A quick note -- I decided yesterday, that rather than deal with restoring the new netbook that was crippled by malware after just a few hours use, I would instead take advantage of Amazon's generous return policy. I sent the computer back yesterday, and today, before noon, a new one arrived. I spent about half of the day provisioning it, something I'm getting good at.

But this time I've used the new knowledge I have about protection to install various tools that help guard against a reinfection. I promised I'd list those here so others can benefit from the incredible outpouring of information from the members of the community.

First, I declined to update Java and then went to Add-Remove Programs, and took Java out of the system entirely. Perhaps someday this computer will need Java, then I can download it from Sun's website. Until then I don't want to take the chance that it was the opening that the malware got in through. (It's the one thing I updated, and when I went to a perf test site to measure the speed of my connection, the little app was running in Java. It's all I could think of, so it maybe unfair to blame Java, just want to say that.)

Then I installed the following apps: Ad-Aware, Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes. The last is, according to Stan Krute, a tool that will help if the computer gets infected. Yesterday I learned how important that is. The malware made it impossible for me to get to the Norton site to get a tool that might remove the bad stuff. Same with McAfee and the Microsoft site for defending against malware. It's a good idea to have the removal software already in place when you need it.

Ad-Aware and Spybot are two old friends. In the days of Kazaa (a supposedly nice program that totally ruined a laptop with spyware) they helped get rid of the infections that kept coming back. In those days I was using IE. One of the blessings of this age is Firefox. It may not be the perfect browser, but it isn't full of all the openings of ActiveX and whatever else IE leaves open that the bad guys take advantage of. I will never ever under any circumstances run MSIE again.

Everyone says great things about Avast. I've run it once, it installed easily.

At this point after just a few hours, all the tools say the computer is 100 percent clean. I have the OPML editor running, and uTorrent, Firefox, VLC, SlingPlayer, iTunes and not much more. Ready to kicks some butt I hope.

A quick note -- I decided yesterday, that rather than deal with restoring the new netbook that was crippled by malware after just a few hours use, I would instead take advantage of Amazon's generous return policy. I sent the computer back yesterday, and today, before noon, a new one arrived. I spent about half of the day provisioning it, something I'm getting good at.

But this time I've used the new knowledge I have about protection to install various tools that help guard against a reinfection. I promised I'd list those here so others can benefit from the incredible outpouring of information from the members of the community.

First, I declined to update Java and then went to Add-Remove Programs, and took Java out of the system entirely. Perhaps someday this computer will need Java, then I can download it from Sun's website. Until then I don't want to take the chance that it was the opening that the malware got in through. (It's the one thing I updated, and when I went to a perf test site to measure the speed of my connection, the little app was running in Java. It's all I could think of, so it maybe unfair to blame Java, just want to say that.)

Then I installed the following apps: Ad-Aware, Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes. The last is, according to Stan Krute, a tool that will help if the computer gets infected. Yesterday I learned how important that is. The malware made it impossible for me to get to the Norton site to get a tool that might remove the bad stuff. Same with McAfee and the Microsoft site for defending against malware. It's a good idea to have the removal software already in place when you need it.

Ad-Aware and Spybot are two old friends. In the days of Kazaa (a supposedly nice program that totally ruined a laptop with spyware) they helped get rid of the infections that kept coming back. In those days I was using IE. One of the blessings of this age is Firefox. It may not be the perfect browser, but it isn't full of all the openings of ActiveX and whatever else IE leaves open that the bad guys take advantage of. I will never ever under any circumstances run MSIE again.

Everyone says great things about Avast. I've run it once, it installed easily.

At this point after just a few hours, all the tools say the computer is 100 percent clean. I have the OPML editor running, and uTorrent, Firefox, VLC, SlingPlayer, iTunes and not much more. Ready to kicks some butt I hope.

Norsefire writes "Two economists at Washington University in St. Louis are claiming that copyright and patent laws are 'killing innovation' and 'hurting [the] economy.' Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine state they would like to see copyright law abolished completely as there are other protections available to the creators of 'intellectual property' (a term they describe as 'propaganda,' and of recent origin). They are calling on Congress to grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Inimitable web celebrity Leslie Hall presents her tribute to crafters and makers - the danceworthy "Craft Talk".
[Thanks, Erica!]

Hall and crew go for a Guinness record with the "world's largest gem sweater in the world". They'll definitely have some competition should they try for knitting next -

From the pages of CRAFT:

CRAFT, Volume 01, page 16

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US courts have generally recognized that eBay isn't liable for the actions of people who use its site to sell counterfeit goods, though a recent decision went the other way. This situation reflects the lack of uniformity around the world in this type of case: for instance, eBay was found liable in France, but was not in Belgium. In the Belgian case, eBay was sued by cosmetics maker L'Oreal, but the company hasn't let the ruling slow it down, as it's now filed a similar suit in the UK. It's also sued eBay in France, Germany and Spain -- which could lead one to believe that it's jurisdiction shopping, simply filing suits in many different countries and seeing what sticks, with the hopes that victory in one place will force eBay to play ball worldwide. The issue of eBay's lack of liability as a platform provider remains an important one, but the problem of international jurisdiction shopping remains a massive one for companies online.

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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Byzantine writes "The Mississippi Legislature has passed MS House Bill 1461 which would amend the state's tax laws specifically to charge sales tax on 'electrically transferred digital products,' including products bought via mail-order. The bill is currently on the governor's desk awaiting signature." Softpedia claims that 20 states have enacted download taxes of one sort or another — most of them for iTunes music — and that New York is considering taxing downloads of all kinds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just last week, we wrote about how officials in Nebraska were coming down hard on a library for buying a PS2 and the game Rock Band as an educational tool and a way to bring more kids to the library. The officials there (and many in our comments) seemed to think that there was no redeeming value for the library to do so. Yet, as reader Tyler Hipwell points out, the American Library Association is now pushing new gaming in libraries initiatives, including an online toolkit for building up gaming resources at the library. Someone should alert officials in Nebraska.

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My friend Justin Sabe made this nifty cigar box sitar and did an Instructable and a short YouTube vid for it.

I decided yesterday to stop thinking about how to do it and finally make a cigar box sitar. The main difference is the buzzing bridge. In many ways, it's easier to make than a cigar box guitar/ukulele because it's fretless and doesn't have any critical measurements to make it in tune. It took me as long to construct as my girlfriend to take a medium-length bath and about three times longer than that to fine tune it for a good rich buzzing sound. As you can see, my cat likes it just fine.

Cigar box sitar (tamboura)

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moonbender writes "Fake but working iTunes gift cards are being sold on Chinese auction sites for a fraction of their value: 'The owner of the Taobao shop told us frankly that the gift card codes are created using key-generators. He also said that he paid money to use the hackers' service. Half a year ago, when they started the business, the price was around 320 RMB [about $47] for [a] $200 card, then more people went into this business and the price went all the way down to 18 RMB [about $2.60] per card, "but we make more money as the amount of customers is growing rapidly."' The people at Chinese market researcher Outdustry have apparently confirmed this by buying a coupon and transferring it into an iTunes account. Oops."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

moonbender writes "Fake but working iTunes gift cards are being sold on Chinese auction sites for a fraction of their value: 'The owner of the Taobao shop told us frankly that the gift card codes are created using key-generators. He also said that he paid money to use the hackers' service. Half a year ago, when they started the business, the price was around 320 RMB [about $47] for [a] $200 card, then more people went into this business and the price went all the way down to 18 RMB [about $2.60] per card, "but we make more money as the amount of customers is growing rapidly."' The people at Chinese market researcher Outdustry have apparently confirmed this by buying a coupon and transferring it into an iTunes account. Oops."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Funny or Die's take on a nationalized Citibank. NSFW language.

Over at Craft: Online, Cathy Callahan writes about iron-on patches from the 1970s, taking special note of their packaging design.

Pictured above are a few packages of iron-on patches I found at my mom's house. I actually think she might have used the drawing on that Sturdy Brand package as a style guide for the way she dressed me. There are pictures of me dressed in almost that exact same outfit. I absolutely adore the graphic design, color palette, and illustrations. Wouldn't you just love to walk into Jo-Ann's today and see a whole rack of packages that looked like these?

I am actually kind of fascinated by the Plasti-Stitch corduroy patches. Were they meant to blend in seamlessly and look like you never had a hole in your pants? Or could you go wild and do a little mixing and matching? Perhaps you could tone down your plaid pants a bit by adding a little gray corduroy patch. The back of the package lists purple, olive green, maroo,n and gold as other available colors. Wow!

Let's take a closer look at the Touch O' Magic package: "Use on new jeans for longer wear..." I love their approach to "preventative" patching. But why not wait until you actually have a hole? And isn't the very nature of denim its strength? Iron-on patch sales must have been down in 1968, so those folks at Sandrew, Inc. (makers of Touch O' Magic) of Streetsboro, Ohio, had to come up with new ways to sell their product.

Paean to iron-on patches from the 1970s

The ACLU of Northern California has put out a primer, Privacy and Free Speech: It’s Good for Business, (1.5 MB pdf) to "help companies avoid privacy and free speech mistakes that can lead to negative press, government investigations and fines, costly lawsuits, and loss of customers and business partners."

Among other sections, this primer will help businesses:
  * Keep users informed about privacy policies and new services so customer surprise doesn’t lead to front-page horror stories.

   * Secure customer information by creating forward-thinking policies about data collection, retention, and disclosure.

   * Stand up for free speech rights so customers don’t let their mouse clicks to a competitor do the talking.

By making privacy and free speech a priority as new ventures and products are being developed, companies can save time and money by protecting customer rights while bolstering the bottom line.

An HTML version is in the works, I'm told.

