pgpark writes "I've been working as a key resource for a small IT consulting firm in the US. While the job has been interesting and the company's growth quite impressive over the last few years, it's been almost half a dozen years now and being ready for something new, I was ready to quit for consulting. It looks like the CEO would prefer to see me stay, as she is offering me ten percent of shares in the company in exchange for five additional years of my services. So the big question for me now is 'should I stay or should I go now?' Have you guys on Slashdot ever been dealing with such a situation? What points would you consider in order to make your choice?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a study that the television industry must absolutely love, researchers apparently found that people enjoyed a sitcom with commercials included by a significant margin over watching the same show without the commercials. Of course, before jumping to conclusions about such a study, it's worth thinking about alternative explanations other than the idea that people really like commercials. In the Freakonomics post above, they posit that sitcoms are written with these breaks in mind -- and the story arc reflects that. Taking the commercials out could make the show feel slightly disjointed. I know I've sometimes felt that way when watching DVDs of TV shows. In fact, I would imagine that a similar study comparing movies shown without commercials and those with commercials abruptly inserted might return the opposite results -- with the version with commercials greatly disliked compared to the movie without.

Another potential explanation could just be the way we view watching sitcoms -- where we've been somewhat conditioned for those regular breaks. We're used to them, and being able to do something during them (go to the bathroom, get a snack, talk to a significant other/kids/parents), and taking them out so that the entire show goes straight messes with our own expectations. If that latter idea is correct, then it would suggest that having people watch a show where they could fast forward via DVR through the commercials should still be quite enjoyable, because they still get the break and still can do those "other" things during the breaks rather than actually watching the commercials. In other words, it may be that people like the breaks, not the commercials.

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Amazing shape-shifter robotic system being developed at University of Pennsylvania that can locate its subsystem clusters and reassemble itself after being kicked or otherwise disrupted.

Shape-shifting robots take form [via Boing Boing]

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ndogg writes "While other companies are throttling their services, and capping bandwidth, Charter Communications, the cable company, is launching a 60/5 Internet service, starting in St. Louis, MO. It's certainly not cheap, starting at 129.99 per month (add another 10 if it's not being bundled with television or phone.) Currently, it's the fastest down stream speed available, and being a cable company, they potentially have greater reach than FiOS." However, there may be a risk to putting too much money down on this service; Charter Communications as a company faces some serious financial problems right now. As reader Afforess writes, "rumors abound that Paul Allen may just cut his losses and run," by selling the company. (Allen is the majority stockholder.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Illuminated pushbuttons can be costly, cool-looking, and really quite helpful especially when panel space is in short dupply. Well here's details on making your own with tactile switches, go 'head get blinky/flashy - Alternative buttons [via Hack A Day] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Here's a clock for geeks. It's $20 on Etsy.

Explanation of clock numerals:

1 Legendre's constant

2 "An infinite number of mathematicians..."

3 A Unicode character as a HTML entity

4 Modular arithmetic

5 The Golden Mean reworked a little

6 Three Factorial (3*2*1)

7 6.99999.. Though a different number than 7, still equals 7

8 Graphical representation of Binary code

9 An example of a base-4 number

10 A Binomial Coefficient

11 An example of Hexadecimal encoding

12 The cube root is the inverse of 12^3

Here's a modular robot from the University of Pennsylvania that can reassemble itself after being kicked into pieces. This is the second video I've seen of a robot that responds in a surprising way to its master's kick. The first video was of the Big Dog pack robot.

the4thdimension writes "While we may not be beaming up to the Enterprise anytime soon, a team of scientists from the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan have managed to teleport information between two atoms up to a meter apart. Until this point, only very tiny distances were able to be traveled. However, using a complicated system of photons, ions, lasers, and electromagnetics, scientists have managed to 'teleport' information contained on one atom to another atom that is in a separate sealed container. This can lead to a wide range of developments in computing and communications." Update: 01/29 22:29 GMT by T : Sorry, it's a dupe, but today's article in Time is better reading than the abstract anyhow.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The long awaited (and somewhat delayed) Digital Britain interim report has been released, and, like the Gowers Report on intellectual property before it, this one seems way too "balanced" for its own good. That is, it seems to avoid taking a really significant stand on anything. For example, it says that the country should have universal broadband (of at least 2 Mbps), but doesn't explain how. It just offers up some vague statements about hoping that private sector ISPs reach that goal, and urging the BBC to promote the wonders of broadband to those who haven't signed up yet.

The same sort of vague uselessness is found in the part on copyright and file sharing. While there were early fears that the report would urge the government to force ISPs to become copyright cops, that turns out not to be the case... sort of. Instead, the report seems to take both sides of the issue. First it seems to admonish the Big Content industries for failing to adapt to new markets and new technologies: "The core ethos, and success, of the internet to date lies in its ability to stimulate shared ideas and content," and suggests that rather than relying on copyright and lawsuits, they should be exploring new business models that allow "for innovation in platforms, devices and applications that make use of content and that respond to consumers' desire to access content in the time and manner they want, allowing them to use it how they want, and at a price they are willing to pay."

That sounds good... but then in a nod to those companies it just told need to figure out another business model, it says: "counter-piracy measures and effective rights enforcement are an 'important element' of upholding creative copyright and content ownership," and then promises to eventually force ISPs to be copyright cops, anyway. In other words, look at new business models, but if you don't, the government is still going to protect your old business model.

Basically, it's hard to feel too much one way or another about this report. It seems to promise everything and nothing, and insist that changes need to be made, while promising to protect those who don't change. It's perhaps not surprising in a political document, but it's hard to see the document as being anything more than fluffy nothingness at this point.

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Mika made use of an old ukulele body as electronics enclosure - a Weird Sound Generator enclosure actually. There's some conceptual metaphor @ work here but I can't quite place it - Weird Sound Generator Mk.I [Thanks, Eric!] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

These 3-D models of professor/computer graphic artist Yoichiro Kawaguchi's computer graphics are Woodring-esque mind blowers. According to Pink Tentacle, Kawaguchi and his team of researchers are "developing robots designed to imitate primitive life forms. Mockups have been put on display at a Shinto shrine in Tokyo, and working versions of the robots are scheduled for completion in two years."

Over at Dinosaurs and Robots, Robyn Miller came across this grin-inducing notice for ballet lessons.

An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish newspaper DN reports (google translation) that the Israeli company Nemesysco has sent letters to researchers at the University of Stockholm, threatening legal action if they do not stop publishing findings. An article called "Charlatanry in forensic speech science: A problem to be taken seriously" was pulled by the publisher after threats of a libel lawsuit." Online translations can be a little wonky; if your Swedish is as bad as mine, this English-language article describes the situation well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I am absolute mesmo-rized by this video depicting a printable integrated stepper motor and controller to be built with a RepRap machine.

Going high risk steampunk [via ladyada]

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LoFi Ninja turned an old floppy drive into a bit-scratching, micro-turntablesque motorized instrument with touch contacts. See it spin and noise about on the inter-tubes (be warned - the video's annotations contains strong language). Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

The many travails of the One Laptop Per Child program have been widely chronicled - after developing a robust, innovative laptop for the developing world, Nicholas Negroponte's educational project failed to garner the reception he expected. One of the main reasons for this was OLPC's belief that the market could not do better than their small project: instead of seeking the best products for the children of the developing world, competition was anathema to the OLPC group.

But news that the hardware from OLPC's second version, XO-2, will be open sourced, gives hope that things are starting to change. Speaking to the Guardian, Negroponte says, "The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google - we'll want people to copy it. We'll make the constituent parts available. We'll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1." Open hardware is an exciting new arena for innovative designs and, by embracing it, OLPC will create a new opportunity for entrepreneurs to create the best laptop for the developing world (or even the developed world). Also, instead of picking an established manufacturer from East Asia, open sourced hardware specifications will allow the developing world's emergent technology industries to compete, strengthening the communities OLPC seeks to assist.

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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snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister offers five reasons why companies should re-consider concentrating their development efforts on browser-based apps. As McAllister sees it, Web apps encourage a thin-client approach to development that concentrates far too much workload in the datacenter. And while UI and tool limitations are well known, the Web as 'hostile territory' for independent developers is a possibility not yet fully understood. Sure, Web development is fast, versatile, and relatively inexpensive, but long term, the browser's weaknesses might just outweigh its strengths as an app delivery platform."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest New Scientist has a piece on Ted Ciamillo, the machinist who invented the hydrospeeder (think: Bondian underwater motorcycle) and the Lunocet (a tail for divers modeled on dolphins). Ciamillo's latest project is a human-powered mini-sub he plans to use to pedal across the Atlantic:

Ciamillo designed his mini-submarine around a larger version of the Lunocet. The body of the vessel is built from lightweight yet tough materials: a stainless steel frame, a polycarbonate shell and a propulsion system made from aluminium and titanium. It will operate as a "wet" sub: instead of having a pressurised shell filled with air, it will be full of water at all times. Buoyancy is provided by PVC foam packed into the shell and from air bladders that can be filled or emptied to keep the vessel at the desired depth. At 1.2 metres at its widest point by 5 metres long it is not exactly roomy, but neither is it claustrophobic. "Being weightless, with all the windows, you feel like you have plenty of room," Ciamillo says.

