Mobile phones on bar tables deserve what they get. But that doesn't make it suck any less when you're the drunk with the dead pixels. Ask MAKE subscriber Tim Watson. When his iPhone got a party night beer bath, he was faced with either replacing his screen or trying one of the free utilities or fixes suggested online. Software solutions didn't work, so he tried the screen massage method (usually suggested for just a few dead pixels). With time and a lot of massaging, he managed to at least greatly reduce and move the necrotic mass to the edge of his screen. BTW: It should go without saying, but when he says he did it with a Sharpie, he means the cap of the pen, not the marker itself!

Fixing dead pixels on an iPhone

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alphadogg writes "The Downadup worm — also called Conflicker — has now infected an estimated 10 million PCs worldwide, and security experts say they expect to see a dangerous second-stage payload dropped soon. 'It has the potential to infect about 30% of Windows systems online, a potential 300 to 350 million PCs,' says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence in the counter threat unit at SecureWorks. The worm, first identified in November and suspected to have originated in the Ukraine, is quickly ramping up, and while Downadup today is not malicious in the sense of destroying files — its main trick is to block users from accessing antivirus sites to obtain updates to protect against it — the worm is capable of downloading second-stage code for darker purposes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

failcomm writes "I've been talking with my son's (middle-school) computer lab teacher about a 'time capsule' project. The school has a number of 'retirement age' PCs (5-6 years old — Dells, HPs, a couple of Compaqs), and we've been kicking around the idea of trying to preserve a working system and some media (CDs and/or DVDs), and locking them away to be preserved for some period of time (say 50 years); to be opened by students of the future. The goal would be to have instructions on how to unpack the system, plug it into the wall (we'll assume everyone is still using 110v US outlets), and get the system to boot. Also provide instructions on how to load the media and see it in action; whether it is photos or video or games or even student programs — whatever. So first, is this idea crazy? Second, how would we go about packing/preserving various components? Lastly, any suggestions on how to store it long term? (Remember, this is a school project, so we can't exactly just 'freeze it in carbonite'; practical advice would be appreciated.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Howardd21 writes "PC World reports that Mozilla Labs wants 1% of its Firefox users to voluntarily provide information about how they use the browser, and their web browsing habits. This would be done through an add-on named "Test Pilot" that collects the information and associates it with some demographic information that the user has provided. Unlike other data collection utilities that software developers may include to provide usage information, the add-on will follow the same open source concept that Firefox adheres to, allowing the market to better understand what is being collected. Mozilla Labs stresses privacy when discussing how they will collect, store and use the data, including publishing it for other researchers to to analyze."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Before the G1 was released and Android was only available via emulator, Jeffrey Sharkey reverse engineered DACP and created a really slick Android iTunes remote that functions just like the Remote app on the iPhone.

The Digital Audio Control Protocol (DACP) was recently introduced by Apple, and is built into all recent iTunes™ versions. DACP is the protocol used by the Remote app on the iPhone/iPod Touch to remote control your desktop or laptop iTunes player.

DACP is similar to the well-known DAAP, using Bonjour MDNS to find libraries, then using HTTP requests with binary responses to transfer data. After a few days in front of packet dumps, I have most of DACP decoded.

With the protocol now reverse engineered, I wrote an Android client in about a week. Now you can remote control your iTunes from your new Android phone when it arrives later this year. This works out of the box without installing any extra software on your PC or Mac.

If you're a G1 owner, you can install this app to remotely control iTunes from your phone. If you're a developer, it's all open source, so look to this if you even need to create you own app that speaks DACP.

