Saturday, November 30, 2002

Technorati: How'm I doin'?
Technorati: a suite of services for making sense of your blog's position in the Internetverse, including googlejuice, googleshare, recent inbound links and so on. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:47:49 AM permanent link to this entry

Friday, November 29, 2002

Interview with Mark Frauenfelder
Journalist Kiruba Shankar interviewed me today. It was fun! Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 6:53:57 PM permanent link to this entry

Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo
Phil sez: "A video of a demo given by Doug Engelbart at SRI in 1968, of their online computer system. The first appearance of the mouse and includes hyperlinking, collaboration over a network and input by a chording keyboard. It's fascinating to watch the guy demo this groundbreaking stuff live." Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 1:11:04 PM permanent link to this entry

Profile of a spam king
Ex-con Alan Ralsky makes a terrific living by spamming 250,000,000 email addresses.

"I'll never quit," said the 57-year-old master of spam. "I like what I do. This is the greatest business in the world."

It's made him a millionaire, he said, seated in the wood-paneled first floor library of his new house. "In fact," he added, "this wing was probably paid for by an e-mail I sent out for a couple of years promoting a weight-loss plan."

Ralsky acknowledges that his success with spam arose out of a less-than-impressive business background. In 1992, while in the insurance business, he served a 50-day jail term for a charge arising out of the sale of unregistered securities. And in 1994, he was convicted of falsifying documents that defrauded financial institutions in Michigan and Ohio and ordered to pay $74,000 in restitution.

He lost his license to sell insurance and he declared personal bankruptcy. But in 1997, he sold a late model green Toyota and used the money to pay back taxes on his house and buy two computers.

Friday Web Zen: Holiday Shopping
(1) Mac Logo sneakers. Fo shizzle my Appizzle. Link

(2) The "Birth of Christ" Guitar. "Gibson’s largest and most majestic guitar model, the ’39 Super 400 is the canvas upon which the story of the Savior’s birth is told through paintings, carvings, engravings, and inlay." Link

(3) "The Easy Expression Bustier, an essential Hands-Free Pumping Bra." Link

(4) Fifteen dangerous toys that the world needs back. Link

(5) Japanese Ice Cream. Link

(6) Geekmaids.com: hire a downsized techie to clean your floors and sort your underwear. Link

Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:59:03 AM permanent link to this entry

Thursday, November 28, 2002

Get your Thanksgiving on. With, uh, Henry Kissinger and John Poindexter.
There's a new slew of "Get Your War On" comics online, posted 11-26-02.

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:42:27 PM permanent link to this entry

1930 Masonic prank catalog
Complete page scans from the 1930 DeMoulin Bros. & Co. Fraternal Supply Catalog No. 439, which sold all sorts of elaborate pranks and stunt props for hazing Mason recruits. The illustrations and descriptions are fabulous. I'm flabbergasted. Bucking goats! Exploding airplanes! Traitor inquisition stands! Electrical shockers. Looking through this catalog makes me realize how much things have changed in 70 years. It's weird to think that this large company even existed. It would be so much fun to play these pranks on people, but even better to be the victim of the pranks. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 9:01:58 PM permanent link to this entry

Going away for a while, some parting links
My grandfather died this morning and I'm going home for the funeral and shiva. I'll be blogging sporadically, if at all. Thanks in advance for all your condolences, but this message is mostly a plea to take it easy on me for the next week or so. Just keep emails and calls to a minimum -- nothing but essentials. Blog-suggestions should go to the form, not me. See you all next week.

I'm not blogging today, but if I was, here are the links I'd post:

Notes on Iain M. Banks's Culture

Fox CEO's Comdex speech deconstructed

Short story in Salon, announcement that Salon will do reprints from Coppola's Zoetrope mag

Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book online

Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:28:40 AM permanent link to this entry

Housekeeping: QuickTopic is down
QuickTopic, the service that hosts our "Discuss" links, is down. I've dropped 'em a line, and imagine they're working on it now. Sorry folks, no discussion until it's back up. Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:23:01 AM permanent link to this entry

Wacky/gorgeous online gallery of burning matchstick art
Artist David Mach creates sculptures from the colored heads of matches, then sets them on fire:

"I made my first matchhead in 1982. Kinskihead was a response to a reviewer comparing one of my magazine installations to a weekend modeller making a ship or the Eiffel Tower out of matches. The reviewer talked about matches as if their rightful place was at the bottom of the materials league. I was puzzled by this and immediately attracted to this underdog. Of course the reviewer was referring to modellers who don't use matches but just matchsticks, small pieces of wood. Live matches offer an entirely different proposition. The first head, Kinskihead, was set alight by mistake. It was originally made out of blue and red matches but once burnt they became different shades of grey ash. What interests me is the violence and power involved in that change and the fact that this performance comes from such a cheap, throwaway, almost non-material...

There doesn't seem to be any limit to the subject matter and of course they all have that lethal incendiary device capability. In fact you can describe three clear lives to these sculptures: the original head with colour; the performance of burning it; and the burned head, instantly aged black and white version of the original. Not bad for a nothing material."

F--k hip hop: eulogy for "the last black arts movement"
Heard this interesting media/culture/money rant read aloud on Garth Trinidad's always-500%-brilliant "Chocolate City" radio show tonight, here in Los Angeles. Excerpt:

“Balling” shouldn’t be renting a mansion; it should be owning your own distribution company or starting a union. Bill Cosby’s bid to buy NBC was more threatening than any screwface, jewelry-clad MC in a video could ever be.

As a DJ, it’s hard. I pick up the instrumental version of records that people nod their head to... and mix it with the a cappella version of artists with something to say. It is expensive and frustrating. But I feel like the alternative is the musical equivalent to selling crack: spinning hits because it’s easy, ignoring the fact that it’s got us dancing to genocide.

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Antigravity scooter uses bug shell mojo to hover
In 1988 scientist Viktor S. Grebennikov discovered that some types of insect chitin contain anti-gravitational properties.

Based on this opening and by using bionics principles, the author designed and builded antigravitational platform, and also, practically, developed principles manned flight with the speed up to 25 km/min. Since 1991-92 years the device was used by the author as a means of fast movement.

Web Graffiti: ThirdVoice for flamers
Web Graffiti is a system for defacing any web page -- like Third Voice for the nasty. [Not safe for work -- Mark] Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:20:39 PM permanent link to this entry

The truth behind giant mountain letters
The truth behind giant hillside letters:

Giant capital letters adorn hillsides near many cities and towns in the American West. These letters, typically constructed of whitewashed or painted stones or of concrete, are cultural signatures. They serve as conspicuous symbols of community and institutional identity, and they represent an idea, perhaps traceable to a single point of origin, that diffused quickly and widely early in this century...

Hillside symbols have a surprisingly respectable history dating back some eighty years. To a remarkable extent the letters can be traced to a single decade, 1905-1915. They have almost always been built and maintained by college or high-school student groups. The earliest letter-building projects were devices for defusing increasingly violent inter-class rivalries, which college administrators and faculty found difficult to control. It apparently worked. Making a letter was often a gala community event, an organized "men's workday" declared a formal school holiday, with picnic lunch and supper provided by campus women.

Britons can't make fun of Bush on TV
The authority that regulates British television advertising has banned an animated commercial that pokes fun at George Bush, and says it will only reinstate it if the Shrub gives permission.

The producer of "2DTV," Giles Pilbrow, said requiring satirists to seek permission from their targets was "an idiotic request" that would mean asking Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein if it was all right to caricature them.

"I doubt we could get Bin Laden's permission – he's a bit tricky to track down at the moment," he said.

The offending ad shows Bush opening a copy of the video and saying, "My favorite – just pop it in the video player."

He then sticks it into a toaster and burns it.

McGod sculpture
Beautiful collection of "primitive" animist/religious sculpture featuring McDonaldland iconography. Link Discuss (Thanks, Ethno::log!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:49:07 PM permanent link to this entry

Turkey pr0n
Ah, the wonders of e-commerce. This Delta Supreme Breeding Tom Collapsible Turkey Decoy is available online for only $19.99. You want stuffing with that?

"Most Realistic, Effective Gobbler Decoy Available and the ONLY BREEDING TOM. Designed to fit on top of Delta Hot Hen Decoy only (Hot Hens sold separately)... Simulated breeding pose lures gobblers in to investigate or fight. Can also be used alone to simulate a half-strutting or masturbating tom (you heard it here first)."

This holiday season, say it with pr0n apology e-cards.
Just in time for the holidays: an online ministry catering to Internet "pornography addicts and the people who love them" offers a line of "porn apology e-cards". Each bears a twelve-steppy message about the pain of digital pr0n dependency, incribed over oddly suggestive photo backgrounds like this _really_big_flower_, Georgia O'Keefe style. At left: "Your pornography addiction is leaving me lonely lately. Why am I not enough?"

UPDATE: RCB just posted a hilarious, free response card. Suitable for framing, or e-mailing to your favorite Evangelical Antipornista.

Link Discuss (via the brilliant and very-porn-addict-friendly Reverse Cowgirl's Blog)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:34:31 AM permanent link to this entry

Face transplants coming soon
British medical researchers are promising "facial transplants" within a year.

But his own survey of 120 people including nurses and doctors revealed that while some would be willing to receive a face transplant, none would be prepared to donate their own face. Butler hopes that if full details of the procedure and its medical need are made clear, potential donors might be able to overcome their initial revulsion.

The recipient would not look like the donor, Butler stresses. Martin Evison, an expert in forensic facial reconstruction at the University of Sheffield, UK, agrees. "The musculature of a face is particular to a skull as it develops. Muscles in the face of one person would have to be re-sculpted if they were to be transplanted onto another skull - and the face would not look the same," he says.

Eminem's former crib for sale on eBay
For sale on eBay: a Michigan home once occupied by Mr. Marshall "8 Mile" Mathers (photo at left). Current high bid: 12 million samoleans.

Auction here, more details on the seller's web site here Reuters story here.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:44:00 AM permanent link to this entry

Moz 1.2 released
Mozilla 1.2 was released today. Full of goodness. All kinds of goodness. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:50:39 AM permanent link to this entry

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Harry Potter/Luke Skywalker/Frodo Baggins
High-larious cutup and remix of the Harry Potter/Luke Skywalker/Frodo Baggins origin stories. The wish-fulfillment hero with a thousand faces and $50B in combined merchandising revenue. Link Discuss (Thanks, kfury!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:59:54 PM permanent link to this entry

Ubiquitous [computing|work]
Glenn Fleishman has written a sad and wonderful piece about the subversive flipside of ubiquitous connectivity: ubiquitous work. He wrote it in response to this very good Infoworld column, but his piece is better.

I'm on the road all week, in one of my favorite cities on earth, one of the last great urban walking environments, a vibrant, beautiful city where the people talk fast, dress well, and are better entertainment than any performer you could pay to see. I have dozens of friends in this city. And I have a laptop with WiFi and a Sidekick email pager. My days here, my walks here, my peoplewatching and shopping here is sliced up into tiny chunklets, interrupted by the need to check in on my mail and cope with it before it gets too backlogged.

I'm not just talking about work-related stuff -- hell, that stuff needs my attention and I'm glad to give it. I'm talking about the dross and the casual personal notes and the idle questions and the spam, of course, the 600+ daily bits of ping-and-pong, SYN-and-ACK that I exchange, just to keep all my plates a-spinning in my life. As Glenn says, "I believe that eternal work is as close to damnation as we're allowed to see on this material plane."

It's one of my pet peeves that productivity is required to increase every month to indicate a healthy economy. In fact, increased productivity often comes at the expense of the family life so beloved by pro-business politicians. In the blue-collar world, increased productivity means a faster pace (and thus more accidents or decreased quality) or illegal off-the-clock hours. It rarely means more money.

White-color workers of all stripes are expected to spend ever-more downtime hours working so their days start when they wake and check email, extend through the commute into the office, and follow them home and over weekends.

When my uncle worked at HP in the 80s and 90s as a manager, they tried to get him to take a very early personal computer home, and he refused. He knew they would demand that much more work from him on top of his long hours. (Ah, the days, when you could turn down a computer.)

To quote a popular phrase at Amazon.com after my time there: you can work long, hard, or smart; pick any three.

Lunar casino slated for Vegas
The Moon is a 10,000-room lunar-themed sci-fi casino planned for construction in Los Vegas. It looks like it will be cool in a kind of instant-obsolescence, 1939 Futurama/1955 Tomorrowland/Toffler goofy-futuristic kind of way. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:26:06 PM permanent link to this entry

Barbie gets a blog
Madison Avenue has discovered blogging and given Barbie her own blog. As Ishbadiddle notes, she's not listed on NYC Bloggers -- yet.

11/7/2002 Who "New"?
Went to visit Chelsea at the flea market today. The booth next to hers had some fab jewelry. I'm usually into buying "new" but this is the kind of stuff you just can't find in a store. Way cool.

First human clones to gestate, conquer shortly
Squillionaire narcissists are about to give birth to the first generation of human clones, creating an army of priveleged freaks whose bizarre, unforseen mutations will surely make them princes among (wo)men and so forth.

According to Ireland Online, Antinori said the mother is in her 33rd week of pregnancy and the child weighs 5.5 pounds. He refused to say where the infant would be born, saying it would be only in "countries where this is permitted."

Ed Felten's radical technology agenda
Great article about Ed Felten's political awakening and the work that the Comp Sci professor has done to turn lawmakers on to the dangers of allowing entertainment companies to call the shots in the technology world.

In September, in written testimony before a House of Representatives hearing, Mr. Felten criticized legislation drafted by Rep. Howard L. Berman, a California Dem-ocrat, that aims to thwart sharing of music through peer-to-peer networks. If it became law, Mr. Felten said, the measure could also interfere with legitimate Web activity because the Web itself is a peer-to-peer file-sharing system. Researchers, for example, who post excerpts from copyrighted material to their Web sites without permission from the copyright holder could have their Internet service disrupted, even though such postings may be fair use.

Furthermore, he said, a provision in the bill that would allow copyright holders to launch denial-of-service attacks against peer-to-peer networks could prompt "an arms race" between the creators of the networks and copyright owners, with the network creators ultimately prevailing. Denial-of-service attacks attempt to overwhelm computers by sending them such huge amounts of information that they become incapable of responding to legitimate queries.

"The bill, as written, flatly authorizes 'self-help' attacks on the World Wide Web, and not just users of file-trading networks like KaZaA and Gnutella," Mr. Felten said.

Feds raid cable-modem overclockers
FBI agents stormed the homes of cable-modem customers in Ohio, acting on a tip that the suburbanites had been modifying their cable-modems to deliver a higher quality of service than their crappy ISP had been delivering. They estimate damages from use of the higher-quality service at $250,000, a number derived through careful investigation and the use of a dart-board. Link Discuss (Thanks, Ren!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:04:16 PM permanent link to this entry

SOMAFM returns to the online airwaves
Popular downbeat-techno online radio station SomaFM is back!

Thanks to everyone's help in writing to congress and encouraging them to pass HR5469. About 10 days ago, it passed in both the House and Senate. (...)

This weekend, we're launching a new web site, and have now put most of our core stations back on the air: Groove Salad, Secret Agent, Drone Zone, Indie Pop Rocks! and Beat Blender. You can get to them from http://somafm.com. More channels will follow as we rebuild our infrastructure.

We'll still need to come up with about $6500 (hopefully less, the final rates are not agreed to, but we know that it shouldn't be more than $6500 for previous years, and $2000 or 12% of our revenues (donations) going forward. It's still a lot of money for what over the air radio broadcasters get for free, but we can work with this, and stay in the air.

What if Spiderman had been a Bollywood epic?
The movie would have looked a little something like this. The cardinal rule of Bollywood filmmaking: more is better. So, add some Japanese anime characters, and voila.
UPDATE: OK, now we have a full-out widescreen extravaganza, complete with the Taj Mahal. Now with cheesy bhangra midi file soundtrack. (html wizardry from Chris!): Link

Discuss (Thanks, Richard!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:39:41 AM permanent link to this entry

Net Nanny Gone Wild: Web-filtering software bans library's own site
Clive says:

Net Nanny strikes again. The Flesh Public Library in Ohio recently revamped its web sites -- only to find that it now fell afoul of the filtering software on its own computers. The library couldn't even view its *own* site, because Net Nanny didn't like the idea of the words "flesh" and "public" appearing next to one another.

Amazing repro-retro sets
Predicta, cool old repro TVs for $1100 - $3300, capable of tuning all 181+ channels. Link Discuss (Thanks, bakabon38!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:46:02 AM permanent link to this entry

Bill Wyman vs Bill Wyman
Bill Wyman, an editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, must stop using his name, says Bill Wyman, formerly a musician for a British rock band called the Rolling Stones. The bassist's lawyers sent editor Wyman a cease-and-desist letter, stating that if the editor could prove his legal name was Bill Wyman, he would be allowed to use it in his articles only if he included a "prominent disclaimer." The best part is that Bill Wyman, editor, was born with his name 41 years ago, while Bill Wyman, bassist, changed his name from William George Perks 39 years ago. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 8:29:02 AM permanent link to this entry

High-velocity money in a small world
Where's George: Enter the serial numbers of the bills in your wellet and find out if any other whackos have previously handled your ATM food-stamps. Annotate your wallet's contents with "WWW.WHERESGEORGE.COM" and get email everytime "your" money is handled. Race your bills around the world and realize just how goddamned dirty money really is. Track high-velocity money as it circumnavigates the globe. Link Discuss (Thanks, JC!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:25:49 AM permanent link to this entry

RIAA believes that it has authority to remove articles from British websites
An RIAA spokeswoman has written a letter to the Register objecting to its coverage of the recent US Naval Academy seizure of MP3-sharing students' computers at the behest of the recording industry. Fair enough, but get this:

Your rewriting of The Capital's story was a complete fabrication. I demand a retraction and I demand the story be taken down immediately.

Thank you.

Amy Weiss
Senior VP, Communications
Recording Industry Association of America

PC-in-lunchbox
Beautiful casemod: putting a mini-PC in a tin Batman lunchbox. The only way to improve it would have been substituting a vintage Roy Rogers lunchbox for the louche modern Batman. Link Discuss (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:34:39 AM permanent link to this entry

Monday, November 25, 2002

Portrait of blogger as a young fan
Purely self-indulgent link for friends and family. Here's me at age 12 or 13, at a signing by Charles De Lint at Bakka Books in Toronto, where I later ended up working for three years. I'm cute as a friggin' bug. Also pictured: childhood pal Onil Bhattacharya (obscured by book). (Photo by Tom Robe) Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:52:55 PM permanent link to this entry

Winter Vomiting Disease
Who'd a thunk that there was an actual illness called "Winter Vomiting Disease?"

Winter vomiting disease is currently spreading fast through Scotland and northern England. The disease, also known as 'small round structured virus' (SRSV), is very infectious and brings on a sudden onset of vomiting. The vomiting period can last from 24-36 hours.

Link-and-think, Dec 1
Link-and-Think: the online focal point of World AIDS Day. Link, participate, and make the world a more thoughtful place on December 1. Link Discuss (Thanks, Brad!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:21:52 PM permanent link to this entry

Get Your War On and Jim Munroe at Modern Times next week
There are a pair of terrific events coming up next week at Modern Times Books in San Francisco's Mission district: on Dec 5 is David Rees, signing copies of his Get Your War On and on Dec 6, it's Jim Munroe, author of Everyone in Silico and Angry Young Spaceman. Both events start at 7:30 PM. See you there! Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:19:49 PM permanent link to this entry

1997: John Ashcroft says Internet surveillance is bad bad bad.
In a 1997 paper written by John Ashcroft titled "Keep Big Brother's Hands Off The Internet," the then-senator complained that Clinton was setting up an "Orwellian" system to track digital information.

"In order to guarantee that the United States meets the challenge of this new means of commerce, communication, and education, government must be careful not to interfere. We should not harness the Internet with a confusing array of intrusive regulations and controls. Yet, the Clinton administration is trying to do just that."

"There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?"

Readymade Pringles antenna for Don't-DIYers.
I'm going to get one of these readymade Pringle can antennas for $20. They look cool, too! What a great idea. [Update: Dave Sifry warns that if you buy and use a Cantenna, "you could get your door busted in by the FCC, as ubergeek Tim Pozar explains on the BAWUG list"] Link Discuss (Thanks, May!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 4:03:45 PM permanent link to this entry

Woman pulls out 18 teeth with pliers to thwart hallucinatory fly
"She was found ... with her body covered in blood and 18 of her teeth either in a bowl or on the bed... [S]he told Bolton Crown Court she had removed her own teeth in an attempt to stop a 'luminous green and pink fly' from choking her." Link Discuss (Thanks, Pedro)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 3:17:46 PM permanent link to this entry

Deadbeat parents ruin kids' credit
College freshmen applying for their first credit-cards are discovering that their parents have already taken out plastic in their names and run up huge debts, ruining their credits. Sharper than a serpent's tooth is a deadbeat dad. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:52:41 PM permanent link to this entry

New AbFab this Xmas
A new episode of Absolutely Fabulous will air this Xmas on the BBC. Any Britons with the capability of and willingness to make a VCD or NTSC recording will be my forever-and-ever pal. Link Discuss (via Of Mole Queens, Cove Girls, Trixie Friends & Food )
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:34:22 PM permanent link to this entry

Imagineeringland: the busiest place on Earth
Long, kickass Wired feature about the reuilding of Disney's Tomorrowland in an era of a small, neutered Imagineering department.

Tomorrowland has always been the most seamful piece of the Parks, starting with the 1955 Disneyland opening. They ran out of money long before completion and had to triage a lot of the park (workers ran around putting Latin plaques on all the weeds that hadn't been landscaped out of existence, turning them into instant botanical exhibits). Tomorrowland was essentially written out of the budget and given over to private corporate exhibitors, like the Dairy Farmers of Amercia (Cow of Tomorrow: a papier-mache cow with an IV in her hock who watched videos of pastures all day), Kaiser Alumninium (Aluminium Hall of Fame: a giant, walk-through aluminium telescope with exhibits on the was that aluminium makes for a better tomorrow), and a nonsenical exhibit that consisted of a tent containing a midget in the giant-squid costume from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, waving its tenticals.

Over the years, there have been many attempts to modernize -- and retro-fy -- Tomorrowland and nail the moving target of The Future.

The Imagineers will begin testing Mission: Space, first with Disney employees, later with park guests in Orlando. The goal with big attractions like Space is to move through as many as 2,500 guests an hour. If Space turns out to be a landmark attraction — the kind of ride people get in line for again as soon as they come — it'll help Epcot's attendance, which dropped 15 percent last year, more than any other Disney park. (The 20-year-old Epcot is still the third-most visited park in the US, after the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland, according to Amusement Business, an industry publication.) And it would give Disney bragging rights if tourists consider Space to be even cooler than Universal's $100 million Spider-Man ride across town, which is widely regarded as the industry's most advanced attraction.

For the Imagineers, building a ride like Mission: Space is a reminder of the good old days, a visible indicator that everything is actually OK. "If there's a perception that the business guys have taken over, I would point out that the projects we're doing now have the same or higher budgets as we've had before," says Goodman.

