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April 9, 2009

FCC Seeks To Improve US Broadband Access

MojoKid writes "The US Federal Communications Commission is working on a plan to solve the problem of nationwide access to high-speed Internet service. The three main issues the agency is tackling first are, figuring out how to improve availability, quality and affordability. Acting FCC Chairman Michael J. Copps held a meeting this week where he asked the public to comment on the national broadband plan, which Congress has demanded be done by February. The public has 60 days to submit comments; the agency and members of the public will be able to reply to comments for an additional 30 days after that."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

97% Of All Email Is Spam, But How Much Of The Other 3% Is Just Noise?

A new report from Microsoft says that 97 percent of all email is spam, reflecting the degree to which email systems worldwide are swamped with the messages. The figure seems high, but perhaps that's just because anti-spam tools have gotten better at deflecting spam away from most people's inboxes. But clearly enough is still getting through -- and enough people are buying what it's selling -- to make it financially worthwhile for spammers. Personally, I don't see too much spam these days, as Gmail's filter works pretty well for me. But what I do see lots of is "soft" spam -- messages that come from web services, retailers, mailing lists and thanks to writing on the web, PR people. Most of these messages come from things with which I've had some sort of relationship, commercial or otherwise, in the past, but most of them are still uninteresting and unwanted. While many of these people are pretty good about honoring unsubscribe requests, many are not, and also seem to share my email address with impunity. The result is that my email account is full of noise -- while my inbox isn't overrun by V1*GRA-type spam, all the other soft spam, as well as the bacn, or messages I've subscribed to but never read, obfuscate the messages I actually care about, making email a pain to deal with.

The point here isn't really to complain about my inbox, but rather to illustrate how even as "real" spam becomes more and more hidden from many users, email still has plenty of problems. Eliminating the 419 scams, joe-jobs, fake drug spam and the like would certainly be great, but even beyond that, email still has its flaws, leading people to communicate through IM, social networks and other means. To be sure, email is still eminently useful, but will that usefulness soon be outweighed by its detriments? And will it be salvageable?

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



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Data Centers Work To Reduce Water Usage

miller60 writes "As data centers get larger, they are getting thirstier as well. A large server farm can use up to 360,000 gallons of water a day in its cooling systems, a trend that has data center operators looking at ways to reduce their water use and impact on local water utilities. Google says two of its data centers now are "water self-sufficient." The company has built a water treatment plant at its new facility in Belgium, allowing the data center to rely on water from a nearby industrial canal. Microsoft chose San Antonio for a huge data center so it could use the local utility's recycled water ('gray water') service for the 8 million gallons it will use each month."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Washington Post Editor Defends Anonymous Unmoderated Comments

When it comes to major media properties (and even quite a few blogs these days), it seems that "moderating" comments has become the norm. However, it's surprising (though, refreshing) to see a Washington Post editor speak up in defense of unmoderated and anonymous comments, which the Washington Post allows:
I believe that it is useful to be reminded bluntly that the dark forces are out there and that it is too easy to forget that truth by imposing rules that obscure it. As Oscar Wilde wrote in a different context, "Man is least in himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

Too many of us like to think that we have made great progress in human relations and that little remains to be done. Unmoderated comments provide an antidote to such ridiculous conclusions. It's not like the rest of us don't know those words and hear them occasionally, depending on where we choose to tread, but most of us don't want to have to confront them.
What's most impressive is that this comes from a guy who wasn't just opposed to such things originally, but was opposed to the whole concept of "blogging." When he finally relented to blogging, he was adamantly against unmoderated comments... but the more he's seen, the more he's realized the value in them:
I have come to think that online comments are a terrific addition to the conversation and that journalists need to take them seriously. Comments provide a forum for readers to complain about what they see as unfairness or inaccuracy in an article (and too often they have a point), to talk to each other (sometimes in an uncivilized manner) and, yes, to bloviate....

In fact, comment strings are often self-correcting and provide informative exchanges. If somebody says something ridiculous, somebody else will challenge it. And there is wit.... Comments also tell us that readers do not always agree with journalists about what is important.
We have always felt that way about comments. While they can be frustrating and ridiculous at times, they are also incredibly educational and entertaining. And, the most ridiculous stuff of all is quickly dismantled by others. That said, it doesn't mean that there aren't ways to improve the commenting experience without necessarily moderating or banning anonymous commenters. We're working on some things here that we'll be rolling out in the near future to hopefully continue to improve the overall commenting and discussion experience.

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Make: Talk #005 Part Deux Over w/ Tom Igoe


I borked last week's show 15 minutes into it. Amazingly, we were in the process of talking about failure and embracing it, learning from it. So we kept the episode. Listen to the brief discussion and then hear me muttering to himself as I try to fix my screw-up. Hilarity ensues. So, THIS week, we'll finish talking to Tom Igoe, one of the developers of Arduino (and I'll try not to hit any wrong buttons).

We'll also present some news from the world of making, and our favorite tricks, tips, and tools of the week. Be sure to call in for prizes that we'll award during the program! The number is (646) 915-8698.


