CWmike writes "Nvidia is considering developing an integrated chip based on the x86 architecture for use in devices such as netbooks and mobile Internet devices, said Michael Hara, vice president of investor relations at Nvidia during a speech that was webcast from the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week. Nvidia has already developed an integrated chip called Tegra, which combines an Arm processor, a GeForce graphics core and other components on a single chip. The chips are aimed at small devices such as smartphones and MIDs, and will start shipping in the second half of this year. 'Tegra, by any definition, is a complete computer-on-chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power and very small but highly efficient,' Hara said. 'Someday, it's going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the anime world, while there have been occasional clashes, it seems that many anime creators have learned that "fansubs," videos where fans translate the content into other languages and provide the subtitles, are a great way to learn what other markets want. Yet, it seems like other parts of the movie industry are having a lot of trouble understanding this, as recent efforts around the globe have forced the closure of a number of fansub sites -- even ones that don't provide the actual movies to download at all, just the subtitles. Yet movie studios an the courts are ruling that just creating translated subtitles is infringing. In one case, it appears that a site was shut down just for linking to such an "unauthorized subtitles." These are fans trying to help build up a bigger audience for a movie, where the movie studios have failed to provide the product. They're helping the movie gain a bigger following. The studios should be thanking these people for providing free labor. And, instead, they're dragging them into court, shutting down their sites and demanding compensation. The world is a mixed up place sometimes.

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On Friday March 6th at 12pm Pacific, Dale Dougherty and I will be hosting the first episode of our new live call-in show, Make: Talk. Our guest are Gareth Branwyn, who edited the "Lost Knowledge" section of MAKE Vol. 17, and Jake von Slatt, who designed and built the Wimshurst Spark Generator shown on the cover.

To listen to the show, you can click the player above tomorrow at noon, or visit the show page at BlogTalkRadio. We welcome your calls at (646) 915-8698.

You can also subscribe to the podcast of the show here.

MAKE Volume 17 goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene, makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine, an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts, a "Florentine Flask" siphon coffee brewer, and a tea cup-powered Stirling Engine. The section will also cover watchmaking, letterpress, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th century technologies. Our guest is Gareth Branwyn, who edited this volume's special section. We'll also talk with Jake von Slatt, creator of the Victorian-era Wimshurst Spark Generator that appears on the cover of our current issue.

Amerika writes "Craigslist is 'the single largest source of prostitution in the nation,' according to Cook County, Illinois Sheriff Thomas Dart. He has announced that he's filing a lawsuit against the popular classifieds site. Craigslist says it's determined to prevent criminal activity." NewYorkCountryLawyer adds a link to the 28-page complaint (PDF), which "alleges that Craigslist maintains 21 classifications of sex-for-hire, coded as 'w4m,' 'm4m,' 'm4w,' etc." and that it has facilitated child prostitution and kidnapping and human trafficking.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have just a few days left of guestblogging and more ideas than I can fit, so here's a list of some. For all of them, I'm thinking super-short here, just a few paragraphs each, outlining the "and here's why..." part. If you want to read any of these, please post in the Comments, and I'll write them up. Just one reader's expression of interest is enough to put me to work, and if no one cares, I'll pick myself.

A) What is a crackpot?

B) My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering.

C) Was Jesus a comedian?

D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures.

E) We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem.

F) Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition.

G) Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others.

H) Poetry will become popular again.

I) "Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's.

J) The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential.

K) Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship.

L) Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry.

M) Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability.

 

Happy Harry made a terrific "reanimation" of The Watchmen as if it was a Saturday morning cartoon. (Follow the link and click "Watch This Movie!") Saturday Morning Watchmen (Thanks, Joel Johnson!)

Dan Kaminsky, the computer consultant who found a fundamental vulnerability in the Web's DNS, so fundamental, it could have given him theoretical control over every domain on the Web, will be giving a last-minute talk tonight at HacDC. He'll be talking about this amazing story as well as talking about some current research, to be officially announced on Monday.

Over the Christmas holiday, I read Dan Sanchez's book Daemon, a "killer Internet" thriller. It's Dan's first novel, and it's not without its flaws, but it's pretty gripping and he does a great job of incorporating, and extrapolating upon, current high-tech hardware and network technologies and how these might be used in extraordinarily destructive, evil ways. It's downright unnerving in sections. One night, reading in bed, unnerved, I got up to... ah... visit a different room of my house. I picked up the latest Wired and began scanning through it. The next thing I knew, I was enthralled by Joshua Davis' December Wired piece on Kaminsky and the DNS discovery. It was almost as unsettling as my Daemon read, but this was real! It was a bit of a struggle to get back to sleep that night, one of those creepy moments where fantasy leaks into reality.

[Read MAKE Editor and Publisher Dale Dougherty's review of Daemon on Boing Boing.]

Dan Kaminsky at HacDC TONIGHT at 8 PM!

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Reader VivekM alerts us to an unfortunate news story in India, where a blogger who was critical of a journalist's coverage of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year was sued for his blog post, and then forced to take down the post and apologize. The specific issue appeared to be over a quote taken from a Wikipedia article about the journalist, rather than any actual personal attack on the journalist. Of course, in forcing the blogger to take down the content, it's kicked up quite a lot of attention and a fire storm of protest from numerous Indian bloggers who feel that this is an attack on free speech. Defamation laws are all too often used to stifle free speech, and it doesn't look like India has any sort of anti-SLAPP law to prevent these sorts of legal attacks. There's nothing wrong with being offended or bothered about criticism, but there are plenty of ways to respond to criticism without resorting to lawsuits.

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Condiment writes "Next time you're sick, take five and actually read the pile of contracts your doctor dumps on your lap, because it's becoming more and more likely that your doctors are banning patients from posting reviews on the Web. You heard that right: as a prerequisite to receiving medical care, patients are in many cases required to sign away their First Amendment rights!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

linuxkrn writes "The State of Colorado's Office of Technology (OIT) has set up a work skills website. The problem is that the site says 'DO NOT use FIREFOX or other Browsers besides IE. It has been decided that Mozilla based, non-IE browsers pose a security risk.' (Original emphasis from site.) If the leading IT agency for the State is making these uneducated claims, should the people worry about their other decisions?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When I first got involved in digital electronics, it took me awhile to understand the concepts of pull-up and pull-down resistors and when to use up or down, and when to use internal (built in, programmable) resistors, and when to use actual, discrete component, resistors.

On Youritronics (a name that will always make me wince), new editor Laci runs through a simple demo of pull-up and pull-down resistors, using the ATmega8 protostack.

In digital electronics the engineers use the terms pull-up or pull-down resistor, this is a simple resistor usually between 10k and 100k, to define the input state when no signal source is connected, this way overriding the noise signal, common sense dictates that when you have potentially larger noise then a smaller resistor is needed, but don't be careless about it, don't place a 100Ohm resistor because your signal source must be able to "defeat" the pull-up(down) resistor. A rule of thumb is to use at least 10x larger pull-up(down) resistor then your signal source impedance.

The pull-up term is used when the resistor connects the pin to the + and pull-down when connects to the ground, but then which should you choose? Good question, in these days it doesn't really mater, your application or the pcb design should dictate, the older generation digital IC's had asymmetrical current sink/source capability, they could sink more current and because of that the pull-up resistor was more common.