Across the ocean in a pedal-powered submarine

More:

• American Maker: The Winner "Airheads Air Drums"
• Build your own one-person submarine

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Andnissen writes -

A TV Shop themed demonstration of a Turing Machine made in LEGO Mindstorms. It was made as part of a project at computer science at Aarhus University.

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Clickjacking is a technique that's sometimes used by various internet nasties to get users to unwittingly click on something they didn't intend to. Javascript is used to carefully position an invisible frame under the mouse pointer. When the user attempts to click on something visible on the page, the click is transmitted to the contents of the invisible frame instead.

This has been used in the past to trick a user into clicking through a Flash security dialog, allowing the site owner to secretly access a user's web cam and microphone. A patch was issued for Flash that doesn't allow the camera to be accessed in certain scenarios, but as James Padolsey illustrates with a Twitter Clickjack attack, there are numerous other ways for this trick to be used to fool a user.

Using the basic technique of positioning an iframe over a button coupled with Twitter's 'status' URL parameter I have created a small demo which shows you just how serious (and annoying) this could be!

...

What does this mean? It means anyone can update your Twitter status without you knowing! Actually, it's YOU that's updating it, you just don't know at the time.

This is a pretty harmless example but I can imagine it being used for more sinister endeavours!

If you're a Firefox user, there's a browser addon called NoScript which can protect you from these sort of attacks. Besides allowing you to control which sites are allowed to execute Javascript, Flash, and Java, it also has a built-in tool called clearClick which compares any page you view in its unaltered form and with all of its iFrame's opacity set to 100%. If there are differences, it gives you a warning that there may be a Clickjack attempt present.

Clickjacking Twitter
NoScript

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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. And here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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Today's Boing Boing Video episode is the final installment of a series of conversations shot during a visit to Shepard Fairey's gallery in LA, as the work of legendary punk / hiphop / skate culture photographer Glen E. Friedman was going up on the gallery walls, for his first ever career retrospective "Idealist Propaganda."

The first episode focused on Fairey's famous Obama poster, the second episode on a collaboration between Shepard and Glen involving the hardcore group Bad Brains. The third was all about Glen's early work in skateboarder culture and hardcore punk.

TODAY: We explore Glen's work documenting hip-hop in the 1980s, and moments he captured with great artists like RUN DMC, Public Enemy, and Ice T, shown below.

Also in today's episode, Glen tells us about the Liberty Street Protest, a graphic statement against the Iraq war. This visual protest took place right across the street from the ruins of the World Trade Center site, destroyed in the 9/11 attacks.

As Glen explains, graphic images were hung in windows in a loft belonging to Def Jam mogul and hip-hop pioneer Russell Simmons, and the message was: "New Yorkers were right here when 9/11 happened, and we don't want this war in our names."

Glen's books are available here.

Big thanks to Boing Boing pal Sean Bonner, who coordinated this series of conversations. And very special thanks to Michael Donaldson, aka Q Burns Abstract Message, for generously allowing Boing Boing to use music from his Eighth Dimension label in this episode.

Below, a song from a Public Enemy record which featured Glen's photos on the cover. The track is "Rebel Without a Pause."

Previously on Boing Boing:

* BB VIDEO: Glen E. Friedman, Skate + Hardcore Punk Photo-History
* BB VIDEO: Glen E. Friedman in conversation and collaboration with Shepard Fairey
* Glen E. Friedman's photo show at Shepard Fairey's gallery
* BB VIDEO: Shepard Fairey and the Obama Poster, on Inauguration Day

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

I found these looping cacti in the botanical gardens in Phoenix, where exotic species display the most amazing attributes, all of which they developed to survive and compete in a very hostile climate. Arizona vegetation is tough and extremely well defended (as anyone knows who has brushed carelessly against a prickly-pear cactus). I admire those traits.

Hesham writes "Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute just released details on their "why-didn't-I-think-of-that-style" 3D video conferencing application. Considering how stale development has been in this field, this research seems like a nice solid step towards immersive telepresence. I was really disappointed with the "state-of-the-art" systems demoed at CES this year — they are all still just a flat, square, video stream. Hardly anything new. What is really cool about this project, is that researchers avoided building custom hardware no one is going to ever buy, and explored what could be done with just the generic webcams everyone already has. The result is a software-only solution, meaning all the big players (AIM, Skype, MSN, etc.) can release this as a simple software update. 'Enable 3D' checkbox anyone? YouTube video here. Behind the scenes, it relies on a clever illusory trick (motion parallax) and head-tracking (a la Johnny Lee's Wiimote stuff — same lab, HCII). It was just presented at IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia in December."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last summer, a district court ruled that selling promo CDs is perfectly legal. This was an important ruling, because it reinforced the right of first sale -- which has been a part of copyright law for ages -- and it made it clear that companies couldn't wipe out the limits of copyright law simply by declaring them void. The case involved a guy, Troy Augusto, who was selling CDs on eBay. Many of the CDs were "promo" CDs that had been sent to reviewers and radio stations -- stamped with the words to the effect of "Promo: Not for Resale." I've got a few such CDs in my own collection.

Universal Music Group claimed that these CDs remained its property because of that stamp. However, that goes against the entire first sale doctrine concept -- which has always allowed individuals to resell copyrighted products that they possess. Universal's claim was that the stamp meant that it continued to own the CD, even though it never asked for such CDs back. If allowed, this would effectively let any company create their own copyright laws by simply stamping the content with the rules. So, forget the current, already ridiculous, term for copyright. New authors or musicians could just stamp every product with "Property of the content creator" and you would never actually own the product.

Luckily the court disagreed... but Universal has appealed, and the RIAA has filed a brief siding with UMG as well. The EFF has now filed its own brief, noting the ridiculous consequences of any ruling where Universal wins. Allowing Universal to win would effectively mean that all of the extremely important (and already diminished) limits found on copyright today no longer apply. That would be a travesty and go against everything that copyright was originally designed to represent.

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Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.

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I'm a firm believer in clinging to as much childlike wonder as possible. I love it when people take it upon themselves to inject a little magic and whimsy into the human herd. A few examples, one from my past that's stayed with me, one a recent discovery. Years ago, I was living in a group house. A woman came to visit, an artist and crafter who specialized in miniatures and dioramas. Her work, which she shared with us via a slideshow, was breathtaking – these pristine little dioramas, frozen scenes from some alternative kidverse of talking-animal storybook characters and various human strangelings, all going about their daily Lilliputian lives inside her little black boxes. She stayed for a few more days, and after she left, life on the commune moved on. We had a tree in our front yard which was itself something out of storybook, a big ol' gnarly tree with a humongous rotted knothole on one side. One day, I was doing some work in the yard, likely grumbling over the heat and the generalized ick of a Virginian late-summer afternoon. As I passed the tree, something caught my eye, something in the knothole. I peered in, and for a triple-take moment, all of the wistful fantasies of childhood overtook my adult reality. There, inside the dank hole, was a tiny overstuffed chair sitting on a braided rug, and next to it stood a floor lamp. Tiny pictures hung on even tinier nails on the inside walls of the knothole. A family portrait. Reclining in the chair, watching the TV inside the hole, sat a little rabbit-man. I think he had on overalls. And he may have been drinking something. A can of carrot juice? Honestly, I don't remember the details, and I'm sure time and memory have exaggerated them. But I honestly remember the impact. It was a simple reality hack with extraordinary impact, a rare moment when magic existed in the world. It worked me on so many levels – the fact that she never said anything to us about it, the amount of thought and work she'd put into it (all in secret), my chance discovery of it days after she'd gone, and that brief, delicious blurring of the mundane and the fantastic – a gift given only to those who happened upon it. This is all a very long-winded way of introducing my most recent encounter with someone doing the work of the fairy. Lea Redmond calls it the World's Smallest Postal Service. She writes little tiny letters on little tiny stationary and seals them with wax inside a little tiny stamped and canceled envelope. The letter is then placed by an official World's Smallest Postal Service employee (er... Lea) inside a little tiny blue post box. Then our ham-handed land of the giants reality takes over and the little magic letter is prepared for real-world mailing. It is put into a slide mount-like viewing envelope and then inside of a larger glassine envelope with a magnifying glass thoughtfully included so that the recipient can actually read it. You can order the letters online or you can check the calendar to see where the World's Smallest Postal Service will be setting up shop in the Bay Area. Online, you fill out a form with what you want your letter to say (up to 12 lines!) and where you want it sent. Each letter cost a measly $8. I bought a bunch of them for family and friends over the holidays and everyone seemed genuinely enchanted by the whole enterprise. Be sure to check out the rest of Lea's site. There's more clever whimsy to be had: matchbox theater, recipe dice, conceptual knitting patterns, earrings with flower seeds in 'em, and lots more awesomeness, If you ask me, we need a lot more surprise knothole dioramas and little tiny wax-sealed letters in this-here junkyard world. Are ya with me, people?

Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets, we... • Looked at a neat MacBook netbook concept with shades of the Vaio P. • Found a limited edition speaker even Godzilla would love. • Discovered that iPhoto 2009 knows LOLCats. • Watched someone faceplant on a Segway. • Wildly pointed around a vintage, Vietnam-era camera gun. • Allowed SEGA to tell us how to make love. "At the beat, make love harder!" I'm trying! • Found out that the Dell Mini Inspiron 9 has a better screen than a $2500 MacBook Pro. • Learned how to staplessly staple. • Looked at some of our readers' bitching laptop art. • Discovered a strange netbook with a removable OS drive. • Put Adobe Photoshop CS4 on 6,400 floppies. • Arranged four magnets on our desk in just such a way that they floated in thin air. • Looked at a 15th century steam-driven iPhone prototype. • Wore some awesomely cyberpunk Apple concept devices from the early 90s. And more besides. Come read us! Link

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

A friend of mine built this cabin by hand, using raw wood from a local saw mill and loose stone gathered on the 40 acres where the cabin is located at the end of a 10-mile dirt road. He lived here for a couple of years, mostly on canned food, before selling the place at a good profit during the real-estate bubble.

Since the water table is too deep to enable a well, water is mostly collected from the roof, into several buried barrels. A wood-burning stove is fuelled with juniper logs. The satellite TV is powered from one car battery through a small inverter.

Today my friend is prospecting for mineral deposits in an arid wasteland just south of the Hoover Dam. As an expert on mining and minerals, he likes to remind me that almost every single product around us is derived ultimately from raw materials that were dug out of the ground, or from things that grew in the ground. Our civilization depends entirely on activities such as mining, drilling, and logging, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.

Greg Huang writes "In early January, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation laid off half its staff and shed work on the Sugar graphical interface. Now, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and president Chuck Kane for the first time detail the foundation's new plans, describe how the XO laptop will do what netbooks can't do, and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's not much to say about the press that hasn't already been said. If it didn't get through the first 100,000 times, it's not going to get through on the 100,001st.

I've gotten so fed up with reporters that I decline all interviews. I've occasionally made an exception when I was sure I'd be treated fairly, but even those have gone sour.

A new policy: 1. No interviews. 2. No exceptions.

But that doesn't mean I'm giving up because I'm not.

I think many reporters just don't know how awful they are with their sources.

I have a positive suggestion for reporters: Interview each other the way you interview your subjects. Your eyes will open.

A lawyer in Houston is suing Citibank after he got scammed in a variation on the classic Nigerian email scam. There are a few interesting tidbits here that are worth discussing. First, the details: the lawyer, who does collections work, was contacted via email by a company that claimed to be a Japanese company that was trying to collect money from four clients in the US -- offering a contingency fee to the lawyer for help in getting the customers to pay up. Soon after that, the "Japanese company" claimed that one client had agreed to pay some of what it owed -- and it sent the law firm a check for $367,500. Citibank said the check cleared, and the law firm wired $182,500 to the company. Of course, it later turned out that the check was fraudulent, and the law firm was out the $182,500.

This is a variation on a popular version of the Nigerian email scam. The way it usually works is that the scammer buys something that's for sale... and then sends a check that's for significantly more than the purchase price using some sort of excuse. Once the check "clears," the seller is asked to wire back the excess money. This version is interesting in that it's slightly more sophisticated -- carefully going after law firms that do collections. Rather than being a totally "out of the blue" situation, they worked hard to make it seem like business as usual until the scam is done. Sneaky.

While it's easy to mock the lawyer for getting tricked, the basic version of the scam and this more sophisticated version both rely on a very unclear part concerning check processing. Most people assume that once a check "clears" it's confirmed as valid. That's not true. Banks clear the check before it's actually validated, and the scammers exploit both the time between these two events and the fact that most people assume (or are told) that once a check clears, the money is definitely theirs. There are a few ways to solve this that banks could take. They could not clear the check until it's absolutely declared valid. Or, they could make it much clearer that, while the money is available, the check has not been validated and the money could be pulled. Since most banks do neither, the guy's lawsuit against Citibank is at least somewhat understandable -- though, it's unlikely a court will agree with him.

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Zonk brings word that Mythic has announced their plans to expand Warhammer Online in the coming months using a series of live events that will open up new careers, gear, and zones. The first event, planned for sometime in March, will allow access to the Dwarf Slayer and the Orc Choppa, as well as a new RvR scenario. Later, players will race to unlock a massive new zone, the Lands of the Dead. The expansion itself is titled "A Call to Arms," and it will be rolled out free of charge.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a neat post about growing shiitake mushrooms. Looks like you don't have to do much other than keep the log moist after initial setup:

Some of the most expensive and delicious gourmet mushrooms on the market are shiitakes, which also are credited in Asia with healthful properties such as lowering cholesterol and improving immunity to cancer. They are simple to grow in logs and take about 6 to 18 months to emerge. They can fruit in a wide range of temperatures, from just above freezing to nearly 90 degrees F. To grow shiitake mushrooms on logs, the process is as follows.

(via Chelsea Green)

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(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

Today I’m going to include some photographs of Northern Arizona, the part of the United States which I find most visually, politically, and socially congenial. This view is from the balcony of a house where I once lived in a former mining town, perched on the side of a mountain about 30 miles from Sedona, which is somewhere amid the red rocks near the horizon.

dfdashh writes "A former Fannie Mae contractor has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Baltimore, MD for computer intrusion. He attempted to propagate a malicious script throughout the company's 4,000 servers. The DC Examiner has details of the incident: 'Had this malicious script executed, [Fannie Mae] engineers expect it would have caused millions of dollars of damage and reduced if not shutdown operations at [Fannie Mae] for at least one week. ... The virus was set to execute at 9 a.m. Jan. 31, first disabling Fannie Mae's computer monitoring system and then cutting all access to the company's 4,000 servers, Nye wrote. Anyone trying to log in would receive a message saying "Server Graveyard." From there, the virus would wipe out all Fannie Mae data, replacing it with zeros, Nye wrote. Finally, the virus would shut down the servers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Project log of a homemade couch with a lot of storage-space, moving back and integrated additional seats...

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Bre writes -

I recently met Greg Marra at ROFLthing. He is doing awesome work at Olin College. I found this sweet video of a stingray automaton that he and his team made in a rapid prototyping class. I asked him some questions about how it works, he got back to me and brought me up to date on the project.

Check out the post for more videos and details...

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Nearly four years ago, Amazon.com announced its Amazon Prime shipping club. The idea was that high volume users of the site could sign up, pay $79/year, and get free two-day shipping. I don't buy enough (or enough that I need quickly) from Amazon to make this worthwhile for me, but some friends use it and like it. When it launched, we wrote about it. No big deal.

In 2007, some people who somehow signed up for the program without meaning to, started Google searching the program -- and commenting on that post, often complaining that they were signed up against their will. In April of 2007, one person noted that the charge on his credit card was denoted as being for AMZ*Prime Club. Within days, if you did a search on that phrase, we were the top result. At first, our comments started to fill up with angry messages from people who claim they never agreed to sign up for the program. Then... people started emailing and calling us demanding a refund. For a while it was a deluge of calls and emails, leading me to write a post warning Amazon that it was clear to us that many, many people were confused by the way they explained the Amazon Prime offering. That was because Amazon offered people a "free month" trial of Amazon Prime, after which they would be automatically charged the $79. Many people apparently signed up for the free month, and failed to read the details.

