Boing Boing

Friday, October 31, 2003

Slashdot troll speaks

Tom Coates has been discussing technical tricks for coping with message-board trolls on his Everything in Moderation blog, and, surpisingly, an avowed Slashdot troll has shown up to explain why he undertakes extreme technical measures to disrupt Slashdot's message baords.
...i believe that the people who must be treated with the most public, forthright, and open methods of censure are those who offend us the most. i do not believe that trickery is ever as effective as open methods because trickery is, at its core, dishonest to both the person being tricked and the online community you have secretly enacted policy for.

i believe that secret punishments inevitably lead to abuse and combativeness, that they lead to an arms race against people of equal intelligence and unlimited free time.

Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aaaaand we're back

Well, it looks like we may or may not be back up (don't be surprised if we get an outage or two in the next couple days!).

Thanks to everyone who wrote in asking if everything was all right. The server threw a shoe, we moved it to a new host, all is well.

Thanks to Carl Steadman, for his years of hosting the box, and thanks to Ken Snider, who has taken over hostly duties. All hail the sysadmins.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:28:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hallowe'en and copyright

Ernie sez, "On Halloween, what is more scary than copyright law? For example, did you know that the famous vampire movie 'Nosferatu' was almost lost forever due to copyright? On the other hand the makers of a Michael Myers Halloween mask won a lawsuit by proving they took the idea from the movie. Maybe someone can figure out how to get around pumpkin carving DRM. If not, some ghost pirates (or is that pirate ghosts?) have a solution for the file sharing problem." Link (Thanks, Ernie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:58:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I'm interviewing Stross on the WELL

I'm interviewing Charlie Stross for the WELL's inkwell.vue conference for the next two weeks or so -- it's free to read, and you can ask questions by emailing me and I'll post 'em.
I suppose you could say my second writing career dates to about 1998. I took stock of myself and found (a) one unfinished novel (I was 12 months in to it), (b) one finished, unsold novel with structural problems (bits of it have since re-surfaced in the form of "The Atrocity Archives"), (c) one short story sale in 1998 -- and that was a reprint of something I wrote in 1991. I was in my early thirties and I realised that either I should give up, or I should get serious about writing. I started by setting myself a goal of writing *and selling* four stories a year, and a second goal of getting into the magazines that get name recognition -- Asimov's, Analog, F&SF. Somewhere in the preceeding decade I'd cross-fertilized a chunk of ideas between the biological and computer science, and I'd also learned a little bit more about human nature -- enough to handle characterisation better than during my late teens or early twenties. (Parenthetically: this is one of the reasons why we often see new authors erupt on the scene aged thirty-something -- they've finally learned enough about human nature to have something interesting to say about it.) So in 1998 and early 1999 I finished and sold "Antibodies" and "A Colder War" (which got me into the Year's Best SF anthologies), wrote "Lobsters" (which got me into Asimov's and onto the Hugo and Nebula ballots), completed the novel now know as "Singularity Sky", and got serious.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:34:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Issue Two of LA Innuendo magazine now out

The second edition of snarky LA Innuendo, post-ironic slicers and dicers of all that is Hollywood, is now out. If you're in LA on Wed. Nov. 5th, check this: editors and contributors will do standup at the Hudson Theater's Comedy Central Stage. Link to the mag, Link to event details.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:22:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to bypass voicemail hell and get a live operator

List of ways to get to a live operator for various banks, airlines, credit card companies, and support centers.
If you want to reach a live voice at Gateway, hit zero twice, but be prepared to wait on Hold for a little while.

For Hewlett-Packard say "agent" when you're first prompted to speak.

We found no magic bullet to bypass Dell, Apple, or IBM's automated voice menus.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:12:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web archiving legal in the UK

Parliament has enacted a law allowing the British Library to scrape and archive British websites.
"This new legislation will now mean that a vital part of the nation's published heritage will be safe," said MP Chris Mole, who supported the move.

The archive will comprise selective "harvesting" from the 2.9 million sites that have "co.uk" suffixes.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:05:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Powerbook 15" has known screen-defects

The new 15" PowerBooks have a new known screen defect, in which big ugly white splotches show up on your display. My new 1GHz 15" has this in spades; Dan Gillmor's has a less severe case. The problem is that I suspect that I'll have to give the box back to Apple for a week to get it fixed, and there's no way in hell I can afford to do that any time soon. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:47:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lock-in prevents landfill

The AP has run a good piece on cellphone recycling that is marred by an excitingly stupid lede about the likelihood that number-portability will cause many of us to throw away our phones once we get better deals under the new competitive rules, and that this will be an environmental disaster. Lock-in prevents landfill. Cheez.
The new rule that takes effect Nov. 24 allowing users to change wireless (news - web sites) companies without losing their phone numbers is expected to motivate as many as 30 million people to switch within the first year.

Those who do will need to buy new phones. That's because even carriers that use the same network technologies employ different encryption.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:38:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photo quiz: Serial killer or Programming Language Inventor?

I got 7 out of 10. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:43:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Album covers redone in Lego

Famous album covers re-envisioned in Lego. Can you guess this one? Nirvana's Nevermind. Link (thanks, jean-Luc!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:22:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hack the universe

BoingBoing patron saint Warren Ellis spake thusly, and lo; it was good:
Read this Scientific American piece. Short version; the universe is actually a two-dimensional plane packed with information, and the three-dimensions universe we perceive is nothing but an expression of that information. Matter and energy and life are, in fact, holograms. It leaves something very very interesting open for the future. If the universe is a vast two-dimensional plane of information -- then it can be hacked.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:15:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crazy TokyoFlash watch: the Pimp Watch

New on the killer TokyoFlash watch site, the Pimp Watch -- at $129, it's a little rich for my blood, but boy, that's some sweet watch action. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Senator John Edwards to guestblog for Lessig

Presidential hopeful Senator John Edwards is coming to Lessig's blog for a guest stint -- Lessig's doing this very swell thing in convincing presidential candidates to write frankly and personally about their aspirations on a blog. Shoot by and ask Edwards a question or two... Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:41:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Temporary IP address instead of boingboing.net

As you may have noticed, we're in the middle of an extended outage. We've got a new server up and running (with lots of new posts), but the DNS is going to take a day or two. In the meantime, http://216.126.84.59/ is your friend. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:05:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, October 30, 2003

Protection from Pornography Week

First they came for the bukkake websites, and I did not speak out because I was not a bukkake website. George W. Bush says:
Pornography can have debilitating effects on communities, marriages, families, and children. During Protection From Pornography Week, we commit to take steps to confront the dangers of pornography.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:34:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hallowe'en, Jack Chick style

If you're tired of celebrating Hallowe'en in a TP- and egg-free house, why not give you Jack Chick tracts instead of candy this year? Jack's got a bunch of suggestions for helping you warn your neighbors off of the evil crypto-druidic satanic costume-festival. Link (via EBA)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:32:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nokia's sideways phone makes people feel silly

Sidetalkin' is a photoblog devoted to pix of people demonstrating how ridiculous they feel talking into the new "sideways" Nokia N-Gage phone, which requires that you hold it at a right-angle to your head and talk into the thin edge. Link (via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:52:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Extended iCal rant from a timezone warrior

Apple's iCal has an unbelievably annoying, poorly thought-out system for handling timezone changes. Here's how it works: when you change the timezone of your system-clock, it adjusts all of your calendar items, so if you go from Pacific to Eastern time, you noon lunch appointment is "fixed" so that it shows up at 3PM -- the Eastern equivalent of 12PM Pacific.

What is the use-case for this? If I'm in San Francisco and I'm going to Toronto in a week and I make a 6PM dinner appointment with my brother and sister-in-law, should I enter it as a 3PM appointment, knowing that my computer will adjust this to 6PM when I land in Toronto and change my system clock? And if I do, how do I avoid double-booking myself when someone else asks me to have dinner at the same time and my calendar shows that 6PM isn't booked, that's fine?

In other words, why does Apple think I want to use Greenwich Mean Time, rather than my internal, subjective frame-of-reference, as my clock?

Now, Apple has updated iCal with a "switch timezones off" feature. Which doesn't work.

Here's how it doesn't work: Create an appointment with timezone "support" switched off. Make it from noon to 1PM. Now, go to your system clock and change your timezone to one hour back. The appointment will shift back by one hour. That's with timezone "support" switched off.

If you switch the "support" on and change timezones, iCal will ask you if you want to change the timezone "display" for your appointments. Answering "no" seems to solve the problem, as all of your events will stay localized for whatever timezone you were in when you created them. What's more, whenever you create an event, it gives you the option of specifying a timezone for it and adjusts it on your behalf -- so if you create a 12PM appointment while in EST and specify that its timezone is PST, iCal will move the event back to 9AM for you.

This stinks. For starters, that's all well and good when you and I make a lunch date for noon next week in New York, but it falls down when you call me back an hour later and ask me if we can make it brunch at 2PM -- now I have to go into iCal and work out that my noon-Eastern/9AM-Pacific appointment is really a 2PM-Eastern/11AM-Pacific appointment and, rather than simply bumping a noon appointment to 2PM, I need to subtract three and move a 9AM appointment to 11AM.

It gets worse, though: say you use the timezone "support" and just don't worry about the timezones. All start/stop times stay as you entered them, provided you keep on clicking "no" every time you change zones and iCal asks you if you want to update your display. So far so good. But woe betide you if you create an appointment with an alarm -- your 9AM alarm will ring a 6AM when you're on the west coast (if you created it while your clock was set Eastern), even though it will show up as a 9AM alarm in your calendar. There's a user-hostile design decision!

It gets even worse: Just wait until you synch iCal with your PalmOS device! Last night, I moved from Mountain to Central time. I adjusted the time-zone on my Clie and my Powerbook, but asked iCal to leave all my appointments in Mountain time. Then I made the mistake of synching my Clie: iSync decided that all the appointments in my Clie were an hour behind, and moved them up an hour -- including my wake-up alarm and the alarm for my 8:30AM conference call (Thanks, Apple!).

I have toyed with the idea of leaving my timezone set to GMT or some arbitrary value, and then spoofing my clock by manually setting it forward or back whenever I get off an airplane, but this royally screws up your email (which arrives at the remote end with bogus timestamps that indicates that it was sent hours in the past or the future, depending), and messes up any kind of incremental backup that uses change-dates to determine which version of a file to overwrite.

So, after all that whingeing, I have a solution of sorts. I used to use an app called "iCalTimeZoneFixer" that would automatically adjust your calendar items when you changed timezones, undoing the damage wrought by Apple's system. But with Panther and the new iCal, this doesn't work so good anymore: about 70% of the time, running iCalTimeZoneFixer deletes all the items in my calendar.

So this morning, while I was missing my phone call because my alarm hadn't gone off, I figured out a fix of sorts. It hinges on the fact that your iCal calendar file (which you'll find in ~/Library/Calendars/$CALENDARNAME.ics") is a flat text file, that you can edit with a text-editor like BBEdit.

1. Quit iCal, then make a copy of your calendar file. Open your calendar file in a text-editor (I used BBEdit)

2. Look for the string that denotes the city/timezone your calendar is localized to, i.e. "America/Chicago" or "America/San Francisco"

3. Go to System Preferences -> Date and Time -> Time Zone and use the map interface to find out the name of your desired timezone (i.e., if you're in America/San Francisco on your way to America/Denver, America/Denver is your desired timezone)

4. Search-and-replace the existing timezone string with your desired timezone and save

5. Start iCal up again, then go back to System Peferences -> Date and Time -> Time Zone and change your timezone. iCal will "adjust" your calendar and you'll find yourself looking at the correct times again

There you have it: using a text-editor and search-and-replace, you can undo the stupidest feature I've ever seen in a calendar app.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MoveOn calls for homemade CC-licensed anti-bush TV spots

MoveOn is sponsoring a competition to produce the best 30-second political TV spot showing "the truth about George Bush." The winning entry will be aired during the week of the State of the Union address -- and all entries must be opened under a Creative Commons license.
All eligible submissions will be posted on this web site and rated by visitors. The top rated ads will then be voted on by our panel of esteemed judges, including Michael Moore, Donna Brazile, Jack Black, Janeane Garofalo, and Gus Van Sant. The winning ad idea will be broadcast on television during the week of Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, and the winner will receive a recording of the ad as broadcast.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Atkins Hacks: Overclocking your metabolism

A Salon piece picks up on something I've been saying for a while: low-carbing is the geek diet. It's why conferences are now filled with nerds with jawlines.
Sure, if you eat fewer calories and exercise more you'll lose weight, but if, like so many dieters, you're unable to follow that advice, who cares if it's an airtight theory? "If that's science, then it's science that has yet to produce a lot of results because American asses grow rounder every day," says Doctorow. "If you ask people to reduce their caloric intake and increase their exercise, you won't get a lot of good results. It's like going around complaining that people have crappy passwords."

"The hacker ethic is not necessarily being a formally trained engineer, not necessarily being someone who understands the science. It's a reverse-engineering perspective: Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong, but it's based on empiricism," says Doctorow. "That's kind of the low-carb approach, which goes against the conventional wisdom about how you do nutrition and weight loss."

Scientific studies sanctioning the approach are just starting to appear, but there's a still a sense that one is tinkering with one's own body to somewhat unknown ends. "Maybe it will make us all grow third arms and go blind in 20 years," quips Doctorow. "It's sort of hard to tell. It represents a kind of hacker's approach, grounded as it is in jack-legged engineering rather than science."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:22:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MySociety: Technology in the public interest

MySociety, a new project from the people behind FaxYourMP and VoxPolitics, launched today. MySociety is a foundation that supports the production of low-cost technology that is produced in the public interest:
mySociety.org will support projects that have three broad attributes:

1. Founded on electronic networks. This includes the internet, mobile and telephone networks, wireless, fax and anything related.

2. Real world impact. The projects must have an impact which is above and beyond helping users to use their computers or mobiles more efficiently. We understand that there is a degree of philosophical ambiguity here (isn't faster browsing a real life impact?), so we've developed the following list of desirable outcomes from projects...

3. Low or zero cost scalability. This is key. We are looking for projects that cost the same (or virtually the same) to run for ten or a million users. This doesn't exclude the possibility of SMS based services, but it does rule out one-on-one tuition or building a site just for your community.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:22:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

RIP, Hal Clement

Harry Stubbs -- AKA the golden-age science-fiction legend Hal Clement -- has died. He was a gentleman, a talented writer, and he always had the time of day for beginning writers. We were on panels together at Ad Astra, the Toronto science fiction convention, a couple times, and he always made me feel like I was worth listening to. I saw him and had a brief and friendly conversation with him in September at the World Science Fiction convention. He was very old, but sharp as a tack, and friendly as ever. Goodbye, Hal. Link (Thanks, Scraps)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CIA's goofy spy-robots

The CIA has celebrated its 40th by showing off its misbegotten spy-robots (mechanical, eavesdropping bumblebees, dragonflies and catfish!) in a private exhibit.
In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency's scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it.

They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped.

Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Biz-card-sized PDA with Crackberry functionality

Here's some leaked info about a new business-card-sized PDA from Citizen that supports a WiFi card (or Bluetooth, if you're some kind of pervert) for email. Rumor has it that it will be targetted to corporations at 20,000-30,000 Yen ($185-$285) each. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:04:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

America approves anti-shortness therapy

The FDA has approved human growth hormone for use in treating shortness, so that parents of short kids can hack their hormone-balance and make them into beanpoles. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google to create searchable archive of 60,000 books

Hot on the heels of Amazon's brilliant new text-search service for books, Google is getting ready to announce a similar service.
So far, Google has made agreements that give it the ability to scan as many as 60,000 titles, the report said.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:36:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fox threatens to sue Fox over Simpsons

Fox News threatened to sue Fox Entertainment because a Simpsons parody of the Fox News crawler hurt Rupert Murdoch's feelings.
"Fox said they would sue the show and we called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it," Mr Groening told National Public Radio in the US.

"But now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls [tickers] on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," he added on NPR's Fresh Air programme.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:35:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Totally TMI: Survey shows information overload on the rise

A group of researchers at UC Berkeley have just released research that shows global information production grew by 30% annually from 1999 to 2002.
"All of a sudden, almost every aspect of life around the world is being recorded and stored in some information format," said [researcher Peter] Lyman. "That's a real change in our human ecology."

According to the researchers, the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years. And, new information produced in those forms during 2002 was equal in size to half a million new libraries, each containing a digitized version of the print collections of the entire Library of Congress, they added. The researchers also report that electronic channels - such as TV, radio, the telephone and the Internet - contained three and a half times more new information in 2002 than did the information that was stored.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:16:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Code Genealogy of the New Napster

The New Napster launches tomorrow, and -- apart from the crippling WMA/DRM barbwire -- it's really a rather nice app. With more than a little resemblance to Pressplay and MyMP3.com, from which it is descended. I asked MP3.com founder Michael Robertson (also founder of Lindows.com, SIPphone.com) to trace the digital DNA for BoingBoing readers; here is his take on who begat whom:
(1) VU buys MP3.com.
(2) VU owns half of pressplay (Sony owns other half)
(3) Pressplay uses MP3.com to build pressplay service.
(4) MP3.com had my.mp3 which made it fairly easy to do pressplay since framework was already built
(5) Roxio buys pressplay and got along with it 150 engineers in San Diego and the my.mp3 technology which is used for pressplay
(6) Roxio buys Napster
(7) Roxio takes pressplay, adds to it with tech all built by my ex-guys in San Diego
(8) Relaunches as Napster
So Roxio currently has a building in San Diego, one of the old MP3.com buildings full of engineers that do the work on Napster. It's like a soap opera.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:13:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Burn, Hollywood Burn. More on blogs and SoCal wildfires.

At left: snapshot I just phonecammed of the sky outside my home. Los Angeles is a very strange place to be this afternoon. Mad Max kind of vibe. Sunset, all day long. When I step away from the laptop, open the door, and step out into the street, I taste ash. See little bits of carbon floating in the air, little dark snowflakes. Smell smoke. Car is covered in fine black soot. It's hot here, but it's not just hot south hot, it's a weird kind of hot. Barbecued city hot. Freeways and roads are closed all over. Mayors appear on TV, telling entire cities to stay home from work.

I ate lunch on the westside with a friend today. Outside the cafe walls, in the open air, two tanned Hollywood moms in Gucci shades -- with infants at breast -- nibble on arugula. My friend exhales quickly, expressing disgust, then says, "How could any responsible mother just sit outside in the air with her baby today?" They're closing schools, too, because outdoor breathing is unsafe for children. Usually in the afternoons, you'll see a track-field of boys in football practice at the high school down the street from my home. Not today. Everything that's solid bears burnt dust; everything that's air is mud-orange, and I feel anxious, restless. Dirty and uptight. Boxed in.

Here are a bunch of links to blog coverage, thanks to Jonah at LABlogs.com.

