Last week, we wrote about a defamation lawsuit over a review on Yelp, which seemed to backfire -- bringing a lot more attention to the negative review than if left alone. That case actually was settled soon after, but yet another defamation lawsuit has been filed by yet another person -- this time a dentist -- over a negative review. There are a few things worth commenting on about this lawsuit, but the big one that caught my attention is that the lawsuit was filed both against the couple who wrote the review... and against Yelp.

Now, as pretty much everyone knows around here, filing against Yelp is a big no-no. Yelp is clearly protected by section 230 safe harbors that make third party service providers immune from liability for actions of their users. This is pretty widely known among anyone involved in anything having to do with internet law... but was not known by the lawyer who filed the suit. In fact, the lawyer admits in the article above that he "wasn't aware" of the law and will probably drop the suit against Yelp now that he knows about it. But, it certainly raises questions about the lawyer if he was totally unaware of a key piece of internet legislation before filing such a lawsuit.

Then, there's the bizarre response from the dentist, replying to the point that Yelp lets the service providers directly contact those who write negative reviews to try to clear up the problem. The dentist says: "I would be very upset and would not know what to say to them." Fascinating. So, rather than talking it out as adults and clearing up any misunderstanding (and from the sound of it, it was a basic misunderstanding), she jumps straight to the lawsuit stage? She doesn't know what to say to them, but has no problem dumping a lawsuit on them. Isn't America great?

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dooberrymctavish writes "You can now download an installer and bootloader for getting Debian running on your Android (G1 at the moment) device; the whole install process will take you about 10 minutes, and leaves you with access to the full plethora of programs available in Debian and lets you continue using your phone as it was intended to be: as an Android device with all the capabilities thereof. Here's a look at it running.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott Smith of Avella, PA uses his Shopbot CNC tool to build stage sets. His latest work involved creating scenery for "My Bloody Valentine 3D", which opens Friday nationwide. If you like these kind of movies, here's a few items to look for.

For the horror flick, Scott used his ShopBot to fabricate signs, facades and routed letters for motels, hospitals and tunnel and mine entrances.

Thanks to Dave @ ShopBot for sharing this work. More Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toolbox | Digg this!

Above, "A Moment of Silence," a short video art piece -- and paper art, red ink on calligraphy stock -- about the conflict in Gaza. Calligraphy and video by Flickr user Yaronimus.

Judging from the very high amount of discussion traffic in Gaza-related posts from last week, our audience still has a lot to say about what's happening in the current conflict between the Israeli military and Hamas, in Gaza. Here are a few quick news items I've been reading today, and space for an open discussion. As always, with topics like this that tend to draw very passionate responses: please, keep it civil and respectful. The Boing Boing community includes friends and family in Israel, and friends and family in Gaza.

* The guys at Wired's Danger Room blog have been posting very astute analysis of recent events, including the use of phosphorus bombs *by both sides*, and impact on civilians.

* Danger Room also has a much-updated post up about today's attack by Israeli forces on a United Nations compound in Gaza. Israel's defense minister has apologized, describing the incident as a "grave mistake." Here's a related report in the NYT.

* Daoud Kuttab, a forward-thinking and peace-minded Palestinian journalist, has the distinction of having been arrested by both Israeli and Palestinian authorities in the past. I tend to think that when a reporter's work upsets officials on both sides in a conflict, he's probably doing something right. Kuttab has a post up today about the independent radio station he co-founded turning to a "citizen journalist" model during the current crisis. The short version: there weren't enough reporters to cover all of the action, including protests in Amman, so they turned to listeners in the streets -- including taxicab drivers. Read: Jordan Radio Goes Citizen Reporter.

Previously on Boing Boing:

* News from a Red Cross Worker In Gaza

* Gaza Attacks: Two Related Reactions, in Second Life and Twitter

* Global Voices' coverage of Gaza Strip Bombings (and how to keep the coverage alive)

* Al Jazeera Releases Gaza Video Archive Under Creative Commons License

* Israel Invades Gaza: Online coverage, "citizen reporter" resources.

Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America, for which he is currently on book tour. He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

Just for the record, yesterday's post will be the last thing I say in public about aviation safety. Thankfully, early reports on the crash of US Airways Flight 1549 this afternoon into the Hudson River suggest that -- amazingly -- no fatalities occurred, thanks to what sound like a set of truly extraordinary snap decisions by the pilots, and a perfect water landing. But clearly I am done tempting fate on this issue.

CDM highlights this interesting approach to music sequencing. More than just incredibly-fun-looking music software, Al Jazari is an art performance and installation (which also appears to be high in fun) -

Al-Jazari is livecoded entirely by gamepad, and employs a simple graphical language to allow robots to interact with each other and move over a terrain populated by audio triggers. The running code is displayed and edited in thought bubbles over each robot. For upcoming performance dates see this page.

The software is available for download but does require compiling/installing various supporting programs. - Al Jazari

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eldavojohn writes "You might have heard or felt that there is little left to patent these days but IBM begs to differ. They came in at over four thousand for the year of 2008. Now, this isn't a good metric to measure success or progress but for those of you who like to keep track: 'IBM said it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, more than triple the number of patents earned by rival Hewlett-Packard. Microsoft Corp earned 2,030 patents, while Intel Corp had 1,776 and Hewlett-Packard 1,424, according to the report, which compiled data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics had the second-highest number of patents at 3,515.' You can find the original source of this study here as well as 2007's data and even 2006's data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I own quite a few books about the art of Frank Frazetta, but Rough Work just might be my favorite. It's such a treat to see pages from his sketchbooks, as well as roughs of his most famous illustrations. For some reason, I usually like an artist's sketches for paintings more than the paintings themselves. They are looser, and in Frazetta's case, brimming with vitality.

Frazetta also knew his roughs were often better, and he eventually started submitting roughs to his clients (paperback book publishers, and Creepy and Eerie) as finals.

From the forward, written by Russ Cochran, who shared a studio with Frazetta:

At first we did roughs on everything and got them approved. Often the roughs were superior to the finished art. The roughs had more charm, more color, more everything. Then, finally, I gave up doing the roughs altogether. Frank would say, ‘The hell with roughing this thing, that’s doing it twice! You know I can do it. They’ll take the final painting and like it - the hell with the rough!’ And it worked.

Here are some sample pages (click for big):

Frank Frazetta: Rough Work

Warner Music has a rather long history of being first in line to sue pretty much any new and innovative online music service out there. While it doesn't get nearly as much attention, we've heard repeatedly from people that Warner offers many of those sites a deal: give us a big chunk of the company and we'll drop the lawsuit. The lawsuit is merely a big stick used in the "negotiation" to get a piece of the company. So, when you see a lawsuit and then a settlement, involving Warner Music, often the reason is because the other company agreed to hand over a hefty chunk of equity. It's difficult to think of any major online music service that Warner hasn't threatened, sued or received an equity chunk from.

According to TechCrunch, that activity on Warner Music's part has now killed off an attempt by Facebook to open up its own music service. The company had been working for nearly a year on such a service, but Warner simply wouldn't allow it -- especially since it already had ownership stakes from a bunch of other players, and didn't want the competition. This is exactly the sort of chilling effect on innovation that we're consistently talking about. It's rather ridiculous that one company can hold up new and useful ways of listening to and sharing music. When things like the DMCA and other copyright extensions came out, the RIAA insisted that it would never try to block any new devices or services, but its members -- and Warner Music, in particular -- have never lived up to that agreement. Warner Music especially overvalues the music, and undervalues any service that makes that music more valuable -- and thus needs to block or kill off any such service that it can't own in some way. That's not the intention of copyright law, at all. In fact, it's a drastic abuse of copyright law.

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I got a kick out of these phony audiophile products. They are almost, but not quite, as silly as genuine audiophile products. Six exciting new Hi-Fi products from the Intelligent Design Team at Elemental Voice!