This continued for many months, and we ended up writing a second open letter to Amazon, pointing out that whether they knew it or not, an awful lot of people were confused and all of them seemed to be blaming us for the confusion. It was becoming quite a nuisance dealing with the various calls and emails. Some people in our comments noted Amazon was quite straightforward in how they described the details of the program, and we were wrong to tell them that it was too confusing. That may be so, but I can assure you that there are an awful lot of people who still don't understand the details of the program.

It has continued to this very day -- though we tend to only get two to three emails and calls per week nowadays, as opposed to the multiple complaints per day. To be honest, we've taken to ignoring most of the calls and emails, because it's just not worth responding. There was one very confused older woman who called a bunch of times, and we just had to help her because she sounded so distressed, but for the most part, we let them go. Until... this week.

I'm not sure why, but I was glancing at the customer service email account the other night when one such email came in. It read:

Subject: refund my $79.-- immediately [CustomerService]

------ Comments ------

I ordered some things from Amazon (for the last time, believe me) before Christmas. When I went on line tonight to check my bank balance I discovered that $79.00 had been deducted from my checking account withut my permission or prior warning. This is certainly not the way to get and keep customers. I want the money credited back to my account immediately, please. I do not remember anywhere on your website where it asked if I was willing to participate in this program. If there had been, I would have said NO!

I will be expecting an e-mail from you tomorrow. My cell phone is broken and I am waiting for a new one to be shipped to me which should take about a week. I certainly do not hope that I have to speak with you about this again.

I was going to just ignore it, but since the woman seemed to realize that the problem was with Amazon, and it only took a second, I figured I'd email her back a quick note:

Perhaps you should try contacting Amazon instead of us?

Simple, to the point... I thought I was being helpful. The woman clearly saw the email, because she replied immediately to me... but it was a blank email, other than her signature being appended above my response to her. I thought it was odd, but let it go, figuring it was an accidental reply (or maybe she even meant to say thanks for sending her in the right direction). The next morning, we received another feedback form message from the same woman:

Subject: need money put back into my checking account [CustomerService]

------ Comments ------

This morning as I was checking my bank, I realized that your organization had debited $79.00 from my checking account for something called : "tech dirt". This simply looks like current events. I am not interested in it and need to have the $79.00 redeposited into my husband's and my checking account immediately before we become overdrawn. I can be reached at my e-mail today - my cell phone broke and I am waiting for a new one to be shipped to me.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Now, at this point, it's obvious the woman is lying. She had emailed us the night before about it, recognizing that it was a charge from Amazon and not Techdirt. This was confusing, but maybe (maybe?!) she was just confused. So, I tried to be helpful:

I am afraid you are confused. We do not charge people anything. We do not even have a merchant account with which to charge you. From your *other* email last night, it seems clear that it is Amazon.com that charged you for their Amazon Prime service, which costs $79. Please contact Amazon to have them take care of it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=518316

Thanks,
Mike

Ok. I figured we were all done with things. But... a day and a half goes by and suddenly:

Subject: $79.00 refund [CustomerService]

------ Comments ------

I truly do not remember authorizing you to take $79.00 from my checking account using my bank card. I simply would not have approved of that high a debit. While I am sure your web-site is a good one, it's a site in which I have no interest.

Because of that I am asking for a refund of the $79.00 as soon as possible. Unfortunately, my cell phone broke the other day and it will still be a few days until my new one gets here. The only way you can communicate with me is through e-mail: [email address deleted]

Hmm. Ok. Perhaps my emails to her went into her spam filter...? Even though she had actually replied (blankly) to that first one? I gave it one more shot:

Hi [name deleted],

This is your third email to us. We have replied to each of the first two -- including the original one where you properly noticed that it was Amazon that had charged you -- not us, so I am somewhat confused as to why you are now saying we charged you. We are a publication that merely wrote about Amazon's program. We do not even have the ability to charge credit cards.

Your problem is with Amazon.com and you should probably contact them.
Thanks,
Mike

Five minutes later, she replies:

How the hell do I contact Amazon - it seems to me that you and Amazon are probably working in collusion to fleece people.

And... with that I give up. Apparently, it wouldn't matter how clearly Amazon explains their program. There are still some people who will not be able to figure it out.

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mcgrew writes "New Scientist reports that a British team has overcome the obstacles to cheap LED lighting, and that LED lamps as cheap as CFLs will be on the market in five years. Quoting: 'Gallium nitride cannot be grown on silicon like other solid-state electronic components because it shrinks at twice the rate of silicon as it cools. Crystals of GaN must be grown at 1000C, so by the time a new LED made on silicon has cooled, it has already cracked, rendering the devices unusable. One solution is to grow the LEDs on sapphire, which shrinks and cools at much the same rate as GaN. But the expense is too great to be commercially competitive. Now Colin Humphreys's team at the University of Cambridge has discovered a simple solution to the shrinkage problem. They included layers of aluminium gallium nitride in their LED design... These LEDs can be grown on silicon as so many other electronics components are. ... A 15-centimetre silicon wafer costs just $15 and can accommodate 150,000 LEDs making the cost per unit tiny.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I received a lot of positive responses from my last "In the Maker Shed" videos, so I decided to do another. This time it's the Mignonette game system. It's really easy to make, and a lot of fun to program. You can pick one up in the Maker Shed.

Mignonette is a do-it-yourself electronic game console to learn about soldering, microcontrollers, and game programming. Inspired by the Mignon Game Kit that was done in Germany several years ago. Extended upon their wonderfully simple design to include a bicolor display, as well as a completely new software library for making games.

Suscribe to the MAKE podcast | Download for iTunes

All this week get 10% off you order in the Maker Shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year!

In the Maker Shed:

In the Maker Shed: Mignonette kit

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Make: television's John Park on G4! -

Kevin sits down with John Park, frequent contributor to 'Make' Magazine and the host of the new 'Make' TV Show. John's got some tips on some great homemade gadgets and some answers for Kevin about the makeup of the 'Make' show.

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eldavojohn writes "Russell Tice, former NSA employee & whistleblower, has revealed yet more details claiming that wiretapping was combined with credit card data to target civilians. He also suggests the CEOs of major companies hold the truth: 'To get at what's really going on here, the CEOs of these telecom companies, and also of the banking and credit card companies, and any other company where you have big databases, those are the people you have to haul in to Congress and tell them you better tell the truth.' Will congress follow his suggestions?" This adds to information revealed by Tice last week that the wiretaps targeted journalists in particular.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every so often, when someone new shows up on Techdirt, reading a post about our complaints about overly aggressive copyright holders, they'll make a comment along the lines of "well, you wouldn't be saying that if someone took Techdirt's content, copied it and started making money from ads! I'm going to do just that, and I bet you'll be just as angry!" And, every time someone posts this, we end up linking back to the fact that a bunch of folks already do this, and we're perfectly fine with it. Here's the explanation I gave for why it's fine with us a while back:

We have no problem with people taking our content and reposting it. It's funny how many people come here, like yourself, and assume you've found some "gotcha." You haven't. There already are about 10 sites that copy Techdirt, post for post. Some of them give us credit. Some of them don't. We don't go after any of them.

Here's why:

1. None of those sites get any traffic. By themselves, they offer nothing special.

2. If anything, it doesn't take people long to read those sites and figure out that the content is really from Techdirt. Then they just come here to the original source. So, it tends to help drive more traffic to us. That's cool.

3. As soon as the people realize the other sites are simply copying us, it makes those sites look really, really bad. If you want to risk your reputation like that, go ahead, but it's a big risk.

4. A big part of the value of Techdirt is the community here. You can't just replicate that.

5. Another big part of the value of Techdirt is that we, the writers, engage in the comments. You absolutely cannot fake that on your own site.

So, really, what's the purpose of copying our content in the manner you describe, other than maybe driving a little traffic our way?

So, if you really want to, I'd suggest it's pretty dumb, but go ahead.

I should note, by the way, that by ignoring these copycat sites, most go away. There's one (relatively nicely designed one) that's managed to stick around for a while, but most fade away pretty quickly. Still, we're perfectly fine with people taking and repurposing our content. We hope they give us attribution, but we don't worry too much if they don't (actually, it would be even cooler if sites added more value to our content). There's really no reason to spend much time thinking about it. Yet, we still get people emailing us all the time to ask for "permission" to reuse our content -- and of course, we always "grant" the permission, even though they don't need it at all.

Sometimes people ask us why we don't put Techdirt under a Creative Commons license. The answer is that while CC-licenses are certainly a good overall concept and I think it's great when people use a CC license, they still rely on copyright to function, and we believe that content creators should experiment with getting by entirely without copyright to see what happens -- and we try to live up to what we promote. Of course, it's actually a lot harder to do that then you might think. As Stephen Kinsella recently discovered putting your content into the public domain is incredibly difficult. In some cases, it's not even possible. Thanks to (relatively recent) copyright law that grants a copyright the instant content is put into a fixed medium. And, while you can put a "public domain declaration" on content, it won't apply in many countries. Effectively it's nearly impossible to legally make your content public domain. So, as for us, we just leave things alone, and figure that most people will figure out sooner or later that they're free to help promote our content by reusing it however they want.