Links from Oct 28: Joseph :: Extensive collection on pictures in San Diego :: green gabbro :: tolitz :: Kenneth Cowan :: yambiguity (pics) :: kristen havens :: cruft (pic) :: koganuts (lots of pictures and first hand account) ::

Links from Oct 27: Brain Farts (with pics) :: Give War a Chance :: 20 20 Hindsight (multiple posts) :: Sean Bonner (with pics) :: Douglas Welch (multiple posts) :: Tankbear :: Grotani :: Floorpie :: Skits :: Dogs don't purr :: Bitty Boo :: Kitty Bukkake :: Everything is Wrong (pictures, close to the fire) :: zilched :: cognizant :: boing boing (with links to photoblogs) :: baldilocks :: xero79 (pictures) :: emmanuelle (pics) :: incadenza (multiple entries) :: MyHuman (pics) :: annika :: marc brown (with links to pics) :: painfully cool :: los(t) angeles :: blogging.la (dramatic pics) :: Textamerica Fire Moblog (cam pics from around the southland) :: Doc Searls (with an inflight pic from today) ::

News/Satellite Photos: Satellite shot showing fires from Ventura to Baja :: Yahoo News Photos Detailed maps and affected area updates at GeoMac Wildland Fire Support's California Wildfire Viewer.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:38:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Memory glasses

MIT researchers announce a new invention: "memory glasses," intended to treat poor eyesight and poor mental recall.
Whatever you need to remember is programmed into a tiny computer that you wear. The computer sends messages in the form of light to a mini TV screen on the glasses. The messages -- like someone's name, or a word like keys or medicine -- flash before your eyes at 180th of a second. It's too fast for the eyes to notice, but not the brain. "Our tests have shown a 50 percent better memory with these than without, and the thing that's interesting is that people aren't even aware that anything is happening," [MIT spokesman Dr. Alex] Pentland said.
Link (thanks, BT)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:41:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ray Kurzweil on the coming revolution in IP

Our cultural future? Software-based musical instruments, intelligent accompanists, and music as information, according to author/futurist Ray Kurzweil in a keynote speech delivered at a 2003 Audio Engineering Society convention -- The Future of Music in the Age of Spiritual Machines.
The issue of protecting intellectual property goes far beyond music and audio technologies, but the crisis has started in the music industry. Already, music recording industry revenues are down sharply, despite an overall increase in the distribution of music. The financial crisis has caused music labels to become cautious and conservative, investing in proven artists, with less support available for new and experimental musicians.

The breakdown of copyright protection is starting to impact musical instruments themselves. Synthesizers, samplers, mixers, and audio processors can all be emulated in software. It has been estimated that at least 90 percent of the copies of "Reason," one of the emulation software leaders, are pirated.

Music controllers still require hardware, but when full- immersion visual-auditory virtual reality environments become ubiquitous, which I expect by the end of this decade, we'll be using virtual controllers that are essentially comprised of "just" software. When we have the full realization of nanotechnology-based assembly in the 2020s, we will be creating actual hardware at almost no cost from software.

We are not far from that reality today, and for the recording industry it is already clear that the principal product music is pure information. In all industries, the portion of products and services represented by their information content is rapidly increasing. By the time we get to the nanotechnology era, most products will be essentially information.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:36:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Back from the Islands and hungry for WiFi

We're back from our four month trip to the South Pacific. We'd planned on being there for a year, but our kids ended up catching pneumonia, lice, and other creepy afflications and the health care there was really bad so we evacuated. I'll have an article at the LA Weekly about it in a few weeks. In the meantime, I wrote a piece about my search for WiFi connectivity for TheFeature.com. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:31:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool Wired mag illo: Zen and the Art of gaming

Canadian artist Kenn Brown says:

"The model was photographed in a studio against a white backdrop - he was then combined with the glowing mandala background (created with 3dsMax) and the wires were painted in using Photoshop. Final tweeking was done to the overall lighting on the monk to integrate all of the elements into a seamless image which runs full page in this month's Wired Magazine."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:30:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snip from Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl's Blog" Breslin's new book

Excerpt from Susannnah Breslin's recently-released collection of PornoPoMo literary shorts, You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?.
Oh, he was a bad man. He had been terrible since the day he was born, before even then, perhaps. He had cried constantly as a small baby, masturbated obsessively as a young teen, and become the kind of man as an adult who only truly enjoyed himself when he was hurting other people. Now, he wanted to know, what was so wrong with that?

This badness, after all, had taken him to where he was today, sitting in his car in an empty parking lot with his brain like a dog running in a circle on a chain in the yard of his mind. Because, these days, he was King Shit of Turd Hill, a paid propagator of evil, a guy unabashedly enough in touch with his, well, bad self, really, that he made a living off it. Everyone else, he thought, could go and fuck themselves.

He was a pornographer, and he was not ashamed. In fact, he was terrifically proud. He told those who stood around him while he worked that porn stars were like game pieces, and porn sets were like chessboards, and he was like the god who moved them around. He would add, after a pause, But in this game, somebody always gets fucked in the ass! Then, he would laugh, and everyone else would laugh right along with him. His life was hilarious, actually. Put that in your mouth, put this in your vagina, put the other thing up your butt. The variations were endless. It was their willingness that staggered his mind. The people in front of him were as malleable as freshly pulverized meat. Having been punched by their mothers, screwed by their fathers, and screamed at by their lovers, they stood limply before him and just did whatever he said.

Bonus: interview with the Invisible Cowgirl on Zulkey.com, here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:00:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Isenberg on the Future of Money

David Isenberg has some interesting commentary on the Future of Money conference:
The agenda is interesting, but with glaring holes where the problems of the world are. For example, take the first session, "Digital Pearl Harbor: A Modern Disaster Scenario." I infer that this deals with what happens when the money system comes under attack.

Well, the money system already is under attack for anybody in the class formerly known as "Middle" who has children, according to The Two Income Trap, a jaw-dropping empirical study of 2200 U.S. families that went bankrupt.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: New Napster launch

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day", I speak with host Alex Chadwick about tomorrow's launch of Napster 2.0. The pre-release app was super-sweet and surprisingly stable, not entirely unlike iTunes, includes some goodies iTunes lacks, performs elegantly in Win environments, loved the massive catalog (found almost every obscure old-school hip-hop and dub track I wanted within seconds) but WMA + Win-DRM = ouch. Like a waiter serving you a hot, frothy, mouthwateringly delicious cappucino you've been craving all day -- then, peeing in it. Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:45:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My notes from Decentralized Economic Systems and Monetary Evolution

Here are my running notes from the "Decentralized Economic Systems and Monetary Evolution" panel at the Future of Money conference.
Mobile phone companies have become billing systems. Payment infrastructure is being integrated into software that you d/l to your computer.

The info is more portable: your credit-record is more accessible, it can be used to quickly get a credit-line, found a reputation system, etc. As this is integrated into IT systems, we'll get a wealth of apps, build on a centralized server.

How do you make the convenience sufficient to drive new market apps? PayPal was successful by enabling new merchants -- lower barrier to entry than getting a Mastercard acct. It's a P2P system in that it allows individuals to accept payments. We have a lot of IP in the antifraud systems that make that happens. The centralized system allows for the antifraud systems, which allows for the very fast creation of merchant accts.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:29:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

San Diego Bloggers blog SoCal wildfires

BoingBoing reader Joe writes:
I don't think I realized the impact of blogging until 9/11 -- and I was a bit dismayed when these fires hit that there seemed to be not a whole lot of coverage. But looking now and updating San Diego Bloggers I see that there are LOTS of people blogging about their experiences in the fires. Many first hand accounts of evacuees, many photos. Thankfully, things appear to be stabilzing. But the persistent smell, countywide, of campfire is still with us, and authorities say that they don't hope to have control of the fires for several more days.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:14:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Asia Carrera -- adult film star, geek -- evacuates from SoCal fires

Adult film actress and self-professed nerd of porn (NSFW) Asia Carrera is among the many people evacuating homes in the line of fire today:
Homeowners packed their cars and fled several communities as adult film actress Asia Carrera left her Chatsworth townhouse after packing clothes, a computer and two cats into her metallic-blue Corvette. "I've been through it before, but this [fire] is a hell of a lot bigger," Carrera said. "I didn't sleep at all last night. I sat by the window and looked at the sky glowing red."
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:39:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Audio Marx Brothers remixes.

The FARKers are remixing Marx Brothers audio clips to make their own tunes, dialog, and comedy routines. I'm quite fond of this MP3 (617k). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:31:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spam ecosystem breeding hardier UCE

Spammers acquire all the tools used by antispammers to filter email, and they tweak their spam accordingly. Antispam algorithms are acting like predators on the spam ecosystem, culling weak, easy-to-detect spam and leaving behind more virulent, hardier strains.
"There will be an enormous drop in HTML spam, and we will have more text-based and chatty spam," said Graham-Cumming. But "the volume of spam will increase as spammers send variants of messages to get them through."

Although no spammer has yet to fool every Bayesian filter, some tricks work better than others. One recent spam employed a trick that misspelled almost every word in the body, but was still coherent enough to get the gist through.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:58:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, October 27, 2003

Tekpunk author/visionary Kenji Siratori starts blogging

BoingBoing pal Warren Ellis points to disturbed genius Kenji Siratori's brand-spankin'-new blog, and warns would-be readers to "start with small doses." Born in 1975, Siratori is the Japanese author of Blood Electric, and describes himself as a 'hypermodern writer working in a digital environment'. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:06:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Entire house contents stolen

Eli the Bearded sez, "Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a story about the entire contents of a man's SF apartment being stolen. All the furniture, photos, the food from the fridge. Everything. This was four months ago, and the police have no leads. The quirky thing about this, not mentioned in the article, is that it took place just about the same time an entire house (save the foundation) was stolen in Placerville, CA." Link (Thanks, Eli!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:56:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Report from Machinima awards 2003

Hugh sez, "The Machinima Film Festival 2003 happened on Saturday in New York City, and quite a lot of what it revealed was surprising. For example, Machinima is going pro much faster than most people anticipated - the films that swept the awards were either already commercial (and in one case bound for Sundance this year) or going that way - Red vs Blue is hopefully heading onto shop shelves soon. And the attendees were mostly older film-makers or film students, many of them already established as creators in other media." Link (Thanks, Hugh!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:53:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fire photoblogging from Jason DeFillippo

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:39:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aeron wheelchair

Herman Miller has teamed up with a Tennessee company called Permobil to produce a powered Aeron wheelchair. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:33:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gamespaces' toilets

This Russian site features screenshots of toilets as they appear in dozens of video games, from the paleolithic VGA potties of Leisure Suit Larry to the nurby whimsy of Counter Strike's classy wooden-seat shitter. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:31:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

George Lakoff on why the conservatives seem to be winning

My friend Bonnie Powell interviewed master linguist and cultural commentator George Lakoff at UC Berkeley about how the Democrats desperately need a lesson in language. This is a must-read:
"...Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing."
Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:15:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SoCal fires: more aerial imagery, online

BoingBoing pal and benevolent wireless hacker Mike Outmesguine sends these links to mindboggling aerial imagery of the fires raging in Southern California. Link one, Link two, Link three, Link four.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:07:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whitehouse site blocks indexing of files about Iraq

Whitehouse.gov has a robots.txt file that keeps directories containing the word "iraq" from being indexed by search-engines.
Sometime between April 2003 and late October, 2003, hundreds of instances of the term "iraq" were added to the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file.

On a quick look, It appears that the google cached version of the robots.txt file very nearly could be created by searching for the string "text" in the April 16 file and replacing it with the string "iraq" then adding the newly changed files ("text" to "iraq") to the original file, keeping the lines with "text" in them as well. That's from a quick look so I'm not sure it would hold up, but it appears it could explain the bulk of the "iraq" appearances.

Link (Thanks, Kurt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:34:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soccer balls made from plastic bags

Nice photo-illustrated account of how kids in Burundi use off-cuts of fabric and old plastic bags to improvise soccer balls. Link (Thanks, Bob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:32:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WorldCon-running game

If I Ran the Zoo Con is a game from NESFA Press in which you attempt to successfully run a World Science Fiction Convention. Greg Costikyan's got some good ruminations on it.
The game, in other words, serves a didactic purpose: It is intended to help wannabe WorldCon bidders at least understand some of the problems people have faced before, and (hopefully) get them to avoid making the most obvious mistakes. It serves that purpose admirably--and even if you don't plan on making a WorldCon bid, it's pretty fun to play, at least if you have an interest in science fiction and the field's personalities. It's rather amazing what can go wrong.

Since the digital games revolution began, starry-eyed twits have been going on and on about how games will change education and lead us all down a future glorious path in which everyone learns everything because it's fun to do so. This is, of course, nonsense, and always will be, since creating something interactive =and fun= is bloody hard enough, and insisting that the result should also cram some facts into people's heads is enough to turn "bloody hard" into "well nigh impossible." (And.... Have you noticed that every school computer lab in the country has Oregon Trail and SimCity installed--and few if any other games--and that this has been true for twenty years?)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paper-plate origami

WholeMovement is a site devoted to paper-folding projects that use round sheets of paper -- specifically, 9" diameter paper-plates. Nice how-to, too. Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:33:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New images from Iraq on Kevin Sites blog

Kevin Sites is in Northern Iraq today. He just posted a slew of new photos to his blog, including the one below:

"During a night raid, while her brothers and sisters were crying this little girl was virtually stoic. He mother covered here face while the little girl peered right into my lens. I almost felt as if she was recording my image in her mind, just as i was getting hers on a memory stick." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:58:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK salons provide captive audience for short films

UK hair salons will showcase short films to customers in the chairs, who will be the last captive audience now that UK TV channels has stopped showing shorts.
Paul Trijbits, head of the Film Council's New Cinema Fund, which backs 150 shorts a year, said: "Short films are essential to filmmakers' development. With limited short film programming in cinemas and little support from broadcasters, this is a fantastic way of getting an audience."
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired runs a balanced Broadcast Flag story -- last week to fight the proposal

As promised, Wired News has run an extensive, in-depth followup to the Reuters Broadcast Flag story it ran last week, soliciting comment from the activists who've been working on the issue since its earliest days. This coincides with a feature by Farhad Manjoo in Salon today, too. The Broadcast Flag will likely be enacted by Hallowe'en, unless we mobilize our friends to slashdot the FCC with letters in opposition to the proposal.
"The mandate comes with all kinds of obligations about what kinds of features you're allowed to offer with your product and how they must be implemented, and the people who control those requirements are the Hollywood movie studios and other technology and consumer electronic companies," he said. "It creates an environment where small innovators who are not willing to compromise for someone else's business model essentially get shut out."

He pointed to DVD technology as an example of what happens when technology is controlled by a particular group.

"In order to interoperate with DVD, you have to sign on with a bunch of agreements and private licensing arrangements under the auspices of the DVD forum," he said. "There's been no new feature added to DVD players since their introduction. And that's exactly the way Hollywood likes things to go."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:51:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Meatspace wildfires undermine gamespace law and order

Ted Castronove points out that meatspace fires can cause gamespace riots:
"All Sony Online Entertainment customer service support is closed due to the wild fires raging throughout San Diego and the proximity of those fires to the SOE offices. Normal operations will resume once this local emergency is over..."

In other words, a firestorm has knocked out the government that rules over 750,000 accounts. There will be no police officers on the streets tonight. If you're in the mood to do some random looting and griefing, now's the time.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:46:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire

The Free State Project is a coordinated group of 20,000 libertarians who are moving, en masse, to New Hampshire, to field candidates in key elections, in order to turn the state into a laboratory for libertarian experimentation. The Project hopes to bring 20,000 people to New Hampshire by 2006. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:45:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot-assisted 2-minute jack-o-lanterns

The Detroit Science Center's pumpkin-carving robot uses a drywall saw to render finished jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins in two minutes, then "as each piece is completed, the robot spears it in the center, then wipes it off by passing the saw through a fork located above the orange bucket." Link (via JWZ's Livejournal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:40:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dean campaign notes from Gary Wolf

Gary Wolf, an old Wired hand, has been working on a major story about the Dean campaign's use of the Internet. He's taking running notes on his blog as he organizes the peice -- it's fascinating stuff. Particularily interesting is the "Retroactive Manifesto for the Dean Campaign," identifying the principles that have worked best so far.
ALLOW THE ENDS TO CONNECT (David Weinberger)
This is the principle that resulted in the massive Meet-Up momentum, with 128,878 sign-ups as of tonight. What goes on at all the meet-ups? The Dean campaign has only the vaguest idea. “They are allowing the ends to connect without any centralized control from the campaign,” says David. “The goal is not necessarily to have messages flowing up and down. Democracy is supposed to be about people talking with each other about what matters to them and then organizing to get the things they want. If all you have a is a TV set and a ballot box, that's a shadow of democracy.”
Link (via Joi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:34:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, October 26, 2003

Phonecamming the fires in LA and San Diego

There's a public phonecam blog here, where people are snapping and uploading mobile shots of the fires currently raging throughout Southern California: Link. OMFG. The fire situation here in San Diego/LA is completely insane. I could see ash in the sky here in Los Angeles -- nevermind see, I can taste it. The air is dense with smoke, and we're like 40-50 miles away from the major blazes.... but even here, okay: I can usually see the Hollywood sign from the cafe where I spend most of my Sundays, and today I can barely see a couple of blocks away. There are fires in San Diego, too -- and several major airports were closed here for at least part of the day today, including LAX. Also, Sean Bonner at Sixspace gallery posted this. Update: More photoblogs at Buzznet here and here. And this amazing sat photo of smoke plumes. Link (thanks, SJ)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:26:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, October 25, 2003

New car smell, in a bottle

That sexy "new car smell"? In Cadillacs, it's enhanced by a distilled industrial perfume called "Nuance." The auto maker uses it to liberally coat the insides of fresh-off-the-assembly-line cars, as sensory stimulant for prospective buyers. From the New York Times:
"You pay the extra money for leather, you don't want it to smell like lighter fluid," said James T. Embach, G.M.'s manager for advanced features. "You want it to smell like a Gucci bag." ... The new-car smell need not stop at leather, however. "We believe there is growth potential in people wanting to be in this big burly S.U.V. with rich walnut and they want it to smell like wood," said Jeff Rose, senior vice president at Collins & Aikman.
Anyone want to place odds on how long before we see Nuance (or an eau de car knockoff -- perhaps Chanel No. 92 Unleaded) hits retail shelves? No telling what trouble a dab behind the ear might get you into. Link (thanks, Clive)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:07:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Citi's CEO's SSN sky-written over NYC

The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights paid a skywriter to etch part of the social security number of Citigroups CEO in the sky over Manhattan, to protest Citi's lobbying against new consumer privacy legislation.
"Citigroup has gotten off pretty easy for advertising that it protects peoples' privacy, when in fact it has been not only sharing information among its many affiliates, but also spending $4.6 million lobbying in the first half of this year on this bill," Court said. "Their customers have to know that all those ATM fees they're paying are going to work against them. Citigroup has to face the fact that if they keep this up ... there's a good chance that one day they may face a boycott."
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:01:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen double-header: Celebrity

(1) defacer
(2) stacey as britney
(3) fishyspoon
(4) impersonators
(5) b list
(6) celine dreams
(7) more than hucknall
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:11:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Progress for French street portrait shooters

This fellow uses a digital camera, and carries a color printer around his neck. He'll take your souvenir portrait digitally, and print the results within five minutes. What, no Photoshop?

