Last night, a PR person contacted me and said to expect a mysterious "puzzle piece" to arrive the next morning. I steepled my fingers, squeezed in my monocle, and warned her that it was unlikely that we'd participate in a marketing thing like that.

It arrived anyway. It turned out, however, to be a gigantic 3D-printed robot head. My heart softened just a little at this, not least because of the irony embodied by how thoroughly FedEx had managed to destroy it, despite the enormous padded box it came in. It's amazing how good FedEx is at destroying packages. Protip: don't send organs via FedEx, even if it's just a hobby.

It turns out that the puzzle is part of a code, and a bunch of tech blogs all have to punch theirs in at the website for a new Droid cellular handset. This will unlock something. "Something" presumably being "an ad", right? So I found the code and punched it in, just to be a good sport. But it didn't work. Their flash site just said "Verifying Code" and never did. At this, I said oh well!, then got on with my day.

So now, of course, all the other sites have done their bit and Boing Boing is being harangued on Twitter by Droid fans to get with the program. Sneaky, intelligent PR here. But this makes it interesting! What should I do? Let's vote:

1) Just punch it in! Also, your pious avoidance of naming the advertiser is vaguely irritating, because you've posted it anyway and we're just going to go and look it up now. I have eight credit cards.

2) Post a picture of the code with a rival manufacturer's logo concealing a couple of digits, leaving a few hundred possible combinations to try.
        2B) and dont post it until 1 minute remains on the 'deadline' countdown at the puzzle website.

3) Screw 'em.

THE CHOICE IS YOURS!

UPDATE: 11:45 a.m. - I am informed by PR that they have triggered our code entry without any further action from us.

♫ I HAD A FEELING/
I HAD A FEELING ONCE/
UNTIL SOMEONE TOOK IT AWAY/
UNTIL SOMEONE TOOK IT AWAY (OH YEAH) ♭

Wikileaks, facing criticism after unredacted versions of diplomatic cables escaped into the wild, today accused a Guardian journalist of negligently publishing the password required to decrypt them.

A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables.

Knowledge of the Guardian disclosure has spread privately over several months but reached critical mass last week. The unpublished WikiLeaks’ material includes over 100,000 classified unredacted cables that were being analyzed, in parts, by over 50 media and human rights organizations from around the world.

For the past month WikiLeaks has been in the unenviable position of not being able to comment on what has happened, since to do so would be to draw attention to the decryption passwords in the Guardian book. Now that the connection has been made public by others we can explain what happened and what we intend to do.

Wikileaks also says it is in touch with the U.S. State Department and will be taking legal action.

UPDATE: The Guardian, in a story about the availability of the unredacted cables, denies that its journalist disclosed the password. [Thanks, Douglas!]

But further down in the story it seems to admit it, instead blaming Wikileaks for letting it do so:

"Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours."

Interesting! Now you may go and check the timelines again to find out when certain password-protected files might have left Wikileaks' exclusive custody. Go right ahead! No-one's going anywhere.

UPDATE: the book passage in question may be read at Google books. Just like that, for all the world to see, since the day it was published.

WIKILEAKS EDITORIAL - Guardian disclosure [Wikileaks]

When I was at Venice Beach with my family, we came across a freak show. The barker in front had a couple of two-headed turtles in a plastic tub filled with water. He said admission was $5. The barker also told me that we could take photos of everything inside. What an enlightened attitude! Many of the other businesses at Venice Beach had signs forbidden photography, bu not the Venice Beach Freak show. My wife, my 8-year-old, and I got our tickets and headed inside.

Read the rest

42-year-old Michael Allison of Illinois could spend the rest of his life in prison for recording police in public. He faces five counts of eavesdropping, a class one felony. Of course, the police are allowed to video people in public with impunity.

The Illinois Assistant Attorney General has joined the case and told the judge that citizens do not have the constitutional right to record police.

Illinois Man Faces 75 Years In Prison For Recording Cops

See also: Federal Court: recording cops an unambiguous first amendment right

The spectacularly shrewd Ashley McDowell was approached by two men in a McDonald's parking lot where they offered to sell her an iPad fetish for $300. She only had $180, but they gave it to her anyway. When she got home, she confirmed that it was really just a block of wood with an Apple logo painted on the back.

Woman Buys a Block of Wood with an Apple Logo

See also: Crafty crackhead Powerbook made from garbage bags

The Monsters of Grok t-shirt line is funny. (Via Liz McLean Knight)

Cat meets balloon cat

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom describes his Simulation Argument on a recent episode of the excellent Philosophy Bites podcast. He proposed the argument in 2003, and it is interesting to hear him discuss it here.

As I understand it, one of the following three statements must be true:

1. Civilizations go extinct before they are able to create advanced simulations.

2. Advanced civilizations are not interested in creating advanced simulations.

3. There are so many advanced simulations that is is far more likely that we are inside a simulation than in the physical universe.

I might be oversimplifying things here, but I think that's the gist of it.

If we are in a simulation (and I don't think we are) it is upsetting to imagine a cruel operator who could flip a switch and send all of the people in the simulation into agony for all eternity (using Freeman Dyson's Eternal Intelligence idea for extracting infinite computation during the heat death of the universe).

