representative Mary Osako; to Lucie Morillon of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, to UC Berkeley Journalism school dean Orville Schell, and human rights activist Qiang Xiao, who is also head of UCB's China Internet Project. All four organizations will be represented at Wednesday's hearings in Washington. Also invited to attend, other tech firms including Google and Microsoft -- both of which have also received recent criticism for complying with repressive policies of China's communist government.

Link to archived audio for "Yahoo! May Have Aided Arrest of Chinese Journalists." (Special thanks to Tian for pronunciation-checking!)

Previously on Boing Boing:
Report: Yahoo helped jail another Chinese 'net dissident, Li Zhi

Click for full size. Spotted on Metafilter by Boing Boing reader Ross Nelson, attribution info gladly accepted and reader Sereena X says, "This link is from March 15, 2005."

Sean Bonner has another suggestion here.

And Boing Boing reader Charles Vestal says,

I set up a script so you can generate your own fake CNN story about how Dick Cheney shot you or a loved one. It can yield some interesting results. Enjoy!

I believe the list should certainly include "outing your status as a covert intelligence agent."

"We really need to find him soon because the Smithsonian wants to put him in a travelling collection in the autumn," said (Hanson Robotics's Steve) Prilliman referring to Washington's Smithsonian Institute, an organisation of museums and art galleries...

Prilliman and others close to Phil baulked at giving too many details about his disappearance including the name of the airline that was transporting the robot when he went missing.

Hanson officials said news of Phil's disappearance could hamper the ongoing investigation and search for the robot.

The company officials said they feared ransom demands might be made or Phil could turn up listed for sale on an internet auction house such as eBay.

"It's not just one or two elements that we've proven in the lab. We've proven the entire thing," says Philips' engineer Leo Warmerdam...

In another talk at the conference, Markus Böhm of the company PolyIC in Erlangen, Germany, described an experimental 13.56-MHz tag that PolyIC produced last fall. This device sends back just one bit of information. "It's just a very simple signal saying 'I'm here,'" says PolyIC physicist Wolfgang Clemens.

Despite such progress, many hurdles remain before plastic RFID tags will show up in supermarkets or mailboxes. For instance, neither team used printing technology to make its device—a must for inexpensive production. Also, neither tag broadcasts its signal more than a few centimeters.

These domes have served as an effective shelter against wind, extreme heat and, once painted, rainfall. The largest of the three domes in the picture opposite measures approximately 12' 7" in diameter and is about 6' 3" high at its center. We recommend building the largest one. All the measurements throughout this web site relate to the largest size.

Two Tracking Laser beams are directed to the left and to the right shoulders of the groove of the record. Only the part of the beams that reach the groove are reflected to two PSD (Position Sensitive Detector) optical semiconductors. The part of the beams that fall on the land area of the record are deflected and not picked up by the PSD devices. The signals are sent to a microprocessor via analog to digital converters, then to servos to maintain the reader head position directly above the groove.

Two additional laser beams are directed at the left groove wall and the right groove wall just below the tracking beams. Modulation on the individual grooves is reflected to scanner mirrors and onto left and right photo optical sensors. The variations of the modulated light cause the audio sensors to develop an electrical representation of the mechanical modulation of the grooves. The entire sound reproduction chain is analog.

Update: Darrin points out this former business-partner of ELP's warning you to stay away from them, and Luke raises some objections about the science behind the turntable.

Update 2: Steve sez, "I designed a laser turntable and described it in my 1982 book, Industrial Design with Microcomputers (Prentice-Hall), to illustrate some concepts of optical sensing. I never took it any further or actually built one (I got a bit distracted by computerized bicycles; besides, CDs were starting to appear, so it became a less interesting hack). Amusing, nevertheless, to see that someone is supposedly doing it...

HDCP is a system for crippling PCs so that they are incapable of copying some digital files. It is overseen by a licensing authority that controls whose HDCP implementations can play back files that are locked with its restrictions.

The world's supermajority of "high-definition" displays are connected to PCs, and many PC owners have attempted to future-proof their investment in this equipment by buying video-cards that advertise HDCP compatibility.