Make: Talk on BlogTalkRadio

More:
Make: Talk episode #005 (the Failure episode)

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Fake People Tell Fake Stories About The Threat Of Gay Marriage

Baratunde’s Posterous posted this unwonderful video produced by The National Organization for Marriage, describing it as "Fake People Tell Fake Stories About The Threat Of Gay Marriage."

I don't know if the people are fake or not [UPDATE: They are actors], but they are assholes. One woman whines plaintively, "My freedom will be taken away," if gays are allowed to marry. What -- her freedom to be intolerant?

UPDATE: Here are the audition tapes that show these people are actors.




Can't see the video? Click here





To do in SF tonight: Yuri’s Night!


(Image: Laughing Squid / Scott Beale) As Boinged previously, the annual global space party Yuri's Night is happening in hundreds of cities around the world, all week long. If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I know a fair number of BB readers are, you'll want to drop whatever you're doing tonight and head over to Yuri's Night Bay Area at the California Academy of Sciences. I believe my old pal Steve Nalepa is on the turntables! Don't know if there are still tickets available, but this will be really great, if you can still get in on late notice.

Event founder and organizer Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides explains,

There will be DJ's, planetarium shows, talks by NASA Ames Center Director Pete Worden and Q&A with NASA Astronaut Steve Robinson who has flown into space 3 times- once with John Glenn and once on the first flight after the Columbia accident. By coincidence, the woman who runs special projects at the Academy and who is hosting YN used to water his parents plants in Moraga, CA...small planet. More info here. Also, check out the "art installation" that Ace of Cakes (the Food Network show) made for Yuri's Night NASA Goddard on Saturday! The piece will stay on display in their visitor center- but the sheet cake they send has all already happily been eaten.

Previously:






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Working Toward a Patent-Agnostic Open Source License

Glyn Moody writes "Are there ever circumstances when software patents that require payment might be permitted by an open source license? That's the question posed by a new license that is being submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for review. The MPEG Working Group wants to release a reference implementation of the new MPEG eXtensible Middleware (MXM) standard as open source, but it also wants to be able to sell patent licenses. If it can't, it might not make the implementation open source; but if it does, it might undermine the fight against software patent proliferation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crazed Costume Shop Owner Pwns Local News Guy Investigating Cyberstalking Charges


This is quite possibly the best piece of internet video of all time, or at least this week. Police in a Rhode Island town filed charges against 59-year old costume shop owner Ann Bruno for allegedly "cyberstalking" a competitor. A reporter with the local NBC News affiliate attempts to question her about the internet harassment charges. Ms. Bruno responds in character, while wearing several layers of costumes. It's like the dude walked into an acid trip. If I'm not mistaken, this even includes a smidgeon of ukelele. The original video on the NBC affiliate website is here, but a ganked, embeddable YouTube version is here and embedded above. (Thank you, John Andrew Walsh!)

UPDATE: Oh dear god, there's a followup segment, on the same local news channel, where the anchordüde interviews local police. Do watch, below (Thanks, Matty Kirsch)



Steam powered iPod generator

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Thomas built a steam powered iPod generator. From Jake von Slatt's Steampunk Workshop:

I coupled a Lego Technic Motor to a Jensen #75 steam engine to make a crude generator. From there I built a 5V regulator circuit and soldered in a female USB connection to power any USB device. Since I wanted to use it to charge my iPod, I put in a diode and a .5 amp fuse to provide some circuit protection. Attached are some pictures of it and here are some links to videos of it in action. Unfortunately you can't see the charge light on the ipod, But as you can hear, the iPod really loads the engine. I was somewhat surprise it could hack it.
What a cool idea. Just think if they could scale up this idea and use steam to generate electricity for entire cities!

Multiple Fiber Cuts In San Francisco Area

georgewilliamherbert writes "Multiple news reports, mailing list posts, blogs, and tweets are pointing out two overnight acts of sabotage in the San Francisco Bay area, with long distance fiber network cables being cut in two locations in the early morning hours. The first cut, around 1:30 AM, affecting landline and cell phone service and 911 calls in the communities of Morgan Hill, Gilroy, and parts of Santa Cruz counties, was on an AT&T fiber alongside Monterey Highway near Blossom Hill Road, in San Jose. A second cut, around 3:30 AM, in San Carlos, affected Sprint fiber and has significantly disrupted services at the 200 Paul datacenter in southern San Francisco. Rumor says that this may be related to a AT&T communications workers contract having just expired — but no evidence has been published yet in the media, and this could be an intentional act of sabotage by someone unrelated to the company's workers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thinking About A National Broadband Plan

When we first heard about President Obama's "broadband" stimulus, we worried that it was nothing more than a boondoggle for incumbents rather than an actual broadband plan. One of his top advisors, Blair Levin, effectively acknowledged that by admitting that the stimulus package really had little to do with stimulating broadband, and a lot to do with stimulating jobs. As such, they were a lot less interested in disruptive innovation, and a lot more interested in projects that would require hiring tens of thousands of people to dig ditches (though, it's worth pointing out that the broadband stimulus has enough strings attached that the incumbents appear to be balking at it). However, Levin said that a real broadband plan would be coming up soon enough.

