crazipper writes "Tom's Hardware interviewed Charlie Miller, winner of this year's Pwn2Own contest and formerly with the NSA. He discusses the effort it took before the contest to be able to take down a MacBook within seconds, sandboxing, and the effectiveness of the NX bit and ASLR. His outlook on end-users protecting themselves against attacks? 'Users are at the mercy of the products they buy.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

I've always admired Matt Taibbi's writing and I've followed his byline from his hilarious early efforts at The eXile, a Moscow-based free paper for ex-pat Americans to his stint at The NY Press, and now at Rolling Stone, where he's been published for some time. Jann Wenner's smart patronage of a fine writer like Taibbi is ample proof of Rolling Stone's continuing relevance in a world of 24/7 news cycles and instant internet publishing.

This article is Taibbi at his best. It takes no prisoners!

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream."

The Big Takeover: How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution.

Thanks, Mike Backes!

In case you were unaware, there's a sale going on in the Maker Shed, with 15% off all craft kits and CRAFT T-shirts for only $7. When ordering kits, use the code UCRAFTER to get the discount. The sale ends on March 31st, so get while the gettin's good!

The Maker Shed

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

In just a short while, Wikileaks has proven to be both an amazing resource to reveal useful information and a massive thorn in the side of those who wish that info wasn't revealed (this includes, by the way, Wikileaks itself, which had to deal with some of its own private info that was leaked as well. However, you knew that eventually governments would start to look for ways to "deal" with Wikileaks -- and up first appears to be the German government. Authorities have apparently raided the home of the owner of the Wikileaks.de domain name. The claim is that the raid was supposedly for "distribution of pornographic material" and "discovery of evidence." The speculation (and, yes, at this point, it's still speculation) is that the raid had to do with Wikileaks recently publishing censored-site lists from various governments, which included certain porn sites those gov't's wanted censored, though it did not include any pornographic material itself.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Lucas123 writes "The Internet Archive, the non-profit organization that scrapes the Web every two months in order to archive web page images, just cut the ribbon on a new 4.5 petabyte data center housed in a metal shipping container that sits outside. The data center supports the Wayback Machine, the Web site that offers the public a view of the 151 billion Web page images collected since 1997. The new data center houses 63 Sun Fire servers, each with 48 1TB hard drives running in parallel to support both the web crawling application and the 200,000 visitors to the site each day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Because here's a second shot that traditional media has at usurping the control of the tech industry over the future of news. They've been like kittens up till now, and of course there's no reason to believe they could get their act together anytime soon. But the major media companies should think of Twitter as another Napster, not as a threat (that was the mistake they made in 2000) rather as a Hulu-like opportunity to build their own platform that's more friendly to news.

What do the media companies do well? Have they innovated even a little in the new electronic media? What right do they have to demand our support if they won't take any chances?

I think it's clear that Twitter-the-Company has proven it doesn't understand news. Do the media companies understand it? If they did, they'd be all over this.

And if I were advising FriendFeed, I'd make a platform for Twitters, make it really easy for a developer with a miniimum of programming, almost all UI coding, to develop something that does exactly what Twitter does. And of course let them add whatever else they like from the FF bag of tricks. Think of a thousand flowers blooming instead of being so vertically integrated.

In the last few days there's been a discussion in the blogosphere as to the future of browsers, and the continued charm of Firefox, or whether there's any serious movement to Chrome. My original piece basically said that no matter how attractive Chrome might be, I can't switch because so much of what I do depends on plugins that are only available in Firefox.

But part of the the discussion centered around whether or not Firefox is slow relative to the other browsers. David Naylor posted a series of tests that show that, if anything, it's getting more efficient. His numbers are impressive. Less than half a second to launch. I've never measured the performance of Firefox or any other browser, and I don't plan to. But when people talk about the speed of a browser, I don't think of how quickly it launches or even how fast it renders a page right after it launches.

Here's what I do care about -- how slow it gets after it has been running for a number of hours with a full complement of tabs. That's the A-B comparison that we should be looking at. I think that's the subjective measure people use to say whether a browser is fast or slow. Ideally you only launch a browser once every time your machine boots. But how often do you have to quit the browser because it has become so bogged down and is using up so much of the machine's resources? I wonder if most users know that you can make the browser faster by quitting and relaunching?

It's also possible that people who use Chrome fit a different profile and don't load it up with a lot of tabs, or the UI of Chrome discourages lots of tabs -- I don't know since I have only tried Chrome, I have not used it as my daily browser.

An anonymous reader writes "id Software has released a port of the classic Wolfenstein FPS to the iPhone. Some of the coding was done by John Carmack himself, who also used original code combined with new code from Wolf3D Redux. The original code was open sourced years ago, and enthusiasts have been updating it, which made the port considerably easier for id. It's available in the iTunes App Store, but the source is available for free at id's website." Carmack also posted a detailed writeup about the decision to bring Wolf3D to the iPhone, including design notes and a few snippets of code. At the end, he says, "I'm going back to Rage for a while, but I do expect Classic Doom to come fairly soon for the iPhone." Kotaku got a chance to try the game at GDC: "It's not just a good reproduction of the original, it seems better."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unfortunately, I missed yesterday's panel here in Nashville about the "ISP/recording industry relationship," but apparently Jim Cicconi from AT&T admitted what most people had already assumed: that it was a willing and eager participant in the RIAA's self-destructive campaign to kick people off the internet for file sharing -- and, in fact, has started a "test" whereby it's sending out notices to those accused of file sharing. This isn't much of a surprise, but it's interesting to see how quiet AT&T is still being about all of this. It's still not releasing many details, perhaps knowing that doing so would lead to a pretty massive backlash -- while also recognizing that the severe lack of competition out there in most of its markets means that customers really don't have much of a choice. Update: Apparently, Comcast and Cox have admitted the same thing as well. Disappointed to have missed that panel yesterday.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "I am working with a couple of large companies that are purchasing web and collaboration software stacks from Microsoft, IBM and others. These are for thousands of end users and are (supposedly) ready for multiple data center deployment and other big-corp requirements. I have suggested some open source alternatives such as Liferay and Drupal, and the technical people are interested but management types are not. They have given a few reasons, such as concerns over supportability and enterprise-readiness, but my feeling is that they are being won over by FUD from large vendors and the fact that most corps do not have significant deployments of FOSS technologies beyond Linux yet. All this seems to be in line with a survey on Web-app servers by OpenLogic. So my questions are: How have you persuaded larger enterprises to adopt server-side OSS, beyond server-room Linux and a couple of demo JBoss boxes under someone's desk? And which products are truly ready for enterprise-scale deployment?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer science is cool again. At least, that's what the headline at Network World says. Apparently, CS enrollments are up for the first time in six years, driven by "teens' excitement about social media and mobile technologies." I'm a CS grad student, so you might expect me to be excited about this development, but I'm not actually sure it's such a good sign. It's great that there are more people considering careers in the IT industry, but I worry about people going into computer science for the wrong reasons. In my experience, if your brain works a certain way, you'll love programming and will have a successful career in the software industry. If it doesn't, there probably isn't much you can do to change that. So I'd love to see more kids explore CS, but if, after taking a couple of classes, they're not sure if CS is the right major for them, then frankly it probably isn't. If you don't enjoy programming, you're almost certainly not going to be a good programmer, and you're not going to be either successful or happy in that career. The fact that you like Facebook or your iPhone definitely isn't enough reason to be a CS major.

I think it would be better if colleges focused on expanding the computer training that non-CS majors receive. Almost every technical field involves manipulating large datasets, and so the ability to write basic computer programs will be a big productivity boost in a wide variety of fields, from economics to biology. Most people aren't cut out to be full-time programmers, but lots of people could benefit from a 1-semester course that focuses on practical data manipulation skills with a high-level scripting language like Perl or Python.

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

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

A new bill before Congress calls on the NTIA and FCC to inventory the spectrum use in America. Previous work on this by the likes of the New America Foundation found that the vast majority of US broadcast spectrum was sitting fallow -- either squatted on by members of the National Association of Broadcasters (who get their spectrum for free but are theoretically required to put programming in it and use it in the public interest) or reserved from allocation to keep from interfering with licensed users (many of whom were not using their spectrum at all).

Three tiny slices of open spectrum, at 900Mhz, 2.5Ghz and 5.7Ghz, have created a massive economic and technological revolution through WiFi and other unlicensed uses of the public airwaves. The potential for new economic and technological gains from more open spectrum is unimaginable. Getting that spectrum into use is damned good policy, and long overdue.

My only concern is that the FCC will look for short-term cash gains by auctioning off all or most of the fallow spectrum for exclusive use, as has been done with 3G licenses. But this short-sighted approach trades the immediate gains from an auction for the perpetual income stream that arises from the commerce and activity that's enabled by open spectrum. Think, for example, of the total economic benefits that the nation and the world have derived from WiFi -- from cards and base-stations to hotspots to all the gains in efficiency and new opportunities created by wireless networking, and compare this to the paltry sums extracted by a few phone companies selling crippled, metered, filtered 3G network access.

The bill, entitled the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act, was introduced last week by John Kerry (D-MA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Roger Wicker (R-MS). It amends part of the Communications Act by adding a requirement for a national survey of what's being broadcast into our radio airwaves. The survey will cover everything from 200MHz to 3.5GHz, and will be run by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Federal Communications Commission, with input as needed from the Office of Science and Technology.

