Aaron Swartz memorial in San Francisco at the Internet Archive on Thu —

Carl Malamud sez, "If you are in the Bay Area, please come to the Internet Archive Thursday evening for a memorial honoring Aaron Swartz. The program will be streamed on the net." — Cory •

Aaron Swartz's friends and colleagues at the Internet Archive will be holding a memorial gathering for him on January 24 from 7PM onward at the Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco 94118, in the Presidio. — Cory •

A paper in a 1909 edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London described the dissection of Charles Babbage's brain. The whole article is on the Internet Archive, from which the Public Domain Review has plucked it.

Babbage himself decided that he wanted his brain to be donated to science upon his death. In a letter accompanying the donation, his son Henry wrote:

I have no objection…to the idea of preserving the brain…Please therefore do what you consider best…[T]he brain should be known as his, and disposed of in any manner which you consider most conducive to the advancement of human knowledge and the good of the human race.

Half of Babbage’s brain is preserved at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London, the other half is on display in the Science Museum in London.

The Brain of Charles Babbage (1909)

Get a copy of the Web —

Want 80 terabytes of web-crawl? The Internet Archive will give you a copy of (an appreciable slice of) the Web, for research purposes: "we would like to experiment with offering access to one of our crawls from 2011 with about 80 terabytes of WARC files containing captures of about 2.7 billion URIs. The files contain text content and any media that we were able to capture, including images, flash, videos, etc." — Cory •

How to Be a Retronaut picks out the best of a 1946 portfolio of designer room interiors from the Internet Archive. Above, a room I would live in in a heartbeat. Right, a swell kitchen.

Portfolio of Room Interiors, 1946

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

On March 15, Boing Boing kindly allowed me to use this august forum to serve notice on 7 government officials and 10 of the CEOs of the $1-billion/year industry of standards people. The issue was privately-developed public safety standards that were incorporated into U.S. law, but only available by paying big bucks. We asked the government and the standards people to send us their comments by May 1 as to why the law shouldn't be available for all to read.

There have been no such comments received, so today we're making available for public inspection 317 legally-mandated documents, most of why have been previously unavailable on the net. To properly document this open source release, Tim O'Reilly, Jennifer Pahlka, and the 2012 Code for America fellows joined me in an Internet town hall.

Although Public.Resource.Org received no comments from the standards people, this doesn't mean they haven't circled the wagons. Tuesday [today], the Department of Commerce is hosting the CEOs of the biggest standards bodies in a big standards summit. We asked to participate as did a number of other public interest groups, but we didn't make the cut.

Although all these Standards Development Organizations are non-profits, they do quite well for themselves. In fact, the 5 nonprofit CEOs attending this meeting (which is conveniently not webcast and isn't taking questions or comments from the net), the average salary is $633,061. The standards people claim they need the money, but I don't think they need nearly as much as they're making and, in any case, you can't have a democracy if the citizens don't know what the law is. I hope everybody can take a few minutes to look at these standards and make your voice known here on Boing Boing or directly to your government. (This isn't just a U.S. issue, by the way, and we're now preparing a release of public safety standards for other countries.)

If you're interested in other links, you might consider:

* One Man's Quest to Make Information Free (Bloomberg Business)
* Making Laws More Public (On the Media)
* Why building codes should be open

Free archive of for-pay laws

Riseup, a "progressive Internet organization" that operates an anonymous remailer had its servers seized by the FBI without notice two weeks ago. They installed a little CCTV camera after the seizure. On Wednesday, that camera recorded footage of the FBI putting the servers back.

On April 18, 2012, a Riseup server located in MF/PL's colocation cabinet and managed by ECN, a progressive provider in Italy, was seized by the FBI. MF/PL found out about the seizure when Riseup reported that there was no response from the server. Technologists visited the server location and found that the machine had been removed.

The FBI is investigating bomb threats being made to facilities and people at the University of Pittsburgh and believed that one of the servers used to email these threats was an anonymous email server operated by ECN. "These servers have no logs or traces of who used them," MF/PL Director Jamie McClelland said. "Nothing useful could be gotten from this seizure but there is a concrete outcome: the seizure disrupted May First's work and disrupted the communications of hundreds of people who lawfully use that server for email and website services everyday."