Android DACP Remote Control
HOW-TO: Tunes Remote Setup - Android Community Forum

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An anonymous reader writes "In a recent Computerworld interview, Linus revealed that he's switched to Gnome — this despite launching a heavily critical broadside against Gnome just a few years ago. His reason? He thinks KDE 4 is a 'disaster.' Although it's improved recently, he'll find many who agree with this prognosis, and KDE 4 can be painful to use." There's quite a bit of interesting stuff in this interview, besides, regarding the current state of Linux development.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "In a recent Computerworld interview, Linus revealed that he's switched to Gnome — this despite launching a heavily critical broadside against Gnome just a few years ago. His reason? He thinks KDE 4 is a 'disaster.' Although it's improved recently, he'll find many who agree with this prognosis, and KDE 4 can be painful to use." There's quite a bit of interesting stuff in this interview, besides, regarding the current state of Linux development.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bk- writes with news that documents from the "Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit against Microsoft indicate the software giant could be on the hook for as much as $8.52 billion in upgrade costs. "[University of Washington economist Keith] Leffler came up with his total upgrade costs by calculating how much it would cost to upgrade each of the 19.4 million PCs with 1 GB of memory and graphics cards or onboard chipsets able to run Aero, according to Keizer. Leffler put the maximum cost of upgrading the desktops at $155, while positing that the notebooks' integrated graphics would be more tricky to replace and would cost between $245 and $590 per unit. The total price tag for Microsoft would thus range from $3.92 billion to $8.52 billion and in some cases would include complete replacements of notebooks that could not be feasibly upgraded, Leffler testified. Microsoft in its response argued that giving litigants 'a free upgrade to Premium-ready PCs would provide a windfall to millions.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taking devotion to Mario to a whole new level is this eeepc etching by flickr user Revolvingdork. This project taught me 2 things:
1. 70% speed 40% power are good settings for etching with an Epilog on an eeepc.
2. The levels in Mario really weren't that many screens long!

You can pick up an image of the etch to do your own here.

(via hackaday)

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Philip Hingston writes "Computers can't play like people — yet. An unusual kind of computer game bot-programming contest has just been held in Perth, Australia, as part of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. The contest was not about programming the bot that plays the best. The aim was to see if a bot could convince another player that it was actually a human player. Game Development Studio 2K Australia (creator of BioShock) provided $7,000 cash plus a trip to their studio in Canberra for anyone who could create a bot to pass this 'Turing Test for Bots.' People like to play against opponents who are like themselves — opponents with personality, who can surprise, who sometimes make mistakes, yet don't robotically make the same mistakes over and over. Computers are superbly fast and accurate at playing games, but can they be programmed to be more fun to play — to play like you and me?" Read on for the rest of Philip's thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets: • A woman with uncanny valley fingers showed off the phone watch of tomorrow. • A speedboat in the shape of a guitar went on sale. • The Phantom of the Opera advertised a chess set. • Knight Rider could not afford an iPhone. • John loved the look of Jolicloud, a Linux distro for netbooks. • Pastel colors came back to rack-mounted synthesizers. • Spectacles went USB. • We discovered that laser-etching a Moleskine can kill you. • Someone invented the better ice tray. • We discovered the most adorable C-3P0 ever. • Palm responds to Apple's veiled lawsuit threats: "Bring it." • Roadside LED signs were easily hacked to warn about upcoming zombie outbreak zones. • We all revealed our hearts and souls by starting a gallery of our laptop sticker art. And much more besides! Link

An anonymous reader sends us to Telephony Online for a story about Comcast's second attempt at traffic management (free registration may be required). After the heavy criticism they received from customers and the FCC about their first system, they've adopted a more even-handed "protocol agnostic" approach. Nevertheless, they're once again under scrutiny from the FCC, this time for the way their system interacts with VOIP traffic. By ignoring specific protocols, the occasional bandwidth limits on high-usage customers interferes with those customers' VOIP, yet Comcast's own Digital Voice is unaffected. Quoting: "The shocking thing is just how big a Pandora's box the FCC has appeared to open — and it just keeps getting bigger. When the FCC first started addressing bandwidth usage and DPI issues, it quickly found itself up to its knees in network management minutia. Not long after that, it followed another logical path of the DPI question and asked service providers and Web companies about their use of DPI for behavioral targeting. Now it seemingly has opened up huge questions about what it means to be a voice carrier in the age of IP. It's not hard to imagine the next step: What about video? Telco IPTV services are delivered in roughly the same way as carrier VoIP services — via packets running on the same physical network but a prioritized logical signaling stream. Is that fair to over-the-top video service providers?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Malvineous writes "Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke has recently filmed a high-definition 35-minute video tour aboard the International Space Station. For those who missed the HD broadcast on NASA TV, the video is available on YouTube. Due to YouTube length limits, the tour is split into four separate videos. Here are Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