New bill calls for inventory of US spectrum

Chris sez, "I'm following the live video stream, and the live #ftcdrm twitter coverage of the FTC DRM town hall meeting in Seattle. Very fascinating stuff, with people discussing the harms and benefits of DRM. In the link I've submitted, I've aggregated such links to live coverage and video streams of it that I can, including a direct link to the video stream (some people, such as me, have problems getting by the wrapper that the FTC has on the video feed)."

FTC DRM town hall meeting now in session (Thanks, Chris!)

1sockchuck writes "Making changes to Google's search infrastructure is akin to 'changing the tires on a car while you're going at 60 down the freeway,' according to Urs Holzle, who oversees the company's massive data center operations. In a Q-and-A with Data Center Knowledge, Holzle discusses Google's infrastructure, how it has engineered its system to route around hardware failures, and how it responds when something goes awry. These updates usually go unnoticed, but during system maintenance last month a software bug triggered an outage for Gmail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on EMS Labs, Lenore has a piece on how to successfully photograph Light-Emitting Diodes:

Taking pictures of LEDs can be difficult. Digital camera sensors just don't respond the same way that human eyes do, so it is nearly impossible to take a picture that reflects what you are seeing. But manipulating a few settings like white balance and shutter speed can improve things immensely, as can simple physical things like using a tripod.

Photographing LEDs

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

The various record labels have pushed sites like MySpace to institute aggressive filters to try to stomp out the ability of people to upload others' music -- but as with any such filters, they seem to make mistakes that aren't easily fixed. Reader Ken Blake points us to the news that indie musician Emily Bezar had her account flagged as a copyright violator after she tried to upload five or six songs from her own self-produced CD. She's emailed MySpace's support email... and seems to have heard absolutely nothing back weeks later. But, no, overly aggressive copyright enforcement doesn't hurt anyone, right?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

xororand writes "The initiative called 'Accelerated 3D on the web' has been formed by the Khronos consortium with the goal to define an open standard for 3D content on the web, using OpenGL and ECMAscript, as it was suggested by Mozilla developers. 'The Khronos(TM) Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an "Accelerated 3D on Web" working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months.' Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards, and the increasing performance of ECMAscript engines."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

xororand writes "The initiative called 'Accelerated 3D on the web' has been formed by the Khronos consortium with the goal to define an open standard for 3D content on the web, using OpenGL and ECMAscript, as it was suggested by Mozilla developers. 'The Khronos(TM) Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an "Accelerated 3D on Web" working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months.' Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards, and the increasing performance of ECMAscript engines."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photographer Chadwick Tyler creates magnificent, decadent photographs. I saw a reference that his latest exhibition, titled Tiberius, has been extended at New York City's Honey Space Gallery for a few more days. No telephone number listed for the gallery to confirm though. Chadwick Tyler's Tiberius and Tiberius II (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

MAKE Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder made this stringed instrument last weekend and posted it on Dinosaurs and Robots:

My goal was to make an electric string instrument that uses drone tuning. I don't know anything about music theory, but drone tuning is a way to tune an instrument that makes it sound good no matter what you do with your fret fingers. Sitars, some dulcimers, and bagpipes use drone tuning. The clubhouse strummer uses GDG tuning (the Gs are one octave apart). I copied the fret layout from a strumstick, but I could have used this handy mountain dulcimer fret calculator to figure out the fret spacing.

The Clubhouse Strummer

More:

• Maker Workshop - Cigar Box Guitar on Make: television
• Project: The $5 Cracker Box Amplifier
• Download a free PDF of the Cracker Box Amp article from MAKE, Volume 09 here.

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

Lorin Ricker writes "Computing in the Cloud — Free Apps — Outsource It! Yippee! Automation TCO nirvana at last! You can hear the non-technical managers and home-users unite in grateful song and dance! If we can just offload our office applications and data to the Cloud Known As Google, that apparently bottomless source of storage, search and now other useful capabilities, our office automation problems will be solved! Hooray! 'Well, just y'all hold up there a minit, lil' cowboy. Thar's a few thangs y'all oughta know 'bout afore ya go rushin' off...' If John Wayne didn't say exactly that, well, he should'a." Keep reading for the rest of Lorin's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---

Above, Boing Boing Video and Offworld's live streaming channel for 2009 Game Developers Conference.

The entire Boing Boing Video crew (Xeni Jardin, Wes Varghese, Derek Bledsoe, and Jolon Bankey) is in San Francisco this week, along with a number of the bloggers from Offworld, BB Gadgets, and Boing Boing, to cover the 2009 Game Developers Conference. And this time, for the first time ever, we're doing it with live video broadcasts on our new Ustream channel. Tune in for conversations in our BBV@GDC studio with hosts including Matty Kirsch from Killscreen TV,  Xeni and Joel from Boing Boing, visits from Brandon, Cory, and Pesco, and lots of game biz guests and happy mutants throughout the world, all week long! Also: Dani from Costa Rica, playing Guitar Hero and generally looking cute.

For BB + Offworld's complete video and blog coverage of GDC09, visit offworld.com/gdc09.

(Special thanks to our live stream host Ustream TV, to Wayneco Heavy Industries, and to our transportation provider at Virgin America.)

Two weeks ago, I posted about people who are bringing the DIY ethic to funerals. For my latest essay over at GOOD, I thought a bit more about this concept and how it might be part of a larger quest for authenticity. From GOOD:

As cyberspace becomes a “layer” on top of the physical world and we spend more of our lives online, a new-found appreciation emerges for authentic experiences, interactions, and goods. I think that’s part of why so many people are embracing the “maker mindset” of DIY culture, from Stitch and Bitch to Maker Faire...

Last year, my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future spent a day brainstorming with James Gilmore and Joe Pine, authors of the famous business book Experience Economy. Their latest book, Authenticity, is about what the demand for truly “real” things means for business strategy. It was fascinating to think with them about the myriad contexts in which questions of authenticity arise. What does “authentic” mean on a Bourbon Chicken Grill’N Dip label that boasts of “authentic food court flavor”? Or in Las Vegas, where the fakeness itself is authentic? Or in death?

DIY Funerals and the Quest for Authenticity

Red light cameras and speed cameras continue to stir up controversy as police and local governments increase their use. The general claim is that they're used to make roads safer, but scams like in Italy, where people have been accused of shortening yellow lights in order to catch more offenders, do little to quell the idea that revenue generation is the real goal. The good ol' radar gun is generally pretty widely accepted by people, even though on more than one occasion, they've proven fallible, too. The latest story comes out of England, where a guy has gotten out of a ticket for driving 173 miles per hour -- after pointing out that his unmodified car's top speed is 127. He admitted to driving 105 in a 50 mph zone, but wanted to avoid the jail time a conviction for driving at the higher speed would bring. In this case, rather than technology fouling up, it looks like human error: the guy was busted with a time-and-distance device, which measures the time it takes a car to travel between two points. Police officers have to press a button or take some other action when the car passes the points -- opening up tremendous scope for error, particularly at high speeds.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I really like this pack of 75 flexible jumper wires from the Maker Shed. You can re-use them over and over again! I have been using these for a few weeks now, and they are by far my favorite way to prototype new ideas.

Features:

• (4) 200mm jumper wire
• (6) 165mm jumper wire
• (10) 125mm jumper wire
• (55) 80mm jumper wire

More about our Deluxe breadboard jumper wires

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

I'm taking the day off skiing cause my legs hurt and it's snowing like a mofo outside. And I'm writing post after post, finding they're already written. How did this happen? I went skiing yesterday. It's been so long, maybe as much as 15 years -- I don't remember the last time I went skiing. But it all comes back, esp the part about how many new ideas come from the simple act of going up and down the mountain.

I think it's because of the pace of the sport. Going downhill everything is in motion and your brain is processing data at a huge rate. Emotionally it's exhilirating, no matter how you're skiing. If I'm skiing poorly, like the first run of the day, I'm fearful of breaking something or looking terrible and wondering why I even came. But if I'm hitting all the marks, as I was toward the end of the morning, I'm feeling svelte, alive, on top of everything, important, masterful -- all kinds of very positiive stuff.

And then there's the ride up the mountain. The blood is rich with oxygen, the muscles have this incredible sense of well-being, endorphins are flowing, and that's when the ideas come!

I know how long it's been since I've ski'd -- I've never blogged about it. So I stopped skiing right around the time I started blogging. I wonder why.

Anyway tomorrow I'll be back on the mountain, so expect some more good stuff after that.

An anonymous reader writes "A Canadian court has ordered the owners of the FreeDominion.ca to disclose all personal information on eight anonymous posters to the chat site. The required information includes email and IP addresses. The court ruled that anonymous posters have no reasonable expectation of privacy, a major blow to online free speech in Canada."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gosh it's almost as if I work for Amazon. How the heck did that happen. There was a long time I didn't like them, because of the 1-click patent. I was afraid they were going to be a big black hole in the middle of the net, where open ideas went to die. But they haven't seemed to be bullying people with the patent, and then an off-hand comment by Matt Mullenweg about how he was furnishing his whole life with Amazon got me to try them out and I was hooked.

The thing I like best about shopping at Amazon are the user comments. They really are good. And I often base purchasing decisions on what the other users say. It got so bad that when I went shopping at Fry's for some sound equipment I fumbled around until I realized what I was missing was the advice of other shoppers. I did the unfair thing, listened to a bunch of stuff and then went home and bought what I liked and what the others liked, from Amazon.