However, true HDCP compatibility is controlled by an inter-industry consortium of giant CE companies and Hollywood studios, and these companies have ruled that merely buying a HDCP-compatible graphics card is insufficient for gaining access to HDCP-locked video. Only systems designed from the ground up by OEMs (such as themselves) will be able to gain access to these videos.

We've been able to confirm that none of the Built-by-ATI Radeons support HDCP. If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080 resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money.

NVIDIA, being a GPU manufacturer was unable to discuss the plans of board manufacturers. We contacted all six of NVIDIA's Tier-1 board partners. None of the GeForce 6 or 7 video cards available on the market, including the most recently released GeForce 7800GS, have HDCP support. So if you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your money.

The only good news here is that this will spur unauthorized P2P systems into developing the capability of sharing high-definition video more reliably. After all, you may not be able to play Matrix Impossible 2000 at high rez on your PC if you buy the DVD, but you'll sure be able to do so if you download it instead.

Way to fight piracy, guys. Link (via /.)

1. Ladies Do Love Me
2. Belly Movin
3. Buildin My Life
4. Electrified Kite
5. Let it Beast
6. Lovely NYC
7. Anna's MCs
8. Love You To Check It Out
9. Looking Down The Barrel of a Warm Gun
10. A Day in The Life of A Beastie Boy

Update: dj BC sez, "My service provider panicked (due to volume, not content) and as a result the site is down temporarily. I hope to rectify the situation this evening, but in the meantime, I wonder if you'd like to provide this torrent link to the full album and CD sleeve?"

I've blogged twice about a Canadian Red Cross executive's misguided harassment campaign against users of the red cross symbol to indicate health services.

Now a Canadian trademark lawyer has reviewed the Canadian Red Cross's claims and found them dubious at best. Even if they had merit, I can't imagine a more frivolous and even harmful use of the Canadian Red Cross's limited resources than to chase around bugging people who use the red cross mark (Band Aids, anyone?). If I'm going to donate money to a humanitarian charity, I want it to be spent furthering the charity's mission. not causing trouble for publishers who produce works of fiction that use its marks.

The Canadian Red Cross, in their letter, takes the position that such adoption and use is unlawful (s. 11 provides the prohibition against "use"). However, being somewhat unfamiliar with video game law, I think that one of the more interesting issues now raised is whether the display of the Red Cross emblem inside a video game would even constitute adoption/use "in connection with a business".

Maybe Mr. Bennett knows of some case law that is on point. But in the absence of such case law, I could see some video game developers trying to argue that use of the Red Cross Emblem inside a video game is not use of the mark in connection with a business; and that such use is therefore not prohibited by the Act.

That also leads me to the following scenario... what about showing actual Red Cross vehicles displaying the emblem as part of a TV news clip. This is done often by various TV news media. Would such a news clip also be an adoption in connection with a business? I suspect not, but again I don't know the answer for sure.

Pratt's made statements about violent videogames conflicting with the Red Cross's humanitarian mission, something that's both ignorant and offensive. There's nothing anti-humanitarian about playing with simulated violence in works of art. Humanitarianism is about not harming people -- hurting pixels isn't bad for anyone. Pratt's brand of literary criticism is about as well-thought-out as his understanding of Canadian trademark law. Link (Thanks, Sander!)

Dad: They made a lot of money but I guess it was not enough. They wanted the big websites like Google, Amazon, eBay, MSN etc. to pay them and not use their network for free.

Son: That’s so bad of Google to not pay them. I have lost all respect for Sergey and Larry. How can they expect a free ride? So convenient for them to make all that Ad dollars while running their algorithm from public libraries?

Dad: Public Libraries?? What are you talking about? They had their own offices and datacenters.

Son: But you said they used the internet for free. How can they provide content without paying for the bandwidth?

Dad: Oh! They did.

Son: Wait. I’m all confused here. We paid for our end of the bandwidth and the websites paid at their end. So who is getting a free ride here?

Dad: I haven’t figured that out yet.