Link ( thanks, Jean-Luc) update: BoingBoing reader Brian says: "While the photographer may be French, he is actually standing in front of the Trevi fountains in Rome (the biggest fountains in the world). I saw the guy when I went to Italy this summer."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:03:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

American Idol for Russian prisoners. Prize: freedom

In a grotesque, totally po-mo spin on reality talent shows like "American Idol," Russian prison officials organized a contest in which prisoners sing their way out of jail. Six convicts pleased judges enough to win pardons.
Vladimir Volzhsky sang his own song, White Nights of the Perm Prison Camp. He has already released two albums. The prisoners sang to 1,100 guests, most of whom were prison and police officials. Technically, the six to be freed will be released because their parole is due, not just because of the competition. The 17 losers received a television and a small cash prize.
Link to story. Anyone who provides BoingBoing with links to MP3s of winning (or, heck, losing) tunes wins a reduced life sentence. UPDATE: An anonymous BoingBoing reader points us to MP3 files from prison singer Vladimir Volzhsky. Link to Russian page, Link to English.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:58:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GPS-tagged jpegs: location-indexed phonecam pics

Boingboing reader Modesty writes:
So you take a moblogged photo, upload it to your MobileType blog, a bit of script finds the GPS Lat/Long/Alt co-ords in it and then links it to a mapping system, so you can see where the photo was taken. I think this is really great. I've already given up sorting all my photos, I just use a timeline system to find them. Now you could search them by location as well (get me all the photos I took downtown last month). On the other hand, when this starts to become standard on all GPS phones (and there's really no reason why it shouldn't), it better be a feature you get to opt-in to. Otherwise, there'll be an awful lot of people walking around taking photos with out realising each one has such detail tagged in the headers.
Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:48:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, October 24, 2003

PHP insult gen

This handy app generates polysyllabic slurs, so you don't have to:
* May 98 flaming SWBell technical support snuggle with a sharp stick while standing on your unusually small bottle of maple syrup.
* May one million homeless late night talk show hosts puke up Count Chocula after smelling milkshakes using only vaseline and your decaying popcorn.
* May 50 billion quadriplegic door to door salesmen implode Planter's Cheeseballs using only your Swedish fonics monkey.
* May a crowd of nuclear people named "dr. delicious" discover the secret of lard over your Swedish platypus.
* May a gross of fleshy jaywalkers ask "What chu talking about, Willis?!" to testicles, tinkering with your unusually small pontoon boat.
* May 32 Swahilli unix system administrators whip killer bees while performing a drive-by-shooting on your tv dinner.
* May three trillion free-balling members of Menudo swallow flaming crayons after genetically cloning your nose hair.
link (Thanks, Sean!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:48:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Misbehaving, great new all woman group-blog

Misbehaving, a new all-woman group-blog, with stellar contributors including Meg Hourihan, Caterina Fake, Danah Boyd, Liz Lawlet, Dorothea Salo, Halley Suitt, Gina Trapani, and Jill Walker. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:50:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big-ass solar storm tonight

A very large solar storm is expected to take place tonight, and may cause some aurora borealis effects to appear throughout mid-latitudes (over the continental US and Europe). Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:05:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Swarthmore and Diebold team up to undermine integrity of elections

Ernie sez, "Manufacturer of e-voting machines Diebold has been running an aggressive notice-and-takedown DMCA campaign to suppress postings of their internal company memos that show Diebold to have been well aware of security flaws in their e-voting machines. Swarthmore students have started an electronic civil disobedience campaign to keep the memos public by hosting them on a variety of student servers, moving the files around as each student's page is taken down. Unfortunately, Swarthmore has been very risk-adverse and is shutting down student sites that host the memos even before Diebold sends a notice-and-takedown letter. Even worse, Swarthmore is now shutting down student websites that link to the central protest website (which links to the current location of the memos)." Link (Thanks, Ernie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:20:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool free font: Capitalis Pirata (corporate pirates)

Swelligant font set that mimics corporate logos. McD's, Honda, Ford -- all in there.
Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:07:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Carnivore

(1) eat bunny
(2) potted meat
(3) octodog
(4) ham sculpture
(5) poutine
(6) meat shake
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:02:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Petition: Stop drive-thru mastectomies

Robert sez,
Last year, my mother had breast cancer (cancer runs in my family like wildfire). She had to have a mastectomy, which is not trivial surgery; it's not open-heart surgery, but it does require a large incision to be made, which is always dangerous. And yet the insurance company mandated that she be out of the hospital within 24 hours. This is something that a lot of insurance companies have been doing, to a lot of patients who undergo serious surgeries (not just breast-cancer patients); get the patient in and out of the hospital in 24 hours. Costs stay down, profits stay up and the CEO gets another fifty-million-dollar bonus at the end of the year. Having seen my mother in the hospital when she got out, I can say -- and I hope you believe me when I do say -- that twenty-four hours is not enough recuperation time for surgery like that.

Lifetime TV has put a petition on their web site for people to sign. The goal: get the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act passed, an act that would require insurance companies to cover a minimum 48-hour hospital stay following such a surgery. It's about eliminating the "drive-through mastectomy" where women are forced to go home hours after surgery against the wishes of their doctor, still groggy from anesthesia and sometimes with drainage tubes still attached (my mother went home with one still attached).

Link (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woodworking tools coming with bullshit EULAs now

The vile, anti-customer shrinkwrap licenses that are universal in software have started showing up in hardware; particularily, jig-makers are requiring those who buy their templates to aver that they will not loan, sell or allow re-use of the templates they buy.

This is revolting: it comes down to the idea of expecting the world to pay your living, even though your business isn't sustainable. Copyright doesn't give you the right to restrict sale and lending of your works, but it does give you the power to shrinkwrap all of the copies of your work with a contract that claws back all of the public's rights in copyright, including the first sale right that enables reselling and so forth.

This is an abuse of copyright, plain and simple, and the manufacturer's claim that:

"...the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself. Therefore we are verifying your honesty that only you will use the tool and you will not be passing it around to others to use for free. It is exactly the same as the 'shrink wrap' agreement that comes with almost all computer software. Please help us fight 'tool piracy'."
is outrageous: we're chosen to get into a business that is tenuous and unsustainable. Therefore, we demand that you surrender your rights and legitimate expectations about what you may do with the goods that you lawfully acquire in order to ensure that we can keep our doors open. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:53:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Shelley Jackson's SKIN project: (c) and your flesh

Writer Shelley Jackson is doing a "mortal art" project in which 2,095 people will each tattoo one word of a 2,095-word story somewhere on their person. So far, 650 people have signed up via e-mail, and she's soliciting 1,445 more on her website. What's most interesting to me here is that Jackson intends to "retain copyright" over the work as a whole... but, the medium for this work is other people's bodies.
The text will be published nowhere else, and the author will not permit it to be summarized, quoted, described, set to music, or adapted for film, theater, television or any other medium. The full text will be known only to participants, who may, but need not choose to establish communication with one another. In the event that insufficiant participants come forward to complete the first and only edition of the story, the incomplete version will be considered definitive. If no participants come forward, this call itself is the work.

When the work has been completed, participants must send a signed and dated close-up of the tattoo to the author, for verification only, and a portrait in which the tattoo is not visible, for possible publication. Participants will receive in return a signed and dated certificate confirming their participation in the work and verifying the authenticity of their word. Author retains copyright, though she contracts not to devalue the original work with subsequent editions, transcripts, or synopses. However, correspondence and other documentation pertaining to the work (with the exception of photographs of the words themselves) will be considered for publication.

From this time on, participants will be known as "words". They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:49:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Render 1,000,000 trees in eight seconds

SpeedTree is a graphic utility for generating realistic forestry in gaming and other contexts. It can render out 1,000,000 trees in 8 seconds on a home-grade PC. There's a (Windows-only) demo app that sounds pretty mindblowing. No love on my Mac, though.
The Valley shows off some AMAZING new capabilities, including bump mapping, self-shadowing, specular effects, new trees (check out the giant Sequoias), animated grass, a new trunk algorithm and more.
Link (via Terra Nova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:46:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aussie senators shout at Bush during Parliamentary visit

Aussie Green Party senators shouted antiwar sentiments at GW Bush during a speech in the Australian Parliament. When they were ordered removed from the building, they sat down and refused to be budged. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:34:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nano-velcro sticks tight

It's theoretically posssible to make super-velcro as strong as krazy glue out of hook-ended carbon nanotubes. (There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that carbon nanotubes are the next asbestos.)
The researchers estimate that nano-velcro would be about 30 times stronger than conventional epoxy adhesives. It would bond most solids together so powerfully that the materials themselves would break before the pads of hooks came apart. It would also be about 3,000 times stronger than a microscopic version of Velcro made by carving tiny hooks into silicon wafers
Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:21:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Naturally occuring alphabet on the wings of butterflies

Armand sez, "Smithsonian naturalist and photographer Kjell Sandved one day found a butterfly with a silvery, gleaming letter 'F' woven into the tapestry of its wings. Having found one letter of the alphabet, he wondered whether there might be others butterflies flying around with letters on their wings. Could he find them all? He took the challenge but little did he know that it would take him 24 years." Link (Thanks, Armand!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:19:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tattoo Artist Database

Online database of tattoo artists around the USA. Tattoo enthusiasts are encouraged to contribute new additions. Link (thanks, keith)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:30:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage '60s--'70s pr0n movie posters

From the just-released book X-rated: Adult Movie Posters of 60s and 70s by Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh. Shown here: "The Pleasure Machines," about -- what else -- Robo-Hos! Link (Via MeFi)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:55:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos: Carnival Strippers

Amazing photo collection, "Carnival Strippers," by photographer Susan Meiselas in 1974. All the trucker hats belong to actual truckers. Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:00:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Picasa launches photo "Hello" digital photo communication thingy

Two words that explain why this -- and similar new services I'm seeing of late -- are so important: Image conversations. Online consumer digital-photo-organizer service Picasa just launched a new realtime share feature called Hello. I had a chance to sit down with Picasa/Hello CTO Michael Herf for a demo over coffee a few weeks ago, and was totally blown away by it. Don't think there's a Mac version yet, but for Windows users, it is most certainly teh win. Snip from the press blurb:
'Hello' opens an entirely new way of sharing photos with friends and family through it's' private Peer-to-Peer network. Through this live experience, users connected via the internet are able to instantaneously share photos, and provide each other with immediate feedback using 'Hello's' chat function. 'Hello' simulates the experience of sitting down on the couch with a friend and showing them your photo album. This integrated software program eliminates email attachments so your readers can bring the highest quality of photos to life while allowing its users to organize, edit, make and share through its own private network
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:44:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired Magazine publishes story online before printing it

Wired magazine did an unusual thing today: they published a story online before printing it -- because news broke. Amazon has a new, searchable book archive which amounts to a huge leap toward making books searchable.... a (semi)browsable database of 120 thousand books... 33 Million indexed pages. Wired had an exclusive on it -- a really smart piece by Gary Wolf -- but it wasn't going to hit newsstands for three weeks (ah, the wonderful 19th century world of magazine publishing), so editor Mark Robinson and others at the mag decided to put it online at wired.com. I'm told this was standard practice back in the publication's pre-Conde-Nast day, but it's interesting to see this happen again for the first time in what would appear to be a long while. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:30:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony finally launches SDR (renamed QRio "Curio")

BoingBoing pal David Calkins, RSA honcho and robotics guru, points us to the new Sony website for its consumer-oriented android Qrio. Dig the Engrish-flavored prose! I 'love' the seemingly random 'use' of 'quotation marks'!

"It is the product of cutting edge artificial intelligence and dynamics technology. An entertainment robot that lives with you, makes life fun, makes you happy. Its name is QRIO. QRIO can gather information and move around on its own accord. QRIO not only walks on two legs, it can also manage uneven surfaces, dance, recognize people's faces and voices, and carry on conversation. QRIO is eager to be friends with people.

Until a decade ago, the word 'robot' was associated primarily with industry. Having robots perform tasks in place of humans is 'helpful', but wouldn't it be 'fun' if people and robots could not only work together, but live together too?SONY decided to create a 'partner' that talks to you, plays with you, encourages you." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:19:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday in SF: Seemen machine art shows

Machine-art mad scientist Kal Spelletich offers two performances of "Live Audience Experiments with Machines and Robots" this weekend in San Francisco. Takes place Friday, October 24, at 8:00 & 10:00 PM. E-mail in advance for reservations, $10 per person.

Link to event details (including pre-reg instructions), link to photos, link to more photos. When your ticket includes a disclaimer like "YOU VOLUNTARILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING THIS PERFORMANCE," you know you're in for a rockin', robotic good time.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:09:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Michael Robertson's SIPphones now unwired

Consumer 'Net telephony company SIPphone.com (founded by Michael Robertson of MP3.com, Lindows, etc) announced today the release of an adapter that allows you to plug in any cordless phone and go. Previously, if you wanted to use their service to make supercheap (basically free) international calls, both parties on the phone conversation had to have a SIPphone. Now, you can use a "regular" cordless, with adapter. A single SIPadapter can be purchased for $79.99 and a 2-pack is available for $149.99.
Each SIPadapter comes immediately ready to use with no monthly fees or activation fees. There is also no per minute fees, so callers can avoid large long distance charges which means a SIPadapter can pay for itself in a very short time.
There's background in this story I did for Wired News a few weeks back.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:00:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Popeye: New short story from Jim Ruland

A new short from author/Navy veteran/tattooed hipster inkslinger Jim Ruland: The Previous Adventures of Popeye the Sailor. Look for his stuff in Barcelona Review, Exquisite Corpse, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Snip:
He goes by many names. In the Mediterranean he is Iron Arm. In Sweden he is known as Karl Alfred. In Denmark he goes by Skipper Skraek. Here in the Western Pacific he is best known as Father of One Hundred Bastards. Popeye’s past is forever creeping up on him. When he mutters his half-mad asides, is he speaking to those who would bring him down, or is he speaking to me?

To control Doan Vien, he introduced her to opium and made sure she had enough to smoke when he left her bedchamber each morning. Soon the pipe became more than an accoutrement for managing the quiet time between clients. Within a matter of weeks, it had become her master.

It is an easy thing to take out an eye. In the lexicon of tattooing, an anchor symbolizes a search for a home. This is ironic because a home is precisely what Popeye was not searching for.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:50:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hijacked IPs

BoingBoing reader Uncle Foobar points us to a website that deals with investigations of hijacked IP address blocks -- they're sort of like the "bad sectors" of the Internet, just as you have bad sectors on your computer's hard drive.
If you do not know what hijacked ips or even if you do know but are visiting this webpage for a first time, we strongly advise you read "Hijacked IPs Q/A" which explains in detail what hijacked IPs are and what can be done about it. We also maintain separate list of "hijackers" on this page - this has the same ip blocks listed here but grouped by hijackers and it is a recommended webpage to see after this one for those who are on this website for the first time. If you are searching for particular information you can also use our search engine (which includes ability to search in all hijacked ip block investigation evidence files)

If you believe particular large ip block (directly allocated or assigned by RIR) may be hijacked and is not used by proper company current, you can report it on this form (also use the same form if you have any new information regarding blocks already listed below, but if you directly represent the company listed as having hijacked or used ip block below, then use the disputes procedures to challenge this listing)

link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:37:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese manga about bloggers

Or a blog about manga, I can't really tell which. Link, ( Thanks Jean-Luc) Update: Link to translation from Matt's blog.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:30:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Invisible Cowgirl rides again: Susannah Breslin's new book

Yee-Haw. Susannah Breslin, she of the recently shuttered Reverse Cowgirl's blog, has written a collection of sordidly sexual tales. And she will be reading chunks of YOU’RE A BAD MAN, AREN’T YOU? (Future Tense Books) at various locations in and around New Orleans, LA. Snatch it up for $7 at Amazon or Future Tense Books:
These poignantly provocative stories feature mannequin fetishism, midget love, and pornographers gone wild, providing the perfect literary accompaniment to the porn collection of any true intellectual. Bringing together the hilariously obscene and the obscenely hilarious, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? heralds the unexpected arrival of Pornographic Postmodern Literature. Fondling a book has never felt quite this good.

Warren Ellis says: “Susannah Breslin writes about sex in America the way Darwin used to study monkeys humping. The stories are like shattered glass; cold, hard and sharp. A window on the underside of the world, kicked in with a stiletto heel.”

Former VF editor, On Spec author, LA Innuendo publisher Richard Rushfield sez: “She is literature’s dominatrix, with a heart where her whip should be.”

READINGS: The Dragon’s Den, Friday, October 24th, 7PM, New Orleans, LA and Saturday, October 25th, 10AM – 6PM at The New Orleans Bookfair, Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA. Link to story in "Best of New Orleans."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:21:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free WiFi: cuz we don't have pay toilets, either

Good Computerworld piece explains why giving away WiFi is good for business:
Panera Bread Co., based in Richmond Heights, Mo., has also embraced free Wi-Fi as a marketing tool and plans to offer the service in 130 of its 600 bakery cafes by year's end, eventually extending the service chainwide. Ron Shaich, the company's chairman and CEO, says he views free Wi-Fi as an amenity that has already started to attract and retain customers at what he calls a "minimal cost."

In fact, Shaich considers free Wi-Fi to be such an essential marketing tool that he dismisses any discussion of ROI. "What is the ROI on a bathroom?" asked Shaich, pointing out that the day of pay restrooms in restaurants has long since passed.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:26:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USB air-purifier

A Chinese company is marketing a USB-powered ionic air purifier that "decontaminates the surrounding air by ridding smoke, dust, germs and other dangerous particles." Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:23:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks

Danny O'Brien's talk for ETCON 2004 is called, "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks." He's collecting tips from nerds for managing information and tasks at high density, and he wants to hear from you:
* Got to be geeks. There are plenty of books and guides for people who are managers or generally interested in organising their lives. I think geeks have their own problems and solutions. I leave "geek" deliberately undefined. You know what I mean.

* Don't got to be famous. If you know someone who you think is the best-organised geek you've ever seen, put their name down (or mail me, if you'd like to preserve their privacy. Famous people get picked for this list because we've both heard of them. There are plenty of my friends I'll be hobnobbing for this, and if your friends fit, I'd like to chat to them too.

* Don't worry about the genius thing. I'm well aware that Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds get most of their work done just be being naturally very good at programming. Doesn't matter. I'm still curious to see how they work. And why shouldn't people who are fantastic at coding get some hints on how to organise their lives from their peers, too? Just because you can code a reverse compiler in your sleep doesn't mean you pay your phone bill on time.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:21:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Textbook arbitrage gets US students a deal

American students are discovering that they are gouged by textbook publishers, who charge them double or triple the price that they charge for the same books in the UK and Canada. Now, thanks to the Internet, they're able to mass-import these cheap textbooks and get the same deal that students enjoy abroad. Link (via Lawmeme)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:20:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC launches iCan

The BBC has launched the beta of iCan, its service for enabling Britons to act collectively to participate in their governments. This is a brave and important experiment. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT headlines change typefaces

The NYT is switching typefaces for its headlines, harmonizing on Cheltenham. Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:02:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What iTunes music costs: Ownership

Here's a good article on one of the things that we lose by buying music from the iTunes store: ownership of the music we buy.
With this digital copy of Turn On the Bright Lights, however, my options seem drastically limited. Actually, beyond deletion of the files, my options are nonexistent. I only possess the idea of the music, the electronic fingerprint of its existence, perfectly non-negotiable, perfectly free of value.

But that’s the point, isn’t it. It’s never been about the copying. It’s always been an issue of ownership. If I sell my physical copy of Mellow Gold to the used CD store, I’m the only party profiting in the exchange. And if, in turn, the used CD store sells that same copy to another Beck fan, once again, it’s between the used CD store and the buyer. The cycle goes on ad-nauseam—endless exchanges of cash for that same disc, and not a taste for the record label.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:01:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MiniITX casemods in household objects

Good NYT story on the rise of Mini-ITX motherboards and their usefulness for modding small household objects into PCs:
Across Europe, the United States and the Far East, hobbyists have been stuffing the works of personal computers into toasters, humidors, biscuit tins, lampshades, even a plush E. T. doll.
Link (Thanks, Stefan!!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:54:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Blogging for Jesus

I suppose this isn't the only faux evangelical Christian weblog out there, but it is a rather colorful hoax.
Hi my name is Christina and I am a 14 year old home school student and I am going to blog for our lord and savior Jesus Christ since he is in heaven and there is no internet in heaven since internet is mostly filthy porn and athiest places that dont get into heaven.
Link (thanks, Sean, but you're still going to Hell)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:16:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Time-lapse vegetation footage

Goddamn there is nothing cooler than time-lapse videos of germinating plants and opening flowers. Our world is inhabited by triffid-creepy alien lifeforms that move on such a slow timescale, we hardly notice. This archive of time-lapse vegetation gives me the willies. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:06:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teensy, cool, overpriced MP3 player can record off phone

The "Compact Series 290" MP3 player only stores 256MB of stuff, but it's the size of a disposable lighter and has a line-in with an adapter for recording phone conversations. Want. (But not enough to shell out $230 for it). Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:03:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Who painted Paul's painting?