J ROC writes "Phone numbers on Canada's Do-Not-Call registry have apparently been sold to off-shore telemarketers, scam artists, and other ne'er-do-wells, according to reports in the Globe & Mail and CBC News. The CRTC, which runs the registry, sells lists of phone numbers online for a small fee; making it available to anybody who might be interested in buying it, including con artists. I guess this explains why, ever since I added my number to the registry, I've been getting phone calls from 000-000-0000 trying to interest me in some free vacation scam. Canada's Privacy Commissioner is currently investigating."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "US Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told Microsoft this week that US citizens should get priority over H-1B visa holders as the software vendor moves forward on its plan to cut 5,000 jobs. 'These work visa programs were never intended to allow a company to retain foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American workers, when that company cuts jobs during an economic downturn,' Grassley wrote in a letter sent Thursday to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The letter asked Microsoft to detail the types of jobs that will be eliminated and how those cuts will affect the company's H-1B workers." Reader theodp adds, "On Friday, Microsoft coincidentally announced it would postpone construction of a planned $500 million data center in Grassley's home state of Iowa, although work on data centers in Chicago and Dublin will continue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe has released 'Release Candidates' of Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 for immediate download from Adobe Labs. Both provide additional Raw support for the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30 DSLRs. Lightroom is also now available in 8 new languages. The 'release candidate' label means the downloads are 'well tested' but not yet final versions.

Meet the Flaming Lotus Girls, a women-centric maker collaborative that creates gargantuan, fire-breathing sculptures. In the Workshop, John Park builds a digital TV antenna from wire coat hangers and a $10 video camera stabilizer. William Gurstelle shows surprising uses for cable ties, and Maker Channel contributors show off a motorized lounge chair, an eye-popping I/O brush, a vest that controls a video game with a back massage, and an explosive, giant match made from thousands of matchsticks. Check out the HD version on Blip or get the m4v.

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These women are fired up: The Flaming Lotus Girls, a women-centric maker collaborative, creates gargantuan, fierce, flame-breathing sculptures. This popular Bay Area organization boasts diverse membership, welcoming members from all backgrounds. Whether they're artists, lawyers, mothers or scientists, all Flaming Lotus Girls share two things in common: a desire to get their hands dirty, and a love of all things flammable. And the Flaming Lotus Girls are not alone; countless women welded during WWII, and today a new generation of women welders is picking up the torch.

To learn more or to join the Girls, go to www.flaminglotus.com

Get the m4v or subscribe in iTunes. Or watch on YouTube or Blip.

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Digital converter box? Check! Great reception? Not so much. John Park shows how to take a fistful of wire coat hangers and make a TV antenna that gives great digital reception. While he's at it, he also makes a video camera stabilizer using metal piping and counterbalance weight; great for at-home moviemaking.

Check out the PDFs for the DTV Antenna and the Steady Cam

Get the m4v , subscribe in iTunes. Or watch on YouTube or Blip.

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John Park shows how to make a Digital Television Antenna. Check out the plans for building your own. Check out the comments below to see how people have modified our design, and the success some people have had. If you do anything differently or better, be sure to leave a comment in the blog!

Watch the DTV Antenna and Steadycam segment here.

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Check out the PDF for details on making an affordable and easy-to-use steadycam. Thanks to Johnny Lee for writing the original article, found in the premiere volume of Make:

Watch the DTV Antenna and Steadycam segment here.

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In this 'Toolbox' segment, William Gurstelle demonstrates a dizzying array of applications for cable ties. Got any other "multi-tasking" tools? Let us know.

Get the m4v or subscribe in iTunes. Or watch on YouTube or Blip.

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Make: television presents:

I/O Brush - Kimiko Ryokai's electronic "paintbrush" transfers any object it touches, whether static or moving, onto a special board with eye-popping results.

Motorized Barcalounger - Engineer Lyn Gomes's kicks back in her motorized lounge chair.

Massage Me Jacket - Hannah Perner-Wilson and Mika Satomi's wearable massage vest acts as a video game controller

[Trouble Maker] Giant Match - Billy Gordon fires up a monster match made from 15,000 wooden matches.

Get the m4v or subscribe in iTunes. Or watch on YouTube or Blip.

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Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek specializes in works made from reclaimed wood, like this lovely cupboard. He does floors, too!

Piet Hein Eek (via Cribcandy)

Toronto author and free software activist Robert Boyczuk's short story collection, "Horror Story and Other Horror Stories" has finally been published. Quill and Quire reviewed the 19-story collection, crediting Bob with "having a real knack for creepy, Twilight Zone-style atmospherics." The whole manuscript's up for free CC download as well, natch.