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Instructables user Weissensteinburg made this raft by collecting plastic bottles for pontoons, and shows you how to make your own, too.

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If you bring a child to Britain from outside the EU, be prepared to have her fingerprinted, even if she's only six years old. That's because the British government now leads the world in undermining the civil liberties of children, beating the US-VISIT program by eight years (visitors to America are only fingerprinted if they're over 14). Most of the British government seems not to have realized that this was going on -- even though the UK's Members of European Parliament have been pushing to make this a requirement across the EU.

Remember when the head of Scotland Yard proposed taking DNA samples from five-year-olds who displayed criminal tendencies so that they could be rounded up for arrest later in life? Here again, we see the British government mistaking Nineteen Eighty-Four as a manual for statecraft.

In fact, no one has called the Borders Agency to account. Home Office officials I have talked to outside the agency were shocked that official government policy is now to fingerprint children.

When asked why (question 226407), the Home Office itself offers a much more solid defence: that the EU requires it. What it does not admit is that the British government is almost alone in pushing the EU to ensure that the age when fingerprinting can start is so low. Home Office officials pushed the EU to establish a standard age of six, despite opposition within other European governments. The next time you hear a government official support the EU, it is not just because it is a vehicle for "peace, prosperity and freedom", but also because it is a vehicle to push through policies that the UK government would prefer not to pursue through the legislature at home.

The Bush administration rejected the contemplation of fingerprinting children, even within the controversial US-VISIT program that fingerprints visitors to the United States. The Department of Homeland Security is prohibited from fingerprinting children under 14, though it may well consider lowering it.

Six-year-olds fingerprinted by Britain

Lawrence Person writes "Everyone's favorite live-action science fiction comedy series will finally return to TV, with Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat all making it to Earth. The new two-part series Red Dwarf: Back to Earth will appear on digital channel Dave, will be written and directed by Red Dwarf co-creator Doug Naylor, and will reunite the line-up. 'It will sit alongside two further new episodes — the improvised Red Dwarf: Unplugged, which will feature the cast dealing with no sets, effects or autocue, and Red Dwarf: the Making of Back to Earth, a behind the scenes look at the new production.' Personally, I think this is pretty smegging fantastic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist and paper engineer Matt Shlian makes incredible art with paper. The unfolding piece below is one of the most impressive paper sculptures I've ever seen.

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coondoggie writes "Ok, maybe this is getting a little too close to bringing Terminator-like robots to life. For starters, eco-friendly engine builder Cyclone Power this week inked a contract from Robotic Technologies, Inc. (RTI) to develop what it calls a beta biomass engine system that will be the heart of RTI's Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR). The purpose of EATR is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling — in other words it needs to 'eat.' According to researchers, the EATR system gets its energy by foraging, or what the firms describe as 'engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.'" We can only hope they don't team up with the Multi-Robot Pursuit System project to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wow! The 11th Make: NYC 1/28/2009 meeting was PACKED! The task - make "timer" based on the material the Make: NYC gang supplied, in under two hours and it needs to ring a bell at the end of 10 seconds. I'll try and get some links to the winner and update the post later - Special thanks to NYCR for hosting the event and Eric, Matt & Ryan for running the show! More photos & video here.

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Make: television, Geek Squad and Science Museum of Minnesota are extremely excited to announce the first public event based on Make: television called Make: Day!

Make: Day celebrates the ingenuity and inventiveness in our community. Building off the success of Maker Faires and the American Maker events, Make: day will give local engineers, artists, tinkerers and inventors the opportunity to showcase their DIY creations to Science Museum visitors.

Festivities will take place on March 14th,from 10 am to 3 pm throughout the Science Museum's exhibit galleries. The event is included in the regular admission price and free to all members of the museum.

Here are some of the things you'll find:

• Dozens of other local talented Makers, several of which appear on the first season of Make: television


• All of the Maker Workshop projects including the Burrito Blaster and the DTV Antenna


• Demonstrations from Makers and musical performances emceed by our very own William Gurstelle


• Tons of hands-on activities for people of all ages

Stay tuned to makezine.tv for more info, but for now, mark your calendars for March 14th!

All of us here at Make: television wish to thank Geek Squad for their committed support of Make: television initiatives, visit our sponsor page for the story behind their support.

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Here's an interesting MP3 player concept. Move the cube in a specific direction to advance the track through a built-in accelerometer detecting force. Similar to Apple's iPod shake function in their new Nano, we like the DIY sensibilities and industrial design of this little guy.

Motion Controlled MP3 Player via Hacked Gadgets

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Ben crafted this fine-looking enclosure/keyboard with a variety of wood types - he then made it functional by adding the guts of a regular old plastic keyboard -

The purple keyboard is made of the woods: purple heart, santos mahogony (for the 'white keys') and an unidentified yellow wood for the black keys. The woods naturally occur as the colors they appeared as... (inother words, no staining or coloring of the woods happened - just an oil finish..) The circuit inside the keyboard is a Yamaha PSS-140 and its been rewired and modified (also called circuit bent)

- Ben Simon Wooden Synth Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Mobile | Digg this!

An anonymous reader writes "In what has been billed as a world first, four music companies and Irish ISP Eircom have agreed to work together to end illegal music downloading. The Irish branches of the record companies (EMI Records Ltd, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Ltd, Universal Music Ltd and Warner Music Ltd.) brought a High Court action against Eircom last March which has resulted in this settlement after eight days of trial. Eircom will be implementing a three-step process — informing a subscriber that their IP address has been detected infringing copyright; warning the subscriber that if they do not stop they will be disconnected; and finally disconnecting the user if they fail to heed the warning. Which technology they will be using to spy on their customers is currently unknown. EMI and the other record companies have recommended US-based Audible Magic, which (among other things) claims to block copyright violating web content from sites like Youtube and MySpace. However, digital surveillance is nothing new in Ireland and Eircom may have already tested and implemented the necessary technologies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in December, we wrote about a student at Michigan State University, who was disciplined by the school for spamming, after she sent out an email to all of the professors at the school concerning a schedule change that would impact their class schedules in a future semester. One teacher complained, and the student was found to have violated the school's anti-spam policy, which said you couldn't email more than 30 people at a time. This seemed silly, as the message was clearly not spam in the traditional sense at all. After a widespread public outcry, and the EFF preparing a lawsuit on the student's behalf, the school has backed down and cleared the woman of any wrongdoing, and said that it will review and potentially change its anti-spam policies.

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CWmike writes "Technical advisers to the antitrust regulators who monitor Microsoft's compliance with the 2002 antitrust settlement will test Windows 7 'more thoroughly' than earlier versions of the operating system were tested, according to a new status report filed with the federal judge watching over the company. Microsoft is also facing renewed scrutiny from the EU, which two weeks ago filed preliminary charges against the company over bundling IE with Windows, and said more recently that Microsoft 'shields' IE from competition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "Technical advisers to the antitrust regulators who monitor Microsoft's compliance with the 2002 antitrust settlement will test Windows 7 'more thoroughly' than earlier versions of the operating system were tested, according to a new status report filed with the federal judge watching over the company. Microsoft is also facing renewed scrutiny from the EU, which two weeks ago filed preliminary charges against the company over bundling IE with Windows, and said more recently that Microsoft 'shields' IE from competition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This portrait of President Barack Obama was created by artist George Vlosich using an Etch-A-Sketch toy. The picture took 80 hours to draw using the two dials in one, unbroken line. In addition to this piece, the artist has created several more portraits that are equally impressive, although trying to duplicate them might take some work. Check out the link below for some more examples of his work.

via Daily Mail

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In case you tire of photocell for sound (ahh but who could?), here's a demonstration using an entirely different type of sensor -

Short demonstration of the device used for my "Nunk on Droise" (Noise Under the Influence) performances. The device is constituted of three alcohol sensors connected through an Arduino board to a computer running a Pure Data patch. The bars on the computer's screen correspond to the content of alcohol detected by each sensor. Sorry for the sound that is really bad.