ATmega8 protostack simple demo

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CWmike writes "Microsoft said today that it will deliver three security updates on Tuesday, one of them marked 'critical,' but will not fix an Excel flaw that attackers are now exploiting. 'It doesn't look like we're going to see patches for any open Microsoft security advisories,' said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, pointing to three that have not yet been closed. Those include two advisories issued last year — one from April 2008, another from December — and the Excel alert published last week. 'I'm not really surprised that the Excel vulnerability won't be patched, what with the timeline,' said Storms, 'but the others have been open for a long time.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My initial summary of my trip to the Midem music industry event in January was that it was about turning "optimism into denial." There was a tremendous sense of optimism from all sorts of upstarts: musicians and companies who were really innovating and creating wonderful success stories over and over again. And then... the old school industry guys showed up. They spoke about the optimism and the success stories... and said a few things that made it sound like the got it. They talked about ending this "war" with consumers, and focusing on solutions that worked. But, then the clouds would descend, and they'd immediately start angrily saying that even with these great new business models and innovations, "we need to stomp out piracy." In doing so, they demonstrated how severely they missed the point -- and it's now showing in their actions. We've been seeing more braindead maneuvers over the last month with highly questionable lawsuits, and licensing decisions that only serve to piss off users.

It seems that my initial read is (unfortunately) the same conclusion others are coming to as well. Two of the "industry insiders" I got to meet at the event -- who both came down on the "optimistic" side at the event have each written up blog posts for the MidemNet blog, complaining about the very same thing. That initial sense of optimism that was seen at the event has pretty much gone away -- crushed by dumb moves within the industry. Ted Cohen, who helped moderate much of the event, diplomatically points out that for all the talk of collaboration at the event, the chaos isn't over, and he wonders when we'll actually get down to business. Meanwhile, Bruce Houghton (of the excellent Hypebot blog) more specifically fears that all the talk of a more collaborative approach was nothing more than talk -- and there is no intention to really collaborate.

This is a pretty big problem -- and I obviously won't speak for either Bruce or Ted, who I'm pretty sure would disagree with this assessment -- but, it won't change until the old system and the old structures and the "old guard" are finally pushed out. There are tons of success stories -- but those are in spite of the industry, not because of it. It's time to wipe out the house of cards that the industry has built in terms of Rube Goldbergian copyright licensing schemes, and start fresh. There are business models that work great for everyone -- but the current system is designed to allow bystanders and middlemen to profit at the expense of the musicians and the public. Get rid of the old system, and everyone but those middlemen will benefit.

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Hey look, here's a bank that's not afraid to loan. Fascinating idea. Wonder if it'll work?

From: Why does Open Source Hardware need a bank?

Right now, the status quo, emerging trend for OSHW DIY'ers has been: build something, put up a bunch of money to build a few of them, if people like it, scale it up, raise money, realize you might lose all that money, charge a margin on top of it to cover your potential losses, start a small company to resell more, cross your fingers, maybe get lucky or maybe not. Setting up each little company takes an infrastructure investment like incorporation legal fees, Paypal transaction costs, and website hosting fees to name a few. For every small hardware project, there's a potential to have to pay upwards of 40-50% of the initial cost of the project again in just infrastructure fees - that's prohibitive and ridiculous for little guys like me.

From: The Solution: how the Bank will work

The Open Source Hardware Bank will work to eliminate the scaling and quantity pricing problem for OSHW projects by funding the build of 2x the quantity of any Open Source Hardware product. That means, if a project has found a way to find 10 potential buyers, the bank will put down the money needed to fund 10 more, for a total of 20 products. If a project has found 25 community members to buy in, the bank will fund another 25, to bring the total quantity down to 50. This should reduce the unit costs by around 10-30% of any hardware project, and in the case of the Illuminato, it'll reduce costs by almost 40%!

In return, anyone who pitches in money to the bank will get a modest and sustainable return on their investment, somewhere between 5-10%. Normally, this wouldn't be a huge amount, but given what I've learned about the "real" economy recently, 30-50% return on investment may never have really existed in the first place, let alone represented "sustainable growth." This money gets paid back and cashed out when the rest of the inventory is bought as a check that Justin, Andrew, or I write and sign personally.

[Sent in to us by MAKE subscriber Robert Boerner. Thanks, Robert!]

Introducing the Open Source Hardware Central Bank

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Vancouver-based painter Ryan Heshka takes inspiration from Golden Age science fiction pulp covers. He has a show opening March 14 at Miami's Harold Golen Gallery. Above is a sneak preview of startling works from the exhibition, titled "Electro-Wonders"; click the images to see them larger. Ryan Heshka (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

According to Cool Tools, the best source for Neodymium Iron Boron (NIB) super magnets is "Mr. George the SuperMagnetMan." He's a charming fellow, wont to saying things like, "These magnets have caused more blood blisters than any other magnet I have."

His prices are the best on the net. His selection is vast: no one else has the stock he has or the variations in size of commonly available shapes. This is no exaggeration or hype. He's got stuff you can't get anywhere else and is constantly adding new items, like axially- and diametrically-magnetized NIB wedding rings and radially-magnetized ring magnets. He has magnets so large they are dangerous (fortunately he has put videos on YouTube that show you how to safely handle these monsters -- with large leather welding gloves and a special wooden wedge and a 2x4!). He also sells magnetic hooks, pyramid shaped magnets, magnetic jewelry, teflon coated magnets, heart, star, and triangle magnets. You can even get powdered magnets that act like iron filings on steroids! You name it he's got it. Most magnets are N45-N50 grade, the highest strength you can buy.

At Music Machinery, Paul Lamere posts about his search for drummers who use a click track, an electronic metronome that helps the musician avoid tempo deviations. Paul wanted to see if he could use software to identify which drummers use click tracks on recordings. The graph above on the left plots the natural tempo deviations for The Beatles' Dizzy Miss Lizzie. For comparison, the graph on the right shows the "unnatural" lack of tempo deviation on Green Day's "American Idiot." Now, this analysis surely isn't an exact science and there's an interesting discussion about the project following Paul's blog post. "In Search of the Click Track" (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

A cleverly-placed sticker changes the meaning of this road sign.

BB pal and former guestblogger Bruce Stewart sent along this slippery little geometry brain teaser. Click the image to see it larger.

revjtanton writes "Amid all the discussion and argument about Gamestop's two-billion-dollar trade-in industry it seems Amazon.com is getting in on the action. Like Gamestop, Amazon asks for the games to be in good condition, however they offer just a few more dollars for your discarded game (Gamestop listed Left 4 Dead for the 360 at $24 while Amazon had it at $26.50 trade-in value). Gamestop had already ruffled feathers in the developer and distribution communities with its practice of accepting used games; does Amazon joining the practice legitimize it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alfred Poulet wrote the book on foreign bodies found in people's bodies. Literally. His two-volume set from 1880, titled "A Treatise on Foreign Bodies in Surgical Practice," is up for auction on eBay. Click the images above to see larger. From the item description:

* The books describe, for example, a case of a woman who had been experiencing vaginal bleeding for several months, but which failed to respond to conventional treatments. After direct observation, the patient was found to have a live leech in the vagina [after removal of the leech, the doctor recommended her to use an underwear or a cork stopper when going to the river for a bathe]. Leech died of starvation after removal.

* There are other cases in which spoons, cups, needles, glass bottles, hair brushes, avocado pits, beans, snails, or a variety of insects, arachnids, or fish were removed from different orifices of the human body.