(Tom Andrews/LAist)

Julie says: "The house is pretty fun, but the chandelier very very odd."

In honor of Barbie's 50th Birthday yesterday, locally based Mattel revealed the famous ultimate California blonde's Malibu Dream House along with the new version of Barbie. The 3,500 square foot house in Malibu was designed by “Happy Chic” interior designer Jonathan Adler and features a chandelier made of Barbie hair, a closet filled with thousands of shoes and a sunburst mirror made from 65 Barbie dolls.

Barbie's full-size Malibu house

ivaldes3 writes in to note his post up on Linux Medical News, pointing out the severe shortcomings of the Health IT provisions of the just-passed stimulus bill. "The government has authorized enough money to purchase EMR freedom for the nation. Instead the government appears set to double down on proprietary lock-down. The government currently appears poised to purchase serfdom instead of freedom and performance for patients, practitioners and the nation. An intellectual and financial servitude to proprietary EMR companies for little or no gain. A truly bad bargain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gama-Go's Greg Long just snapped this photo of a roll-up door in San Francisco. Click the image to see it larger. Here's what's written on the door above and below the graffiti:

All are welcome to express themselves in the box below.

Printing within the above box is hereby expressly permitted and shall not be considered "graffiti" in accordance with article #23 of the San Francico Municipal Code.

Sweden is home, of course, to the folks who run The Pirate Bay, but it's also the home of numerous indie bands and indie labels that are doing some really interesting experiments that focus on embracing the opportunities and possibilities presented by technology, rather than fighting against it all. Dan Sellberg writes in to alert us to an amusing experiment by the band Bob Hund, who is releasing a new song, called Fantastiskt, but they're doing so by selling the only copy in existence of the song on eBay as an art project:

"Fantastiskt" will be sold and delivered as an art piece comprising; the original master dubplate vinyl (the only existing copy) mounted on a real working turntable with cover art, song lyrics and monogram etched onto the lid by the artist Martin Kann.

The publisher insists that this will be the only release of this single. Talk about taking "scarcity" to a different level... Obviously, this is something of a publicity stunt, but it's not a bad one.

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Kevin Lin, 12, is apparently a master at Adobe After Effects. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

My friend Dustin "UPSO" Hostetler writes:

Driving through indiana on my way to toledo from chicago, i chanced upon a broken radio station. i listened for over a 1/2 hour, in hopes someone would come on the air and explain what happened. i slowly went insane. "and find a production?" "and find redemption?" what was the man saying?

91.9

I've had an Android G1 phone since late October (verdict: I hate it less than other phones). There are plenty of useful/fun apps in the Android Market, but today I downloaded my first game-changing app: Android Calling Card, which auto-dials any cheapo calling card you buy down at the corner store, and the PIN, and then any number from your address book, automagically. It supports multiple cards (the cornershop card-array is very country specific -- Eastern Europe, USA, China, and other nations all have their own cards) and unobtrusively shims itself into the phone's built-in dialer app.

I just used it for an hour-long overseas conference-call -- the kind of thing that used to cost me £20 or £30 -- and the total cost was £0.51! I hate how the mobile carriers gouge on long-distance, so I get a grim feeling of satisfaction knowing that I'm depriving Orange UK of the gigantic sums it used to charge me for staying in touch with people elsewhere (of course, I'm also pissed at Orange because an operator named Colin boneheadedly kept on insisting that I'd somehow used 37GB of bandwidth last month with my phone's 3G networking -- something that would require me to watch YouTube 24/7 every day of the month to even approach!).

I can't see any reason why this app wouldn't work when I'm roaming in other countries (I have a T-Mobile SIM I use when I'm in the US) -- I'd just have to drop a buck or two on a local calling-card to work with it.

Android Calling Card

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy reports on rumors that IE8 may be Internet Explorer's swan song: 'IE8 is the last version of the Internet Explorer Web browser,' Kennedy writes. 'It seems that Microsoft is preparing to throw in the towel on its Internet Explorer engine once and for all.' And what will replace it? Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit, which is used by Safari and Chrome. The WebKit story, Kennedy contends, could be a feint and that Microsoft will instead adopt Gazelle, Microsoft Research's brand-new engine that thinks like an OS. 'This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected.'" The sticking point will be what Microsoft does about compatibility for ActiveX apps.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I helped Tom Igoe with the RFID/Arduino workshop at ETech, and it was a lot of fun. Really inspiring to watch people explore and make!

Alasdair Allan wrote up the workshop over at The Daily ACK:

My afternoon tutorial is Hands-on RFID for Makers given by Tom Igoe and Brian Jepson. We've been given, well purchased, but you know what I mean, an Arduino mini pro, a bread board and a SonMicro SM-130 module to allow us to read and write to the Mifare RFID tags that O'Reilly are using here at ETech.

We kicked off by accessing the card reader directly from our laptops using Processing and Tom's SonMicro library, first to just read from the card and then to write to it...

The Daily ACK: ETech: Hands-on RFID for Makers

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At the NYC FIRST Robotics Competition this past weekend, we launched an exciting new program to allow FIRST robot teams, and any other group or club, to raise funds by selling subscriptions to MAKE. Here's how it works:

• You email your contact information to makemoney@makezine.com (see details on the card above).
• We send your group a fundraising kit with subscription forms.
• You return the forms and subscription payments to us.
• We send you back a monthly check for 50% of all your sales.

Your team or club gets $17 for every subscription sold! And as an added incentive, the top team salesperson gets a $50 Maker Shed Gift Certificate!

We're really excited by this. We think it's a great way to capitalize worthy tech, science, civic, and social organizations, while expanding our subscriber base. If you participate, please tell us about your team/club/group in the comments and how much money you were able to raise.

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Want to know why the old school newspapers are failing one after another? Maybe it's because they're spending all their time rewriting the same column over and over again. The latest is David Carr of the NY Times who has written the same column that has been written about fifty times in the past 6 months by others, saying that newspapers should all collude, stop giving away content for free, force Google to pay to link to them, among some other nonsense that makes no economic sense whatsoever.

Steve Yelvington, however, has put up a good list of eight challenges that any newspaper or reporter who wants to charge for news should need to respond to in full. His list is focused on those who want to charge for "local" news, but I think it mostly applies to all news:

1. The painful lessons of experience. You might want to look into the history of attempts by general news sites to get consumers to pay for access. Did you actually think we hadn't thought of it, and tried it? Your ignorance of the field and of history is one of the things that makes the online guys reject everything you say. Do you need a list? The burden of research here is on you; it's your idea, after all. But I can tell you where to start.

2. The problem of scale (volume). It takes scale to make paid content work, and you don't have the volume you think you have. Quit making up wishful percentages based on your totally bogus monthly unique-user count ("well, if we get just 10 percent of our 85 zillion unique users to pay"). If you're going to engage in wishful thinking, base it on the cohort of individuals who visit your website more than three times a week. You will be shocked, and dismayed. I've been saying this for years: How can you get them to pay if you can't even get them to visit frequently when it's free?

3. The problem of scale (breadth). The idea of premium paid content (to generate reader revenue) plus free commodity content (to support an ad model) is alluring, but be honest with yourself. Local sites don't have the breadth of content to simultaneously support a paid premium content model, while maintaining enough free pages to harvest the advertising benefits of the open model.

4. Relative strength of the geotargeted advertising model. Ultimately the idea of paid content goes to war against the idea of ad-supported content. In local markets, the ad model is stronger than in global markets. There is, and always will be, a gross surplus of ad inventory on the Internet, and that drives CPMs into the sand. But actual deliverable geotargeted advertising -- and please understand that I'm talking about a reality that includes the entire sales support system, not theory -- is an entirely different matter. Local advertising sold by local sales forces is a substantial revenue stream, and if you're not tapping into that, it's your own fault.

5. Competition. There are plenty of competitors and would-be competitors just waiting for you to strangle your own website so they can step in and steal your future. The larger the market, the more this is true. In some relatively small, isolated markets you may be able to get away with it. For awhile.

6. Lack of unique content, coupled with a false sense of being unique. When you've had a virtual monopoly for decades, you grow arrogant and develop blind spots about your own weaknesses. From the viewpoint of the consumer, you're not nearly as unique and special as you think. And you've exacerbated this problem with your poor pay scales historically, and more recently your vicious cutting aimed at higher-salary veterans.

7. Support costs. If somebody drops 50 cents into a newsbox and it won't open, they just go away mad. If somebody is paying for access to your website and it won't work, they're going to call and suck up 12 dollars of staff time. You have no idea what you're getting into. Computers are evil, perverse devices aimed at driving humans crazy.

8. Your own staff. Your online staff hates the idea and they'll do everything they can to undermine it. Yeah, you can fire them. Why don't you get a table saw and cut off the fingers of your right hand while you're doing it? I've seen this happen time after time as newspapers consolidate print and online staffs, and the "formerly known as print" people conspire to expel the "formerly known as online" people. The result is a great leap backward. It's self-destructive.

I'd add another important factor to this list: What value are you providing that makes it worth paying you? That's the question I keep asking. Newspaper folks seem to think that their content is magically so valuable that everyone will start paying if they charge. There's no evidence that's true at all. So what value are they adding beyond all the other content out there that makes it worth actually paying for?

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Pablo sez, "Idiots' Books and Tor.com are happy to bring you One Page Wonders, an exciting new way of hiding a dozen different stories -- all of which can be unlocked with a pair of scissors and a few deft folds --in a single sheet of paper. This week's installment is called 'Captain A-OK Fights Blug-Glub-Glub.'"

One Page Wonders: Captain A-OK Fights Blug-Glub-Glub (Thanks, Pablo!)