Paul sez, " I own a painting that is probably about 50 years old, and I want to find its artist and possibly return the painting to her/him. I put a thumbnail and full shot on my blog, and am casting far and wide to find the painter. It is one of those cases where Google fails because of a similarly-named artist."

Paul sez, "Update: Found the artist, through her parents. The story was off by about 15 years (she graduated high school around 1970), but the rest of the story was correct. Her parents still live in the Bay Area, so I'll bring them the painting next week." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:48:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired News to publish new story on Broadcast Flag

I've just gotten word from Wired News that they've decided to balance out this morning's stilted story about the Broadcast Flag with a piece that takes into account the perspectives of the civil-rights/consumer-advocacy groups who've been fighting the Broadcast Flag from day one. I'm really glad to see this -- makes me glad to be a Wired News reader. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:37:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scheneier -- what data-mining can't solve

Good Bruce Schneier op-ed on why terrorist profiling fails:
I have an idea. Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad - one of the accused D.C. snipers - both served in the military. I think we need to put all U.S. ex-servicemen on a special watch list, because they obviously could be terrorists. I think we should flag them for "special screening" when they fly and think twice before allowing them to take scuba-diving lessons.

What do you think of my idea? I hope you're appalled, incensed and angry that I question the honesty and integrity of our military personnel based on the actions of just two people. That's exactly the right reaction. It's no different whether I suspect people based on military service, race, ethnicity, reading choices, scuba-diving ability or whether they're flying one way or round trip. It's profiling. It doesn't catch the few bad guys, and it causes undue hardship on the many good guys who are erroneously and repeatedly singled out. Security is always a trade-off, and in this case of "data mining" the trade-off is a lousy one.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Michael Moore's new book excerpt on Salon

Michael Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country? is out, and Salon's got an excerpt this morning.
What is the worst lie a president can tell?

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

Or ...

"He has weapons of mass destruction -- the world's deadliest weapons -- which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:57:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired News publishes idiotic story on Broadcast Flag

Wired News has published a Reuters article on the Broadcast Flag that appears to have been written without a moment's thought to the proposal's critics -- indeed without any serious consultation with anyone who is even remotely skeptical about it. The piece says, basically, well, this will stop piracy, and the opponents are upset because people will have to buy new DVDs.

What Wired News misses by publishing the Reuter's piece instead of doing original reporting is that this won't stop piracy (as even the studios have admitted, in the plug-and-play cable proceeding), that it has nothing to do with buying new DVDs, that it makes a whole class of general-purpose open source software illegal, including code that's already in the market, and that it will give the companies who called home taping and peeing during commercials theft a veto over the design over DTV devices, including parts of your PC.

It also misses that fact that there is currently no problem with "theft" of Hollywood movies: these companies are making more money than they ever have -- a situation that's obtained every year since 1959, and more particularily since 1984 when the VCR was legalized and not only failed to strangle the film industry, but rather more than doubled its income.

This is the shoddiest thing I've ever seen in Wired News. It's disgusting. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pill packaging

Check out this amazing gallery of birth-control-pill packaging. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:48:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ETCON pre-reg open

Pre-reg is open for the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference. I've been on the committee for this con, and we're just closing up the program grid, and it looks killer -- easily worth the money (and you save $455 by regging now) Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:48:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Human Genome story

John Sundman, a man who had three children with rare, horrible diseases, discovered that the human genome was being mapped for profit, with the intention of rendering the results into a proprietary storehouse to be sold to the highest bidder. That's why he's taken a compelling interest in the human genome project, a successful effort to map the genome and turn the data over to the public domain. Today in Salon is the first part of the story. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:40:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vertu: a phone for rich people who spend foolishly

Vertu is the latest ridiculo-phone -- a handset (whoops, I mean, an "instrument") made of precious metals that costs as much as a downpayment on a house and will be obsolete in six months to a year. Link (Thanks, Kev!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:37:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are virtual items real enough to insure?

High-larious story of a conversation between Julian Dibbell, an online gaming-wonk and PayPal, asking why virtual goods sold in meatspace but transferred in gamespace don't fall under PayPal's guarantee:
"OK, I just want to be absolutely clear about this now. So say I ship somebody tickets to a football game -- is that covered?"

"Yes, because you’ve shipped them tickets. That’s a tangible good."

"OK, then what if I ship them tickets to a virtual item?"

"What?"

"Say I write down a password that gives the buyer access to a virtual item -- say I write that on a piece of paper or put it on a computer disk and ship that to the buyer and then give you guys the tracking number for that shipment. Would that be covered?"

Link (Thanks, mileena!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:33:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Film critics boycott giving awards to MPAA over "anti-piracy" measure

Adam sez, "The LA Film Critics Association is so peeved over the MPAA's decision not to mail out DVDs and tapes of movies for award consideration that it's not giving out awards. Period. The LAFCA has said that if the MPAA reverses its decision, they'll do the same." Link (Thanks, Adam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:30:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites: Raid near Baji, Iraq

Kevin Sites posts a new entry to his blog -- photos and a first-person account of a military raid in a small, northern Iraq town.
But as the [American soldiers drive], three men firing from a nearby ravine ambush the squad. Luckily the attackers are bad shots. AK-47 rounds go wide and a rocket propelled grenade sails overhead. The engineers return fire with the guttural thumping of the 50-caliber machine gun mounted on the vehicle. The suspected attackers flee, but are quickly captured. No weapons are found in the ravine, but there are dozens of spent shell casings.

Within minutes the Iraqi men, all in their early to mid-twenties, begin to turn on each other. They not only admit their guilt—but also point out a nearby house where they say they have accomplices. Lt.Colonel Huron tells Captain Larry Lyle to come up with a plain for a raid.

“Larry,” Huron says of the plan, “just make it quick and violent.” Violent I’ve come to understand, is a tactical term, rather than adjective. For soldiers it means a show of overwhelming force that immediately convinces an adversary to surrender rather than fight.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:08:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Speakeasies for food

"Underground" restaurants are springing up across the USA, run by elite (and amateur) chefs who can't or won't go through the certifcation process necessary to securing a restaurant license.
But securing a seat at Mamasan's is not easy. The restaurant, which also happens to be Lynette's apartment, has no sign, and the only way you will ever find it is if someone tells you where it is (a quiet street, a hidden door, up a dark stairwell to the top apartment). Even then, you can't just show up: you must have an invitation. To get one you need an introduction from a previous guest. This may seem as if it's a complicated way to get a plate of grilled salmon, but Mamasan's Bistro is not a legal endeavor. Its kitchen lacks the certificates, permits and inspections required by the city of San Francisco. And although the coconut-mango cocktails flowed, Lynette does not have a liquor license.
Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:16:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, October 20, 2003

Lovy on the Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology

With his usual brilliant insight and objectivity, Small Times news editor and NanoBot blogger Howard Lovy reports in from the 11th Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology. Surprise! The rest of the world is catching up with yesterday's "crackpots." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:44:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired: interview with "Matrix" FX guru John Gaeta

In Wired News today, an interview I conducted with special effects guru John Gaeta on the future of film and media convergence. Fresh from finishing work on The Matrix Revolutions (which opens November 5), Gaeta hopped a plane to Barcelona to speak at tech/culture confab Artfutura, and I spoke with him there about his belief in a hybrid future of gaming and motion pictures. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:32:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, October 19, 2003

A night with Stephen Hawking

My friend, journalist Peter Sheridan, emailed me his account of attending a Stephen Hawking lecture. It's really great, and he kindly gave me permission to post it here:

One superstar I did see this week, who has been one of my idols for many years, was Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Physics at Cambridge University.

I've been an admirer of his work for more than 20 years now, and knowing that he comes to California every year or so, I've been looking for the opportunity to attend one of his infrequent public lectures.

This Friday, I was lucky enough to see him lecture at Cal Tech.

It was like a rock concert.

People began standing in line for tickets the day before, pitching tents on the campus lawn outside the box office, and gathering through the night to discuss physics and black holes and molecular interactions.

When the 1,100 tickets finally became available at 9 a.m., they were gone in minutes.

Those who failed to get tickets immediately began standing in line for standby seats.

On the night of the lecture, there were more than 300 people in the line without tickets. Many who didn't get into the auditorium were given tickets to view a live video feed into an adjacent lecture hall. Those who couldn't squeeze into the hall could hear the lecture blasted across the campus on speakers, or go home and view the live webcast.

Anticipation was high inside the Beckman auditorium. Young girls with bouquets of flowers for Hawking milled around expectantly.

Physics undergrads roamed the aisles, begging autographs from several of the Who's Who in Physics stars attending the lecture. Many of them looked a lot older than the young men on their book jackets.

Finally, Prof. Hawking was wheeled in on his wheelchair down the center aisle: a truly extraordinary figure.

One of the most brilliant minds alive on the planet today, he is cruelly trapped within a useless body, which slumps like an understuffed and oversized rag doll in his large and gadget-filled wheelchair.

In a smart grey suit and white shirt with fine blue stripes unbuttoned at the collar, he was smartly dressed, with a mop top-type short haircut that made him look like an escapee from Quadraphenia.

Yet his movement is minimal. He blinks his eyes, his right knee vibrates up and down with an involuntary tremor, and only the slow rise and fall of his stomach indicates that he is still alive.

Because he lost the power of speech many years ago, he writes his lectures painstakingly slowly on his wheelchair-laptop computer, manipulating the cursor with only the slightest movement of his fingers, in which he has barely any movement left.

At the press of a button, his computer then reads Hawking's text in a perfectly modulated, slightly Americanized voice, which sounds a lot like the Daleks that Dr. Who used to battle.

Each sentence of his lecture is therefore preprogrammed into his computer, and Hawking controls the pace of its delivery through his limited hand movement and the cursor. Even this is a difficult feat for him, and sometimes three or more minutes would pass between sentences, as he slowly manipulated the computer.

At times the silence dragged out so long, it was hard to believe that he was not asleep. I wanted desperately to shout "Wake Up!" or run on stage and slap some smelling salts under his nose, just to make sure that he hadn't died on stage as we watched, and nobody was any the wiser. Yet after what seemed like an interminable pause, his computerized voice would start up again.

Once, early on in the lecture, his head slumped forward like a broken doll, and an aide had to walk on stage to readjust his body: an undignified moment as Hawking's head was manhandled and repositioned, and then his whole body picked up and put down, as if the aide was plumping up a particularly large and unwieldy pillow.

It was simultaneously eerie and inspiring: to know that within this frail, almost lifeless carcass, there hummed the thrilling genius of the mind that produced A Short History of Time, and The Universe in a Nutshell, and some of the most seminal work on black holes.

It was a remarkable experience, and I was delighted to be there, and yet there was also an element of disappointment at the scope of Hawking's lecture, which was ambitiously titled 'Godel and the End of Physics.'

I was expecting a lecture, especially one staged at Cal tech, that would be intellectually challenging to me, if not completely over my head. Instead, it seems that Hawking gives his technically overdosed lectures in private to select groups at Cal Tech, while his public addresses are more populist.

As a result, the level of physics involved, and the ideas addressed, were probably of a freshman undergraduate level, and while it was an interesting and often humorous lecture, that covered his topic neatly and succinctly, it was somehow disappointing not to be intellectually challenged by the lecture, nor to feel the awesome power of that incredible mind blowing over you like an intellectual Santa Ana wind.

Nevertheless, a night to remember. -- Peter

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:38:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

1,300 hot beverages coming to 7-11

The new 7-11 hot-beverage automaton can mix 1,300 permuations of scalding fluid.
At 7-Eleven's new "hot beverage stations," customers will have a choice of more than 1,300 combinations. A minimum of five varieties of coffee, four flavored syrups, seven different tea bags, five toppings, creamers, sweeteners and all types of milk will be available at each station. 7-Eleven's customers will make the drinks themselves, guided by store suggestions, thus avoiding waiting in line to order. The drinks will cost about $1 per cup instead of the typical coffeehouse prices hovering between $3 and $4.
Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:55:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great roadside signs of Denver

I've been in and around Denver all week for the Digital ID World conference, and I couldn't stop jumping out of my rental car to take pix of the amazing googie signs that grow in such stunning proliferation here. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stained glass photo-archive

Stained Glass Photography is an enormous archive of beautiful photos of classical church-glass, organized by artist. Link (Thanks, Neil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:00:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?

What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? is an essay that pulls out ten of the signal differences between weblogs and traditional journalism. I don't often link to stuff like this, since it's so often either wrongheaded polyannish nonsense or utterly obvious, but this piece manages to explore the possible wihtout losing sight of the probable. Link (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:41:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Internet Security Model debunked

Great essay exploring what the Internet's "threat model" actually is, and what it is presumed to be by SSL and other common security measures.
A threat model looks at the application - at what we are trying to protect. In this case, we know that the actual threat that SSL was built for was the sniffer of credit card numbers. But, he, the sniffer, is not considered, what's replaced his role is some theoretical bogey man. The bogey man can do anything that we know how to protect against, and not the things we can't protect against...

SSL was put together as a "perfect" protocol to solve a "convenient" threat model from the (admittedly persuasive and pervasive) knowledge of the times. And, it took little or no account of the needs of the application...

That's why, for example, the protocol finishes its security job close to the borders of the comms. That's why CA-signed certs were chosen, because they solved something that could be solved, with no particular analysis as to whether anyone would bother to attack that weak link. That's why, for example, it's a channel security product, and not a page (credit card number) protection product. And, for example, the digsig creates a chain instead of affirming an intent.

Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:35:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Social Hygeine posters through history

The University of Minnesota has posted an amazing archive of "social hygiene" posters from the turn of the 20th century to the 1970s.
Your mother has been unselfish
and devoted to you

Will you be worthy of her?

The chivalrous youth protects the
honor of all women and girls

Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:33:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, October 18, 2003

10,000th link

This is the 10,000th link posted to Boing Boing. Whee! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:35:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Broadcast Flag request redux

EFF is asking for your help with the Broadcast Flag. This is a proposed technology mandate that would give Hollywood studios a veto over the design of the output and recording technologies that get built into DTV receivers -- which is by way of saying the stuff that we take for granted on our general-purpose machines, like CD/DVD burners, high-speed cabling standards like FireWire, and so on. This is an unprecedented maneouvre: the Hollywood studios are saying that tech companies should have to get the studios' permission before releasing new tools to their customers. These are the studios that tried to ban the VCR, that sued ReplayTV over commercial-skipping, that put Fritz Hollings up to the CBDTPA bill, a proposal to make *all* technologists get the entertainment industry's approval before producing new equipment.

What's more, the Broadcast Flag demands that approved technologies will have to be built to be "tamper-resistant." That means that we'll have a law that will require an entire class of general-purpose technologies to use only obfuscated, closed-source drivers. That's right, it bans open source for tech that can be used in DTV applications.

The worst part is: there's no problem. Hollywood has made more money every single year since the last fight like this, over the VCR. Last year was the movie companies' best year since 1959 -- this despite a worldwide economic crisis! Hollywood doesn't dispute this, but they insist that since there *might* be a problem tomorrow, they need to take extrodinary measures today. This is ridiculous, of course: it's like eating your seatmate on the off-chance that your plane will crash.

Well, the FCC sought comment on this. They asked the public and other organizations to participate in the rulemaking, to help them make up their minds. EFF has been calling on our supporters to send notes into the Commission in opposition to this plan, and we've passed over 15,000 faxes onto the Commissioners' desks.

Numbers count in this fight. When over 700,000 Americans wrote to the FCC on media consolidation, it so alarmed lawmakers that Fritz Hollings (of all people!) called for Congressional action to limit media consolidation. We need lots of people to write into the FCC asking them to set this proposal aside, and we want you to help. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Foo Camp interviews

Last weekend, Tim O'Reilly through an informal campout at the O'Reilly and Associates offices in Sebastapol, inviting a bunch of geeks to come out and hang around. Lisa Rein interviewed a number of the attendees, and is posting her footage, including talks from Danny O'Brien, Ben and Mena Trott and Esther Dyson. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:26:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Data-over-meat net uses human flesh as medium

DoCoMo researchers have demoed a 10 mbs Ethernet running over human meat rather than copper wire.
The network, dubbed ElectAura-Net, is wireless, but instead of using radio waves, infrared light, or microwaves to transmit information it uses a combination of the electric field that emanates from humans and a similar field emanating from special floor tiles.
Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:23:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google softens AdSense ToS

Google, having gotten a lot of public criticism for its terms-of-service for AdSense (which implied that AdSense users were prohibited from criticising Google), has changed its terms to soften the worst of it. Looks good.
Updated - In response to recent feedback regarding the Google AdSense Online Standard Terms and Conditions, we have made clarifications to this agreement in the following sections: Prohibited Uses (section 6), Confidentiality (section 8), Payment (section 12), Publicity (section 13), and Miscellaneous (section 17).
Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:38:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA streamlines confiscation of customers' life's savings

The RIAA has figured out a cheaper way to intimidate its customers. Rather than suing them by the hundreds, they're offering to "settle" claims with people who are on their radar. So far, their settlements have consisted of confiscating the life's savings of students and the college fund of a twelve-year-old girl.
The RIAA said from now on it would send out warning letters first, allowing suspects to negotiate a settlement before being served with a lawsuit. Those who do not respond within 10 days will be sued.

"In light of the comments we have heard, we want to go the extra mile and offer illegal file sharers an additional chance to work this out short of legal action," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Game-designer on copyright

Greg Costikyan, an award-winning games designer (he's the man behind Toon and others) who makes his living off of copyright, has written a brilliant editorial on the nature of intellectual property today.
In general, when the RIAA complains about file-sharing, the refrain is that "artists" are being ripped off. I agree, 100%. Artists are indeed being ripped off--by the members of the RIAA. Anyone with more than a cursory understanding of business practices in the recorded music industry understands that the labels have refined the business of screwing recording arstists to a very fine art. With rare exception, musicians never see a dime beyond their initial advance--nor will they if the RIAA succeeds in its effort to suppress file trading. Realistically, this is not about defending artists. It's about defending the labels.

Recently, I went to a movie, and was subjected to a spot from some film industry organization, I do not remember which, that featured a fellow who is a set maker for the movies. He spouted some nostrum about how people who 'steal' movies were screwing him, not the studios. I was not impressed. He's a member of a craft union in Hollywood, and receives union scale when he works; I very much doubt he gets residuals, or any kind or royalty on the films that get made. His income is not affected one whit if the studios lose income through 'piracy'. To be sure, if fewer movies get made because piracy affects Hollywood's revenues as whole, he may be affected--but this is at best a red herring. It's the suits who'll suffer first.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:23:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spider Jerusalem blogs

Warren Ellis is blogging in the voice of Spider Jersualem, his character from the brilliant and sadly finished Transmetropolitan series.
Junior wrenched open a draw in the desk and ripped from it a scrawny-looking cuddly toy with its eyes plucked out and awful stains on its mouth.

"THIS is Ringo!" he exulted. "RINGO is my FRIEND!" He clutched the scabby thing to a chest already pebbledashed with cocaine, bloodclots and snot.

My back bumped into the door. "And… he says things, does he?"

"Yeahhhhhh," Junior sighed, stroking Ringo's stomach in a disturbingly sexual way.