Horror Story and Other Horror Stories press release (Thanks, Brett!)

somanyrobots writes with this excerpt from the Dallas News: "In a major defeat for social conservatives, a sharply divided State Board of Education voted Thursday to abandon a longtime state requirement that high school science teachers cover what some critics consider to be 'weaknesses' in the theory of evolution. Under the science curriculum standards recommended by a panel of science educators and tentatively adopted by the board, biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the 'strengths and weaknesses' of Charles Darwin's theory that man evolved from lower forms of life. Texas is particularly influential to textbook publishers because of the size of its market, so this could have a ripple effect on textbooks used in other states as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beeps-a-Lot Box, Arcane Device, and Stylophonic Device each answer a question I hadn't considered: What would have happened if H.R. Giger had decided to teach band? These graceful sculptures are working musical instruments produced by Gulf Coast artisan Mike Ford Designed to evoke curiosity as well as admiration, each is heavy with mysterious controls, indicators, and attachments, all beckoning to be explored. Growing up in a family of Gulf fishermen. Ford learned the value of inventiveness early on. Even as a tyke, he embraced this heritage, secretly designing and building a control panel for an imaginary rocket ship Sadly, his space exploration dreams were cut short after some critical knobs had to be unglued and returned to his grandmother's TV set. A skilled stringed instrument builder, Ford was inspired by an article on circuit bending to start modifying discarded electronics boards. Dissatisfied with common project boxes for these creations, he began developing cases as exotic as his circuits. Finding this new challenge artistically satisfying, he pursued refinements to his design process and metalworking skills while an art student at the University of Mississippi Nowa full-time artist.

Ford melds the electronics of his instruments with cases that, despite their fluidly seamless look, are largely composed of repurposed or found pieces that he works with hand tools. His design is decidedly deco-industrial, a look that has captivated him since he first glimpsed the retro-futuristic gadgets in movies like Dune and Brazil. This inspiration is easy to see in the wonderfully strange effectors on his instruments, whose functions seem both obvious and inscrutable. giving his gear the look of something from a not-quite-parallel world (a world where they use a lot of chrome). Besides building up his stock of sculptures, Ford is now constructing microsynthesizers based on vintage analog integrated circuits. l'm guessing those won't be in plastic boxes.

Mike Ford's website: mikefordsculptures.com
>> His work is also featured at: getlofi.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 6, page 21 - Bob Scott.

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zwei2stein writes "I found this question with far-reaching implications in the off-topic section of a forum I frequent: 'My economics teacher is forcing us to give up all of our work for the semester. Every page of notes and paper must be turned over to her to be destroyed to prevent future students from copying it. My binder was in my backpack, and she went into my backpack to take it. Is that legal?' Besides the issue with private property invasion, which was the trigger of that post, there is much more important question: Can a teacher ask a student not to retain knowledge? How does IP law relate to teaching and sharing knowledge? Whose property are those notes?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(NSFW, contains nudity and sexual references) Goddamn, Black Dynamite looks good. It's hard to imagine this movie not being awesome, if it's anywhere close to what the trailer promises in glorious "anamorphic duovision." Every second of the preview looks great. Movie just sold for $2MM at Sundance, to the jive motherfuckers at Sony. Worth its weight in CIA ghetto smack. This analysis of the essential elements of blaxploitation by the filmmakers is ROFL-arious:

# Stick it to The Man: Black paranoia is usually right in there. There's usually this conspiratorial thing that The Man is plotting your doom. There's a lot of real blaxploitation movies that involve a plot to exterminate black people. It's a constant storyline. In these movies, white people spend 95% of their time coming up with plots against black people.

# White people by the pool: Every one of those ['70s blaxploitation flicks] depicted white people beside a swimming pool. We actually had that scene, but we cut it. A lot of times they were older character actors.

# The exploding car off a cliff: Cars always exploded for no reason.

# Bad physics: When somebody got shot, they would often fall the wrong direction.

# Random theater actors: You had really terrible actors alongside these theater actors trying to be drug dealers, but they'd over-enunciate everything.

(Thanks, Coop!)

WATCH: Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here.

VIEWER WARNING: This episodes contains verbal descriptions of graphic violence. Discretion advised.

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Today's episode of Boing Boing video is an excerpt from OUTLAWED, a film produced by WITNESS, in partnership with more than a dozen other human rights groups around the world.