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Make: television is super excited about a project coming to Make: Day this weekend. The guys from a local DIY group, Studio Bricolage, sent us this picture of their progress so far. They start by affixing a cable to a balcony ledge which they'll drop down three stories to the bottom floor. Once it's secure, they'll tie a 10-pound bowling ball with 4 RC-controlled paint nozzles mounted to it. A huge piece of paper will sit on the floor (with a tarp under it, of course) and they'll fling the bowling ball around and hand over the controls to the crowd to let them squirt the paint at their will.

The bonus feature? A remote camera that'll broadcast the signal to a nearby TV screen.

For those who can't be there, we'll have pictures, we promise!

Make: Day is this Saturday, March 14th from 10am -3pm at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

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jonniee writes "MIT Professor Barbara Liskov has been granted the ACM's Turing Award. Liskov, the first US woman to earn a PhD in computer science, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking. She is only the second woman to receive the honor, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the 'Nobel Prize in computing.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The weekly Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those slightly off to the side). Each Tuesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" is also the theme of MAKE Volume 17 (due on newsstands TODAY, March 10, 2009)

---

In honor of MAKE, Volume 17, officially released today, I thought I'd post a couple of pages from the issue, from The Lost Knowledge Catalog, a piece I did, illustrated by the incomparable Suzanne Rachel Forbes. The whole issue was really a ball to work on, but I especially had fun doing this piece.

More:

• Lost Knowledge: The Antikythera Device
• Lost Knowledge: Village tech in West Papua, Indonesia
• Lost Knowledge: Neon lights
• Lost Knowledge: Reanimating Dead Media
• Lost Knowledge: Manual typewriters

---

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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TEDChris writes "Here's an intriguing attempt at a versatile new tech device that tries to augment the wearer's five senses. It comes out of Patty Maes's group at the MIT Media Lab. By combining a computerized personal projector with a camera and linking both to the Net, a host of surprising new applications becomes possible. This 8-minute demo created a lot of buzz at TED last month and was posted online today. Would love to know what the Slashdot community makes of it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Textbook pricing is always a controversial subject among college students and professors -- many of whom feel that the prices of the books are artificially inflated. Textbook publishers faced their first "shock" when internet booksellers came along, and they suddenly had less of a monopoly on the supply of books. But even that didn't decrease the price all that much. Over the past few years, a number of textbook publishers have been freaking out over the "threat" of "piracy." But rather than recognizing that they needed to improve their product to compete, they basically just looked for ways to make people pay even more. So, it really shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the market is ripe for disruption.

We've already seen some innovative business models enter the space, such as Flat World Knowledge and its free online textbooks with tiered pricing for additional products -- and it looks like various state education agencies are actively interested in moving away from the old model of super expensive textbooks. Reader MikeZ points us to an article detailing how a bunch of states have been making it easier for teachers to look at switching to online educational materials rather than textbooks, recognizing both that textbooks are often too expensive and not nearly as useful as some other resources. States that had budget line items for textbooks only are quickly redefining things so that money can be spent on other educational resources.

This certainly doesn't mean the end of the traditional textbook, but if the existing publishers follow the footsteps of other industries in trying to resist this disruption rather than adapt to it, expect plenty of angry stories about the evils of internet "piracy," with little recognition that piracy isn't the problem at all.

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Video of "Twitter your energy footprint" on CNN with Poppy Harlow.

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Here's a leaked, 125-page transcript of the brainstorming session that begat Raiders of the Lost Arc, a sit-down in 1978 with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan. Spielberg and Lucas veritably fizz with ideas.

G — What can he chase them with? What if he jumps on a camel?

S — I love it. It's a great idea. There's never been a camel chase before.

L — Is this camel going to chase a car?

S — You know how fast a camel can run? Not only that, he can jump over vegetable carts and things. It could be a funny chase that ends in tragedy. You're laughing your head off and suddenly, "My God, she's dead..."

S — We still have the big fight in the moving truck to do. And now we have a camel chase.

G — We've added another million dollars.

S — Not really. How much trouble can a camel be?

The “Raiders” Story Conference (via Waxy)

Glyn Moody writes "For years, the content industries having been trying to get laws passed that would stop people sharing files. For years they failed. Then they came up with the 'three strikes and you're out' idea — and it is starting to be put into law around the world. First we had France, followed by countries like Italy, Ireland — and now South Korea: 'On March 3, 2009, the National Assembly's Committee on Culture, Sports, Tourism, Broadcasting & Communications (CCSTB&C) passed a bill to revise the Copyright Law. The bill includes the so called, "three strikes out" or "graduated response" provision.' Why has the 'three strikes' idea caught on where others have failed? And what is the best way to stop it spreading further?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

Like lots of folks these days I find myself speculating about whether we're heading into something worse than a bad recession, such as the kind of calamity that tests civilization. I've suspected this before.

Back in my younger days I played music for a living. We were based in Vermont, a collection of folks who mostly saw the world as a place where music and the good life surrounding it were an end in themselves. While I subscribed to this philosophy for the most part, I was also the band member who read newspapers, and the one who had to handle details like bookings and getting paid. 

The real world intruded enough, therefore, to occasionally be as worrisome as fun; and I had a pessimistic side in any case. At one point, gloomier than usual about humanity's future, I wrote a song about how people like us would (or wouldn't) get along when the apocalypse happened, something I feared might be imminent. It wasn't, then, but I'm wondering again.

The song was called "When It All Falls Apart," and the lyrics went like this:

What will you do when it all falls apart?
Have you made your plans?
What will you be when it all falls apart?

There won't be any plumbers. 
There'll be no politicians.
Be no civil engineers.
Be no musicians.
There'll just be the farmers and the thieves.
And what do you know about the land?
What will you do when it all falls apart?

What will you be?

The song was on an album called "Road Apple," after the name of a band that lasted in one form or another for about seven years. Doug McClaran, who played piano, was the other main member of the band during that time. Besides Doug, who died way too young, this recording features Robin Batteau on violin, Tommy Steele on alto sax, Al Zanzler on baritone sax, Skeeter Camera on drums and Will Patton on bass. My brother Steve produced it, and you can listen to it here:

This gorgeous home just two hours north southeast of San Francisco could be yours for just $2.7 million. That's not bad considering it's in California, has 5 bedrooms and 4.5 baths, and is 3,700 square feet on 80 acres. Oh yeah, it was also designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. From the San Francisco Chronicle (photo by Scott Mayoral):

Wright was known to tell clients selecting home sites to go as far away from cities as they could - and then go 10 miles farther. That advice stands at sharp odds with modern planning, which stresses the environmental benefits of dense urban design. But in the Fawcett house, one of the few still as remote as it was the day Wright glimpsed the setting, one can understand what he had in mind, at least from an aesthetic point of view.

The elongated structure and the lines of the low-pitched roof, banded with a copper fascia, echo the flatness of the fields around it. The wings stretch out like open arms to the Coast Range in the distance. Where the sections of typical homes feel squared off and self contained, the obtuse angles, walls of windows, loggia and terrace open up the space, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.

"He softened the whole effect of the place on that barren center of a valley by using the 120-degree angles," said William Storrer, author of "The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion." "It just seemed to be right for the space."

"A rare chance to buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house" (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

Remember how EMI insisted it was going in a new direction that wouldn't be anti-technology and anti-fan? The company even hired some well-respected Silicon Valley techies for street cred. And then... it just kept on suing any and every innovation that came, often making it personal. Last month we wrote about yet another such lawsuit that had numerous troubling implication. The lawsuit targeted a developer of a service, Swurl, who just used an API for another service, Seeqpod, that was being sued. It's quite troublesome to claim that one company is liable for simply using an API of another company who, itself, is probably not doing anything infringing. But, EMI is a big company with lots of money (though, it's dwindling) and the developer it sued, Ryan Sit, was just a guy working on a fun project -- so, he's now pulled down the project. So, congrats, EMI for killing an innovative service. Great way to show how you're "different" and how much you "get" Silicon Valley. If I were Doug Merrill or Corey Ondrejka -- EMI's two big digital gurus -- I'd be ashamed to be employed by such a company. You're helping to stomp out innovation rather than enable it.

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Last week, I posted about a mysterious sonic boom that rattled residents on California's Central Cost. Today, Matt Drudge pointed me to reports of two more booms, in two nights, heard in New York's Rockland and Westchester Counties. From the Journal News:

Officials at Westchester County Airport and Stewart International Airport said they had no knowledge of aircraft from their facilities causing the disturbance.

Officials at NASA said yesterday that they had no knowledge of the boom nor any explanations for it. They referred calls to the U.S. Air Force Space Command.

Calls to Space Command headquarters in Colorado seeking comment were not returned.

And no U.S. Coast Guard operations in the area could have generated such a loud noise, Petty Officer Barbara Patton said...

There also have been no confirmed reports of seismic activity over the weekend.

"Another mystery boom wakes people in region"

I always have to reinvent this, every time I want to set up an OPML Editor server on port 80. So now, by posting it here, I can just search for it and I should find the instructions. If you don't understand, don't worry.

It's now incredibly simple to do this.

1. Add this line to opmlStartupCommands.txt:

user.opmlEditor.flServerOnPort80 = true;

2. If the OPML Editor is running, quit and relaunch.

3. As it starts up it asks for your Admin password so it can do a port forward.

You're done!

"curly"

I always have to reinvent this, every time I want to set up an OPML Editor server on port 80. So now, by posting it here, I can just search for it and I should find the instructions. If you don't understand, don't worry.

It's now incredibly simple to do this.

1. Add this line to opmlStartupCommands.txt:

user.opmlEditor.flServerOnPort80 = true;

2. If the OPML Editor is running, quit and relaunch.

3. As it starts up it asks for your Admin password so it can do a port forward.

You're done!