"Well, um, excellent. I should be going. I have to accept a shipment of dolphin steaks tonight

Link (via Vertical Hold)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:18:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Franken book changes conservative columnist's mind

Becky Miller, a conservative editorialist in The Oregonian has read Al Franken's excoriating new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, and it's caused her to reconsider her politics.
I read the book in one sitting. It is an amazing book, and -- if you're a decent, honest, hard-working, patriotic, true-blue conservative who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and watches Fox News -- an earth-shattering book.

To be aboveboard, I must tell you that Franken and I are friends. Well, OK, the truth is I made a wisecrack to him at a book signing, and he looked at me. (Read the book -- the part about Ann Coulter -- and you'll get it.)

Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:12:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, October 17, 2003

Swedish Fish trademarks

Ernie sez, "Apparently, the makers of Original Swedish Fish have lost their trademark battle with Famous Sqwish Candy Fish in a complete rout. The case is an example of how not to protect trademark, but more importantly is an interesting look behind the scenes of the gummy business. For example, do you know the difference between 'Gummy' and 'JuJus'? See footnote 2 of the case." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What if Photoshop was a web-service?

Here's an interesting idea: a web-services-like image filter system: send your phonecam pix to the service and it will twist them according to your prefs and send 'em back to you. Link (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Foglio fan-art for Good Omens

Phil Foglio, one of the premier genre toon artists, has produced a two-page fan-art tribute to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's spectacular and hilarious end-of-the-world novel Good Omens. Link (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:29:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Full-back koi tattoo blog

Keith sez, "I've been blogging the process of having my entire back tattoo'd with a Japanese Koi. I am eight sessions in, with four more to go." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:25:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russian prison tatts

Amazing site devoted to reproducing and interpreting elaborate Russian jailhouse tattoos. Link Update: Looks like they're down now. Maybe try back later.

More update: Nik points out that there's a mirror at the Internet Archive (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cellular minutes can be resold in the Philippines

A Filippino cellular company is allowing its customers to re-sell unused airtime.
Ms. Gazo, a 33-year-old housewife who lives 600 miles south of Manila in Davao City, is one of more than 100,000 mobile phone users who re-sell Smart's cellular services through a new prepaid service called Smart Buddy e-Load. With a special, $20 chip for her mobile phone, Ms. Gazo can transfer bits of air time to her friends' and acquaintances' phones - as little as 30 pesos worth (about 55 cents).

For every 1,000 pesos she sells, Ms. Gazo collects 150 pesos in commissions, turning her mobile phone into a second source of income for her family of four. "If I can earn 150 pesos a day," Ms. Gazo said, "I don't have to work."

Link (via Smartmobs)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pez museum opens

A Pez museum has opened in Easton, Pennsylvania, around the corner from the Crayola factory. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:57:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF's new file-sharing movie

EFF has released a new Flash movie aimed at explaining what's good and what's at risk with file-sharing. It's called "The Great MP3 Caper," and it's some funny stuff.
For years, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been waging war against peer-to-peer file-sharing software and the technologists who create it. Now the RIAA has turned its crosshairs on you, threatening to sue you for sharing the music you love. But even shotgun-style lawsuits won't solve the RIAA's problem. As more and more Americans learn to love online music, the answer must lie in new business models that harness the power of P2P as a vehicle for paying artists. If artists get paid when we share files, then artists win, we win, and yes -- even the RIAA wins.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:54:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kids today on videogames yesterday

Wil sez, "Electronic Gaming Monthly gathered up a bunch of pre-teen kids, and sat them in front of some classic video games. Their comments are at once hilarious, and depressing. Some highlights:"
Niko: Hey-Pong. My parents played this game.
Brian: It takes this whole console just to do Pong? Kirk: What is this? [Picks up and twists the paddle controller] Am I controlling the volume?
Tim: Which [Tetris] button do I press to make the blocks explode?
Tim: Mario dies way too easy. Oh, grab the umbrella. Those are cool. Unfashionable, gay, but cool. Oh, 300 points. That's it? All you get is points? That's lame. Can't you do something with the umbrella?
Tim: They just put totally random stuff here for points. Oh, you've got an umbrella. You've got a purse.
Link (Thanks, Wil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:36:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, October 16, 2003

Farming RPG

Nelson Minar describes Harvest Moon, an SNES farming-simulation game:
You pull weeds, plant crops, and try to marry someone in your town. The intro to the SNES game is charming - "how to play" features scenes of you breaking rocks and removing stumps. The screenshot above is the village church. I love the idea of a Japanese corporation earnestly making a cute simulation of agrarian Europe.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:10:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Independent soundracks to classic sf novels

Marc sez, "Sine Fiction commissions electronic-music soundtracks to classic science fiction novels, then makes them available online for free as MP3 files. Sine Fiction just posted its latest three: Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God, composed by Oeuf Korreckt (aka Frédrick Blouin); William S. Burroughs' The Ticket That Exploded, composed by A. Dontigny, who curates Sine Fiction; and Italo Calvino's Ti con Zero (or t zero, depending on your paperback edition), composed by Ellende." Link (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:01:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunted Mansion tatt

Jason DeFillippo has posted a pic of his friend Tim's tattoo, which is based on the wallpaper pattern at the Disneyland Haunted Mansion (there are also some killer HM tatts on display at the photo-gallery for the goth Bat's Day in the Fun Park site). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:18:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Edison's mistakes recapitulated by RIAA

George Ziemann of MP3 NewsWire has posted a terrific installment in his ongoing series on the history of copyright and technology. Today's installment is called, "RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes," and it walks us throught he way that Edison's film monopoly -- which was eventually crushed by the Feds -- had a history that was very parallel to the RIAA's own tactics here.
The government allowed the Motion Picture Patents Company, which had been formed in December, 1908, to get away with their anti-competitive control over the industry for less than four years. The U.S. government brought an antitrust suit against the MPPC in 1912 and declared it illegal in 1915.

Considering that the government has a) been trying to diffuse the voice of the music industry for a half century, if not silence it altogether and b) four of the five major labels are foreign-owned, sooner or later someone at the top end of government is going to possess the lucidity to wonder why the government should even care what happens to the record industry.

The only real issue is how long we have to wait. Step 8 should be worth waiting for -- the same independent renaissance that filmmakers enjoyed in the 1920s and 30s when Edison's movie empire fell apart. But the indie filmmakers didn't even wait for the government. They simply walked away and started over.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tampon angel DIY

How to make a tampon angel.
1. Dip into water until tampon expands.
2. Remove and tie at the top to create the angel's head.
3. Let hang (by handy dandy string) for several days until dry.
4. Paint face with peach or skin tone color, and draw small black dots for eyes.
5. Add blush or pink paint to cheeks.
6. Paint "dress" with glimmer paint.
7. Criss-cross thin gold ribbon across chest (around neck) .
8. Add yellow doll hair to top of head as well as a gold pipe cleaner for a halo.
9. For the grand finale...glue small gold angel wings to back.
Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:51:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

TechTV to potentially violate DMCA this Saturday

On Saturday, Kevin Rose, the host of a guest on TechTV's Unscrewed will violate potentially violate the DMCA by modding an Xbox to run Linux. Link (via Wasted Bits)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:36:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Giant Japanese wooden keyboards

A Japanese company is shipping (Japanese and English) keyboards with giant wooden keys, aimed at old people. Link (via KoKoRo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:32:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lego for a living

Lego is looking for a full-time "Master Builder" to work at a California theme-park. Link (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:18:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moderation blog

Tom Coates has started a blog called "Everything in Moderation," for discussions of moderating message-boards. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Identity thief steals sex-offender's name

A drunk in Connecticut stole his neighbor's identity in order to get around his suspended driver's license. His neighbor was a registered sex-offender.
Perry moved to Connecticut about a year ago and things went well until Perry was arrested for disorderly conduct.

A routine computer check found that "Kowalski" was a convicted sex offender in Michigan and not registered as required with the state of Connecticut.

Every bit of identification in his possession labeled the suspect as "Kowalski," but man himself was adamant that he was not a convicted sex offender, police said.

Link (via Crypto-Gram)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:45:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kinko's keylogger captures 450 banking passwords

A crook in NYC installed keyloggers on Kinko's machines across the city, using the captured data to thieve the identities of Kinko's customers, including over 450 banking passwords. Link (via Crypto-Gram)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Seekrit computer training for America's execs

Senior execs at big companies hire seekrit computer tutors to train them after-hours, because they're too embarassed to reveal their ignorance to the in-house sysadmins. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:52:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trash on San Francisco's sidewalks: a photo-essay

Heather Champ has taken camera in hand and set out to produce a lovely photo-essay on the endless heaps of garbage strewn over San Francisco's sidewalks. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:48:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harry Potter to be sold by German homeless

A magazine sold by Germany's homeless population will feature an ahead-of-schedule excerpt from the German-language edition of the fifth book in the series. Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:44:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The NeoFiles, RU Sirius's new Web 'zine

bOING bOING co-conspirator RU Sirius is editing The NeoFiles, a new 'zine sponsored by a "life enhancement" supplement company. Along with a survey of nanotechnology and a discussion of life extension technology, RU interviewed me about "Tools for Brains," from biopharmaceuticals to bionics. (Quite hontesly, I was honored that RU was asking me questions instead of vice versa!) Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:43:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help fix the typos in my short-story collection

The (admittedly modest) initial print-run of my short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More has nearly sold out in just over a month since the initial publication (w00t!). My publisher is going back to the press for a second run, and he's asked me to provide him with any errata that I would like fixed before it goes to press (this means that the missing acknowledgements page will finally see print!).

If you've noticed any typos in the print edition (not the electronic texts), I'd love to know about them so we can get them fixed in the second printing (oh, also, this means that this is just about your last chance to get a copy of the first edition, which is sure to be an errata-filled collector's item after my untimely death). Please email me by Friday with any tyopos, etc. Email Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:21:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanoscale avatars for chemistry ed

Roland sez, "In 'NanoKids made in lab,' Nature writes that "man-shaped molecules help students learn chemistry." "A team of Texans has created molecules in their own image. The tiny army of human lookalikes is helping Houston kids to learn about chemistry. The researchers call their molecules the NanoKids. Their bodies are made from carbon and hydrogen, and their eyes are oxygen atoms. Each stands just 2 nanometres tall." The Texan team has produced a DVD filled with the NanoKids to teach chemistry to young students. This summary contains other links to the project and pictures of some of the NanoKids, like the NanoTexan, the NanoTeen or the NanoScholar molecules." (Thanks, Roland Piquepaille!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:04:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hellboy fan-film captures interest/approval of Hellboy film director

Jason sez, "This guy did a test animation of a CGI Hellboy that looks very much like the comic book. It looks so good that the director of the upcoming Hellboy movie saw it."
I saw it. Is quite spectacular. I truly hope the movie succeeds and we can get a cartoon series off the ground. Obviously this is the guy to go to.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:57:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Enron's email laid bare

Great Salon piece about the gigantic library of internal Enron email that has been posted online as part of the discovery process as the Feds slowly grind the corrupt empire into tiny, thoroughly punished bits of mince (of course, Kenny Lay will almost certainly walk away with his fortune and person intact, but we all expected that, right?).
Amid a sea of dick jokes, spam and Internet porn, the e-mails offer a window into the soul, such as it was, of Enron: from the high-flying days when the company decorated its top executive office suites in holiday themes -- according to a 2000 e-mail, Ken Lay's office was done up in honor of St. Lucia, Jeff Skilling's had Kwanzaa, and Andrew Fastow's was lit up for Hanukkah -- to the end, when things had gone so far south that members of the Lay family began to fear they'd be kidnapped...

Dear Joe: Enron, Mr. Ken Lay and Mr. Skilling are requesting that their contribution be matched per our understanding from the fax and verbal communications from Warren Robold. This totals $100,000 between both individuals and the Corporation for the RNSEC matching funds program. We want these funds matched in time for the Texas State deadlines. It was our intention from the onset of this program to have our funds go to this account. The various points of contact from the RNC caused some minor confusion so checks went to Texas instead of DC. This is very important to Mr. Lay and Mr. Shilling. Let us know if we need to request these funds returned and new checks written and mailed to you at your DC address. You may call me if you have any questions.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:15:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Islamic mobile points to Mecca

A new Muslim-targetted mobile phone uses a compass and location data to tell its owners which direction Mecca is at prayer-time. Bruce Sterling wrote this into a story called "We See Things Differently" for the seminal and brilliant Semiotext(e) SF anthology in 1990.
By setting the -5300-compass to the north and inputting their location information, Muslims can now easily find the direction of Mecca. With this feature, the handset positions itself as a specialized functional phone in the Middle East market. In particular, it is expected to spur a boom in the region because the compass may be used even where GPS services are unavailable.
I wonder if you can get a ringtone of a Muzzein's call to prayer? Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:09:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brad Bird's Incredibles -- sneak peek

Anthony sez, "These are screen captures from a sneak peek ABC did for Pixar's upcoming film, 'The Incredibles.' Looks absolutely amazing. The character design and direction is wonderfully done by Brad Bird, who did much-loved film, 'The Iron Giant.'" Link 1, Link 2 (Thanks, Anthony!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MTA alerts as RSS

Mobius sez, "My friend Martin took the NYC MTA's Subway Advisory Alerts and made RSS feeds for each individual train. The URLs link directly to PDFs of the same posters the MTA hangs in the subway stations. Comes in pretty handy if you're used to MTA service sucking ass. Throw a feed up on your desktop aggregator or on your blog (as I have done at sexveggie.com) and you'll never get stuck waiting a month for the train again." Link (Thanks, Mobius!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Desert Island discs skunked by iPod

Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, How to Be Good, High Fidelity, etc, has completely skunked the BBC4 "Desert Island" program -- sure, he only specified ten records he'd bring with him to the hypothetical desert island, but he chose an iPod as his luxury item -- clever sumbitch! Link (via Blackbelt Jones)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dyslexia-friendly typeface

"Read Regular" is a typeface designed to be legible to people with dyslexia. Link (via Blackbelt Jones)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Historical still photo archive posted by Pathe

British Pathé, the news-footage archive that launched an enormous archive of its newsreels this time last year, has released a comparable archive of old still photos. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:48:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Private-but-not-secret is hard online

Danny O'Brien has posted a brilliant essay about the disappearance of the "private" sphere online -- the place where you talk about stuff that isn't a secret, but also isn't intended for public distribution. It's a response to some of the griping about the "Foo Camp" that O'Reilly threw last weekend, wherein a bunch of geeks that Tim likes were invited up to the O'Reilly offices to spend a weekend hanging out and playing and chatting.
If I was to be perfectly honest, if you were to hover about fifty yards away from the festivities, squinting with your eyebrow arched, it was like that. Were Andrew to hide in the bushes of Sebastopol, he would have had very little of his convictions shaken. People said "ohhhhh cool!". A lot. There was a Segway and an Aibo. There was one particular "acoustic jam" that had me choking on pie and making a polite exit to the bathroom.

But you know what? I can do the same thing to your parties. It's easy. And with a few hours training and a dictionary of convenient stereotypes, you could hang out in the shadows of a J-Lo-hosted all-nude sex-party and feel superior too...

Much can be made of all of this, but without more substantive points, it's just "Hahahahaha! Aren't the Different People funny?". Yes, it was Californian. This is because we are in California.. .

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:44:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boot Xbox into a clustering Linux

There's a new Linux distro that will boot an Xbox into a mode where it becomes a Linux box that automatically seeks out its peers on the network for the purpose of forming a distributed computing cluster. So long as MSFT is subsidising the purchase price of its PC-disguised-as-a-game-box, this seems like a promising approach to forming cheap-ass, pwoerful clusters. Also, you can always yank a box or two out and play some games. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Three-parent foetuses

Chinese fertility researchers have created a technique to generat human foetuses with three parents: transfering the guts of a fertilized egg (sans mitochondria) to the hollow egg of a third party, who provides the mitochondria. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unicode primer

Joel-on-Software's posted a great primer on the Unicode character set. If developers all read this piece, I'd never get a bloody question-mark and a broken RSS feed when I pasted in a curly-quote or an accent-character.
In this article I'll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. All that stuff about "plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits" is not only wrong, it's hopelessly wrong, and if you're still programming that way, you're not much better than a medical doctor who doesn't believe in germs. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.
Link (via Nelson's Weblog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MacLeod on The Secret Return of the British Boffin

Ken MacLeod, the Scottish Trotskyist sf author who wins libertarian sf prizes, has briefly reviewed a fascinating-sounding book called Backroom Boys: the Secret Return of the British Boffin. I've just ordered mine.
Even many SF fans, I suspect, will be as surprised - and gripped - as I was by the tale of the British space programme. I honestly didn't know that ... (no spoilers from me). Likewise, I didn't know the backroom stories of Concorde, computer games (pioneered by libertarian SF fans), mobile phones, the human genome project, and Beagle 2 (the barbecue-shaped British-built space probe, due to land on Mars on Christmas Day this year).

Spufford does more than tell engaging tales. He painlessly puts across a wealth of information about science and engineering. To cover six very different areas of technology and science in such an intriguing way, and to catch the distinctive style of each field's native geek, is a rare achievement. Above all, he tells a coherent story, of industrial decline countered - in part at least - by ingenious adaptation to the 'post-industrial' world. It sharply evokes a lost world of Dan Dare, Look and Learn, and Meccano, and goes on to show us how that world was never lost: that it is, in fact, part of the secret history of today.

Link (via Electrolite)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, October 13, 2003

Early Peanuts anthology coming from Fantagraphics

There are two Elvises: pre-army and post-army. There are two Lucille Balls: one who starred in I Love Lucy, and the one who was in everything after that. There are also two Charles Shulz's: one that drew Snoopy as a quadriped, and the later one who drew him as a biped. In all three cases, I like the earlier versions better. That's why I was so excited to learn that Fantagraphics will be publishing a book of Shulz's very first Peanut strips from 1950-1952 in THE COMPLETE PEANUTS.
This first volume, covering the first two and a quarter years of the strip, will be of particular fascination to PEANUTS aficionados worldwide: Although there have been literally hundreds of PEANUTS books published, many of the strips from the series’ first two or three years have never been collected before — in large part because they showed a young Schulz working out the kinks in his new strip and include some characterizations and designs that are quite different from the cast we’re all familiar with. (Among other things, three major cast members — Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus — initially show up as infants and only “grow” into their final “mature” selves as the months go by. Even Snoopy debuts as a puppy!) Thus THE COMPLETE PEANUTS offers a unique chance to see a master of the artform refine his skills and solidify his universe, day by day, week by week, month by month.