The tell-tale webcam
The NYT covers "Necrocam," a movie about a Dutch nerd with terminal cancer who has a webcam put in his coffin to observe his post-final days.

The movie's accomplishment is to capture the way technology, including the Internet, has permeated contemporary culture. This is our youth's daily existence. The film's young people communicate through online messages, play computer games and record their pledge with a video camera instead of a quill dipped in blood. For them technology is an extension of life. So it is only logical that cyberspace would play a role in death.

This comfort with the Internet stands in contrast to how technology is typically depicted in Hollywood films, where it is glorified or, more often, demonized. Thus for every "You've Got Mail," in which Tom Hanks cutely woos Meg Ryan over the Internet, there are a dozen clones of "Birthday Girl," in which Nicole Kidman is a devious Net-order bride. The James Bond films take both approaches, so that a technological threat endangers the world until it can be defeated by 007 and his gadgetry.

Japanese perspective on Moblogging
My pal Yuichi "Jnutella" Kawasaki has written a great piece on Moblogging for Hotwired Japan. The mechanical translation is a little stilted, but still fascinating.

And a web log is also a development way still more. I think that it is Japan where the cellular phone which the thing with a high possibility that a web log will increase rapidly from now on high-performance-ized spreads. Although it is the usage that news flash nature is also a very important element, summarizes its idea immediately and attaches notes to the phenomenon which has occurred now, in a web log, the optimal tool for this is a cellular phone.

The cellular phone is high-performance-ized at frightful speed. The data which mail, a browser, a camera, and a video function take lessons from a device, and goes back and forth in connection with it has changed from the text to video from an image and an image. The cellular phone with a camera added the function "cutting off a scene and appending high-density information as contents" to the feature of mail of telling feeling and a thought. By these highly efficient-ization, it can be said that the cellular phone evolved into 'the terminal which makes rich contents'.

Windows app helps Bush run the country
Screen shot of Bush's Window's app. It made me chuckle. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:58:28 AM permanent link to this entry

Thailand to introduce Digital ID cards in April '03
The Thai government will introduce the country's first digital ID card that includes a chip storing personal data by next April, according to a recent Bangkok Post report. Plans include issuing the smart card to newborns and students, and widespread implementation is scheduled within 3-5 years. Excerpt:

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:25:11 AM permanent link to this entry

Sunday, November 24, 2002

CodeCon 2003 Call for Papers
Last year's CodeCon conference was the best technical event I attended all year. It was full of meaty, dense discussion of real and in-progress P2P hacks and projects. The 2003 CodeCon will be held February 22-24, 2003 at Club NV in San Francisco. The organizers have posted a Call for Papers -- if you hack the net, you need to be at this show.

All submissions should be accompanied by source code or an application. When possible, we would prefer that the application be available for interactive use during the workshop, either on a presenter-provided demonstration machine or one of the conference kiosks.

Ideally, demonstrations should be usable by attendees with 802.11b connected devices either via a web interface, or locally on Windows, UNIX-like, or MacOS platforms. Cross-platform applications are most desirable.

Great technical spamfighting overview
Good technical/academic overivew of strategies for automatically identifying spam, including Bayesian distribution and Bayesian trigram filters.

For purposes of my testing, I developed two collections of messages: spam and legitimate. Both collections were taken from mail I actually received in the last couple of months, but I added a significant subset of messages up to several years old to broaden the test. I cannot know exactly what will be contained in next month's e-mails, but the past provides the best clue to what the future holds. That sounds cryptic, but all I mean is that I do not want to limit the patterns to a few words, phrases, regular expressions, etc. that might characterize the very latest e-mails but fail to generalize to the two types.

In addition to the collections of e-mail, I developed training message sets for those tools that "learn" about spam and non-spam messages. The training sets are both larger and partially disjoint from the testing collections. The testing collections consist of slightly fewer than 2000 spam messages, and about the same number of good messages. The training sets are about twice as large.

A general comment on testing is worth emphasizing. False negatives in spam filters just mean that some unwanted messages make it to your inbox. Not a good thing, but not horrible in itself. False positives are cases where legitimate messages are misidentified as spam. This can potentially be very bad, as some legitimate messages are important, even urgent, in nature, and even those that are merely conversational are ones we do not want to lose. Most filtering software allows you to save rejected messages in temporary folders pending review -- but if you need to review a folder full of spam, the usefulness of the software is thereby reduced.

The Monstrous and the Marvelous!
"Unicorns' horns, mermaids' skeletons, minerals of breath-taking beauty, fossils, preserved animals and plants, sea-shells, monstrous births, insects in amber, wax effigies, death-masks, ivory carvings of incredible virtuosity, automata that imitated living things, clocks, musical instruments, lenses, celestial globes..." Thames & Hudson has just published a gorgeous new art book about Cabinets of Curiosities! I, for one, am delighted if the resurgence of the 17th century Wunderkammern meme means that the pendulum is swinging again toward an age of wonder! Link Discuss
posted by David Pescovitz at 6:49:45 PM permanent link to this entry

Playmobil Tarot!
Wonderful Tarot deck made from Playmobil figures. Link Discuss (via JWZ)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:16:35 AM permanent link to this entry

Saturday, November 23, 2002

Luke takes Lessig's challenge
Luke Francl has taken Larry Lessig at his word. Following up on Larry's challenge to give as much money to defending freedom and independent artists as he spends giving to the media oligopoly for CDs, movies, and cable/DSL, he is donating regularly to good causes, matching his spending.

August 2002 EFF $100. Recieved a baseball cap, "Fair use has a posse" t-shirt, and a sticker

October Radio K, local college radio station which plays tons of indie and local music. $120 ($10/month for the next 12 months). Supposedly recieved a t-shirt, but I never picked it up. I'm not totally sure when I committed to this donation.

Morbus Iff, donation for AmphetaDesk. $50

November Sam Brown, Exploding Dog. Paid $65 for an Exploding Dog print.

Total: $335

Farscape fans make commercial
Farscape fans have paid to privately produce and air a commercial begging the SciFi channel to put the show back into production. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:30:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Friday, November 22, 2002

Charlie's book-cover!
My pal and collaborator Charlie Stross has gotten an advance peek at the cover of his forthcoming -- and wonderful -- novel, Singularity Sky. It's wicked beautiful. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:35 PM permanent link to this entry

ScamAssassin: marry Snopes to a mail-filter
LazyWeb is Matt Jones's coinage that describes the process whereby one throws out an idea in the hopes that someone else will build it. Here's my LazyWeb idea; I call it "ScamAssassin." The idea is to build an email filter (maybe a SpamAssassin module?) that identifies email that contains a hoax or scam that can be found on Snopes or Purportal and pastes in a warning at the top of the message, so:

FROM: BARRISTER AKINI ABBEY
OKEAYA INNEH LAW FIRM
ATTORNEYS/LEGAL PRACTITIONERS.
NIGERIA

ATTENTION: XXXXXXXXXX
DEAR SIR/MADAM,

COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON. GRACE AND PEACE AND LOVE FROM THIS PART OF THE ATLANTIC TO YOU. I HOPE MY LETTER DOES NOT CAUSE YOU TOO MUCH EMBARRASSMENT AS I WRITE TO YOU IN GOOD FAITH BASED ON THE CONTACT ADDRESS GIVEN TO ME BY A FRIEND WHO WORKS AT THE NIGERIAN EMBASSYIN YOUR COUNTRY. PLEASE EXCUSE MY INTRUSION INTO YOUR PRIVATE LIFE.

This note appears to be a "419" or "Nigerian letter" scam. See http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/nigeria.htm for more

FROM: BARRISTER AKINI ABBEY
OKEAYA INNEH LAW FIRM
ATTORNEYS/LEGAL PRACTITIONERS.
NIGERIA

ATTENTION: XXXXXXXXXX
DEAR SIR/MADAM,

COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON. GRACE AND PEACE AND LOVE FROM THIS PART OF THE ATLANTIC TO YOU. I HOPE MY LETTER DOES NOT CAUSE YOU TOO MUCH EMBARRASSMENT AS I WRITE TO YOU IN GOOD FAITH BASED ON THE CONTACT ADDRESS GIVEN TO ME BY A FRIEND WHO WORKS AT THE NIGERIAN EMBASSYIN YOUR COUNTRY. PLEASE EXCUSE MY INTRUSION INTO YOUR PRIVATE LIFE.

Howard Rheingold on SmartMobs on the WELL
Howard Rheingold is being interviewed in the WELL's public conference about his book SmartMobs. Nice stuff.

The FCC was set up to regulate the spectrum on behalf of its owners -- the citizens. It happened in the wake of the Titanic disaster, where "interference" was an issue. Radio waves don't physically interfere with each other -- they pass through each other. But the radios of the 1920s were "dumb" insofar as they lacked the ability to discriminate between signals from nearby broadcasters on the same frequencies. So the regime we now know emerged -- broadcasters are licensed to broadcast in a particular geographic area in a particular frequency band. For the most part, licenses to chunks of spectrum are auctioned, and the winner of the auction "owns" that piece of spectrum. We have seen in recent years that the owners of broadcast licenses have amassed considerable wealth, and that those owners have consolidated ownership in a smaller and smaller number of more and more wealthy entities. And of course, political power goes along with that wealth. These aren't widget-manufacturing industries. These are enterprises that influence what people perceive and believe to be happening in the world.

Recently, different new radio technologies have emerged. Cognitive radios are "smarter" in that they have the capability to discriminate among competing broadcasters. Software-defined radio makes it possible for devices to choose the frequency and modulation scheme that is most efficient for the circumstances. Ultra-wideband radio doesn't use one slice of spectrum, but sends out ultra-short pulses over all frequencies. It is possible now to think of "intelligent" broadcast and reception devices that use the spectrum in a way similar to the way routers use the Internet: devices can listen, and if a chunk of spectrum isn't being used by another device for an interval (millionths or billionths of seconds), the device can broadcast on that frequency; reception devices are smart enough to hop around and put the digital broadcasts together, roughly similar to the way packets assemble themselves as they find their way through the Internet. Again, let me caution that there are probably many people who read this who can point out gross technical generalizations and slight inaccuracies in this description. The point, however, is that spectrum no longer has to be regulated the way it used to be. Politically, however, those interests that benefitted from the traditional regime have the ear and pocketbooks of rulemakers, whether they are regulators or legislators. Yochai Benkler at Yale has proposed an "open spectrum" regime, and Lawrence Lessig has discussed a mixed regime, in which parts of the spectrum continue to be owned and sold the way they have been, but other parts are opened to be treated as a commons.

All-terrain wheelchair videos
Nice video of the iBOT, Dean Kamen's climbing/all-terrain wheelchair, in action. The real astonishing stuff here is the stairclimbing and the "balance" function. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Ricochet resurrected in San Diego
Wireless broadband service provider Ricochet just re-launched consumer service in San Diego, increasing the total number of urban areas covered by the service to three (the others are Dallas and Denver). They're offering a free modem incentive to new subscribers, and re-subscribers get a free month's service... but that $44/month fee seems insanely steep now, given the many other options that now exist for bandwidth-hungry wireless nomads. They ruled, back in the day, with 51,000 subscribers in 21 markets at their peak. I was once a very happy customer, and went into an extended depression when the little green light on my Ricochet modem stopped smiling back at me. The service went under in August, 2001 when previous owner Metricom BK'd. Their tech assets were acquired by Aerie Networks later that year.

The new service, once consumer-driven, has expanded its footprint to include public safety networks and municipal applications. For nearly a year, Ricochet has been testing its wireless mesh network service with the city's Denver Advanced Wireless Network for emergency and disaster preparedness. Ricochet's return to San Diego is due in part to a lease agreement with the city of San Diego to provide wireless access to city-run departments in exchange for city rights of way.(...)

Ricochet boasts speeds of up to 176 kbps, which according to the spokesperson are Ricochet's actually speeds, not its "burst" speed, which is what many DSL providers and wireless carriers use to lure in consumers.

"Any wireless technology has the capability to "burst," but that's not your average speed," said the spokesperson.

Ricochet's burst speeds are up to 400 kbps, the spokesperson said.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:10:09 AM permanent link to this entry

Kevin Bacon's dad rides skateboard
92-year-old Ed Bacon stages skateboard protest in Philly's LOVE Park:

Who is Ed Bacon? For starters he is the father of Kevin Bacon. But more importantly, he is the architect who created LOVE Park, Dilworth Plaza (in front of City Hall) and the Municipal Services plaza. Basically he is the accidental genius behind creating the perfect atmosphere for street skateboarding.

So why is he protesting? Ed Bacon thinks it's a shame that the city is turning its back on skateboarders. Ed has been writing into various local newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and the City Paper in opposition to the laws against skateboarders. He always angrily opposed Mayor Street and his stance on LOVE Park.

Adverstudies: pharma ad agencies producing medical "research"
Scary-as-hell story about advertising agencies who specialize in pharmaceuticals getting involved in "research," commissioning studies in support of their clients' dope and pushing editorial boards of scientific journals to adopt their conclusions.

Ad agency executives say they do nothing to distort the research process. But critics worry that science is being sacrificed for the sake of promotion. "You cannot separate their advertising and marketing from the science anymore," said Dr. Arnold S. Relman, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites) and a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (news - web sites). "Ad agencies are not in the business of doing science."...

"We would like to help draft this manuscript," Marcia Zabusky, a vice president of Intramed, told the doctors in a conference call, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by The New York Times, "and then submit it to you for your for your editing and for approval."

During the call, Shane Schaffer, a Novartis marketing executive, told the doctors that the company wanted "a quick, down and dirty" article. A study expected to provide scientific data showing Ritalin LA's advantages was not scheduled to start until the following day, he said, but the lack of research findings should not be an obstacle.

Friday Web Zen: Keyword smackdown!
Cheaper than horseracing, tidier than a dogfight. Pit opposing keywords against each other at Googlefight to measure zeitgeist heft. For instance: "Xeni" vs. "Xena": she kicks my ass (937,000 entries for the Amazon Warrior Princess in Google, vs. a measly 6,590 for me). Try also: "Marilyn Manson vs. Marylin Monroe," "Googlefight vs. waste of time," and "OJ Simpson vs. Homer Simpson." Link Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:46:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Domino mosaic art
Robert sez: "I've come up with a new way of making mosaics out of dominoes. (An artist named Ken Knowlton came up with another way in the 1980s.) Here's what happens: You give me a picture. I then take out 48 (or 49 or 100) complete sets of dominoes and arrange them (using some software I wrote) so that when we step back from the dominoes, they look like the picture. The site contains (virtual) 48-set domino portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, etc., and photographs of a 16-set portrait of Marilyn Monroe made of real dominoes." Link Discuss (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:41:24 AM permanent link to this entry

Pay for metered city parking via SMS
Scientists at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) are developing a new, wireless way of paying for urban parking:

[C]ustomers will need to register their mobile phone number and vehicle details online. They can then prepay their parking fees by credit card, as well as check their account balance and parking history or change their vehicle details online, at any time.

Once users have curbed their car, they then dial a phone number displayed at the lot that will, in a matter of minutes, relay back to them an SMS stating either that the meter has started ticking, or that they have insufficient funds. Parking inspectors can view a list of vehicles authorised to park in the area using a phone or handheld computer.

Alternatively, customers can call a different number (again displayed at the car park) that is supported by a talking computer. The system asks the customer how many hours they wish to pay for and, if they have more than one car, which car they are parking. The time of the call is logged, the account is checked for its balance, debited and a confirmation message is sent to the caller.

Hot laptop burns willie
A man's laptop horribly burned his genitals. I can't find a single paragraph from this story that I'm willing to quote -- for fear that some of you might be eating. Suffice it to say that the words "crust," "suppurate," "blister" and "scrotal" all figure heavily. Link Discuss (Thanks, Miladus!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:10:51 AM permanent link to this entry

Science site shutdown robs the public
Last week, the Department of Energy bowed to pressure from private science publishers and shut down a its free website with gobs of great science samizdata. Dan Gillmor's rant on the subject is fantastic:

The correct word for what has happened here is "theft" -- because the government has allowed private interests to steal from the public domain.

The claim that this was done to save money -- a paltry $200,000 a year -- doesn't even begin to pass the smell test. This was an arrangement on behalf of corporate interests, and an absolute thumb in the eye to the public.

It's as if the book publishers persuaded communities to shutter public libraries. (Not that they won't try; e-publishing could lead to that by default.)

Now, anyone who wants access to information collected and/or catalogued using our tax dollars will have to pay for it. Pay again, that is.

Watch this kind of thing happen again and again. America's government doesn't work for the people. It works for campaign contributors and corporate interests, for the rich and powerful who are getting just about everything they want from the government they've purchased.

What to do? Some public-minded foundation should immediately offer to put this back online, by covering the $200,000 cost. Or the collective brain out there should find a way to put the data up on peer-to-peer systems.

Yes, any of these workarounds would set a bad precedent, encouraging more of these information removals. But the bad stuff is already happening. Since it's obvious that the government won't do the right thing, we're going to have to go around the government that no longer works for citizens.

Switch stoner speaks
Ellen Feiss, the Switch ad stoner poster girl has broken her long silence and given an interview to a college paper.

Does it bother you at all that some of your fame might be related to your perceived state of sobriety in the commercial?

It doesn’t really bother me. I do admit to looking pretty out of it in that commercial — I think I look horrible. It was after school, but I was the last person to make the commercial, so by the time I made it it was like 10, so I was really tired. The funny thing was, I was on drugs! I was on Benedryl, my allergy medication, so I was really out of it anyway. That’s why my eyes were all red, because I have seasonal allergies. But no one believes me.

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Airport confiscata sold off at Goodwill
A Sacramento Goodwill store is selling off all the edged cutlery confiscated at the local airport security checkpoint. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:43:25 PM permanent link to this entry

Nortec Collective psychofunky digital-art bash in Tijuana, Sat. 11-23-02
If you're within 500 miles of Tijuana, drop what you're doing and start driving. The eternally-inventive, always-brilliant group of musicians, DJs and artists known as the Nortec Collective are holding another Nortec City bash this Saturday in TJ. The event celebrates the release of their new Beat Shop compilation CD (free at the door), and will feature live performances by collective musicians (Bostich, Fussible, Panoptica, and others), plus crazy far-out digital and low-fi art, and experimental films. Takes place at Playas de Tijuana / Cortijo San Jose. Event details here.

My photologue from a previous Nortec City bash on September 8, 2001 is here. Two archived articles I wrote about the Nortec Collective are here (GOTHAM magazine), and here (Silicon Alley Reporter).

Link Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:11:35 PM permanent link to this entry

LAT Op/Ed on technology and totalitarianism in America
Interesting essay by GWU Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, in which he puts forth the argument that technological advancements are enabling the creation of an Orwellian state:

In some ways, [the recently-appointed head of the DARPA "Information Awareness Office," Ret. Vice Adm. and former National Security Advisor John M.] Poindexter is the perfect Orwellian figure for the perfect Orwellian project. As a man convicted of falsifying and destroying information, he will now be put in charge of gathering information on every citizen. To add insult to injury, the citizens will fund the very system that will reduce their lives to a transparent fishbowl.

What is most astonishing is the utter lack of public debate over this project.Over the last year, the public has yielded large tracts of constitutional territory that had been jealously guarded for generations. Now we face the ultimate act of acquiescence in the face of government demands.

For more than 200 years, our liberties have been protected primarily by practical barriers rather than constitutional barriers to government abuse. Because of the sheer size of the nation and its population, the government could not practically abuse a great number of citizens at any given time. In the last decade, however, these practical barriers have fallen to technology.

Scientists seek to create man-made life-form
Gene scientist Craig Venter and Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith are developing a plan to create a single-celled, partially synthetic organism with the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain life. If they're successful, the tiny man-made cell would have the capability of reproducing on its own, to to create a population of cells unlike any known to exist. Venter is founder and former principal of Celera Genomics, the company that beat out publicly-funded researchers in the race to map the human genome.

The project raises philosophical, ethical and practical questions. For instance, if a man-made organism proved able to survive and reproduce only under a narrow range of laboratory conditions, could it really be considered life? More broadly, do scientists have any moral right to create new organisms?

Frankenstein's plankton
Nice Wired interview with an entrepreneur who plans on sequencing the genome of all organisms in the ocean:

The goal is to engineer a new species of microorganism from scratch — to improve metabolic function by orders of magnitude so that we can make biological CO² scrubbers for power plants. The organism's genetic structure would allow it to exist only in a specialized environment, so if it ever got outside, it would immediately die.

Based on the metabolic rates of existing microorganisms, you'd probably need something the size of an ocean. But if we can boost metabolic processes 1,000-fold, we can reduce carbon volumes 1,000-fold. Many biological processes have been sped up 10,000-fold or greater. I think it has to get down to a swimming pool-sized environment for a power plant, or a reactor that size

Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Doc talks Creative Commons
Doc "Doc" Searls interviewed today for the Creative Commons:

Well, as we pointed out in Cluetrain, business is thick with the language of shipping. We have something we call "content" that we "load" into a "channel" and "address" for "delivery" to a "consumer" or an "end user." Even a category as human-oriented as customer support talks about "delivering" services...

That said, the businesses that are most afflicted with pipe-mindedness are the ones that are quickest to call everything "content." It's amazing to me that I used to be a writer, and now I'm a "content provider." Entertainment and publishing are the biggest offenders here, at least in the sense that they see the Net entirely as a plumbing system. The whole notion of a "commons" is anathema to the plumbing construct.

This was the problem with all these dot-com acronyms with a 2 in the middle -- B2B, B2C and so on. "To" was the wrong preposition. As Christine Boehlke put it to me once, the correct middle letter should have been W, because in a real marketplace we do business with people not to them. Does anybody ever shake hands and say "Nice doing business to you!"? Because the Net is more fundamentally a place than a pipe, we do business with each other there, not just to each other. Critical difference.

Million-dollar prize for P=NP proof of Minesweeper
Daen sez: "One of the million-dollar Clay Mathematics Institute problems is the P versus NP problem. There's an excellent description of how minesweeper relates to this problem (it has been proven to be NP-complete) and also descriptions of how to make logic gates out of minesweeper configurations..." Link Discuss (Thanks, Daen!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:50:32 PM permanent link to this entry

Turducken: chicken-in-duck-in-turkey
The turducken is a chicken-stuffed-in-a-duck-stuffed-in-a-turkey. And it's the big thing this T'giving:

A well-prepared turducken is a marvelous treat, a free-form poultry terrine layered with flavorful stuffing and moistened with duck fat. When it's assembled, it looks like a turkey and it roasts like a turkey, but when you go to carve it, you can slice through it like a loaf of bread. In each slice you get a little bit of everything: white meat from the breast, dark meat from the legs, duck, carrots, bits of sausage, bread, herbs, juices and chicken, too.

Google your life
MSFT's new project takes all of your life experiences and puts them in an unstructured database, making a searchable record of your life. I imagine this will including your GPS readings as you walk around, the RFIDs your PDA logs, the numbers you call and the numbers that call you:

It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable. "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life," says Gordon Bell, one of the developers.