And, in fact, reports are now coming out that the administration has gone to work on creating a real national broadband plan. As with all things, the devil will be very much in the details. There is some fear that a "national broadband policy" won't mean much more than to hand Connected Nation a lot of power, which would do little to help things. Connected Nation is an incumbent-backed operation that gives off the appearance of "mapping" broadband connections, but really seems designed to deflect interest in the real issues: such as enabling real competition in the broadband space. Hopefully that's not where things go.

The good news is that (unlike with IP issues), the administration has either brought on or is working with a fair number of folks who do grasp some of the real issues here, such as Susan Crawford. So, what would a better broadband plan be? One that is focused on competition. In the Wired link above, Ryan Singel suggests that the administration look closely at the new national broadband plan announced in Australia, where the government will fund a new company to the tune of $43 billion (US) to lay fiber optics capable of 100 Mbps to 90% of all Australian homes and schools (and wireless at 12 Mbps to the other 10%). The company wouldn't be a retail ISP itself, but would then sell access to ISPs to offer competitive services on the network.

This is an idea that should be studied carefully, and is quite similar to ideas we've been discussing for years. The thinking is that high speed fiber optics represent a natural monopoly. That is, it's expensive to set up that platform, and it makes little sense to have multiple companies compete to create their own, because the negative externalities are massive (lots of companies digging up your yard to run fiber, plus too much investment with many of the companies failing). So, like the highway system, the thinking is, figure out a way to build a single system that is then open for anyone to use. Then, on top of that platform, you offer real competition, as any ISP can offer services and they can compete on real service. The idea is that, just as the interstate highway system helped enable increased shipping and travel, so too would a national fiber optic plan create increased digital opportunities. It's a compelling argument, though there are some who aren't convinced that broadband is a natural monopoly. My problem with the Australian solution is that it's too slow. It's aiming at a target that isn't fast enough, and would likely need to be upgraded too quickly. For a system like this, you need to aim as high as possible.

A more practical and politically-supportable option might be to do something more along the lines of the Homes with Tails idea, whereby we further push ownership of the connection out to the curb. The idea is that every home would pay for and own the fiber optic connection from the home to the curb (the infamous "last mile" which the incumbent providers complain is too costly to build themselves). But, then, once you reach the connection point, any service provider on that network can offer to provide service to that "tail." Again, there are many questions raised by this proposal as well, but it's an interesting one to explore and see whether or not it has any merit.

There are some other intriguing possibilities out there as well, and hopefully the administration and the FCC will explore all of these seriously. The worry, of course, is that lobbyists will get in the way, and work to make sure that any such broadband policy really just means giving them more money, subsidies and power -- rather than actually encouraging competition. So, consider this yet another opportunity to see how much influence lobbyists have over the new administration.

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Copper bandaid bracelet


Naz sez, "You guys ran a link on copper band aid a while back; I sent the link to my boyfriend who welds lighting, sculptures and jewelery so he got the idea to make that into bracelets."

Ben-Hur Bandaids. (Thanks, Naz!)

Previously:


Floating rocks

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Robyn Miller has been following the odd phenomenon of floating rocks.

Floating rocks are an event rarely captured on film. Very little is known about them, other than they float only for a short time, sometimes only minutes, before slowly returning to the ground.

Previously:





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Spinning papercraft

Patti writes on New World Geek:

I really like playing with papercraft - it doesn't cost much to make projects, and they can be incredibly complex and interesting. Paper Forest posted about this wonderful spinning star - I've watched this video over and over, trying to figure out the movement and why it's so elegant. They say the original design is by Ramin Razani, and there are directions to make a similar cutout here.


Papercraft popup spinner

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Gecko-Inspired Dry Adhesive Set For Space

AndreV writes "Biomimetic adhesives aren't new, but a PhD graduate in British Columbia has developed a new method of creating microscopic, mushroom-like plastic structures in order to produce a dry adhesive that mimics the stickiness of gecko feet—and is prepping his glue-free innovation for outer space. A research group at his university, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, is engineering a spider-like, sticky-footed climbing robot destined to explore Mars, and it is also developing reusable attaching systems for astronauts to use where magnetic and suction systems generally fail. In the future, he says, single-use versions could be used in any number of medical applications as well as for replacements for everyday sticky needs, such as Post-It notes and Scotch tape."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Insights: Businesses Leveraging Symbiotic Relationships

ic This is a case from the Insight Community, a powerful new marketplace that connects companies with intelligent communities like Techdirt. Click here to learn more.

Continuing from our earlier cases, American Express is sponsoring more conversations here in the Insight Community concerning how small businesses can handle the current economic environment. Contributions to our past discussions have made their way to American Express' OPEN Forum blog, and we're looking for further insights that will complement the topics on the economy section of the OPEN Forum blog.