A Treatise on Foreign Bodies in Surgical Practice (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon has the details on this clever Ghostbusters/Pac-Man t-shirt. Glenn Jones' Called for Help T-shirt (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

If you're the sheriff, aren't you supposed to understand at least the basics of the law? Apparently not in Cook County, Illinois. Sheriff Thomas Dart is now suing Craigslist because it's "the single largest source of prostitution in the nation." Of course, we've been through some of this before. Atlanta's mayor mistakenly blamed Craigslist for prostitution a while back, but didn't do anything about it. Some Attorneys General were threatening to do stuff, so Craigslist finally changed its policies last year. Of course, as expected, all that did was make prostitutes disperse to other sites. In other words: same amount of prostitution, just a lot more difficult to catch.

There have been some officials who recognize this. Some police officers have realized that Craigslist certainly isn't to blame, and is, in fact, a great tool for tracking and catching prostitutes. Hell, even Dart's own staff has regularly used Craigslist as a tool to crack down on prostitution. His own office says it's used Craigslist to bust at least 75 prostitutes in the last 18 months. Rather than suing Craigslist, he should be thanking Craigslist for making it so easy to catch these prostitutes. It seems unlikely that this lawsuit will go very far. Craigslist is almost certainly protected by Section 230 safe harbors as the service provider. You would think that a sheriff that used the tool successfully for so long could recognize this... but apparently Dart would rather it be more difficult to find and arrest prostitutes.

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At breakfast this morning, Berkeley friend and former journalist John Feld said we need journalists to do impartial investigations into government corruption. I asked if he knew of any and he said Seymour Hersh. I agreed.

When he comes out with a piece, I stop everything and read it, as do many others.

John is right, what Hersh does is important, so we should consider that a real challenge. How do we pay for the work he does, and others who want to follow in his footsteps.

Isn't academia the place for a person like Hersh? Isn't that what we want our tenured faculty to be doing -- digging for the truth, no matter where it leads or who is offended? That's what academic freedom is all about.

It would also be great if such "academic journalists" could teach a course or graduate seminar to share their process, teach students how to do what he or she does.

I think it would be even better than having them work for big media companies, because then they could go after the BMCs, and lord knows they need going-after.

notthatwillsmith writes "Maximum PC just posted a comprehensive visual retrospective about data storage, starting with the once state of the art punch card and moving through the popular formats of yesteryear, including everything from magtape to Blu-ray discs. It's amazing how much data you could pack on a few hundred feet of half-inch magnetic tape!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I remember, the first time I saw a bee box (or bee lining box), I was fascinated by all of its chambers (this one has two, others have three), lifts, sliding doors, windows, etc. It's like something a magician might flourish onstage. But it's not. It's used for hunting and capturing wild bees and using the captured ones to follow them back to the hive (a lost art called "bee lining").

Bee lining

More info on bee lining in general can be found here.

[Thanks to MAKE subscriber, and bee liner, Rick of 2wicky, for sending us his video.]

More:

• Backyard beekeeping - splitting a hive
• DIY: Bee Keeping

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I've obviously been writing quite a bit about both the music industry and the news industry lately -- as there are tremendous similarities between the two industries -- a point highlighted by Tim Lee, who (at the same time) notes that the one difference is that "piracy" isn't a problem for the news business (though, those who incorrectly blame Google for the downfall of journalism might argue otherwise). Tim's point (and it's one I agree with) is that the basic factors hitting both industries are really the same, and the "piracy" excuse is something of a near total red herring. It's actually the overall dynamics of a changing market when the main output becomes digital.

Lee's piece is a response to James DeLong's article decrying the death of newspapers which pins it on all of us fools who claim that "information wants to be free." DeLong, you may recall, was a bigshot at the Progress & Freedom Foundation -- a DC think tank that has long advocated ever more draconian copyright measures. And, he's effectively doing the same thing here: saying that newspapers will only survive if they charge for every little thing. This is, once again, the same incredibly wrong advice that he spewed out to the entertainment industry for years -- and look where that got them?

The similarities actually remind me of the one time that I actually got to meet DeLong, nearly three years ago, at a Cato Institute symposium on copyright, where I first laid out the details of why "free" isn't a problem in economics, and how it should be a part of the business model, if you follow through on the basic economics. It was actually on the flight to that event, reading a book about the history of the number zero that I realized just how difficult it was for many to get past the zero. It was as if, the second they came across zero, their brain popped out an error and they stopped thinking. It leads to ridiculous claims like "if I give it away for free, I won't make any money!" That's not true if you look at the larger economic ecosystem, understand the economics of information or infinite goods, and recognize how they can play into the overall economic model.

While DeLong was there that day and heard me speak on this, it's pretty clear that he didn't get the message. Instead, he's continuing to focus on how to implement artificial scarcity, believing that markets only work when everything has its price -- and that price isn't zero. But this is a huge mistake from a business perspective. If you understand where the zero fits into the business model, then there are plenty of business models that work great. The problem with the recording industry is that they've never believed the zero fit anywhere. The problem with the newspaper industry is that it recognized the zero, but forgot to figure out where the rest of the business model fit. Instead of figuring that out, reactionaries like DeLong are moving backwards and trying to just ignore the zero again. Unfortunately that's what breaks the model even worse. Ignoring the reality of where a zero fits into a business model is a simple recipe for failure as it tries to go against fundamental economics.

No one has ever said that "everything must be free" (though, angry copyright system defenders repeatedly pretend that's what we are saying). All we've said all along is that it's important to recognize that in the information economy, it makes plenty of economic sense for certain things (i.e., "infinite goods") to be free (that's where the zero goes) and then the scarce goods are what you charge for. The trick is enabling a business model where the infinite goods make the scarce goods you control more valuable. This is absolutely possible for any business -- and, in fact, failing to understand how you do this will most likely doom your overall business.

We'll be talking about this and much more at the Free! Summit in a couple months, and we hope you can join us. However, we have to admit that early interest in the event has been overwhelming, so we've already had to shut down the open registration and opened up a waiting list. We're working hard to see if there are ways we can accommodate a much larger audience (if you have any ideas, let us know -- or if you're interested in sponsoring a live web feed, please let us know), but if you were thinking of going, at least get on the waiting list early.

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MojoKid writes "Similar to Roku and Vudu, ZillionTV relies on a set-top box that attaches to your TV. The ZillionTV Device connects to your home router via a wired Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection. It requires a broadband connection that is at least 2.7Mbps or faster. ZillionTV claims that it will have 15,000 titles available by the end of this year from content providers, including 'Disney, 20th Century Fox Television, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. Digital Distribution.' While Roku and Vudu are essentially available to anyone who has a broadband Internet connection and who is willing to purchase a device, ZillionTV will not be quite as easy to get. Instead of making the device and service directly available to consumers, ZillionTV will only be available (at least initially) through Internet service providers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is beautiful! I think it is from Indonesia. From the eBay listing:

I saw this at the flea market and it was drawing so much attention, I knew I should buy it before it got snapped up. The hand tooling on this thing is amazing. It is covered with fancy designs and also heavy equipment, including a bulldozer, road grader, dump truck, and crane. There is a large eagle on the front over the nameplate, which reads "C.L. Aldrich". On the back is a nameplate which reads "Atlas". The condition is excellent, though it could use a little cleaning. The liner is in good condition as well. This is a standard McDonald Mine safety Appliance Co. hardhat that has been laboriously hand tooled into a one of a kind work of art. On top it is inscribed Kota Gede Yogya with the initials NR. Kota Gede/Yogya is a region in Indonesia widely recognized for it's fine silver craftsmen. The initials NR are probbably those of the artist.