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Gao writes -

Hi my master:

I has made a cheapest Standalone Arduino mini use ATMEGA8 and breadboard.
maybe you would like see it,here it's photo on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/whaleforset/3197918087/

If you think that's funny enough to post on makezine's blog,,,just do it.

Thank you very much for reading and sorry for my english.

Please no apologies - you've obviously never read my Mandarin ;)

Hmmm ... I haven't been keeping score on least expensive Arduino but this one certainly seems economical (depending on how much that breadboard sold for). In any case, nice label graphics! - Standalone Arduino mini pin mapping

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narramissic writes "Doing a download speed test of his Time Warner cable connection, James Gaskin discovered something odd, something that he is quick to note isn't a rigorous benchmarked lab test. The discovery: His Ubuntu machine 'returned a rating from the Bandwidth.com test of 22-25mbps over several tests' while the same test done from a Windows XP PC returned a rating of 12-14mbps. The two computers used in the test are 'almost identical: both off-lease Compaq small form factor D515s, part of the very popular corporate desktop D500 family. Both have Pentium 4 processors running at 2GHz. The Ubuntu machine has 768MB of RAM, while the XP box has only 512MB of RAM. Both run Firefox 3 as their browser.' Gaskin's question: Can a little extra RAM make that much difference in Internet download speeds or does Ubuntu handles networking that much faster than Windows XP?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Next week, CNBC will air a special TV program called Marijuana Inc.: Inside America's Pot Industry. To hype the show, CNBC.com invited High Times magazine's "cultivation editor" "Danny Danko" to put together a slideshow of high-grade medical marijuana strains and their prices. True pot porn. Seen above, Super Silver Haze, which apparently 'is renowned for stimulating properties and is sometimes referred to as 'ampheta-weed.'" A Gallery of Medical Marijuana (via Dose Nation)

When I first saw a television commercial for Bumpits (Big Happie Hair!), I thought it was a parody. It isn't. (Thanks, Lisa Mumbach!)

mldkfa writes "Recently I told a friend about OpenOffice and how it was a great alternative to the big name pay office suites. She went home and searched on Google for it and thought she found the website, filled typical registration information, and downloaded OpenOffice.org 3.0. The next time she opened her e-mail she found a request for 98 [Euro] for her 1-year subscription to OpenOffice.org 3.0 from the company that she downloaded it from. Apparently the EULA stated this cost and here in Germany she is required to pay up. So I thought I would ask Slashdot, should she pay? On the OpenOffice.org German website there is a warning of these schemes being legal. Shouldn't Sun change the license of OpenOffice.org to protect their fans or are they doing this to protect someone else? It has really made me think about recommending it to any more friends." Below, read Google's translation of the warning; it wouldn't be the first time that open source software has been lightly repackaged and sold in ways that should raise eyebrows among anyone familiar with the wide, free availability of the same apps.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since the first Arduino project contest went so awesomely, Libelium decided to do a sequel. They're on the lookout for the best ways Arduino can improve your day-t-day. Document your project and write up a how-to to eneter. First prize winner will score GPS, GPRS, SD and solar modules for Arduino. Deadline is April 15th, more registration info on Libelium's site

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Birdchick lives in Minnesota, where it's wicked cold right now! She shot this video of what happens when you spray hot water at -20 degrees F. So are those threads of ice dropping down, anyone know exactly what is happening?

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TorrentFreak has the odd story of the band Franz Ferdinand, out of Scotland, who in the past has encouraged fans to use file sharing software to get access to various songs from the band. However, a bunch of websites were surprised to receive takedown notices from Web Sheriff concerning posts linking to tracks from Franz Ferdinand's latest album. When those sites asked for clarification, rather than actually answering any of the questions raised, Web Sheriff ratcheted up the rhetoric into legal threats. Now, clearly, it's within the legal rights of a band to encourage access to some songs, but not others, but that certainly gives fans (who are trying to promote the band) an incredibly mixed message.

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Sunday's "Straight Table" is made out of eight industrial levels, with a glass top -- perfect for fulfilling your compulsive need to get the table exactly level. Lovely stuff -- pity the website's a stupid unlinkable Flash blob.

Stupid unlinkable Flash site (via Cribcandy)

Yesterday, I posted about Thomas Wold's fantastic mushroom coffee table. Turns out Thomas has an exhibition of new installations opening tomorrow evening, January 16, at The Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco. Thomas posted photos of some of the delightful pieces from the show, titled "Come Together," on his blog. Seen here is "Boy's Room." Of this piece, Thomas writes, "the palette came about from my liking of classic interior decorating images from the 1950's and 60's, the over decorating of rooms with all matching parts."
Thomas Wold's "Come Together"

Riding with Robots writes "NASA is announcing today that the definitive detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere means the planet is still alive, at least geologically, and perhaps even biologically. 'Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,' said one agency scientist. The gas was detected with observations made over over several Martian years with NASA telescopes at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Both biological and geological processes could explain the methane."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to yesterday's post about creating lenticular images by splicing two photos together, MAKE reader Benedikt Seidl sent us a utility that makes the slightly tedious job a bit easier.

Some years ago i made a php-script for Lenticular images. You can also make one Lenticular image from three pictures and choose how many stripes you want.

The source isn't available, but I did give the script on Benedikt's site a try and it works quite well. After making a couple of these manually, I can attest that this is a _huge_ timesaver.

Anyone care to send in a Photoshop macro?

Lenticular Image Utility in PHP

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Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America, for which he is currently on book tour. He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

Ever since the heady days of the pre-scream Howard Dean campaign, a lot of us who are interested in decentralized systems and emergent behavior have wondered when politicians would start to use new collaborative technology to do something other than organize rallies and raise money. Sure, it was exciting to see Web 2.0 concepts transform political campaigns, but wouldn't it be even more exciting to see them transform the way we govern?

So it's cool to see on the always-interesting Change.gov site the newly released Citizen's Briefing Book, which is effectively a Slashdot/Plastic/Digg take on public policy. (The underlying technology is Salesforce.com's Ideas product.) Here's the description on the site:

Share your ideas on any issue facing the new administration, then rate or comment on other ideas. The best rated ideas will rise to the top -- and be gathered into a Citizen's Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama after he is sworn in.

Right now, the top three most popular proposals are: 1) Ending Marijuana Prohibition, 2) Bullet Trains and Light Rail, and 3) An End To Government Sponsored School Abstinence Programs. In other words, what the people want are stoned kids having sex on bullet trains. Sounds about right to me!

On Wednesday, at the Congressional Internet Caucus' State of the Net 2009 conference, during the panel on digital copyright, NBC Universal's Alec French made the case for technology-based filters on various websites, claiming that the filtering technology is so incredibly good these days that it can even understand fair use, and not block it. That seemed like quite a claim, and one at odds with pretty much everything we've seen. Of course, it may be in how he (and the entertainment industry) defines fair use. The example he gave was a Saturday Night Live video that was stitched together from clips from various newscasts, rather than the original SNL video. French pointed out that the software could tell the difference, and such a clip would be allowed to stay up.

Unfortunately, things don't always work that way in reality. Michael Geist points out that YouTube has banned a video essayist, claiming that his commentary videos, which included clips from various movies, had to be taken down due to copyright violations -- and since it happened three times (yay, three strikes), his entire account was banned. So, here's a case where it seems that since the clips were used for commentary -- which is a clearly accepted fair use -- and, yet not only were the videos taken down, the guy's entire account was banned.

Geist points out that this isn't YouTube's fault, since it's just obeying the DMCA. But he does fault the DMCA for creating such a chilling effect on commentary and creativity. But there's a larger point too. French insists that computers can somehow tell what's fair use and what isn't -- at a time when humans still argue about it pretty much every day. I'm sure there will be some copyright system supporters who speak up in the comments (as they often do) that we're crazy to think such videos were fair use. Given that, how can anyone actually believe that a technology system can accurately determine in any automated way what is and what is not fair use?