Now onto Scoble.

I've been reading Scoble for a very long time, but he never wrote a post as insightful as the one he wrote about where Facebook is going. He says the goal of Facebook is to improve on the experience that Amazon provides (he didn't say it that way, but that's how I read it). Not only will I be able to rely on other users to tell me which products are good, but I'll also know what products my friends are buying and liking. Scoble's example was picking a sushi restaurant on University Ave in Palo Alto. I could find Scoble's favorite, and Mike Arrington's, and Steve Jobs's, etc. That would carry extra weight, if I knew who the people doing the recommending are, even though Amazon's reviews are generally so good, I can get by without knowing who the people are.

So this insight led me to wonder if Amazon, being the smart, ambitious, rich company that it is, has already figured this out and is lying in wait to pounce on Facebook, or maybe buy them if the price gets attractive. I can't imagine that they're not on top of this.

The point is this -- if you're not thinking of Amazon as a social networking company, you should.

AS220 Labs' Make and Break workshops are a great way to get some hands-on hacking fun. Tonight (Wednesday, March 25, 2009), Tom Sgouros, Maker Faire Bay Area 2008 performer and editor of the occasional Make book, is presenting Make and Break: All About Motors:

When: Wednesday March 25th, 5:30pm to 7pm

Where: AS220 Performance Space

The real fun in electronics is when you can use a circuit to make things go. Come learn some basics of electric motors, including DC motors, AC motors, servos, and steppers with Tom Sgouros (www.sgouros.com). Guest appearance by Judy the robot.

This session is free if you want to come and listen. You'll have to pay for materials if you want to complete the kit and take things home with you. Some sample motors will be available, which can also be purchased cheaply.

Make and Break: All About Motors

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

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "After receiving a Rule 11 Sanctions Motion (PDF) in a Houston, Texas, case, UMG Recordings v. Lanzoni, the RIAA lawyers thought better of proceeding with the case, and agreed to voluntarily dismiss the case 'with prejudice', which means it is over and cannot be brought again. The defendant's motion papers detailed some of the RIAA's litigation history against innocent individuals, such as Capitol Records v. Foster and Atlantic Recording v. Andersen, and argued that the awarding of attorneys fees in those cases has not sufficiently deterred repetition of the misconduct, so that a stronger remedy — Rule 11 sanctions — is now called for."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A nifty site that's "... dedicated to the progress of the package design industry and its practitioners, students and enthusiasts." #

I'd say EC2 for Poets was an unqualified success.

Its purpose was two-fold: 1. To see if intelligent people who have never put up a server before could do it with EC2. 2. Having given them the experience, they would then see new applications for servers that people who usually put up servers don't see.

There were requests for more Poet's Guides -- one in particular -- OPML Editor for Poets. The suggester realized toward the end of his request that the last person to write a Poet's Guide is the person who is immersed in the details of the thing being written about. The guide has to be someone who, like the reader, is a newbie -- who knows just enough to get it to work, and not a whole lot more.

One thing people were disappointed about was that the instance you start doesn't retain its state when you shut it off. It would be highly desirable to have a hosting service where the image of your virtual server was retained and could be restarted just like you restart your laptop or desktop computer. But you would only pay for the time the server is actually running. This could be a lucrative business, it seems, esp if the launch times could be shorter (say the same speed that a virtual machine launches on a desktop). It would also be nice if there were a way to do this with Mac OS.

How about a Kindle for Poets? As you may know -- I got a Kindle recently, but haven't had a chance to use it for real until I took a plane flight earlier this week. I bought a copy of the NY Times for $0.75 and read it on the 2 hour flight to Salt Lake from SFO. I liked it. In ways it was better than reading the paper Times. Not so unweildy, easier to remember my place if I get distracted. No paper to throw out when I'm done.I didn't have to stand in line at the news stand, or have exact change for the vending box. And it's cheaper than the physical paper. Good deal.

Now what I'd like to do is run a script on my netbook to load up my Kindle with lots of content from bloggers I read, without going through Amazon's servers. I don't want to use their limited web browser. I want the content to be first class, as pleasant as reading the NY Times. In other words, I want it to function like an iPod -- I only use iTunes for the last step in loading content onto my iPod, I manage all my podcast subscriptions myself with my own podcatcher. I want the Kindle to work largely the same way. I bring this question to the Scripting News readership -- how do I get started? And if successful I may well write a Kindle publishing howto, if there isn't already one.

I would, of course, use Scripting News as a guinea pig for the process -- I'd love to make it available to Kindle readers, but I'd want to be able to tinker with the user experience if it's at all possible to do so. I see a new reading device as a learning tool not for me, as a writer, but also as a media hacker.

Also I invite others to write their own Poets howto's for things they're interested in or passionate about. You learn a lot from the process. As they say -- people teach what they most need to learn.

What is it with curmudgeonly journalists who jump at any opportunity to blame the internet? JJ sends in a link to a bizarre column by Christie Blatchford in Toronto's Globe and Mail where she appears to simply go off on all of "cyberspace" due to something having to do with a murder... though, the connection isn't clear at all. Perhaps this is par for the course for Blatchford, who we also mentioned last year when she wrote a nasty column slamming blogging and the idea that readers might want to comment on news stories. To her, "journalism is a monologue." Yet, this latest column seems somewhat disconnected from reality. It pieces together a few separate and somewhat unrelated things to effectively try to indict the entire internet and internet culture for the death of a teen.

To be honest, Blatchford (the professional) does a pretty poor job even explaining what she's so upset about -- but she seems pretty sure that it's the internet to blame. From what I can gather, a woman (or maybe a teen? it's not clear) was killed by a teen, and another teen was convicted of first degree murder for being the "mastermind." Fair enough.

So why is the internet evil?

From what I can parse out, there are four main complaints:

1. Friends of the convicted girl have set up a Facebook group supporting her, despite her conviction.
2. They dared to use her real name as you would expect friends to do -- rather than obeying the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which forbids naming such juvenile offenders.
3. The messages in support from her friends have terrible spelling and grammar.
4. The two teens involved in the murder text messaged each other a lot -- including at least two conversations where they discuss going to the bathroom, and a few conversations where they discuss sexual acts.

And, that's about it. But, you see, all this points out how the internet is such an evil influence. In fact, Blatchford seems quite upset that in the trial convicting the girl, no one has focused on "the role that was played by the web - enabling and empowering at the least" the murder itself. First, it's unclear what the first three awful points raised above had to do with the internet's influence on the murder itself. As for the final point -- it's about SMS text messaging rather than "the web" (but I guess we shouldn't expect a luddite to distinguish), and it's still not clear what role it actually had (if anything). The same conversations could have (and perhaps would have) taken place via voice over the phone as well if SMS wasn't around. These kids were obviously troubled, but there doesn't seem to be any indication (at least from what's presented) that technology (let alone the web) had anything to do with it, whatsoever. But why should that stop an angry columnist from blaming it?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

A man picking fruit on an island in eastern Indonesia fell out of a tree where he was then mauled to death by two Komodo dragons. From The Guardian (photo by Dezidor/Wikimedia Commmons):

The man, Muhamad Anwar, 31, was found bleeding from bites to his hands, body, legs and neck within minutes of falling out of a sugar-apple tree on the island of Komodo and died later at a clinic on neighbouring Flores. The giant lizards had been waiting for him under the tree, according to a neighbour, Theresia Tawa...

The carnivorous Komodos, which live for up to 50 years, can grow to 10ft in length and weigh up to 200lbs. Though they rarely attack humans – and had not previously killed an adult for more than 30 years – an eight-year-old boy died after being mauled in 2007 and attacks are said to be increasing as their habitat becomes restricted. Their diet usually consists of smaller animals, including other members of their own species.

"Komodo dragons maul man to death"

ISoldat53 sends this quote from McClatchy DC: "The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering. Appearing last month before a US Election Assistance Commission field hearing in Orlando, Fla., a CIA cybersecurity expert suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies fixed a 2004 election recount, an assertion that could further roil US relations with the Latin leader. ... Stigall said that most Web-based ballot systems had proved to be insecure. The commission has been criticized for giving states more than $1 billion to buy electronic equipment without first setting performance standards. Numerous computer-security experts have concluded that US systems can be hacked, and allegations of tampering in Ohio, Florida and other swing states have triggered a campaign to require all voting machines to produce paper audit trails."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The intrepid travelers at Curious Expeditions recently visited Boston's Mapparium, a three-stories-tall glass globe that you can walk through. Built in 1935, the dome was designed so that visitors could examine a model of the Earth without the distortion of perspective that accompanies looking at a globe's exterior. Interestingly, the Mapparium is housed at the Christian Science Publishing Society's headquarters. From Curious Expeditions:

The Christian Science Monitor was a serious and respected publication, and every newspaper worth its snuff had to have an impressive headquarters. The Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston is just that. In 1930, Boston architect Chester Lindsay Churchill was commissioned to design the new Christian Science Publishing Society headquarters. A beautiful lobby, dubbed “The Hall of Ideas”, is complete with a grand water fountain, marble floors, and one-of-a-kind globe lamps (one showing constellations and the other showing the ocean’s currents). But a grand entrance wasn’t enough. After all, the New York Daily News building had that famous first class gigantic spinning globe. How could the Christian Science Monitor compete with such cosmopolitan worldliness? With an even better globe, of course.