More pics here: Hand-tooled aluminum hard hat

Glyn Moody writes "We now know that Microsoft's lawsuit isn't just against TomTom, but against Linux too: but what exactly is Microsoft hoping to achieve? Samba's Jeremy Allison has a fascinating theory: 'What people are missing about this is the either/or choice that Microsoft is giving Tom Tom. It isn't a case of cross-license and everything is ok. If Tom Tom or any other company cross licenses patents then by section 7 of GPLv2 (for the Linux kernel) they lose the rights to redistribute the kernel *at all*. Make no mistake, this is intended to force Tom Tom to violate the GPL, or change to Microsoft embedded software.' Maybe embedded Linux is starting to get too popular."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If Mirrors Could Speak" is a super creepy educational film from 1976 in which misbehaving kids are presented in clown make-up.

In hopes of keeping kids' attention, social engineering films would often use supernatural elements to make their points. In this film, we see a magic talking mirror that reflects bratty kids as clowns. Most of the misbehaving kids understand how their behavior is disruptive and make amends. Surprisingly, one kid doesnt care if he is a "clown" and continues being a jerk probably for the rest of his life.

This film is included in archive.org's stupendous "A/V Geeks Film Archive"

Earlier this week, I was on a fun panel put together by the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley, which was mainly focused on what the Obama Stimulus plan (and the broadband allocation specifically) would most likely mean for the industry. At one point, an attendee in the audience said that he was from a startup, and questioned how he might partake of the stimulus funds -- and I responded, perhaps flippantly, that he was out of luck: the stimulus isn't for startups. That's not entirely true, of course. There will be some token amounts of money handed out to startups, but pretty much everyone on the panel agreed, the administration has made clear that the stimulus package is about creating jobs as quickly as possible, and the administration has made it clear in so many words that this means handing it to incumbents. They've been pretty frank that the stimulus plan has a lot less to do with increasing broadband capabilities than with job creations -- and plans to get funds that show more job creation will get preference over those that actually increase broadband.

And that's why the stimulus package is not for startups -- and is potentially dangerous in the long run. Truly revolutionary startups don't immediately create jobs -- they destroy them. The process of creative destruction takes on those incumbent providers and wipes them out. We're seeing it with plenty of industries today that are challenged by new upstarts that have upset their old business models. And, while most economists should recognize that this process is good for the overall economy, in that it leads to economic growth and more efficiency, it does upset the status quo, and causes many big companies to contract or disappear altogether.

So, think about it from a government bureaucrat's perspective right now. Go back a few decades, and assume someone came to you with a plan to create the internet -- and even accurately described how it would allow a great free exchange of information. The reaction, if you were trying to deal with an economic crisis, would be to focus on all of the jobs it upset. People can share music online? Think of all the job losses in the music industry! People can read news for free? Think of all those newspapers shutting down! But they wouldn't consider all of the economic activity created by the internet -- the billions of dollars and millions of new jobs created thanks to it.

If, today, you had a concept for a totally new technology that would greatly increase broadband access across the globe, in a revolutionary way. It would allow anyone to have super high speed access anywhere. It wouldn't be that costly to create or build or even maintain... and it wouldn't even require making use of existing infrastructure. From any normal calculation this would be fantastic. It would spur enormous new economic growth opportunities and speed along our economy in massively useful ways. Yet, it's exactly the type of project the government would be against right now -- because it would make AT&T, Verizon and others obsolete... and think of how many people that would put out of work, at the same time that the gov't wants to claim how many jobs it's created.

That's an extreme hypothetical, but it's useful in illustrating the point. So, this focus on using the stimulus for short-term job creation is dangerous in that it will likely be used to prop up existing incumbent businesses, because they can create the most jobs most quickly -- by doing very inefficient things. The startups that do things more efficiently end up doing short term job destruction, even if the long-term results would be a much larger, more stable economy with larger job creation.

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Hey there Boingdom -- I'm en route to Cotonou, Benin as I type this, and will be meandering around several countries in West Africa for a few weeks. I hope to capture some special things to share with you. In my not-very-connected absence, my Boing Boing Video colleagues Jolon Bankey, Derek Bledsoe, and Wesly Varghese will keep our daily original video programming rockin', and we're planning some super rad new stuff for later in the month, together with all the Boingers. More on that soon, in another post. Producer Derek Bledsoe will be blogging each day's BBV episode while I'm on the road, and today's ep is a very interesting feature about Darfur. Hope you enjoy all they're going to publish while I'm traveling, and if you have any recommendations, questions, or thoughts to share on what I ought to be paying attention to (or pointing camera/microphone at) in the region where I'll be, please share in the comments!

Above, a snapshot I took of the door at the Temple of Pythons, in Ouidah, Benin, back in 2007. Ouidah is the spiritual heart of Benin, and is considered an important historical center of Voudun ("voodoo") tradition.

Remember the Groove Armada "Download MP3s from their new EP via Bacardi and maybe win an iPod Touch courtesy of Boing Boing Video" contest? We now have a winner. BB commenter NiCaprio, whose followers on the bliveshare site can be seen here. Thanks for participating, everyone, and NiCaprio -- we'll send the prize to you soon!

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Bourne, the creator of the Bourne shell, or sh, talks about its history as the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7. Bourne worked on the shell in 1975 and said the process took no more than 6 months. Sh aimed to improve on the Thompson shell. 'I did change the shell so that command scripts could be used as filters. In the original shell this was not really feasible because the standard input for the executing script was the script itself. This change caused quite a disruption to the way people were used to working. I added variables, control flow and command substitution. The case statement allowed strings to be easily matched so that commands could decode their arguments and make decisions based on that. The for loop allowed iteration over a set of strings that were either explicit or by default the arguments that the command was given. I also added an additional quoting mechanism so that you could do variable substitutions within quotes. It was a significant redesign with some of the original flavor of the Thompson shell still there. Also I eliminated goto in favour of flow control primitives like if and for. This was also considered rather radical departure from the existing practice. Command substitution was something else I added because that gives you very general mechanism to do string processing; it allows you to get strings back from commands and use them as the text of the script as if you had typed it directly. I think this was a new idea that I, at least, had not seen in scripting languages, except perhaps LISP,' he says."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The local review site Yelp has been under fire lately from some businesses that aren't happy with reviews people have written about them, or how they're displayed on the site. Not that this is anything new: people have sued the site for defamation before, while others have tried to game the system to make their businesses look more popular. But now, some doctors are trying to get patients to sign waivers saying they won't post comments about their doctors online (via Information Week). A company has set up a service that provides doctors with the waivers, then monitors review sites for comments about them. If they find a comment on one of the subscribing doctors, they attempt to use the waivers to get the sites to remove it. Of course, most of the comments are anonymous, so it's not clear exactly how they link a particular comment to a particular patient who's signed a waiver, and at least one site has refused to comply.

The founder of the service says the only thing that should matter to patients are a doctor's medical skills -- but that hardly seems true. Certainly they play a large role in determining a patient's happiness with their care, but there's the oft-referred-to "bedside manner" that also plays key part. Consumers have the right to as much information about their medical caregivers as they need to feel comfortable, but it can often be difficult to ascertain. That seems to play into doctors' hands, so it's hard to see these attempts to gag patients as little more than a further attempt to stifle anything that challenges the status quo in the world of medicine.