The book is being designed by Seth, creator of the fabulous comic, Palookaville. Many of the strips have never before been anthologized. Publication date is April 2004. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:05:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley Engineering

In my latest issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:
* Clearer vision for unmanned air vehicles
* Radar for grape growers means better wine
* Bio-chips for detecting "break-bone fever" in South America
* and why so many people die at railroad crossings.
Stop on by! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:05:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monkey controls robot arm through neural interface

Researchers at Duke have implanted a neural prosthesis in the brains of a monkey, connected same to a robot arm, and taught the monkey to work a third arm through the use of its mind. The Flash animation from the Duke U site is a scream. The filthy monkey, it manipulates its robot arm. Link (Thanks, Justin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:39:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites: arriving in Baghdad

NBC News combat correspondent and blogger Kevin Sites has posted a second entry from Iraq on the newly re-opened kevinsites.net:
I am pleasantly surprised. Baghdad is neither new nor vastly improved, but it is much better than I remember it. An easy point to score considering last time I was here bombed out vehicles and burning tank wreckage lined the streets. But that was only five months ago. Now the place has a colonial feel. With two gulf wars past, we have grown accustomed to the sight of U.S. soldiers and Marines in the desert. It is different to see them patrol the streets of Baghdad in Humvees or baked by the Middle Eastern sun in their body armor and Kevlar. They are locked and loaded, sucking on Camelbacks as they move in five-man squads through the marketplace. At the Republican Palace, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked twenty somethings on loan from the State Department or Pentagon—staff the makeshift Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) offices that simultaneously administer Iraq’s overwhelming current civil needs while hammering out the blueprint for a post Saddam future. Many of the Iraqis I’ve talked to say they’re discouraged so far. With 60-percent unemployment and rampant crime (25 reported carjackings a day in Baghdad) it is a difficult time. But there has also been undeniable progress like news schools and sewage treatment facilities. Highly educated and immensely proud (one of our drivers teaches economics and Baghdad University) most Iraqis I talk with say they want a faster transition to self-rule. They make no bones about it, they are happy that Saddam and the Bathists have been ousted, but they are not comfortable being occupied by foreign troops.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:39:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Justin Hall's photos of mobile phone users in Japan

Justin Hall has put together a fantastic photojournalism story for TheFeature.com about mobile phone use in Tokyo. Remarkable things are happening there, like camera phones that have 3D displays, and street vendors who will shrink-wrap colorful covers around your phone on the spot.
Japan's mobility still beats the US by at least eighteen months. Each time I'm in the United States I feel like, hey, we're catching up! And then I come to Japan and I find TV tuners and highly designed tiny handsets and second generation video mail. Everyone has a camera phone here, while in the US I'm still waiting for my friends to get color screens.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:43:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, October 12, 2003

Island Chronicles: Islomane no more

Our latest Island Chronicles dispatch is up at LA Weekly. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:56:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homeland Security deports fiancee of Homeland Security staffer

Dan Hughes sez,
This just hit the wire about my brother, who works *for* Homeland Security, and his fiancée who was incarcerated on Yom Kippur last week *by* Homeland Security. The story broke on the front page this morning.

Beate (Bay - ah - tah), Trevor's fiancée, was returning to the US from Germany. She had interviewed with career diplomats at the American Embassy just weeks before and was granted a 6-month visa. Nevertheless, when she landed in Atlanta she was interrogated for six hours, led away in handcuffs with criminals, booked into the Atlanta prison system (finger prints, mug shots and a group cell) and the next day was placed in solitary confinement in a white room with nothing save a toilet. She was left without food for 20+ hours and finally deported to Germany. The whole time being told that she was not a criminal, nor suspected of any crime!

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:22:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My collection reviewed in NYTimes

My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, is reviewed in today's NYTimes Sunday Book Review!
[It's] a bracing collection of short stories by a Canadian writer whose influences range from Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker to Donald Barthelme and Roald Dahl.

As knowledgeable about computers as he is about flea markets, Doctorow uses science fiction as a kind of cultural WD-40, loosening hinges and dissolving adhesions to peer into some of society's unlighted corners. His best known story, ''Craphound,'' tells of a competitive friendship between two junk collectors, one human and one alien; what it says about the uses of the past is no more mysterious than the prices paid for a vintage Coke bottle or an early Barbie doll. Not every attempt to wrest truth from cliche works -- but you won't want to miss Doctorow's satiric glance at co-opted dissent among the grade-school set or the insidious horror of his updated Pinocchio tale.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired illo: Wachowski Brothers, Anim(e)atrix style

In keeping with the live-from-Barcelona Matrix thread, here is a commissioned portrait, Anim(e)atrix style, of the photographically elusive Wachowski Brothers -- by Canadian illustrator Kenn Brown. He explains: "Try googling them.. you wont find much - we were lucky to get a very small pic taken at the Wired offices to base this illustration on. The cityscape behind them is based on thier hometown of Chicago and was inspired by the Japanese anime classic Metropolis - (Metropolis was brought to the screen by anime legends Katsuhiro Otomo (of "Akira" fame) and Rintaro who once worked with Tezuka on the anime TV series Astro Boy)... you if you look closely you might recognize a few of the buildings. The windows echo the cascading effect of the famous matrix code." Click here for the full image, and feast your eyes on the gloriously ultra-hi-res version in the current print version of Wired on sale now.

I'm still at Artfutura, btw -- watching a bunch of game developers demo some amazing projects that involve use of wireless technology to blend real and online gamescapes; meshing feedback from both virtual and physical worlds. You can hear helicopters outside, right now, flying over contrasting protests. October 12, is Dia de la Hispanidad, a national holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus. Besides the official celebrations, a bunch of anticolonialist/anti-imperialist protesters are holding manifestaciones on one side of town, and some pro-fascist/anti-immigrant eurosupremacist guys are waving flags on the other side of town.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:39:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gummy mummy

My friend Jef has discovered and captured evidence of the pinnacle of the gummysmith's art: the Gummy Mummy. Link (Thanks, Jef!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:26:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shag does the Tiki Room

Shag (a one-man tiki-revival!) has produced a series of limited-edition merchandise to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:24:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anime credit-cards

If you're lucky enough to live in Japan, you can get yourself an anime-themed credit-card. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:21:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, October 11, 2003

Why were computers beige colored?

Why were most personal computers colored beige? I seem to remember reading that some researchers (at 3M?) used focus groups to determine that beige was the most non-obtrusive color to use in an office setting, but I can't find a reference. If you know, email me at mark@well.com.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:38:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Shag fonts from House Industries

The world's best font shop, House Industries, has a new set of fonts designed by retro artist Shag. They're also selling a Shag sculpture and prints. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:09:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter

Sir Mix-A-Lot's "(I Like) Big Butts)" "Baby's Got Back." In Latin.
magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur,
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos
(Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits)
Link (Thanks, chris242!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:40:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese restaurant menu gallery

Steve sez, "Indigo Som is an artist who is assembling a collection of every chinese restaurant menu in the US, she's got an art exhibit in Marin going on right now of her photos of the menus/restaurants and her site nicely explains the intent of her 'exploration'" Link (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:02:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Matrix trilogy FX directors speak at Artfutura

I'm in Barcelona at the tech/art/culture confab Artfutura, listening to the two effects masterminds behind the Matrix trilogy: John Gaeta (right-hand side of the photo below) and Greg Juby of effects house ESC (Greg's at left in this photo).

ESC is the company created by the Wachowski brothers and John Gaeta to produce the complex work of visual effects in the Matrix series. Gaeta may well be the single most influential person in the last decade of visual effects, and right now he's talking to the audience of Spanish digital artists and tech developers here about the creative process behind the films, and what to expect in the forthcoming Matrix: Revolutions:

* "What will be different in Revolutions? It's the final, ultimate manifestation of Larry and Andy Wachowski's anime dream: to make am movie as close to an anime as possible. Take the best and coolest aspects of anime -- large scale robotics, entanglements between man anad machine -- and tranform it into a feature, live action film. You'll also see lots more bullets."

* "Subconsciousness needs to be redefined with every generation. Matrix is a stylized sci-fi story, but the root of the idea that you can have imagery placed into your mind is a very possible scenario, and I think that's a universe that our generation was finally ready to start dealing with. I grew up on Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and many other filmmakers that triggered ideas inside my mind -- that's how evolution works. One generation speaking to another. Larry and Andy [Wachowski] are preoccupied with those ideas, too, but they're also pop culture junkies and they share an obsession we also have with darker sci-fi threads in films you see in films like Bladerunner. It's no accident that some of the scenes in the Matrix trilogy are reminiscent of Bladerunner, because we've been dying all our lives to do that kind of work. "

* "I want to make an electrochemical movie. In the year 2099 I'll be 130 years old, but I think around 2063 I'm going to have my brain taken out and have it inserted into a clone who's about 21 years old. Maybe some bionic augmentation upgrades, too. In about 40 years, I'm thinking some sort of military-industrial-supercomplex-international-intelligensia supergroup will figure out how to export imagery to people's brains. If you can see it in your head while you're dreaming -- well, that image is created somehow. Someday, someone will figure out how to place that image into your brain. It'll be some combination of electricity and drugs, and they'll call it Rosebud.

A billion people will attend the first electrochemical movie premiere. Everyone in the audience will experience love again for the first time, and we'll become gazillionaires. I don't know how we'll make our electrochemical movie into a DVD, though. And distribution is definitely going to be a problem."

* "The most difficult thing about creating effects for the trilogy? Designing choreography that could never be actualized by human beings."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:11:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hard-drives as Buddhist prayer-wheels

Who needs Tibetan prayer-wheels when Buddhist theorists are out there reforming their theology to admit hard-drives as instruments of devotion?
Right now, your hard drive is serving as a Mani wheel, because there are several copies of the mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" on this page, and they are all stored on your hard drive in the cache for your browser.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:03:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, October 10, 2003

Gorgeous graphics for Target's Halloween campaign

Target hired Charles Anderson to design its Halloween campaign, and it looks amazing. "Asked to create the look of the store's seasonal identity, the design company took inspiration from the campy aesthetic of vacu-form plastic masks that many adults remember from childhood." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:21:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

URGENT: Tell the FCC to say no to the Broadcast Flag

The FCC is ruling on the dread and dreadful Broadcast Flag, a technology mandate that would give Hollywood a veto over general-purpose PC and home electronics technology, in order to prevent the potential infringement of copyrighted movies on a potential national digital television broadcast network.

Breaking PCs and VCRs and PVRs and such today, before there's any evidence of any problem (indeed, Hollywood makes more money every single year, and just closed the books on its best year since 1959) -- it's stupid. Passing a technology mandate before anyone can point to a problem is about as stupid as eating your seatmate before the plane crashes.

Nevertheless, there's every indication that the FCC will make the Broadcast Flag happen -- unless we slashdot them with letters telling them not to. EFF has an action center item on this, a letter you can tweak and send in to the commissioners with one click of a mouse. A Broadcast Flag mandate today will make tomorrow's technology dependent on the sufferance of the movie studios -- the companies that Business Week called "The most change-resistant companies in America." If you don't want these companies speccing your PC in a couple years, send a letter now -- this is easily the most important thing you can do this year to safeguard your technology freedom. Tell your friends. Re-blog this. This is big, important stuff.

Hollywood is at it again, trying to control the design of new digital technologies. If the motion picture studios have their way, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will force all future televisions to include Hollywood-approved "content protection" technologies. Fair use, innovation and competition will suffer. What's more, the "broadcast flag" technology that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has proposed is so weak that it will do nothing to stem Internet redistribution of television programs. In fact, the only people hurt by this are legitimate consumers, innovators and researchers.

The FCC has promised a ruling before the end of October. We need you to tell the FCC that we don't need "broadcast flag" regulations that hurt competition, consumers and innovators.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:00:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free webhosting for "life" in exchange for getting a logo tatt

Stefan sez, "About ten years back, NPR's morning show ran an April Fools gag story about teens getting corporate logo tattoos on their earlobes in exchange for discounts. Now, a Pennsylvania company will give you free web-page hosting services for life if you get a tattoo of one of their mascots. By 'lifetime,' they mean of their company, of course." Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:55:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites: Back to Iraq with MSNBC, back to kevinsites.net blog

Blogger and journalist Kevin Sites is back in Iraq, this time on assignment with MSNBC. He's also re-starting the kevinsites.net blog. Snip from his first post, this time around:
The blog is reopen for business. It has been seven months since this site went silent. Time for everyone to get back to work. To all of you who have made this place so interesting with your informed and intelligent discussions, I thank you. For all who have been so kind as to inquire about my welfare—I also thank you and apologize for not being able to respond. When CNN politely (I mean this sincerely) asked me to stop blogging I felt it was my obligation to do so immediately and completely. CNN was signing my checks at the time and sent me to Iraq. Although I felt the blog was a separate and independent journalistic enterprise, they did not. Period. We move on.

Now I am freelancing again, but currently on-assignment in Iraq with MSNBC. I had been a long time staff member with NBC News and feel comfortable back with my old friends. MSNBC has also agreed to allow me to continue with my PERSONAL and may I stress, NON-AFFILIATED weblog. However, there are a few understandable stipulations which I want to relate to you: 1) I’m here because NBC News has hired me to be here, therefore the observations and experiences in Iraq that I relate to you this blog would probably not happen without them. 2) They have the right of first refusal on anything that I write that relates to this assignment. That means I run it by them and if they want it they will publish it on MSNBC.COM. It will be republished here. 3) If it’s something they’re not interested in or not directly related to an assignment they’ve paid me to do—it can appear here first. I think that’s fair and bypasses any of the editorial oversight and ownership issues that we encountered in the first run of kevinsites.net.

That being said, I look forward to a renewed dialogue on the very serious as well as the inane. We hear so much about the “synergy” of media companies with the so-called vertical integration of different communication businesses, well here’s the chance for individual “synergy” to impact media coverage. I’d like to know what you see as the shortcomings of media coverage in Iraq and elsewhere. What aren’t you getting? What are you getting too much of? I welcome your well-conceived story ideas, relevant information and observations or valuable sources that may contribute to better journalism and a more informed public.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:44:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NaNoWriMo is almost here

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) -- the annual challenge to write a book in 30 days -- is fast approaching.
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Link (Thanks, Randy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:39:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scannell needs money to keep fighting CAPPS II

Bill Scannell (the cypherpunk who has devoted his energies to outing Delta, Jet Blue, Cendant and the CAPPS II/TIA unpatriotism emanating from the Feds) needs help if he is to continue doing his good work. He's broke, basically -- spending all your time blowing whistles puts a big dent in your earning power. So he's soliciting donations.
Running the anti-CAPPS II campaign costs a lot of time and money. The Boycott Delta and Don't Spy On US websites require a team of graphic artists and web designers. As you can imagine, the bandwidth usage is enormous.

The over 40 million dollars in publicity generated for the ongoing anti-CAPPS II awareness campaign came at a cost of hundreds of media interviews, astronomical telephone bills, and all of my time and energy.

Up to now, I have funded this project out of my own personal savings. America has been good to me and spending money to keep our country free seemed only fair. Unfortunately, I can't do this alone anymore, which is why I am turning to you for help.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:15:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mouse Shoppe: Disneyland schwag reseller

Mouse Shoppe is a site apparently run by people who go to Disneyland, buy merchandise at full price, then resell it at a markup. Right now, they've got a bunch of the very tasty new Haunted Mansion stuff that was released last week, including the hoody I bought and wore to Club 33 last weekend -- eatcherheartout! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nanoscale waterproofing

"Nano-turf," a new nanoscale material composed of teensy spikes is planned for use as a super nonstick coating for submarines ("which would glide through the water with much less resistance") and raincoats ("rain would fall and simply run off any garment").
"The surface is repelling water. It is densely populated so it will let the water flow against air instead of a solid surface, which makes it very slippery.

"When we roll a drop of water on this surface, we make it 99%, or more, less sticky than the flat surface."

Link (via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:35:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How do you get the sheet metal Bill of Rights home?

Little did I suspect, when I slipped my pal Nelson a sheet-metal Bill of Rights, that it would be the source of a flash of horrible realization that we're in deep crap:
I'm not one to make displays like that so it was an accident it came with me to New York. But now where do I put it going home? In checked luggage, where security may find it while I'm not around and decide to punish me for being clever? Or in my hand luggage, where it may cause my bag to be searched and an awkward conversation? Maybe I should just leave it behind.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated

Then I realized, I was stressing about what people would think about me having a copy of the Bill of Rights! It's a terrible thing we've done to ourselves.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:31:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Metafilter Matt's Long Now project

Matt Haughey, he of Metafilter and seven other kinds of fame, has launched a project in honor of his 31st birthday called Ten Years of My Life. It's a website wherein he plans to post one daily photo for the next ten years. Why?
A few weeks ago I realized how quickly everything has been changing since I've turned 30, and how much I miss doing daily photos. I came up with the idea of doing it over ten years for a couple reasons. Although it sounds like a lot of work, it's only about 3650 images if I posted every single day, and I've taken more than that many shots in just the last year alone. During the upcoming ten years, from the time I turn 31 until I turn 41, I expect I'll be witnessing a great deal of major changes and would love to have a way to remember them.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:29:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Usability movment hijacks, improves Parliament's website

The "Paramilitary Wing of the Usability Movement" (a group of geeks who scrape and reformat badly designed websites) has tackled its most ambitious project yet. The site scrapes Hansard, the badly designed website for the UK Parliamentary record, reformats all the information to be had therein, and presents it in inforgraphic Tuftean glory, as a series of easy-to-digest and permalinkable charts, stats and so forth. Link (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Artfutura in Barcelona today

I'm in Barcelona at the 14th annual edition of Artfutura, a yearly conference on technology, art, and culture. Apart from being a mindblowingly beautiful city, filled with architecture that makes you feel like you've just dropped acid, Barcelona is home to a thriving community of bloggers. This afternoon, I'll be moderating a live discussion with the Spanish blogging community, and special US guests Anil Dash and Meg Hourihan. Tune in here!

UPDATE: Madrid-based blogger Marta Peirano of La Petite Claudine is doing a live blog throughout the conference at elastico.net. Check it out!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:13:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, October 9, 2003

Gotchi lamps

Tramp Lamps sells lamps made out of petrified women's undergarments. Link (Thanks, Kelly)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:10:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whiny crybaby lobe of brain located

Stefan sez, "Scientists have located a part of the brain that becomes active when a person recieves a severe social snubbing . . . and believe that such slights are as unpleasant as actual physical pain." Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:41:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RC robots at Tokyo Game Show

Justin Hall has turned in agreat report on phone-controlled RC robots at the Tokyo Game Show for The Feature.
Tiny tanks controlled with mobile phones seem positively playful compared with Fujitsu Labs' Maron-1, a home security robot also run by mobile devices. A research prototype was announced last year; according to information on the web site, the Maron-1 robot comes with two cameras, taking pictures on command and sending them to a mobile phone. Also, the Maron-1 can be programmed to understand the house layout, traversing locations issued by mobile phone command, calling the police or a mobile device if there is a disturbance or intrusion. Best of all, Fujitsu announced that the Maron-1 has infrared ports built-in to control appliances, so perhaps a lonely Maron-1 can entertain itself by piloting Combat DigiQ tanks. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep indeed.
Link (Thanks, Justin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:33:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pynchon to do The Simpsons

Thomas Pynchon is slated to do a guest voice on The Simpsons:
We also have a show where The Simpsons go to London and it includes guest voices from Ian McKellen, J.K. Rowling, Jane Leeves and Prime Minister Tony Blair, playing himself. We have a show coming up where Marge writes a novel and gets endorsements from writers playing themselves, including Tom Clancy, Thomas Pynchon-

...He's wearing a paper bag over his head, but it is his voice.

Link (Thanks, Tregoweth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:31:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Share iTunes Smart Playlist tips

Spencer sez, "In light of the recent post about Smart Playlists in iTunes, I thought this was timely: 'Announcing the launch of SmartPlaylists.com! This new website is a resource for creating, sharing, and chatting about iTunes' Smart Playlists. Why? Because they're cool and there are many ingenious ways to use them to keep your music fresh.'" Link (Thanks, Spencer!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:39:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virtual Book Tour is underway

This year's "Virtual Book Tour" has kicked off:
In a nutshell, a Virtual Book Tour consists of an author "stopping" at a given number of websites in a given about of time, either to be interviewed, to take over the site for a day, to hang out with the site owner if they're in the same physical location etc. It's just like a traditional book tour except the cities are websites. The author never needs to live their living room, which makes it cheaper and easier than booking flights, hotel rooms, rental cars and all that jazz.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:21:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

22 pregnant cows killed by a single lightning bolt

A lightning strike in Florida has killed 20 pregnant cows and fatally injured two more. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Presidential web roundup at E-Democracy

The volunteer, nonprofit E-Democracy project has put together a good site with links to resources around the 2004 Presidential campaign. Link (Thanks, Steven!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:32:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

eMusic turns into a steaming pile

eMusic, having been acquired by Dimensional Associates LLC, has eliminated its all-you-can-download plan (the only thing that made the service worth the $10 a month), in favor of a 40-download-a-month plan, with a "premium" $15 plan that gets you 60 tracks a month. The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing -- downloading things on the chance that you'll like them, downloading songs for an occassion (such as Christmas songs, or the time I made my Dad a three-CD set of different versions of "Stormy Weather"), and other forms of no-risk, all-you-can-eat entertainment. Well, eMusic was fun while it lasted. Bye.
Q: Why is EMusic changing its service?
A: The music industry continues to suffer under intense financial, legal and technological pressure. As a provider of music downloads, EMusic is subject to a complex system of intellectual property rights and technological challenges that impose high costs and often uncertain risks on the company.