The future of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and of the men held there, has been at the top of the news this week -- President Obama has ordered the facility closed, one released detainee has now become the head of Al Qaeda in Yemen, and some around the world are calling for war crimes tribunals to be held over the torture some prisoners survived during rendition.

In this Boing Boing video episode, we are introduced to Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, an Ethiopian man in his thirties (ACLU bio and a detailed report about his case here). Mr. Mohamed survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government working with various other governments worldwide.

The story of what he endured, which included horrific sexual violence during interrogation, was painful for us to watch in the studio, when we were editing this preview piece. But all of us on the BB Video team felt like this was an incredibly important story for the world to hear, and we were grateful for the ability to draw greater attention to the story at this time.

Speaking on my own behalf here: What happens with Guantánamo and the legal process surrounding the men still held there should matter to each person who reads this blog post. The safety of our nation does not require us to abandon universally-recognized principles of human rights. Torture and disappearances do not make America more secure.

Paraphrasing what one person from WITNESS told us in email -- if more Americans realized they live in a nation where, on a street corner in the town where you live, any one of us could be picked up, pushed into an unmarked van, then moved around detention centers all over the world, tortured, without a charge or a word to your family, surely there would be more outcry.

OUTLAWED was produced around the time when the Council of Europe issued a report on the topic of extraordinary rendition and torture involving America's "War on Terror." To document why those issues matter, WITNESS created a coalition with a number of US human rights and social justice 'project partners' such as Amnesty and the ACLU to distribute the video.

Mr. Mohamed is still being held at Guantánamo Bay.

After the jump, a note with which we updated this BB video episode. You can watch the film in entirety at links provided here, or purchase the documentary on DVD.

(Special appreciation to Boing Boing Video producer Derek Bledsoe. Sincere thanks to Bryan Nunez, Grace Lile, and Yvette J. Alberdingk Thijm from WITNESS. Music in this episode graciously provided by Amon Tobin / Cinematic Orchestra.)

Boing Boing Video archives.

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UPDATE, January 23, 2009: In a declassified note to his lawyers dated Dec. 29, 2008 but only released by US officials this week, Mohamed says:

It has come to my attention through several reliable sources that my release from Guantanamo to the UK had been ordered several weeks ago.

It is a cruel tactic of delay to suspend my travel till the last days of this [Bush] administration while I should have been home a long time ago."

Mohamed's lawyers said they are concerned for his health. He has been on a hunger strike over his continued detention for more than four weeks. Britain has formally requested Mohammed's release, The U.S. has so far declined, "due to security concerns.

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JobsEnding writes with this quote from IBTimes: "A British court ruled on Friday that a man who hacked into US military computers will be given permission for a judicial review against his extradition to the United States. Hacker Gary McKinnon, 42, who had been diagnosed recently with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, has admitted hacking into the military computers. His lawyers had said McKinnon was at risk of suicide if he were extradited." We discussed the granting of McKinnon's extradition in 2006 when it was first granted, as well as a profile of the man more recently.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ShareBrained Technology, makers of the wild and wooly Chronulator clock kit, have released a new version of their product. Chronulator is an electronics kit that lets you build arbitrarily weird electronic clocks, from TokyoFlash-style digital numbers to whacky analogue ones that use dials, wheels or other readouts to display the time. John Park from Make tested the kit by building this handsom little fella inside a Romeo and Julieta cigar box.

Chronulieta cigar box clock

On Talking Points Memo, Dan Gillmor makes some stinging points about the media's complicity in manufacturing the financial crisis by unquestioningly promoting reckless bubble spending while pooh-poohing any idea that the bill would come due some day:

When we can predict an inevitable calamity if we continue along the current path, we owe it to the public to do everything we can to encourage a change in that destructive behavior.

In practice, this means activism. It means relentless campaigning to point out what's going wrong, and demanding corrective action from those who can do something about it.

So in Florida, Arizona and California, among other epicenters of the housing bubble, newspapers might have told their readers -- including governmental officials -- the difficult truth. They could have explained, again and again, that the housing bubble would inevitably lead, at least locally, to personal financial disaster for many in their regions, not to mention fiscal woes for local and state governments. How many should have done this, given the media's at least partial reliance on advertising from those who profited from the bubbles? Any that cared to do their jobs.

Some plain-as-day woes don't present any financial conflicts. For example, the threat to New Orleans from hurricane-created flooding was clear long before Katrina, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune did run a series of articles warning of what might happen years before the hurricane struck. What it didn't do was follow up in the relentless kind of way that might have spurred local, state and federal action to prevent or mitigate the inevitable disaster.