"curly"

Hey gang! You may have noticed less posts and articles from me in the last couple weeks, I am about to 100% go on a "MAKEcation" - this is a term I thought up for folks who want to take a "vacation" but instead of going to a tropical island, you build projects you always wanted to but never had time for. At the end of the MAKEcation (or during) you share what you made with others.



So - for the most part most of you won't see me until Maker Faire (May 30th & 31st). Since we started MAKE about 5 years ago, I've only taken off one week, and that was the first and only time I went to Burningman to ride that steam engine in the desert. I've stored up a few hundred projects over these years, I can't wait to do them!



If you're wondering what I am working on, well - stay tuned and keep watching the web! For now there were 2 projects I wanted to get out the door in the last couple weeks and both happened!




Tweet-a-watt - I've had a "Kill-a-watt" for about 5 years, I liked the idea but thought it was odd that it couldn't publish it's information in some way (serial) etc - so once the Xbee hit the scene I knew eventually this would make a good hardware mash up. We released this a couple weeks ago and it really took off!

---

Next up, “Learning electronics” merit badges - I don't think the Boy Scouts would have wanted me when I was a kid, spending a lot of time alone hacking up things - so for a few years I've wanted to design “Learning electronics” merit badges for everyone, girls, boys, adults - anyone who wants a small way of remembering (and collecting) a skill they've mastered. The first is "soldering" - more to come soon!

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The success of the Halo franchise is unquestionable. Bungie's trilogy of first-person shooters established a standard against which most similar games have been judged for the past eight years. Thus, when Ensemble Studios picked up the task of bringing the Halo universe to real-time strategy, they faced two separate mountains to climb: maintaining the high quality demanded by fans of the series and developing for a genre that traditionally translates poorly to console play. Fortunately, they had a head start on the latter, bringing in a wealth of experience from the Age of Empires series. Creating an intuitive and dependable control scheme was a top priority, and their success in doing so makes Halo Wars a worthy addition to the series. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oh, where to begin with the Speed Bong Bottle Opener. The design? The image of the guy demonstrating it? The fact that the eyes light up when you "pop a bottlecap"? Or just that it's a tool specifically designed for shotgunning beer!?
"Speed Bong Bottle Opener" (Thanks, Esther Chow!)

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

I pick on the New York Times a lot for its flubs, not because I hate the paper or because I own some nearly worthless shares in the company. I do it because the journalism done there still matters.

Over the weekend and yesterday we saw examples of the organization's better and lesser sides. Let's start with the good stuff:

The better came in the form of a richly detailed magazine story about Cleveland's housing and neighborhoods -- left a shambles by the deflated bubble that has done so much damage around America and the world. The story is a ground-level look at the disaster, and it's as grim as you can imagine: a city, pillaged by greed at every level, but almost totally outgunned by the pillagers.

The writer, Alex Kotlowitz, is a university professor, author and former reporter. He's as good as they get, and the Times surely paid plenty for this piece, in its freelance fee plus expenses plus the editing talent inside the newspaper itself. More on this in upcoming posts, but if we don't find ways to support this kind of journalism we'll all be worse off.

Also in the Sunday edition, however, was the paper's long-demanded interview with Obama, which the Times somewhat arrogantly considers its birthright with every new president. The reporters used the opportunity to learn a few things about Obama's work and goals. But in the process one reporter, Peter Baker, asked one of the most idiotic questions I've ever heard from a reputable news organization. He asked if Obama was a socialist, and then, when Obama said no, followed up with, "Is there anything wrong with saying yes?" Obama, for his part, called the paper later to say he couldn't believe the paper was "entirely serious." That's more polite than the journalists deserved.

The Washington Post, in a rare case of one news organization asking hard questions of another about its journalism, followed up on this and got the following from an unnamed NYT editor who quoted an email from Baker:

   The goal of the question was to get at the same issue your sister publication, Newsweek, was addressing with its recent cover story, “We Are All Socialists Now.”

   The point is not the label, per se, but the question of whether the times and the solutions under consideration represent some sort of paradigm shift in our national thinking about the role of government in society. In a moment of taxpayer bank bailouts and shifting tax burden proposals and exploding deficits and expansive health care and energy plans, what is the future of American-style capitalism?

   We were also interested in exploring how a new president defines his political philosophy, something that has been the subject of intense debate. We wanted to draw him out on all of that and I think his answers, both in the interview itself and the follow-up phone call, were interesting and important.

If the goal was really what he said, he could have asked the question in that context. He could have simply said, "Given the paradigm shift in the view of government's role amid all the bailouts, stimulus, health care and all the rest, Newsweek's cover story recently said, 'We are All Socialists Now.' Do you agree?" An exchange prompted by that question would have been legitimate.

But the real context, as everyone else in the world knows, was the right wing talk machine's collective decision to brand Obama as a socialist who wants government to take over just about everything. Given how Baker asked his question, and his snarky near-demand that the Obama answer yes, he embarrassed his newspaper, badly. Give the Times credit: It didn't delete this stuff from the transcript, which might have been a temptation given the vacuous nature of Baker's queries.

Speaking of giving credit to the Times, several of its writers and editors are hanging out more often in public places where they can be part of a larger conversation about what they do. This is a hugely important recognition on their part that their audience has something useful to offer, and that they have a duty to that audience to be a genuine part of this emergent conversation.

Which accounts for some small disappointment in an exchange I had yesterday on Twitter with a Times editor who's one of the more open members of his clan and who's doing a lot to make the place seem more human and less institutional. It started when he posted a Tweet announcing, "NYT e-mail interview with Ann Coulter. SHE WRITES IN ALL CAPS!!!! http://bit.ly/yf9Eq"

The rest of the exchange went this way (I removed our screen names and re-quotes of the other's Tweets for clarity):

Me: serious news org doesn't interview Ann Coulter
Him: A serious news organization doesn't declare things off limits.
Me: nothing off-limits for NYT? GMAB - there's stuff the Times will never do, properly so..
Him: If Coulter didn't sell books or have a following, I might agree. We try to explain the world, even parts you don't like.
Me: so notoriety and book sales trump all other judgment. disappointing.
Him: That's not what I said. Have a nice day.

To be fair, no, I didn't repeat back precisely what he said, but I do think I reflected the gist of it. Also to be fair, Twitter is probably the worst place to have a serious conversation. You can't do nuance in 140 characters; at least I'm no good at it.

Most of all, there was no way I should have expected him to denounce his own employer's decision to engage in a public conversation with one of society's best-known spreaders of political poison. But his ultimate brush-off struck me as just the kind of thing Big Journalism folks do when asked to justify things they've said. Maybe I deserved to be shut down there, but he never did fully address the issue he'd raised in the first place by promoting the paper's email exchange with the odious pundit.

News organizations are complicated places, filled with people who want, by and large, to do the right thing. More than almost any other, we expect the Times to reflect the best in American journalism. At least I do.

bsk_cw writes "About a month ago, in Living free with Linux: 2 weeks without Windows, Preston Gralla wrote about what life was like for a long-time Windows user trying to live with Linux. His main problems came when he tried to install or update software. Loads of people responded with advice — so he went back and tried again. Here's what he learned, and what did and didn't work for him."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve points us to a story in the UK about how Sony Computer Entertainment Europe is considering taking legal action against the folks behind an anti-video game advertisement because a photo in the ad includes a boy holding what appears to be a Playstation controller. The whole thing seems pretty silly. The anti-video game ad is pretty ridiculous itself, but Sony overreacting to it seems even worse. First of all, other than hardcore gamers, who's even going to notice that it's a PlayStation controller? Instead of suing and drawing more attention, Sony might want to just focus on reasons why the ad is misleading and that video gaming doesn't lead to "cancer, diabetes, and heart disease." Suing over the use of the controller just makes it look like they have something to hide.

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carusoj writes "Researchers at Princeton University and University College London say they can identify unique information, essentially like a fingerprint, from any blank sheet of paper using any reasonably good scanner. The technique could be used to crack down on counterfeiting or even keep track of confidential documents. The researchers' paper on the finding is set to be presented at an IEEE security conference in Oakland, Calif., in May."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pink Tentacle has a long photo-essay about monster mummies stored in Japan's Buddhist temples and museums. Shown above: the mummified head of a three-faced demon (the third face is behind the other two faces)

It might seem odd that Buddhist temples in Japan house the occasional stray mummified demon (oni), but then again it probably makes sense to keep them off the streets and under the watchful eye of a priest.

Zengyōji (善行寺) temple in the city of Kanazawa (Ishikawa prefecture) is home to the mummified head of a three-faced demon. Legend has it that a resident priest discovered the mummy in a temple storage chamber in the early 18th century. Imagine his surprise.

Nobody knows where the demon head came from, nor how or why it ended up in storage.

The mummified head has two overlapping faces up front, with another one (resembling that of a kappa) situated in back. The temple puts the head on public display each year around the spring equinox.

Today the Guardian announced their "Open Platform," much as the NY Times did a couple of weeks ago. It's even less open than the Times was.

If it were actually open they'd announce it to all developers at the same moment, so we could all try it out at the same time on a level playing field, not give an advance to their favorites. In the press release they talk about developers who got an early look. Fine. It wasn't open then, that's for sure. Is it open now?

Well: "API key approvals will be granted on a very limited basis, so please don't be offended if we fail to reply to you or don't approve your request in the short term. You can be assured, however, that we intend to open the service more widely soon."

Okay, but please don't be offended if I don't apply for one.

You gotta wonder if when they get out of beta their competitors will be able to repurpose their content. My guess is not. And how broadly do they view their competition? And why should anyone have to guess if they're "open."

All this begs the question, because even if they were just publishing RSS feeds (btw, they are), to be competitive in the API business, you have to enable other people to publish on your side of the API. That was the flaw of the Times model too.

