An excerpt from a much larger Fast Company infographic about Facebook portraits.

But I don't care if you want to attempt to stop people from copying your work over the internet, or if you plan on building a business around this idea. I mean, it sounds daft to me, but I've been surprised before.

But here's what I do care about. I care if your plan involves using "digital rights management" technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; if your plan requires that online services censor their user submissions; if your plan involves disconnecting whole families from the internet because they are accused of infringement; if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate; if your plan prohibits me from keeping online videos of my personal life private because you won't be able to catch infringers if you can't spy on every video.

And this is the plan that the entertainment industries have pursued to in their doomed attempt to prevent copying. The US record industry has sued 40,000 people. The BBC has received Ofcom's approval to use our mandatory licence fees to lock up its broadcasts with DRM so that we can't tinker with or improve on our own TVs and recorders (and lest you think that this is no big deal, keep in mind that the entire web was created by amateurs tinkering with systems around them). What's more Apple, Audible, Sony and others have stitched up several digital distribution channels with mandatory DRM requirements, so copyright holders don't get to choose to make their works available on equitable terms.

In France, the HADOPI "three strikes" rule just went into effect; they're sending out 10,000 legal threats a week now, and have promised 150,000 a week in short order. After three unsubstantiated accusations of infringement, your whole family is disconnected from the Internet -from work, education, civic engagement, distant relatives, health information, community. And of course, we'll have the same regime here shortly, thanks to the Digital Economy Act, passed in a three-whip washup in the last days of parliament without any substantive debate, despite the thousands and thousands of Britons who asked their legislators to at least discuss this extraordinarily technical legislation before passing it into law.

vogue hommes international

Contest entry: Nembutal for that dilated childhood

This floor was once home to the Postal Police! Though you'd never expect them to need it, this area used to be a jail cell for the Postal Police's use. You can still see marks from the bars in the floor. We continued into the old Postal Police offices... This was the main hallway for the police wing. One of the neat things about the offices in this wing is that they're all connected! Literally, a path through all 10 or 12 offices:

Also (and it must be said): that young man appears to be consummating unnatural relations with the Flatiron building.

Soviet ad 1925

The Social Network, aka The Facebook Movie, fails the Bechdel test.

Rebecca Davis O'Brien writes about the film's "female props" in The Daily Beast:

Women in the movie (...) are less prizes than they are props, buxom extras literally bussed in to fill the roles of doting groupies, vengeful sluts, or dumpy, feminist killjoys. They are foils for the male characters, who in turn are cruel or indifferent to them.

Because if there's one place where women can get even less of a fair shake than in Silicon Valley, it's... Hollywood.

(via Esther Dyson)

An image gallery of Photoshopically-censored Mariah Carey album covers, as sold in Saudi Arabia. Mariah! Beware the self-replicating censorkitty!

(via Ethan Zuckerman, originally from Ahmed Al-Omran, aka Saudi Jeans, Saudi Arabia's best English language blogger.)

Update: Shocked cat is shocked:

Read the rest

Our experience suggests a different approach, one we call Building New Clubhouses. Instead of trying to fit people into existing engineering cultures, it may be more constructive to try to spark and support new cultures, to build new clubhouses. Our experiences have led us to believe that the problem is not so much that communities are prejudiced or exclusive but that they're limited in breadth--both intellectually and culturally. Some of the most revealing research in diversity in STEM found that women and other minorities don't join STEM communities not because they are intimidated or unqualified but rather because they're simply uninterested in these disciplines.

One of our current research goals is thus to question traditional disciplinary boundaries and to expand disciplines to make room for more diverse interests and passions. To show, for example, that it is possible to build complex, innovative, technological artifacts that are colorful, soft, and beautiful. We want to provide alternative pathways to the rich intellectual possibilities of computation and engineering. We hope that our research shows that disciplines can grow both technically and culturally when we re-envision and re-contextualize them. When we build new clubhouses, new, surprising, and valuable things happen. As our findings on shared LilyPad projects seem to support, a new female-dominated electrical engineering/computer science community may emerge.

On Feminism and Microcontrollers

(via O'Reilly Radar)

(Image: LIlypad Embroidery, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from bekathwia's photostream)