A World Frozen in Time

snydeq writes "Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC. 'First of all, I don't know how to make money on it,' Whitehurst said, adding that he was uncertain how relevant the desktop itself will be in five years given advances in cloud-based and smartphone computing, as well as VDI. 'The concept of a desktop is kind of ridiculous in this day and age. I'd rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.' Despite increasing awareness that desktop Linux is ready for widespread mainstream adoption, fellow panelists questioned the practicality of switching to Linux, noting that even some Linux developers prefer Macs to Linux. 'There's a desire [to use desktop Linux],' one panelist said, 'but practicality sets in. There are significant barriers to switching.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, I posted about the Science Museum of London's fantastic online exhibition "Brought To Life: Exploring the History of Medicine." In Fortean Times this month, Jen Ogilvie visits Blythe House, the physical home to many more of the strange artifacts not on public display. From Fortean Times:

Most of the medical history objects crammed into Blythe House’s cupboards and jostling for space on its shelves come from the collection of the pharmacist and philanthropist Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), and the air of barely contained chaos seems somehow to bear the echo of his exuberant, omnivorous delight in things. In the surgery room, lines of near-identical scalpels and tonsil guillotines are marshalled in drawerfuls of menace; nestling nearby are materials and skull fragments used in experiments by an English doctor interested in Neolithic trepenation; German WWI cotton wool is bundled in corners; surgeons’ ornate walking sticks hang over high shelves, lasting testimony to the status anxiety of their owners. Locked up in the drugs room are the antidote cases and medicine chests sent by the publicity-savvy and lionizing Wellcome on famous adventurers’ expeditions to Everest or Brazil or the Antarctic, and thousands of jars of exotically strange natural medicines collected from around the world and inscribed with apothecary-evoking legends like ‘East Indian Blistering Fly’ or ‘Dragon’s Blood’. The room of x-ray machines crosses an eccentric inventor’s workshop with a torture chamber, and contains oddities like the Pedoscope, left-over from the days when irradiation seemed a fun way to fit shoes...

Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities

Last week, we had a bit of a back and forth with Jim Griffin, who's trying to build Choruss, a recording industry-backed service to have certain gatekeepers (universities initially, then ISPs, then...?) act as gatekeepers, who would effectively pay a per user fee, which they'd likely pass on to users, to allow those users to file share (sorta -- as the record labels would still likely try to shut down file sharing networks and still push for "three strikes" laws). I got to see Griffin present his "vision" for Choruss at the Leadership Music Digital Summit and spent some time chatting with him after (no punches were thrown -- it was quite friendly). That said, having heard from him directly, I'll say I'm still quite skeptical and somewhat worried about where Choruss is heading, and many others I spoke to in attendance felt the same way.

First, Griffin's point is basically this: for the past 150 years or so, any place that "used music to draw a crowd" eventually ended up paying some kind of license for it. It started with restaurants and then moved on to concert halls and radio and movies and television. So, to Griffin, setting up a similar licensing scheme (which he continues to say is voluntary, not compulsory) is simply the next obvious step. He paints himself as a technology supporter -- and I have no doubt that's true. He also points out that "piracy" isn't necessarily the biggest "problem," out there, though he still says it is a problem. He notes that there's a lot more competition for everyone's time and entertainment dollar spend. From his vantage point, the real problem is that all of the different rights holders are sitting around yelling at each other (it's true, it happened on an earlier panel) rather than agreeing to take a dollar and split that dollar. So, while they all fight, that dollar goes somewhere else. So, based on that, the solution is simple: set up a process to get the dollar, and then let everyone fight over that dollar behind the curtain, rather than out front in dealing with consumers directly. I've heard a very similar vision from folks like Fred von Lohmann over at EFF.

While I've been tough on Griffin, I will say that I believe quite strongly that he earnestly believes this is the best solution to the "problems" facing the recording industry. I don't think he's trying to create a pure money grab for the record labels or create what becomes a "music tax." The problem is that that's exactly what such a program is likely to become.

To defend against those claims, Griffin repeatedly says what he said earlier: this is just an experiment! He says that later this year a bunch of universities will launch with Choruss (in fact, he claims that more universities wanted to sign up than they could handle) -- but each may be using a different model. So, one university may require every student to participate. One may be opt-in. One may be opt-out. One may set up their own centralized file sharing server. Even how they measure what files are shared will be a variety of experiments: one may use technology tools. One may simply use self-generated "diaries" (like the old Nielsen/Arbitron systems). Payments may be based on downloads on one system and "plays" on another. The pricing may be different at different universities. Basically, it's just a series of tests, and supposedly we'll all "learn" from it and move on from there. In fact, he's hoping that since these tests will be done at research universities, that professors there will help study the results. So that's why Griffin has been upset about some of the coverage (including ours) that didn't highlight the fact that these are tests that could go in a variety of different directions.

He didn't address any of the questions we raised in that last post, in part because he doesn't have the answers to many of them yet (it's part of what he hopes shakes out from the experiments). However, there are still plenty of reasons to be quite wary of this plan. For all of Griffin's belief that this is the an experiment worth trying, I think it's built on faulty premises and will quickly go down a dangerous road. It's just too tempting to take this concept in exactly the wrong direction.

The faulty premise: that licensing is a way to "handle" the issue (even if he still doesn't want to call this a license). Licenses have always been a way to duct-tape on a temporary solution to a new technology. Adding yet another such license is simply layering on yet another layer when it's simply not needed. Griffin complains that "we cannot tolerate a society where paying for art, culture and knowledge is voluntary," but that's missing the point. It assumes, incorrectly, that paying for the content directly is the only way to make money off of that content. As we've been showing over and over again (and many others at this very event are demonstrating) that's simply not true. There are lots of ways to make money, and many of those are enhanced by having the music be available for free.

Griffin addressed that briefly, suggesting that those other models still work on top of Choruss, whereby Choruss acts as sort of a "basement floor" on top of which those other models can be built. That sounds great, but it sounds to me like a social welfare program, separate from what the market would allow. And once you build such a system, as we've seen over and over again, the folks who control it keep asking for more and more. So even if these are experiments and who knows where the final model will go, given who's backing it, it's not hard to guess: they're going to demand to make it about as close to compulsory as possible. ISPs are going to offer it and will simply add to everyone's bill. The program doesn't work at all if they don't do that -- and that's simply going to piss off a lot of people, just at a time when musicians actually have been showing they can win the trust (and money) from true fans.

Griffin suggests that ISPs won't have to make it mandatory, but will be able to "upsell" people to tiers that include the Choruss tax covenant not to sue license whatever it's called. He uses, as an example, just how difficult AT&T (he didn't name them, but it's clear who he meant) has made it to sign up for naked DSL. He interprets this to mean that the ISPs are good at upselling users. He ignores the fact that AT&T worked hard to hide the option and when that was revealed a rather angry outcry went up among AT&T customers who felt cheated.

When challenged on all this by an audience member -- Dave Allen, member of the UK band Gang of Four, who has now gone on to a second career helping musicians build real business models around their brands -- Griffin used "the cable model" as a way that this all makes sense: i.e., even if you don't like sports, you get ESPN in your basic cable package. Allen smartly shot back the fact that customers hate that and are increasingly looking at alternatives like Hulu and Boxee, that let them get away from such deals. All Griffin could do was insist that such bundling would "come back."

But Allen really got to exactly the heart of the problem with Choruss: it's a plan based on what's best for the existing stakeholders, not the customers. There are plenty of business models out there (and I've been hearing about a bunch more from musicians as I chat to them at this event) that work by creating a true win-win relationship between the musicians and the fans. They're models under which everyone benefits. Choruss doesn't work that way. It seeks to perpetuate the old model, where you have to "get" money out of others in order to "allow" them to do something. It's not about creating win-win models where everyone's happy to take part, making a willing transaction where they feel better off. The examples Griffin gives -- of older licensing models, ISP upsells and cable TV bundling -- are exactly the sorts of things that have always pissed off fans, and it seems likely that Choruss will do the same, no matter how much Griffin hopes to have it avoid that fate.

Instead, there are tons of models that don't involve anyone feeling angry or ripped off -- and those embracing them are finding them to be quite lucrative (in many cases more lucrative than older offerings). Griffin says that Choruss won't interfere with those other models, but that's unlikely (at best). If people feel they're getting ripped off by having to pay a university fee or ISP-fee (tax) for music, they're going to be less willing to participate in these sorts of new business models, already feeling pissed off and that they've "given" already... often under duress. That's not the model on which to build a successful industry.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Free Mac application that overlays customizable grid guides (via). #

The exterior of the Justice League of America's "Hall of Justice," seen on the Super Friends cartoon, was based on Union Terminal, a gorgeous Art Deco railroad built in 1933 in my hometown of Cincinnati. Hanna-Barbera, creators of Super Friends, was sold in 1967 to Cincinnati-based Taft Broadcasting Co. Apparently, Hanna-Barbera folks would visit the city where they would have seen Union Terminal. From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

When creating "Super Friends," the producers wanted a grand headquarters for their heroes.

The job was given to Al Gmuer, background supervisor for Hanna-Barbera for more than 30 years. Using his knowledge of architecture, he sketched out a building that almost resembled the finished product.

"Mine had more windows," Gmuer said.

The drawing was then given to the network, including Joe Barbera, where it was turned into the Union Terminal look-a-like that's known today, he said.

Gmuer isn't sure why they redesigned his building to look like Union Terminal. He doesn't give the Hall of Justice much thought today.