For this case, we're looking for small business owners who have found that teaming up with other business has improved both organizations. If you've experienced this phenomenon, tell us how you developed the relationship. How did it evolve? Why do you think the match was successful? Did you actively search out another business to help out yours? If so, how did you go about doing so? What do you think are the most important criteria to evaluate before partnering with another operation?

Ideally, submissions will contain specific examples and personal experience. Any insight that is selected to be published on the American Express OpenForum blog will be awarded a payment. You may submit multiple insights, but make each submission a post that can stand alone.

View Case Details at InsightCommunity.com



BB Video: Music in Video Games, a conversation with Peter Kirn and Matt Ganucheau


Download the MP4 here. Flash video above, click "fullscreen" icon inside player to view large. YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

Today's Boing Boing Video episode is a conversation with Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music and Matt Ganucheau of Expression College about music in games: new tools, new forms of composition, and new ways of thinking about the role music and sound play in the gaming experience. We conducted this interview during Boing Boing/offworld's marathon live coverage of GDC, and this video clip -- part one of a two-part conversation -- includes the work of Ganucheau's students in a class about composing music for videogames. One of the works we show is from a young student named Jason Bowers. Here are more details on working with Space Invaders as a teaching tool for interactive music. And here is Max/MSP, the music software used.

Previously:

* Social Games, and The Quest for Virtual Poo.
* Doctor Popular's Awesome Yo-Yo Stylings
* Hideo Kojima on Metal Gear Solid Touch (games)
* Jane McGonigal on Emotion, Gaming, and Dance.
* Jane McGonigal - Games Can Change the World.
* Jane McGonigal's Game Developers' Conference talk on Making Your Own Reality
* BBV @ GDC live stream archives, at Ustream.tv
* Boing Boing Video and Offworld.com Live at GDC09: offworld.com archive
* Boing Boing Video and Offworld.com Live at GDC09: boingboing.net archive

[ Special thanks to Joel Johnson for editorial help on this episode! BBV Live @GDC09 credits and thanks: Production Team -- Jolon Bankey, Derek Bledsoe, Daniela Calderon, Eddie Codel, Xeni Jardin, Allison Kingsley, Matty Kirsch, Alice Taylor, Wesly Varghese. Special thanks to Wayneco Heavy Industries (accommodation and studio facilities), Virgin America Airlines (air travel), Celsius (thermogenic energy beverage), Ustream.tv (streaming video host). Moral support, production assistance, additional talent, and good vibes provided by: Domini Anne, Scott Beale, T.Bias, Jeremy Bornstein, Brandon Boyer, Chris The Van Guy, Peter S. Conrad, Marque Cornblatt, Wayne, Bre, and the entire de Geere family, Marcy DeLuce, Cory Doctorow, Joel Johnson, Kourosh Karimkhany, Jim Louderback and the Revision 3 team, Karen Marcelo, Rocky Mullin, Alicia Pollak, Jackie Mogol, Taylor Peck, David Pescovitz, Micah Schaffer, and Teal. ]






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Out of this world Wall-E casemod machinery

Another one of those jaw-dropping casemods found on a Russian modder's site. This one is a Wall-E case, cut and milled entirely out of sheet metal. Dozens of pictures detail the build process. The fabrication is so beautiful, I almost wish he hadn't painted it. Stunning.


Russian Wall-E Case Mod [Via Serge on the HacDC elist]

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HOWTO set up a molecular biology lab for less than $1000

Dave Ng sez, "Whilst doing a bit of homework for a chapter I'm writing, I tried to cost out some equipment needed to set up a molecular biology lab. Although a lot of this would require the use of your credit card to buy enzymes and unused plastic ware (not too expensive this part), you would also need some routinely used equipment/hardware that would be on the expensive side.

"However, if you turn to eBay, you can get a lot of this equipment at bargain prices (without even needing to bid). Anyway, a lot of the common equipment needed , as purchased through eBay, would total to less than $1000 (not including shipping that is)."

Using eBay to set up a molecular biology lab: costs less than $1000! (Thanks, Dave!)

Bad Business Advice: Always Look To Charge For Content

A few people have sent in the NY Times story supposedly about the "free vs. paid" debate that quotes some business school professors giving what appears to me to be awful advice:
Eric J. Johnson, a professor at Columbia Business School, said he had been amazed by media companies repeatedly adding free online services, like on-demand video. "Before you add something to your site, you should say that if consumers really want it, that should be part of a package that you could charge for."
That's looking only at one side of the equation and is doing so in a dangerously short-sighted way. Rather than saying "hey, if people want this, we should charge for it," why not actually look at the larger ecosystem? Why not recognize the added value that can be added if it is free and how that can enable other business models? The problem is that professors like Johnson are basically pushing the idea that a media company is a "content company," rather than a company that's building a community. It focuses on the belief that the content is the final product. It's not. It's never been the final product. If you have open and available content, that allows users to make it more valuable by sharing it, spreading it, annotating it, commenting on it and building off of it. You can't do that when you put it behind a paywall. Content behind a paywall is less valuable to most people. So why would people pay for content that is less valuable?