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Eric Loyer's "Rube & Lullaby" is an interactive narrative for the iPhone. It's billed as a "story you can play like a musical instrument." Brandon has more info and a video demo over at Boing Boing Offworld. Ruben & Lullaby, an iPhone love story

Today we're starting a new feature on Make: Blog dedicated to tools, those technical appendixes we like to lord over the lower kingdoms as something unique to us, or at least something we're a whole lot more invested in than any other critter. The Make: Blog Toolbox will try and focus on tools that are under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool projects like the one below, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your shopflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we'll pay special attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, refurbish, etc.

And please share with us your great tool finds. As a maker, there's nothing more satisfying that being turned on to some insanely great tool or shop tip that seriously changes your working habits and the quality of your projects. That's what we want to be talking about here.

For our first installment, we thought what better place to start a Toolbox column than inside the box itself.

A builder who goes by Txinkman on Flickr found this beat-to-the-splinters old machinist's box on eBay and bought it for $10. You might have thought he'd been ripped off if you didn't see what he ended up doing with it. Like a lot of such projects, this was clearly a labor of love, a quest to create something beautiful and unique, not just something sturdy and functional. And is usually the case with such labors, it probably ended up costing more on parts that was "required" and took ungodly numbers of hours to finish, but the results, the obvious pride, and the amount of attention this project is getting speaks for itself.

After the jump, more pics of the build process, comments from Txinkman, and pics of an even more spectacular, expensive, and time-consuming box-rescue he did last spring.

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dfn_deux writes "In a follow up to a 2005 story where Florida judge Doug Henderson ruled that breathalyzer evidence in more than 100 drunk driving cases would be inadmissible as evidence at trial, the Second District Court of Appeal and Circuit Court has ruled on Tuesday to uphold the 2005 ruling requiring the manufacturer of the Intoxilyzer 5000, Kentucky-based CMI Inc, to release source code for their breathalyzer equipment to be examined by witnesses for the defense of those whom are standing trial with breathalyzer test result being used as evidence against them. '"The defendant's right to a fair trial outweighed the manufacturer's claim of a trade secret," Henderson said Tuesday. In response to the ruling defense attorney, Mark Lipinski, who represents seven defendants challenging the source codes, said the state likely will be forced to reduce charges — or drop the cases entirely.' ... What this really means is that outside corporations cannot sell equipment to the state of Florida and expect to hide the workings of their machine by saying they are trade secret. It means the state has to give full disclosure concerning important and critical aspects of the case."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bonnie sez,

Yes, a Star Wars telegraph. Some unproduced toy concepts cause fans and collectors to react "Why didn't Kenner make that back in the day?". Not so much on this one. Kenner's "Concept 2000" telegraph toy was branded with a Star Wars logo in the corner panel to mix the hit film with "high-tech" gadgetry for kids' product concepts. The color scheme could easily be representative of the Empire, but the toy definitely says "A long time ago...". Of course, telegraphs have not been high technology since the early part of the 19th century, yet kids wireless telegraph toys remained popular through the 1970s until they began getting replaced by wireless voice-transmitting walkie talkies.

Star Wars Telegraph (Thanks, Bonnie!)

nandemoari writes "The damage isn't just limited to the United States. Shipments of PCs in Europe, the Mid-East, and Africa dipped to records posted around the turn of the century. It was even worse in Asia, which according to Gartner, posted its worst growth rate ever — just 1.8 per cent. Within the industry, desktops took the hardest hit, as was expected. Sales of non-portable computers were down about 16 per cent as consumers opted instead for the rising 'netbook' and similar hybrids. That fact alone is troubling for PC makers, given that $300-$500 netbooks offer a far lower profit margin than more expensive and more powerful laptops and desktops."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot points us to an immensely troubling law being proposed by a state Senator in South Carolina that would make it a felony to use profanity in a public forum, whether written or spoken (so assume the internet is included). Punishment could include fines up to $5000 or prison sentences up to 5 years in length. One would hope that others in the South Carolina legislature would never let this get anywhere, but these days you never know. Of course, such a law is ridiculously unconstitutional, and if it somehow did get passed would certainly get tossed out by the courts. But just the fact that an elected representative thinks that such a law is reasonable is pretty scary. Someone want to send him a copy of the Constitution?

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Glyn sez, "Harriet Harman MP plans to use a special parliamentary order that can become law within 24 hours after being debated by MPs and peers next week. It will exempt details of all MPs' and peers' expenses from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, and nullify all past requests by journalists and campaigners to get them published."

Harriet Harman, the leader of the house, is to use a special parliamentary order that can become law within 24 hours after being debated by MPs and peers next week.

It comes just as MPs were about to be forced, following a victory by campaigners at an information tribunal, to publish 1.2m expenses receipts, covering the period between 2005 and 2008.

In return the government is to increase the number of published categories, such as travel and accomodation, which detail where MPs used their expenses.

Government exempts MPs' expenses from freedom of information (Thanks, Glyn!)

This Instructable is interesting because it lets you run a gas generator on propane and also might serve as an introduction to adapting fuel inputs more broadly.

Anyone know whether this would work as-is with methane instead of propane?

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An anonymous reader writes "With Steve Jobs stepping down from heading Apple for at least six months who's running the company that he resurrected? This article names the three people who will try to keep things running. But you have to wonder whether they'll have the charisma needed to keep Apple cool..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "White House of Hippiedom" was a legendary Marin County, California mansion that THe Chose Family commune called home in the 1960s. (A Grateful Dead album cover photo was shot outside the house.) In 1969, the house burned to the ground, exposing a pre-1834 Adobe home. Excavation of the site began in 1997 but the discovery of asbestos led to the stuff being put into barrels and stored. Now, researchers from the California Department of Parks and Recreation, aided by hazmat crews, are going through the barrels and finding a mish-mash of interesting pioneer artifacts and hippie detritus. From the San Francisco Chronicle (snip of photo by Kim Jomenich/The Chronicle):

The artifacts from the Age of Aquarius were laid out Tuesday on a plastic sheet in an old barn in Marin County's Olompali State Historic Park.

There, stiff and rumpled from being in storage so long, was a leather jacket with a rainbow colored flower motif, some old boots, dozens of melted records, burned-out speakers, charred beads, monopoly pieces, soot-covered reel-to-reel tapes, pieces of a porcelain toilet and beer cans - lots of beer cans...

No bongs have been found...

"Adobe home found under Marin hippie commune"

BuhDuh writes "The New York Times is carrying a story concerning that well known bastion of legal authority, the 'Foreign Intelligence Surveillance' court, which has ruled that the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program was perfectly legal. It says, 'A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans' private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It amazes me how otherwise very intelligent people have their brains stop thinking as soon as they come across a zero. Of course, it's been going on for thousands of years. Our brains just seem to have trouble with the concept of zero. Hell, there was a time where believers in zero were considered heretics who should be killed. These days, everyone insists they believe in zero, but when they come across it as a price, they seem to have any additional thought processes stop. It's as if the brain hits a "divide by zero" error and just gives up -- or returns nonsense.

The latest example is in a recent David Carr column in the NY Times. The column itself is nothing new. It's the same old whining from an old school media guy, wishing there were some other business model by which newspapers could charge again. The main points in the article have been ripped apart by those who understand the news business quite well -- but what struck me was the following comment in Carr's article from Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research:

"Free is not a business model."

That's the zero-brain-stop point. As has been discussed over and over and over and over again is that no one says that free is a business model. What people say is that free often makes sense as a part of the business model. And that's been true in tons of businesses throughout history. Free samples. Buy one, get one free. First one's free. Buy twelve, get the thirteenth for free. All of those use free as a part of the business model. No one says those models don't work. And, no one is saying that "free" by itself is the business model. People merely point out that it often makes sense as a part of the business model.