"In the long run, I hated that building," he said. "The way it's designed, it was not easy to draw. I had nightmares about that damn building."

"Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice ..." (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

Al writes "European researchers have taken a step towards replicating the functioning of the brain in silicon, creating new custom chip with the equivalent of 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. The aim of the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States (FACETS) project is to better understand how to construct massively parallel computer systems modeled on a biological brain. Unlike IBM's Blue Brain project, which involves modeling a brain in software, this approach makes it much easier to create a truly parallel computing system. The set-up also features a distributed algorithm that introduces an element of plasticity, allowing the circuit to learn and adapt. The researchers plan to connect several chips to create a circuit with a billion neurons and 10^13 synapses (about a tenth of the complexity of the human brain)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A piece came out in yesterday's LA Times that quoted from my podcasts with Jay Rosen and blog posts here. The piece was a bit all over the map, the author was having trouble coming to grips with a premise that I take for granted. Twitter is a news system, today, it will be more of a news system in the future, and whatever becomes of Twitter the company or their web service, the essentials of what Twitter does is an integral part of the news system of the future.

Let's try turning the question around -- if Twitter isn't a bootstrap of or a dry run at the news system of the future, then what is it? A fad with no significance? People said that about CB radio, something that I never did myself, but it seems vindicated now -- it was a dry run at Twitter. People said the same things about blogging, but I don't think anyone doubts that blogging is part of the news system of today and the future.

An example...

The other day I was shopping at Target in Berkeley, and noticed that the parking lot was full, and wondered how this could be, if there was a recession going on. I noticed that the parts of the store that sold supermarket-like products were jammed, and the parts that sold durable stuff, clothes, luggage, toys, sporting goods, electronics -- were empty. When I got to Starbucks after my stop at Target, I reported this on Twitter, along with a picture I had uploaded from the parking lot (it goes to Flickr and is automatically pushed to Twitter). Soon after reports came in from around the country about Target parking lots where other people lived. Now here's the point -- that's what network news used to simulate, by sending reporters to all the locations to find out what's going on. Instead we got the reports from the shoppers. Not a whole lot of difference. And Twitter was both the newsroom and the delivery medium.

I'm sure some willl argue that what's going on in the parking lots of shopping centers during a recession isn't really news; then I would point those people to the first reports of the USAir flight that landed in the Hudson, which didn't appear on CNN or ABC -- it appeared on Twitter, with a picture, in much the same way my picture of the Target parking lot did. The technologic channels can report small stuff or sensational stuff, with equal alacrity.

I wonder why press people have trouble seeing that news is what's happening there. Sure there's a lot of other stuff on Twitter -- they focus on that instead. I leave it to the investigative journalists to figure out why.

cryfreedomlove brings news that YouTube has once again been blocked in China. The Google-owned video site was censored in China last year because of videos about the protests in Tibet, and that may be the impetus behind this latest restriction. According to a New York Times report, "'The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,' said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley... Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fit with what appeared to be an effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube was a target. It also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hannah Perner-Wilson is working on some really interesting sensing experiments including this potentiometer that's controlled by sliding a large metal ball bearing around two conductive traces.

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

Make: television continues to grow steadily across the country...

Starting this Saturday, March 28th, you can watch Make: at 11am in Seattle/Yakima on KCTS and KYVE.

We're excited to welcome Seattle/Yakima as the newest member of the Make: television family. Seattle is home to countless makers and awesome maker groups like the HazardFactory and Dorkbot SEA, Robothon, 911 Seattle Media Arts Center as well as our very own RFID implantee, Amal Graafstra.

What makes the Seattle area a hotbed for maker activity? Tell us about the places, projects and people who are vital to your maker community!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

Despite Steve Jobs' proud promotion of the 200 patents Apple has around the iPhone, there's been no shortage of patent infringement lawsuits filed against the company. The latest (sent in by Jon) involves a company suing Apple for daring to promote the iPhone as an ebook reader, noting it holds a patent on An Electronic device, preferably an electronic book. So apparently the fact that others, by creating software to do the rather obvious thing of allowing people to read digital ebooks on their iPhones, Apple is now getting sued?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Check out this excellent 1942 documentary film from RCA explaining the intricate manufacturing process involved in the production of vacuum tubes - even detailing differences between metal and glass encased units. And in case you missed it, be sure to check out Paillard's DIY version of the process. [via Matrixsynth]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Last year, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) proposed a plan to legalize the file sharing of copyrighted songs, which involved a small monthly fee to people using an internet connection. Critics of the plan complained that it amounted to another tax, and the Canadian recording industry said it violated copyright law. Now, as an anonymous reader writes, "The SAC has renewed its bid to legalize peer-to-peer file sharing in return for a levy on Internet service. The SAC is now calling for the plan to be voluntary, with both consumers and creators having the right to opt-out. ACTRA, the leading performer group in Canada, now says it is also supportive of a legalized approach with the prospect of extending the plan to video sharing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a stroller hack from Parenthacks reader Noelle: "To keep your umbrella stroller from tipping over from the weight of the diaper bag on the back, we bought a pair of ankle weights and put them on just above the front wheels. This keeps the stroller from tipping over especially when the child gets out."

I tip over the stroller ten zillion times a day. This is smart.

Add ankle weights to umbrella strollers to keep them from tipping

Rob sez, "This is a video of Mario blowing the warp whistle and being sent to Chicago. Well done and overall very fun. Great ending!"

Lovely work indeed.

Warp Whistle (Thanks, Rob!)

Above, a music video for "Return of the Ninja Droids," by Desert Planet. Produced in 2005 by director Jari Mikkola. (Thanks, Matti Laakso!)

CWmike writes "Although three of the four browsers that were targets in the PWN2OWN hacking contest quickly fell to a pair of researchers, none of the smartphones were successfully exploited. TippingPoint had offered $10,000 for each exploit on any of the phones, which included the iPhone and the BlackBerry, as well as phones running the Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android operating systems. 'With the mobile devices so limited on memory and processing power, a lot of [researchers'] main exploit techniques are not able to work,' said TippingPoint's Terri Forslof. 'Take, for example, [Charlie] Miller's Safari exploit,' referring to Miller's 10-second hack of a MacBook via an unpatched Safari vulnerability that he'd known about for more than a year. 'People wondered why wouldn't it work on the iPhone, why didn't he go for the $10,000?' she said. 'The vulnerability is absolutely there, but it's a lot tougher to exploit on the iPhone.'" Chrome was the only browser at the contest that was not successfully exploited. We previously discussed day one of the contest, and a summary of day two is available as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member svofski made this rather sweet touch-sensitive keypad with backlighting -

This a custom implementation of capacitive sensing technlogy as per QMatrix Whitepaper. It uses an ATmega8 to scan the keys and outputs ASCII characters to the serial port.

Schematic, PCB, and source code are available, though the project page is currently Russian-only. Check out the Googlish interpretation for details.

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

Bracer Jack has a nice modeling tutorial on the Iron Man helmet, especially focused on techniques for modeling hard surfaces. He even offers the files containing his 3DS Max schematic drawings to get you started.

Ironman Helmet Modeling by Bracer Jack

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

Apropos of yesterday's blog post about the insane, paranoia-inducing "anti-terrorism" posters the London cops have put up, Peter Mahoney offers this remix of the "A bomb won't go off because weeks before, a shopper reported someone for studying the CCTV cameras. Don't rely on others: if you suspect it, report it." poster.

His reads "A bomb won't go off here because people tend to be quite nice, really. Fear everything. Then, tell us about it."

Got your own remix? Post a link in the comments!

sheet_road_cctv (Thanks, Peter!)

We've been covering the ongoing legal brouhaha between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey over whether or not his iconic Obama poster was copyright infringement of an Associated Press photo -- with most of the focus being on whether or not the use was protected by fair use. However, the EFF is noting something quite odd (and quite troubling) in the AP's countersuit against Fairey: it's claiming that his post violates the DMCA. That should leave you scratching your head, considering that the DMCA seems almost entirely unrelated to Fairey making a poster. But the AP seems to be claiming that in removing the little copyright notice beneath its photo, Fairey violated section 1202.

As the EFF notes, since Fairey didn't "strip" the data from the image, but merely appears to have cropped the image for his purposes, it's hard to see how Fairey actually violated the DMCA here. However, more to the point, the EFF explains why this is likely been thrown into the case by the AP. By invoking the DMCA, it adds much greater potential statutory fines, then for a straight copyright infringement case. That gives the AP a much bigger potential award -- which it can use to pressure Fairey into settling. As the EFF points out, such huge potential fines creates a pretty massive chilling effect on others -- something all too common with the DMCA.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from CNet: "AT&T, one of the nation's largest Internet service providers, confirmed on Tuesday the company is working with the recording industry to combat illegal file sharing. At a digital music conference in Nashville, Jim Cicconi, a senior executive for AT&T told the audience that the ISP has begun issuing takedown notices to people accused of pirating music by the Recording Industry Association of America, according to one music industry insider who was present. In December, the RIAA, the lobbying group of the four largest recording companies, announced the group would no longer pursue an antipiracy strategy that focused on suing individuals, but rather would seek the help of broadband providers to stem the flow of pirated content. The RIAA said an undisclosed number of ISPs had agreed to cooperate but declined to name them. This is important because the RIAA has said that repeat offenders faced the possibility of losing service — at least temporarily — as part of the music industry's 'graduated response' plan."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kim sez, "In the 1940s and 1950s, comic great Basil Wolverton's half-page strip 'Culture Corner' ran in the back of 'Whiz Comics' (home of Captain Marvel). Each strip featured Croucher K. Conk, Q.O.C. (Queer Old Coot) explaining the 'cultured' way of doing such tasks as 'How to Go Soak Your Head', 'How to Snore Without Being a Bore', and 'How to Kick a Person in the Teeth'. Dinosaur Gardens has dug up most of these old strips and made them available for download."