I have no idea how these guys got the idea that they could save the news industry by becoming the tech industry; I don't think they can. What's the diff betw what they're doing and just adding more metadata to their feeds?

My guess this is the result of some tech guys doing their best to give the higher-ups what they want. Some market analyst or consultant told them that to survive they need an API, so come hell or high water, an API is what they'll have.

Correct me if I'm wrong please. (And if the past is prologue, the Guardian will attack personally, calling me names, in print, as they've done so many times. Not to say there aren't a number of very nice people at the Guardian these days. Maybe they can moderate the response keeping it professional and impersonal.)



Big hugs, your pal in Berkeley, Dave

Today the Guardian announced their "Open Platform," much as the NY Times did a couple of weeks ago. It's even less open than the Times was.

If it were actually open they'd announce it to all developers at the same moment, so we could all try it out at the same time on a level playing field, not give an advance to their favorites. In the press release they talk about developers who got an early look. Fine. It wasn't open then, that's for sure. Is it open now?

Well: "API key approvals will be granted on a very limited basis, so please don't be offended if we fail to reply to you or don't approve your request in the short term. You can be assured, however, that we intend to open the service more widely soon."

Okay, but please don't be offended if I don't apply for one.

You gotta wonder if when they get out of beta their competitors will be able to repurpose their content. My guess is not. And how broadly do they view their competition? And why should anyone have to guess if they're "open."

All this begs the question, because even if they were just publishing RSS feeds (btw, they are), to be competitive in the API business, you have to enable other people to publish on your side of the API. That was the flaw of the Times model too.

I have no idea how these guys got the idea that they could save the news industry by becoming the tech industry; I don't think they can. What's the diff betw what they're doing and just adding more metadata to their feeds?

My guess this is the result of some tech guys doing their best to give the higher-ups what they want. Some market analyst or consultant told them that to survive they need an API, so come hell or high water, an API is what they'll have.

Correct me if I'm wrong please. (And if the past is prologue, the Guardian will attack personally, calling me names, in print, as they've done so many times. Not to say there aren't a number of very nice people at the Guardian these days. Maybe they can moderate the response keeping it professional and impersonal.)



Big hugs, your pal in Berkeley, Dave

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You may recall this motorcycle getting tons of great press this summer. Students from Saint Thomas Academy created an electric motorcycle with a 40+ mile per charge range. The bike has some amazing safety features, which really sets it apart from other electric motorcycle designs.

We're happy to welcome the STA Experimental Vehicle Team this weekend at Make: Day.

We asked the advisor, Mark Westlake, to tell us more about the bike.

Backed by an InvenTeams grant from the Lemelson-MIT program, the Experimental Vehicle Team from Saint Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights, Minn., has applied its ingenuity to develop a lithium-phosphate-ion-powered motorcycle that will travel 40+ miles before needing to be recharged by an on-board 110 volt charger. "Crush zones" formed by compressible materials, and other safety features protect the driver by keeping him inside the vehicle in a collision.

Make: Day is this Saturday, March 14th from 10am -3pm at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

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MessedRocker writes "I have at least a few USB flash drives around that I haven't needed since I got my 16GB flash drive, a 40GB external hard drive which I haven't needed since I upgraded to 500GB, and a couple of SATA hard drives I have pulled out of laptops which are either as large or smaller than the one I have in my laptop now. Furthermore, I don't really know anyone who needs any hard drives or flash drives. What should I do with my small, obsolete storage devices?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WindBourne writes "China will be launching 2 new space stations this next year. One is for their civil program (as run by the military), while the second is openly for the military. It appears that there will be multiples of the military version to be launched in 2010, and that they are developing the same US Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) that was canceled in 1969. In addition, it appears that China is accelerating their timelines on a number of the earlier space announcements."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephen S. Power alerts us to an ongoing debate in the chess world over the question of whether or not you can copyright a chess move. Specifically, the current debate arises from a demand by the Bulgarian Chess Federation that certain websites stop "live broadcasting" a chess match, saying that it violates copyright law. I'm certainly not familiar enough with Bulgarian copyright law to know if it actually could be interpreted in such a ridiculous manner, but in the US, at least, lawsuits have clearly stated that reporting on the facts and data from a sporting event is perfectly legal under copyright law. Most of the article focuses on the philosophical questions concerning whether or not a chess move can be "owned," but it's hard to think about the issue in any terms and come up with a good explanation for how such a move could be covered by copyright law. If you take that to the extreme, it would mean that you simply couldn't play chess. Whoever played the first few games would "own" most of the opening moves and everyone else would be out of luck. I imagine that the copyright supporters might insist that this would only force other players to use new moves, thereby increasing their creative output. Yes... I'm being sarcastic here, but it does highlight just how silly it is to even think about the idea of copyrighting chess moves, or even a collection of chess moves in terms of "broadcasting" a match.

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MAKE, Volume 17 is here (m4v video)! Get your spark on with Steampunk genius and cover star Jake von Slatt's Wimshurst Influence Machine. Learn to build your own categorized cabinet of wonders to display your collectible oddities. Read all about William Blake, a poet who was actually a maker! Go inside a California steam-powered sawmill. Brew the smoothest cup of coffee with John Park's siphon brewing apparatus. recreate a 1930s model airplane and give it an RC twist for the best toy flier in the sky. Build your own ball-bearing controlled tangible sequencer, plus lots more projects!

You can start reading MAKE right now if you're a subscriber in our digital edition, or sign up and get going right away! Use code CMAKE to get $5 off!

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An anonymous reader writes "After many years of release-free development, FFmpeg, the most widely used audio and video codec library, has finally returned to a regular release schedule with the long-awaited version 0.5. While the list of changes is far too long to list here, some high-profile improvements include the reverse-engineering of all Real video formats, WMV9/VC-1 support, AAC decoding, and of course vast performance improvements across the board. To commemorate the 'lively' discussions predating the release, 0.5 is codenamed 'half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed.' The new version can be downloaded from the official website." As another reader points out, FFmpeg is what makes some open source multimedia apps (like MPlayer, Xine, VLC and Kdenlive) so versatile.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Take a tour of a Wurlitzer Factory--in 1950.
• Three years of visualized GPS data track one man's Bay Area runs.
• Charles Shopsin helped us get our PS3 running as a media player. It's a shame, writes Daniel Campos, that the remote control is so bad.
• Steamnocchio won a Steampunk art contest.
• The beautiful Moto Major 350 motorcycle resurfaced, half a century later.
• iPhone prototypes hit eBay.
• Dell's got a new rugged laptop out, the E6400 XFR.
• Incase's new iPhone case matches a pair of sneakers.
• Dell's Mini 10 netbook isn't very good, according to Laptop Mag.
• Wozniak dances.
• "Screw megapixels!" he shrieked, throwing his brandy into the fire.
• Lilliputing penned a paean to the instant-on ultra-portables that they don't make any more.
• Vodafone's 135 is sleek, cheap and ultra-thin.
• Hungy is an LED anglerfish nightlight.
• Twenty-four Samsung flash drives make for one fast RAID array.
• Cultivate prosperity with Comrade Calculator.
• Ikea's Sunnan is a cheap and colorful solar-charged lamp.

Infrared sensors can give robotics projects useful data about nearby objects, but what if you want to actually see that data yourself? -

I recently acquired a few Sharp GP2Y0A21YK0F IR distance sensors. This is an inexpensive proximity sensor which can detect objects from 10-80cm. A nice tutorial on this sensor can be found at robotroom.com. These sensors only detect objects within a narrow beam, so I decided to mount mine on a servo, so that I could pan the sensor approximately 180 degrees, and take multiple readings to build up an idea of what obstacles are in front of my robot. I like to visualize things, so I decided to write a small program in processing to visualize the sensor data for debugging and to help me better understand what the sensor is seeing.

Though not scaled precisely to match, the above overlay illustrates how the outside world appears via sensor panning. This could prove quite useful for remote 'exploratory missions'. Instructions and source code available at uC Hobby.

In the Maker Shed: Make: Arduino

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Citizen K sez, "Retired senior police officer David Gilbertson has created an online petition against expanded police powers of arrest in the UK. The Serious and Organised Crime and Policing Act of 2005 removed the link between an imprisonable offence and the power of arrest, instead allowing police to arrest people for any offence whatsoever. People have since been arrested for climbing a tree and dropping litter."

Section 110 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was enacted to replace Section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Arrest without Warrant: Constables), and for the first time since 1829 has empowered any constable to arrest and detain any person without warrant for any offence, no matter how trivial. Constables may now arrest for offences which do not attract a sanction of imprisonment and are merely summary in nature, such as minor traffic offences and bye-law offences. In all cases they may use reasonable force, may detain with handcuffs, and may require a DNA sample to be taken. There is a body of evidence which shows that police officers are abusing this power in large measure.

Petition

Background from the Guardian's Henry Porter (Thanks, Citizen K)

An anonymous reader writes that "[Monday] evening, on systems with Norton Internet Protection running, users began to see a popup warning about an executable named PIFTS.exe trying to access the internet. The file was shown to be located in a non-existent folder inside the Symantec LiveUpdate folder. There were several posts about this to the Norton customer forums asking for help or information on this mysterious program. The initial thread received several thousand views and several pages of replies in a few short hours before being deleted. Several subsequent posts to the Norton forum were deleted much more quickly. These actions — whether actively covering up, or simply not well thought through — have spurred people to begin crafting conspiracy theories about the purposes of this PIFTS program. I for one am blocking the program until more information becomes available." The current top link on Google for "PIFTS.exe" links to one of these deleted questions on Norton's support boards, which sounds innocent enough: "I searched this forum but did not see PIFTS.exe. Any idea what this is?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Considering he invented the thing (joking... joking...), it's weird that Al Gore is supporting an initiative that would only add confusion and expense to the Internet. Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection are publicly endorsing a new effort to create .eco, a new top-level domain for individuals and corporations to "signal their interest in joining a global ecological movement that promotes nonpartisan change." Profits from the initiative, currently lobbying ICANN at their meeting in Mexico, would help fund environmental research.