But, for some reason when folks like Moffett get to the point where they see the price of $0, they stop considering that that's only the first part of a wider business model. That certainly doesn't mean that there are plenty of businesses that haven't thoroughly planned out the rest of the business model, but Moffett falsely implies that many companies actually thought that "free" was a business model by itself -- and ignores how pretty much every business was actually looking to use free as a part of a larger business model.

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An anonymous reader writes "Germany's Minister for Families has announced a legislative initiative to force ISPs to implement a government-mandated block list (in English), which will be updated daily. The BKA (Germany's equivalent of the FBI) will be in charge of generating and maintaining the list. As usual, this is being brought in under the "fight child porn" guise. The minister is quoted as saying: "We must not water doen the problem" in reply to being challenged that this law and technology could be used to censor other content. She then went on to say: "I can't know what wishes and plans future governments will develop." She has agreed the principle of the legislation with the interior minister and the technology minister, which in German coalition government terms means it's pretty much a done deal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seen here is a bass larvae with two heads. Thousands of such mutated animals were spawned at a fish farm in northern Australia likely due to contaminated water. Other animals at the Noosa River hatchery were also born with birth defects and death rates were abnormally high. From AFP:

"I have been working in aquaculture for 10 years and this is the first time I have ever seen anything like it," (said Matt Landos, an aquatic animal specialist and member of the Australian College of Veterinarian Scientists.)

Tests had excluded the presence of a virus or bacteria, leading Landos to suspect that pesticides from a neighbouring macadamia nut farm were to blame...

The Queensland state government said tests gave no indication that the macadamia farm was using the chemicals against the manufacturers' instructions.

"Contamination fears over two-headed Australian fish"

Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing Gadgets introduces this Boing Boing video review of the open-source video content manager Boxee:

Boxee is one of the more fool-proof ways to get stuff like Netflix, Hulu, Comedy Central and even network television to your computer: here's a live demo given to BBG from the loud and booze-soaked floor of CES Unveiled. You can also download it in MP4 format.

Join the discussion for this video at Boing Boing Gadgets.

About this Boing Boing video episode, Joel Johnson at Boing Boing Gadgets explains:

One of the first thing we actually put our hands on at CES this year was a prototype sign language translation device from Krown Manufacturing called..."The Sign Language Translator". It's essentially just a dictionary that links to videos of man signing words and letters on screen. Basic in execution, perhaps, but also potentially quite handy for teaching yourself how to sign. (I have a couple of deaf friends who can read lips or, you know, words written on paper or typed into a Sidekick.) Still: neat. Here's a direct MP4 download if you'd prefer that version.

Join the discussion around this video at Boing Boing Gadgets.

Last month, the Internet Watch Foundation, which maintains a child porn blacklist used by British ISPs, gained some attention after it blocked a Wikipedia page, making it impossible for UK web surfers to make any edits to the online encyclopedia. While they later relented, the episode highlighted the folly of trying to use blacklists and filters to limit access to certain online content. The IWF is back in the news this week, and it's being blamed for blocking access to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, an online store of old web pages. But unlike the Wikipedia episode, only users on some IWF blacklist-using ISPs are having the problem. Perhaps that's a bit better than a blanket ban, but once again, it provides a perfect illustration of why blacklists and filters often do much more harm than good. Are British child-porn surfers really being stopped by the blacklist? That's very doubtful. Meanwhile, plenty of people trying to access harmless content are being effected.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Congratulations to Antti Seppänen, whose Beagle Board-based robot is the winner of the first Beagle Board design contest.

What's more, Antti also created a very cool expansion board for the Beagle Board, and made the design available under a CC license:

My Beagle bot required building an expansion board. Some requirements for expansion board:

• Wide input voltage range up to at least +15 volts
• +5 volts stable and reliable power supply for Beagle Board and for USB hub
• Level shifters and pin headers for +5 volt tolerant I2C, SPI and some GPIOs
• 5 pcs of 50 Hz PWM output for normal RC servos
• RS232 header, preferably two
• Open-drain outputs for various peripherals
• Control of servos and open-drain outputs from Beagle via I2C

The expansion board is going to be a big help for Beagle Board hackers, as it solves a lot of issues (power, level shifting, etc)!

Beaglebot, an experimental robotics project based on Beagle Board

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stonedcat writes "A Wisconsin woman has claimed that Dell computers and Ubuntu have kept her from going back to school via online classes. She says she has called Dell to request Windows instead however was talked out of it. Her current claim is that she was unaware that she couldn't install her Verizon online disk to access the Internet, nor could she use Microsoft Word to type up her papers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader noted the latest developments in the controversial censoring of the internet by UK ISPs. Apparently since some content of the Wayback Machine is bad, the whole thing needs to be blacklisted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OK technically the creator "Sheyr" calls it the FuG-01/ET but regardless, it's a really sweet looking stock case mod based off the classic game Castle Wolfenstein (which I remember playing WAY WAY back on my Atari 800)

For more pics and details check the story below.

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David Weinberger sez, "Nature Magazine, which should be the stodgiest of the stodgiest, continues to show an admirable willingness to experiment (stopping short of doing the full open access Monty). It’s now created Scitable, 'a collaborative learning space for science undergraduates.' It’s got articles, online class tools, teacher collaborative tools, student collaborative tools, discussion areas... This initial implementation focuses on genetics, although Nature is planning on expanding the topics. On top of all that, it’s great to contemplate how blasé we’ve become about the primordial value of collaborative tools. Collaboration is the new greed."

Learn At Scitable (Thanks, David!)

Doozer_not_fraggle put together an Instructable for a honey extractor made from an old washing machine. I know a lot of you keep bees - have you come up with clever ways to extract honey?

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In Australia QR codes are used mainly in advertisements, but check out this take-back-the-medium piece by one of the folks at Radical Cross Stitch:

I've been working on stitching QR Codes for some time now. I've been doing them on regular Aida fabric (14 count mostly) and they've been working really well. So I decided to do it large scale. This project was stitched with black and white finger knitted wool and stitched on animal fencing (which is tough to work with but has a lovely strong and square grid).

QR Codes, or Quick Response Codes are an open source mobile phone read bar code type technology which originated from Japan (download the free reader here). While the Japanese tend to use QR codes for communicating public service information ie public transport timetables. The introduction of QR Codes to Australia has largely been based in advertising (ugh).

So I've been working QR Codes in cross stitch as a way of exploring non-corporate alternatives to this potentially very interesting and useful communication medium.

The piece designed for The Streets of Melbourne is designed to make a very clear statement on the irony of a privately owned and operated city square. A space that, within Western culture, has traditionally been the primary space for free speech. And of course this space in particular is part of the traditional gathering grounds for the people of the Kulin Nations.

It is to the Kulin Nations that this piece, QRacks in the Land, is dedicated.

Via Wooster Collective.

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At the Congressional Internet Caucus' State of the Net 2009 conference on Wednesday, there was also a panel discussion on the future of digital copyright that was anything but reassuring in terms of what to expect on the copyright front. Basically, it was a lot more of the same. The Congressional representative on the panel, Aaron Cooper, counsel to Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee, basically said that Leahy (who pushed through the highly problematic ProIP bill last year) is planning to introduce new laws concerning performance rights this year. This issue was seconded by Daryl Friedman, from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (and who's also on the board of SoundExchange). Friedman also later talked up the importance of unifying the various collections agencies into a "super agency." Funny that the guy from SoundExchange (who likely would be that agency, and which has a problem historically with actually paying money out) would suggest that...

The real problem, though, is that the entire framework for the whole debate remains the same. It's set up as this big adversarial situation, where content creators go on and on about the need to "protect" their "assets" and the importance of making sure that content creators are compensated. Of course, the problem is that content creators think those two things go together: i.e., you have to "protect" the content to get compensated. As we've seen over and over again, nothing is further from the truth. But it's this adversarial view that leads to troubling policy implications. It got so ridiculous that Alec French, from NBC Universal (and occasional Techdirt commenter), started comparing copyright issues to questions of who pulls the trigger in a murder. Specifically, he was talking about Cablevision remote DVR case, using the analogy that Cablevision set up the gun with a string attached to the trigger and a door -- and if someone opens the door (pushes a button on a remote) and the gun goes off and kills someone, Cablevision should be liable (just as the person who set up the gun would be liable). Of course, there's a huge glaring hole in this analogy. Recording a video for personal time shifting purposes is perfectly legal -- unlike murder.