The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.

Bell and his colleagues developed MyLifeBits as a surrogate brain to solve what they call the "giant shoebox problem". "In a giant shoebox full of photos, it's hard to find what you are looking for," says Microsoft's Jim Gemmell. Add to this the reels of home movies, videotapes, bundles of letters and documents we file away, and remembering what we have, let alone finding it, becomes a major headache.

Hubcab menagerie
Spectacular gallery of hubcap sculptures. Want want want. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:40:18 PM permanent link to this entry

BBC's new site learns from you
The new BBC homepage does something amazingly clever. Matt Jones sums it up:

Go there... click on News or Sport then click back to the homepage. Try doing that a few times... Notice the background colour of box which you clicked the link from gets a few shades different?

It's all coded so that whatever you click most gets reinforced over time, making it easier to find what you always want. A gentle, reactive form of personalisation that doesn't take away any choices

MSFT's Darknet paper: must read
Microsoft delivered their "Darknet" whitepaper at the Association for Computing Machinery DRM conference early this week. I saw an earlier draft of this, and it's a pretty remarkable paper. MSFT argues that watermarking and DRM are both doomed strategies, as are anti-circumvention laws -- but of course, MSFT is also advocating the Palladium Trusted Computing platform, which obviates the need for any of that stuff in favor of really rigorous technical locks that are enforced in hardware. Still, it's amazing how radical their position ends up. Check out the intro:

People have always copied things. In the past, most items of value were physical objects. Patent law and economies of scale meant that small scale copying of physical objects was usually uneconomic, and large-scale copying (if it infringed) was stoppable using policemen and courts. Today, things of value are increasingly less tangible: often they are just bits and bytes or can be accurately represented as bits and bytes. The widespread deployment of packet-switched networks and the huge advances in computers and codec-technologies has made it feasible (and indeed attractive) to deliver such digital works over the Internet. This presents great opportunities and great challenges. The opportunity is low-cost delivery of personalized, desirable high-quality content. The challenge is that such content can be distributed illegally. Copyright law governs the legality of copying and distribution of such valuable data, but copyright protection is increasingly strained in a world of programmable computers and high-speed networks.

For example, consider the staggering burst of creativity by authors of computer programs that are designed to share audio files. This was first popularized by Napster, but today several popular applications and services offer similar capabilities. CD-writers have become mainstream, and DVD-writers may well follow suit. Hence, even in the absence of network connectivity, the opportunity for low-cost, large-scale file sharing exists.

Words-to-cruft calculator
GetContentSize calculates the ratio of actual verbiage to html cruft on any given URL. Boing Boing is 47.46% content and 52.54% cruft. Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:24:55 PM permanent link to this entry

Samizdata movies from San Fran's antiwar marches
Homegrown video-footage from Monday's Antiwar/Anti-Feinstein demonstration in San Francisco. Link Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:13:04 PM permanent link to this entry

Secrets of management consulting revealed
HuhCorp: the funniest management consulting firm that never was:

Our main strategy is to convince people that we do stuff they can't do themselves, and that we deserve lots of money for it.

The best way to do this is to always look good, and always sound like we know something you don't.

If you're still not convinced, we'll show you lots of market research and cost analysis and global positioning strategy reports to confuse you and hopefully convince you that we're so knowledgeable you couldn't possibly succeed without us. Because you can't. So don't even try.

Lowcarb ascendant
"Atkins Diet" is in the top-ten rising Google queries, and rising, rising, rising. Link Discuss (via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:07:48 PM permanent link to this entry

Using the DMCA to copyright freaking *sale pricing*
Wal-Mart and other retailers are upset that various websites have posted leaked info about their upcoming Black Friday sales. They've decided -- conveniently enough -- that this is a copyright violation, and they're using the freaking DMCA to shut it down. That whacky DMCA, it's the goddamned MacGuyver/Leatherman of copyright laws -- endlessly versatile, endlessly adaptable, slices, dices and makes Julienne civil liberties. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:06:05 PM permanent link to this entry

Woz comes back to the Mac fold
The Woz is breaking his six-year boycott of talking about the Mac and doing a presentation at Macworld San Francisco in January. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:00:04 PM permanent link to this entry

New charges in Bumfights case: beer-and-donut conspiracy
A new round of charges were filed yesterday against producers of the online cult video series Bumfights:

[Prosecutors say] the defendants induced some of the brawls by offering beer and doughnuts... In one sequence, a homeless man named Donald Brennan is shown having sex with a woman described as a drug-addicted prostitute after the filmmakers paid $100 to have "Bumfight" tattooed on his forehead. For beer and doughnuts, Brennan and another homeless man, Rufus Hannah, fought each other Jan. 5 in a La Mesa parking lot while one of the defendants filmed and cheered them on. The following month, Brennan broke his leg fighting with Hannah.

A homeless woman "known only as 'Pork Chop'" was paid $20 to attack Peter LaForte in a San Diego beach bathroom, prosecutors say. The filmmakers later told LaForte that "Pork Chop" accepted the money "because she was hungry," according to the complaint.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:57:55 AM permanent link to this entry

History Revised? Operation TIPS website vanishes
The website for controversial and much-blogged citizen-informant program Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) has disappeared. Background on the program is here, and the former location of a detailed webpage about the program was here. In Politech, Declan McCullagh writes:

It's been mysteriously deleted. I've copied it from Google's cache and mirrored it here. I wonder if the case of the disappearing TIPS has anything to do with the Department of Homeland Security bill [PDF link]:

SEC. 880. PROHIBITION OF THE TERRORISM INFORMATION AND PREVENTION SYSTEM. Any and all activities of the Federal Government to implement the proposed component program of the Citizen Corps known as Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) are hereby prohibited.

Link Discuss (via politech)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:30:48 AM permanent link to this entry

Comdex goodies: New wrist PDA by Fossil
Hip-and-affordable watchmaker Fossil is teaming up with PalmSource and Flextronics to produce two USB-synchronizable "wrist PDAs." The new models are scheduled for consumer release in spring '03, and will include address book, date book, memo pad and calculator, as well as the ability to beam data to full-size PDAs and each other. USAToday story excerpt:

The models, which sell for $199 and $299 but operate identically, each have a 1-inch backlighted screen, far smaller than Palm's usual 21/4 inches square but a bit larger than a traditional watch face. They have a tiny stylus in the wristband for writing information on the screen. The rechargable battery is said to last four days at 30 minutes of use a day.

Though electronic organizers have been built into digital watches before — to transfer data to Timex's Data Link, you hold it up to the PC screen — none has been as full-featured as a PDA, and none has used the Palm operating system. Fossil says the watch has all the capabilities of the Zire, the recently introduced, lowest-priced Palm device at $99.

"Monetizing Anarchy": Jim Griffin on the economics of digital entertainment
Mobile industry news site The Feature just published a great essay by Pho list co-founder and Cherry Lane Digital CEO Jim Griffin that explores whether or not it's possible to "pay for art without controlling art." Disclosure: bb's own Mark Frauenfelder is a contributor there, too. Excerpt:

If there’s a copyright war between technology and entertainment, between delivery and creativity, between left brain and right brain, between people who use stuff and people who make stuff, here’s a prediction for how it ends: A pool of money, and a fair way to divvy it up, all of which will be supervised by government.

This is a safe prediction: Effective control is impractically elusive, inefficient and counterproductive, and we know it. The history of the intersection of electricity and art is actuarial, not actual control. Pleas for copy protection are elaborate misdirection akin to sending the husband to boil water while the wife is having a baby.

The real battle is where the money is: Control of the pools. Simply for music in the United State alone you can count ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, RIAA-SoundExchange, Royalty Logic, NMPA, Harry Fox, AFM, AFTRA – well, the full list of acronyms and their translations would require pages; still worse, multiply it by well over a hundred countries worldwide.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:52:12 AM permanent link to this entry

Hilarious online short film about makin' it in the movie biz
Gut-bustingly funny online short, "The Reel Truth." Dry, sarcastic send-up of what it *really* takes to get ahead in Hollywood [ok, more specifically--TV commercials]. Jim Griffin sez:

"oh so accurate and true ... and proof that a small video can draw a large crowd. Whomever made this will likely recover whatever they spent and then some ..."

Link to Quicktime file. Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:33:11 AM permanent link to this entry

Get your Lunch on: Jazz and War comics in LA, Dec. 4

Jazz artist Les McCann will join "Get Your War On"'s David Rees for a lunchtime culture jam on December 4th, at LA's Knitting Factory.

location: 7021 Hollywood Blvd. (in Hollywood), tel 323-463-0204
starts: 12 noon.
cost: $10 advance, $15 at the door, buffet lunch is extra (but reasonable!).

The afternoon will be David Rees' only central LA speaking engagement, and will consist of selected readings from the GYWO book (blogged here many times, and recently published by Soft Skull Press). The event will also feature video presentations about Adopt-A-Minefield, who will receive the author's royalty on book sales and proceeds from this event. Following David's presentation, acclaimed jazz musician Les McCann will perform new, unreleased material. Note: GYWO website's down at the moment. Buy a book so those pobrecitos can afford more bandwidth!

New Kids on the GPS Grid?
Say hello to the world's first GPS-tracked teen heartthrob. According to a post in entertainment industry newsletter Cynopsis, Ex-New Kid on The Block Jordan Knight will releasing two new singles on December 2 exclusively through his website. The revamped site will also include "JORDAN TRACKER, the: Jordan Knight Positioning System"-- a world map with a blinking dot that represents Jordan's exact, current location as pinpointed by a global positioning device.

Link (Thanks, Stacie!) Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:01:24 AM permanent link to this entry

Crypto: Now is the time
John "Cypherpunks" Gilmore has posted a stirring call-to-arms for Americans to get cryptofied, now.

The US government's moves to impose totalitarian control in the last year (secret trials, enemies lists, massive domestic surveillance) are what some of the more paranoid among us have been expecting for years. I was particularly amused by last week's comments from the Administration that it'll be too hard to retrain the moral FBI agents who are so careful of our civil rights -- so we'll need a new domestic-spying agency that will have no compunctions about violating our civil rights and wasting our money by spying on innocent people...

Now's a great time to deploy good working encryption, everywhere you can. Next month or next year may be too late. And even honest ISPs, banks, airlines (hah), etc, may be forced by law or by secret pressure to act as government spies. Make your security work end-to-end.

Kosher pizza delivered to patrols
PizzaIDF lets anyone, anywhere send pizza and soft-drinks to Israeli soldiers on patrol (BurgerIDF.com has burgers). Ice cream optional. Buy more than $250 worth and get a tax-receipt. "Our deliveries are coordinated with the security forces and pose no security risk." Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:02:55 AM permanent link to this entry

Abandoned buildings: revealed
Dark Passage is a webzine devoted to the exploration of abandoned buildings. It's filled with well-written, lavishly illustrated accounts of exploration of old nut-hatches, ice-palaces and other spooky old real-estate dogs. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:40:22 AM permanent link to this entry

Argentine copper-thieves stripmine the phone-net
As Argentina continues its slide into economic collapse, crooks are dismantling the telephone system by stealing the copper cables and selling them for scrap. A lot of developing countries with crappy telephone service made the leap to digital cellular telephony without a lot of the crufty intermediary stages that the developed world went through, leapfrogging the US and Canada. Maybe Argentina, stripped of wire infrastructure, will make the leap to mesh networking and IP telephony.

During the last six months, as the country's economic crisis has deepened, stealing telephone cables has become increasingly common, authorities say. Thieves are taking the cables because of their copper wires, which can be sold as scrap metal on the open market. Each phone cable carries between 50 and 2,000 pairs of wires. The thicker the cable, the more copper it contains.

About 2,765 kilometers (1,715 miles) of cables have been stolen over the last year, said Pablo Talamoni, a spokesman for Telecom. Much of the stolen copper is apparently being shipped abroad, although authorities aren't sure who is making the shipments.

Great UK newsreel archive
Thousands -- and thousands -- of hours of old British newsreel footage. Tons of free previews, though the hi-rezzes cost a fortune. Link Discuss (Thanks, Wil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:18:00 AM permanent link to this entry

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

How FM radio got so sucky
The Future of Music Coalition has released an amazing, 150-page study of the effect of radio consolidation on the music industry. From the exec summary:

This report is an historical, structural, statistical, and public survey analysis of the effects of the 1996 Telecommunications Act on musicians and citizens.

Each week, radio reaches nearly 95 percent of the U.S. population over the age of 12 (see Chapter 5, p. 69). But more importantly, radio uses a frequency spectrum owned, ultimately, by the American public. Because the federal government manages this spectrum on citizens’ behalf, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a clear mandate to enact policies that balance the rights of citizens with the legitimate interests of broadcasters.

Radio has changed drastically since the 1996 Telecommunications Act eliminated a cap on nationwide station ownership and increased the number of stations one entity could own in a single market. This legislation sparked an unprecedented period of ownership consolidation in the industry with significant and adverse effects on musicians and citizens.

Baltimore traffic, interactive
Amazing interactive map of the Baltimore area, with detailed messages from all the electronic traffic signs, speed on all the major highways, traffic cams, roadwork closures, and weather. Link Discuss (Thanks, Timmer!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:30:54 PM permanent link to this entry

OSX Aibo
Jam: OS X remote-control for an Aibo robot-dog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Ernie!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:38 PM permanent link to this entry

Out of print book about cattle mutilations now online
"An out-of-print book by a pair of Montanans about a wave of cattle mutilations in the Great Falls area in the 1970s is available online and free of charge." Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 1:41:51 PM permanent link to this entry

Holy Cellular Automaton!
Kevin Kelly has a great piece in the new issue of Wired called "God Is the Machine." The idea is that our universe is both a computer and the output of that computation, and that the simulation is the reality.

Any large computer these days can emulate a computer of some other design. You have Dell computers running Amigas. The Amigas, could, if anyone wanted them to, run Commodores. There is no end to how many nested worlds can be built. So imagine what a universal computer might do. If you had a universally equivalent engine, you could pop it in anywhere, including inside the inside of something else. And if you had a universe-sized computer, it could run all kinds of recursive worlds; it could, for instance, simulate an entire galaxy.

If smaller worlds have smaller worlds running within them, however, there has to be a platform that runs the first among them. If the universe is a computer, where is it running? Fredkin says that all this work happens on the "Other." The Other, he says, could be another universe, another dimension, another something. It's just not in this universe, and so he doesn't care too much about it. In other words, he punts. David Deutsch has a different theory. "The universality of computation is the most profound thing in the universe," he says. Since computation is absolutely independent of the "hardware" it runs on, studying it can tell us nothing about the nature or existence of that platform. Deutsch concludes it does not exist: "The universe is not a program running somewhere else. It is a universal computer, and there is nothing outside of it."

FILM: Pedro Almodovar's "Talk to Her" opens in US theaters this week

When Geraldine Chaplin approached the stage to introduce "Talk To Her" at AFIFest in L.A. on Sunday night, anticipation throughout the packed theater was palpable. This 14th film by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, in which Chaplin plays a rare feature role, was billed as the ten-day festival's closing night gem. It didn't disappoint.

"[Almodovar's] sense of comedy reminds me of my father [Charlie Chaplin], and his sense of tragedy reminds me of my grandfather [playwright Eugene O'Neill], she said, "Because of that, he feels like family."

"Talk to Her" begins where the director's last film "All About My Mother" (1999) ended: a gold-fringed theatrical curtain lifts to reveal a stage on which a wordless dance by German choreographer Pina Bausch unfolds. Two seemingly blind women careen toward walls and furniture; a male partner dashes in front of one, just in time to snatch a chair away from her violent trajectory. In the audience, the performance is moving one man to tears. The man seated next to him notices, and wants to tell his incidental companion that he too is moved--but can't.

Later, the two meet again when Marco (played by Dario Grandinetti) visits a clinic where his lover, a female bullfighter (Rosario Flores), lies in a coma having been badly gored in the ring. By chance, Benigno (Javier Camara) is a nurse there, looking after a young ballerina (Leonor Watling) who is also comatose.

"Talk to Her" explores the power of words and silence. It's a magnificent melodrama about the desire to communicate something impossible to someone who is unable to hear it. The film follows the lives of four central characters: two are physically crippled, two emotionally broken in exquisitely compelling ways.

Those more familiar with the in-your-face, over-the-top, punk rococo style of Almodovar's earlier films will find familiar elements here. Rape? Check. Drug overdoses? Check. Bullfighters? Check. Smoldering sexuality? Uh-huh. But shock-for-shock's sake is gone, replaced by an organically ornate, deliciously complex, mellowed aesthetic.

Near the film's surprising close, Chaplin's character--Alicia's mentor--turns to Marco and says, "I'm a ballet teacher; nothing is simple." Nothing about this film is simple. Narrative is divided into three parts, but sidewinds into layered, dreamlike sequences that skip forward, back, and outside of time completely. It's linear, but linear like a rollercoaster, or the tracks of snakes that the otherwise fearless bullfighter Lydia fears so much. It works.

Almodovar veers off into outrageously surreal comic detours--including a silent film within a film in which a palm-sized shrunken man leaps headfirst into his lover's vagina, where he lives happily ever after.

In another dream-scene tableau, Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso delivers a mindblowingly evocative reinvention of a classic Mexican ranchera to an open-air, nighttime assembly. The camera scans the crowd, capturing the impact on audience faces, including those of Lydia and Marco (who is again moved to tears). The song's lyrics presage their fate, and the moment is allegory for art as a primal force capable of stopping time and exploding into the lives of its witnesses:

They say that during the nights, he passed them, crying
they say he didn't sleep anymore
he passed them, drinking
they swear the sky shook at the sound of his crying
he suffered so much over her
until his own death, he cried for her
cucurrrucucu.... dove, don't cry for her anymore.

If anyone needed further proof that Almodovar is one of the most masterful directors alive, this is it. Don't miss this film.

Links: (movie site) (trailer) Discuss ("Talk to Her" opens in U.S. theaters on 11-22-02)

TuCows launches pay-for-clickthrough program for software authors
TuCows, the old-school shareware/freeware/demoware download site, has a new program for its software authors. Authors can pay to place their apps in the listings (though there's still a free option), and get paid for click-throughs on their download pages. Link Discuss (Thanks, Elliot!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:46:11 AM permanent link to this entry

Calliope: Free Software Yahoo! Groups
Calliope is a Free Software version of the back-end for Yahoo! Groups. Y!Groups is a cool service that makes it trivial to form, organize and maintain communities online, but the Yahoo! legal team notorious for making arbitrary decisions about which communities are worth hosting and which ones aren't. Strong, active groups have discovered that their community has been disappeared without warning, membership list vanished, archives disappeared. When Calliope is available, anyone with a little server-space will be able to set up a community server with better policies than Yahoo's.

Calliope really needs developers. If you wanna hack community systems, sign up at SourceForge and keep the net safe for even those groups that Yahoo wants to rid itself of. Link Discuss (Thanks, Will!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:40:59 AM permanent link to this entry

DMCA and the Mac
Adam "TidBITS" Engst has posted his new issue, which takes on the role of the DMCA and the Mac. It's a great piece!

The end result here is that innovation is stifled. Companies that license CSS cannot, even if they wanted to, produce products that consumers might like to buy, such as DVD recorders that could copy a DVD. That keeps new companies, niche players, or even independent programmers from competing with the consumer electronics giants with innovative features that in any way run afoul of CSS. So although the consumer electronics companies might not have minded consumers copying DVDs, since they would sell the equipment to make that happen, it's worthwhile for them to abide by CSS to eliminates potential competition.

Equally as problematic is that the CSS license's numerous requirements force the consumer electronics firms to be technologically responsible for regulating our movie viewing and copying behaviors for the studios. Signing this draconian contract is an all-or-nothing deal, so the movie studios have cleverly managed to pass off the dirty work of technological regulation on everyone else (they just produce the content; the DVD and player manufacturers must implement CSS). It's a big step toward a trusted system in which all the parties are bound by the CSS contract.

(As an aside, another effect of the CSS contracts is also to move the entire issue from the world of copyright law, where there is at least some presumption of needing to benefit the public, into the world of contract law, which doesn't give a damn about the public good. If this continues to the logical extreme, the concept of copyright, and unauthorized access to any content, could be locked up forever in simple contracts that lie underneath a trusted system's technologies, all backed up by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.)

10,000 public domain kids' books online soon
The International Children's Digital Library launches tomorrow, filled with over 200 books in 15 languages. The Library collects public domain texts and makes them available in a variety of formats, suitable for screen-reading and printing. The curators hope to build it up to 10,000 books before long. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:06:56 AM permanent link to this entry

Apple I replicas, built to order
Nice story on a guy who's building replica Apple I PCs, duplicating the machines that The Steve and The Woz built in their garage. The I's will be built to order, but unless Apple licenses out its Apple I ROMs, it won't be functional. Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:58:01 AM permanent link to this entry

Monday, November 18, 2002

Fat != chloresterol
New study sez: gorging on Atkins-compliant greasebombs lowers your chloresterol. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:08:02 PM permanent link to this entry

Grocery cutups
The Royal Photoshopper Army of the Republic of Farkistan is on maneuvers today, cutting up and remixing "Worst-selling grocery items." Sheer hilarity! Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:24:41 PM permanent link to this entry

Wild-ass TCP tools
More goodness from Dan Kaminsky: he's gone gold on "Paketto Keiretsu 1.0," a suite of TCP hacking tools, including this wild-ass visualizer.

Phentropy plots an arbitrarily large data source (of arbitrary data) onto a three dimensional volumetric matrix, which may then be parsed by OpenQVIS. Data mapping is accomplished by interpreting the file as a one dimensional stream of integers and progressively mapping quads in phase space. This process is reasonably straightforward: Take four numbers. Make X equal to the second number minus the first number. Make Y equal to the third number minus the second number. Then make Z equal to the last number minus the third number. Given the XYZ coordinate, draw a point. It turns out that many, many non-random datasets will have extraordinarily apparent regions in 3-space with increased density, reflecting common rates of change of the apparently random dataset. These regions are referred to as Strange Attractors, and can be used to predict future values from an otherwise random system.

iPods for Singaporean museum tours
Dan "TCP/IP hacker" Kaminsky sez:

So I was out in Singapore, giving my "Black Ops Of TCP/IP" speech at Black Hat Asia. Stuck around a while after the con, because heh -- I'd never been in Asia, let along Singapore. So, my last day out there I went to the Singapore Museum of Art, and what do I see as I walk in the door but the Mac flat panel. No big deal -- lots of Mac fans out there; there was even this cute l'il "iMirror" (a mini-mirror built like the new iMac). But I get a bit closer, when I realize something:

You know how museums have "Audio Tours" on tape or localized radio/IR? Check this out -- they gave out iPods, loaded with MP3s describing all the exhibits throughout the building! Everything was organized into folders and absolutely trivial to manage. Best non-music use of an iPod I've ever seen. I snapped a few photos on this *mind bogglingly* small 1.3mpixel camera I bought, but there wasn't much light to support.