Basil Wolverton’s Culture Corner (Thanks, Kim!)

The home of Theodor Reppe, who owns the wikileaks.de domain, was raided by German police in retaliation for Wikileaks' publication of the secret government blocklists from around the world, like the Australian list of forbidden sites. The "ACMA" list is supposed to be a list of child porn and other illegal sites, and it is the backbone of a proposal to censor the entire Australian Internet. Publication of the ACMA list showed that the bureaucrats charged with secretly building a list of forbidden material had shoved in enormous amounts of legitimate stuff that they just happened to disagree with -- straight-ahead porn sites, gambling sites, and other material. Unsurprisingly, people who are given absolute power over their neighbors' intellectual curiosity without any accountability end up misbehaving.

A statement on Wikileaks's website claims police were investigating the "distribution of pornographic material" and "discovery of evidence".

Wikileaks claims Mr Reppe is not involved in the website other than "sponsoring the German domain name and mirroring a collection of Wikileaks US Congressional Research Service reports"...

"The raid is over the censorship lists, but which particular list, we can not be certain, although the Australian lists are the most recent and the most prominent due to their non-voluntary status."

In the past week, Wikileaks published three lists all purporting to be the Australian Communications and Media Authority's (ACMA's) blacklist of websites.

While ACMA and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy last week denied the list belonged to ACMA, they both warned that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) would investigate its distribution.

The lists contained apparent links to child pornography websites, gambling sites, as well as relatively innocuous sites including those of a dentist and canteen manager.

Police raid Wikileaks.de domain owner Theodor Reppe's home over 'censorship lists' (Thanks, Tom!)

Many of us can recall repeatedly trying to load up NES cartridges that, for one reason or another, decided to display shifting screens of random bits instead of their intended game. No Carrier's open source glitchNES software makes exploring those accidental realms of digital art easy. Alter the code to your heart's content then load it up in your favorite emulator program. Though you may feel the reflexive urge to blow into a cartridge upon first viewing the results, these visuals would likely compliment your next chiptune performance quite nicely. [via Create Digital Motion]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

OMG! If I'd found this gem glowing underneath the aluminum Christmas tree when I was a kid, I'd have sprained something in my geekly excitement. I think I'd sprain something now... my wallet. This kit sold for a rather steep-at-the-time $50 and goes for 100 times that now. But I'd still be tempted. I think that's just about the most inspired atomic age objet d'art I've ever seen. Joseph Cornell, David Lynch, the Fluxus artists, William Gibson, and the Coraline box makers, all working together, couldn't do anything more aesthetically/culturally/temporally resonant than that.

The set came with four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a geiger counter, a manual, a comic book (Dagwood Splits the Atom) and a government manual "Prospecting for Uranium."

Other Gilbert sets (e.g., the No. 11 Atomic Energy set) continued to carry the spinthariscope, the ore and the manual. In addition, the Geiger counter could be purchased separately.

Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (1950-1951) [via Boing Boing]

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

microbee writes "Following the Linux kernel 2.6.29 release, several famous kernel hackers have raised complaints upon what seems to be a long-time performance problem related to ext3. Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, Andrew Morton, Andi Keen, Theodore Ts'o, and of course Linus Torvalds have all participated. It may shed some light on the status of Linux filesystems. For example, Linus Torvalds commented on the corruption caused by writeback mode, calling it 'idiotic.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE columnist and advisory board member Saul Griffith, giving a brief TED talk introducing the concept of high-altitude kite-generated energy and his work at Makani Power.

Saul Griffith: Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind

More:
Powering Down: Q&A with Saul Griffith...

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

With many newspapers struggling to stay in business, a lot of ideas have been tossed around about how to keep existing papers alive. One idea, which has reached the US Senate in the form of a bill introduced by Senator Benjamin Cardin, is to allow newspapers to operate as non-profits, which would exempt them from taxes on subscription and advertising revenue, while also allowing them to raise funds via donations, similar to how public broadcasting companies operate. This approach would seem to have many potential issues. First of all, to qualify for the program, a paper would no longer be allowed publish editorial endorsements. This could have the twin effect of chilling editorial commentary in support of or against various candidates' positions, and driving more bias into the reporting. It would also put the government in charge of what could or could not show up in a paper's editorial pages. Second, to be successful, the papers would be heavily dependent on donations, which could raise questions about objectivity. But the biggest problem with this approach is that it simply props up a failing business model, rather than forcing the newspapers to adjust to the new realities of the marketplace. In the senators own words:

"We are losing our newspaper industry," Cardin said. "The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy.

Whether the loss of newspapers (as opposed to journalism) is a tragedy "for our democracy" is certainly debatable. But the senator is right about the business model being broken. And if that's the case, wouldn't it be wiser to experiment with new, better models, rather than put the old one on life support?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

One of the new features to make it into Flash 10 is the ability to generate software-based audio. There's essentially an event callback that will trigger during audio playback that lets you fill an input buffer full of wavelength samples. I'm looking forward to seeing what types of generative music folks will be able to create with this.

gotoAndLearn has a quick introduction to the topic that lets you tweak a waveform based on mouse position (shown above), and Andy Hulstkamp has a quick rundown on the basics of generating and modulating a specific tone. If you're a Flash hacker, go make some bleeps and blips and send us a link to your algorythmic creations in the comments.

Flash Player 10 Dynamic Sound
Generating Waveforms, Timbre and Pitch

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

BountyX writes "First and foremost, wikileaks.org is back up after downtime due to server load; however, the German government wants to keep the site down. According to their twitter page, police have raided the home of Wikileaks.de domain owner Theodor Reppe (PDF) over internet censorship lists that were leaked two weeks ago. What the Australian government's secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist has to do with Germany is a mystery. This case is a prime example of multiple governments collaborating in support of censorship." Reader iter8 provides a link to coverage on Wikileaks itself, which says that police searched Reppe's homes in both Dresden and Jena, and adds: "According to police, the reason for the search was 'distribution of pornographic material' and 'discovery of evidence.' Wikileaks has published censorship lists for Australia, Thailand, Denmark and other countries. Included on the lists are references to sites alleged to contain pornography, including child pornography. Wikileaks has not published any images from the sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The PIR Sensor in the Maker Shed can detect motion from up to 20 feet away by using a Fresnel lens and an infrared-sensitive element. It's inexpensive and really easy to use. It's ideal for alarm systems, motion-activated lighting, holiday props, and robotics. Check out the link for more details.

Features:

• Simple 3-pin connection
• Single bit output
• Small size - easy to conceal ( 0.96 x 1.0 x 1.27 in.)
• Arduino Compatible

More about the PIR sensor module

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

Just posted: our hands-on preview of the Canon 500D / T1i. We've managed to get our hands on Canon's latest consumer-grade DSLR and have been delving through the menus and scrutinizing its new features. We've also gone out and shot a handful of real-world sample images to show what it's capable of. So come in and meet the new Rebel.

Exclusive: our hands-on preview of the Canon 500D / T1i. We've managed to get our hands on Canon's latest consumer-grade DSLR and have been delving through the menus and scrutinizing its new features. We've also gone out and shot a handful of real-world sample images to show what it's capable of. So come in and meet the new Rebel.

tdobson writes "The popular online radio service Last.fm has announced that users outside of the UK, USA and Germany will need to start paying 3 Euros (about $4.40 USD/£2.80 GBP) per month to continue streaming music on their service. Last.fm doesn't offer much of a reason as to the change, other than writing on their blog that '[t]here will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio.' Already, there appears to be quite a backlash in responses so far, amongst subscribers and non-subscribers of all nationalities — has this killed Last.fm's appeal, globally?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For quite some time, mobile operators have been talking about how they want to get mobile connections in all sorts of consumer electronics as a way to grow their businesses. For instance, Verizon Wireless got a ton of press in November 2007 when it announced it was "opening" its network -- but the pledge hasn't yet really delivered much in the way of new devices or services. The Amazon Kindle remains about the only moderately successful example of the concept in practice, though there have been a few other products. The WSJ is reporting, though, that Sprint is still looking towards connected devices as a big part of its future growth. The Kindle's data connection, supplied by Sprint's EV-DO network, works well both technically and in terms of its business model, which is invisible to the end user, so Sprint should have a decent idea of how the system can work. But if this market is really as promising as the operators have been saying for a few years now, it's time to get some more devices available to consumers.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Taking some time off!