The Media's Role In The Financial Crisis

One of the big discussion points at MidemNet, this year, was the idea that ISPs might start offering "legalized" file sharing offerings, where for a certain fee, you would be able to file share without worry of a lawsuit. Depending how this is implemented it could be quite problematic, but structured in a voluntary way, it would at least be an interesting experiment to watch. And, in fact, at MidemNet, folks like Feargal Sharkey suggested that it would only be a matter of weeks until we heard about such offerings in the UK. That may not be the case. The Register is reporting that UK broadband provider Virgin has killed off plans for just such a service that it was just about set to announce... due to ridiculous demands from at least two of the record labels involved. Despite the fact that the plan was to create a "legal" P2P offering that would track file sharing using deep packet inspection (ick), Sony Music and Universal Music supposedly demanded that Virgin agree to block file uploads and downloads from users' PCs.

That really doesn't make much sense -- as the whole point of P2P (legal or not) is that it involves people uploading and downloading from their computers. Still, this also explains part of why Virgin was so willing to jump on the recording industry's bandwagon for sending warning notices to customers and threatening to kick them offline. It was apparently step one in a negotiation to see about working out a deal for a "legalized" P2P solution. While I still don't believe such a solution is the best way to do things, it at least seems like a step in a more reasonable direction... so, of course, the big record labels were quick to kill it off.

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netizen writes "CircleID is reporting a large-scale DDoS attack affecting all of Network Solutions' name servers for the past 48 hours, potentially affecting millions of websites and emails around the world hosting their domain names on the company's servers. The NANOG mailing list indicates that it is due to a very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS which Network Solutions has also confirmed: 'There is a spike in DNS query volumes that is causing latency for the delay in web sites resolving. This is a result of a DDOS attack. We are taking measures to mitigate the attack and speed up queries.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Wife murdered for Facebook status," screams the headline on the BBC News site. "A man murdered his estranged wife after becoming 'enraged' when she changed her marital status on Facebook to 'single'," it goes on to say, after a man in England was convicted of killing his estranged wife who wouldn't respond to any of his attempts to contact her. Apparently changing the Facebook status was the final straw, but to say she was murdered because of it seems like little more than an overly ambitious attempt to craft a really juicy headline. This woman was murdered because her estranged husband went nuts; Facebook was hardly an accessory. While this may not seem like a huge deal, it's these sorts of stories that spring politicians into action against technology, blaming it for society's ills while ignoring the real underlying problems. I mean, if people are getting killed for their Facebook status, surely we need to ban Facebook statuses, right? To protect the children?

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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Today on Offworld we saw a pair of pairs of retro-game inspired footwear, possibly the reigning champ of game-cakes, as these are ones you can actually play, explored the possibility that Taito may be returning to the DS for more retro-futuristic Space Invaders love, and saw more of Sega's upcoming Wii title that parodies retro gaming's finest. We also held a brief service for the death of legendary design house The Designers Republic, best known in the games sphere for their work defining the visual identity of the Wipeout series, saw fantastic new media from Fez creators Polytron on the opening of their new website, and saw the first and likely only set of lesbian artificial intelligence erotica we'll ever see, with a forbidden romance between Portal's GlaDOS and System Shock's Shodan. Finally, we saw one man's attempt to bring The Wrestler's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson forward from his on-screen 8-bit roots to full next-gen glory, and settled on a game for this weekend's community play: the open beta of London indie Beatnik Games' Plain Sight, a raucous and light-hearted robot arena battle that takes the best bits of Mario Galaxy's spherical worlds and combines it with brutal aerial acrobatics.

One of the more ridiculous lawsuits we saw last year was smaller newspaper chain GateHouse suing the NY Times for linking to its site with a headline and brief excerpt on the Boston Globe website. Romenesko points us to news of the NY Times response, which seems pretty damning for GateHouse. Specifically, they show emails from GateHouse officials pointing out that identical activities are clearly fair use, and another email where GateHouse tells one of its own sites to immediately stop doing the exact same thing that it's accusing the NYT of doing. In other words, GateHouse pretty clearly knows that an excerpt, a headline and a link are fair use -- but still went after the NY Times for doing the same thing it did.