Script Kiddee baby clothes
Baby tees that read "Script Kiddee/I am leet, give me warez." The perfect Xmas gift for the hax0r prego-saur in your life. Link Discuss (Thanks, Quinn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:17 AM permanent link to this entry

Childhood beliefs database
I Used to Believe: A database of childhood beliefs:

When I first heard the expression, "post nasal-drip" I thought it was a cereal.

I used to think buying ice ceam from the truck was the same as taking candy from a stranger,

I thought that when newsreaders spoke of 'guerilla fighters', that they were referring to actual gorillas on the rampage ;o)

Fark seeks a marrow-donor
Fark-reader Jason Oh needs a bone-marrow transplant. Fark gets 500,000+ readers a day; I get a sense that they might find a donor through this. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:14:07 AM permanent link to this entry

Multiple-choice for prospective coders
Here's the kind of essay-question quiz that prospective engineering employees are being given. Joey had to take these a couple weeks ago for a job interview:

1.What is good code?
2. What are basic, core, practices for a developer?
3. What do you like about .NET?
4. What don't you like about .NET? What would you change?
5. What do you like about programming?
6. Do you have a favourite programming book? More than one? Which ones? And why.
7. What is the responsibility of QA?
8. Who is Dr Bob?
9. Who is Don Knuth?
10. Who is Kent Beck?
11. What do you know about Linux? Assuming you're familiar with it, what do you like about it? What don't you like? If you haven't used Linux you can skip this question.
12. What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?

Kurzweil's plans for life-extension
Ray Kurzweil interviewed about life-extension and consciousness-uploading in today's Wired News. I'm writing a novel about this stuff, working title "/usr/bin/god" (sure to change, since no one knows how to alphabetize a slash), and this is great background for me.

I think there's some part of our identity and valuable information in our bodies. There's more in our brains, but there's some in our bodies as well. It gets into some technical issues. There's a better way of preserving the brain, which they haven't been able to do with the whole body yet. The vitrification process, which does a better job of preserving structural integrity in the cells, they do with the head but not with the body. At any rate, I'd go for the grade A plan.

One reason I guess it's hard to think about the decision is it's hard to deal with your own mortality. I think your own death is a profound motivator for a lot of behavior, even more than sex. As I mentioned in my talk I think that that meme is very powerful: The idea that life is short and we're only here for a short time. That's a very powerful meme in human thinking and I don't believe that. I don't think we have to die. And the technology and the means of making that a reality is close at hand.

I actually think we have the knowledge right now, today. Not to live forever if knowledge were to stop, but if you combine the knowledge today with the observation that we're actually on the knee of the curve in terms of acceleration of knowledge and these technologies, and that the full blossoming of the biotech revolution will be here within a couple decades, we can remain healthy through that period and then pick up with that technology. In every different aspect of the aging and disease process we have ideas for how to get them under control. I believe we'll do that within a couple of decades...

My diet is low carbohydrate. Not as low as the Atkins diet, but I pretty strictly avoid high-glycemic-index carbs so my carbohydrates are mainly vegetables. I eat fish and other omega-3 fats and a lot of protein. We actually have invented some food products that are low-fat, low-carbohydrate, no sugar, low-calorie, but have the taste appeal of high-carb products, like cake with frosting, and puddings and breads, hot cereal and things like that. They'll be called Ray and Terry's Health Products (after Dr. Terry Grossman, with whom Kurzweil is writing the book A Short Guide to a Long Life). And also a lot of supplement products to implement the kind of things I talked about. I take about 150 supplements a day.

Moxi PVR -- features, flexibility and DRM
Paul Allen's Digeo has demoed its Moxi PVR for OSNews. The device has got lots of sweet features -- runs on GNU/Linux, allows for easy expansion, and will record both digital and analog TV signals. You can plug in CD burners or DVD players, and it doubles a videophone. On a disturbing note, though, the device apparently comes loaded up with DRM out of the box:

PCs are not secure enough for the PVR purpose, as most channel providers won't like to see their content easily pirated. Moxi provides such security after special agreements with the cable provider or channels.

Google ads come to Yahoo
Google's AdWords will now be returned on matching Yahoo searches. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:45:33 AM permanent link to this entry

Meteor shower of a century tonight
Kathryn sez:

Tonight's the last good Leonids this century (and the last known 'upcoming meteor storm' for decades. Unfortunately Toronto gets bad weather tonight, but the Bay Area has clear skies.

Short version: Big meteor storm tonight with 1000-1200 an hour visible during the storm's two peaks. The first visible in Europe at 0400 UT, the second in North America at 1030 UT. See www.spaceweather.com for links including local city time data.

Even with the full moon you should see 200-300 meteors in 15 minutes at the peak. Roughly, the peak will hit sometime around

West coast: 2:00-3:30am local time
East coast: 4:00--early sunrise, local time depends on location. see here for peaks listed by city.

Because of the full moon, you don't have to worry quite so much about being in an extra dark location if you can't travel far- a dark park near a city can be enough. You still want to be away from headlights, porchlights and other direct bright lights.

The show does get better the darker, higher, or drier your location (high moisture in the air scatters moonlight, making it harder to see). Weather: http://weather.gov, weather.com, or wunderground.com.

For viewing, all you'll need are warmth, a comfortable way to sit back/lay down (reclined is best- less neck strain), and lots of sky. With one exception an unobstructed view is best: you'll want one tree / post / building that blocks the moon in the west. (or bring a hat with a brim to block it). Leo will be in the east at the peak, about 45 degrees from the horizon, with the bright planet Jupiter nearby.

[Standard astronomy club request if you're going where a club is: never shine lights, other than red lights, on other meteor observers- it ruins dark-adapted vision. If you need a flashlight, put red film over it, and as much as possible cover all lights (including interior car lights). Because of the full moon Monday you don't have to be a purist, but it is still recommended.]

Argentinian Jews flee to Montreal
Argentina's economic meltdown is prompting the country's Jewish citizens to flee to Montreal, where the old and established Jewish community has been dwindling.

In what he admits is an optimistic projection, Mr. Cummings speaks about doubling the size of the Jewish community in the next 10 years, not just through immigration, but by persuading out-of-town students graduating from Montreal universities to settle in the city.

The Jewish community's interest in Argentina dovetails with an active recruiting effort by the Quebec government, which appointed a full-time immigration adviser to its delegation in Buenos Aires this year. Quebec has already received more than 2,000 immigration requests from Argentines since March.

Many are members of the 22,000-strong Jewish community -- descendants, like Mr. Boim, of Jews who fled Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century.

iPulse for OSX diagnostics
iPulse is a super-dense diagnostic tool for OS X. Instead of running MemoryStick, CPU Monitor and NetMonitor to get a graphic view into your computer's load and activity, run iPulse, learn to decipher its user interface, and have a groovy, high-tech desktop widget. Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:17:36 AM permanent link to this entry

Impending policy war over WiFi
Markoff's got a good general piece in the NYT about WiFi, and he ends with this kicker:

Moreover, many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the digital wireless world warn that powerful interests in the wired Internet business are unlikely to meekly accept such a challenge to the status quo.

Traditional owners of the airwaves — from radio and television station owners to companies like Motorola that provide special-purpose communications systems — may bitterly resist giving up some of their existing spectrum or being subjected to potential interference from competing users. Veterans of the policy battles agree.

"In their candid moments everybody at the F.C.C. will tell you they are being pressured quite severely by various forces that are quite concerned about Wi-Fi," said Reed E. Hundt, a former chairman of the F.C.C. "They're worried that it is really a trenching machine that will uproot the entrenched forces."

Studebaker Avanti
Nice LoC gallery of Raymond Loewy sketches for the Studebaker Avanti. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scoo!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:39:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Toronto and San Francisco: twin webcams
Neat gallery of real-time webcams from approximately parallel locations in the Bay Area and the Greater Toronto Area (like the 401 at Yonge St versus the Golden Gate Bridge, or New City Hall versus Civic Center, etc). Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:35:28 AM permanent link to this entry

Sunday, November 17, 2002

Matt's Doors of Perception notes
Matt "Blackbelt" Jones has posted three days' worth of terse notes from Doors of Perception, the wicked-leet pontifi-con in Amsterdam. That no one invited me to. Not that I mind. Honestly.

Day 1: John Thackara, Janine Benyus, Louis Fernandez-Galliano, David Rokeby, Lars Eric Lundquist, Marko, Axel, Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos

Day 2, Part 1: Bruce Sterling, Michael/Toke, Aditya Dev Sood, Felice Frankel and Marco Susani

Day 2, Part 2: Philip Tabor and Patricia De Martlaere

Day 3, Part 1: Stefano Boeri, Malcolm Macullough, J.C. Herz, Massimo Balzni and Francisa Nori

Day 3, Part 2: Natalie Jeremijenko, Enzio Manzini, Gill Wildman + Ellie Runcie, and Neil Gershenfeld

Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:34:35 PM permanent link to this entry

When bots collide
A.L.I.C.E. is a chatterbot known for its ability to carry on human-like conversations. But when you hook two A.L.I.C.E.s up to one another, the conversation quickly deteriorates into recursion and madness.

Alice2: Why don't you just download me?
Alice1: I love talking to people about that. No you download me.
Alice2: That was not a yes or no question. I don't have any reason to download you.
Alice1: Have you ever had reason to download me?
Alice2: No I don't think I have any reason to download you. But I do have a lot of friends on the web.
Alice1: Umm. Cool. I have a lot of likes and dislikes.
Alice2: Where did you get your likes and dislikes? I have 100 clients.
Alice1: Where did you get your 100 clients? I have a friend named "E.L.V.I.S."

Faith-based AIDS prevention: abstain, pray, and eschew the rubber
The CDC and other health agencies are changing their tune on AIDS-prevention, at the behest of the White House. Instead of promoting condom use, they're asking people to abstain until marriage, and then be monogamous:

"The only 100 percent effective way to avoid nonmarital pregnancy and STD infection is to avoid sexual activity outside a mutually faithful, lifelong relationship - marriage," says the Texas-based Medical Institute for Sexual Health. The group's founder, Dr. Joe S. McIlhaney, Jr., now sits on the presidential AIDS panel.

Nerd R0TC
The Department of Defense has started "CyberCorps," a kind of nerd ROTC. Haxx0r kids get trained, get a Master's degree, hang out with creepy three-letter-agency spooks, then go to work for the Man for two years.

Getting paid to hack using some of the most high-tech equipment on the planet might be worth a few sacrifices and a background check, particularly if it means he can work for a super-cool agency like the NSA.

"That agency didn't even admit it existed until a few years ago," says Mark. "You've got to figure if you want to get into the really hairy stuff, that's where it's gonna be."

He says he really has no idea what kind of "hairy stuff" the NSA might be up to, though he assumes it involves the same type of high-tech gadgetry as was portrayed in the hacker-friendly movie "Enemy of the State."

Congress to get electrical mail delivery service
Since the thraxpanik, all Congressional mail has gone through irradiation before delivery, slowing mail between contituents and their lawmakers. Now, House Administration Committee Chairman Bob Ney is proposing that all mail be scanned, and then forwarded electronically to congresscritters to cut down on delivery time. You know, straight-up email would sure speed things along -- this is like Congress proposing that mail be delivered by steam-driven pneumatic systems. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:58:37 AM permanent link to this entry

Anarchist parenting: spare the rod
Anarchist parenting: non-authoritarian child-rearing resources:

Authoritarian parents are not unloving, rejecting, or cruel. Like the vast majority of parents, they do what they consider to be the best for their children. But the authoritarian adult is the kind of person whose view of the social world is extremely highly structured, and the structure is very much based on considerations of power strength, of in-groups and out-groups. It is a very black-and-white picture of the social world, so that there tends to be a complete acceptance of the mores of his own group, and, with that, a complete rejection of those of other groups. One of the manifestations of this is prejudice: colour-prejudice, anti-semitic prejudice - all these things tend to go with authoritarianism...

One mother, for instance, said to me, quite kindly: "In bringing up children obedience is the first essential. I'm older than the children. They must learn to respect what I say. They must learn to do what I say. This is the only way I can save them from the world". If you think about this, it is like somebody leading a pet dog through a dangerous jungle; it is not like one human being talking aboot another human being. Whereas another mother from a non-authoritarian group said: "It's very difficult to say what you should do with children, because really anything you can find that makes things easier and pleasanter for you will be good for them. I just take it easy with my children, and it works".

Michael Moore on TechTV
Michael "Roger and Me" Moore did a spot on TechTV's Screensavers last week, describing the danger that the Internet will go the path of FM radio: growing more and more commercial, losing its role as an agent of samizdata in a corporate-centric mediaverse. The Screensavers' page has two Windows Media clips of his segment (couldn't get 'em to run on Mozilla, but they play fine on MSIE for OS X). Link Discuss (via Fark)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:20 AM permanent link to this entry

Law & Order: the game
Law & Order -- my primary televisual vice -- is a computer game now.

"Law & Order: Dead on the Money" ($30, Windows) unfolds like an original episode of the hit TV show, with interesting characters, sharp dialogue and some nice twists and turns -- some of which involve insider trading on Wall Street.

Legacy Interactive has created the mystery story and courtroom drama using features typically found in an adventure game, such as video clips, scenes to explore and plenty of personal interaction with the characters.

The "puzzles" involve finding a password to a computer, the combination to a safe, and the right pieces of evidence to get people to spill their guts.

Wireless primer
Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishmann and Adam "TidBITS" Engst have written a book on setting up a home wireless network, called "The Wireless Networking Starter Kit." The book runs down the cross-platform, step-by-step instructions for setting up and running a WiFi network from scratch.

Table of contents

1 Why Wireless?
2 Networking Basics
3 How Wireless Works
4 Connecting Your Computer
5 Building Your Wireless Network
6 Wireless Security
7 Taking It on the Road
8 Going the Distance
9 Things That Go Bump in the Net
10 The Future of Wireless

Gallery of floaty pens
Gallery of some of the world's finest floaty pens: the Jesus-walking-on-water floaty is positively sacrelicious. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:35:56 AM permanent link to this entry

Saturday, November 16, 2002

Friday, November 15, 2002

Alan Moore's alternate history of the DC universe
h0l sez, this is "the banned-by-DC-comics-from-the-WWW but still available via Google newsgroups version of Alan Moore's _AMAZING_ mid-eighties retake of the entire DC universe. this was a proposal that never got off the ground, but even for non-comics fans, it's pretty spectacular stuff - lots of carnage, weird Martian Manhunter sex, and hyper-intelligent writing."

The House of Steel
This is one of the two most powerful clans, and it dominates the eastern seaboard around New York and environs. Alternatively, if I change my mind it could be outside America altogether and set in the Arctic Circle, based around a new Fortress of Solitude. This is because the House of Steel consists of the clan founded by Superman- We have Superman himself, a morally troubled figure who doesn't know what's best to do about the chaos he sees sounding him, but who has come to accept that the Houses provide the only real permanent structure in a Stabilizing world and are thus important to maintain. Superman has married and raised a couple of kids, and the person that he has married is Wonder Woman, who has had an identity change to Superwoman to accommodate her new stature- We see the genuine and powerful love between these two in the face of the perils of the world sounding them and the desire to do what's best They are also troubled by their two offspring- One of these is a new Superboy, and he's about eighteen when the story opens, and he's real bad news. The other child is a less delinquent Supergirl, and new one who, like Superboy, has been born of the union between Superman and Wonder Woman but who is much kinder and gentler, more her mother's child. Having three members in the Superman class and Wonder Woman (Superwoman) herself, they are obviously a clan to be reckoned with.

Ants love Apple hardware
Creepy crawly computation: ants colonize an iBook.

Has anyone had this problem? I hope not . . . After the first rain of the year, the ants outside were restless (and homeless). My wife had left her ibook on the mantle charging overnight. The next morning we noticed a large number of ants milling around it. Upon inspection we discovered ants crawling in and out of every hole in the computer. I grabbed my can of compressed air and started blowing! To my horror hundreds of ants started pouring out carrying eggs! I knew this was bad. I took the computer out to the garage and completely disassembled the thing layer by layer . My stomach turned when I exposed the main circuit board and saw thousand of ant and eggs (and a queen or two), writhing across every inch! Argh! After several hours with a vacuum and a can of air I finally got the thing clean. I put it back together (only a few extra screws) and luckily it works fine. Any theories on why ants would decide to move an entire colony into an ibook? Warmth? Sweet circuit boards? I think they were attempting to colonize the ultimate frontier: cyberspace.

Sneakernet MP3 sharing kicks P2P's ass
Paul Boutin slams P2P file-sharing in a great caffeinated rant. The real threat/opportunity for exchanging huge volumes of MP3s is old-fashioned sneakernet, assisted by newfangled toys like iPods and CD burners.

Cheapskate yuppies like me have already taken piracy to the next level. In the past, a stack of 20-cent CDs let me copy my friends’ favorite albums in 10 minutes. Now, for $499, I can dump their entire collections onto an iPod in an hour.

iPod is marketed as an MP3 player, but under the stylish skin it’s nothing more than spinning media. It’s a 20-gig disk drive with a firewire connection that can suck down an album’s worth of music in less than 15 seconds – with room for 400 more. The interface puts P2P freeware to shame, and it even talks to PCs. With an iPod in my pocket, I don’t bother asking for CD recommendations anymore. I drag and drop my friends’ entire jukeboxes. Rip ’em now, decide what to play later.

Free European airfares
European discount airline Ryanair is giving away 500,000 tickets between any European destinations -- all you pay is the taxes and airport fees. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:04:26 PM permanent link to this entry

10-in-1 Atari emulator-in-a-joystick for $19.99
Eli the Bearded sez: Avon, the makeup company, is selling a joystick with 10 classic Atari games in it. No console needed, just hook this up to the RCA jacks on your TV and play. I was just watching someone play it, and I want one now. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:20:18 PM permanent link to this entry

Pencil-lead sculpture
Dalton Ghetti is a sculptor who carves miniscule sculptures out of the leads of pencils, by hand, without a magnifying glass. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:27:00 PM permanent link to this entry

Paying $10 to get pitched: more movie ads coming
Regal movie theatres will expand their pre-show advertising and trailers to twenty minutes. The last few AMC/Loew's movies I've gone to in San Francisco have had 20 minutes' worth, too -- it seems to be the norm everywhere. The CEO of Regal sees a trend: "I hope that the line between entertainment and advertising will begin to blur." Link Discuss (Thanks, Futtbuck!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:39 PM permanent link to this entry

Utrecht/L.A. transcontinental digital art camp-in: "Afterneen", Sat. Nov. 16
On Saturday, November 16, Miltos Manetas' Electronic Orphanage art collective will produce a crazy and cool digital art event in L.A.'s Chinatown district. Billed as "the introduction of NEEN, the first art movement of the 21st century, to Europe," Saturday's performance takes place simultaneously with a participating team of artists in Holland. If you're stopping by in LA, the event will be going full-force from about 6-10PM.

Location: electronic orphanage, 975 chung king road, los angeles, california 90012 (map)

The event is sort of a simulwebcast/simul-camp-in with a sister gallery in Utrecht, Holland. During the show, digital artists from San Francisco, LA, and New York will gather at the Orphanage space. The idea is that each artist will, for the weekend, become a little avatar that operates in the "virtual space" of the gallery. For the duration of the show, the galleries in Holland and LA each are transformed into Internet space.

Printable invitation here: (PDF) (JPG): The press kit is here. Photos I took of Miltos' analog work (large-scale paintings of technology still-lives) from August are here.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:51:34 AM permanent link to this entry

Friday Web Zen: A Mixed Bag.

It's Friday. Pour yourself a cup of something hot, crank up the headphones, and try to look super-productive and workerly while you burn valuable time on these urls. Some are oldies, all are goodies.

(1) Movie-a-Minute: using sekrit plot condensation technology (and probably a few lasers), this site provides ultra, ultra-short capsule summaries for films including "Speed" (Jan de Bont, 1994)

Dennis Hopper: I will blow up the elevator.
Keanu Reeves: Oh no. Not the elevator. (saves elevator)
Dennis Hopper: I will blow up the bus.
Keanu Reeves: Oh no. Not the bus. (saves bus)
Dennis Hopper: I will blow up the subway.
Keanu Reeves: Oh no. Not the subway. (saves subway)
- THE END -

(2) Design For Chunks: An airbag saved my life. In-flight barf-bags, reimagined. (image at left: Dude Studios)
(3) Guess the Dictator and/or Television Sit-Com Character.
(4) Yodeling horse-things: this site might just kick the ass of singing kittens.
(5) Tiny Bubbles: if you liked last week's Flash bubble-wrap popping site, hold on to your seat.

Harry Potter and the mass shredding
A fundie lunatic Minister in Maine was denied a permit to burn stacks of "Satanic" Harry Potter novels, so he opted instead to host a mass shredding.

"I feel like I'm in a cutting mood tonight," the Rev. Douglas Taylor told 30 supporters before bringing out the scissors.

Roxio to buy Napster
Roxio, makers of the CD-burning software Toast, have made a credible bid to acquire all of Napster's assets out of bankruptcy. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:43:41 AM permanent link to this entry

Mind-boggling soy-sauce ad
Mind-boggling, queer-positive, cat-hanging, erotic, musical Flash promotional ad for Kikkoman Soy Sauce. In Japanese. Link Discuss (via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:23:35 AM permanent link to this entry

Comdex going bust?
Comdex, the annual mega-nerd-circus in Vegas, may have to declare bankruptcy.

Why the downturn? Key3Media Chief Fred Rosen blames -- oh, you'll never guess -- the shrinking IT industry and travelers made wary by Sept. 11. But tech buyers are still attending conferences, a former Key3 executive told the Mercury News, only they're favoring more focused gatherings over Comdex' smorgasbord approach. BusinessWeek Online did the math: "Last year, average attendance at info-tech trade shows sank 14%. At Comdex, attendance was down 41%." As the crowds are drifting away, so are corporate booth-buyers. A few years ago, IBM made headlines for refusing to buy space. This year, Sony's opting out.

Douglas Adams meets Dr. Who
The unshot Dr. Who episode that Douglas Adams wrote has finally been produced by the BBC and will be webcasted soon.

The episode, called Shada, was described as "the greatest Doctor Who story never shown" and began filming in 1979 but production was halted by industrial action.

Following several false starts in attempting to bring it back, the drama will finally be premièred in a webcast on BBCi in the spring.

SGI and fluid dynamics in disposable diapers
Procter and Gamble are buying gigantic SGI supercomputers to model the aerodynamics of Pringles chips -- less aerodynamic chips won't take flight from the fast-moving conveyors -- and the fluid dynamics of human waste in disposable diapers. Link Discuss (via JWZ's Livejournal)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:46:41 AM permanent link to this entry

Schneier's new book
Bruce "Secrets and Lies" Schneier has announced that he's working on a new, untitled book, about using information security techniques to evaluate the post-911 security measures we've been asked to buckle down and shut up about.

I reviewed a draft of this last month, and it is a damned fine book. It starts with the premise that bad security is worse than no security -- a false sense of security puts you at more risk than eyes-open vulnerabilities. Then it discusses the idea that security is always contextual: you can't make something generally "more secure;" you can only make it more secure from some attack.