While the goal is laudatory, the method is just silly. Instead of digital posturing, there are a host of other established, effective organizations and ways that companies and individuals can help protect the environment. A .eco TLD is not necessary to demonstrate support for the environment, it just adds another cost for companies and confuses users.

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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This Instructable shows you how to build a lighter-based 12v battery trickle charger made from a laptop power supply, a LM317T regulator, and an Altoids tin (and some other misc components).

Car Battery Charger from Spare Parts in Mint Tin

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Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, guestblogger Charlie "Modern Mechanix" Shopsin has found video of a captivating 1950s tour of a Wurlitzer factory!

The video I'm linking to today is called "A Visit to Wurlitzer:" made in 1950, this film visits the factory that made Wurlitzer jukeboxes. Maybe not the most exciting video to watch but it is fascinating. Think about all of the buzzwords relating modern production: just-in-time logistics, outsourcing, off-the-shelf components, sub-contractors, and even automation. Now think of the opposite and you'll have some idea of what this factory was like.

Wood, plastic and metal go in one end, and jukeboxes come out the other. They make pretty much everything on site. There are chemists who develop and produce the varnishes, machinists who make the tools, and a sharpening room. They even make their own plywood. Because they produce pretty much everything from the cabinet to the smallest circuit on their assembly line, the schematics for a single jukebox cover 300,000 square feet of blueprint.

Wurlitzer Factory Tour - 1950

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Jeremy built a standalone photo booth/box with a Ricoh GR digicam and a number of salvaged parts -

My goal is to build a portable photo booth that could be set up in virtually any location. It is build almost entirely of salvaged parts found at Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity's ;Build it again center. It has a built-in 40 watt-second flash with diffused panel on the front and an old 5-inch B&W TV on the bottom with a live feed from the camera so you can compose the picture. The still photo is displayed for 3 seconds on the screen after it is taken. The images stay on the camera's card and create a visual record of the people who came to the event at which the photo booth was used.

This project would be great for big get-togethers. Add automated printing and you'll have a DIY replacement for costly photobooth rental (plus a great souvenir for guests!).

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ChunKing writes "YouTube is to block all premium music videos to UK users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the Performing Rights Society. For many of us in the UK this is great news. The two main music licensing agencies in the UK — Phonographic Performance Limited and PRS — have a stranglehold on music use in this country and are stifling creativity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We were thrilled to be informed that MAKE won FOLIO magazine's FAME (FOLIO: Awards for Magazine Events) award for Maker Faire, in their "Best Series of Events" category. Congrats to everybody who's responsible for making Maker Faire the spectacular, award-wining event that it is.

If you want to be a part of this year's fun and games, check out the Maker Faire website. This year's focus is Re-Make America, inspired by President Obama's call for all of us to participate in rebuilding America. We're looking to showcase "the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things." If you have something you want to present at the Faire, take a look at our Call for Makers page.

2009 FAME Award Winners Announced!

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Lawyer Scott Harris, one of the inventors of the concept of a 'marketing company devoted to selling/marketing products produced by other companies in return for a share of their profits,' is appealing the USPTO's rejection of US Patent Application No. 09/387,823 which was intended to patent that 'invention.' This court action is important because it directly challenges the In Re Bilski ruling, which tightened the rules to get rid of most so-called 'business method' patents. One of Mr. Harris's legal theories is that a 'company is a physical thing, and as such analogous to a machine.' If the name seems familiar, it's because Mr. Harris has a long history of inventive legal maneuverings. I'm honestly surprised that SCO never tried to hire or sue him."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the comments - Ned shows us this very excellent video of "Del's Beautiful New Wooden Machine", and beautiful it is!

An intricate hand-cranked machine made entirely of wood and glue (no metal or other materials). It was designed and built by my friend Del, using many different woods and incorporating a variety of mechanical motions. He has made several other wooden machines, but calls this latest one his crowning achievement.

It's another awesome machine built only for the love of machine-making itself. I'm starting to think think there must be a whole a genre for these devices! Hmmm ... come to think of it, I do believe there's already a name for this type of thing -- "art" ;)

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Following in the footsteps of Warner Music's debacle in overplaying its hand and having all its music removed from YouTube -- leading to a ton of fan and artist resentment pointed at Warner Music, it looks like the UK's Performing Right Society (PRS) is going down the same route. After making demands on Google that would make it so that the company was losing significant money every time a video was watched, Google has simply pulled music videos down in the UK. Basically, Google is making the point to PRS: you need us much more than we need you.

I'm not entirely sure if this is in effect already. I'm in the UK right now and a quick search on YouTube found all of the videos I looked for. However, it seems that Google knows that it's the one with the leverage in these negotiations and is finally letting other parties recognize that. The record labels keep demanding more without any actual reason for it, insisting that 100% of the value comes from the music, rather than the service and the promotions. It's about time that some of the service providers proved they were wrong. Yes, the music is part of the value, but it certainly appears that a much bigger part of the value is the community that Google brings at YouTube.

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The folks at Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose were our most gracious hosts for the Maker Faire Auditions on Sunday. On April 25th, the museum will play host to their 22nd annual Tech Challenge, an annual team design contest for budding engineers in grades 5 - 12. MAKE is proud to be a sponsor of this event.

The Challenge is looking for more teams. They're looking for kids from grade schools, home schools, church groups, after-school clubs, camp programs, any sort of youth group who wants to participate. If you don't have a team/club, no problem, you can create one for the event! All you need is an adult sponsor.

This year's challenge?

Your challenge is to design a simple device that can safely deliver a small payload to a specific target inside a volcano. Of course, we don't have a real volcano at The Tech, so we have created a simulated one for this challenge. Check out the drawings of the volcano Test Rig.

To find out more, visit the Tech Challenge 2009 site.
To register, go here.
Join the Tech Challenge Facebook group here.

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PMA 2009 is over, and as we return to some semblance of normality it's time to reflect on wha this year's show tells us about the state of the industry and to look at some of the emerging trends in digital cameras and digital imaging in general. We've updated our show report to include not only our thoughts on the exhibition itself but also our usual pick of the products on show. We'll be adding a few interviews over the next week or so.

Most Canon digital cameras have an IR remote feature that allows you to control the shutter with a Canon RC-1 or RC-5 wireless remote. These work exactly like a TV remote, and it turns out that the signaling for some VCRs and Satellite TV receivers are similar enough to the RC-1 that they will trigger the exposure on your camera.

This means that with a universal remote and the right device setting, you might be able to add wireless shutter control to your camera for a few bucks.

According to the discussion on the Camera Hacker forums over the last few years, folks have had some success with using a number of remotes and several camera models. Most have reported success using a code for MGA VCRs, though I couldn't get this to work with a Digital Rebel XT. The Digital Rebels are reported to work with codes for Telefunken VCRs or Echostar satellite receivers (bummer that my RCA remote supports neither).

Have you been able to get this to work with your camera and universal remote? Please share your experience in the comments.

Universal remote with Canon cameras
Camera Hacker discussion forum

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This week on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's excellent Search Engine podcast, host Jesse Brown has posted part one of a fantastic interview with Ann Cavoukian about the risks associated with RFID-enabled identity cards and other personal objects and devices.

Jesse frames the issue as well as I've heard it ever framed: "They freak me out. Not because I think there's some kind of sinister government conspiracy behind them, but because the idea of every dude walking around with a thirty foot cloud of data emanating from his pants is so tantalizing that it invites sinister conspiracies. It challenges criminals' brains to come up with ways to defraud us. It woos law enforcement to blur or bend or rewrite the rules. That is how filled with FAIL arphid tags are."

Podcast #24 is up!

MP3 Link

Subscribe to Search Engine podcast feed

Eric Moreau has translated my Locus column Why I Copyfight into French, in honor of the bill in French Parliament that will criminalize copyists and downloaders.

Pourquoi accorder tant d'importance à la question de la réforme du copyright ? Qu'est-ce qui est en jeu ?

Tout.

Jusqu'à une époque récente, le copyright était une réglementation industrielle. Si l'on tombait dans le domaine du copyright, cela signifiait que l'on utilisait quelque prodigieuse machine industrielle – une presse d'imprimerie, une caméra de cinéma, une presse à disques vinyles. Le coût d'un tel équipement étant conséquent, y ajouter deux cents billets pour s'offrir les services d'un bon avocat du droit de la propriété intellectuelle n'avait rien d'un sacrifice. Ces frais n'ajoutaient que quelques points de pourcentage au coût de production.

Lorsque des entités n'appartenant pas une industrie (individus, écoles, congrégations religieuses, etc.) interagissaient avec des œuvres soumises au copyright, l'utilisation qu'elles en avaient n'était pas régie par le droit de la propriété intellectuelle : elles lisaient des livres, écoutaient de la musique, chantaient autour du piano ou allaient au cinéma. Elles discutaient de ces œuvres. Elles les chantaient sous la douche. Les racontaient (avec des variations) aux enfants à l'heure du coucher. Les citaient. Peignaient des fresques inspirées de ces œuvres sur le mur de la chambre des enfants.

Petit précis de lutte contre le copyright par Cory Doctorow

Astute social media researcher danah boyd -- now running her own lab at Microsoft Research -- has published the notes from an internal company talk she gave called "Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?" It's a good condensation of the material in her dissertation, full of punchy insights into how social media evolved and what it's meant to society.