The problem is focusing so much on the product rather than on the real benefit. Having the content free enables so much else. And if you focus on charging, all it does is open up an opportunity for others to step in and provide that value, and sap away the "paying" users. Focusing just on the pay question and ignoring the value side of the equation is a recipe for trouble.

So, rather than the NY Times "debate," perhaps check out what the site Hypebot did, which was note that the "debate" is already over. It's not about whether or not there should be "free" content, but that the economics and the market are clear: it will be free. So, with that in mind, it put together a whole series of thoughts from different folks about ways to embrace "free" as a part of larger business models. There's plenty of good stuff to read there.

Glenn Peoples, at Billboard, also picked up on the discussion, which is great, though I'd like to challenge one thing he wrote, complaining about Chris Anderson's take on "free":
Anderson did not draw enough distinction between marginal cost -- which in the case of digital distribution is zero -- and average cost. When Anderson writes that "the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing," what he means is the marginal cost of distributing that digital information. There are significant costs in recording music. The cost of creating a brand and inducing awareness, other considerations Anderson understates, are both unavoidable and considerable. An insignificant cost of creating and distributing one more digital file does not reflect the amount of investment to be recouped.
While I don't want to speak for Chris, he and I have certainly talked about these things, and I believe that Peoples is misstating Chris' point on all of this. As we've discussed here before, no one is ignoring the cost of creation or the cost of those other things. We're simply stating the economic fact that none of those things matter in terms of final price. This isn't how we want things to be. It's how economics works. Price is influenced by marginal cost. That's it. Price is not influenced by fixed costs (or average costs). That's not because of what Chris says or what I say. It's how a market works, no matter how anyone thinks things should be.

That doesn't mean you ignore the fixed costs or the average costs. Obviously, you do need to pay attention to those for the sake of making sure there's an ROI where you need it. But that's where you look at your overall offering rather than focusing so narrowly on just the content. So if you can take the content (as you can) and make it free, and use that to drive up interest and value in other scarce products you can sell, then that's where it matters. And, as for the question of "the costs in recording music," we (here at Techdirt) have certainly addressed that at great length: the creation of content is in fact a scarce good. And you can charge for it -- and many have. Jill Sobule is a perfect example of this, getting people to pay to create a new album. Other models work as well, including having brands help pay for the creation of music. There are lots of models that work -- and they don't conflict with or negate the fact (not opinion) that the content itself will have its price driven towards free.

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EFF Lawyer Calls YouTube ContentID Worse Than DMCA

Richard Koman writes "Warner Music Group is apparently blocking everything YouTube ContentID comes up with as potential infringement. We knew that, but this piece by Jason Perlow shows that they're also spewing out DMCA takedown notices for some pretty clearly fair-use stuff. In my interview with EFF's Fred von Lohmann he talks about how, as bad as the DMCA process is — and it's pretty firmly against fair-use — YouTube's process gives remixers and digital creators even fewer options to assert their right to speak through the fair use of copyright material. While EFF is negotiating with Google and the studios, he suggests that users boycott YouTube if they won't stand up for fair use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RIP Dave Arneson, 1947-2009

Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died. From Ed Grabianowski's post on Robot Viking:
It’s tempting to say that Arneson brought the “fluff” to D&D, while Gygax was the “crunch,” but that’s really too simplistic. It is safe to say that Arneson’s ideas on storytelling, experience levels and rules flexibility shaped virtually every aspect of the RPG as an industry and an art form. Yet he never achieved the widespread fame that Gygax did, perhaps because his personality wasn’t the kind that drew attention. By most accounts, he was easy-going, good-humored and never took himself too seriously. I’ve always thought of him as the George Harrison of D&D.


What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems?

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make your own paranoid British terrorism poster!


James Holden's anti-terror billboard generator invites you to remix the infamous British police poster that asks you to inspect your neighbours' trash and report them if you don't like what you see: "This odious billboard appears in my town, encouraging me to rat on my neighbours because I don't understand what they throw away."

Anti-terror billboard (Thanks, Phillip!)

Previously:


What’s New Now

In yesterday's piece about the AP fighting last century's battle, the big story is not that AP has missed the Internet opportunity of the 21st century, it's that everyone has.

No one, and I mean no one, has the site that everyone goes to to find out What's New Now.

The holy grail is the What's New Now page for everyone.

The place we go to find out what's happening in the world.

Someone will crack that nut and make the NYT, CNN, Google, Facebook and Twitter look like stepping-stones.

My point yesterday was that, in theory, it could be AP. Too small a point.