They seem quite sensitive - performing at a club/bar with these may prove a bit unruly, possibly quite fun. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

?These "Anti-Theft" lunch bags are regular plastic sandwich bags with black splotches on them so they are made to look like your lunch is spoiled. Interesting idea for a built in anti-theft device for your lunch although we're not sure if people actually steal these types of sandwiches anymore.

via Design Spotter

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Last year, the IFPI sued Irish ISP Eircom for copyright infringement. This was quite a leap. While the IFPI, RIAA and other such organizations had been pushing ISPs to filter file sharing or cut off file sharers via a three strikes approach, this was the first time that an ISP was being sued for being actually liable for the infringement as well. The "evidence" appeared to be some internal emails where Eircom employees joked about piracy. That seemed like a stretch... but rather than go through a full lawsuit, it appears Eircom has settled. Reader eoinmonty points us to the news that Eircom has agreed to implement a three strikes policy as a part of the settlement. Interesting that this comes just days after the neighboring UK announced that it will not require three strikes policies from UK ISPs. Of course, now the IFPI and the record labels have a framework: sue ISPs, and then push them to implement three strikes as a part of the settlement.

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Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's got word of these "Jeeves and Wooster" lampshades in the shape of a bowler and a silk topper. Old, much-loved, timeworn silk toppers and bowlers are actually surprisingly easy to pick up for a song on eBay, so the UKP450 asking price here could certainly be beat by a credit-crunch special remake.

Hidden Art's Jeeves and Wooster lamps, inspired by P.G. Wodehouse's novels, are jolly good. They are also jolly expensive: £450.

Jeeves and Wooster Lampshades, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Eircom, a major Irish ISP, will now disconnect its users from the Internet if they receive three unsubstantiated copyright infringement claims from the record labels. The record labels are vowing to hold other ISPs to the same deal, wh?ich is part of a court settlement in a lawsuit against Eircom. The UK has just rejected this measure, and initiatives to spread this across the EU and the US have died as well. Good thing, too -- as I've written before, this is an insanely dangerous and disproportionate proposal.

After all, you don't hear the record labels offering to have their Internet connections cut off if they send out three false copyright accusations. The Internet's a single wire that delivers freedom of speech, of assembly and of the press -- it's a conduit for civic engagement, health care, employment, education, distant family, love and life. Disconnecting people from the Internet on the basis of an unsubstantiated accusation, without a court order, without a chance to defend yourself against your accusers, without a chance to see and challenge the evidence -- it's positively medieval. Shame on Ireland -- so much for their high-tech economic miracle.

As part of the settlement, the record companies will supply Eircom with the IP addresses of all persons who they detect illegally uploading or downloading copyright works.

Eircom will then contact the subscribers directly and either warn them or terminate their account.

Willie Kavanagh, chairman of EMI Records, said he was delighted with the outcome and commended Eircom’s far-seeing approach.

During the court case it was claimed music piracy is costing record companies here up to €14 million a year.

Other ISPs contacted by The Irish Times last night could not confirm if they would implement the system. A spokeswoman for 3 Ireland, which has 130,000 mobile broadband customers, said it would be “happy to look into the matter”.

Ronan Lupton, chairman of Alto, which represents telecoms operators other than Eircom, said the agreement “is not one enforceable on the rest of the industry given the direct nature of the action against Eircom”.

Internet users face shutdown over illegal music downloads

Ryanair -- easily the worst non-Russian airline I've ever flown -- will now fine passengers 30 Euros if they're caught with overlarge carry-ons. This is against the backdrop of Ryanair's 10-20 Euro bagcheck fee, which has prompted many travellers to try to beat the system with carry-ons. Now, I hate selfish jerks who fill every compartment with their carry-ons as much as the next guy, but it's hard to imagine how giving Ryanair's already vicious flight attendants the power to issue on-the-spot fines and boot off passengers who won't pay will improve the situation much.

For context, the last time I flew Ryanair, it was from London Stansted to Berlin (supposedly). After keeping us on the ground for an hour, they boarded us, then announced that we were not going to Berlin, as we'd missed our landing window, and would instead land in a secondary airport near Munich, sometime after midnight, and that coaches would be by before 3AM for the three hour journey to Berlin. The return trip wasn't much better: Ryanair called us to the gate an hour early, then locked us in there with no toilets. After we boarded, I needed to tap a kidney, but the flight attendant said I'd have to wait another hour until we taxied, took off and attained altitude. When I argued, he threatened to have me arrested.

It's not really any wonder that this airline would start issuing "fines" to passengers -- they already treat them like prisoners.

Ryanair to ticket passengers who try to cheat the baggage system (via We Make Money, Not Art)

palegray.net writes "Teachers are sorely in need of an education in what open source software is, what it isn't, and how it can benefit their students. A recent news story at the Reg discussed the case of a Texas teacher who accused those distributing Linux to students of committing criminal acts. A HeliOS blog entry exposes a "higher education" culture of apathy, lies, and fear of open source software. Things have got to improve, and that improvement needs to start with misguided teachers getting their facts straight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a gallery of stunning aerial night-photos of London from Jason Hawkes, who notes, "I often shoot tethered to my MacBook Pro to check the sharpness of the images whilst I shoot." He's taking questions on technique at Boston.com, too.

Just before I first moved to London, some well-meaning friends took me up on Primrose Hill at night to "see the London skyline." I didn't want to disappoint them, so I oohed and aahed, but to be frank, the skyline, as seen from the hills, isn't much of an advertisement for the city, in which the majority of buildings are old, squarish low-rises. But London from the sky -- that's something else entirely. Seen from that angle, London's purely magic. I'm convinced that the back-breaking queues for the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland are entirely driven by that opening trompe l'oieul flyover of London in miniature.

More of London from above, at night (via MeFi)

A forthcoming journal article in Psychological Science reports on the research of scientists from the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis into what brain activity takes place while we read narrative stories. The study concludes that our brains simulate the action in the story, echoing it as we read.

I've always assumed that this was the case -- especially when it comes to character motivations. When I hear the voice of a loved one in my head, cheering me on or disapproving, I know that this is my mental simulation of that person. When a character does something in a story and I feel for him, it's the same kind of simulation. And when I try to write a character doing something "wrong," I know that this, too, is part of the simulation, and the resistance I feel there is the same as the resistance I'd feel if I tried to imagine my mother committing an ax-murder.

Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.

"These results suggest that readers use perceptual and motor representations in the process of comprehending narrated activity, and these representations are dynamically updated at points where relevant aspects of the situation are changing," says Speer, now a research associate with The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) Mental Health Program in Boulder, Colo. "Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change."

Readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations, brain scans suggest (via Futurismic)

Sergei Larenkov has photoshopped together modern images of St Petersburg with photos taken during the brutal Siege of Leningrad during WWII (at least, I think these are Leningrad, from the translations -- can someone more familiar with the city and the language confirm?). The results are stunning. I walk through East London every morning to get to work, and sometimes you can see the terrors of war superimposed on the modern landscape -- the sawn-off stubs of the iron railings that were harvested "for the war effort" (and dumped in the Channel without being turned into munitions after all), the single handsome old building stuck like an old tooth in the gleaming modern denture-work of sterile, post-War neubauten. But to see these ghost-photos is to see the invisible craters and hear the inaudible screams.

???????? ?? ??? ????? Fima_Psuchopadt (?) (via Warren Ellis)

When the Bilski decision came out, we said that it would greatly limit software patents, but various patent system defenders (mostly lawyers) insisted that I was wrong and most software was still perfectly patentable. Basically, they said it just meant everyone had to write claims differently, and we'd have just as many software patents as before. Listening to them (there was a hilarious conference call of lawyers insisting this was nothing to worry about), it sounded like they were in serious denial, claiming the only patent this ruling would lead to being rejected was the Bilski patent -- all others would be fine. Things aren't actually turning out that way, however, with a much more aggressive rejection of software claims than those lawyers insisted would happen. This is a good sign... though now we get to wait to see if the Bilski ruling is appealed to the Supreme Court.

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Anonymous writes "A non-government study in the Netherlands found that 4.7 million Dutch Internet users 15 years and older downloaded hacked and pirated DVDs, games, and music in the last 12 months — or, about 25 percent of the Dutch population. But there may be an upside to this unauthorized sharing/distribution: 'The average [Dutch] downloader buys more DVDs, music, and games than people who never download,' with illegal downloaders representing 45 percent of consumers who purchase content legally, according to the Institute For Information Law, which administered the study."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eklux writes -

This video shows a self oscillating ball pendulum, that feeds a ten counter balance. If I've had enough time, Meccano and balls, the idea was to built a complete clock, with a set of sequential balances, that together would display the current time. Also, it would have been nice to fall a sleep at night to the gentle sound of a ticking ballclock.

