Turkish Airlines bars staff from wearing lipstick —

Europe's fourth-largest airline said the ban was aimed at keeping crews "artless and well-groomed with makeup in pastel tones", reports Ayla Jean Yackley; Turkey's move toward a more conservative brand of Islam has secularists concerned. [Reuters] — Rob •

The right to "unlock" your cellphone is just the start —

Derek Khanna writes that a more permanent solution is needed to the underlying legal mess, "ensuring consumer rights, protecting small businesses, and fostering innovation." [The Atlantic] — Rob •

Fans fix Aliens: Colonial Marines' amateurish game trailer

Rob Beschizza at 6:21 am • •

UPDATE: Reader Pat David went the extra mile and improved the trailer a different way: by keeping the music and sound effects but removing the dreadful voiceover: "turns out it's a center-panned vocal - so just inverted the LR stereo channels." Pat's edit is pasted above, UberWaz's is below.

After years of waiting, Alien fans were shocked yesterday by the appalling state of the trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines. Badly-acted and terribly-scripted, it made the forthcoming game look amateurish and cheesy; the project's lead writer immediately and publicly disowned it. But what a difference a day makes: Rock Paper Shotgun reader UberWaz remixed the clip with new audio, creating something that perfectly matches the franchise's gloomy mix of science fiction and horror.

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Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day (UPDATE: called off)

Rob Beschizza at 6:59 am • •

UPDATE: Having made such a positive splash already, organizer Leigh Alexander decided to nix the day itself lest it get out of hand:

#Objectify has gotten much bigger than I expected. At first I was excited, but now I see the scale of the discussion and coverage is creating a number of valid risks -- and as a result, I'd like to call off the event. ...
The dialogue's been great, but the end result -- a day of circulating a hashtag on Twitter -- runs the risk of catching fire with people who miss the point. #Objectify is not about celebrating objectification or about making people feel uncomfortable, but I'm increasingly worried that point will be lost and that harm can be done.

The first annual Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day brings attention to the ways, subtle and otherwise, in which female journalists are objectified and trivialized. Here's organizer (and BB contributor) Leigh Alexander, writing in The New Statesman:

The purpose of the exercise isn’t to “get revenge” or to make anyone uncomfortable: simply to help highlight by example what a gendered compliment looks like, and to get people talking in a funny and lighthearted way about how these kinds of comments distract from meaningful dialogues and make writers online feel like their point of view is only as relevant as how attractive they are.

Roll Up For The First Annual Objectify A Man in Tech Day [newstatesman.com]

Mugshot sites sued —

David Kravets, at Wired: "An Ohio man who found his police booking photo on several privately run mugshot websites is suing those sites under a novel legal theory: that the mugshot publishing industry is violating his right of publicity". Here's more at NPR. [Thanks, Jemma Hostetler]

Lately: "Potential Prostitutes" site lets users label women as prostitutes, charges "removal" fees — Rob •

Warrantless email snooping could still be killed —

Buzzfeed's John Stanton: "Backers of new protections against warrantless monitoring of private citizens’ emails said Wednesday that Congress has a good shot of passing digital privacy legislation next year — despite complaints that a bill passed last week didn't include the provisions." — Rob •

Animal personhood —

When does an animal count as a person? At io9, George Dvorsky reviews recent moves to secure legal protections for "highly sapient" animals such as great apes, elephants and cetaceans. — Rob •

Survey: 60% want web tracking regulated —

The New York Times offers a blunt reminder for tech companies which claim defaulting to "Do Not Track" deprives users of the right to make the "decision" for themselves: users do not want to be tracked. According to one new survey, a majority now wants it banned outright: "Sixty percent said they prefer regulation to 'prevent Web sites from collecting information' about them." — Rob •

7 rules for recording the police —

Rule #6: Master Your Technology. [Steve Silverman at Gizmodo] — Rob •

Defendant's encrypted laptop yields secrets —

After seizing an encrypted laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu, prosecutors headed into difficult waters: could she be forced to unlock it? A judge ordered her to give up the password, raising issues of unreasonable search and seizure and the right not to incriminate oneself. Fricosu's lawyers suggested she had forgotten it, but a showdown was averted: she either turned the password over or they figured it out some other way. [Wired] — Rob •

Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing

Cory Doctorow at 10:55 am • •

General-purpose computers are astounding. They’re so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they’re for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright.

But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself.

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SOPA not the only battle; don't forget to help kill Protect-IP —

Maxwell Kielt writes in: "While much of the media's attention is directed towards SOPA, Protect-IP (PIPA) is nearing completion. PIPA is arguably as bad as SOPA, and while it has received a great deal of criticism in the Senate, it is not as well-known in the public eye. Senator Wyden has promised to filibuster the bill, but the vote scheduled for January 24th is a cloture vote - meaning that unless Wyden has a set number of supporters, he cannot filibuster, and the vote will progress without delay." — Rob •