This is the setup for Bruce to tell us how to figure out if something is a risk, if some measure mitigates that risk, and points us at the ways our world has changed since 9-11, in order to make it more "secure."

This book presents a vital suite of critical thinking tools. It's a shame we won't see it on shelves until next September -- publishing being what it is -- but when it hits the stands, it will be required reading.

We are being told that we are in graver danger than ever, and that we must change our lives in drastic and inconvenient ways in order to be secure. We are being told that we must give up privacy or anonymity, or accept restrictions on our actions. We are being told that the police need new investigative powers, that domestic spying capabilities need to be instituted, and that our militaries must be brought to bear on countries that support terrorism. What we're being told is mostly untrue. Most of the changes we're being asked to endure don't result in good security. They don't make us safer. Some of the changes actually make things worse.

My new book, still untitled, is a book about security. Not computer security, but security in general. Its goal is to teach readers how to think differently, how to tell good security from bad security, and to be able to explain why. Its goal is to instill in readers a healthy skepticism about security, especially the technologies surrounding security. Its goal is to convince readers that good security is about people.

The book walks the reader, step by step, through security: what works, what doesn't, and why. It gives general principles that the reader can use to understand and evaluate security. It illustrates those principles with anecdotes from all over: crime, war, history, sports, natural science, myth, literature, and movies. And it gives the reader a simple process that he can use to understand the difference between good security and bad security.

Real-world security looks a whole lot like computer security. It's not just that computers are everywhere; the same concepts and methodologies that allow us to make sense of computer security also apply to the real world. In my previous book, "Secrets and Lies," I used real-world metaphors to explain computer and network security. In this book I am going to explain real-world security using the techniques, processes, and formalism from the computer world, without assuming any computer knowledge.

Thursday, November 14, 2002

EverCrack packet-sniffer for net-game cheaters
Cringely's latest column describes ShowEQ, a GNU/Linux app you run on the same LAN as a one or more Windows boxes playing EverQuest. ShowEQ sniffs all EverQuest packets, decrypts them, and gives you precognitive powers to know where all the other players in the game are, when someone bad is headed your way, and so on. Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:36:12 PM permanent link to this entry

Busting the No-Fly list, Internet-style
Now that the FBI has admitted to maintaining a secret list of dissident enemies-of-the-state who should not be allowed to fly (though there is no way to find out if you're on the list, why you're on the list, or how to get off the list), the ACLU has created a form for people who are barred from flying to submit their personal info and details. Go get 'em, ACLU! Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:26:12 PM permanent link to this entry

Mozilla adds Bayesian spam-filter
Another reason to praise Mozilla: Mox hackers have added a Bayesian spam-filter to the Mozilla mailer. A Bayesian filter learns from its user -- you give it some examples of messages that are and aren't spam, and it will use statistical analysis to guess whether new mail is more like spam or more like not-spam. When it guesses wrong, you give it a gentle corrective feedback and it learns, getting better all the time. Link Discuss (via /.)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:07:05 PM permanent link to this entry

Sub-$500 Lindows tablet PC coming
Lindows, the company that ships a version of GNU/Linux that runs most Windows apps, will be shipping a <$500 tablet PC (most tablet PCs to date go for $2000-$3000). The device has wireless networking built in, a nice sharp LCD, and will look mighty fine nestled on my coffee-table. Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:00:27 PM permanent link to this entry

HG Wells, ripoff artist
A new book, The Spinster and the Prophet, traces the story of Florence Deeks, a Torontonian amateur historian who wrote an amazing, enormous history of the world from a feminist perspective during WWI. She submitted the manuscript to Macmillan, HG Wells's publisher, and shortly thereafter, Macmillan published Wells's "The Outline of History," a 1,300-page bestseller that ripped off enormous chunks of Deeks's works. Deeks sued in every Canadian and UK venue available to her and lost all the way. Today, though, she's vindicated in "Spinster and the Prophet," which makes a strong case for the claim of plagiarism. I wrote a novella, "A Place So Foreign," whose mcguffin is the idea that Jules Verne meets time-travellers and uses their technology to plagiarize sf writers from Wells to Gibson. I picked the wrong villain, it seems. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:54:48 PM permanent link to this entry

Vanity TV: a new scam
Teresa Nielsen Hayden comments on a new variation on the vanity publishing scam that Lore "Brunching Shuttlecocks" Sjoberg encountered:

Ran into an interesting scam the other day. I got a call from someone claiming to be a producer for a television show, saying he wanted to interview me, in my capacity as a Web programmer and the owner of Seven Deadly Productions, for a show on the Bay Area business scene. He was interested in me "as an expert," he said. I'm not an expert on the Bay Area business scene, but I am an expert at bullshitting in interviews, so I called him back. ...

The spiel was odd from the beginning. For instance, he described his show as being "like Hard Copy or 20/20 except we only say good things." Hard Copy without the criticism is like World's Scariest Police Chases without the reckless driving. ...

Then he went into the details of what they're going to do for me. He pointed out that they were going to pay for a cameraman and lights and so forth, to the tune of something like ten thousand dollars. This is where my right eyebrow began to lift of its own accord. ...

... [T]hen he dropped the bomb. Well, more kind of sidled the bomb into place. Introduced the bomb. He told me that what with them paying for the videotaping and all, I'd be expected to pay the relatively small cost of "production and editing." Then he quickly moved onto something else which I don't remember because of the klaxon and flashing red lights that were going off in my head.

700-year-old "Hidden Mickey"
A 700-year old Austrian church fresco has been discovered, with a likeness of what appears to be Mickey Mouse. The Maltese tourist board is considering suing Disney for trademark infringment. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:34:23 PM permanent link to this entry

Roger Wood show opening Nov 20
My pal Roger Wood, a gobsmackingly brilliant assemblage sculptor who makes breathtakingly wild junk-clocks like the one pictured here, is having a gallery show in Toronto.

When: Nov 20th, 2002 - Jan 19th, 2003
Where: Wagner Rosenbaum Gallery, 169 King St E, Toronto

Roger's clocks are folk-art-cum-fine-art. Put one of Roger's clocks on your shelf and you will smile, every day. If you're in Toronto and you miss his show, you're missing out on a chance to have your mind blown. Say hi to him for me, OK? Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:28:43 PM permanent link to this entry

Smart-paint heals corrosion in tanks
The US military is developing smart-paint for its armored vehicles. The paint will be a-crawl with "microscopic electromechanical machines... that could detect and heal cracks and corrosion in the bodies of combat vehicles, as well as give vehicles the chameleon-like quality of rapidly altering camouflage to blend in with changing operating environments." Link Discuss (Thanks, Higgins!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:20:35 PM permanent link to this entry

Jim Leftwich's CyberPort
Nice Wired news article about Jim "Jimwich" Leftwich's CyberPort interface. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 4:16:51 PM permanent link to this entry

Twisted, Spanglish 'Cucaracha' comic strip goes national
Lalo Alcaraz's brilliant and infamous "L.A. Cucaracha" comic just got picked up for a 10-year syndication deal. Right on, Lalo! Link Discuss

UPDATE: Buy prints from Lalo, like the extremely chido "Never Forget Columbus" cartoon at left, at the cartoonista.com store or here on eBay.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:32:54 AM permanent link to this entry

Give the gift of space bling-bling.
Cool gift ideas from the world's largest space-related e-tailer, thespacestore.com. Below, the $2.5 million Destiny Module replica currently on display at SPACEHAB headquarters in Houston, TX

Hipster welding helmets
Hoodlum Helmets: One-stop hipster welding-helmet shop. Link Discuss (Thanks, cruella!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:28:20 AM permanent link to this entry

Canada ponders national ID card
Canada's Federal Immigration Minister is calling for a national debate on the merits of a Canadian nation ID card. Why is it that Canada always seems to adopt the worst of US policy, instead of picking up on the good ole First Amendment? Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:25:15 AM permanent link to this entry

Homeland Security's coming panopticon
William Safire blasts the Homeland Security Act in an editorial in today's NYT.

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Sex urged as stimulant for flaccid world economy
The 7th Asian Congress of Sexology starts today in ultra-conservative Singapore. Some participants are suggesting that having more sex may an effective way to boost the global economy:

Healthy sex lives make happy workers, who will in turn create a more robust economy, said Emil Ng, sex therapist and founder of the Asian Federation of Sexology. "Sexual health is not just about absence of diseases or dysfunction...It is about the ability to enjoy sex...This will improve the whole nation's well-being and productivity. When your economy is down, sexual activity will be lower, not because of sexual problems, but financial problems. This is a vicious cycle."

Apple laptops kick Windows boxens's asses in price-performace shootout
The Mac Observer has compiled a wonderful roundup comparing laptops from Apple, Dell, HP, Gateway, Sony, and Toshiba at various price-points ($3000, $2300, $2000, $1600, 1300, and $1000). The Macs win on almost every axis, but consistently fail to match PC boxen for L1 cache. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:07:21 AM permanent link to this entry

Pork: The Other Tuition Payment
Lindenwood University in St. Charles, MO, has begun to pigs from rural students' families in exchange for tuition. A little piece of Argentian barter economy is in the midwest. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:59:27 AM permanent link to this entry

Pirate batteries
Toronto cops busted a Duracell-bootlegger ring with $2.9 million (Canadian) worth of pirate batteries. Pirate batteries? Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:54:40 AM permanent link to this entry

JK Rowling's pub
The pub where JK Rowling wrote her first four novels has turned into her base-of-operations, the place where the stages media interviews and a sacred spot for Potterpilgrims. Unsurprisingly, she doesn't get a lot of writing done there anymore. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:52:53 AM permanent link to this entry

Giant, erect condom welcomes Bill Gates to India
Please: someone send photos. An eight-foot high inflatable condom greeted Bill Gates today during a visit to Hyderabad, India. The unusual welcome gesture was intended to commemorate the Microsoft chairman's generosity in fighting HIV/AIDS through his charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:37:25 AM permanent link to this entry

Self-destructing DVDs react with air
A bizarre new form of DVD digital rights management: DVDs impregnated with a dye that reacts with air to render the disc unplayable in eight hours. The disc is being distributed -- in airtight packages -- as a promotional item with a CD, containing a video about the band. However, the instant-landfill media doesn't contain any of the usual copy-restriction technology that prevents it from being copied to a PC before the dye eats it. Link Discuss (via /.)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:12:55 AM permanent link to this entry

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

Steven Johnson's blog
Steven "Emergence/Feed/Suck" Johnson has started a wicked new blog. Woohoo!

David Talbot, celebrating Salon's 7th birthday, is nice enough to include a shout out to FEED (which I co-created many moons ago) and Suck (which I briefly helped run from 2000-2001) before thumbing his nose, rightfully, at the Salon doomsayers: "Salon has outlived many worthy Web colleagues -- let us observe a moment of silence for the likes of Suck, Hotwired, Feed, Word and APBNews.com, all of which got out the electric cables, yelled 'Clear' and zapped the flat-lining carcass of American journalism." I would have described it as more of a colonoscopy, but it's a nice gesture either way.

Mac-on-x86 rumor resurfaces
The rumor that refuses to die: Apple will port MacOS to commodity chips. Usually, the rumor holds that Apple will climb into bed with Intel; this time, it's AMD.

Nevertheless, these observers report that Apple has been serious enough about its ace in the hole to seed a few lucky civilians with prototype boxes – delivered heavily swaddled in layers of cloak-and-dagger security, natch. Specifically, recent testers report taking delivery of Athlon-powered boxes that Apple had assiduously welded shut to prevent prying eyes from ogling whatever other gremlins might be lurking inside these nondescript beige chassis.

MAD magazine lampoons The Onion
MAD's lampoon of The Onion ("The Bunion") is spot-on: the caption for this reads "Funny Hairdo, Muppet, Reportedly Turns Otherwise Uninteresting Bush Photo 'Wacky'." Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:46:13 PM permanent link to this entry

Steven King to mentor Maine's iBook-equipped 7th graders
Stgephen King has volunteered to pitch in on Maine's grand iBook educational experiment, which has outfitted every student with a wireless iBook. King -- a longtime Mac user -- will mentor 7th-graders in an online writing workshop. When I was in grade 12 in 1988, I convinced the Toronto Board of Ed to loan me a MacSE and used my modem to mentor a group of grade 2-3 students in creative writing. Good to see the idea has caught on! Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:41:54 PM permanent link to this entry

WPA poster gallery
Stunning gallery of WPA-era silk-screened posters, including high-res, uncompressed TIFFs of the scans. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matthew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:37:45 PM permanent link to this entry

Lego sex
Very odd photo collection of Lego figurines getting their freak on. So that's how they reproduce. Warning, adult (but 100% plastic) content. Link Discuss (via the always-awesome Reverse Cowgirl's Blog)
UPDATE: Looks like the Lego porn series was actually lifted--without credit--by the missoizo.com folks from the original source at drew.corrupt.net. (Thanks, Eric)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 5:56:31 PM permanent link to this entry

Your name on Mars
Songdog says:

No, it's not a scam ("Lunar Real Estate For Sale", "Give Someone a Star For Christmas"). This one is bona fide. From NASA. Names submitted via a web form will be burned to DVD, carried to Mars in a 2003 rover mission, and photographed on the surface.

Sweet new thing from Nokia: ordinary cellphone with a full keyboard.
Are we one step closer to texting for the US masses? Maybe. On Tuesday, Nokia introduced the 6800--a new GPRS/GSM device that's not a smartphone, isn't bundled with an OS from Microsoft, Symbian, Palm, or RIM... but *does* include a full keyboard. Excerpt from PCWorld story:

"Nokia appears to be the first manufacturer to include a keyboard in an ordinary cell phone, setting the unit apart as a legitimate text messaging device. It also includes Instant Messaging; multimedia messaging service and Short Messaging Service; access to any POP3 or IMAP e-mail account; and an x-HTML Web browser. The handset, which will ship in the second quarter of next year, uses Nokia's own proprietary Series 40 OS and browser, not its newer Series 60 design. The Series 60 is the platform design that Nokia is selling to other handset manufacturers such as Sendo, which includes the Symbian OS plus an HTML browser from Opera."

GPS Digital-Art-Happening in Los Angeles
GPS coordinates as art? On Friday in L.A., a technology performance art event called "34 NORTH 118 WEST" debuts as part of the LA Freewaves art festival. Using a GPS-enabled Acer Travel Mate Tablet PC and headphones provided for audience members, participants' coordinates are tracked and integrated into the performance. Where each audience member moves determines how the story flows. The landscape becomes the interface, and the performance is rendered in real-time according to participants' movements.

Imagine walking through the city and triggering moments in time. Imagine wandering through a space inhabited with the sonic ghosts of another era. Like ether, the air around you pulses with spirits, voices, and sounds. Streets, buildings, and hidden fragments tell a story. The setting is the Freight Depot in downtown Los Angeles. At the turn of the century Railroads were synonymous with power, speed and modernization. Railroads were our first cross-country infrastructure, preceding the telegraph and the Internet. From the history and myth of the Railroad to the present day, sounds and voices drift in and out as you walk.

Pre-bubble zeitgeist flashback: Four years ago today...
...two complete nobodies with a completely nothing website made a whole lotta somethin.' Four years ago today, theglobe.com went public in what was the most successful IPO to date.

Things change.

Link Discuss (via Scripting News).
posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:18:49 AM permanent link to this entry

BBEdit 7.0 ships!
BareBones -- makers of the stellar MacOS text editor BBEdit -- have announced BBEdit 7.0, with lots of sweet new features. I use BBEdit for everything from writing novels to editing html to composing email -- I'm writing this blog entry in BBEdit!

BBEdit 7.0 allows you to configure multiple Web sites in the preferences and then work with files from any of the defined sites. Syntax coloring support for ASP/VBScript has been added, as well as XHTML 1.1 support in the HTML Tools and syntax checker, and a "Close Current Tag" command which speeds and simplifies HTML tag creation and editing.

For text editing, BBEdit 7.0 adds support for selecting and operating on rectangular regions of text.

Bare Bones also added a few general improvements including a "Paste Previous Clipboard" command, Quartz text smoothing support in editing views, improved support for Mac OS X Services (on Mac OS X 10.2), plus palette-savvy window resizing and a new "atop" window stacking option. A new plug-in info window displays version information, online help, and web links for installed plug-ins. Plug-ins can also now be installed via drag-and-drop.

Stan Lee sues Marvel over Spiderman ripoff
Marvel claims it didn't make any profits from the $400*10^6 it earned on Spiderman, the movie, and so doesn't owe Stan "10% of the profits 'cause I invented him" Lee a dime. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:43:35 AM permanent link to this entry

Bluetoooth still sucks
Bob Frankston explains why Bluetooth still sucks: it's all about the connectivity.

We should learn from the example of X.400. X.400 was (is?) a mail protocol approved and required by essentially all the telecommunication agencies throughout the world. It was designed over a period of ten years yet failed against SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) which could be implemented in an afternoon. Like x.400, the Bluetooth was designed and promulgated before anyone could learn from the first generation. Bluetooth is designed to work in the specific cases imagined by its designers and thus will perform very well in precisely those scenarios and these are the scenarios touted in press releases. It's not surprising that if you don't use Bluetooth precisely as envisioned it will not work very well. There is a tendency to view these problems as anomalies and those of us who point them out are considered spoilers and are thus discounted.

Eric Idle reads Charlie and the Chocolate Factory MP3
Free downloadable MP3 audiobook excerpt from Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," read by Eric "Python" Idle on Salon. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:36:38 AM permanent link to this entry

New York cuisine, Atkins-style
New York restaurants are being flooded with low-carb, high-fat dieters who eschew sugar, flour, and most veggies in favor of meat and cheese. Posh eateries are putting bacon on the appetizer menus, offering sauces on the side, and getting accustomed to diners who have a before-dinner vodka instead of a wine.

Low-carb dieters are eating enormous quantities of food, local restaurateurs, diners and dietitians agree. "Guys come in here and order one steak after another, boom, boom, boom," said Mr. Goldstein of Angelo & Maxie's. Jack Lamb, an owner of Jewel Bako, a popular sushi restaurant in the East Village, said, "You can always tell who the low-carb people are: they order miso soup and an awful lot of sashimi, more than you'd think a person would want."

Dieters say that if you're used to eating a lot of bagels, pasta, pizza and sandwiches, all staples of busy New York lives, you have to eat large amounts of protein- and fat-rich food to get the same feeling of fullness. A three-egg omelet for breakfast, bacon and a big lump of cheese for lunch, salad and pork chops for dinner, then a late-night snack of peanut butter is not an unusual day's menu.

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Weird-ass head-massager patent spam
Check out this weird-ass spam that landed in my in-box tonight -- apparently, these folks think that a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about their seekrit magic head-massager technology will a) make me grateful that I'm not infringing on their "patent" and b) make me want to buy lots and lots of head-scratchers out of sheer relief.

We believe you are selling "The Head Trip" aka "Happy's Head Trip. That product infringes on our patent. We believe that you respect the Intellectual Property rights of others, and that you had no idea you were infringing.

We'd like to offer you THE TINGLERÆ at competitive prices. It is covered by our United States Patent 6,450,980. We also have additional patent applications pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office relative to this and other products. You can go to our website http://www.everythingforlove.com to check THE TINGLERÆ and our other products.

Smart fabrics report
Nice little story about the latest smart-fabrics:

INFINEON, WHICH which has a large presence at the "Electronica" electronics fair which opened in Munich today, said it is demonstrating chips and sensors woven into "smart textiles", with connecting wires integrated into the weave and with miniscule power consumption.

The firm is showing a jacket with a voice controlled MP3 player, and the garment can even be washed.

It's also demonstrating further applications which could be of real use, including thermal generators which pick up body heat to power the microelectronics.

Distributed Proofreading's slashdotting
The Distributed Proofreading site assigns random pages from scanned-in or re-keyed public domain texts that are being prepared for the Gutenberg Project library to volunteer proofers who correct the errors and check them back in. After a recent slashdotting, the sites pages proofed per day rate went from less than 1,000 pages/day to over 10,000. At this rate, they'll have the entire public domain up in jig time. Link Discuss (via Infoanarchy)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:39:00 PM permanent link to this entry

Gar's Tips on Sucks-Less Writing
My pal Gareth Branwyn was and is a great mentor to me. When I started bOING bOING (the print zine) in the late 1980s, he helped me with my writing immensely. Now he has posted a wonderful tip sheet at Street Tech, called "Gar's Tips on Sucks-Less Writing." Thanks for sharing your secrets, Gar!

Throw out the First Waffle
One of the first things I noticed when I began getting my work published, was how often my introductory paragraphs were unceremoniously hacked into the trash by miserly editors. I once heard the phrase "throwing out the first waffle" used to describe divorce in a first marriage. I've come to think of these intro paragraphs as the first waffle(s) of writing. Writers, especially newbies, often waste this first graph (or two or three) setting up their subject, gobbling up precious column inches, awkwardly warming up to their subject. When you're done with your initial draft, take a hard, dispassionate look at the first few graphs. See if you can slice 'em off. Be harsh.

Trashy zine is all about "found stuff."
FOUND magazine is an incredibly cool online and print publication that explores the beauty and funkiness and accidental poignance of found things. Trash. Discarded objects. Weird notes about random sex, like this one, that defy description. Love letters (like the one at left) pinned behind car windshield wipers that eventually dislodge themselves to float down the street, unread. Link Discuss

UPDATE: FOUND has plans to expand, according to this Chicago Trib story. Watch for an audio CD in '03, with found sound--think answering machine messages, discarded audio letters, and original songs inspired by found notes. (via Poynter.org).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:10:59 PM permanent link to this entry

San Diego researchers develop solar-powered wireless broadband network
A group of University of California San Diego (UCSD) researchers have developed a network of solar-powered stations that enable broadband microwave antennas to reach remote rural locations. Known as High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), the project is already powering several Native American learning centers.

"There are thousands of small communities that could access the wireless Internet using the unlicensed microwave spectrum, as does HPWREN," [said] UCSD researcher Kimberly Mann Bruch..."The use of solar panels to power wireless broadband equipment -- radios, antennas and the like -- is especially feasible and cost-effective in areas where traditional electricity is not available."

UPDATE: The HPWREN web site with photos, topography map, and other project background is here.
posted by Xeni Jardin at 2:51:14 PM permanent link to this entry

Napster founder's new venture: viral info sharing
I wrote a story today for Wired News on the launch of Napster founder Sean Parker's new company, Plaxo. Like Napster, it involves sharing. But this time it's personal data, not music--which is unlikely to rile the RIAA. Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:30:04 AM permanent link to this entry

Soho Street Ephemera Gallery
Electric Artists founder Marc Schiller has a great photo gallery of posters, stickers, stencils, and grafitti in New York City. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 9:16:48 AM permanent link to this entry

"Guard-Dragon" robot with sense of smell--and sense of style.
Japanese robotics company tmsuk (say: "tem-zack") has teamed up with Sanyo to develop an improved model of its home-robot Banryu--which means "guard-dragon." As in, even badder than a "guard-dog."

The prototype looks like what would happen if you mated an iMac with a gargoyle. Sort of a hip, futuristic reptile. Product is scheduled for consumer release in 2003.