Listen to Nick Bostrom on the Simulation Argument

On October 17, 1814 at the Meux family brewery in Tottenham Court, London, a massive vat of beer cracked open, spilling 3,500 barrels of beer and killing eight people. Smithsonian's Food & Think blog sums up the "London Beer Flood" and several other "Deadly Disasters Caused By Food." Here's another:

Boston Molasses Disaster: In Boston’s North End, near the city’s financial district and working class Italian neighborhoods, there stood a molasses tank owned by the Purity Distilling Company. Built in 1915, the vat was capable of holding some 2.5 million gallons; however, by 1919, locals were complaining that it was leaking, and on the afternoon of January 15, it exploded. Flying metal knocked out the supports of nearby elevated train tracks and a 15-foot-high wave of molasses crashed through the streets at some 35 miles per hour, knocking down and enveloping people in its path. Parts of Boston were standing in two to three feet of molasses and the disaster left 21 dead and 150 injured.

"Four Deadly Disasters Caused by Food"

"Boston Molasses Disaster" (Boston Public Library on Flickr)

JC Penny was called out for selling this t-shirt, emblazoned with the words "I'm too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me." What a positive, empowering message for girls aged 7-16, apparently the target market for this design. The Village Voice reports that JC Penny has quickly pulled the shirt and issued a statement, saying in part "We agree that the "Too pretty" t-shirt does not deliver an appropriate message, and we have immediately discontinued its sale." Good for them. I wonder if they calculated what impact, if any, the PR hit and this decision are having on their revenue. Probably not. After all, math class is tough.
"J.C. Penney's 'Too Pretty To Do Homework' T-Shirt Is Too Stupid for Words" (Thanks, Puce/Sarah Wulfeck!)

Kevin Kelly interviewed the two grad students at Cornell Creative Machines Lab who posted that amazing video of Cleverbot-driven avatars having a conversation.

You've probably seen the viral video of the AI bots arguing with each other. Almost the first things the bots start to talk about is God and who made them. Next they begin to accuse each other of lying. The conversation was so strangely humanish that I had to interview the creators to see what was going on. 

First, watch the short clip if you have not seen it.

The conversation between the bot and itself was recorded in the Cornell Creative Machines Lab, whose faculty is researching how to make helper bots. Two grad students, Jason Yosinski and Igor Labutov, and professor Hod Lipson are responsible for the experiment.

Jason and Igor told me how it came about:

"We've been trying to make robots that can help you find things. Maybe the robot can't help you directly, but could find something else, maybe another robot, that can. So we thought about having one bot asking another bot for help. That got us thinking about having two chat bots talk to each other, one running on a laptop next to each other. We tried having the classic Eliza bot talk to itself but it quickly just got into a rut, repeating itself. There are a lot of other chatbots, but we heard good things about Cleverbot because its database is based on snippets that humans actually write and say. So we feed the output of one Cleverbot to the input of another. Then we feed the text log into Acapella, a free text-to-speach synthesizer. Then we animated the soundtrack usingLiving Actor Presenter. We don't think we are the first to have two bots chat, but it seems we are the first to animate it. In retrospect that seems such an obvious thing to do."

Theological Chatbots

For The Economist, Glenn Fleishman wrote an item about our comment policies, which are strict as fuck. (Disclosure: Glenn also writes for BB occasionally)

Beschizza approvingly cites an essay published in July by Anil Dash, the first employee of blog-software firm Six Apart, and who is currently involved in not-for-profit efforts to help governments and citizens talk effectively to one another. Mr Dash called on sites with communities and forums actively to police themselves, rather than allow the most egregious participants to set the tone. "If your website is full of assholes, it's your fault," he writes bluntly. "And if you have the power to fix it and don't do something about it, you're one of them."

Boing Boing's substantial community is ably moderated by Antinous and his splendid cronies, the unsung heroes of the piece. Alongside these traditional subjects of spam, trolls, toxicity and general quality control, however, the hot issue now is of anonymity and pseudonymity.

To clarify a little, I think everyone at BB is actually a hardliner on the "Nymwars" issue: requiring real names is bad. But I don't think any site running on standard well-logged webserver setups, which can get subpoenad, seized or hacked, should claim to offer complete anonymity. Technical, traceable fingerprints may remain. Here, you can post under any identity you like, but it is incumbent on everyone to learn how to protect themselves.

In Hamilton County, Tennessee, a gentleman noticed that his Cadillac was smoking so he pulled into a gas station. He lifted the hood to reveal flames on the engine which in turn caught the adjacent gas pump on fire. Fortunately, the man, and his five children, moved quickly away from the burning vehicle and a station employee hit the "emergency stop" button to block gas and electricity from reaching the pump. "Car burns next to gas pump, 5 children get out safely" (Times Free Press)

In Seattle, Marlow Harris and JoDavid curated a rather curious and delightful Paint-by-Number art exhibition for the 2011 Bumbershoot Arts Festival. More than 40 artists altered vintage (and completed) paint-by-number paintings for the show. Bill Blair painted massive paint-by-number backdrops and wrote stories for vintage paint-by-numbers while Ryan Feddersen installed a table tableau decorated with hand-cast wax crayons of fruit, vegetables, and meats. Above, "Father and Son" by Troy Gua. At left, Chris Crites -- whose work we've previously featured on BB -- "enhanced" a classic schooner paint-by-numbers.
"Bumber by Number at Bumbershoot" (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)