A picture named bythesack.gifAdrian Palacios asks if there will really be a single source. "Yes I think at least for a while there will be one What's New Now site that we will "all" use -- in the same sense that everyone got their news in the early 90s from CNN. Of course there were exceptions, but it had the aura of being the place to tune in when something is happening. Nightline played that role in the early 80s. There is nothing now that does that, there's a void. But people still want news. And the Internet has great potential for news that it hasn't lived up to yet. Probably because people who love news and know it best have been scared or shouted down or some combination of both. I think the shouting is about to stop and I think a consensus will emerge. I think AP and CNN and Twitter will all kick themselves for not having focused on this."

Great Moments In AP Protectionism: Demands Takedown Of Videos It Purposely Shared With Affiliate

A bunch of folks are submitting the latest and greatest in the Associated Press's attempt to become the RIAA of news. The AP, smartly, has a YouTube channel, where it puts up a bunch of AP videos, with the embed code enabled. An AP affiliate in Tennessee reasonably embedded some of those videos... and were promptly accused of "stealing" the AP's licensed content and ordered to take it down. There are so many things wrong with this situation it's difficult to know where to start:
  • It's the AP's own YouTube channel.
  • This radio station is an AP affiliate.
  • The AP turned on the embedding function
  • When told all of this, the AP exec demanding the takedown had no idea it had a YouTube channel.
This is clearly part the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing... but it's also a sign of how out of touch the AP remains. When it purposely offers up content for sharing, it did something smart. Demanding that anyone take down content that was specifically designed to be shared in this manner is just amazing.

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Microsoft Begs Win 7 Testers To Clean Install

Barence writes "Microsoft is imploring millions of Windows 7 beta testers to perform a clean install of the forthcoming Release Candidate, rather than upgrade from the beta. 'The reality is that upgrading from one pre-release build to another is not a scenario we want to focus on because it is not something real-world customers will experience,' the company claims on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. Those who attempt to install the Release Candidate over the beta will find their path blocked." I've read complaints that reviews of new Linux distros often focus too much on the installation process; Microsoft seems to understand that complications at installation time (dual booting? preserving an existing data partition?) can sour one's experience pretty thoroughly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Ryden’s Tree Show book comes with special goodies

And, Just Like That, France Rejects Three Strikes

The situation in France just gets stranger and stranger when it comes to the proposed "three strikes" law for kicking music and movie fans off the internet. You probably know that just last week it was approved by legislators in a surprise vote, where just a small number of elected officials waited until most others (who believed the vote would be held later) had left before holding the vote. This resulted in cheers from Hollywood and others in the legacy entertainment business. However, now it appears that The National Assembly has surprised everyone back by rejecting the measure, but with a similarly small group of officials voting. The law was rejected 21 - 15 in what's described as "a near-empty National Assembly." I'm sure more will come out about how this happened, but perhaps politicians who were upset about how it passed in the first place, just played the same trick back. Either way, I'm sure this is not the end of this issue in France (or elsewhere).

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New CASMOBOT Lawnmower Controlled By a Wiimote

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark have modified a Wiimote so that it can control an industrial lawn mower. The project is called Casmobot (Computer Assisted Slope Mowing Robot). 'The Casmobot project is about making grass cutting more efficient,' said Kjeld Jensen, a robotics researcher at the University of Southern Denmark who developed the system. It uses a standard Wiimote that communicates via Bluetooth to a computer and robotics module built into the mower. Actions of the mower are matched to tilt actions of the remote. For example, if you tilt the remote down the mower moves forwards; tilt it up, and it moves backwards, and so on. The Wiimote can be used to control the mower manually or in computer-assisted mode, where the mower uses autonomous navgiation based on RTK GPS positioning to cut larger areas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

London Police poster mashup

EFF Says Obama Warrantless Wiretap Defense Is Worse than Bush

SonicSpike writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just said that 'In the warrantless wiretapping case, Obama DOJ's new arguments are worse than Bush's.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EFF Says Obama Warrantless Wiretap Defense is Worse than Bush

SonicSpike writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just said that 'In the Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook Overreacts: Decides All Of The Pirate Bay Is Illegal

I didn't bother writing up the story from a couple weeks back about a The Pirate Bay feature to easily share links to torrents on Facebook, because it wasn't particularly interesting. But, you knew that someone would overreact negatively. The question was whether it would be the entertainment industry or Facebook first. It looks like Facebook may have won. Rather than dealing with it intelligently, it overreacted and has blocked any and all links to The Pirate Bay, noting that due to the ongoing lawsuit and "controversy" it's basically decided to assume all links to The Pirate Bay are infringing and a violation of Facebook's terms of service. Now, it may very well be true that the majority of content shared via The Pirate Bay is unauthorized and infringing. But, even so, this seems to go too far. There are plenty of legitimate uses for The Pirate Bay, and there is a significant number of legitimate offerings on the site. Furthermore a link should not be considered infringing by itself. No copyright is infringed by a link alone. There were plenty of more reasonable ways that Facebook could have handled this, and it chose the sledge hammer approach. And, as David Title points out, the likely end result is merely that an arms race has begun, where The Pirate Bay will create a workaround, and Facebook will have to block yet again...