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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Eric Goldman writes "The Utah legislature has tried to restrict keyword advertising twice before, with disastrous results. In 2004, Utah tried to ban keyword advertising in adware; that law was declared unconstitutional. In 2007, Utah tried to regulate competitive keyword advertising; after a firestorm of protests, Utah repealed the law in 2008. Despite this track record, Utah is trying to regulate keyword advertising a third time. HB 450 would allow trademark owners to block competitors from displaying certain types of keyword ads. In practice, this law is just another attempt by the Utah legislature to enact a law that doesn't help consumers at all but does help trademark owners suppress their online competition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Leica has announced it is discontinuing its R-Series manual focus SLR. In a letter sent to dealers, the company said the R9 and R-series lenses would no longer be produced. The camera, which was compatible with Leica's DMR digital back, still featured on the company's stand at PMA in Las Vegas, despite the move. The company said that insights gained during the development of the S2 (its first autofocus camera), will feed into the development of a future generation of the R-system.

The SolarSpeeder Kit from the Maker Shed is a really fun kit to make and race. The kit comes with detailed instructions, and is easy enough for even a beginner to assemble. I really like the contoured circuit board with it's cool looking gold flames. It really was amazing how fast this little solar racer ran across the floor after less than a minute of charging. Next I have to try out some of the upgrades. I'll keep you updated.

The SolarSpeeder was designed using ideas gathered from many years of Solaroller racing at the BEAM Robot games. You only need a soldering iron and basic hand tools to turn this high-quality coreless DC motor, lightweight body, and tweaked electronics to build your solar speed-demon.

The SolarSpeeder can cover 3 meters (10 feet) in less than 40 seconds in direct sunlight. Simple to construct and a great project for beginners!

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In the Maker Shed:


More about the Solarspeeder Kit

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rudeboy1 writes "Lars Ulrich, drummer for Metallica, and long time opponent of file sharing admitted to 'pirating' his own album, Death Magnetic last year. 'I sat there myself and downloaded "Death Magnetic" from the Internet just to try it,' he said. 'I was like, "Wow, this is how it works." I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download "Death Magnetic" for free, it's me.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slowly, but surely, more bands are starting to figure it out: the music is free. Whether they want to believe it or not, the actual music is free, so you might as well get it out there and then focus on selling scarcities. The latest example (which a ton of you have sent in), is the band No Doubt, who is giving away their entire catalog of music as a download, for folks who buy certain concert tickets. Now, obviously, if someone wants, they could go download all that music already, but effectively the band is admitting that the music is free, and the money is in the scarcity of concert tickets: so if you're going to pay for that scarcity, why not make sure that the fan knows all your music?

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Marilyn sez, "Urban Camouflage: imaginative use of military ghillie suit where you look like a tree, local vegetation etc. Funny videos! Another guy disguised to look lie a pile of boxes that has tumbled from shelves in the warehouse area. When he starts to shuffle away it's funny!" Shown here: "person disguised as pile of colored paper at Ikea, next to display of same."

URBAN CAMOUFLAGE (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Jonathan sez,

Peter Cowhey (UCSD and now the Senior Counselor at USTR) and Jonathan Aronson (USC) have a new book out from MIT Press. It can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license.

Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation explains why global information and communication markets matter, why change is needed, and what should be done.

I was an early reader of the book in draft and was very impressed -- this is good, insightful scholarship.

Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets (Thanks, Jonathan!)

nandemoari writes "Mozilla may be this year's winner in the 'browser battles' as they ready the next beta version of their tour-de-force, Firefox 3.1. Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox — a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users. As this year's crop of new browsers emerges, enhanced features are becoming secondary to one thing: speed. Mozilla is nearly ready to release the next beta version of Firefox 3.1 to the public for testing, and insiders predict that it will outpace even Safari 4, which has been the fastest browser in wide release since its beta began last week." It looks like they also will be upping the next major release to v3.5 to better show the significance of the release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For MAKE magazine readers, this weekend's episode of Make: television may look and sound a little familiar. But the allure of a project that's accessible, classic, and cool was too great... so we decided to devote the Maker Workshop segment to the Cigar Box Guitar, originally featured in MAKE magazine, Volume 04. Of course what would a Cigar Box Guitar feature be without the king of the craft (and original author of the article) himself, Ed Vogel?

Did we mention he brought along a band, complete with Display Case Bass and Canjo?

Check out the Maker Workshop this Saturday, March 7, to see more of the Cigar Box Guitar and the first-ever jam session on Make: television.

Also, read the original Cigar Box Guitar article from MAKE magazine, and watch some of Ed Vogel's Cigar Box Guitar videos.

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Windell Oskay of EMSL found this 12-inch seven segment display on his trip to electronics megacity of Shenzhen, China, and he started hacking a controller for it right there in the hotel room:

As part of the China trip last week, we had a little scavenger hunt, where the challenge was to build something with parts and tools acquired at the electronics markets.

Here's what I found: a single-digit seven-segment LED display with twelve inch digit height. (Whoa!)

When I came across this display, it was in the display case of a vendor at the SEG electronic market-- it was too tall for the display area so they had to put it in sideways, next to the 8" displays. (It's the one with the green protective film.)

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eldavojohn writes "The MIT Technology Review brings news of a new report from Harvard assessing circumvention software. The best tools they tested (and they actually did test them in cybercafes in China) were Ultrareach, Psiphon, and Tor, while Dynaweb and Anonymizer also scored well — of course, the huge downside is the long loading times. The report also includes responses from developers of the tools."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been a bunch of buzz this week about a new "album" created by an Israeli musician, Kutiman, who took videos on YouTube of people playing different instruments, and mixed them together to create a series of songs (tragically, it looks like all the attention has brought down the site right now). The end result is incredible. The music is really good, even if it's based off of a mix of high and low quality clips that no one ever would have put together otherwise. Whenever we talk about the power of "mashups" or "remixed" content, there's always someone who complains that it doesn't count, and it's not really creative or new because the remixer "didn't create anything." However, I don't see how anyone can listen to the songs created here and say that Kutiman didn't create something new and amazing. But, of course, as reader Johnjac notes, in theory, those whose videos were used on this album certainly could claim copyright infringement (in the credits, you can see all the "original" videos), and perhaps they might. But it's difficult to take seriously any copyright law that says that creating music in this manner is illegal.

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Mike posted this hypnotic video of a 5-axis industrial CNC machine carving a prototype car form and applying/smoothing the epoxy shell. Even after understanding how it works, it's still quite a fascinating process to take in. [via Hacked Gadgets]

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SkiifGeek writes "With Adobe's patch for the current PDF vulnerability still some time away, news has emerged of more techniques that are available to exploit the vulnerability, this time without needing the victim to actually open a malicious file. Instead, the methods make use of a Windows Explorer Shell Extension that is installed alongside Adobe Reader, and which will trigger the exploitable code when the file is interacted with in Windows Explorer. Methods have been demonstrated of successful exploitation with a single click, with thumbnail view, and with merely hovering the mouse cursor over the affected file. There are many ways that exploits targeting the JBIG2 vulnerability could be hidden inside a PDF file, and it seems that the reliability of detection for these varying methods is spotty, at best."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jake von Slatt sent us a link to this nifty "legendary" automotive tip for removing old bearing races from an aluminum axle hub. There's no way of knocking or prying them out. But if you weld a bead around the inside of the race, when the weld cools, it'll shrink enough that it'll come away from the hub, so that you can install new bearings. Cool! I guess this technique would work in other situations where shrinking a metal part would free it from a housing.