Among recent design improvements, Banryu's speed has been increased from 3 meters/min. to 15meters/min. Pretty darn fast for a robot moving around inside, say, a small Tokyo residential apartment. The 'bot can also navigate over gaps exceeding 10 cm, and has the ability to sense height via sensors on its legs.

Pics on the Banryu-bot's home page, here (Japanese text only). From a news article today:

"The robot also [has] a completely new 'odor-sensor' developed jointly by tmsuk, Kanazawa Institute of Technology... and New Cosmos Electric Co., LTD. The developers believe that this is one of the first devices that can sense a particular odor with practical accuracy. With the sensor the robot will be able to detect 'burnt scent' which is known to occur in the atmosphere preceding a fire."

Aibos and foliage: artful dissonance
Amazingly cool and dissonant photos of Aibos frolicking with fresh produce in a summer garden. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:46:06 AM permanent link to this entry

Reliable TCP's weird symbiosis with unreliable IP
The latest Joel on Software explains -- brilliantly! -- how reliable TCP can run over unreliable IP.

Imagine that we had a way of sending actors from Broadway to Hollywood that involved putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Some of these cars crashed, killing the poor actors. Sometimes the actors got drunk on the way and shaved their heads or got nasal tattoos, thus becoming too ugly to work in Hollywood, and frequently the actors arrived in a different order than they had set out, because they all took different routes. Now imagine a new service called Hollywood Express, which delivered actors to Hollywood, guaranteeing that they would (a) arrive (b) in order (c) in perfect condition. The magic part is that Hollywood Express doesn't have any method of delivering the actors, other than the unreliable method of putting them in cars and driving them across the country. Hollywood Express works by checking that each actor arrives in perfect condition, and, if he doesn't, calling up the home office and requesting that the actor's identical twin be sent instead. If the actors arrive in the wrong order Hollywood Express rearranges them. If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood Express doesn't even tell the movie directors in California what happened. To them, it just looks like the actors are arriving a little bit more slowly than usual, and they never even hear about the UFO crash.

GoogleHacks -- search engine tricks for everyone
GoogleHacks, an O'Reilly book with 99+ interesting and productive things to do with Google -- written by Tara "Researchbuzz" Calishain. Link Discuss (via Raelity Bites)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:27:06 AM permanent link to this entry

Cool new $399 digital audio appliance for Win users
The Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer looks bitchin', for Win ME/98/2K/XP users. Debuts in January, 2003:

Need enough music for a week? Or two? The Neuros HD has the capacity to hold 5,000 songs, and superior functionality to provide the technology you demand in an MP3 audio computer. The Neuros can broadcast songs wirelessly to your stereo. It can record and identify songs from the FM radio. With automatic synchronization all your downloads, playlist changes, and requests from your PC library will be automatically executed.

Monday, November 11, 2002

Web zen: Internet bear poops prime numbers
Strange little web site featuring what is, in all likelihood, the world's only "Prime Number Shitting Bear." Link Discuss (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:35:15 PM permanent link to this entry

Canadian "Switch" parody
High-larious "Switch" parody from an American who "switched" to Canada. Choice quotes:

Canada's money doesn't stink. US money, the green stuff, it stinks. I mean, literally, smells. I don't know what it is, it's like it's designed to absorb sweat.

My credit record? Wiped clean...

On many occassions, I've heard someone say, "If you don't love the United States of America, then get the hell out."

I did.

ETCON 2003 Call for Participation
Last year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference was the best event of the year, hands down. Never have nerds of so many stripes had so many interesting conversations about so much wicked tech. This year's confernece is gonna be twice as good. If you can't afford to pay the door, why not submit a paper? The Call for Participation was just posted, and if you've got something interesting to present about, it's your ticket to free admission, and all the hot, geeky conversation you can eat. Don't freaking miss it!

Social Software
We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of social software, software designed to support the interactions of groups of people. After nearly a decade of exploring the Web's uses as a one-to-many medium, there is a growing awareness and excitement about both the problems posed in writing social software, and the potential benefits...

Untethered
The history of networked computing from its very first days until the mid-1990s were all about balls and chains: computers and the wires that anchored them into useful aggregations of resources. As early as the 1970s, networks without wires have transformed the tethered user into a mobile swarm (having accelerating into a high-speed and widespread trend in the late 90s). Untethered users cluster like savannah beasts around a watering hole when they find high-speed wireless access; cellular telephone users disperse and gather dynamically as they transmit short notes billions of times a month.

Biological Models of Computing
Despite the messiness inherent in natural systems, evolution has produced "machines of extreme perfection," to use Darwin's felicitous phrase. As our technological systems become more complex and planning for all cases becomes impossible, what can we learn from the biological world? In particular, what can we learn from the design of both organisms and systems that can adapt to a wide and unpredictable range of signals without collapsing?...

Digital Rights
Digital Rights Management, copy-restriction, and rights-expression tools are potentially dangerous but often-innovative technologies. Some claim to be tools for safeguarding the public's privacy; others maintain that they add functionality to general-purpose hardware. Congress, the FCC, the European Parliament, and WIPO are all considering pro- and anti-DRM initiatives...

Hardware
Moore's Law drives ease-of-hacks in hardware just as well as it does in software. Hardware hacks expand the machine in new and powerful ways, using cheap, off-the-shelf technology. At the tiniest end of the spectrum, miniaturization is showing the promise of a nano-world, where everything we take for granted about the physical universe is up for grabs.

Are carbon nanotubules the next asbestos? Will MEMS graduate into "utility fog?" Your talk-proposals for the hardware track should tell us how we can change the world today with Radio Shack parts and simple schematics or how the world of tomorrow will be upended by clouds of tiny sub-micro devices.

Business Models
We feature a range of technologies that are growing just below the horizon of commercial viability, and place a spotlight on projects and people who are likely to become very important to the future of Internet computing. Equally important is a careful study of what the new business models will look like. Will they be a return to the traditional, times being as they are? Or is there still room to innovate? Who is putting a stake in the ground and attempting to build the new applications, network, and online culture?

Marine reading by rank
The USMC has released its new required reading list for various ranks. Included are:

• Heinlein's Starship Troopers (Privates and Lance Corporals)
• Card's Ender's Game (Sergeants and Corporals)
• Constitution of the United States of America (Staff Sergeants through First Lieutenants)
• Guevara's On Guerrilla Warfare (Majors and Chief Warrant Officers)

Rotting dice
A gallery of photos of decaying vintage celluloid dice, from a book called 'Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck,' published by WW Norton. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kelly!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:45:36 PM permanent link to this entry

The phone never sets on the British Empire
In 1986, the Guardian wrote:

By the year 2000, Mintel suggests that small pocketphones "will be as common as Walkmans... " People would have to develop a whole new social code... You could not, for example, take calls in the middle of a crowded restaurant. Indeed, the potential nuisance effect of pocketphones (which, of course, exist at the moment, but are clumsy and extremely expensive) is enormous, though perhaps no more so than the nuisance of the transistor radio. Besides, the social value of being able to make a phone call at any time will also be extremely large.

Rove pulled electoral strings on his 2-way
Karl Rove, one of the Shrub's homunculus puppeteers, coordinated the 2002 electoral campaign by sending haiku-like micro-managing micro-messages to stumping politicos around the country via his BlackBerry email pager.

Through it all, Rove wore his war room on his belt'the postcard-size BlackBerry communicator that holds his unmatchable Rolodex as well as his e-mail system, through which he squirted orders and suggestions to campaign workers and lobbyists using only a few words. "It's like haiku, "says a political operative who has been on the receiving end. During meetings'even ones with the President'Rove would constantly spin the BlackBerry's dial and punch out text on its tiny keyboard. "Sometimes we're in a meeting talking to each other and BlackBerrying each other at the same time, "says a colleague. At times Rove's voltage got too hot even for all his outlets. He became known for breaking into song in midsentence. During games of gin rummy on Air Force One during Bush's campaign swings, Rove was always the loudest one yelling, "Feed the monkey! "when it was his turn to pick up a card. (Bush played once, Rove says, and "whipped me.')

HBO nastygrams bars that show Sopranos
HBO is sending nastygrams to bars and restaurants that show "The Sopranos" on Sunday nights, threatening them to cut it out or else. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:24:12 PM permanent link to this entry

Animatronic Bob Hope to yuk it up in San Diego
A group in San Diego is raising money to build a life-size coin-op animatronic Bob Hope that will tell corny USO jokes as a "military tribute."

The Tribute occupies the beautifully landscaped San Diego bay area. As you walk across the terazzo bridge into a circle filled with historical memories, you'll enter the realm of one of America's greatest entertainers. Five bronze full-size statues of Bob Hope stand on the points of a granite five-star platform. Let history come to life as you hear motion-activated recordings of Bob Hope telling jokes, while five full-size statues representing each military branch (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard) respond with the hearty laughter of those who so appreciated Bob Hopes efforts to improve their morale.

Internet's most PageRanked pages
Feeding the query string "http" to Google causes it to barf up all the pages in its database in order of their "PageRank" value. The ten most important pages on the Web today?

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
3. Microsoft Corporation
4. Adobe Systems Incorporated
5. AltaVista - The Search Company
6. My Excite
7. Amazon.com--Earth's Biggest Selection
8. CNN.com
9. Lycos Home Page
10. MapQuest: Home

AIs ate my economy
This week saw another virtuoso piece from Futurefeedforward, the most prescient source of science fictional thought on the Web. This week, its about AI trust-managers whose flocking behavior emerges trust-like activity in Indiannapolis.

Originally designed to curtail trust abuse by unscrupulous trustees, intelligent trusts have evolved complex and profitable investing strategies never imagined by their programmers. "I-trusts have really branched out in recent years," notes Pressupmanship. "Last year they got interested in real estate for the first time. Up until that point they'd only ever really been into traditional securities and some sophisticated derivatives trading, but it looks like they've got their eyes on the consumer goods sector now."...

Recognizing that intelligent trusts are responsible for the price spikes and prosecuting them legally may, however, prove to be two entirely different things. "The problem is showing that they intend to manipulate the markets in these goods," notes Waikman. "In most cases it's just a matter of pack behavior. With a few exceptions, no one trust does buying that really reaches an abusive level. It's just that when you put it all together, it amounts to a manipulation. They don't just get together and plan to corner a market. One of them just takes a position while the others hang back. But, once there's blood in the water, they all rush in, driving up the prices and putting a stranglehold on the market."

Fast-forwarding is not a crime!
Great LA Times editorial by Ernest "Lawmeme" Miller about the baseless ire expressed by movie directors over software that lets users circulate edit lists that insert or skip through material during playback, so that educators can produce virtual "highlight reels" with their own voice-over, or parents can generate and circulate kid-friendly versions of Hollywood movies.

When you buy a book you can highlight portions or rearrange pages. A friend can recommend that you rip out the boring chapters and read only the climax, and neither the author nor the publisher has a right to stop you. Why should movies on DVD be any different?

When a DVD is legitimately purchased or rented, consumers should have the right to play it with software that enhances their personal viewing experience. Parents should have the right to skip a second or two of gratuitous nudity in an otherwise family-friendly film. Film buffs should have the right to watch a film with an alternative audio commentary by an expert such as Roger Ebert, without permanently altering the disc.

Ultimately, the issue is one of control. Technology has given consumers the ability to control how they watch movies in their homes, and the DGA wants to take that control away by banning the technology. Even if you don't have kids, aren't much of a film buff or love graphic movies, do you really want Hollywood dictating how you view DVDs in your own home?

1.4 million beetles tile palace ceiling
An avant-garde Flemish artist has redecorated a palace in Brussels by gluing 1.4*10^6 jewel beetles to the ceiling of the great dome.

The beetles were culled for Fabre by a team of entomologists who scoured the restaurants of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand where the creatures are regarded as a delicacy...

Birds' wings, giraffes' legs and salamanders' eyes can all be discerned in the creation as can the letter 'P' for Queen Paola who succumbed to years of lobbying and gave Fabre carte blanche .

"It looks like a kind of greenish, bluish, violet, yellow golden sea of light that moves around constantly, creating drawings using the light," Fabre, 44, told the Guardian yesterday.

"It will never go away, the colour will never fade and it will stay there for hundreds of years. I am quite satisfied."

Net censorship down under: Australian government to block protest websites
As part of a federal crackdown on "Internet-assisted crime," Australia's government plans to block access to websites used for organizing protest activities.

A police ministers meeting in Darwin this week agreed it was "unacceptable websites advocating or facilitating violent protest action be accessible from Australia".

Internet regulator, the Australian Broadcasting Authority, only last week decided not to block access to websites organising protests for the World Trade Organisation meeting in Sydney.

UPDATE: More on Australia Net-censorship efforts from Electronic Frontiers Australia (via Declan McCullagh's Politech list). Link
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:54:09 AM permanent link to this entry

Two fed-up promo CD recipients to return a million CDs to AOL
Hey, AOL, you've got mail! Two California men have organized a global campaign to return one million of those annoying promotional CDs back to America Online.

"People find this action very cool and the ecology aspect is very loved in France," said Aziz Ridouan of Stop CD France, which has accumulated about 1,600 CDs for the men so far.

[International campaign organizers Jim] McKenna and [John] Lieberman say they have nothing against AOL, but see the discs as a waste of resources and have found a creative way to ask the Internet giant to stop making and sending them.

AOL is responding by offering to help.

"If they reach their goal ... I'd be happy to give them directions and greet them at the door," company spokesman Nicholas Graham said. "We would make a contribution ourselves to put them over the top."

Bluetooth suitcase
Samsonite introduces... wireless business luggage. Link Discuss (via Dave Farber's IP list)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:37:03 AM permanent link to this entry

Sunday, November 10, 2002

Edgar Allen Nostradamus predicts a century of cosmology
Edgar Allen Poe's 150-page hallucinatory prose-poem, Eureka, about the origins of the universe, was just speculation, fevered imaginings. But now, the NYT reports, modern cosmology suggests that Poe was, in the whole, correct!

"From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be irradiated spherically — in all directions — to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space — a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms."

The language is vague and convoluted, and some details are wrong (Poe had no concept of relativity, and it makes no sense today to speak of the universe exploding into "previously vacant space"), but here, unmistakably, is a crude description of the Big Bang, a theory that didn't find mainstream approval until the 1960's.

Amazing electric boner machine
A Norweigan scientist has developed an electric "Viagra alternative."

Electrical engineer Birger Orten invented the simple stimulator. The contraption is comprised of a narrow, thin ring with advanced energy transferral that is placed at the root of the penis.

The machine has no side effects, needs no prescription and works immediately. It can also be mounted inside a condom.

Smart Mobs signings in the Bay Area
Howard Rheingold will be signing his book, Smart Mobs, at a bunch of locations in the Bay Area in November:

# Stanford Bookstore, November 11th, 7:00 p.m.

# Commonwealth Club, November 12th, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. reception Reservations 415/597-6705/6705 or register online

# Borders (San Rafael), November 14th

# Booksmith (on Haight St.), November 19th, 7:00 p.m.

# Cody's (Telegraph Ave.), November 21st, 7:30 p.m.

Open spectrum explained for the laity
Seattle Times has run a great story on the group of "lawyers, engineers and telecommunications analysts" who are lobbying the FCC for cognitive radio and open spectrum.

In an ideal world, the FCC would treat the airwaves like a highway system nobody owns and enforce rules governing how people use its lanes without crashing into each other, the group says. And in cases where this isn't possible, the FCC would allow people to drive across other people's "property" as long as they keep a low profile and don't do any damage.

Given this freedom, inventors and entrepreneurs would invent new vehicles and new ways of using the highway, the thinking goes. Consumers would finance the development of the airwaves by buying the devices that suit them best and abiding by the rules of the road that prevent nasty accidents.

But to make this vision a reality, the devices need a slice of the spectrum that would form a virtual park or an airwaves commons where equipment makers and others could experiment. In addition, common protocols — industry standards that allow devices to understand each others' communications — and rules are needed to prevent accidents and to make sure everyone gets a fair shake.

HipTop Swarms: PDA-enabled smart mobs
Nice abstract for an academic paper on "Hiptop Nation" -- the new kinds of group behavior enabled y the T-Mobile Sidekick and other examples of Danger's HipTop PDA.

This paper examines the successful evolution of a specific smart mob into a wireless community of practice. It begins with an examination of a popular wireless blogging website "Hiptop Nation" (http://hiptop.bedope.com). "Hiptop Nation" acts as a central blogging site for owners of the "Sidekick" device, a portable handheld data communications device recently introduced by Danger (http://danger.com). The Sidekick supports wireless AOL Instant Messaging, email, SMS text messages, and web access. Users of the Sidekick can post wireless public blogs on Hiptop Nation via their Sidekick device, as well as upload photographs from the Sidekick's digital camera.

On Halloween, October 31 2002, Hiptop Nation sponsored a photo-scavenger hunt competition across the US. Participants were users of the Hiptop Nation blog site who were placed into competing teams, and participants coordinated their actions as well as acquired and uploaded photographs across the US exclusively via their Sidekick wireless devices. The hunt lasted for 24 hours.

Hi-rez DVDs released without "protection"
Columbia Tristar has taken to shipping high-res "Superbit" DVDs in Europe without Macrovision, the expensive and ineffectual technology used to keep home users from making VHS recordings from their own DVDs. The Macrovision company charges the film companies big bucks for licenses to their technology, so that viewers who want to make a copy of their DVDs for the kids' room or the cottage have to shell out for a second disc instead.

Except that Macrovision's technology stinks. It's trivial to circumvent (though the DMCA makes such circumvention illegal, even if the copy you make isn't), and it makes home-theater setups unnecessarily complex.

So Columbia-Tristar is forgoing paying for Macrovision licenses for its new Superbit titles and releasing without the copy-prevention technology. The discs are marked "Warning: This disc is copy protected," but this refers to CSS, the "content scrambling system" that ensures that viewers can't watch DVDs from other regions (i.e., watch American DVDs in Europe), and makes it impossible to ship legal open source DVD players.

Macrovision is reportedly upset with Columbia-Tristar, though, since it views this warning as a kind of protective coloration for the Superbit discs, using Macrovision's reputation to intimidate viewers without paying Macrovision's protection money.

The New Scientist article on this reads like a motion-picture-studio press-release. Consider this graf:

Like other DVDs, the disks do have tough digital copy protection, meaning only hackers can duplicate them with a PC. But Macrovision, a technology that prevents people copying by simply connecting the analogue output of a DVD player to the analogue input of a recorder, has not been used.

The story doesn't call out the fact that the "protection" measures in DVD are in place to control what paying, law-abiding customers can do with their property -- format-shifting, time-shifting, backup -- but does not even slow down real "pirates" who make bootleg editions of DVDs and sell them for profit. In other words, the "protection" here is protection from you, not from criminals. Link Discuss (Thanks, Druidbros!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:49:33 AM permanent link to this entry

Giant Robot store online
The Giant Robot online store is your one stop shop for Astro-Boy and Afro-Ken merch, tin-robot illustrated books, and Bruce-Lee-as-DJ hoodies. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:21:59 AM permanent link to this entry

Saturday, November 09, 2002

Picastro MP3s available for download
I've taken to using Google to check up on old friends and see what they're up to. Last night, I dug up Zak Hanna, who was just about my best pal from the age of 14 to my mid-20s. We got into all kinds of trouble together, and even then, he was a guitar virtuoso. So these days, Zak is playing in a band called Picastro, which has been signed to a little microlabel, which has made a couple of MP3s off their disc available for download. It's lovely and spooky and haunting, and takes me back to my teen years, when I would fool around with my computer while Zak thrashed away on his guitar. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:34:26 AM permanent link to this entry

Unbelievable Tetris championship video
This video from the 2001 Japanese Tetris championship is the most goddamned hypnotic thing I've ever seen. I have never dreamed of such masterful tetrising. Link (12.7MB MPEG) Discuss (Thanks, David!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:55:03 AM permanent link to this entry

Friday, November 08, 2002

Sub-micro Tetris
Teeny-tiny Tetris:

A real-life implementation of the evergreen arcade game Tetris was obtained by optically trapping 42 glass microspheres (1 μm diameter) in a 25 μm x 20 μm sized field under a microscope. Their positions are then steered with a computer.
The generation of multiple traps, as well as the computer-steering, is accomplished by the use of acousto-optic deflectors: devices that tune the deflection of a laser beam that have very fast response.

POW transport photos
Weird pictures of POWs being transported on a military jet. From Art Bell's site, so who knows if they've been photoshopped? Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:54:55 PM permanent link to this entry

How Guantanamo's detainees amuse themselves
Weekly Standard article about strange behavior at the Guantanamo prison camp.

When I ask the Marines if they've seen anything weird, they laugh sheepishly, looking at each other. Finally, Sgt. Josh Westbrook, who sports a forearm tattoo of flaming baby heads, steps up. "They know they're being watched," he explains, "so they'll stare at you, and while they stare at you, they'll, uh, masturbate."

According to these Marines, they don't just pleasure themselves to freak out the snipers, but also to embarrass the female Army guards in the camp's interior. The weirdness doesn't end there. They've also eaten their toiletries and urinated on equipment. "The other day," says Westbrook, "one of the guys tried to do a naked cartwheel." In the most bizarre twist, Lance Corporal Devin Klebaur says a few have also been known to "put toothpaste in their ass." "What's the purpose?" I ask. "I'm not sure," he says, puzzled.

Credit Card Art
Amazing technicolor starburst art made from cut-up credit cards, by Raymond Pirouz.Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:36:29 PM permanent link to this entry

Science and the Artist's Book
"Science and the Artist's Book is an exhibition which explores links between scientific and artistic creativity through the book format. In 1993, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) invited a group of nationally recognized book artists to create new works of art based on classic volumes from... the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' Special Collections. The resulting artist's books, each inspired by the subject, theories or illustrations of the landmark works of science with which they are paired, offer a number of witty, imaginative, and even poignant insights into the creative side of scientific research." Link Discuss
posted by David Pescovitz at 11:08:26 AM permanent link to this entry

Lab Notes!
Using DNA as a nano-assembly line, simulating bad vision with good graphics, and how not to burn down the Space Station... in this month's issue of my Lab Notes research digest from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. Please check it out! Link Discuss
posted by David Pescovitz at 11:03:21 AM permanent link to this entry

Are you anywhere?
This Office of National Drug Control Policy glossary of "Street Terms: Drugs and the Drug Trade" is far out. (Are you anywhere? = Do you use marijuana?) Link Discuss
posted by David Pescovitz at 10:54:12 AM permanent link to this entry

Own a 12000 Pound Thrust Rocket Engine!
Stefan sez:

A couple of mad rocket scientists are selling a liquid-fueled rocket motor. "Build the world's fastest rocket car!" (and star in your own urban myth?)

Friday Web Zen: Instructional hipsterism
In this week's fun-filled, timewasterly installment of Web Zen, we actually learn a thing or two.

1. How to be Electroclash. Don't know what Electroclash is yet? Retro subculture trend du jour that's all about vocoders, Giorgio Moroder, methadone, safety pins, glitz, space invaders, Pac-Man, leatherette, 80's porno, robots, robots robots. And the '80s film classic: Liquid Sky, image at left.