But just the fact that the conversation is at that level shows what a huge hill there is to climb to have this policy debate actually get somewhere useful. The real problem (which the entertainment industry and, sadly, most of our elected officials refuse to entertain) is that copyright is fundamentally broken. It's a system that was designed for an entirely different purpose, and as each new technology innovation has come around, we've applied a weak duct-tape patch to copyright law to try to deal with that unique scenario. And, we keep patching the law here and there, and with each new innovation, copyright law doesn't quite work right. This was a point raised by Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge on the panel -- and she's exactly right. But, folks like Alec French dismissed the whole concept with a wave of the hand to talk about stuff that "actually might happen" in Congress. I have no doubt that French is correct that Congress won't take up the real issues, but that's a big problem.

So, in the end, there's probably not much to look forward to when it comes to copyright reform. There are very few Congressional reps who actually understand the issues, and there's little likelihood of them gaining much more interest. Instead, they're going to continue with their superficial understanding of the issue, and rely on representatives of the entertainment industry to tell them what they need. And, so we get more unnecessary compulsory licenses, stricter (more damaging) copyright controls and a bigger mess to deal with.

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alphadogg writes "Barack Obama's election to U.S. president has already brought a string of firsts, and on Wednesday there came another. The official presidential portrait was shot on a digital camera for the first time. The picture was taken by the White House's new official photographer, Pete Souza, and issued by The Office of the President Elect through its Web site. It was taken on Tuesday evening at 5:38 p.m. using a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, according to the metadata embedded in the image file."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has introduced the PowerShot A480 digital compact camera, replacing PowerShot A470 with a more compact body and easier operation. Twenty five percent smaller than its predecessor, the A480 includes a new simplified button layout for ease of use. This entry-level compact houses a 10MP sensor, 2.5" LCD, Canon's DIGIC III processor and includes features such as Motion detection and Face Detection.

This "Electric Trike" is a pretty cool ride that maintains its low rider status. Powered from two 12 volt, 32 amp batteries and a 75amp, 24 volt speed controller made in England, it gets pretty good speed even with someone strapped in for a ride. Check out the video to see it in action and the link below for some details on its construction.

Electric Trike via Hacked Gadgets

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André simulates what might it might be like if the elements of a video test pattern suddenly broke rank and became free of their eternally monotonous task. It's worth mentioning that the video was created entirely in FinalCut and the music was recorded by Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

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MojoKid writes "Russian-based ElcomSoft has just released ElcomSoft Wireless Security Auditor 1.0, which can take advantage of both Nvidia and ATI GPUs. ElcomSoft claims that the software uses a "proprietary GPU acceleration technology," which implies that neither CUDA, Stream, nor OpenCL are being utilized in this instance. At its heart, what ElcomSoft Wireless Security Auditor does is perform brute-force dictionary attacks of WPA and WPA2 passwords. If an access point is set up using a fairly insecure password that is based on dictionary words, there is a higher likelihood that a password can be guessed. ElcomSoft positions the software as a way to "audit" wireless network security."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While we certainly think that having a better broadband policy in the US is an important step, there's a difference between just saying that you have a broadband policy, and actually implementing a plan that helps improve broadband. The devil's in the details, as they say. And... so far, the details that have come out have suggested that the key elements under discussion look something like a boondoggle for incumbent providers, rather than a truly comprehensive plan to stimulate actual competition in the broadband space.

On Wednesday, I got to attend the Congressional Internet Caucus' State of the Net 2009 conference, where the opening (surprise) speaker, was Blair Levin, one of President Elect Obama's tech transition team. In his remarks, he clearly tried to respond to these criticisms raised by us and others by suggesting (1) that the team is still tossing up a variety of ideas and nothing has been concluded and (2) there are two elements that need to be considered: (a) a short-term "stimulus" plan to get the economy churning and create new jobs and (b) a more comprehensive broadband policy. From this, he suggested that the first part -- the "stimulus" part -- would have to involve "existing structures" (i.e., the incumbents), but that was only a piece and "not the whole puzzle" or "just an inning, not the whole ballgame."

While it's a relief that the tech team recognizes there is a larger issue, I think it's important to keep hammering home the point, because this has all the warning signs of a "best laid plans..." situation. The initial "bailout" (and the ISP representatives keep making sure to say "it's a buildout, not a bailout") as an initial stimulus just seems ripe for abuse. The incumbent players have almost no record of either playing fair on these issues or delivering what they promise to deliver. And, why should they? There's been no downside to simply accepting the subsidies and not delivering. And, of course, after that happens, there may be the next crisis to deal with. Do we ever get that really comprehensive broadband plan? Remember, President Bush also had big plans to provide a massive broadband policy... and that went nowhere.

While I understand the point that Levin is making for separating out the short term action and the long term action, it's still not clear that the short term strategy makes sense and will do what it's supposed to do. And then there are questions about whether or not the long term strategy will ever actually show up. Combined... you have to wonder if we're just hearing a lot of hype about nothing. I'm sure Levin and the rest of the team are earnest in what they want to do. From what I've seen from the folks working on the transition, there are an awful lot of really smart, dedicated and sincere folks involved. So that's (at least) a good first step. But going from there to actually implementing something real that's useful? That's a big step, and we've heard enough vague promises over the years not to take such a promise at face value. Hopefully, we'll be surprised, and both the short and long term plans will make sense -- but considering how many times the "best laid plans" of government officials have gone off the road and into a ditch, it's hard to provide the benefit of the doubt without at least a little more info on what's really happening.

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We've all had this problem before: Our parents call us up in dire need of "tech support" for their "new fangled gadgetry" that they can't seem to figure out how to operate. I know this happens to me every month or so, or whenever I go home. In response to this, Dan O'Sullivan (co-author of the Physical Computing book) decided to make something to help him out with this dilemma and titled it the "Camera Hat for Complicated Televisions" which basically consists of a hat with an embedded phone running Android and a custom application that streams the camera footage back over the web so that he can visually walk his mom through the debug. Check out more details on this project and the source code at the link below.

Camera Hat for Complicated Televisions

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Keeper of the Robot Room David Cook put together an excellent collection of workbench tips, covering a variety of situations and materials familiar to circuit makers out there. Even if you're perfectly content with your current methods there's likely at least one little trick/technique the article can show you.
Great stuff. - Prototyping breadboard tips

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Slatterz writes "I own a basic 70mm telescope, which I'm sure Galileo would have given his right arm for in 1609. In fact, this year marks exactly 400 years since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the skies — discovering the moons of Jupiter and helping to prove that the universe doesn't revolve around us. As a mark of respect, the United Nations has declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy. Official festivities kick off this week in Paris and, to help start the celebrations, 17 radio telescopes in Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas will track three quasars using something called "real-time Very Long Baseline Interferometry" — basically creating hi-res images by combining their data to simulate a telescope as large as the Earth. Sounds cool."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This video shows a homebrew MIDI-CV box playing algorithmic acid from Max on a connected x0xb0x synched up to a Jomox drum machine with Live and Rewire connecting everything. The result is a pretty cool Arduino-controlled DAC, allowing one to send smooth (non-PWM) voltages into a 303, x0xb0x, or other voltage controlled synth. Check out the video to see it in action.

Robin Price Blog via Pete's Sonic Art Research

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I say again unto you noble blog-reader - take heed of a gathering born from sonic discovery and construction, best known by its moniker "Handmade Music". Signals will be sounded and noises will be nurtured in the name of all musical makers - and there's gonna be free beer!