Social network sites became critically important to them because this was where they sat and gossiped, jockeyed for status, and functioned as digital flaneurs. They used these tools to see and be seen. Those using MySpace put great effort into decorating their profile and fleshing out their "About Me" section. The features and functionality of Facebook were fundamentally different, but virtual pets and quizzes served similar self-expression purposes on Facebook.

Teen conversations may appear completely irrational, or pointless at best. "Yo, wazzup?" "Not much, how you?" may not seem like much to an outsider, but this is a form of social grooming. It's a way of checking in, confirming friendships, and negotiating social waters.

Adults have approached Facebook in very different ways. Adults are not hanging out on Facebook. They are more likely to respond to status messages than start a conversation on someone's wall (unless it's their birthday of course). Adults aren't really decorating their profiles or making sure that their About Me's are up-to-date. Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended purpose as a social utility. For example, it is a tool for communicating with the past.

Adults may giggle about having run-ins with mates from high school, but underneath it all, many of them are curious. This isn't that different than the school reunion. We all poo-poo the reunion, but secretly, we really want to know what happened to Bobbi Sue. Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the recent "25 Things" phenomena. While teens have been filling out personality quizzes since the dawn of social media, most adults only went through this phase once, as a newbie when they felt as though they really needed to forward the chain letter to 10 friends or else. The "25 Things" phenomenon took me by surprise until I started thinking about the intended audience. Teenagers craft quizzes for themselves and their friends. Adults are crafting them to show-off to people from the past and connect the dots between different audiences as a way of coping with the awkwardness of collapsed contexts.

"Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?"

After spending a long time decrying social networks and media-sharing sites for helping to encourage crime, lots of police around the world are realizing that the sites can actually help them fight crime. Some have started posting details of crimes and suspects on popular sites, but some cops are going even further, and taking to private, crime-focused social networks to share information with other cops and investigators. It sounds like they've discovered some of the benefits that increased and easy information-sharing can generate, but there are a couple of areas for concern. First, it isn't just police on these sites, they also include private companies like banks and retailers and security companies. Second, all of this info-sharing is unregulated -- no subpoenas or warrants, or any sort of oversight or rules for transparency. It would seem there's a lot of scope for abuse or for innocent people to be misidentified and mistreated, particularly by private companies on the systems. The rules governing police investigations and the protections they aim to give people exist for good reason; while police and other groups should be able to use technology to better do their jobs, they shouldn't be able to use technology to circumvent regulations. Balancing these two aims will be a critical battleground for legislators, investigators and civil-rights groups moving forward.

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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Owen Goss writes "Everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reality is that with the App Store now hosting over 25,000 apps, the competition is fierce. While it's true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don't make a lot of money. In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios. The post reflects what is likely the norm for developers just getting into the iPhone development game."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In James Boyle's excellent book, The Public Domain the ninth chapter expresses his hope that politicians passing copyright law would actually demand evidence before passing laws:

Imagine a process of reviewing prescription drugs that goes like this: representatives from the drug company come to the regulators and argue that their drug works well and should be approved. They have no evidence of this beyond a few anecdotes about people who want to take it and perhaps some very simple models of how the drug might affect the human body. The drug is approved. No trials, no empirical evidence of any kind, no follow-up. Or imagine a process of making environmental regulations in which there were no data, and no attempts to gather data, about the effects of the particular pollutants being studied. Even the harshest critics of regulation would admit we generally do better than this. But this is often the way we make intellectual property policy.

The one exception he highlights? Copyright extension in the UK, where the famous Gowers' Report recommended against copyright extension, based on evidence that it would do a lot more harm than good. After the report came out, Gowers actually admitted that the evidence showed that the best economic results would be to make copyright much shorter, but he didn't push that at the time, since the interest was in the other direction. Yet, despite this evidence that copyright extension would basically harm nearly everyone -- including musicians and the public -- some politicians in the UK have been saying it must be done anyway. Yes, the one case where actual economic evidence is being used... and it's being totally ignored.

The good news is that this is pissing off a lot of very smart people, who are demanding to understand why the government wants to ignore all of the evidence:

There has been some talk of 'moral arguments' for extension but it is hard to discern a compelling 'moral' case for a proposal whose prime effect is to benefit major label shareholders and a few, already highly successful, artists while imposing significantly greater costs on new creators, the general listening public and the custodians of our cultural heritage.

As Gowers concluded, and the Government has until now consistently reaffirmed, policy-making in this area should be evidence-based and designed to promote the broader welfare of society as a whole. Policies that appear to reflect nothing more than lobbying will only perpetuate the "marked lack of public legitimacy" which the Gowers report lamented — and discourage those who wish to contribute constructively to future Government policy-making in these areas. We therefore call on the Government to present any evidence that has led to this change of policy.

Indeed. The moral argument for longer copyright makes no sense when the economic evidence suggests that nearly everyone is made worse off (including musicians themselves) by longer copyright. How can it possibly be moral to have everyone worse off?

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ColdWetDog writes "It's not Sigourney Weaver tossing aliens about, but The Register has an interesting blurb about a real human-capable exoskeleton that looks pretty cool (Lockheed-Martin press release). Runs for three hours at 3 mph on internal batteries; max speed is 7 mph. Of course, no price is listed but I suppose if you have to ask you can't afford it. Team this up with a Big Dog and you've got the ultimate high-tech cross-country team. Bring your own batteries. Or just wait for your jetpack to arrive."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on Offworld, our Brandon's got a post on the art of Christopher Locke, whose modern fossils series creates fossilized versions of our iconic manufactured goods from a notional future in which our middens are excavated by tomorrow's archaeologists.

In a special process, these items are reproduced in a proprietary blend of concrete and other secret ingredients, giving them the look and feel of real stone fossils. Each fossil is made one at a time, by hand, in an individual mold. Because of the hand-made nature of the item, there will be variations in pigmentation, and small imperfections in the surface. While you can choose a general color range, please keep in mind that each fossil is unique, and color variations are inevitable.

Each "species" of modern fossil has a Latin name marked on the bottom or back, and can be shipped straight to your door.

Who will blow in our NES carts when we're gone: Christopher Locke's Modern Fossils

Discuss this on Offworld

A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discusses the brain's God-center, the region that seems to be responsible for feelings of the numinous and the sanctified -- why would evolution create a God-lobe? Is religion the by-product of biology?

Grafman started by interviewing 26 people of varying religious sentiments, breaking down their beliefs into three psychological categories: God's perceived level of involvement in the world, God's perceived emotions, and religious knowledge gained through doctrine or experience. Then they submitted statements based on these categories to 40 people hooked to fMRI machines.

Statements based on God's involvement — such as "God protects one's life" or "Life has no higher purpose" — provoked activity in brain regions associated with understanding intent. Statements of God's emotions — such as "God is forgiving" or "the afterlife will be punishing" — stimulated regions responsible for classifying emotions and relating observed actions to oneself. Knowledge-based statements, such as "a source of creation exists" or "religions provide moral guidance," activated linguistic processing centers.

Taken together, the neurological states evoked by the questions are known to cognitive scientists as the Theory of Mind: They underlie our understanding that other people have minds, thoughts and feelings.

The advantages of a Theory of Mind are clear. People who lack one are considered developmentally challenged, even disabled. Anthropologist Scott Atran, a proponent of the byproduct hypothesis, has suggested that it let our ancestors quickly distinguish between friends and enemies. And once humans were able to imagine someone who wasn't physically present, supernatural beliefs soon followed.

Religion: Biological Accident, Adaptation — or Both

To think that the humble anal bead began life as a quack 1930s back massager! From the Aug, 1930 ish of Physical Culture (which magazine, I'm reliably assured by Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre is a kind of ground zero for quack medical adverts.

NU-VIM (Aug, 1930)

The UK government's reps in the European Union are pushing to gut the right of Internet users to access and contribute to networked services, replacing it with the "right" to abide by EULAs:

'Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users' rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a "principle" that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services. The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.' To add to the irony, an accompanying text cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, without attribution.

UK Government Wants To Kill Net Neutrality In EU

??

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

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In today's Boing Boing Video episode, we present an excerpt from the National Film Board of Canada feature "Roadsworth: Crossing the Line" a documentary which follows the work of Canadian street artist Peter Gibson, aka Roadsworth.

Gibson integrates provocative art with government traffic signage, questioning the ownership of public space.

In 2001, he began his street painting campaign to question car culture, and encourage his neighbors to share the road with fellow bicyclists. What began as a sort of street safety PSA evolved into an illegal art campaign spanning almost 3 years -- until Gibson was finally caught, with paint-stained hands, and charged with 53 counts of "mischief."

While many of the street scenes he painted may long since have been painted over, the legend of Roadsworth lives on through this film.

For those of you attending the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas next week, you can watch the whole feature in entirety on Saturday, March 14th, at The Hideout. Details 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. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

AlexanderDitto sez, "This week's LoadingReadyRun video addresses combining restrictive End-User License Agreements with Friendships. Results: pain. Also laughs!"

I really liked the sideswipe at the kind of "friendship" that social network services seem to think we live with."

Terms of Friendship (Thanks, AlexanderDitto!)

Alan sez, "Volunteers in Hampshire, England, discovered a Dalek head while cleaning trash from the bottom of a local pond!" They're keeping the pond's location a secret, because, "The last thing we want are sci-fi fans descending on the pond frantically seraching for other Dalek parts."

Sales executive Marc Oakland was pushing a rake around the bed of the shallow pool when he found the object with its distinctive eye stalk.

The 42-year-old said: "I'd just shifted a tree branch with my foot when I noticed something dark and round slowly coming up to the surface.