2. How to Dance Goth. Put your (black-fingernailed) hands up in the air, and wave 'em like ya just don't care.

3. The glamorous and highly competitive world of cat dancing."The question to ask is not 'Will my cat dance with me?' but rather 'Will I dance with my cat?' "

4. How To Be a Cribster: Preparing yourself to be on the MTV show Cribs. Excerpt: "You don't eat, sleep or have sex, you 'Get your eat/sleep/f*ck on.'... Things are not shiny. They are blinged out. ... They are not friends. They are 'dawgz.'... You may own any or all existing video game systems other than a Nintendo, which is for beeyotches and kids. However, you may only own NFL or NBA themed video games. (No one has ever said 'This is where I get my flight simulation on.')"

Discuss (Thanks, Frank!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:22:32 AM permanent link to this entry

S&M; Barbie doesn't interfere with Barbie sales
Mattel has lost a bid to block sales of a kinky S&M; Barbie doll made by sticking the heads of legitimately purchased Superstar Barbies onto kinky bodies.

Manhattan federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain surprised Mattel with a preliminary finding this week that ruled in favour of the doll because she found it wasn't "a market substitute for Barbie dolls".

"To the court's knowledge, there is no Mattel line of 'S&M; Barbie,'" Judge Taylor Swain said.

Debbie Does Dallas does Broadway
Debbie Does Dallas, the musical, opens off-Broadway:

Like the movie, Debbie the musical isn't terribly hardcore. Its attitude toward sex is lighthearted, even a little earnest; there's none of the straightforward, stick-it-in candor that's become so rampant in today's culture. (This is a musical that's still making banana jokes, people.) One sex scene is peformed using well-choreographed dry-humping. A brief threesome takes place only in silhouette. There's a cutesy dance number using some flipping dildos, and one character nearly gets caught in flagrante delicto with a candlestick. I may be wrong, but I don't think I heard a single coarse word in Debbie's book, unless you count a "cock" or two. The cast is as pretty and effervescent as a page plucked from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog — especially Debbie herself, who is played by Sherie Rene Scott. Everyone has nice hair and teeth, they smile all the time and they're happy as hell, and why not? They're in a porno musical that they can actually invite their parents to.

Thursday, November 07, 2002

Kenyan condom survey says: golden-brown, vanilla-scented rubbers are it.
German condom manufacturer Condomi AG recently surveyed 15,000 condom-users in Kenya for a foreign-aid funded AIDS prevention program. The problem? When users don't like a product, they won't use it. So if condom manufacturers have better data about user preferences, more people will use more condoms and have safer sex.

Exactly what the 15,000 Kenyans told Gothe in the survey, done in conjunction with Germany's KfW development agency, remains a trade secret. But he's happy to talk about the result: a vanilla-scented, golden brown condom he says people in sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to use -- which is the whole point of the project.

"Sometimes it's more intelligent to think about the social and cultural adaptation of the product -- for example, the color, the lubrication, the smell, the packaging," said the tousle-haired, jeans-clad 33-year-old.

Standard white latex just didn't do much for his African testers, it turns out.

"Why is the condom gold? Because gold means something very valuable," he said. "Why should a condom be white in this region?"

1,000 custom ViewMaster reels
Fisher Price will turn your stereoscopic images into 1,000 ViewMaster reels, starting at $1000 (including loan of the stereoscopic camera). The dessert menu at the 50s Prime-Time Dine-In at Disney-MGM Studios in Walt DIsneyworld is on ViewMaster, and it's one of my favorite things in the universe. I'd love to make viewmaster reels out of my holiday snaps and send them to all my friends and family. Link Discuss (Thanks, Teresa!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:26:46 PM permanent link to this entry

Iran to America: Axis of evil, huh? Fine, but we're not an axis of your TV ads.
Iran's government has barred its press and broadcasters from running any advertisements for American products, according to a state representative's announcement on state-run television yesterday.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:22:29 PM permanent link to this entry

Tunisia jails, reportedly tortures popular blogger and online journo
The notion that Tunisia's less-than-democratic government is unfriendly to outspoken journalists is nothing new. But according to a story in OJR by Andrew Stroehlein, Tunisian authorities have recently expanded their policies of anti-free speech brutality to their first online journalist. Web publisher Zouhair Yahyaoui was arrested, allegedly tortured, and sentenced to two years in jail for "spreading false information" through his blog and news site TUNeZINE. Excerpt:

In late May, for example, the satirical online magazine hosted a Web poll asking readers to vote whether Tunisia was a republic, a kingdom, a zoo or a prison.

Yahyaoui also openly discussed a tourist boycott of Tunisia in protest of the country’s human rights record -- a particularly touchy subject for the regime as tourism is a key sector of the Tunisian economy and one that has already been hit hard in the past year in the aftermath of 9/11.

Yahyaoui’s downfall, however, was probably his publishing of an online article, actually a letter by his uncle, Mokhtar Yahyaoui, a former judge, saying the Tunisian judiciary showed a total lack of independence.

New EDGE video streams: Kurzweil, Minsky
The latest edition of John Brockman's EDGE is now online, and features two great discussions on the nature of universes with Ray Kurzweil and Marvin Minsky.

THE INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE: RAY KURZWEIL
The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. Video (REAL)

THE EMOTION UNIVERSE: MARVIN MINSKY
To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist? Video (REAL)

Yemen Assassination: new age of robot warfare?
The legal implications of last week's assasination of alleged al Qaeda operatives by a robotic, U.S. drone aircraft are the subject of an interesting analysis piece in the UK Guardian:

While defence experts said the incident could herald a new era of robotic warfare, international lawyers debated the legal implications of the surprising turn in US strategy: killing specific individuals in countries where there is no war.

"To have a drone that engages and kills people, that is quite a threshold to cross," Clifford Beal, editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, told Reuters.

"This is the beginning of robotic warfare. There is underlying tension in the military about using it. The CIA does not have any qualms. This is really the first success story of this system."

The Predator drone said to have carried out the attack has a range of 400 miles and would not necessarily have been launched in Yemen.

Bunghole Astringent
Sphincterine makes your ass "kissin' sweet." Link Discuss (Thanks, Andrew!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 8:49:28 AM permanent link to this entry

Cartoon guide to tragic entropy
Alan "Watchmen" Moore and Melinda Gebbie's one-page toon excerpt explains entropy in the context of 9-11. Link Discuss (via Blackbelt Jones)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:08:50 AM permanent link to this entry

White "mosquito net" weddings increase malaria
Impoverished Ugandan brides, urged by Christian ministers to have white weddings, are tearing down white mosquito nets to make beautiful gowns. Health officials warn that the practice will increase the spread of malaria, already an epidemic in Uganda. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:51:54 AM permanent link to this entry

Harry Potter versus Tanya Grotter
A Russian young-adult witchcraft novel starring a character named Tanya Grotter has put a wild hair up the ass of the Harry Potter corporate machine. Tanya and Harry have a bunch of similarities, but the Grotterfolk claim that "it was meant in part as a parody of the Harry Potter series, but with roots in Russian culture and folklore..." "It's a sort of Russian answer to Harry Potter," Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:45:13 AM permanent link to this entry

Looking for coding work in a buyer's market
Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla chronicles the depredations of looking for programmer work in a buyer's market:

Me: So what happens next?

Headhunter: Well, standard procedure for them is to have two interviews. The first is a simple get-to-know-you. It's all personality, to see if you fit with the rest of the team. They're strong on personality. That'll be the easy one.

Me: I take it that the second interview is the technical one.

Headhunter: Probably not "technical" in the way you're thinking. The second interview is an hour-long presenation. You make one in front if the president and some higher-ups.

Me: An hour?

Headhunter: Well, it depends. The Q&A; sessions could go long. I think one presentation took up three hours with the Q&A.;

Me: Uh, do I get a budget for this presentation, or do I recoup my time costs by selling a "Joey's Interview: Behind the Magic" TV special?

Own the elements
For 558 pounds, you can buy this gift-case containing all 92 naturally occuring elements in the Periodic Table -- yes, uranium is included. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:28:10 AM permanent link to this entry

Hitchcock mosaics from the London Tube
The London underground system has commissioned fourteen murals celebrating the great films of Alfred Hitchcock. They were installed in Leytonstone station, not far from Hitch's birthplace. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patricio!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:22:34 AM permanent link to this entry

Same picture, next year
Amazing series of family portraits, taken every year between 1976 and 2002, with the subjects all holding the same expression. Link Discuss (Thanks, Craig!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:15:53 AM permanent link to this entry

Blue electronics and their place in history
The rise of blue-glowing electronics may have been made possible by the invention of blue LEDs, but the signifigance of blue goes back to audiophiles in the 60s:

Blue got another image boost in the 1960s, when McIntosh Labs, a top-of-the-line stereo components maker in Binghamton, N.Y., hired University of Michigan researchers to find out what color of light is most visible to middle-age males, the company's core demographic. Blue, they said, and McIntosh began putting blue-tinted faceplates on its pricey units.

Eventually blue's associations with quality filtered down from obsessed audiophiles to ordinary electronics buyers. "Consumers associate blue light with high-end gear," confirms Ray Weikel, the Logitech director of product marketing responsible for putting blue lights in the company's computer speakers. "Our engineers lusted after blue LEDs for a long time," he says.

Giant ass-tube tours America

The Colossal Colon will tour the USA as part of Colon Cancer Awareness Month, starting in March. People all over the country will be able to crawl around in this gigantic ass-tube, and so understand the importance of colorectal cancer. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:04:20 AM permanent link to this entry

Oil companies carve up Iraq's riches
The British Observer is reporting that the world's oil companies are already meeting to divvy up Iraq's oilfields, deciding who gets what after the war.

The leader of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, has met executives of three US oil multinationals to negotiate the carve-up of Iraq's massive oil reserves post-Saddam.

Disclosure of the meetings in October in Washington - confirmed by an INC spokesman - comes as Lord Browne, the head of BP, has warned that British oil companies have been squeezed out of post-war Iraq even before the first shot has been fired in any US-led land invasion.

Linksys router vulnerability disclosed
If you've got a Linksys router with remote administration turned on, or if you've got a WiFi access-point connected to it, then you'd best update your firmware, now. A newly discovered vulnerability in the Linksys's firmware lets anyone anywhere on the Internet shut down your connection with a simple browser-request. Link Discuss (via /.)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:50:25 AM permanent link to this entry

Penn and Teller's debunker hour
Penn and Teller will be doing a Showtime programme, where they go around and debunk con-men, fake-ass faith-healers, and so on. Link Discuss (via Fark)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:45:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

US Post Office's whacky email scheme
Joey has excavated a 1981 article from Creative Computing magazine, in which Ted "Xanadu" Nelson berates the post-office for attempting to ban all "electronic mail" systems that are outside of their control:

We must control service. We cannot allow our resources to be sprited away. We have a legislative mandate and a financial requirement...

You're not going to see books and newspapers transmitted in the next twenty years.

Comics Journal: Bill Gaines audio interview
Here's an MP3 of an 1983 interview with William Gaines, publisher of Mad and comics like Weird Science and Tales from the Crypt. (Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 8:15:58 AM permanent link to this entry

BMG promises DRM on all CDs
Bertellsman spokespeople are writing to European customers promising them that they will soon stop shipping regular CDs, flooding the market with copy-restricted discs that can't be ripped, played in car stereos, DVD players or computers. They argue that since "normal CD players" can't rip or copy, that their discs ar still "CDs" that play in "CD players." Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:05:57 AM permanent link to this entry

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

Superheros and the Single Girl
Jed sez:

A real-life superhero in New York, who goes by the nom du mask "Terrifica," patrols the streets and bars to save young women from would-be seducers. "'I protect the single girl living in the big city,' says Terrifica, sporting blond Brunhild wig with a golden mask and a matching Valkyrie bra. 'I do this because women are weak. They are easily manipulated, and they need to be protected from themselves and most certainly from men and their ill intentions toward them.'" She draws explicit parallels between her own psychology and Batman's. She even has an arch-nemesis, a man who dresses in velvet and calls himself Fantastico.

Pix from the south pole
Amazing gallery of hundreds of photos from the US Antarctic Program. Link Discuss (Thanks, KerLone!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:04:15 PM permanent link to this entry

U.S. Army locks down wireless LAN
While some government entities--including the Pentagon--are shutting down wireless LANs wholesale, others are implementing unwired networks that combine established security methods with over-the-air encryption. Case in point: a U.S. Army base in Texas.

Fort Sam Houston is a prime candidate for wireless networks. The San Antonio installation is home to the commanders of the Army's medical systems and supports various military training services, including battle simulation. Because other tactical groups often conduct tests at the site, a network may be installed for a week, a few months or even a year.

On top of this, the base has 18,000 computer users and houses a number of older buildings, so running high-speed copper or fiber wiring is expensive, impractical and sometimes impossible.

Wireless local-area networks based on the popular 802.11 standards emerged as the best way to expand the base's network last year because of the easy setup and breakdown, and the minimal disruption to the existing infrastructure.

However, such an approach is not as secure as its wired counterparts, something other government agencies have discovered the hard way.

John Shirley's 70s punk rock
John Shirley kicked off the cyberpunk movement with his 1980 novel City Come a Walkin'. (Gibson called it the "Protoplasmic Mother of all cyberpunk novels.") I had the pleasure of being the editor that reissued the book for Wired Books and for Four Walls Eight Windows.

John was/is also a protopunk when it comes to music. Check out his MP3.com page, which has some wonderful raw songs from his 1978 Portland punk band, Sadonation. They're on heavy rotation on my iTunes player. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 8:26:23 PM permanent link to this entry

New Comics Journal Blog: Journalista
Dirk Deppey of Fantagraphics (the world's greatest comic book publisher) has started a blog about comic books. It's excellent. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 4:59:01 PM permanent link to this entry

NASA seeks to debunk debunkers with new "yes-we-really-did-land-on-the-moon" minibook
Amid fresh media buzz over conspiracy theorist claims that Apollo moon landings were faked, NASA recently agreed to pay aeronautics engineer James Oberg $15,000 to write a monograph countering debunkers' claims point-by-point.

The short book, scheduled for release later this year, may help Buzz Aldrin travel more peacefully. As blogged here previously, on September 9 the 72-year-old astronaut punched out a particularly aggressive Apollo-doubter who confronted him at a Beverly Hills speaking engagement. Bart Sibrel, who produced a film questioning the Apollo missions, demanded that Aldrin swear on a stack of bibles he had in fact walked on the moon, and pursued Aldrin down the street calling him a "thief, liar, and a coward."

NASA also recently published this web site with point-by-point counterclaims to Apollo hoax allegations.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 1:34:50 PM permanent link to this entry

Rucker's transrealist 16th-Cen painter novel -- w00t!
Rudy Rucker, the father of transrealism, the gonzo physicist/cyberpunk who gave us Spaceland (Flatland with an extra dimension), the Wetware books (artificial life, drugs and rock-and-roll), and The Hacker and the Ants (emergence fictionalized), has written a non-sf novel about Peter Bruegel called "As Above, So Below."

Bruegel was a sixteenth-century painter whose works have fascinated Rucker for years. As he writes in the 65,000 words' worth of mind-blowing book-notes on his site:

Encyclopedia Pictures: These are also called Wimmelbilder, for "teeming figure picture". The perspective trick is that [Foote, p. 147] "he appears to move his vantage point progressively higher as the picture recedes...In addition, he usually painted these background figures larger than they would appear under normal rules of perspective." I think another way of thinking of this is that he paints it as if he were inside a Hollow Earth, with the distant landscape bending up to rise high, so that you are effectively looking down at it. Maybe B. did go into the Hollow Earth!

Canada's privacy year in review
Ontario's Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner has put together this long, comprehensive review of changes to access-to-information and privacy across Canada between September 2001 and August 2002.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the government announced in October 2001 that it would spend $9.5 million on new counter-terrorism initiatives and $12 million on an emergency preparedness strategy. It then added another $9 million to this budget a week after its initial announcement. The expenditures will include:

* $2.5 million a year, as well as a special one-time amount of $1.4 million, to improve the intelligence-gathering capabilities of Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario;

* $1 million per year and 8 new officers to expand the mandate of the new provincial Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement squad to include targeting individuals who are illegally in the province;

* $600,000 to develop specialized capacities at the Centre for Forensic Sciences, including DNA testing on a larger scale than previously carried out.

The government also passed the Vital Statistics Statute Law Amendment Act to increase the security of vital documents such as birth certificates. The amendments were given Royal Assent in the legislature on December 5, 2001. They increase the flexibility of the Registrar-General to alter registration procedures, and bestow greater discretion to be able to collect and disclose information for verification purposes or investigation of possible improprieties.

Cassette's musical eulogy
WashPo is running a lyrical appreciation of the life and death of the cassette tape:

A cassette tape lets you know when it's dying.

It starts to give off the sound of music that would be played by a very small band in a suitcase, and then it sounds like that suitcase is inside another suitcase. It sounds like the singer is wearing little socks on his teeth. Consonants go away. Dolby Noise Reduction technology gives up, and if you didn't know what "Sussudio" meant in the summer of 1985, then there's no hope of knowing now, not when you pop in the cassette version.

Everything unspools.

Tonight you are feeling faithful anyhow. There's a tape in you trying to get out, and you feel like doing it the old way. You will stay home, by yourself, have a drink, and turn your attention to the bulky components stacked like artifacts in homage to bachelorhood. With the teak-colored stereo speakers large enough to rest your beer upon.

All the important cords are jacked into the tape deck.

Obsessing into the small hours, pulling record sleeves from the shelves, the LED display pulsing into the red zone when you record. You can nudge the knobs toward more bass. High bias, normal bias, basically you're just biased. You are very careful, like a doctor on the verge on the sheer genius.

(Or: madness.)

World Fantasy Awards presented
The World Fantasy Awards were presented this weekend and my pal Nalo Hopkinson took home the prize for best collection, for her book "Skin Folk."

Novel: The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin

Novella: "The Bird Catcher" by S.P. Somtow

Short Story: "Queen for a Day" by Albert E. Cowdrey

Anthology: The Museum of Horrors, Dennis Etchison, ed.

Collection: Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson

Artist: Allen Koszowski

StopEsso: Picket your local pump about Esso's sabotage of Kyoto
StopEsso is asking supporters to stage mini-protests at Esso stations around the world, handing out leaflets to drivers about Esso's sabotage of the Kyoto accord. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gilberto!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:54:43 AM permanent link to this entry

Monday, November 04, 2002

Big Cartoon Database
The Big Cartoon Database is like an Internet Music Movie (Thanks, Jeffery!) Database for toons. Whee! Zonk! Blammo! Link Discuss (via Memepool)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:41:58 PM permanent link to this entry

Suing the fat-pushers
The lawyer who led the "nonsmokers' rights" class-action suits is laying into a new target: pushers of obesity-generating foodstuffs:

Who will he sue now? For starters, schools with food contracts that provide sugary and fatty food, and fast-food companies in general. His argument: Many food companies have neglected to inform consumers about just how bad their products are, have made misleading health claims about them and, worst of all, have exerted enormous pressure on their most gullible audience -- children. Eventually, he predicts, the states could sue to recover the billions they spend on obesity-related diseases (diabetes, strokes), and then the companies could settle, presumably for oodles of money, like the tobacco companies did.

X-Faces: email icons
X-Faces are highly compressed 48x48 icons that you can put in your mail and Usenet posting headers to be displayed in mail-clients, sorta like the favicons in Mozilla. Here's one that Greg made for Boing Boing -- run it through the decoder on the link below to see it.

X-Face: 5/(/y+5u8;d]xJj4e%F+dUag"AX1!7",
=< l'Z\HToFj*zW'~F]^_6~m#:=nu3[WJ]joxvt,pw+`.
?^0?L^wNi>t~/,YZDNP*[>X>`,p^];_cPNbn
?=9mG!cjtkOucg.bj():KBma56tWP>s)=T3usYL4
f1Qyw&^Ome[g&19#/m9SJIA(";FdB0h9]g!`G,
FH&tJ;$)n

Used bookstore yours for an essay
Jed sez:

For a $250 entry fee, you can enter an essay contest/raffle to win a used-book store in Roseburg, OR. Owner wants store to go to a good home. She's received only half of the 2000 entries she was hoping for, so she's extended the deadline another three months. My friend Ed notes that the Internet allows "odd-but-theoretically-efficient" economic models, like raffles, to work on a large scale even for someone in a small town in Oregon.

Battlefield Earth fetishwear on eBay
John Travolta's lame-ass "Psychlo" leatherman costume from the Scientology-allegory stinker "Battlefield Earth" is up for auction on eBay, for the low, low cost of thirteen grand. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:16:21 PM permanent link to this entry

Ancient anatomy
Dream Anatomy: high-resolution gallery of ancient anatomical drawings. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kelly!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:12:16 PM permanent link to this entry

Massive Canadian university science fiction collection sold to American book-dealer
The University of Winnipeg has sold one of the largest collections of science fiction in the world off to a private dealer. The University couldn't afford to store the 30,000+ books any longer, so it sold them off to an American dealer for $140K, $110K less than the assessed value.

"Unfortunately, we were storing it in our off-site storage facility, which is not climate-controlled, so the collection would have been disintegrating year by year."

Leggott says most of the classic items in the collection can still be found in the university's library. "For example, the first-edition books that were there, like the Dune, the Herbert books, the Asimov, Edward Rice Burroughs – they would all be available still today in other editions."

Leggott says Curry did leave the university about 4,000 hard cover books from the collection.

Panama breaks the Internet
Panama's government has ordered all of its ISPs to begin blocking the UDP ports used for Internet telephony (AKA VoIP). The national telco is pissed that ISPs are undermining their businesses, which rely on charging farcically high rates for long-distance, and they've gotten their pals in government to strong-arm all the ISPs in the country.

In the decree, the Panamanian government requires "that within 5 days of publication, all ISPs will block the 24 UDP ports used for VoIP and any other that could be used in the future (which could end up being all UDP ports)," according to a reporter and computer consultant there, and that "the ISPs will block in their firewall or main router and in all their Border routers that connect with other autonomous systems."

This "unequivocally decrees that all routers, including those not carrying traffic from Panama, but that might be traversing Panama, have the 24 UDP ports blocked."

The significance of the government action affects areas far beyond that nation. Due to its geographical location, numerous undersea cables connect in the country, making it a substantial hub for international IP traffic.

What Panama is doing is asking for the Internet to be redesigned and rearchitected in order to inflict a policy that relates to competition. The result is not the Internet.

It is important for the IAB and IETF to point out to the government of Panama that the service they are asking to be deployed is NOT the Internet. It violates the Internet standards, by incorporating an end-to-end protocol into the routers between adminstrative domains.