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We've been worried about the details of the broadband stimulus bill, since it has looked mostly like a way to give money to incumbent telcos, rather than to actually stimulate any broadband. Obama advisor Blair Levin insisted this was just part I, and was more about creating jobs than tackling the broadband problem, but it looks like more folks are getting worried, as well. Scott Bradner points out the obvious at Network World: the broadband stimulus package seems focused on getting broadband to people who aren't that interested in broadband, more than it's about improving broadband for those who do want it.

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Lucas123 writes "Six of the largest disk manufacturers, along with encryption management software vendors, are backing three specifications finalized [Tuesday] that will eventually standardize the way encryption is used in firmware within hard disk drives and solid state disk drives controllers ensuring interoperability. Disk vendors are free to choose to use AES 128-bit or AES 256-bit keys depending on the level of security they want. 'This represents interoperability commitments from every disk drive maker on the planet,' said Robert Thibadeau, chief technologist at Seagate Technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dorkbot NYC is hosting a special event: You're Doing it Wrong: Creative Misuse of Technology. Douglas Repetto writes:

Please join us at 92YTribeca for a selection of historical and contemporary short videos and live performances featuring inappropriate, inadvisable, and occasionally disastrous creative uses of technology.

Program (subject to change)

Jeremy Bailey: live demonstration of the SOS operating system -- Jeremy will demonstrate his radical ideas for a new kind of operating system.

Guy Ben-Ner: I'd Give It to You -- Ben-Ner and his family build a bicycle from parts found in an art museum.

The Draftmasters + Daniel Iglesia: live pen plotter performance -- a musical performance using old electro-mechanical pen plotters as a sound source. The pen plotters draw and the sound from their motors is amplified and processed. Meanwhile video of what they are drawing is turned into anaglyphic 3D and projected on the movie screen. 3D glasses provided!

Kelly Dobson: Omo/Blendie/Screambody -- machine therapy and wearable body organs.

fur: Pain Station -- losing should hurt.

Daniel Greenfeld: mini-disasters -- recreations of famous transportation disasters in miniature.

Jon Kessler: Cape Carnival/Cookie Machine/Marcello 9000/Rowing Machine/Still Life (with pork chop)

Daito Manabe: face shock/face copy -- Daito Manabe plays tones into electrodes connected to his face, causing muscle spasms. He then hooks up his friends and uses his face to control theirs.

Sam Pluta: data structures/monoliths ii (for chion) -- live video cutup mayhem.

Ride the Planets: Rock Wings

Tetranitrate: Laser Tattoos -- what not to do with a laser cutter.

Tom Sachs: NASA -- an incredibly detailed mis-re-imagining of a NASA space mission.

Paul Slocum: You're Not My Father -- crowd-sourced video of strangers reenacting a clip from 1980s sitcom Full House.

You're Doing it Wrong: Creative Misuse of Technology

When: Wed, Feb 11, 2009, 8:00pm

Where: 92YTribeca Screening Room, 200 Hudson Street

$$$: $10.00

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Using social networking tools to organize political protests is nothing new or surprising, but online protests have been growing increasingly efficient, especially on Facebook. In Canada, for example, a group protesting copyright legislation caught the attention of federal parliament last summer, and another opposing strict restrictions on young drivers had the Ontario Premier considering Facebook consultations in the fall.

The latest story comes from the UK where, in a mere 48 hours, a campaign run through Facebook and TheyWorkForYou.com by mysociety.org helped stop legislation that would have exempted MPs' expenses from the Freedom of Information Act (via the Search Engine). Thousands of emails were sent in the two day period, reaching 90% of MPs, before the opposition parties turned and the government backed down. It's not so much the scale that's worth noting, but the sheer speed at which the campaign was successful. The legislation was scrapped before most snail mail would have had time to arrive. Now, the online protest likely wasn't the only factor, but it played an important role in spreading the message. It seems to be getting a lot harder to sneak stuff through the legislature (though that doesn't stop people from trying) when it only takes a couple days to build an opposition.

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

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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. And here are the archives for Boing Boing Video. An "un-bleeped" version of this video, profanity preserved, is here.

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Last week, we aired two Boing Boing Video episodes shot during a visit to Shepard Fairey's gallery in LA as the work of legendary punk / hiphop / skate culture photographer Glen E. Friedman was going up on the gallery walls, for his first ever career retrospective "Idealist Propaganda."

The first episode focused on Fairey's famous Obama poster, the second episode on a collaboration between Shepard and Glen involving the hardcore group Bad Brains.

TODAY: we bring you part 3 of this conversation. This episode's all about Glen's early work documenting skateboarder culture, and the beginnings of American hardcore. Below, an image from the very first roll of color 35mm film Friedman ever shot, which he discusses in this video. Also in today's episode: Glen shares the story behind the Circle Jerks "Golden Shower of Hits" album cover, which he also shot. His work was so much a part of these subcultures, which were in turn so much a part of my own formative years -- so this episode means a lot to me. I hope you dig it.

We have one more planned in this series, focusing more on his Hip-Hop work, so stay tuned.

A very special thanks to the great Ian MacKaye, and to Fugazi, and the Dischord records family for generously allowing us to Fugazi's music in this series. Mr. MacKaye was the subject of some of Glen's early photos of the D.C. hardcore scene, and in this episode we dive into some of those images of MacKaye's seminal hardcore band Minor Threat. I was there, too, and Minor Threat changed my life. Glen captured the spirit of this time like no one else.

Glen's books are available here. Below, here is a short film based on his latest artistic treatise and book "Recognize. The video includes every image in the book, which is available in limited edition through his website.

Special thanks to Boing Boing pal Sean Bonner, who coordinated this series of conversations.

Previously on Boing Boing:

* BB VIDEO: Glen E. Friedman in conversation and collaboration with Shepard Fairey
* Glen E. Friedman's photo show at Shepard Fairey's gallery
* BB VIDEO: Shepard Fairey and the Obama Poster, on Inauguration Day

(Image: "Over the Crisis," from laverrue's Flickr stream )

The folks at Wikileaks have just published the audio of what is described as a "secret hour-long telephone recording between US heads of industry discussing efforts to prevent the emancipation of unions under an Obama administration." Snip from Wikileaks alert about the audio file:

Yesterday the Huffington Post ran a story by Sam Stein titled "Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill". The story included around five minutes of an hour long recording between federal bailout funds recipiets. Wikileaks has released the full hour long recording. The call shows the firms to be involved in lobbying, effectively with public money.

And here's a snip from the aforementioned HuffPo piece by Sam Stein:

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

Here's the Wikileaks post with audio: Anti-union call between Bank of America, Bernie Marcus, et al. and Rick Berman, 17 Oct 2008
Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill (Huffington Post)

(Thanks, Jacob Appelbaum!)

While ISPs have been reluctant to admit to agreeing to be a part of the RIAA's three strikes plan, if you had to take a guess who would be involved, AT&T and Comcast would probably lead the list (along with Cox, which has already admitted to doing so). So, it probably comes as no surprise that News.com has confirmed from internal sources that, indeed, both AT&T and Comcast have agreed, in principle, to participate -- though neither will admit to it publicly for fear of public backlash. Of course, in places like where I live, what do they have to fear? The only options for broadband here are... AT&T DSL and Comcast cable. So it's not like there are alternatives. It shouldn't impact me directly, since I don't engage in any file sharing, but the principle of the thing is quite bothersome (not to mention the false positives that occur). No matter what other issues one might have with Verizon, the company should be given credit for (a) actually investing in much faster fiber networks and (b) being willing to openly stand up to the entertainment industry over the years. If only FiOS were actually available where I live.

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The article I contributed to the first issue of MAKE was about fixing my daughter's iPod Mini. The stem for the earphones had broken off in the socket. To remove it, I had to break into the iPod Mini, using a hairdryer to melt glue that held the plastic top in place. I had to search all over to find instructions on how to do it.

I saw this press release today for RapidRepair.com that "lets device owners order parts online and do repairs themselves, auickly and affordably." We need more services like this one that extend the lives of the gadgets in our lives. I like that they provide guides that allow you to make the repair yourself. I took a screenshot below of iPod Nano disassembly.

Rapid Repair offers a complete line of replacement parts for many of the most popular electronic devices and game systems, as well as repair tools and guides to make the job easy.

"Many people who own these products are technology-savvy to begin with," said Aaron Vronko, co-founder and service manager of Rapid Repair. "We've made it easy to do the repairs that are within their skill set by making available the parts they need, as well as any tools they may require, which allows them a great way to get the repair done at a savings. For those repairs that are beyond what they're comfortable doing themselves, we'd be happy to do the repair for them with our usual affordable rates and quick turnaround."