A neat trick for removing bearing races

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member Model Army did some testing with a stereolithography machine and posted the elegant results.

For those unfamiliar with the process - stereolithography uses UV lasers to solidify a photosensitive resin, printing objects one layer at a time from a vat of the liquid -

Learn more about the process on Wikipedia.

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An anonymous reader writes "LimeWire's new version lets people create private darknets with contacts on any Jabber server (like GMail or LiveJournal). It's different than the recent p2p darknet announcement because it doesn't use onion routing. Sharing with a friend connects directly to that friend. If you're worried about exposing personal information, LW5 doesn't share documents with the p2p network by default."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yet another vibrobot design, this one made out of a metal jar lid, motor, switch, and battery.

Killer Jar Lid Robot is Coming For You!

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Here are two separate lawsuits, halfway around the world from each other that seem to be touching on quite similar issues: whether or not it's illegal to be a jerk online. The first, described by Eric Goldman, is about a student who has sued a bunch of high school classmates, their parents and Facebook, because those students created a private group on Facebook where they made fun of the girl. Goldman points out all the problems with the lawsuit: suing Facebook makes no sense and will get thrown out pretty quickly. The group was private, and limited to six students, so the total "audience" for any defamation was a grand total of five people -- and, while the comments were mean, they were also pretty obviously not true. Also, suing the parents for "negligence" in supervising their kids isn't likely to get very far. All in all, it seems like the case probably won't last very long.

However, the results on the other side of the planet were a bit different. VivekM points us to the news of a teen in India who started an Orkut group against a certain political party. Many people left anonymous comments as a part of the group, but the party sued the teenager who created the group, claiming he violated a local law against "hurting public sentiment." Rather than realizing the the kid starting the group should have no liability for the statements made by others, the Supreme Court in India has said that he can be charged, noting: "You are a computer student and you know how many people access internet portals. Hence, if someone files a criminal action on the basis of the content, then you will have to face the case. You have to go before the court and explain your conduct."

At some point, people and courts will recognize that there will always be jerks online, and it makes little sense to go around filing lawsuits against anyone in any way connected to those being jerky (even the jerky folks themselves), but until that time, the court systems around the world are going to be quite busy with similar cases.

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Mekonik used an Arduino board, solenoid coil, hall effect sensor, and some clever coding to hold a permanent magnet in mid-air -

The device uses a small Hall effect sensor (SS19 from Honeywell, available for $0.50 from AllElectronics) to sense the field of the permanent magnet and uses that information to modulate the magnetic field of the electromagnet. Since the sensor is on the electromagnet,

the reading on it is the sum of the fields of the floating magnet as well as the electromagnet. The greatest challenge was separating these two and getting the floating magnet's field only. After some theoretical research into inductors and the Amper's law and experimentation, I achieved pretty good stability of a hovering magnet or a magnetic dart or whatever. The result is not completely perfect, some small oscillations are still noticeable. I think that I achieved the limitations given by the Arduino A/D converter.

As you can see, it's currently a magnetic pull instead of the familiar push levitation - but research continues. In order to get feedback/response to the sensor fast enough, he made some key changes to the Arduino IDE's serial library. More info plus discussion in the comments of the relevant project's blog entry.

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The Cheap Vegetable Gardner created this soil moisture sensor using nothing more than picture wall hanging hooks, a soda straw, hot glue, and some Plaster of Paris.

After a little research there was the classic science class method of creating a homemade sensor by simply putting two galvanized nails in the soil and measuring the resistance between them. A major problem with this solution is the soil composition can significantly vary the resistance and keeping the spacing between the nails could be troublesome.

After a little more research I came across the method that has been working well for over 50 years. This method includes taking two metal probes and inserting them into a gypsum block and measure the resistance between them. The gypsum absorbs the water and provides a decent range of resistance and moisture measurement.

Unfortunately I was fresh out of gypsum, so I looked around the garage and found a good substitute, Plaster of Paris...

How to make a cheap soil moisture sensor

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Paul Lamere, of the Music Machinery blog, has a most excellent post investigating the detectability of drummers who use a click track:

I've always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don't, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK ( remix is a Python library that allows you to analyze and manipulate music). In my first attempt, I used remix to analyze a track and then I just printed out the duration of each beat in a song and used gnuplot to plot the data. The results weren't so good - the plot was rather noisy. It turns out there's quite a bit of variation from beat to beat. In my second attempt I averaged the beat durations over a short window, and the resulting plot was quite good.

From the post are these two graphs showing the tempo deviation of Green Day's American Idiot and Enter Sandman by Metallica. Can you guess which band uses a click track?

Paul has posted the necessary Python code and a link to the Echo Nest API, for those of you who are now curious about your own music collection.

In Search of the Click Track

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One tech idea that simply won't go away is the set-top box for streaming movies. It's been tried plenty of times before (Netflix, Vudu, Akimbo, Moviebeam, and more) with little success, thanks to technical problems, poor content, bad business models, or some combination of all of them. Each iteration takes a slightly different tack, but the end result usually ends up the same: the dedicated set-top boxes go out with a whimper. Now, there's yet another one coming out, called ZillionTV, with its own take on things. It's the same basic idea: you hook the box up to your TV and your broadband connection, then use it to stream video content. The business model's a little different, though: it will be sold in partnership with ISPs, and users will be able to choose between pay-per-view content without ads, and ad-supported video, including both films and network TV shows. The usual bugbears seem to apply, including worries about the streaming quality and lack of a wide range of content. The ad-supported model, which will be based on targeting ads to users by tracking their viewing habits and other data, is interesting, though TiVo was playing around in a similar space a few years ago and their efforts seem to have gone quiet. What's a bit odd, though, is that the company says the box will cost $100, because "consumers didn't respond as well to free." That's puzzling -- especially if the company really hopes to make its money from advertising. In any case, we definitely won't hold our breath to see if ZillionTV can succeed where so many others have failed.

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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GamesIndustry is running an interview with Theodore Bergquist, CEO of GamersGate, in which he forecasts the death of physical game distribution in favor of digital methods, perhaps in only a few years. He says, "Look at the music industry, look at 2006 when iTunes went from not being in the top six of sellers — in the same year in December it was top three, and the following year number one. I think digital distribution is absolutely the biggest threat [traditional retailers] can ever have." Rock, Paper, Shotgun spoke with Capcom's Christian Svensson, who insists that developing digital distribution is one of their top priorities, saying Capcom will already "probably do as much digital selling as retail in the current climate." How many of the games you acquire come on physical media these days? At what point will the ease of immediate downloads outweigh a manual and a box to stick on your shelf (if it doesn't already)?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of different sources are reporting on a "near deal" between Universal Music and YouTube to create a special stand-alone music video site, sort of like a "Hulu for music." As has been widely reported, all of the major record labels have been in talks to try to come up with new deals with YouTube -- with most of the earlier focus concerning how to deal with user-uploaded clips that contained music. Famously, Warner Music pulled out of discussions, when it was angry about the terms of the deal. Sony Music, however, recently renewed their deal. The Universal Music deal would be something much larger -- focusing more on content put on an entirely new site by the label itself. The other major labels have been offered the option of joining in as well.