See firsthand, the following items of interest -

• Bizarre sonic objects made from dismembered mannequin torsos and legs, transformed into a Theremin and maracas
  
• Mouse & the Billionaire's Gestural controllers, made with wood and 3D printers, shaping sound with movement
  
• Brian Kerr's Dynamic Musical Interfaces
  
• Rucyl Mills' over-the-shoulder musical fashion with snakeskin and leather
  
• Notendo's prepared Nintendo NES
  
• Make:Television screening with more projects, plus a presentation by our very own Captain Phil Torrone.
  
• Plus - more good things!

So all ye who be in the NYC area would be wise to stop in!

Handmade Music
Free (+ free beer while it lasts)
Thursday, January 15
7:30-10:30pm (drop by for as long as you'd lie)
3rd Ward, Brooklyn NY
Directions to the Space

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Harvard Law prof. Charlie Nesson has been leading a case challenging the constitutionality of a core part of the RIAA's continuing lawsuit strategy. Late last year, he asked a judge if the trial itself could be broadcast live over the internet, noting that the RIAA claimed the lawsuits were part of its education campaign, so he couldn't see why they would object. Of course, they did object, but the judge has sided with Nesson, and the court proceedings will be broadcast live next Thursday, January 22nd on the Berkman Center's website. The judge repeated Nesson's points in responding to the RIAA's objection, noting that the RIAA's objection seemed "curious" considering its previous claims of this being an educational campaign. Nesson and his law students had clearly done their homework on the judge. As the article notes, in 2007, the judge (Nancy Gertner) had testified on Capitol Hill on the importance of broadcasting more trials over the internet and television.

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Just posted! The fifth and final installment of our compact camera roundup looks at 'big zoom' SLR-styled compact cameras. The appeal of being able to shoot everything from a sweeping landscape to a tightly framed telephoto shot with a single affordable - and relatively compact - camera is easy to understand; finding your way through the sea of seemingly very similar models is more of a challenge. We decided to look at seven of the latest models to find out if they are as similar in performance as they are in specification and design.

We posted about the digital ocarina that's available for your iPhone. But what if you don't have an iPhone? Make a traditional clay ocarina! Then again, if you don't have a kiln it may be cheaper to just buy an iPhone. I wonder how well this would work with polymer clays like Fimo?

The techniques shown here will work for most types of ocarinas, including the four hole pendant style ocarina and the ten hole "sweet potato." On the following pages I will be making a 10 hole sweet potato style ocarina with a rectangular voicing.

Read more about How-to: Clay sweet potato ocarina

More:

More about the The Ocarina of iPhone?

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togelius writes "What makes games fun? Some (e.g. Raph Koster) claim that fun is learning — fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve. I think we can create fun game rules automatically through measuring their learnability. In a recent experiment, we do this using evolutionary computation, and create some simple Pacman-like new games completely without human intervention! Perhaps this has a future in game design? The academic paper (PDF) is available as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jay sent in this amazing Wiimote controlled coil gun. This is certainly an effective way to protect your cubical from unwanted intruders. Just keep in mind, this is a lot more effective dangerous than the Nerf versions.

I've seen some of ioBridge projects recently, and in inspired by "ServoBeer" I thought I'd try my hand at one too! I'm really interested in pervasive sensors and opening up more intuitive ways to control systems and have been fascinated by all the great ways the wiimote been used.

More about the Wiimote controlled coil gun

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Hans sent us Tina Pereira Filipe's "garbage table" made from street-finds -- a baby carriage and two sheets of glass, suction-cupped together. The hand-brake is great, but it's the suction cups that really make this for me -- we've got four gigantic industrial dolly-wheels kicking around that we've been thinking of affixing to a sheet of perspex to make a rolling coffee table, but I hated the idea of breaking up the surface with big, nasty bolt-heads. Suction-cups, visible from above like the hungry maw of the Sarlacc -- just the ticket.

Gebruiksvoorwerpen - Tafel (Thanks, Hans!)

Emily sends in the London Shop Fronts blog, "a daily photo blog of shop fronts in London. This is an archive of the disappearing independent shops in London and a view of interesting and sometimes worrying typography and design choices of small retailers."

I love this kind of project, the recording of the overlooked minutae of everyday life -- a cross between the archaeology of the midden and the diaries of Pepys. These shots remind me of my friend Kevin Steele's striking photos of the western end of Queen Street West in Toronto -- nostalgic and loving.

London Shop Fronts (Thanks, Emily!)

Police in New Zealand have arrested a would-be thief after putting CCTV photos of him up on Facebook. The criminal genius tried to crack open a pub's safe, but after an hour in a small, enclosed space, he got hot and removed his ski mask -- then later helpfully looked directly at the CCTV camera. Cops in the town of Queenstown put the image up on their two-month-old Facebook page, and a day later, he was identified. Media worldwide have picked up the story, but really, it's nothing more than some smarts on the part of the police to go where people are. In times gone by, getting images like this in the local paper, or on the Crimestoppers segment of the local TV news were about the best way to try and get witnesses or identify criminals. Facebook and other social-networking sites now offer huge audiences (or potential witness pools), particularly among young people, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise to see cops set up shop there.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Jason has a great write up about the advantages of using a flash diffuser and an off-camera flash. He has a bunch of great examples, and a nice tutorial at the end of his article. After seeing the results, you will want to try it out too!

I'm going to talk about how to make a cheap slave flash, and, how to make a free / super cheap, on camera flash diffuser for Nikon, and really any other camera with a pop up top flash

.

More about DIY: Cheap on-camera flash diffuser

In the Maker Shed:


High-Speed Photography Kit Version 4

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An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have developed a way to network household and commercial fridges together in a distributed peer-to-peer fashion that lets them 'negotiate' with each other on the best time to consume electricity. A retrofittable controller is attached to each fridge and then a temperature profile is built around the unit. The controller enables communication between other fridges on the network and also the power source. It enables fridges to work together to decide when to cool down, and thus consume power, based on how much surplus power will be available, and to anticipate power shortages and change their running schedules accordingly to use as little power as possible during these times."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sigma has announced the 18-250mm F3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM superzoom lens. Offering a 13.9x zoom range in a body only slightly longer than the company's current 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 OS lens, this new model features an optical design of 18 elements in 14 groups, including four Special Low Dispersion elements and three aspherical elements to minimise aberrations. Designed for use on cameras with APS-C / DX sensors, the lens is expected to be available from March, for Sigma, Nikon, Canon, Pentax and Sony mounts.

(Editor's note: post updated below with notes, related factchecking, and news citations. This is a complex story, and many readers have understandably strong feelings about wanting to ensure accuracy and fairness.)

A Boing Boing reader writes:

I do not take sides, as the Gaza civilians are victims of both Hamas and the Israelis. FYI my nephew works for the ICRC in Gaza, and therefore has first-hand knowledge of what's happening on the ground. Here is a summary of what he said in a recent phone call to his family.

- He's holding on in a bunker with metal shutters, he cannot bail out because he is responsible for too many people looking up to him, but 4 ICRC expats have left because of physical/mental exhaustion, and his Palestinian colleagues (Red Cross/Red Crescent) are equally exhausted, plus they have to get back to their families at night and organize survival (assuming their home hasn't been destroyed yet.)

- He has to organize the evacuation and taking care of the dead and wounded (100 yesterday.)

- The Israeli army deliberately intimidates, and aims at humanitarian groups, and they did shoot at an ICRC ambulance convoy three days ago, nearly killing a driver.

- Everything is demolished, and sometimes the ICRC has to use donkey carts because it is the only way to get through, and get at the dead and wounded. The Israeli army refuses to help.

- Palestinian kids are traumatized mentally, and forever.

- Both sides [Hamas & Israelis] have turned mad.

- The media doesn't always tell the truth. For instance, the supposedly phosphor bombs are only a rumor, and nothing is confirmed. My nephew thinks that they are only lighting devices, but that they can burn people.