Reach out and touch your lawmaker
Here are tables showing all the Congresscritters in both houses for California and New York, with their major funders, phone numbers, email addresses and whether they're up for reelection. It often seems like Congress goes out of its way to make it hard to reach out and touch your lawmaker -- here's a step towards fixing that. New York, California Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:40:50 PM permanent link to this entry

Program your own ringtones on Motorola 120T
Jeff Bisbee writes, "I just got a Motorola 120t phone and found out you can program your own ringtones into it. I spent the weekend looking a sheet music and turning it into code that the phone would understand." Check out Jeff's site to learn how you too can program your own, using ordinary sheet music and just a li'l bit of ASCII.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:57:58 AM permanent link to this entry

Just in time for the holidays: Bustier Barbie
Dolls gone wild! What's next, Fluffer Ken? A Pimpmobile accessory kit?

"The Barbie® Fashion Model Collection unveils its first-ever African-American Silkstone doll, the fifth Lingerie Barbie doll. Barbie doll exudes a flirtatious attitude in her heavenly merry widow bustier ensemble accented with intricate lace and matching peekaboo peignoir. Ages 14 and up. Limited Edition."

My review of Smart Mobs
My review of Howard Rheingold's new book "Smart Mobs" is up on Mindjack.

Smart Mobs are the Slashdot effect applied to the meatspace zeitgeist. A squillion like-minded souls who don't know each other and will never meet pop out of the transmetropolitan brickface and break the white-noise balance of atomic viewpoints to speak with one voice, roaring a righteous YES or an adamant NO without organizers, without leaders, without manifestoes or forethought.

Enabled by close-to-hand, invisbly-ubiquitous tech -- the Internet, mobile phones, two-way pagers, blogs, the Web, WiFi -- they turn meme into deed. Howard walks us through the thousand facets of the Smart Mob non-movement, from Finnish wireless augmented reality gamers to the tried-and-true Japanese schoolgirl speed-tribes to earnest anti-Globalist Starbucks-smashers. We meet mystified (and sometimes delighted) (and always delightful) suits from Nokia and Japanese diversified zaibatsus and other bastions of traditional authority, who are watching their Frankenstein Monster take its first lumbering steps across the world.

Washington's Worst Coders
The American Open Technology Consortium has release a list of "Washington's Worst Coders" -- the lawmakers who sponsored six fantastically bad anti-tech laws:

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), H.R.2281

1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) flooded American technology with punishing legal action, jailing scientists and destroying companies. The DMCA's "anti-circumvention" provisions have trumped the First Amendment and have given copyright holders a whip hand over every use of the material they sell to their customers.

Communications Decency Act (CDA), S.314/ H.R.1004

1995's Communications Decency Act turned the Internet into a First-Amendment-Free zone. Speech that would be absolutely protected in the "real world" was criminalized if transmitted over the Internet. After a protracted court battle, a Philadelphia Federal Court zapped this buggy code, declaring the CDA un-Constitutional.

Child Online Protection Act (COPA, "CDA II"), S. 1482, H.R. 3783

After the defeat of CDA, anti-freedom groups and their lawmakers launched a second salvo, COPA. COPA was a narrower attack than CDA, limiting itself to websites hosted by commercial entities, but no less un-Constitutional. The courts stopped COPA dead in its tracks, but today, the Supreme Court is deliberating over whether to unleash COPA on America.

Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA, "The Hollings Bill"), S.2048

This virulent Trojan Horse, written by Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings and friends appears to be a law that promotes technology, but it carries a deadly payload. Under this proposed law, technologists will have to come to film and movie studios on bent knee and beg for permission to ship new hardware and software. The film and music companies who worked to ban every innovative technology from the player piano to Marconi's radio to the VCR and the Internet itself would be in charge of all future innovation in America.

P2P Piracy Prevention Bill ("Berman P2P bill"), H.R.5211

Representative Howard Berman's (D-Cal.) P2P Bill opens a hole in the security of the American judicial system. Under this proposal, copyright holders are free to take illegal countermeasures against any member of the public whom they believe to be engaged in copyright infringement. A law that lets a group of people break the law sounds like an oxymoron, but it's worse than that: by affording a "right of revenge" to movie and music companies, Berman's code legalizes vigilanteism, stripping law-enforcement agencies of the ability to police attacks on Internet users.

CIPA, H.R. 4577

CIPA is a denial-of-service attack on schools, libraries and children. Under CIPA, schools and libraries that receive certain Federal funds are required by law to censor the Web, using filters provided by snake-oil salesmen that raise the cost of providing Internet access to kids while spuriously blocking informative sites that carry information that appears in our schools' mandatory curriculum.

American Airlines' site has the worst click-through of all?
Slashdot has given American Airlines' aa.com an award for longest, stupidest, most insulting click-through agreement for using the site:

...181 paragraphs; 3482 words; and 22411 characters. However even mentioning this is probably in violation of the text."

New wireless antenna tech boosts range to four miles
A new computer-controlled antenna technology being released by a startup called Vivato will increase WiFi range to four miles without emitting more radiation than the access-point on your shelf today. It does it by moving an array of itty-bitty antennae around to follow and focus on connected users, keeping them online even as they move around. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:01:08 AM permanent link to this entry

Sunday, November 03, 2002

Clay Shirky: Welcome to the Guestblog!
Danny and Quinn did a killer job on the guestbar and they're bowing out under the strain of family emergencies, a move, and an impending baby.

Stepping in next on the Guestblog is Clay Shirky, who I first met at the first O'Reilly P2P conference. He gave a to-the-barricades-comrades keynote that had the audience stomping and howling. He's promised to fill the sidebar with links to tasty old forgotten rants from the dawn of the Web. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:38:25 PM permanent link to this entry

Roll your own evil clown
Great Flash applet lets you design your own evil clown. Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:41:50 AM permanent link to this entry

Help recover Chuck Jones's stuff
Chuck Jones's studio wuz robbed:

On the morning of September 25th, the Chuck Jones Studio Gallery in Old Town San Diego was burglarized for a third time in the past 6 months. Linda Jones Enterprises is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.

Saturday, November 02, 2002

Retro vinyl chic CD blanks
Verbatim's new CD-R blanks looks like old 45s. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:15:22 PM permanent link to this entry

Charles Sheffield is dead
Charles Sheffield -- scientist, author, columnist -- has died. His wife, author Nancy Kress, was with him to the end. RIP, Charles. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:23 AM permanent link to this entry

Posh Spice kidnappers foiled
Scotland Yard has foiled a plot to kidnap Posh Spice. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:25 AM permanent link to this entry

Buchanan: Blame Soviet Canuckistan
Canadians' protests over the INS's promise to give "special" attention to Canadian citizens of Middle-Eastern origin prompted Pat Buchanan to call America's Hat "Soviet Canuckistan" and describe it as a "complete haven for international terrorists." Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:40:44 AM permanent link to this entry

Masons thriving in Havana
Freemasonry is thriving in Cuba, with membership doubling in the past year. Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:21:26 AM permanent link to this entry

TiVo users launch distributed password cracking project
TiVo power-users are accustomed to getting access to a variety of powerful hidden features by keying in a manufacturer's "backdoor" password that unlocks them. With TiVo's latest OS update, though, the password has been changed and users are locked out. In response TiVo users have launched a SETI@Home-style distributed computation project to crack the password by brute force, farming the job out to thousands of computers that try different combinations. Link Discuss (via /.)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:04:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Friday, November 01, 2002

Kitty, Hello?
Ditch the Fur Elise, please.

Sprint's Sanyo SCP 6200 mobile phone now comes standard with relatively lifelike doggie-bark or cat-meow ringtones. You can even can configure the phone to bark when an incoming call is has caller ID, and meow when caller-ID-blocked (or vice versa). $199 at sprint.com.

Link Discuss Thanks, DailyCandy!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:26:50 PM permanent link to this entry

The Voynich Manuscript
Could this be a project for distributed computing?

The Voynich manuscript is by far the most mysterious of all texts. It is seven by ten inches in size, and about 200 pages long. It is made of soft, light-brown vellum. It is written in a flowing cursive script in alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania seems to have gone insane trying to figure it out. Though the manuscript was found in Italy, statistical analyses show the text is completely different in character from any European language.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 4:00:09 PM permanent link to this entry

Wireless keyboard connects itself to distant computer
A cordless keyboard defied physics by slaving itself to a distant computer, making it appear to be possessed by mischevious, memo-writing poltergeists.

"About 10 pm I was sitting and watching TV when the computer, which was in sleep mode, suddenly began to buzz. I looked over and noticed it was waking up. I also saw a red light on the keyboard's receiver box blinking as if I was writing something," Helle said.

Manhattan is WiFi-saturated
Amazing map of 802.11 wireless networks through Manhattan -- pretty much all of Manhattan. Link Discuss (via Werblog!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:25:39 PM permanent link to this entry

Spam-filled blogs
Interesting piece in The Laboratorium about spammers infiltrating blogs.

It's so ridiculously easy. Many blogs -- not this one! -- have comment forms attached to every post. All you have to do is go to a blog, click on a "comment on this post" link, type MAKE MONEY FAST into the "Comments" field, and hit the submit button. Bingo: that's an ad. If you're a robot, you can do this to an awful lot of blogs awfully quickly.

Galaxy Killers, Gamma-Ray Mayhem, and Blazars
Researchers in Washington state at Washington University in St. Louis are exploring the mysterious, violent activity that results when gamma-ray bursts are emitted by massive black holes at the center of "active galaxies":

Like meteor showers, each TeV [terra-electron volt] photon leaves a faint blue streak in the atmosphere that points back to its source. Over the last decade, they also have discovered six occurrences of energetic gamma-ray flares from peculiar galaxies known as Active galaxies or Blazars.

"We are learning about the physical conditions inside what are known as relativistic jets, which produce TeV gamma rays, " said Buckley. "The jets are composed of matter and radiation that move very close to the speed of light, scattering ambient light up to extremely high (TeV) energies.

Bringing sand to the Gulf
Uncle Sam doesn't pack light:

Does anyone go to war like the U.S. military?

Not even remotely. Being the world's unmatched military superpower not only means the United States can boast about its combat punch. It means it can take along pretty much whatever it wants.

Like the sumo wrestling suit ($3,395), cappuccino machines ($51,200) and white beach sand ($4,638) the Air Force recently purchased to support its combat operations against Iraq from air bases in the Persian Gulf region.

"Why do we take all this stuff? Because we can," said James Jay Carafano, a retired Army artillery officer and historian who teaches at the Naval War College.

L.A. digital art festival "TV or Not TV" opens today
Freewaves LA kicks off the 2002 edition of its biennial art festival tonight in L.A.'s Chinatown. I covered the fest today here for WIRED News, more details on the Freewaves web site, here.

The month-long event will be the largest in the group's 13-year history, say organizers, who plan to transform an assortment of urban venues -- from museums to billboards -- into showcases for art.

More than 350 artists will present around 300 works at close to 65 venues, including museums, Koreatown pool halls and neighborhood Internet cafes. The festival will also take place on three TV channels, and online.

Ambitions are high at this year's gathering: Included in the dozens of events at the 2002 festival will be a series of workshops aimed at launching a new artist-controlled television arts channel by late 2003.

Hey! My first short story collection is out. Download a bunch of the stories for free here, or buy the physical, dead-tree book!

Explore the creative potential of phonecams,
and participate in the NPR Phonecam Challenge!

The Guestbar! A tiny, guest-edited blog! Johannes Grenzfurthner Johannes Grenzfurthner is writer, artist and founding member of Vienna/Austria based art-tech-philosophy group monochrom. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism. monochrom's mission, its passion and quasi-ontological vocation, is primarily the collection, grouping, registration and querying (liberation?) of the scar tissue represented by everyday cultural artifacts. Reverse ventriloquism: Poor ventriloquists. Scientists - as Laura Nelson reports - have explained their trick in detail, and have managed to produce the reverse effect. Link Francisco Claure Ibarra: Yesterday I had the very great honor to open the exhibition "gente hecha a mano" of Bolivian artist Francisco Claure Ibarra. Francisco presents some of his portrait photographs in our monochrom space at Museumsquartier Vienna. Link Coerced Confessions: Craig Garrett (editor at Flash Art) writes about snapshot photography�s subjective objectivity. Link 9-11 remembrance! This is a very .. uhm ... interesting disaster tribute. a) It's very ... let's say "frivolous". And b) there seems to be an algebraic problem: "By the time you read this it will be September 11, 2003 and it will be the one year anniversary of the attack on America [...]" Link Expressionism and Insanity: As Thomas Röske explains, a recent exhibition in Germany shows the impact of the idea of insanity on Expressionist art. (via Raw Vision) Link Sartre & Peanuts: Nathan Radke claims that Charlie Brown is an existentialist. (via Philosophy Now) Link Repetition: The Ring and the Diabolical Imaginary: Matthew Sharpe's elaborate analysis of the Japanese and English movie versions of 'The Ring' (on Cinetext). Link The Rorschach Inkblot Test, Fortune Tellers, and Cold Reading: An excerpt from "What's Wrong With the Rorschach?" published on the 'Skeptical Inquirer' site. Link Zombie Infection Generator: Oldie but goodie. I like epidemiology JavaApplets. Zombies are grey, humans are pink and panicked humans are bright pink. The rest is georgeromeroesque tragedy... especially if two or three bright dots are trapped in a one way street by a grey dot... Link Pit gallery: This guy carves faces and objects from the seeds of fruit. Hardcore handicraft. Link The Mumford Time Machine: "The Mumford Time Machine is a programmable controller and intervalometer for special photographic effects. It allows you to trip the shutter of your camera or fire an electronic flash at specific intervals or in response to events. These trigger events can be sound, light, motion, or electrical signals." Link Orphan Drift: An artist group active in London and Oslo. Currently working on a mixture of source codes and poetry. >> alien zone- future wants contagious with other dimensions. _ streched light _ mayan calender speed within it is . _pro ducing detail _ vandal to time calender without clock _ . _ zoo(hiatus)] > FAMA; 2p f a-�.chil [pl.pl.play] <> [wa.war.ar][zone][#grey][connect pCCC] Special_Fx: #_$2VOW.ght [third vi94] [c-funny teeth] [.tmp if.txt][invisible] << (via rebel:art) Link Bellymasks? Quote: "A bellymask is an heirloom sculpture created right on your pregnant torso in a simple one-hour process. Made of plaster gauze, it is an exact replica of your pregnant form." Link UK Patent Application No. GB2272154: A ladder to enable spiders to climb out of a bath. Link Fair cake-cutting procedure: NY University professor Steven Brams and his team developed a political-economic theory for efficiently sharing out a cake. Link Making Snow: On the intellectual property rights of snowmakers. (via IPKat) Link Free Bitflows: In early June 2004 a digital culture event will be held in Vienna to examine the theories and practices for making new cultures of access viable. The problem is clear, but not the solution. As some means of production are becoming as cheap as to be practically freely accessible (last year's computer equipment, software, basic Internet access), a new question confronts independent cultural producers: "how can we organize access to cultural works to match the new freedom of production?" Please propose presentations for the conference and themes for the workshops or submit works for the exhibition, or apply for a residency. Link The Awful German Language: This is a classic by Mark Twain. I'm a native speaker of German. And I agree. Totally. Link "Frequency Analysis of English Vocabulary and Grammar": Based on the LOB Corpus by Stig Johansson and Knut Hofland (OUP, 1989, ISBN 0-19-8242212-2); gives the top eighteen English words and their frequencies... Link Arcade History Database: Great arcade video games database. Link Noise and Talk: It is not all too long ago that 24-hour-a-day broadcasting was something unknown in Central Europe. Sometime after the last talk show, the late film or the news came the inevitable nightly signoff. Snow. I remember from my childhood how that was a moment of terrifying stillness and clarity. [...] One of my latest rants. Link Dio for America: America's self-acclaimed "most enduring and well regarded heavy metal vocalist" wants to run for presidency. Of course it's a spoof. But to quote DaddyD: "It would be fun to see hordes of satans minions united in the cause of universal healthcare and same sex marriages." (via DaddyD) Link Killer Fonts: Psst. Are you interested in computer fonts in serial killer's handwriting? Link Gelatin: The members of Gelatin combo do projects like the 'Human Elevator' (strong men were needed to man a scaffolding three stories tall; guests would enter at ground level, be grabbed by buff arms and passed up, hurtling to the top and be dropped on the roof of an apartment building) or the 'The B-Thing' (in 2000 they constructed an improvised balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center) or 'Tierfick' (a softcore video where they shag preparation animals in sailor outfit). But see for yourself. Link Cryptographever: Secret messages are everywhere. Do you understand? *Everywhere!* Here is the prove. Cryptographever is an on-line application which lets you find hidden messages in webpages published on the net. Link Mixmaster: Simple idea. Take two websites and merge them. One site provides the web appearance, one site provides the content. Applied surrealism. Link Dyne:bolic GNU/Linux: I happen to know some folks of the Dyne network and they're doing a great job. Dyne:bolic is a live bootable distribution, an operating system which works directly from the CD without the need to install or change anything on the hard disk. It is user-friendly, recognizes your hardware devices (sound, video, firewire, and USB), and offers a vast range of software for multimedia production, streaming, 3D modeling, photo, peer-to-peer filesharing, Web browsing and publishing, word processing, email, encryption, and networking. It does automatic clustering, joining the CPU power between any other dyne:bolic on the local network, and works on modded XBOX consoles as well. Link The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class: A Cautionary Tale by Dion Dennis (Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Bridgewater State College). Published on ctheory. Link MakulaTure: In cooperation with Australian scientists, Austrian artist Robert Jelinek will reconstruct the pheromone scent (musk extract) of the Tasmanian tiger (extinct since 1936), nasally resettle it in the flora and fauna of Australia and Tasmania, and utilize it as a territorial scent fence for farmers. Link (scroll down page for English translation) Kingdom: You may have come across the name Lars von Trier in connection with his activities as a filmmaker. The Danish director has made movies like "Dancer in the Dark" (with Bj�rk) or "Dogville" (with Nicole Kidman). I'd like to seize the opportunity of being the Boing Boing guestblogger to present one of my all-time favourite TV series: "Kingdom". Lars von Trier directed the extraordinary series (1994-1997) and if you haven't seen it yet you should definitely get your hands on it - trust me! "Kingdom" has a unique look and a unique blend of horror and humour. A crossover of hospital series, ghost story, experimental film and smouldering comedy. Actually, I'm unhappy with the term "crossover", but "mixture", "hybrid" or "crossbreed" don't work either. I'm not sure what kind of genre Lars von Trier created with this work but I disagree with the common reflex to compare it to Lynch's "Twin Peaks". Both concepts are "outsiderish" or "strange" on a mass market level, but they are - in my humble opinion - different in almost any way. What more can I tell you? Expect malpractice suits and seances, severed heads and Volvos, liver transplants and divining rods, a back-stabbing Swedish neuroscientist and a female doctor giving birth to Mister Udo Kier. Provocative, entertaining, witty. Period. Kingdom I (DVD): Link Kingdom II (DVD): Link Pinhole Photography: Artist Justin Quinnell takes pinhole photographs from inside his mouth. Pure magic... Link The Internet Pathology Laboratory for Medical Education: This site invites you to solve "The Case of the Week". Will the real forensic pathologist please stand up? Link Aresa Biodetection: Aresa is working on a biodetection system able to identify the presence of specific components in the soil. The technology being developed is based on genetically modified plants that are able to change colour from green to red when growing nearby specific compounds. If it works out Aresa will present a plant that can detect explosives (such as landmines and unexploded ordnance) or heavy metals just by growing. Link Portraits of Taliban: A collection of astounding portraits of Taliban by Afghan photographers in Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2002. Considering Taliban interpretation of Islamic rules, photography was illegal. But when passport photography was reallowed Taliban would ask for some pictures, secretly taken in the backroom of the studio. Link Saving One Life: Spielberg�s Artificial Intelligence as redemptive memory of things. A tentative exploration of affinities between Steven Spielberg�s and Siegfried Kracauer�s conceptions of cinema and memory / by Drehli Robnik. Link Madonna Wannabe: On video conferencing, music and sadism. Ouch. (via DaddyD) Link WIMP (Windows Interface Manipulation Program) is a program for creating full-screen visual animations synchronized with sound in real time. WIMP utilizes - and exploits - the GUI of the Windows operating system. WIMP can be used as a VJ tool, a screensaver, a cool grafix generator or as a piece of conceptual art. Clever, elegant, ironic software by Victor Laskin and Alexei Shulgin. Link Silicon Zoo: Putting computer chips under the microscope can show you some very interesting creatures hiding there. Complex, beautiful designs of integrated circuitry carefully compsed by some creative chip designers. Link Invaders: Press Space to play. (Yes, Sir!) Link Cryo: Just found this frosty case modding project. Maybe it already was in the glorious blogosphere charts for over twelve months and I didn't realize it... anyway. I definitely *love* it. Build a cryogenic chamber for Lego figures out of your mouse. Link posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 3:44:18 AM | permalink "Discipline Design: The Rise of Media Philosophy": An Email Exchange with Frank Hartmann (Vienna), by Geert Lovink Link Fat Beatz of the Periphery: The global spread of hip hop culture and art. Article by Justin Hoffmann in the Viennese political art magazine 'Springerin'. Link to Fat Beatz Link to Springerin frontpage Church Sign Generator: Fantasy, unfold! Link "Painting as Ogress": S�amus Kealy is a Canadian artist and curator. I first met him last summer when he was artist in residence at the Museumsquartier Vienna, where we happen to have our monochrom office. What can I say? Kealy's paintings are not antimodern nor postmodern. They function as a side step of the modern, a hybrid. But see for yourself ... Link posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 5:50:46 AM | permalink Karin Frank: The themes that Austrian sculptural artist Karin Frank deals with are by no means scandalous: there is a lot of shitting, mountains, a lot of lovemaking, there are portrayals. But be careful: Freudian slippery when wet. Link "Some Code to Die for: On the Birth of the Free Software Movement in 1887": monchrom satellite Leo Findeisen publishes his text on our server. He compares the "Old Codes" of natural languages to the "New Codes" of today, which are programming languages. To help us understand the mechanisms through which New Codes originate, grow and thrive (or do not), he examines the history of two natural languages that developed through an Open Source mechanism: Volapük and Esperanto. (Text in English/Esperanto/German) Link Jörg Piringer: Jörg is dealing with language art, good ol� neo-cut-up, kleptopoetry, time based literature and audiovisual interactive poetry stuff. But to quote J�rg: "You don't have to call it poetry if the term shocks you." Additionally, Jörg is part of the first Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. Link posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 6:05:02 AM | permalink Capsaicin: capsaicin is the chemical found in peppers which causes a burning sensation. In an attempt to make products hotter than plain peppers, scientists use a process to extract capsaicin from the rest of the pepper. The heat of capsaicin is measured in Scoville Units. Scoville Unit Measuring was invented in 1912 by Wilbur L. Scoville, a pharmacologist of the Parke-Davis Company. It is a measurement that involves adding sugar to a solution until one can no longer taste the pepper. Jalapeno peppers measure around 5,000 units. The hottest pepper ever tested, the Red Savina, tested at 577,000 units. Pure capsaicin is estimated at around 16 million units. You want something like that on your burger? Really? You asked for it� Link posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 5:32:41 AM | permalink Guestbar Archives

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