Anonymous email servers keep no records of their users and are frequently used by activists, organizers and information sources world-wide.

FBI returns Riseup server to May First/People Link cabinet (Thanks, Jacob!)

A reader writes, "Librivox [ed: a trove of free, volunteer-read audio adaptations of public domain books] has released the audio version of Tono-Bungay the classic semi-autobiographical novel by H. G. Wells." From Wikipedia:

Tono-Bungay is a realist semi-autobiographical novel. It is narrated by George Ponderevo, a science student who is drafted in to help with the promotion of Tono-Bungay, a harmful stimulant disguised as a miraculous cure-all, the creation of his uncle Edward. The quack remedy Tono-Bungay seems to have been based upon the patent medicines Carter's Little Liver Pills and Dr. Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People.... As the tonic prospers, George experiences a swift rise in social status, elevating him to riches and opportunities that he had never imagined, nor indeed desired. The novel displays Edward's social climbing satirically, and also George's discomfort at rising in social class. The hero's personal life is narrated with unusual frankness for an Edwardian novel.... The empire eventually overextends itself and then collapses. George tries unsuccessfully to save his uncle and eventually ends up designing battleships for the highest bidder. (Summary from Wikipedia)

Tono-Bungay

(Image: Frisbee)

A 1953 Centron Corporation educational film explains how poor posture is the root of all social misery, poor health, and general malaise. And that's one to grow on.

Here is what you’ll learn today, fellow computer users: slouching is the reason no one talks to you at parties, even if you’re a perfectly attractive and friendly person, and the key to good posture is exercise, rest, and good shoes. Though we will tell you one thing: If your reflection in the mirror is mocking you because of your posture, you might have bigger problems than slouching.

1950s Educational Film Explains: Slouching Is For Terrible People [Video]

Craig sez, "This is a music video I've edited for the song 'Down Today' by Jonathan Coulton (from his 2011 album, 'Artificial Heart,' produced by John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants) using footage from public domain films mostly found on Archive.org. 'No! No! A Thousand Times No!! - a 1935 Fleischer Studio animated short film, starring Betty Boop, 'Voyage à Travers l'Impossible' (The Impossible Voyage) (1904) directed by Georges Méliès, 'Le Voyage Dans la Lune' (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) directed by Georges Méliès, 'Le Dirigeable Fantastique ou le Cauchemar d'un Inventeur' (The Inventor Crazybrains and his Wonderful Airship) (1905) directed by Georges Méliès, L.T.A. History of Balloons (1944). More music videos I've edited for songs from Jonathan Coulton's excellent 'Artificial Heart' album. Stream or buy the album 'Artificial Heart' at Jonathan Coulton's website.

Jonathan Coulton - "Down Today" unofficial music video (Thanks, Craig!)

Rick Prelinger sez,

I'm delighted to let everyone know about our newest Internet Archive collection which, for want of a cooler title, we're calling 35mm Stock Footage. Digitized from 35mm original negatives and release prints dating back to the first decade of the 20th century, these unedited sequences were shot for feature films but never used. Studio librarians saved them for use in future productions, and now you can download and use them yourself in a variety of formats, including 720p HD, absolutely free. As far as I know, this is Internet Archive's first all-HD collection.

In the first wave of materials: a trip across the George Washington Bridge in the late 1940s, a snake slithering on rainy ground, aerials of Hollywood studios, 1940s Southern California hotrodders, stunt flying, miniature airplanes crashing, the Staten Island Ferry in the 1930s, and much more. Much of the footage is "process plates" -- film shot for the rear-projection screens you see out of car, taxi and train windows in old movies.

We've also digitized HD versions of newsreels and short subjects from the 1920s and 1930s, and there are even French "primitive-era" silent films dating back as far as 1905. Please get lost in this collection, make your own movies with it (please upload them to Internet Archive if you can!), and keep watching for more.

Welcome to 35mm Stock Footage