Rapid Repair stocks a complete line of parts available online for iPod, iPhone and Zune MP3 players, as well as for the most popular Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo game systems including the latest generation handhelds and consoles. Parts range from a plastic center frame for the Zune Flash to an 8GB mainboard assembly for the iPhone. Several tool kits are also available, as well as repair guides and troubleshooting help to get the ball rolling on disassembly of the device and the DIY project itself.

Parts, tools and guides are available at www.rapidrepair.com
.

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Earlier this week I mentioned that I had watched You're Gonna Miss Me, an excellent documentary about musician Roky Erickson. I forgot to mention that my friends at Process Media recently published a book about Erickson, called Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound.

The trailblazing 13th Floor Elevators released the first “psychedelic” rock album in America, transforming culture throughout the 1960s and beyond. The Elevators followed their own spiritual cosmic agenda — to change society by finding a new path to enlightenment. Their battles with repressive authorities are legendary.

Lead singer Roky Erickson was put away in a maximum security unit for the criminally insane for years. Tommy Hall, their Svengali lyricist, lived in a cave. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland was imprisoned. The drummer was involuntarily subjected to electric shock treatments.

This fascinating biography breaks decades of silence of band members and features dozens of never-before-printed photos. “One of the most exhilarating rock ‘n’ roll stories ever told.” — Julian Cope

Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators, The Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound

An anonymous reader writes "Professional digital photographer and website publisher Rob Galbraith has performed both objective and subjective tests on laptop displays, finding that the late-2008 Macbook Pro glossy displays are 'deep into the not acceptable category' when used in ambient light environments. The Apple notebook came in dead last for color accuracy, and second to last in viewing angles (besting only the Dell Mini 9). He concludes: 'Macs are no longer at the top of the laptop display heap in our minds.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Professional digital photographer and website publisher Rob Galbraith has performed both objective and subjective tests on laptop displays, finding that the late-2008 Macbook Pro glossy displays are 'deep into the not acceptable category' when used in ambient light environments. The Apple notebook came in dead last for color accuracy, and second to last in viewing angles (besting only the Dell Mini 9). He concludes: 'Macs are no longer at the top of the laptop display heap in our minds.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joshuah Bearman alerted me to David Dixon's amazing audio archive website, which has links to audio files that people recorded at home and unwittingly sent to Napster.

This was right around the time that Napster was just beginning to penetrate into the average computer user's lives. At the same time, an audio utility program called MusicMatch Jukebox was also being widely used, since it was often pre-installed on off-the-shelf PC's. MMJ allowed you, among other things, to make recordings using the cheap microphone included with the PC, and save the file in mp3 format. If you didn't give the audio file a name, it assigned a default name "mic in track" followed by a number. Now if you were also running Napster, and you were careless enough to be sharing everything on your computer (which *many* were), then anyone also running Napster could just do a search for "mic in track" and find and download these personal recordings, usually without your knowledge.

I am that guy. I've amassed many, many hours of these recordings, which provide endless voyeuristic entertainment. Typical recordings were of people singing, rapping, or playing along with the radio (often badly), kids practicing their school book reports, audio love letters, kids being silly, and so forth. One of my finds was a 14-minute-long recording of a guy praying very fervently and emotionally, even lapsing into glossolalia. I've posted many of my favorites on my webpage, for free.

Audio Voyeurism

Ed Note: one of Boingboing's three current guest bloggers, 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. (You can see a video interview introducing the book here.) He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

The two most common--and frustrating--complaints I hear about the web and the blogosphere are 1) that they're filled with mean-spirited snark; and 2) that they've been divided up into predictable, Daily Me filters where you're only told stuff you already know. I've been hearing this for years, and every time I hear it I respond by pointing people to the success of boingboing, which I think most of us would agree is as true to the core values of the web as anything out here. First, our hosts are so generous and open--and largely snark-free--in just about everything they post. The default tone is here is always: "Hey, check out this amazing thing I found." And those things are far more eclectic and diverse than anything you would have encountered in the heyday of big media. Only at boingboing could a guy post about Candy Land, aviation safety, Lost, and the Obama IT plan in one week and feel like he's the boring, predictable one. If this turns out to be what the DailyMe looks like, I think we're all going to be just fine.

So it was an honor and a complete blast to hang out here for the past two weeks. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured by any of my posts. I hope you'll get a chance to check out The Invention of Air, but either way I look forward to continuing the conversation here and elsewhere.

This is pretty much the biggest news of 2009 - I am going to email the OLPC folks confirm, but according to this article - The new OLPC XO-2 will be an open source hardware project... Just to recap what that means... the source, the schematics, the PCB files, the firmware, the CAD files, everything will be available and commercial use is OK. If it's true, this is extremely exciting, I'd love to see the best company that can make these at the lowest price / highest quality flourish.

With the XO-1 now being deployed in the field, interest is turning to a follow-on project: the XO-2. This will be a $75 dual-screen device that's held like a book. You can also turn it around and use one of the screens as the keyboard.

"The first generation is a laptop that can be a book; the next generation will a book that can be a laptop," he says. "That's the switch.

One important thing about the XO-2 is that we're going to do it as an open source hardware programme. The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google - we'll want people to copy it. We'll make the constituent parts available. We'll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.

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Matt Biddulph of hackdiary posted links to a number of essential Objective C libraries, directed right at iPhone hackers who have a web development and scripted language background.

For the last few months I've been spending much of my spare hacking time learning to code iPhone applications. I've found Objective C to be a surprisingly pleasant language, and Cocoa is one of the best frameworks I've ever worked with. I've reached a point where I feel I can go fairly quickly from simple app ideas to sketching in real code.

I'm a web developer at heart, and a scripting language user by preference. Coding for the iPhone doesn't feel as fluid in text handling or HTTP access as the environments I'm used to. Fortunately I've been able to find some fantastic open-source libraries and wrappers that make up the difference. Here are my favourites so far.

I'll need to look into a lot of these in more detail, but there are tools here to simplify regular expressions, handle ajax queries more like jQuery, get data into and out of JSON format, and a simple abstraction layer for storing and querying data in SQLLite. Awesome.

For the iPhone developers out there: what's your favorite or most essential Objective C library?

Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries

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PictureBox, publisher of gorgeous art books, is having a monster sale that lasts until February 8. For instance, you can get this giant Gary Panter book for $30 dollars, marked down from $95.

An intimate look at the work and life of a legendary artist. Gary Panter has been one of the most influential figures in visual culture sincethe mid-1970s. From his era-defining punk graphics to his cartoon icon Jimbo to his visionary design for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, he has left his mark on every medium he’s touched. Working in close collaboration with the artist, PictureBox has assembled the definitive volume on Panter’s work from the early 1970s to the present. This monumental, slipcased set is split into two 350-page volumes. The first is a comprehensive monograph featuring over 700 images of paintings, drawings, sculptures, posters and comics, alongside essays by Robert Storr, Mike Kelley, Richard Klein, Richard Gehr, Karrie Jacobs and Byron Coley, as well a substantial commentary by the artist himself. The second volume features a selection from Panter’s sketchbooks–the site of some of his most audacious work–most of which has never been published in any form.

PictureBox book sale

As mentioned, the House has rejected the attempt to push through the delay to the digital TV transition that the Senate approved earlier in the week. The measure needed a two-thirds majority to pass in this attempt, which it did not get. However, it did garner a simple majority, which means it will probably be brought to the floor and passed in the next few days. But it's worth looking more closely at some of the details to understand that this proposal seems likely to make things worse. While the general gist of the measure is that it would delay the transition until June 12th, it actually says that broadcasters can switch off their analog signals any time between February 17 and June 12. So it removes the hard deadline date, instead letting broadcasters make the transition whenever they like in a four-month period. If there's already so much confusion over the transition that a delay is needed, how will the switch from a hard deadline to a whenever-you-feel-like-it plan help? It would seem that one way to ensure people find out about the transition would be to let it happen: if people lose their TV signal (and really care that much), they'll take some action to rectify it. Of course, that still wouldn't solve one of the big issues of the transition: the bungled converter coupon program.

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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Like many Makers, I got my start taking apart everything I could lay my hands on. Sometimes, however, it takes a good old fashioned cutaway to truly appreciate the complexity of a well engineered device. How the heck do they do this? Can I borrow the tool they used?

More photos at Tokyobling. via notcot

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From the classic 1960s BBC TV comedy series 'Not Only But Also'. At about 1:19 in, after the caveman sketch, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sing a 'ballad' about Robin Hood's fabled sidekick Alan A Dale. This episode was shot in 1965. Video Link (Thanks, Drew Carey!)