Of course, no deal is definite, and with all of these things, the devil is in the details. The News.com report notes that the "benefits" that each party brings to the table is that Universal would bring the music, while YouTube/Google would bring the technology. If that's really all there is to it, then it's missing the point of YouTube. The value has never been in the technology itself -- which isn't even as good as some others', and not all that hard to replicate. The value in YouTube has always been the community. Many people now go to YouTube first to find any kind of video they're looking for -- and there's a large and growing community of folks who use YouTube to communicate with others. Creating an entire site to get rid of the riffraff just for the sake of selling higher CPM ads may sound good at first, but if it does so in a way that diminishes the value of the community, it may limit the usefulness or success of the site. In fact, at just about the same time that news of this possible deal was leaking, news was breaking that PluggedIn, a site that tried to be a "Hulu for music" and apparently had wonderful technology, was shutting down.

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justin.foell writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created a Surveillance Self-Defense site. Created with the help of the Open Society Institute, the site intends to serve as a how-to guide for protecting your private data against government spying. From their press release, they 'aim to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government's hands.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Right after the Bilski ruling that greatly limited software and business method patents, lawyers who were in favor of such patents held a conference call, where they basically said the ruling wouldn't change anything. They claimed that the only patent that would be impacted would be Bilski's, and that everything else would be just like normal. It seems they forgot to tell the Patent Office, which has continued to reject patents based on this new ruling that, in all likelihood, would have made it through prior to the ruling. That's not to say that all of the problems associated with such patents are now done with -- but it does seem like the lawyers on that conference call were doing a bit more wishful thinking than honest assessment of the situation.

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Since the 1930s, IBM has not only created adding machines, computers, and the like, but also collected them. They apparently have an amazing historical collection of "counting and reckoning tools and devices," some of which can be checked out online. Joel has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Seen here is a Hahn Calculator from 1774. It could multiply, divide, add, and subtract up to values with 12 digits. "IBM's 'Antique Attic' Gallery"

This Friday, at 12pm Pacific (3pm ET), MAKE is launching a new Blog Talk Radio show, called Make: Talk, hosted by MAKE Editor and Publisher, Dale Dougherty, and MAKE Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder. Each week, they'll have special guest makers on the show, talk about DIY projects, and what's going on at MAKE magazine and Make: Online. They'll also be taking calls and your questions live.

For this first show, Friday March 6, 2009, they'll be discussing Volume 17, the Lost Knowledge issue, of MAKE. I will be the guest, along with Jake von Slatt, the cover gentleman for the issue and creator of the wonderful Wimshurst project featured in 17. We'll be talking about steampunk, and other lost, retro, antique technologies, and whatever else springs to mind.

If you want to join in on the fun, give us a call at (646) 915-8698, between 12-12:30 PT, 3-3:30 ET, on Friday. And you can listen to the show via the widget below.

Make: Talk on Blog Talk Radio

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From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue!

Buy your copy in the Maker Shed
Subscribe to MAKE
Access the Digital Edition (if you're already a subscriber)

In Volume 17, MAKE goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene -- makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine (an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts), a Florence Siphon coffee brewer, and a teacup-powered Stirling engine. This special section also covers watchmaking, letterpress printing, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th-century technologies.

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An anonymous reader writes "The NSW government of Australia has quietly introduced new police powers for covert home searches and covert hacking of computers. The suspect may not be notified of the covert activity for up to three years. These new powers are similar to those given to the UK police earlier this year. The new warrants can only be issued in the Supreme Court for suspected serious offences punishable by at least seven years jail — which includes computer crime offences."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in December, we pointed to yet another (in a long line) of stories about lost votes on an e-voting machine in an election in California. The machines in question were from Premier Election Solutions, the shiny coat of paint put on the e-voting unit of Diebold, whose name had been tarnished for a long history of defective, highly vulnerable e-voting machines (along with a long history of denying any problems whatsoever with those machines). You would think after all these years of criticism, and a shiny new name, the company would be a bit more careful to make sure its machines weren't actually defective. No such luck.

As Slashdot points out, the Secretary of State's report on the matter clearly places the blame on Diebold's faulty equipment (warning: pdf file). Still, the scariest part is what we noted in the original story about the problems: despite all of the claims to the contrary, the 200 or so lost votes wouldn't have been noticed at all under Diebold/Premier's normal auditing process. It was only because of an experimental "transparency" project set up by local officials that the mistake was noted. Thus, Diebold machines in other regions may have lost votes, and no one will know about it. So can anyone explain why anyone still uses e-voting machines from this company? For years they've lied, stonewalled, denied problems, attacked critics... and produced faulty equipment over and over again. And it's still being used.

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Check out Rhizome's article about 3D printing (fabbing) and digital art, with plenty of links and pictures of inspiring works from artists around the world.

Several years ago, while making the lecture circuit rounds, American architect William Massie described a key goal within his practice as moving towards a more direct translation between bits and atoms. Architecture has always thrived on the tension between representation and material assemblages and what he was addressing with this comment was the dawning of an era characterized by a new proximity between digital models and physical output. In selected contexts, artists, architects, and designers have been exploring these accelerated development cycles for a decade but the involved technologies are descending in price so quickly that, for example, 3D printers are now cheaper than laser printers were in 1985. A key question: how does the looming ubiquity of these tools and workflows apply to the production and display of new media art? This article will explore digital fabrication (aka fabbing) at a variety of scales which include the curatorial questions raised by these new hybrid industrial design/sculpture objects as well as the implications on the practice of individual artists.

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At San Francisco's Pizzeria Delfina, they know how to own their pain. Rather than wringing their hands over Internet sourpusses who give them one-star Yelp ratings, they've printed up tees with excerpts from the most scathing reviews ("This place sucks") and given them to the staff to wear.

Instead of simply bitching about Yelp, they've made Yelp their bitch and taken quotes from one-star reviews posted on Yelp about the pizzeria and made them into T-shirts for their staff to wear. (They also have one that simply says, "This place sucks," a quote from yet another typically eloquent and insightful Yelp review.)

The Yelp Tee: Almost More Brilliant Than Pizzeria Delfina's Pizza (via Consumerist)

An anonymous reader writes "The folks behind the DNA-Rainbow project (discussed on Slashdot before) apparently have some time to play around with genome data. After creating amazing pictures from the human DNA code they are now transforming all chromosomes to audio and streaming them to the Internet. Every base is read and broadcasted instead converting it to a color. Seemingly this artistic project will last a while. After some math they found out that it will take them more than 23.5 years to air the whole human genome sequence."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This probably isn't much of a surprise for most folks, but scammers have wasted no time at all in using news about the massive government stimulus plan to try to trick suckers into various scams. Many of these are scams trying to get people to sign up to pay a "fee" to find out how they can get their "stimulus check" even though the stimulus program isn't sending out checks to individuals. Expect to see plenty more similar scams as well.

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I tried to listen to Sunday's Face The Nation podcast, an interview with Rahm Emanuel, but I couldn't stand it. I've really gotten out of the habit, and now with fresh ears I know exactly what's wrong. I want the interviews to be grounded in the reality that we, the people, live -- not the make-believe logic that governs the ruling class in DC. Schieffer kept asking questions Republicans would ask to try to make trouble, but I understood they were based on an unstated and unproved premise that earmarks are inherently evil. Emanuel was answering the questions directly -- yes we will have earmarks. Schieffer kept playing the gotcha game, but it was stupid, Emanuel had conceded the point! OMG.