- Norwegian doctors based in Gaza have denounced Israel's use of phosphor bombs, but there is no substantiated evidence.

- There were talks about having humanitarian planes taking wounded Palestinian kids to Europe for care-taking. That is not the solution: those kids are traumatized to start with ("terrorized" as my nephew put it,) they only speak Arabic, they are better kept with their families. There are great doctors in Gaza, but the long Israeli-enforced apartheid and subsequent shortages limit their ability to work. The best thing to do is to send doctors in the immediate area, i.e. setting field hospitals in Rafat on the border with Egypt, or on the border with Israel with doctors who speak Arabic.

- The ICRC president came for one day to motivate the Gaza team, and said that this conflict was ICRC's worst since the Solferino battle, which prompted Henri Dunant to create the Red Cross (Wikipedia reference).

- The (reduced) IRC team in Gaza has enough food, water and electricity reserves for the time being, but they have to work with constant bombardment/shelling, i.e. no sleep. They think that they are doing a great job, but don't have much hope for the future of the Gaza people.

Previously: Al Jazeera Releases Gaza Video Archive Under Creative Commons License

---

Update: A brief editor's note here, to address some readers' concern that this post might imply an editorial position that human rights violations are being committed by only one side in the conflict. The head of the ICRC issued a statement last week calling for Hamas to cease targeting civilians, also, and there are reports Hamas fighters have hijacked ambulances or aid convoys for use as military vehicles (I am looking for verifiable reports, will add notes as I find). Regarding the submitter's comment that "The Israeli army deliberately intimidates, and aims at humanitarian groups, and they did shoot at an ICRC ambulance convoy three days ago, nearly killing a driver" -- we will note, for context, that there are reports of similar violations by Hamas fighters. I cannot find news reports or ICRC statements substantiating the ambulance attack, but will continue to look, and I welcome discussion in the comments thread. See update below. Here is a related report, and here is a news item about the Israeli military's use of white phosphorus (also referenced above) in combat. This NYT story today also addresses the conflict within Israel about civilian losses, and conduct in war. This item addresses the current civilian death toll on both sides.

Update 2: Regarding the submitter's note about a recent incident in which an ICRC ambulance convoy was shot, news reports indicate that it happened within the past week. Here are several news links related to this story:

* Red Cross restricts Gaza operations after coming under attack
* Gaza: le CICR n'escortera plus les ambulances palestiniennes
* Ambulance Trip from Gaza a Harrowing Ride
* Gaza: the challenge of reaching civilians in need
* Gaza "no place for civilians": ICRC
* Aid groups report way into Israel is deadly

According to broadcast reports, an ICRC representative confirmed that the organization had secured safe passage with the Israelis for this aid convoy, and that they routinely follow protocol by slowing down or stopping at checkpoints. This incident, in which the convoy was apparently fired on by Israeli military forces, underscored the need to re-clarify that understanding with the Israeli military forces.
And regarding the submitter's note that there is no evidence phosphorus bombs are being used on Gaza targets -- there is evidence now. Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.

One of our readers, Stack, sent in a link to this story about an Australian couple arrested for their participation in recruiting others into a Nigerian 419 scam. Stack suggested in his submission that it was a case of a 419 victim who, having "learned" the scam then turned around and started scamming others. But, from the description I'm not so sure that's the case. Instead, it sounds like the couple was really convinced that the scam was real, and merely convinced others to join in the scam, as well, in order to collect the "necessary" money to free the (non-existent) millions in Nigeria (or whereever this particular scammer claimed the money was).

This raises some interesting questions. If my read is correct, then the couple in question certainly didn't profit from the scam at all, and didn't even know they were being scammed. As we've seen in the past, victims of 419 scams are often so convinced by the scam that even when the whole thing is explained to them, they still believe the scammers are willing to give them money -- something that's been found to be true in historical scams like the infamous Drake's Fortune.

However, if that's the case, the couple in question didn't know it was a scam, and wasn't directly profiting from getting others involved (though, they ignorantly thought they were). So... are they victims or are they scammers? Or both?

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Here's a nice parenthack for remembering to re-stock the diaper bag when you get home -- and it'd work for any kind of kit-bag:

So, when you put a extra shirt or pair of pants into the diaper bag for those on-the-go changes, wrap them with a rubber band. First, it keeps your bag neat and it's easier to rummage around in there. Second, when you take the rubber band off to use the garment, put it on your wrist. That way, when you get home, you say to yourself, "what's this rubber band doing on my wrist?" You have a reminder to put new clean clothes into the bag!

How to remember to restock the diaper bag after you get home

Here's a longer, even more breathtaking version of the wingsuit videos that went around a couple years ago. If you want to see daredevils turning themselves into flying squirrels and soaring through the air, look no further.

Wingsuit base jumping (via William Gibson)

Doktor Tchock sez, "Boom Studios is giving away another full issue #1 via myspace, ala last year's North Wind digital/instore simul-release. The new mini Hexed has some nice artwork by Warren Ellis-approved Emma Rios."

Chip from Boom adds, "Last year, we were blamed for destroying the comic book industry when we gave away issue #1 of NORTH WIND. This year the only criticisms we received is not letting store owners know sooner so they could stock up on more copies. What a difference a year makes."

MARK WAID invites you to read the entire first issue of HEXED for FREE!

Bonnie sez, "Everyone has at least one friend who has seen parts of the Star Wars original trilogy but can’t quite tell you every plot point in order. Joe Nicolosi recorded his friend Amanda as she retells the story from the tiny amount she’s seen with hilarious results."

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Matt sez, "The guy behind one of my favorite web comics, Dr McNinja, did this awesome tshirt design wherein Mario's world is de-cartooned and amped up. Yoshi is a scary dinosaur with a monstrous tongue, goombas look like acid visions of mushrooms and the piranha plants have shark-like teeth."

Warrior Plumbers T-Shirt (Thanks, Matt!)

An anonymous reader writes "The European Parliament has signed up to a plan to introduce computerized biometric passports including people's fingerprints as well as their photographs, despite criticism from civil liberties groups and security experts who argue that the move is flawed on technical grounds. (Back in 2005 Sweden and Norway began deploying biometric passports.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're into building retro gaming cabinets, you probably have a bunch of joysticks hanging around, and look what an attractive coat rack they can make! If you don't have them around, they're really easy to get on ebay. Via Geekologie.

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A school in the UK has won a three-year domain-squatting case against some Canadian domain parkers. The school, called Framlingham College, wanted to set up shop at framlinghamcollege.co.uk, but the domain parkers beat them to the punch, and put up a page with links to, among other things, online dating sites. Apparently these sites then had links to "mature porn," which upset the administrators of the Christian school, and gave the BBC justification for the tasty headline "School's links to porn site end." It seems right that the school was able to wrest control of the site back from domain parkers, illustrating that in this instance, the dispute and resolution system worked. That said, was it such an important battle? The head of the school notes "I have no doubt that people who were seriously interested in the college will have found this site and then run a mile" -- so it's not as if people were being fooled into thinking it was the school's actual site. And there are these things these days called search engines that many people use to locate sites they're looking for, rather than just trying random URLs. Perhaps the College would have been better off using some of the resources it devoted to this battle on search-engine optimization, since its real site doesn't seem to appear in the first five pages of Google results for a search on its name. Isn't people being able to find the school's site more important than the URL it uses?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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This is not okay for kids to watch, but it's potentially safe to sneak-watch at work. Durex: Get it On. YouTube, and here it is at the designers' site with hilarious "out-takes." (Via Clayton Cubitt, thanks Susannah Breslin!)

About one-fifth of the people being held at Guantánamo Bay are on hunger strike. According to a report in the UK Times newspaper, they are starving themselves as a form of protest to attract the attention of Barack Obama, who has said he plans to close the facility -- but has not said when or how. Most of the hunger-strikers are being force-fed through tubes.