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Boing Boing on GOOD - Dahomey Diary: Notes from Benin (Xeni)

Priest (video still / Xeni Jardin)

Boing Boing is collaborating with GOOD Magazine on a series of features written by BB editors. The latest installment in that series is a collection of excerpts from a journal I kept during a recent trip to West Africa. Longer form video and audio features are planned for future release through Boing Boing Video. Here's a snip, there's more, along with more stills from video (like the image above) at the GOOD link, too.

A Bariba settlement near Kouandé, in the far north near Nigeria.

Our car pulls as close to the center compound as the dirt path allows. We open car doors, step out into dust, through grass thatch gates. A crowd of women are dancing, drums and high trills. We landed mid-ceremony. We’re here to pay respects to a healer-queen. A few steps inside her hut, bags of blackeyed peas, flour, and hard candy are stacked like cash along mud walls—payment, tribute, from villagers. We’re seated on the ground, swatting clouds of flies, awaiting her audience.

This is the part I’ll remember forever: One by one, young girls file in, after the ceremony. White mud dots on their faces, scar lines carved in dark brown skin, constellations of scars and stars, ancestor ghost signs. They call out like birds as they step inside. The healer calls back, a long vowel.

“Ehhhh,”

“Ehhhhh,”

“Ehhhh,”

“Ehhhhh,”

Again and again, then quiet. The girls lie down before her, stretched out on their sides, heads bowed into the floor, awaiting a tap from her on the left shoulder. Eventually, she taps each shoulder. They rise, and leave.

Soft, resonant wood thud sounds outside now, a different rhythm. Not drums this time, but older women pounding cassava, singing, trading verses of vowels with one another, as they pound roots into mash.

GOOD -- Dahomey Diary: Notes from Benin (Image: Xeni Jardin)

Here are the Boing Boing on GOOD archives, which include more features from Mark, Joel, Pesco, and Xeni.






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Facebook Cuts Off Pirate Bay Links

narramissic writes "Citing legal reasons, Facebook has ended its brief relationship with The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay added a "Share on Facebook" button around two weeks ago to its site that allowed its users to post links to small information files on Facebook that are used to download audio, video, etc. via BitTorrent. Facebook is now blocking those 'bookmarklets' as well as any links from The Pirate Bay, said Peter Sunde, of The Pirate Bay. Sunde said he received an e-mail from Facebook justifying the action because of the legal proceedings against Sunde and three others. The men are awaiting return of a verdict on April 17 from a trial that concluded early last month in Stockholm. They are charged with helping to make available material under copyright."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shane Speal plays Guitar Rag played on cigar box guitar


Marvel at Shane Speal's cigar box guitar licks.

Shane Speal goofing on the three-string cigar box guitar. He's been playing this instrument for 13 years. It's simply a stick shoved thru a cigar box with three strings added. Free plans are on his website. Song: Guitar Rag by Sylvester Weaver, 1923. Later made famous by Leon McAuliff as "Steel Guitar Rag."


French government nukes crazy Internet law in open revolt against Sarkozy

Glyn sez, "French politicians have unexpected voted against a law that would have forced ISPs to disconnect any one accused of copyright infringement. No proof that would stand up in court would have been need. The final vote was 25 to 15 in the poorly attended National Assembly session."

JZ adds, "This is a formidable victory for all citizens. This vote shows that it is still possible to make oneself heard. It is a fantastic example of how to use the Net to fight against those who are trying to control it. Individual liberties, in the end, have not been sacrificed to try to preserve the corporate interests of some obsolete industries. The HADOPI law has been interred earlier than expected.Nonetheless, La Quadrature du Net asks its supportes to remain vigilant. The rejection of HADOPI doesn't mean the end of the government's attempts to control the Internet. We must continue to make use of our collective intelligence and the power of the net to preserve justice and the truth."


Despite the approval of the French recording industry and prominent musicians, including Johnny Hallyday, some attacked the measure.

Civil liberties campaigners and members of the Socialist party said the new surveillance powers were tantamount to "the criminalisation of an entire generation".

Others had said it could end up punishing the wrong people, for instance parents whose children download in secret or employers whose staff use computers at work to break the law.

Breaking ranks from many of their artistic colleagues, a group of French directors and actors including Catherine Deneuve issued an open letter of protest this week.

"The law comes in response to legitimate concerns which we all share - concerns that we will see our work devalued and degraded," they wrote. "However this law ... is merely imposing a punitive system whose constitutionality is dubious and practicality unclear."

French MPs reject controversial plan to crack down on illegal downloaders (Thanks, JZ and Glyn!)

How-To: Stationary bike book holder

bookstandinstuctables.jpg

It may still be too cold and gloomy outside to go for a scenic bike ride, and if you want to ride for exercise, you may find yourself staring at a boring wall, pedaling to nowhere. Instructables user dedlast made this book stand for his wife to mount on her bike for stationary riding. Better than TV, that's for sure!