In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the current unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering, as described above.

Translation: Our industry is thrashing in the tar. We had a pretty decent service here that didn't involve treating our customers like crooks, but the studio execs hated how stupid that made their DRM-and-lawsuit strategy look, so they've made us break it. Our new plan, described above, doesn't taste so bad if you put a lot of ketchup on it and hold your nose. Won't some nice lawmaker please stop us before we hurt ourselves? Link to new Terms of Service, Link to Cancel eMusic Account Form (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SF writers on Schwarzenegger

Eileen Gunn (editor of the brilliant online sf magazine Infinite Matrix) has solicited comments from a number of science fiction writers on the Schwarzenegger gubernatorial victory in California:
William Gibson: I forget whether, in the Virtual Light books, Arnold is president of the US or merely Governor of SoCal, but, hey, it looks like I've gone and been prescient again. I hate it when that happens.

Harlan Ellison: To all the other 49 states — with the exception of Minnesota, whose election of a mountebank transcends even ours — the coronation of Ahnuld seems phantasmagoric. But not to us. We've done it at least twice before: George Murphy to the Senate, and Reagan to the White House. So, been there, seen that, done that. I thought, early on, that it was a great slate with Gary Coleman and Schwarzenegger both running: remember in MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME, the behemoth called "Master Blaster" — this seven-foot-tall brain-damaged, muscle-bound giant, with the midget strapped to his shoulders? Wow, what a terrific Governor we'd have if we just cranked Gary Coleman down onto Ahnuld's shoulders!! As long as nobody blew a high-pitched dog whistle, we'd be in sweet milk an' honey. So what do I actually think about all this foofaraw? To quote Thomas Jefferson, who was rewording Joseph de Maistre: "People get pretty much the kind of government they deserve."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lyrics to 2,000 "Island" songs

Island Song Lyrics is a collection of words (and the occasional accompanying music) to over 2,000 Hawai'ian and south-seas songs:
1602 Bora Bora Breeze
1603 Island In The Blue
1604 Anywhere You Are
1605 Dark And Velvet Sky
Link (Thanks, Larry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:45:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online-game academic group-blog

Ted Castranova (the academic whose game-world works have revealed such fascinating factoids as the GDP of Everquest ranking it among the world's top economies) has kicked off a group blog with a bunch of his fellow acadmic game-theorizers and observers, and it's fine stuff -- a kind of Crooked Timber for online gaming. Link (via Joho the Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:43:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roll your own gossip magazine cover

UK tea-vendor Quickbrew has put up a cute Flash thinggum wherein you pick from among lurid tabloid headlines and photos, enter a few personal details, and out pops a very plausible gossip-magazine cover starring you and your pals. 188K Flash Link (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:39:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Polish hackers offering "untraceable" hosting on hacked boxen

Wired Magazine reports on a new kind of ISP: an "invisible" hosting service, based in the former Soviet Union, which uses a network of compromised machines and some redirection-fu to make it very hard to determine where a web-server actually lives. The service is reportedly marketed to spammers as an untraceable base-of-operations. I'm pretty skeptical about the untraceability of these systems -- I suspect that rather, they are resistant to some tools, not resistant to others, and not hard to write new tools to uncover. Still, it's juicy, lurid reading.
Another site hosted by the Polish group offers free credit consultations. Traceroutes to the site, removeform.com, also provided ever-changing results, ranging from a computer connected to a DSL line in Israel to another provided by EarthLink. However, the title of the site's home page consistently read "Yahoo Web Hosting," suggesting it was actually located on a server run by the Internet giant.

According to Tubul, his group controls 450,000 "Trojaned" systems, most of them home computers running Windows with high-speed connections. The hacked systems contain special software developed by the Polish group that routes traffic between Internet users and customers' websites through thousands of the hijacked computers. The numerous intermediary systems confound tools such as traceroute, effectively laundering the true location of the website. To utilize the service, customers simply configure their sites to use any of several domain-name system servers controlled by the Polish group, Tubul said.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:32:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY Hallowe'en recipes

Here's a great assemblage of Hallowe'en recipes from last year, including a DIY Mexican sugar-skull formulation. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:28:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, October 8, 2003

P2P can save the net

Simson Garfinkel has written a great piece for Technology Review, describing the ways in which P2P technology could give us a more secure, stable, efficient Internet:
* One of the weakest points of the Internet right now is the domain name system, which is run by a loose confederation of name servers. Running DNS on top of a peer-to-peer system instead could dramatically improve its reliability.

* Today, if your business runs a small Web server and the site suddenly gets very popular, the server can crash from all of the extra traffic. But if all of the computers on the Internet were part of a global peer-to-peer Web cache, then small companies and individuals could publish their material to the multitudes. A good system would even prevent malicious modification of the Web page contents when they were served off other machines.

* In the event of a terrorist attack on the Internet’s infrastructure, a peer-to-peer system would be far more likely to recover than a system that depended on top-down control.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:00:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons' LazyWeb wishes

Creative Commons has launched a series of technology challenges -- LazyWeb ideas for tools that could really help the effort along.
* License metadata validation web application.
* License claim embedding specifications for more file types.
* APIs for Creative Commons license metadata.
* GUI for embedding license claims in files and generating claim verification RDF.
* Build Creative Commons licensing into more content creation applications.
* Browser toolbar or plugin that extracts and displays license metadata embedded in a page.
* Media player and file sharing applications that read, verify, and display license claims embedded in files.
* Add license search to a major commercial search engine.
* Write a custom Creative Commons license-aware search engine.
Link (via Lessig Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:58:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spammer exploits PHP app to 0wn computer

Eli the Bearded sez, "Long, detailed writeup of webserver getting 0wned by a sophisticated spammer. Through a PHP product security hole a webserver was converted to a full time spam machine following orders from a remote server. The author of this paper has found that this is not an isolated event and apparently has been going on for months. Got a server? Keep it patched, including any silly little add-ons like the photo gallery bit that got subverted here." 60k PDF Link (Thanks, Eli!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:55:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Online propaganda short from Korea: "Fuck'n USA"

From RobPongi's blog, which features lots of streaming media oddities from Japan and other Asian countries: "This is a very shocking anti-American propoganda video made by North Koreans and previously broadcast on South Korean and Japanese Television." Don't miss the part right after George W. Bush's head morphs into a bloodsucking vampire monkey, where they call America an "audacious" country that "stole the Olympic gold Medal from us." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:07:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Giant Grocery "loyalty card" swapper

Rob's Giant BonusCard Swap Meet is a site where you enter in your Giant grocery-chain "loyalty card" number and the site responds by serving you a printable barcode for someone else's loyalty card number. Paste the barcode over your own and help poison the Giant database. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hard drive capacity explained -- will it stop the court case?

In the wake of a lawsuit over "deceptive" hard-drive marketing in which it is alleged that hard-drive vendors mis-label the capacity of their products to make them seem larger than they really are, the tech site Wiebetech has published an easy-to-follow paper explaining the discrepancy. I wonder if it will be introduced as evidence in the hearing?
We’ve finally determined the math used by the operating system, which has converted our drive from a capacity of 123.5GB to a capacity of 115.04GB. The mystery is solved. This handy formula may be used by anyone for converting decimal GigaBytes to binary GigaBytes (with decimal representation). The mathematical conversion works the other way around as well, as shown below:

115.GB x 1,073,741,824 = 123,522,415,614 decimal bytes (assuming all digits of precision are used in the 115GB). (This allows conversion from operating system GigaBytes to Hard Drive Manufacturer GigaBytes).

76k PDF Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Internet voice technology is not subject to telco rules in Minnesota

A Federal court has ordered the Minnesota telco regulator to stop treating Voice Over IP providers as though they were phone companies. This has been an area of great concern, since it made it appear that the Internet was going to come under the thumb of the thoroughly captured telco regulators, who'd trash our last great hope for bankrupting the telcos while insisting on the local equivalent of horseshoes for steam-engines.
The Minnesota PUC's August decision required Vonage to file with the commission as a telephone company, to receive official certification from the PUC in order to operate in the state and to begin making payments to support 911 service administration.
Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiny remotely chargeable battery for implanted medical apparati

A new rechargable miniature (2.9 mm X 13 mm) battery intended for implanted medical appliances is shipping. The battery lasts 10 years, and is recharged when the body part it resides in is placed alongside an electrified pillow, which remotely juices up the cell.
"In the treatment of urinary incontinence, which is an area Quallion is focused on, the stimulation has to be delivered all day long so there's no good place to put an external coil," Loeb said.

The Quallion team decided to focus on urinary incontinence partly because the problem requires constant stimulation, but also because millions of people suffer from it.

"There are more adult's diapers sold in the world than children's ones," Fong said

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apocamon 3 is out, and $0.25

Patrick "e-sheep" Farley has published the third installment of his brilliant, scathing Apocamon strip, in which he interprets Revelations through Pokemon characters.

He's opted to charge $0.25 for 30 days' access to the strip, using the BitPass system that Scott McCloud was touting a little while ago. Of course, BitPass requires that you buy a $3.00 prepaid "card" in order to give Patrick his $0.25, and there's precious little else I want to buy with my remaining $2.75, so as far as I'm concerned, I've just spent $3 on this Apocamon installment, and as far as I'm concerned, it was worth it -- I'd pay that much for a comic book this good any day.

On the other hand, I'd own the comic book and be able to read it whenever I want to. Patrick's charging $0.25 or $3.00 (depending on how you squint at it) for 30 days' worth of access to his funnybook. Now, if I could only figure out a way to give Patrick the remaining $2.75 for permanent access (preferably without giving any money to BitPass). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:25:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boombox modded into a WiFi AP

The Bass Station is an old-school boom-box with a WiFi access-point built in, along with:
a 120GB hard drive, and an MP3 decoder, and that is controlled using a web browser. Besides being able to play MP3s, it can also stream audio to other devices in its local area network, double as a file-server for file-sharing.
Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBCi director's stunning speech on file-sharing and TV

Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, gave a speech on Monday at the Royal Television Society about the nature of the BBC's ambitious and grand Internet plans. It's a stunner of a talk, filled with extreme sensibleness:
Downloading and sharing this video is the final piece of the jigsaw and will create a killer combination that I believe could undermine the existing models of pay-TV.

The killer combination is broadband together with digital TV and PVRs, plus the ability to share this video in the same peer-to-peer model with which music files are exchanged on the net...

We are exploring legitimate peer-to-peer models to get our users to share our content, on our behalf, amongst themselves, transparently.

And as an industry, we should be more active in creating legitimate content download products, whether that's as a pay-model, or rights-cleared for free. We need to help consumers leap-frog the illegal downloading issues that have wrecked havoc on the music industry. Here's what we believe is the shape of things to come, a way for people to search for whatever they are interested in -- perhaps in the case of a natural history for a school project -- searching from Buffalos to Bears -- and then download it for their use.

Link (via Werblog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, October 7, 2003

Reading/signing on Thursday in Berkeley

A reminder: I'll be reading and signing books on Thursday night at Berkeley's The Other Change of Hobbit (2020 Shattuck Ave, 1-510-848-0413) from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:25:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sliding-scale indie disc with proceeds to bail out RIAA victims

Scott sez, "Today I released my new DIY record, 'Where I've Been,' with a twist: the sliding-scale minimum price is $5, with all amounts over $5 donated to the P2P Defense Fund at downhillbattle.org to help out people who've been hit with RIAA lawsuits. The enhanced CD also contains MP3 versions of the whole record, licensed under a Creative Commons license." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:25:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FCC releases number-portability guidelines

In preparation for the blessed day at the end of November when cellular number portability arrives, the FCC has issued guidelines for carriers. They're non-binding, though.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said carriers should let defecting customers keep their old number even if their account has an unpaid balance. The FCC also found "no technical reason" why switching subscribers should have to wait longer than two-and-a-half hours before their old number is "ported" to their new dialing plan.
Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:22:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

French, Funkadelic 404 page

Leave it to the French Ministry of Culture to create this truly funkalicious pluriligual psychedelic 404 error page. Taste the pixels, baby. (Thanks, Jean-Luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:35:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weapons of Mass Projection in San Francisco October 8

Tomorrow (Wednesday), cyberdelic video performance pioneers Dimension7 will conduct the second annual Video RIOT! in San Francisco:
"This year, Video RIOT! will again showcase San Francisco's homegrown Vj community in a format that is a cross between an edgy electronic tailgate party and a real-time drive-in multiplex. Artists will join forces to create a massive outdoor wall of light just off the Embarcadero. All video projection and light based artists are encouraged to come, and can show if they have their own projector and gear."

Video RIOT! 2 will take place outdoors near the Dimension 7 studios (150 Folsom St. at Spear) from 8pm-11pm. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:56:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tribe.net: BoingBoing tribe!

I've been fooling around with social networking service Tribe.net lately, and enjoying it thoroughly. The UI rules, the site performs pleasantly. The service seems particularly well-suited for folks who want to connect for purposes other than dating (not that there's anything wrong with dating). Like-minded users connect in groups called "tribes," formed around everything from photography to polyamory. One tribe.net user named Pauly recently created a "BoingBoing" tribe, to "further the banter and chitchat that goes along with boingboing". Pesco and I are both members, come check it out. Link to BoingBoing tribe, and recent Wired News story about Tribe.net: "Friendster meets Craigslist?"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:08:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired mag illustration: unmanned robotic aircraft

BoingBoing pal Kenn Brown sends us this link to an illustration he produced in collaboration with fellow Vancouver-based artist Jeremy Hoey. It's a two-page spread on state-of-the-art unmanned, autonomous vehicles featured in this month's edition of Wired Magazine (pages 45 and 46). Buy the mag, it looks way better in glorious, hi-res, technicolor paper. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:53:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK clinic calls texting a "behavioral addiction"

One of the UK's most esteemed psychiatric clinics says that some behavioral relationships with technology are addictions -- and that more and more of us are developing those geek dependencies. Case in point: textaholics, who spend way too much time punching out short messages by cellphone.
"There has been a huge rise in behavioral addictions," including excessive texting, said a spokeswoman for the Priory Clinic which treats 6,000 patients a year for a range of addictions including gambling, eating disorders and drugs.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:45:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If you're a California resident, get off your ass and vote

Here's a list of polling locations (site's been off and on all day with traffic overload). Link
Update: Marc Brown points us to moveon.org, which also list polling sites, and Cyrus F. points us to another list of locations, here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:08:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: controversy over e-voting technology

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day", I'll speak with host Alex Chadwick about advances in computer-based voting technology, and controversy around the security -- or lack thereof -- provided by leading e-voting services. Many California voters will be using the systems for the first time during today's recall election. Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:58:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TypePad launches

TypePad, the new blogging services from the creators of Movable Type, has launched. Subscription fees range from $4.95 to $14.95 a month.
Q. Is TypePad just hosted Movable Type?
A.TypePad was built upon the reliable,tested Movable Type platform, but it includes new functionality that is not in Movable Type. Most importantly, we rebuilt the entire interface from scratch to be simpler, faster, cleaner and more powerful. Then we added in huge new features like photo albums and statistics tracking right in the application itself, and integrated it with built-in hosting with plenty of space for your weblog entries, photos, and the flexible archives Movable Type users have grown accustomed to.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired: Time to Recall E-Vote Machines?

In today's edition of Wired News:
Recent reports claim the software in Diebold electronic voting machines is insecure. But the policies and procedures for using the system in California's recall election raise concerns that the software isn't the only problem.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool laptop holder: oysterdock

From Kevin Kelly's "Cool tools" e-zine:
If you use a laptop, the Oysterdock is fabulous. Very very simple, but just what you've always wanted for your home workstation. It's a really simple idea, but they're good looking and solve an irritating problem: putting a laptop screen where its easy to see. You supply your own peripherals (all you want -- the dock organizes and hides all the cords). There are just a few laptops that won't work with it (i think they list them on the site), basically the ones that don't open to (nearly) 180 degrees.
--Martha Baer
They sell for $150 here, or at Amazon.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:47:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, October 6, 2003

First-ever virtual hurricane

The most powerful computer in the world has burst into hurricane:
Virtual hurricanes have appeared in computer models of the Earth's climate for the first time. The swirling storms are visible in the first results from the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan - the world's fastest supercomputer...

Whereas most climate models divide the Earth into blocks measuring hundreds of kilometres across, the powerful Earth Simulator can run models with cells as small as 10 kilometres. This means that detailed features of the weather - such as tropical storms - can be included.

Link (via Robot Wisdom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:04:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi radiation too dangerous for schools?

An Illinois school-district that deployed WiFi has been sued by a parents' group that asserts that WiFi radiation is dangerous to kids. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:24:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schwarzenegger's Enron connection

Greg Palast reports that Schwarzenegger is working with Ken Lay to ensure that Enron's ill-gotten gains are not returned to California's treasury.
Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.

It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger...

The pay-off? Once Arnold is Governor, he blesses the sweetheart settlements with the power companies. When that happens, Bustamante's court cases are probably lost. There aren't many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if that a governor has already allowed the matter to be "settled" by a regulatory agency.

Link (Thanks, Lisa!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tube-map with "walklines"

The familiar London tube-map is hailed as an example of brilliant information design -- indeed, it is -- because it manages to show the logical relations between the stations clearly and consisely. However, the physical relationships between the stations are not priorities for the map's designers, which means that you can find yourself riding the tube for five stops on two different lines to go between two points that are physically only separated by a few hundred yards, though you'd never know it by looking at the map. Rodcorp has taken a standard London tube-map and added "walklines" to it, showing stations that are separated by 500 meters or less. Link (Thanks, Rodcorp)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:13:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hallucinogenic "tablets" hit Baghdad?

Boing Boing pal Syd Garon points us to this odd article from the BBC, claiming that "a boom in supply of hallucinogenic tablets" in Baghdad is causing all sorts of chaos. To me, the article seems riddled with total disinformation. According to the leader of the Iraq police's anti-drug unit, 10-15 types of tablets were first available for just a few US cents per strip. The article quoes a user who says: ""One type of tablet is called Lebanon - when I take it I see Lebanon. I've never been there, but it's in the tablet." Link (Thanks, Syd!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:37:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, October 5, 2003

More OS X Hacks

Rael Dornfest is doing a new, Panther-ready edition of Mac OS X Hacks and he's looking for your power-user tips:
And so I turn to you, gentle readers, for your interest in contributing to the next book. Got a hack, tip, tweak, loophole, script (AppleScript, Real Basic, Python, Perl, Ruby, shell, ...), haxie, favourite bit of software, unconventional use you'd be interested in sharing and writing up (code and/or prose) for the book? Please do leave a writeback or drop me a line. While we'll certainly be covering more of Panther than you can shake a stick at, there's no reason to be OS version-specific.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:23:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, October 4, 2003

AmIGuyBourdinOrNot.com

Madonna's recent video "Hollywood" is under legal fire as an alleged knock-off of images created by photographer Guy Bourdin some two decades ago. Compare for yourself, on this website that juxtaposes stills from the video with the Bourdin shots they're said to have been copied from.