American mobile operators' advertising is still dominated by claims about their network coverage, from the "Can You Hear Me Now?" guy to consistent sniping about whose network is bigger. But in Europe, competing on coverage largely went out years ago, thanks to smaller geographic areas to cover and denser populations, while converging on a single technology didn't hurt, either. Some operators there have gone so far as to embrace network sharing, where they collaborate on their infrastructure with their rivals to cut costs. Vodafone and Telefonica have announced the biggest network-sharing deal so far, saying they'll jointly build new cell sites and consolidate existing ones in several countries across the continent. Network sharing is seeing renewed interest as operators look to trim their capital expenditures, but it can benefit consumers as well. In one sense, a lot of spending is duplicated by rival operators as they build out network footprints that are roughly equivalent; significantly reducing that cost would have a big impact on their businesses, and allow them to redirect some of those resources elsewhere. As a Telefonica exec says, "by reducing our costs in areas of the business that customers don't see, we can ensure that we invest in areas they truly value." Thus far, many operators' response to the commoditization of their product has been to try and differentiate on coverage; eliminating that factor could spur them to differentiate in other ways, such as with new and better services.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Erik sez, "The Hugos have a special one-time-only award category this year 'Best Graphic Story'. Though you might want to note that one of the nominated stories is from Howard Talyer's 'Schlock Mercenary,' an old fashioned, four panel a day, ad supported webcomic, written and illustrated by one guy with no other credits to his name. The story has been available online since it was originally posted (just like the whole archives are), and he's put together the story in PDF form for people who don't want to trawl through the archives."

The Body Politic (PDF)

The Body Politic (PDF) (Coral cache mirror) (Thanks, Erik!)

Popsikle writes "A few days ago one of the Web's largest hosting discussion forums was supposedly hacked via their backup servers. From the story: 'We've since learned that this very deliberate, sophisticated and calculated hack against Web Hosting Talk was carried out by gaining access to our offsite backup servers. From our backup servers, the hacker gained access to the WHT db server. The malicious attacker deleted all backups from the backup servers within the infrastructure before deleting tables from our db server. We were alerted of the db exploitation and quickly shut down the site to prevent further damage.' What sort of security do you put on your backup infrastructure? Looking at your backup solution could you be completely taken down by either someone obtaining a backup or accessing your backup servers? What sort of recommendations does everyone have for this not to happen?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Syuzi at Fashioning Technology points us to this project by Brett Renfer which uses capacitive sensing via conductive thread and Arduino to make this button organ.

In the Maker Shed:

Lilypad E-Sewing Kit

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

Lucretious points to a Kotaku post claiming that Apple is changing the terms for iPhone developers, such that when users ask for refunds, Apple gives them back the full amount but still demands a 30% fee from the developers. For obvious reasons, this is upsetting developers who worry about getting hit with huge chargeback fees. I would imagine that Apple's response is that if developers make a good enough app, they shouldn't have to worry about refund requests. But, in the meantime, it certainly increases the liability of being an iPhone developer.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Canon has also announced the PIXMA Pro9000 Mark II 14 inch professional inkjet printer. Compared to the previous model, the Mark II offers three times faster black and white printing, supports third-party media and includes a new Ambient Light Correction feature. The addition of 16 bits per channel printing offers a wider color gamut (with 276 trillion colors). In addition, a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop is provided that enables Canon EOS users to directly print RAW files without converting to a compressed format. The Pro9000 Mark II is priced at $499 USD (£499).

Canon has released the PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II 14 inch A3+ professional inkjet printer. With a resolution of 4800 x 2400 dpi, the printer uses a 10-colour pigment ink system, including both matte and photo blacks. This allows photographers to print on both gloss and matte media without changing ink tanks. It offers 16 bits per channel printing and dedicated monochrome printing. It also offers the Ambient Light Correction option that adjusts the final print according to type of lighting under which the print will be displayed. The Pro9500 Mark II is priced at $849 USD (£729).

Canon has also introduced the Speedlite 270EX entry-level flashgun, replacing the Speedlite 220EX with a smaller but more powerful unit. Unlike the 220EX, the new model features a 90 degrees tilting zoom head. It also offers a near-silent recycling in a time of just 3.9 seconds and a guide number of 27 meters. Powered by two AA batteries, this flashgun is compatible with all recent Canon cameras.

Canon has unveiled the EOS 500D (Digital Rebel T1i), the latest addition to its compact DSLR series. The upper-entry-level camera features a 15.1 MP APS-C CMOS sensor with 1080p HD video recording at 20fps. It also offers a 3.0 inch LCD with 920,000 dot resolution and an ISO sensitivity range expandable up to 12800 equivalent. It includes a faster Digic 4 processor offering better noise reduction at higher ISO's and continuous shooting speeds of up to 3.4 fps delivering 170 large JPEG images in a single burst.

Canon has also announced the PIXMA Pro9000 Mark II 14 inch professional inkjet printer. Compared to the previous model, the Mark II offers three times faster black and white printing, supports third-party media and includes a new Ambient Light Correction feature. The addition of 16 bits per channel printing offers a wider color gamut (with 276 trillion colors). In addition, a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop is provided that enables Canon EOS users to directly print RAW files without converting to a compressed format. The Pro9000 Mark II is priced at $499 USD (£499).

Canon has released the PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II 14 inch A3+ professional inkjet printer. With a resolution of 4800 x 2400 dpi, the printer uses a 10-colour pigment ink system, including both matte and photo blacks. This allows photographers to print on both gloss and matte media without changing ink tanks. It offers 16 bits per channel printing and dedicated monochrome printing. It also offers the Ambient Light Correction option that adjusts the final print according to type of lighting under which the print will be displayed. The Pro9500 Mark II is priced at $849 USD (£729).

Canon has also introduced the Speedlite 270EX entry-level flashgun, replacing the Speedlite 220EX with a smaller but more powerful unit. Unlike the 220EX, the new model features a 90 degrees tilting zoom head. It also offers a near-silent recycling in a time of just 3.9 seconds and a guide number of 27 meters. Powered by two AA batteries, this flashgun is compatible with all recent Canon cameras.

Canon has unveiled the EOS 500D (Digital Rebel T1i), the latest addition to its compact DSLR series. The upper-entry-level camera features include a 15.1 MP APS-C CMOS sensor with full 1080p HD video recording. It also offers a 3.0 inch LCD with 920,000 dot resolution and an ISO sensitivity range expandable up to 12800 equivalent. It includes a faster Digic 4 processor offering better noise reduction at higher ISO's and continuous shooting speeds of up to 3.4 fps delivering 170 large JPEG images in a single burst.

Richard Metzger is Boing Boing's current guest blogger.

Okay, I'll admit that I came to the immense pleasures of Canada's greatest export, "Trailer Park Boys" a little late in the party. By the time I downloaded a 17GB torrent file of "the complete Trailer Park Boys" it was indeed just that, complete, with a bow on top. Two feature films and seven TV series, a total of 56 episodes of some of the funniest television I have ever seen. My wife and I positively gorged ourselves on these shows. We'd often watch six a night, one after the other like it was comedy crack. Finally after three weeks or so, the well ran dry. No more "Trailer Park Boys"!! We were majorly bummed out. We went through withdrawal symptoms. We were sad. It was bad, real, real bad.

But then --hooray-- they did a new Christmas special!! Hearing THAT was the best present I could have gotten, believe me! And the Christmas show ended with the set-up to a new feature film that will appear in 2009, "Countdown To Liquor Day." In my household, this was off-the-scale good news.

Here is a selection of short --but exemplary-- clips from "Trailer Park Boys." If like me, you somehow tragically managed to live your life without being acquainted with the distinctly UN-subtle comedic charms of Canada's favorite bad boys, Julian, Ricky, Bubbles (and let's not forget Mister Lahey, the greatest screen lush since WC Fields) and you find that these clips tickle your funny bone, rejoice, you have hours and hours of the most side-splitting humor still to discover. And if you are already a TPB fan --and you know who you are-- post in the forums and encourage other Boing Boing readers to check out this masterpiece of mirth and mayhem. Who knows, maybe even Coop will get around to watching the DVD I gave him?

Ricky and Bubbles fight

"The Water Bong is So Smooth!"

"Reveen!!" (this is the real Reveen)

White rapper "J-Roc" "You know what I mean?"

"Shithawks!"

Ricky gets caught stealing cable

Lots of headlines today about how China has blocked access to YouTube, apparently because of some videos posted by a Tibetan exile group. Of course, this isn't the first time China's blocked the site -- it did so about a year ago, again because of videos related to Tibet. Around the same time, it also started enforcing laws against non-government owned video-sharing sites, and took action against more than 50 of them. This latest block shouldn't be particularly surprising to anybody, but it stands as a reminder that the flow of outside information into China on the internet is like a faucet the government can shut off at any point. The only real question is when did the country lift last year's YouTube block?

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

clover kicker writes "The CBC reports that the group managing Canada's .ca internet domain is working to foil an internet worm set to attack starting April Fool's Day. 'This is the first virus that's really focused on domain names as part of propagating the virus itself,' said Byron Holland, CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, a non-profit organization that represents those who hold a .ca domain. CIRA's strategy includes pre-emptively registering and isolating previously unregistered .ca domain names that Conficker C is expected to try and generate, said a news release issued by the group. That would make those names unavailable for anyone to register in order to set up a website to host the worm's 'command and control' file. A list of the names has been predicted by security experts based on the worm's code. In addition, CIRA is investigating and monitoring activity at names on the list that have already been registered and will 'take appropriate action if suspicious activity is detected.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smith sez, "This blog breaks down the tax code for writing off currently-kidnapped children as deductions. Though one has to sympathize with parents who are actually in this situation (which is very rarely, I assume), I can't help but feel ashamed that our IRS has contemplated this issue to such depths."

Can I still write off a child as a deduction if they've been kidnapped?