Of the 248 inmates inside the detention facility, 44 are refusing food — but 33 of those are receiving nutrition with tubes that are forced up their noses and into their stomachs. On election night, according to one official, news of Mr Obama’s win spread across the prison facility even though no inmates had access to television that evening, and chants of “Obama! Obama! Obama!” erupted throughout the complex.

Human rights groups claim the total number of hunger strikers is higher than officials say. Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer for the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, says that more than 70 men held at the US base in Cuba are refusing to eat. She cited reports from visiting lawyers.

According to one official, most inmates are now well informed about what is happening in the outside world through a combination of watching Arabic news programmes and meetings with civilian lawyers and the International Red Cross, who are allowed to visit the facility. Most are aware of Mr Obama’s pledge to close the prison, which received its first inmates seven years ago this week. Asked why so many were on hunger strike and why the number was increasing, an official said: “This is the seventh anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees, and a week today is the inauguration of a new president. Hunger striking is an acknowledged form of protest.”

One in five Guantanamo Bay detainees is on hunger strike (Times Online UK, via @mkapor)

Gov IT writes "A federal court ordered on Wednesday all employees working in the Bush White House to surrender media that might contain e-mails sent or received during a two and a half year period in hope of locating missing messages before President-elect Barack Obama takes over next week."

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There's been a lot of talk for a long time about the benefits that could be derived from computerizing health care records as a means of introducing more efficiency to the US health system. It's an enormous task, but one in which the incoming administration is very interested. The costs are expected to be as high as $100 billion over ten years, and commentators aren't at a loss for words when describing the complexity of the task. One person quoted by CNN says it will be difficult to create a system that "thinks like a physician." Two points: first, should the system think like a physician? If the industry's current practices (and practitioners) have led it to its current state, can it be expected to generate the best, most efficient solution? Many hospitals are already discovering the value of looking outside the medical field to gain insights on ways to improve their operations, and creating a modernized health information system seems like it could benefit from fresh eyes and insights as well. The second point follows the first: is the government the best party to come up with the system? It's easy -- far too easy -- to find examples of huge government projects gone wrong, flawed either in their conception or implementation, or both. The government can play an effective role in helping to establish national standards, and in funding the project, but again, given the government's role in creating the current state of the healthcare system, would it be more effective to let the market, rather than the industry lead the way and develop its own innovative solutions?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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A tableau of the new president's obsessions, illustrated by the talented Fosta, from London, aka Nick Foster. Click through for larger size, so you can read all the crazy details. He also did this similar work of Boing Boing editor's obsessions, blogged here previously.

One of my favorite web development tools is sIFR, a combination of javascript and Flash that allows you to render elements of a site, such as titles, with non-standard fonts. It allows you to write standard HTML, and the text is replaced at runtime with a Flash embed that renders the text in the desired font. Text can still be selected and copied, search engines and screen readers will see the proper semantic HTML text, and the web designer doesn't spend countless hours cutting text images in Photoshop.

I came across another utility today called sIFR Lite. It's pretty much a drop-in replacement for the Javascript portion of sIFR, with a slightly simplified syntax, smaller file size, and auto-detection of the underlying CSS color.

I haven't used it enough to decide if I'm a convert yet, but it seems tight and it looks to be another useful webdev font hack to add to the toolbox.

sIFR Lite
The Original sIFR

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Psystar tried and failed to pin an antitrust case on Apple in its fight over whether or not Psystar can install MacOS on non-Apple hardware. Now, it appears that the company is back to where we thought it would originally focus: on whether or not a software license agreement can preclude the first sale doctrine that allows you to resell software you legally purchased. It's still a long shot -- but a few recent rulings suggest the courts are at least more open to these discussions. Of course, if Psystar wins, it could severely limit the power of end user license agreements (EULAs) that software companies often use to limit uses of software.

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coondoggie writes "How important have unmanned aircraft become to the US military? Well how's this: the Air Force says next year it will acquire more unmanned aircraft than manned. Air Force Lt. Gen. Norman Seip this week said the service is 'all in' when it comes to developing unmanned systems and aircraft. 'Next year, the Air Force will procure more unmanned aircraft than manned aircraft,' the general said. 'I think that makes a very pointed statement about our commitment to the future of [unmanned aircraft] and what it brings to the fight in meeting the requirements of combatant commanders.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Let it begin! My wife picked up the RCA Victor 21" television last night from our friend. I unloaded it and set it in the hallway; it's a little bit bigger than I envisioned, and even cooler than I'd hoped. The giant channel knob on the side turns the channel indicator display inside a little window above the TV screen. Seems like that needs to be incorporated into the project. Maybe it'll correspond to the "next customer" tickets I hand out at parties.

I only had a moment to poke around, but there are three speakers mounted behind the stylish fabric, and a switch on the back that goes between "TV" and "PH". This is so you could plug your phonograph into an RCA jack and play through the set. Neato!

There have been so many excellent, creative ideas in the comments of my first post on this project, thank you so much. If I can settle in on a direction to go, I'd like to chronicle the build here, with an eye toward carting the finished project to the 2009 Bay Area Maker Faire in May (providing I do a decent job on it and it's Maker Faire-worthy, otherwise I'll deny any of this ever happened).

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Mark Ryden's new book, The Tree Show, came out today, and it has all the paintings from his recent exhibition in LA.

Absorbing Roman poet Ovid's tales of transformation in Metamorphoses and adding his own dash of art-historical figuration and contemporary pop culture, Mark Ryden broaches new terrain with The Tree Show.

"Arcadian Gothic" might hint at the nature of this new work, and fans of Ryden will find familiar preoccupations in these new paintings, drawings and sculptures -- made since his first solo show in 1998 -- transposed to new pastures. Never reluctant to freight his work with layers of reference that range from Renaissance landscape and Neoclassical portrait painting to occultism and literature, in his latest works Ryden combines the arcane with pop-cultural images as ground from which to make his carefully executed leaps into fantasy.

Ryden's series includes depictions of oak trees consuming children, floating tree stumps with "seeing" eyes, imaginary wood nymphs and mythological characters who personify Nature herself.

Ryden paints his characters with a masterful, porcelain glow reminiscent of Ingres and renders his trees with a care that evokes Audubon's botanical illustration. Several of his paintings are presented in elaborately carved frames that project their narratives beyond the canvas. The Tree Show offers reproductions of these paintings and sculptures alongside the fruits of Ryden's research on the tree as myth -- drawing from the Buddha's Bodhi Tree to Adam and Eve, the Sephiroth of the Kabbalah and matters of ecological science. As such, this volume constitutes an enticing dossier on Ryden's encyclopedic exploration of the subject and reproduces in its entirety this series centered around the arboreal world.

For months, we've been arguing that an open, free market is the best way to operate a mobile phone application service. Yet, the leader in the industry, Apple, has continued to operate a Byzantine system of opaque and arbitrary rules. This is confusing to developers and limits competition.

Luckily, there are some signs that Apple may be loosening their anti-competitive restrictions. Since the beginning, Apple has asserted a right to ban applications that "compete" with existing functionality, even if those offer an improvement. In essence, this was nothing more than Apple disallowing competition with its built-in applications. Now, it seems they are changing their stance, albeit quietly, by letting in a number of mobile browsers that compete with Apple's own mobile browser. While it isn't official, and I'm not holding my breath, this hopefully signals a positive move for iPhone users and developers (not to mention Apple, whose product will get a lot more valuable).

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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DesScorp writes "Ricardo Montalban, immortalized as Khan in the Star Trek franchise, is dead at age 88, passing at his Los Angeles home. Montalban had a long and successful career on television and film. The voice of Rich Corinthian Leather is silenced, but we still have the memories."

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Here's a brilliantly simple Instructable on using the sun as your pump for a hydroponics system.

According to the Instructable, clouds passing in front of the sun creates enough change in light to make the pump run. Has anyone seen scaled-up versions of this? Seems like it could be a great way to create some water pressure for harvested rainwater...

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