But the guybourdin.org fan-site also recently announced THE BOURDIN COPY & PASTE AWARDS:

"send us your photos à la manière de Guy Bourdin the best will be shown in this web and win a copy of the book "Guy Bourdin" --amateurs & professionals qualify."
Link, and see more of Bourdin's work archived here. (via Geisha)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:21:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brief fiction gems on Warren Ellis' blog

Author and blogger Warren Ellis has been posting some delectable, bite-sized morsels of prose on diepunyhumans recently. Snip:
She used to have eyes I could lose myself in, and then she had them replaced with laser pointers. Little red dots jumping up and down on the bedroom wall as I took her from behind. I could live with that until she had the animal voice import. The cheetah purring was okay, but the dingo noises just killed the mood. The combination of the red eyes and the gorilla sounds when she jerked off was horrible. A few weeks later, things were moving down there that shouldn't have. Don't be scared, she said, as stuff pumped like organ stops under her skin. Something extended itself and waved at me.

I threw up between her legs and she didn't talk to me for a week. Which I suppose you can't really blame her for, but still.

I knew it was over when she cut her legs off.

Link, and here's another.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:40:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, October 3, 2003

In the Neimans' Xmas catalog: His and Hers robots, $400K

In this year's holiday catalog from upscale retailer Neiman Marcus: his and hers robots, six feet tall, engineered at International Robotics. The pair will set you back a cool $400 grand, though. Heck, for that sum -- *I'll* carry your groceries and respond empathetically! Snip from catalog:
Someone at the door? Click your remote and send His Robot to check it out. His Robot's voice circuitry can deliver your greeting, and His on-board video camera gives you a view of the visitor, who can hop onto His platform and be delivered to you in the den. Need some help getting the groceries into the house? Her Robot is happy to help. Need to leave a message for the spouse or kids? Tell it to Her Robot, and she'll spread the word. In fact, His Robot is designed to respond empathetically to us humans and features programmable technology. Our exclusive package includes much more, like preprogrammed messages and sequences of movements, and training for the humans.
Link (Thanks, siege)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:11:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ad-Sense Terms of Service gag critics

Jason Kottke's got a good post on Google's new AdSense terms-of-service, which not only allow them to terminate you without notice, cause or recourse (withholding any sums owed to you at the time), but also bind you to a number of restrictive confidentiality terms, oncluding one that prohibits you from criticising the service. As Jason points out, this is definitely on the wrong side of the "Don't Be Evil" line.

I really like Google, both the service and the company (hell, I also really like the Googloids whom I'm personally acquainted by). At least once a week, I put on my Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" boxer shorts and get a little grin, and I wore a Google t-shirt to my signing last night.

But that doesn't mean that they should get a free ride. Google wants to be a company that makes money wihtout being evil, and I support that goal! Being not-evil is good, and so's making some dough. But part of being not-evil is that you have to incur liability over and above that which your counsel recommends as the safest path -- just as a shop-owner can't reasonably ask all her customers to submit to a strip-search to contain shoplifting liability, Google shouldn't ask all its users to submit to an unreasonable restriction on their speech in order to contain the spread of negative information about its service.

Google has every right to place whatever limits they wish on people who use their "service", but terminating said service without recourse when money is potentially owed by Google *and then* not allowing any site using Google AdSense (which may eventually include media sites like Salon, NY Times, MetaFilter, Slashdot, and even kottke.org) to comment on the Terms and Conditions that brought about the termination is just plain bad (evil?) and should give serious pause to anyone considering using any Google service.
Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:15:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage Hallowe'en costumes

This week on Retrocrush: a stunning gallery of vintage Hallowe'en costumes. Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

C++ speaks hacker

If you define your variables right, you can get C++ to speak AOL chat-room:
If you define your variables right, you can get C++ to speak AOL chat-room:

  Like main WTF
    INEEDAVARCALLED y KTHX
    HUHU
    LOOPORSOMETHING( TEACHERSAIDSTARTWITH(y, 1) KTHX
                  y ENDSAT 10 KTHX
                  y HASTOGOUP, PUTONSCREEN y )
    PUTONSCREEN HATS KTHX
    STFU(y ISBIGGERTHAN 10) OMG UID10T
    YOUAREFIRED
  KTHXBYE
Link (via NTK)
Link (via NTK)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:13:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: time kill zen

weezer sumo
hangman
catch a fly
beat the quilters
internet tennis
bubble trouble
monkey moon lander
diner
office space

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

For sale on eBay: one air guitar

One air guitar, "non-electric model." Link (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:45:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Latest code-creation from Freenet's Ian Clarke

Freenet creator Ian Clarke does interesting things with code on the weekends while the rest of us sleep/eat/watch the game. His latest is a large-scale collaborative document editing app. Ian explains:
3D17 is a website which allows collaborative editing of documents. Consider the scenario - you blog about someone with some wrong-headed ideas, and you want to write a response, but you would also like to enlist the help of your readers. This is where 3D17 comes in, you go to 3d17.org, create a document, like this for instance, and direct your readers to its URL. They can then suggest amendments to it, which other readers can then vote on, and whichever wins will be applied to the document. Hey, presto! Large scale collaborative document editing!
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:35:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ICANN gives Verislime until Oct 4 to kill SiteFinder -- or else

ICANN has finally grown a spine. The President and CEO of ICANN has written an open letter to the General Manager of Verisign's Naming and Directory serivce in which he issues an ultimatum: get rid of the evilly asinine SiteFinder service (which breaks the Internet by redirecting all misspelled domain-requests to an ad-ware site) by Oct 4, or ICANN will "seek promptly to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations." Apparently, this is ICANN-speak for "terminate with extreme prejudice."
[...O]ur review of the .com and .net registry agreements between ICANN and VeriSign leads us to the conclusion that VeriSign’s unilateral and unannounced changes to the operation of the .com and .net Top Level Domains are not consistent with material provisions of both agreements. These inconsistencies include violation of the Code of Conduct and equal access provisions, failure to comply with the obligation to act as a neutral registry service provider, failure to comply with the Registry Registrar Protocol, failure to comply with domain registration provisions, and provision of an unauthorized Registry Service. These inconsistencies with VeriSign's obligations under the .com and .net registry agreements are additional reasons why the changes in question must be suspended pending further evaluation and discussion between ICANN and VeriSign.
Link (Thanks, Hal!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:10:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lisa Rein video online

Lisa Rein has posted a video of her performing her song, Slipping Away. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free sign-language course

The LifePrint ASL 101 course is a free online introductory course in American Sign Language. Looks pretty thorough. Link (Thanks, John E)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:00:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, October 2, 2003

Nokia Commodore 64 emulator

You can emulate a Commodore 64 on a Nokia Series 60 cellphone.
Why on God's green earth would one possibly want a Commodore 64 home computer running on one's cellphone? Aside from the thrill of seeing your old C64 humming away in the palm of your hand and the eyebrow-raising you're sure to see in friends and family, there are the games... oodles of them, available for playing pleasure from C64 UNLIMITED -- and you don't have to spend a quarter.

Sure they're one-off emulations of arcade games running on a one-off emulation of a home computer, but they're suprisingly well-written and very much resemble the real thing--for some definition of "the real thing" amongst all these emulators upon emulators upon emulators. There's Galaxian and Gorf, arcade favourites of the early 80s, Choplifter from my Apple ][, and hundreds more.

Link (via Raelity Bytes)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:52:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogger Boobie-Thon for breast cancer

An anonymour reader sez, "October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation one blogger has started the Blogger Boobie-Thon. Throughout October people can submit pictures of their boobs (yes, manly chests are welcome as well), with the more risque photographs being placed on the 'pay per boobie' page that can only be accessed with a donation of $50 or more. Collaborative porn for charity, anyone?" Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:05:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF's Trusted Computing white-paper

My colleague Seth Schoen has finished his long-awaited, brilliant white-paper on Trusted Computing. Seth has been briefed as an outside technical analyst by all the companies working of Trusted Computing architecture, and has had his paper vetted by some of the leading security experts in the field. This is the most exhaustive, well-reasoned, balanced analysis of Trusted Computing you can read today. Don't miss it.
Remote attestation is the most significant and the most revolutionary of the four major feature groups described by Microsoft. Broadly, it aims to allow "unauthorized" changes to software to be detected. If an attacker has replaced one of your applications, or a part of your operating system with a maliciously altered version, you should be able to tell. Because the attestation is "remote", others with whom you interact should be able to tell, too. Thus, they can avoid sending sensitive data to a compromised system. If your computer should be broken into, other computers can refrain from sending private information to it, at least until it has been fixed.

While remote attestation is obviously useful, the current TCG approach to attestation is flawed. TCG attestation conspicuously fails to distinguish between applications that protect computer owners against attack and applications that protect a computer against its owner. In effect, the computer's owner is sometimes treated as just another attacker or adversary who must be prevented from breaking in and altering the computer's software.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:30:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Student group rallies against RIAA, MSFT

A group of students at Swarthmore College have formed a "Coalition for the Digital Commons" to combat threats to open culture and information exchange.
This translates into resisting the efforts of the RIAA to sue those who share music files, opposing the DMCA and similar expansion of intellectual property law, spreading the use of Linux and other freeware programs and fighting the plan of Microsoft and the “Trusted Computing Platform Alliance” to put monitoring chips in personal computers.

Linux, a free alternative to the Microsoft Windows operating system, lies at the heart of SCDC’s philosophy. The group’s short-term goals include getting more students to switch to Linux and get some Linux-based computers in public areas, to “show everyone how functional Linux is — that it’s not some impractical pipedream,” Pavlovsky said. A major factor in SCDC’s championing of Linux is the advent of the Microsoft’s new “Trusted Computing” technology, also known as the Palladium chip. This technology, already present in some new IBM ThinkPads and set to be released in the upcoming version of Windows, would require Microsoft to verify if a user has permission to open a file on his or her computer.

Link (via pho, thanks, JP!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:18:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tech confab Poptech: two weeks away

I'll be participating in Poptech in a couple of weeks -- and there are plenty of reasons why you might want to, as well. Among them: Aubrey de Gray is going to talk about the possibility of people living to be 1000 years old. Another guy who creates biological art will talk about injecting tiny sculptures into itty-bitty lifeforms. Then, there's Graham Hawkes, who makes really, really, really deep-sea submersibles. Did I mention "space architect" Constance Adams? The event "explores the impact of technology on our lives, our planet and our future," and takes place October 16-19 in Camden, Maine. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:38:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coke's new "smart" billboard in London

Coca-Cola launched what is said to be the world's largest and "smartest" billboard ever this week: 99 feet wide, full of neon, responds to weather changes and interacts with people observing it from the ground. Can you say overkill?
"This is an intelligent sign, with state-of-the-art computer technology, built-in cameras and an on-board heat sensitive weather station," the Coca-Cola Co. said in a statement. The sign can respond to weather and movement. "When it's raining, big drops will appear on the screen and when it's breezy, the Coke sign can ripple as if it's being blown by the wind," a spokeswoman for the company said. It will also be able to recognize if people are waving at it from the ground below and, eventually, will be able to respond to text messages from mobile phones, she said.
Link (thanks, Halvard !)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:20:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kurzweil and Joy on the 21st century

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
In this long text published by CIO Magazine, Ray Kurzweil writes about the dangers introduced by new technologies. More specifically, he gives his views about genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics (collectively known as GNR). In his conclusion, he says that "we need to understand that these technologies are advancing on hundreds of fronts, rendering relinquishment completely ineffectual as a strategy. As uncomfortable as it may be, we have no choice but to prepare the defenses." As a matter of coincidence, Fortune interviewed Bill Joy a day after he left Sun Microsystems. And of course, he talked about the article he wrote for Wired in April 2000, "Why the future doesn't need us," in which he said that rapid advances in GNR could endanger our lives. This summary contains essential quotes from both articles, but read them in their entirety if you have some time.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:13:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lore Sjoberg's comic-strips

Lore Sjoberg, the Internet-comedy genius responsible for the Brunching Shuttlecocks, has collected his Lore-Brand Comics comic-strips on the Web. Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:02:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Branding your kids

According to US social security records, there were five kids born in 2000 whose parents named them Timberland, forty-nine Canons, eleven Bentleys, five Jaguars, and a Xerox. The kicker? Twenty-four children were named Unique. Link (Thanks, Gil!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:59:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nuns get wired

The Poor Clare nuns, who take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, have launched a website, opening their reclusive world to the public for the first time. Saint Clare is also the patron saint of television. Go figure.
They usually only communicate with visitors, and even family members, by talking through iron bars at their closed monastery in Galway, western Ireland.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:35:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GPRS billing hack is disclosed

GPRS (a cellular data service) has been compromised -- apparently for quite some time, though the disclosure only comes today. The hack that everyone's worried about is one that allows hackers to bill arbitrary services to any GRPS handset:
There are lots of potential issues, but the one which has forced the phone networks to acknowledge that there is a problem, is a scam where a company obtains IP addresses that the GPRS operators own, in the "cellular pool" and start pinging those addresses.

When one of them responds, the scam operator knows that a user has been assigned the address. And, unbelievably, there was nothing to stop them simply providing services direct to that IP address - and taking the money out of the GPRS billing system to pay for it.

Link (via Interesting People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rosetta project for people with axes in their heads

In the fine tradition of I can eat glass, it will not harm me, and other Internet Rosetta Stone projects, here is a page on which you will find many translations of "Oh my god! There's an axe in my head."
Greek: hristo mou! eho ena maheri sto kefali mou!
Tagalog: Ay Dios ko! May palakol sa ulo ko!
Danish: Oh min gud! Der er en oekse i mit hoved.
Afrikaans: O God! Daar's 'n byl in my kop!
Polish: O Moj Boze! Mam siekiere w glowie!
Maori: Ave Te Ariki! He toki ki roto taku mahuna!
Italian: Dio mio! C'e' un' ascia nella mia testa!
Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Acme Products, 1935-1964

The Illustrated Catalog of Acme Products is a collection of frame-grabs from Warner Bros cartoons from 1935 to 1964, displaying the wide range of fine products on offer from the Acme company through the years. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:57:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Decorative rug that looks like a pair of men's briefs.

Tighty whitie home decor. At just 26 bucks (and free shipping when you order online), what better example of trailer park chic? Click thumbnail for full-size image. Link (thanks, claytonjames)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:55:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smart iTunes playlists notes-sharing

Here's a great open thread in which Mac users are discussing how they use iTunes. I'm pretty chuffed about the idea of a "Never Played" smart playlist.
I personally use dynamic playlists almost exclusively. I have the prerequisite Top 25 playlist (highest rated, random 25), the Recently Played (played in the last week) for finding something i recently heard and want to hear again, the Never Played (playcount: 0) to make sure i hear everything, and the Newest (Added after *date*), which i set up before the trip so i could listen to the newest stuff and add it to the iPod easily.

Every other playlist, with the exception of one, is a dynamic playlist with a Genre label and automatically includes anything with the specified genre. I maintain my genres fanatically and every mp3 i have fits into one of my genre playlists. The lone non-dynamic playlist i have is called Tag-Fixing and when i get new music on my machine i drag it into that playlist so i can check the tags. When i have edited the tags to my satisfaction, iTunes notices and pulls them into the appropriate Genre playlist and whatever other playlist they belong in as well. I then delete them from the Tag-Fixing playlist.

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:03:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eurokids fastest-growing online population segment

Kids in Europe who surf the 'Net for everything from tunes to term paper templates have become the fastest-growing portion of the Internet population, according to a new Nielsen/Netratings study released yesterday.
Some 13 million children under the age of 18 in eight countries surveyed surf the web for school work, games and music, a rise of some 27 percent over last year. Four million were under age 12... the findings from the survey covering Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands suggest that a plea from educators and politicians to add the Internet to school curricula and make high-speed Internet services cheaper as well as more accessible is paying off.
Link (via pho)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:57:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anonymous paper "Entrapment" warns RIAA could wrongly accuse non-filesharers

A flaw critics have warned of in the RIAA's series of lawsuits against consumers -- the possibility that "innocent" file-sharers could appear "guilty" -- is the subject of a newly released anonymous paper. "Entrapment: Incriminating Peer to Peer Network Users," was posted this week on a free Australian webhost service. Excerpt from the document:
If a user of peer to peer (P2P) networks is allegedly caught searching for, downloading, sharing or uploading contraband files such as copyright-protected music .mp3 files, they might mistakenly believe that their only option is to plea bargain with authorities. However the P2P user, who the authorities are all too quick to brand as an offender, may actually be an innocent victim. It is possible for an attacker to exploit both the underlying design of P2P networks as well as implementation flaws in P2P applications in order to implicate another P2P user in behaviour deemed unacceptable by the authorities.

In the worst case scenario, an attacker can anonymously trick an innocent P2P user into downloading a contraband file from another user on the P2P network. If authorities participate in P2P networks in order to identify offenders, the innocent P2P user may have downloaded a contraband file from an authority. This article will describe how a P2P user allegedly caught committing an offence relating to copyright violation, such as sharing/uploading/downloading/searching for contraband files, might not have been knowingly involved, or might not have been involved at all.

Link to New Scientist article, Link to "Entrapment" paper (Adobe PDF)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:53:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickenger's Wireless Hacks book is out

O'Reilly's Hacks book are total mind-candy. I've got MacOS X Hacks on my desk, eBay and Google Hacks on the coffee table and now I've found one for the toilet tank: Wireless Hacks, by Rob Flickenger, the WiFi hacker who wrote Building Community Wireless Networks, outed Linksys for using Linux in its APs without delivering code, lost a kidney after falling off a roof while installing a WiFi antenna, and is in lots of other ways the wireless hacker's wireless hacker. Can't wait to get ahold of this. Link (via WiFiNetNews)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

California Recall spawns as many t-shirts as candidates

So. What are you wearing?

Mmm-hmmm. Nice.

Me? This.

Link. Bonus: read Schwarzenegger's 1977 Oui interview in entirety here.
.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:06:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Euro screws US dollar in ad campaign

Russian Finance magazine was forced to tear down their ad posters in Moscow depicting the euro, er, pleasuring the US dollar from behind. "I thought the currencies were dancing on our poster," said the magazine's publisher. Link (Thanks, Vann!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:48:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tenacious D movie script is complete

Ain't-It-Cool News reports that there's a Tenacious D movie in the offing, and the script is complete. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:14:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple's going into the hotspot biz

Apple is hiring a WiFi hot-spot evangelist in the UK -- looks like they're going into the free WiFi business.
The primary purpose of this role is to raise the profile in the marketplace of AirPort, Apple's Wireless networking solution. Achieving this by co-ordinating the opening of WiFi Hot Spots in high profile places, which Apple will support.
Link (via ThinkSecret)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

VoIP providers must apply for licenses, say CA regulators

Following similar moves by regulators in Wisconsin and Minnesota, companies that provide 'net telephony services to consumers in California will soon be required to obtain the same operator licences as regular old phone companies. VoIP developers argue this is not only an inaccurate application of the law -- they're not telecom providers, they're data carriers -- but that it will also throw a regulatory wet towel on an industry that's still in its infancy:
VoIP providers argue that a state's rules govern only telephone calls made over traditional telephone networks. VoIP calls use the Internet and should be excluded, the providers argue. But that distinction is becoming irrelevant, said John Leutza, director of the California Public Utilities Commission's telecommunications division. "They sure look like a phone company in nearly every regard," he said during an interview on Tuesday. "This will be California's policy going forward." Because of its size and national stature, California's decision to bring VoIP providers into the regulatory fold could have enormous sway on the dozens of other state's now investigating a similar step.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:11:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The paper iPod

Can't afford an iPod? Cheap consumer-electronics chic: print, glue onto cardboard, cut out and assemble. 100K JPEG Link (via Mijnkopthee)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:08:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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