According to the IRS website, the answer is "yes," if two conditions are met:

1. The child must be presumed by law enforcement to have been kidnapped by someone who is not a member of your family or a member of the child's family, and

2. The child had, for the taxable year in which the kidnapping occurred, the same principal place of abode as the taxpayer for more than one-half of the portion of such year before the date of kidnapping.

Tax Advice from the Prestigious Internet (Thanks, Smith!)

John sez, "Ted Chiang's short story "Exhalation" --which is currently a finalist for the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award--is now available to read online in a variety of formats, via our Downloads page. Originally appearing in Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse Two, 'Exhalation' is an evocative story of an all-metal world, its argon-breathing inhabitants, and a scientist who performs the ultimate self-examination. The story is also available as a podcast from StarShipSofa".

Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” now available for download. (Thanks, John!)

The Libertarian Futurist Society has released its slate of nominees for this year's Prometheus Awards, the award for the best "pro-freedom" science fiction of the year. I'm proud to say that my novel Little Brother made the cut, as did five other standout books, including a couple personal favorites: Half a Crown by Jo Walton and Saturn's Children by Charlie Stross.

* Matter, by Iain Banks (Orbit Books) - Part of Banks' series of far-future space operas about the Culture, a utopia which reflects Banks' interest in anarchism through its avoidance of the use of force except when necessary for protection and defense. The novel focuses on an agent in Special Circumstances, the Culture's special forces unit, who returns to her home planet, a "shellworld" with multiple layers of habitation, after her father has been killed in a coup.

* Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow (TOR Books) - A cautionary tale about a high-school student and his friends who are rounded up in the hysteria following a terrorist attack, the novel focuses on how people find the courage to respond to oppression.

* The January Dancer, by Michael Flynn (TOR Books) -The classic space opera, set in an interstellar civilization created by a wide-ranging human diaspora, revolves around how discovery of a an alien relic sends agents of a multisystem federation on a quest that exposes them to political and economic institutions of many different cultures and requires them to deal with threats to freedom, from piracy to political corruption.

* Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross (Ace Books) -A robot's adventures after all the humans in a society have died raises complex issues of ethics, duty, family and struggle in this Heinlenesque novel.

* Opening Atlantis, by Harry Turtledove (Penguin/Roc Books) - Set in a world where medieval Europeans discover an island continent in the Atlantic Ocean, this first novel in a new atternate-history series explores the politics of colonization and the struggle for self-determination while offering parallels and contrasts with development of the Americas.

* Half a Crown, by Jo Walton (TOR Books) -The sequel to Walton's Prometheus Award-winning Ha'penny concludes her alternative-history trilogy, set two decades after Britain reached accommodation with Hitler's Germany in the 1940s, with a chilling portrait of people all too willing to trade freedom for security.

2009 PROMETHEUS AWARDS FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

One of the most interesting -- if sometimes creepy -- talks that I sat in on today at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco was "Applied Real Money Trade Design," with Eric Bethke of GoPets (a kid-oriented virtual world with a active market for buying and selling virtual goods) and Andy Schneider of Live Gamer (which runs the marketplace in GoPets). I took a bunch of notes -- this is thought-provoking and odd stuff that crosses the boundaries of fairness, economics, play and work.

Balancing methods: How can you screw up?

* You can't get this right a priori

   * You need to iterate

* Free to play isn't a business model, it's a name for thousands of business models

* Things that are defensive in nature can be charged for, and the time-rich skilled players won't resent lamers having more health or a shorter corpse-run, because they'll still kill 'em

   * But give the lamers big weapons and it amounts to an "I win" item -- instead, sell things like awesome looking weapons <

* Rental is awesome -- an item that's too powerful disappears from the game when the rental period expires

* Limited edition items -- they're scarce, you unbalance the game for 2-3% of the players

   * If it's really bad, you can buy them back

  * But it's a bad habit to get your users into

* Every couple months, come up with a whole new roster of items that are 10% more powerful than all the previous items; the inflation washes away all your past sins and your players are happy to spend all their time grinding those new items

It looks like we've found the new evil bogeyman for the recording industry: people daring to listen to music for free online. We mentioned it earlier this month, when there was a report about how all the various online streaming services were taking away from sales. Apparently, the record labels are passing around statistics claiming that such streaming services hurt music, claiming (incorrectly) that "there's nothing left to promote."

This morning, at the Leadership Music Digital Summit, Russ Crupnick, a music industry analyst at the NPD Group, gave a "state of the industry" talk, where he pointed out (good) that p2p file sharing isn't as big a problem as the industry makes it out to be, but then dove into the "problem" that more and more consumers of music are "only listening to music," using these various online sites and services, rather than buying the music. It seems to be quite a strange world where the idea that lots of people are paying attention to your product and it's seen as a "problem." He even noted that folks who do buy (such as concert tickets) tend to spend a lot more on music-related goods (beyond just concert tickets) but seems to brush over that.

While it's good to see that folks are starting to get beyond just blaming P2P (though, Crupnick did repeatedly refer to it incorrectly as "stealing" music), this industry has a serious problem: it looks at every single opportunity as a "problem" or a "threat" and never as an opportunity. I would argue that's a much bigger problem than fans daring to listen to and share music.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The long-awaited game Storytron, from legendary game-designer Chris Crawford, is now visible to the public. Storytron is a system for creating games in which real stories take place -- and it's designed to allow you to create your own stories as well. The launch-game, Balance of Power is "a geopolitical strategy storyworld."

You begin on September 12th, 2001. You are the President of the United States and your job is to advance American interests, as expressed in a list of policy goals. These policy goals can be found by clicking on the Things button. Each of these is a policy of some sort, with its "owner" (the country that would actually do it) listed first. The USA's own policy actions are at the top of the list. If you select any of these policy goals, you will see a lot of text explaining exactly what it entails. The desirability of that policy goal to the USA is also displayed next to the bold text Undesirable_Desirable. You want to make certain that the policy goals that are desirable are eventually executed, and the ones that are undesirable are never executed. For now you can just skim through this list, but in order to do well in BoP2K, you'll need to familiarize yourself with each of these, even those that don't appear to affect you. Why? Because you will need to make deals with other countries involving some of those policy-treaties.

Your first task is to select which policy goal you want to pursue first. You'll see the incomplete sentence: "I" followed by a menu entitled "Do What?" listing two choices: "set goal" and "set goal to prevent." The first means "I want to set a goal for something I want to achieve." The second means "I want to set a goal to prevent something from happening." Select the first menu item ("set goal") and a list of twelve policies desirable to the USA is presented. This being September 12th, 2001, you want to get your hands on Osama bin Laden. Select that option and click on the little period button that appears. (It means: "period—end of sentence—that's what I want to say.")

Balance of Power: 21st Century (via Beyond the Beyond)

Alice Taylor from the Wonderfland is celebrating Ada Lovelace day with a great post about ARG and gaming pioneer Jane McGonigal, including video and slides from Jane's talk yesterday at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco, which is absolutely the talk of the event.

Find more videos like this on Top Secret Dance Off

My Ada Lovelace day post: Jane McGonigal

Leesa sez, "My dad, an inventor/designer (he invented the Tressy doll--the doll with hair that grows, the first adjustable television turntable and designed unusual wrought-iron modern furniture) designed a chess set in 1968 that was made out of 428 lamp parts. Each set was handmade (by my mother and grandmother in the basement of our house in the Bronx.) Over 250 copies were sold in the late sixties/early 70's to high end stores and collectors."

Superb.

Chess Set (Thanks, Leesa!)

R.U. Sirius says: "This must be a prank. The Wall Street Journal today reports on a couple of "immortalists" whose dreams of living forever were wrecked by Best Scammer Ever Bernard Madoff."

From the WSJ:

[Arakawa and Madeline Gins'] work based loosely on a movement known as "transhumanism," is premised on the idea that people degenerate and die in part because they live in spaces that are too comfortable. The artists' solution: construct abodes that leave people disoriented, challenged and feeling anything but comfortable.

They build buildings with no doors inside. They place rooms far apart. They put windows near the ceiling or near the floor. Between rooms are sloping, bumpy moonscape-like floors designed to throw occupants off balance. These features, they argue, stimulate the body and mind, thus prolonging life. 'You become like a baby,' says Mr. Arakawa... A typical apartment has three or four rooms in the shapes of either a cylinder, a cube, or a sphere. Rooms surround a kitchen-living room combination with bumpy, undulating floors and floor-to-ceiling ladders and poles. Dozens of colors, from school-bus yellow to sky blue, cover the walls, ceilings and other surfaces.

But as R.U. points out, "This is conceptual art folks, not someone's actual dream of immortality. The WSJ simply did a poor job of framing the story."

Here's the WSJ's slideshow of Arakawa and Madeline Gins' whimsical work.

Artists who design intentionally difficult buildings were victims of Madoff

Hugo nominee Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "I released 'Evil Robot Monkey,' which is one of the short story Hugo nominees, as a Creative Commons licensed audio and pdf. (As an object of curiosity, I illustrated the pdf. I was an art major back in the day and this is the way I kept myself amused while waiting for the Hugo ballot to be officially announced.)"

Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. Swinging down from his stool, he crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.

Evil Robot Monkey (Thanks, Mary!)

FIickr's NickIsConfused has a great set showing the secret lives of Star Wars AT-ATs, reminding us that these adorable little critters aren't just for Xmas.

AT-ATs: not just for xmas

Update: Bonnie sez, "I interviewed the photographer over on the Starwars.com Blog last week"