Our economy is crumbling, and these guys are arguing nonsense. We have important business to conduct, saving what we have left of our way of life. But you can't have a realistic conversation without some supposed "journalist" trying to trap you into telling a truth you're willing to stipulate.

The solution is simple -- give Schieffer a script written by real people, and if he won't do it, get someone who will. There's no time to screw around. We need to get real, quickly, without any delay.

Now for the good news, sorta. I listened to a fantastic interview by Terry Gross with Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF. It's both sobering and encouraging. He lays out what we need to do, simply and clearly. It's just common sense, highly recommended.

There are so-called patent trolls, abusing patent law to basically force others to pay them cash for no good reason. And there are "sample trolls" who have abused copyright law to get musicians to pay them money (often despite the fact that the "trolls" probably really don't even own the copyrights in question, and the use is almost certainly "fair use" anyway). And... now... we can add to the list the "clipart troll." Slashdot has a post detailing the apparent campaign of one George Riddick, who apparently claims to hold the copyright on tons of common clipart, and is trying to use the recently enacted ProIP law to basically threaten tons of sites, who often were using clipart that they had licensed. Riddick may, in fact, own the copyright on some of these images, but rather than try to build an actual business around them, he seems to have focused solely on blaming others for his own failure to craft a reasonable business model -- and now it's moved on to suing others as well.

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With Tahoe having received a whopping near 4 feet of snow in the last 24 hours (!!!), my mind can't help but to drift to Makers we've profiled in the magazine who are snow enthusiasts.

In MAKE Volume 10, we featured the folks behind skibuilders.com: Kam K. Leang (Big Kam), Kelvin Wu, and Kam S. Leang (Little Kam). These 3 friends, all avid telemark skiers, are on a mission to show that building a pair of skis (or a snowboard) is not as hard as it sounds, especially if you're the average garage tinkerer with basic woodworking skills. Pictured above are a row of their handmade skis. Their site features a great how-to section, including the Intro to Ski Building overview video, and detailed instructions on building the equipment you need: a ski press, core profiler, and edge bender. This is definitely an open source project, folks, as these gentlemen are generous with all their combined knowledge. From the article, here is a picture of Wu's pneumatic ski press:

And the makers with some fresh skis hot off the press:

Taking it to the next level of DIY skiing is maker Troy Caldwell, who we featured in MAKE Volume 08. In 1990, Caldwell got a sweet deal on 400 acres near Lake Tahoe, between the Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley ski areas. (He actually owns about 70 acres of Squaw, including KT-22, which the ski area leases from him.) A former member of the U.S. Ski Team, Caldwell is a maker with the dream of building his own private ski facility. As a matter of fact, he welded all the towers for his handmade ski lift in his own garage, with the help of a series of pulleys and hoists to move the heavy pieces. From the article, here he is in his garage, next to his snow cat:

He placed the towers on the mountain over a two-week period with the help of a helicopter and 30 volunteers:

A lawsuit filed by Squaw Valley had put this makers dream on hold. SF Gate reported on his progress last year. We'll have to check in with Caldwell to see if his awe-inspiring dream has (hopefully) become a reality.

You can pick up back issues of MAKE Volume 10 (the Home Electronics issue) in the Maker Shed. However, MAKE Volume 08 (the Toys and Games issue) is sold out, but if you subscribe, you can have digital access to all 17 scintillating volumes.

Insider Scoop: Look for a DIY Splitboard project coming up in MAKE Volume 19 for all you backcountry riders! (And a DIY Surfboard project for the wave addicts.)

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When I mentioned that I had a tool that archives my Twitter posts, and those of people I follow, a fair number of people asked that I release the code. I have done so, the app has a user interface and docs, and if you want to try it out or run it, you're welcome to.

The software runs in the OPML Editor, on Mac or Windows. It maintains a folder of folders of OPML files, one for each user, organized in a calendar structure, one for each day; and it keeps an index, also in OPML, and a weblogs.com-compatible changes.xml file for the whole thing. The pointers in this paragraph point into my archive. If you run the software, you will have your own versions.

I also added a feature that automatically (and optionally) synchronizes the folder with a structure on Amazon S3. I want to encourage people to try out S3. You don't need a lot of technical skills to do it. I've included a section in the Howto that walks you through it.

If all this sounds confusing, start here, and follow the instructions, carefully.

http://editor.opml.org/twitterCalendarTool.html

If you have questions, post them here or as a comment on the Howto.

Good luck and I hope you enjoy it!

PS: There may be some interesting applications that can be built on this structure of folders.

CWmike writes "A just-leaked build of Windows 7 lets users remove Internet Explorer, the first time that Microsoft has offered the option since it integrated the browser with Windows in 1997, two bloggers reported today. The move might have been prompted by recent charges by the European Union that Microsoft has stifled browser competition by bundling IE with its operating system, the bloggers speculated. One solution under consideration by the EU would require Microsoft to disable IE if the user decided to install a different browser, such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome. Microsoft had no comment when asked to confirm whether Windows 7 will let users dump IE8 or whether the option was in reaction to the EU charges."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Check out the Doomsday Sound Kit from the Maker Shed. It's a really cool sound generator based on circuit bending a toy. It's easy to build and a lot of fun to play. I haven't made a video yet, but there is one posted in the Maker Shed.

A noise generator that operates entirely on body resistance. The main circuit board is a left over from a Doomsday Novelty Device which beeps for 5 seconds when a button is pressed. At the heart of a circuit is a Motorola MC14001 U Quad Gate, basically a 4 oscillator circuit to tweak. Various spots on the board have been found to cause nice variations in the resulting sound that the circuit was originally intended to produce. The kit can fit into a very small housing, such as a VHS case, or a Kid's Lunchbox. The included touch contacts create a rugged interface with the board for interesting and expressive sound generation.

The kit comes with everything you need, except a case to house all the components. I used an old plastic case that was headed for the trash. Now it's a really cool instrument.

More about the Doomsday Sound Kit in the Maker Shed

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It seems that hardly a month goes by without news of yet another credit-card data breach. Based on this, it seems fairly clear that the industry largely sees these breaches and the fallout from them as a cost of doing business, and one that's preferable to the cost of securing and monitoring their systems effectively. The industry has come up with a security compliance framework, but such rules have a history of being ignored. Even if they aren't ignored, though, they're so full of loopholes that they're fairly worthless. As the original poster, Andrew Conry-Murray, puts it, "It's not about security. It's about an industry covering its ass." Basically, the compliance system exists not to truly protect data, but rather to ward off government intervention.

Conry-Murray's contention is that the compliance system is far too easy to game, particularly because it only checks companies' systems once per year. His suggestion is to force all merchants and processors to comply, and check their systems regularly. Companies could opt out, but by doing so, they would be agreeing to significantly higher fees and penalties in the case of a breach. As he notes, these fees would have to be high enough to where they would make devoting more resources to security a more desirable option. This idea, and indeed any that dramatically increases the cost of breaches, is worth mulling over as a way to encourage companies to increase their security. As long as the fallout from data breaches isn't enough to make companies sit up and take notice -- and change their behavior -- there won't be any real change.

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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Jess Hemerly showed me this photo of a delightful alteration of an emergency hammer box. I asked her where she got the image and she just said, "the Internet."

On Craft, Becky Stern presents a video of how to ply yarn.