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erickhill writes with word that scientists from the University of Maryland have successfully transferred information from one charged atom to another without having it cross the intervening space of about one meter. The academic paper is available in the journal Science, though it requires a subscription to see more than the abstract. Scientists have previously teleported unmolested qubits between photons of light, and between photons and clouds of atoms. But researchers have long sought to teleport qubits between distant atoms. Light's high speed of travel makes photons good transporters of information, but for storing quantum information, atoms are a much better choice because they're easier to hold on to. 'This is a big deal,' comments Myungshik Kim, a quantum physicist at Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom. 'To store information as it is in quantum form, you have to have a teleportation scheme available between two stationary qubits. Then you can store them and manipulate them later on.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jared Boone, of ShareBrained Technology, was kind enough to send me a brand-new Chronulator 2.0 kit. It's an Arduino-compliant analog clock (or anything you want) that uses panel meters as the display. I've written up a full review for MAKE volume 17 (verdict: great kit).

This is a photo I took of the clock I built. I used a cigar box for a case, mounted the board on top, and printed some stock clock faces for the meters (I'm dying to redesign those to match the lovely Romeo Y Julieta typography when I get some time). My more pressing modification is to add some LEDs for face illumination.

Chronulator 2.0 kit

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Mike Petrich and Karen Wilkinson of San Francisco's Exploratorium's Learning Studio have a choice assignment this month. They are visiting a monastery in Sarnath, India, helping organize hands-on science workshops for Tibetan Buddhist monks.

Mike and Karen who run the Learning Studio program at the Exploratorium were brought to India by a program called Science for Monks. On the Learning Studio blog, Mike and Karen talk about their first workshop on Cardboard Automata. In this workshop, the monks were shown an automata with its mechanism disguised and asked to design their own version, guessing at how the original worked.

We were definitely surprised by the gusto with which the monks took to the challenge. Their observations were methodical, precise, and varied, even creative (for example, it was not uncommon for them to hold up the box to their ear to try and determine, from the sound of the mechanism, whether there were gears involved or not). They made very well-thought-out drawings and schematics of possible mechanisms, and then defended their ideas with each other with great vigor.

I asked Mike and Karen to consider writing a Make article on their trip. Mike wrote to me: "It is quite an adventure, the first time the Tibetan leadership monks have used making as a part of their science learning."

So if monks are learning hands-on science and making things, shouldn't everyone, everywhere, regardless of age, nationality or religion? Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this!

While Arizona is considering getting rid of speed cameras across the state (update: this has now been approved), one county has already gone ahead and removed all of its speed cameras, after the newly elected sheriff went through the data and found that the speed cameras were not even remotely effective (thanks to everyone who sent this in). The sheriff noted, first of all, that despite claims this would make the streets safer, accidents actually increased by 16% and fatal accidents doubled (from 3 to 6). He admits, reasonably, that there could be other factors, but there's little to suggest that the cameras did anything to make the roads safer -- which was the main reason why the cameras were first installed.

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jcatcw writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that CAPTCHA cracking isn't that difficult these days. It has even become a business. For example, DeCaptcher.com will solve CAPTCHAs for your spamming needs at a rate of $2 per 1,000 successfully cracked CAPTCHAs. In response, newer systems are in development. Both Carnegie Mellon and Penn State (is there something about the water in PA?) are working on image-based systems. ESP-PIX and SQ-PIX both require the viewer to interpret pictures. Imagination CAPTCHA from Penn has the user find the center of an image. The idea is that humans are better at image recognition that computers, but humans can legitimately disagree on their interpretations and some humans are color blind. Problems remain. For now, sites would be well advised to look at reCAPTCHA — the system that works with Google Books and the Internet Archive to digitize printed texts — which comes with a wide variety of application and programming plug-ins and an open API."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Image, story via Fast Company)

The right thing to do when there are no bike lanes on a road you ride is lobby your local government to create them. The quicker (and cooler) thing to do is project your own. Hence the Light Lane: a biker-centric bicycle lane. No step-by-step instructions yet (or, for that matter, evidence one has been built), but still a great bike-safety project!

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(Image, story via Fast Company)

The right thing to do when there are no bike lanes on a road you ride is lobby your local government to create them. The quicker (and cooler) thing to do is project your own. Hence the Light Lane: a biker-centric bicycle lane. No step-by-step instructions yet (or, for that matter, evidence one has been built), but still a great bike-safety project!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Bicycles | Digg this!