"I got the shock of my life when a Dalek head bobbed up right in front of me.

"It must have been down there for some time because it was covered in mould and water weed, and had quite a bit of damage.

"One of the dome lights was smashed, but the eye-stalk was intact and the head and neck stayed in one piece as I carefully lifted it out."

Dr Who Dalek found in pond (Thanks, Alan!)

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

Following this guy?

Paul Alan Levy writes "Together with the ACLU of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Center for Freedom of Expression, we have intervened in a case pending in Buckingham County, Virginia in which a plaintiff in a defamation case retaliated against a blogger who covered his defamation suit in less than flattering terms by sending a highly invasive subpoena that demands production of the blogger's communications with his sources, IP numbers of all who posted on his web site or even READ the web site. There have been only a handful of cases in which courts have addressed whether bloggers should be treated as journalists for the purpose of considering the reporters' privilege. We are also arguing that, in addition to protecting the commenters on the blog for the reasons usually argued -- protecting their right of anonymous speech -- posters on a journalist's blog should be treated as "sources" whose disclosure violates the journalist's own rights."

We've been seeing a lot of these types of cases lately. It would be good to get some more definitive rulings that establish both the rights of those who blog, as well as those who comment anonymously.

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Instructables user wholman made this nine-square chair from an old road sign by combining techniques from two other instructables. Looks nice!

From the pages of MAKE, Volume 15:

Street Spam Lounger built by Sean Ragan, article by Ed Troxell. Preview in our Digital Edition.

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Maker Faire team held an open audition Sunday at the Tech Museum in San Jose. As usual, we saw lots of interesting things and met some great makers. The auditions are really a small preview of the upcoming Maker Faire.

Photos by Kent K. Barnes / kentkb.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• 
  Marc, a teacher of high school physics in SF, demonstrated live shooting a ping-pong ball out a PVC pipe with such speed that it went all the way through a soda can.
  
• 
  Kate, a procedural artist at a game company, built a custom 3D viewfinder for augmented reality that used her iPhone to project images.
  
• 
  Frank, a furniture maker in Oakland, makes his own metal-making tools and he's building a three-wheel electric car.
  
• 
  Gayle, a weaver and spinner, showed us a variety of fabrics and yarns that she dyed using a variety of mushrooms. She also showed us a beautiful compact device called a Charkha, an Indian invention for spinning wool (shown above.)
  
• 
  Dick, an advisor for a venture capitalist, talked about a large Frenel lens that can melt a stack of pennies. At Maker Faire, he wants to create souvenirs from pocket change.
  

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David Gerard writes "The Microsoft Certified Partner model is: an MCP buys contracts from Microsoft and sells them to businesses as a three-year timed contract, payable in annual installments. Iceland's economy has collapsed, so 1500 businesses have gone bankrupt and aren't paying the fees any more. But Microsoft has told the MCPs: 'Our deal was with you, not them. Pay up.' The MCPs that don't go bankrupt in turn are moving headlong to Free Software, taking most of the country with them. (Warning: link contains strong language and vivid imagery.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report says that "member communities" -- sites like social networks and blogs -- are now more popular than email. The Nielsen report says that two out of three internet users, in the eight countries it tracks, visit social sites more than email sites. Though usage remains behind search, portal and PC software sites, the social-site usage is growing at a far faster pace than any of them. The methodology here is a bit odd, and the classifications of sites not immediately clear, but, if anything, the report underlines how users' online time, as well as their communication, is shifting towards social networks and, perhaps, away from email. This makes sense: as more and more people are spending more and more time inside social networks, it follows that they'll communicate within them, rather than outside them via email. Email still has tremendous value, but also brings plenty of problems, from spam to annoying reply-all responses. As long as in-social-network communication can improve on this experience and offer benefits over email, its use will continue to grow. But that advantage can be fleeting, particularly as problems like spam move to social networks. If social network-based communication becomes as polluted as email, it can't expect to hold its popularity for long.

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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Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

So we're down to naked collusion?

That's the proposal from the NY Times' David Carr this morning, in his latest column about the crumbling business of newspapers, who begins:

Back when I was a young media reporter fueled by indignation and suspicion, I often pictured the dark overlords of the newspaper industry gathering at a secret location to collude over cigars and Cognac, deciding how to set prices and the news agenda at the same time.

It probably never happened, but now that I fear for the future of the world that they made, I’m hoping that meeting takes place. I’ll even buy the cigars.

Boiling it down, Carr suggests these once-powerful news barons a) start charging online readers for the journalism; b) stop letting Google and other aggregators link to their work without some kind of financial arrangement in place; c) raise online advertising prices; and d) toss out a quaint law, the "Newspaper Protection Act of 1970," which let competing local newspapers combine business operations while keeping separate editorial staffs.

The holes in Carr's plan are, of course, huge. Among them: Some media companies would say thanks but no thanks, on the principle that their long-term prospects wouldn't be enhanced by virtually disappearing from public view. Then there's the non-trivial issue of whether Congress would pass a new law -- almost certainly a necessity for such an arrangement -- giving the industry the right to do what it would scream bloody murder if any other industry attempted. (Then again, the Newspaper Protection Act of 1970 was a flagrantly anti-competitive law that made a mockery of editorial writers' pronouncements in favor of free markets, not to mention their organizations' willingness to exercise actual free speech.)

Meanwhile, the CEO of Guardian Media Group's ContentNext (publisher of the excellent PaidContent and other properties) penned a few suggestions last week about how Silicon Valley and its culture could help in "Bring on the Techies" -- with this notable line:

There are various ways that newspapers and Silicon Valley companies can work together to preserve graphical advertising rates, create scarcity and ensure that the age-old way of supporting content survives.

"Create scarcity?" Spoken like a CEO, who's really talking, just like Carr, about collusion.

PaidContent exists because it emerged in a world where there was little or no barrier to entry, a world of abundance. Creating scarcity is the process, in part, of erecting new barriers. No thanks.

Silicon Valley does have plenty to offer, but if the plan is to invent ways to stifle the world of information abundance, it's crazy -- and wrong. (I know, that's not the aim. But it would be one effect.)

The issue is not saving newspapers. The issue is, among other things, seeing that good journalism survives. It's also about making sure that people who "consume" media demand better than they've been getting, by persuading them to become activists in the way they consume. I'll be talking more about all of this in upcoming posts.

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

In his worthy campaign -- dubbed Yes We Scan! -- to become America's public printer, or head of the Government Printing Office, Carl Malamud will take to the Twitter-waves at noon (Pacific Time) today to give a mini-speech of tweets about his plans. Then he's off to Washington to make more waves of the political sort.

Follow the Twitter campaign here.

There's a whimsical element to all this. But Carl is the real deal, and his idea is not only sensible but important.

Go for it, @carlmalamud --

The buzzword in DC these days seems to be "transparency," though it seems like not everyone agrees on the definition of the word. For example, earlier this year, we noted that the press seems to think that transparency means access, even if that's not necessarily the case. Now, as Ed Felten points out, many politicians and the press seem to be confusing transparency with outreach. Specifically, Twitter is full of buzz among politicians these days -- and they're claiming that it's useful for a more transparent relationship with their constituents. However, just because you use Twitter, it doesn't make you more transparent -- it just improves your outreach.

Here's the difference: outreach means government telling us what it wants us to hear; transparency means giving us the information that we, the citizens, want to get. An ideal government provides both outreach and transparency. Outreach lets officials share their knowledge about what is happening, and it lets them argue for particular policy choices -- both of which are good. Transparency keeps government honest and responsive by helping us know what government is doing.

Twitter, with its one-way transmission of 140-character messages, may be useful for outreach, but it won't give us transparency. So, Congressmembers: Thanks for Twittering, but please don't forget about transparency.

It's an important point to remember as we hear more and more politicians claiming to be transparent, when they might really just be focused on outreach.

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Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

So I just stopped by Slate, a (quite good) traditional magazine that is owned by the Washington Post Co. and happens to live on the Web, and here's what the top of the home page looked like -- a giant ad covering the actual article links:

It took me a bit of searching to discover the "close ad" link at the lower left. I don't mind ads, but this is ridiculous.

Glyn Moody writes "Not content with snooping on all Internet activity, the UK government now wants to introduce changes to the contentious EU Telecoms Package, which will kill net neutrality in the EU: 'Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users' rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a "principle" that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services. The amendments, if carried, would reverse the principle of end-to-end connectivity which has underpinned not only the Internet, but also European telecommunications policy, to date.' To add to the irony, an accompanying text cuts and pastes from Wikipedia, without attribution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems like we have a few of these cases every year or so, where some company that tries to maintain strict control over its distribution channels freaks out about people reselling products online. A few years ago it was a shampoo company that said no one could resell their shampoo bottles. Now, it's the famed cosmetics firm Mary Kay, who is claiming that an online retailer is violating its trademark.

The details of the case are pretty interesting. Basically, Mary Kay requires its "independent" distributors buy a certain amount of product every month to sell -- and the amount required is often a lot more than they can reasonably expect to sell. So, one former Mary Kay distributor set up a pretty good business in buying the "remnant" inventory from others at lower prices (better than being stuck with it completely) and then reselling it online. It's basically arbitraging the inefficiencies set up by Mary Kay's ridiculous system that pushes excess product onto its distributors.

But, of course, Mary Kay doesn't like any of this (despite the fact that it still gets paid for its product) -- and, in theory it should have no case due to the always popular first sale doctrine (i.e., you can resell stuff you bought). Except, Mary Kay is trying to get around this by claiming that the online seller's goods are "materially different" and thus first sale doesn't apply. Why are the products materially different? Apparently, they're old, expired and not supported any more -- which doesn't necessarily seem to be "materially different," but perhaps a judge will find otherwise.

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