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Obama’s transparency commitment makes secret copyright treaty public - UPDATED

Glyn sez, "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement designed to combat the 'increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works.' is considering whether to involve internet service providers (ISPs) in fighting copyright infringement. Details of the negotiations have at last been published as a result of Obama's commitment to transparency in government.
Section 4: Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement in the Digital Environment This section of the agreement is intended to address some of the special challenges that new technologies pose for enforcement of intellectual property rights, such as the possible role and responsibilities of internet service providers in deterring copyright and related rights piracy over the Internet. No draft proposal has been tabled yet, as discussions are still focused on gathering information on the different national legal regimes to develop a common understanding
ACTA fact-sheet PDF -- US Trade Rep

Wikipedia on ACTA

(Thanks, Glyn!)

Update: Michael Geist sez, "I blogged this (partially) in response to your recent ACTA posting, which I think has an inaccurate headline and gives too much credit to Obama: 'There are many reports about the release this week of an ACTA summary document that was first made available on the USTR website. These articles suggest that this reflects new support for transparency from the Obama administration. While it may be true that the administration supports greater transparency, making that connection in this case is misleading. The document is a negotiated text between all the ACTA countries (this was made clear in the DFAIT consultation). Some countries (Canada among them) are supportive of greater transparency, others are not. It is not entirely clear where the U.S. stands. Moreover, it is not just the U.S. that made the document available - all ACTA partners are entitled to do so (the Canadian version is here). Finally, while it is not a bad document, there is still far more information available online from non-governmental sources. A commitment to transparency would mean making available actual documents including draft text and "non-papers" used as the basis for discussion.'"

Previously:





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Sunspot Activity Continues To Drop

slreboy writes "The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. The year 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73 percent). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent)..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sunspot Activity Continues to Drop

slreboy writes "The sunspot cycle is behaving a little like the stock market. Just when you think it has hit bottom, it goes even lower. The year 2008 was a bear. There were no sunspots observed on 266 of the year's 366 days (73 percent). To find a year with more blank suns, you have to go all the way back to 1913, which had 311 spotless days. Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Maybe not. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of March 31st, there were no sunspots on 78 of the year's 90 days (87 percent)..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 Years Of Anti-Piracy Commercials…

John was the first of a few to send in a collection of 15 years worth of "anti-piracy commercials" that run at the beginning of films, put in place by the movie industry, who has only just realized that perhaps they should offer up a more positive message to customers who just paid good money to watch a movie, rather than accusing them all of being criminals. Most of these commercials are so over the top as to be hilarious. "The pirates are out to get you. Don't let them brand you with their mark. Piracy funds organized crime... piracy funds terrorism... and will destroy... your future enjoyment." It makes you wonder if the folks making these commercials actually thought they'd be effective.

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Working Chevy V8 model motor

Our Photo Editor, Sam Murphy, sent us a link to this amazing working Chevy V8 motor model, emailed to her by her dad (thanks, dad!). The model engineer is Jim Moyer, and he has several breathtaking models on his site. This V8 is 1/6th scale, based on the 1964 327 cu. in. Corvette engine. The AA battery gives you some idea of the minute (1.10 cu. in.) size of this thing.


1/6th Scale Chevy V8 [Thanks, Sam!]


More:


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Privacy In BitTorrent By Hiding In the Crowd

pinguin-geek writes "Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new "guilt-by-association" threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thingamakit’s evil twin …

thingamakill.jpg

Mark Dalzell brought a Thingamakit over to the dark side and came back with the above seen Thingamakill. It appears the transformation brought a few additional features, including what appears to be control inputs for each oscillator, master pitch and power starve pots. The original LEDicles seem to have survived the journey intact. [via MatrixSynth]

In the Maker Shed:
thingamakit_2-upcrop.jpg
Thing-a-ma KIT

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French Assembly Rejects Three Strikes Bill

An anonymous reader writes "The French Assembly has rejected the Three Strikes bill (in French!) which would allow ISPs to cut off users found to have been downloading protected content after two warnings. Summary, the Sarcozy administration can go back with a new draft for approval by both chambers or try to get upper house approval of a softer version without the cutoff passed by the lower house."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How-To: Footswitch array for music software control

Inspired by Michael Una's DIY footcontroller AlexMC built this 21-switch array for use with Ableton Live software. The magic ingredient here is a basic USB keyboard, but Alex also posted his plans for building the MDF enclosure plus a cheap source for switches over on the Ableton forums. [via Create Digital Music]

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Thank The Economy For More Traffic Cameras

We just wrote about Maryland ramping up its traffic camera program, pointing out that it seemed more motivated by revenue than safety (despite what officials claimed). And, now we're seeing that New York is also ramping up its traffic cameras. Once again, though, the issue is about revenue more than safety. Paul Kedrosky points us to a study that notes that traffic tickets always increase when the economy goes down because municipalities are motivated much more by revenue than safety.

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Conficker Downloads Payload

nk497 writes "Conficker seems to finally be doing something, a week after hype around the worm peaked on April Fool's Day. It has now downloaded components from the Waledac botnet, which could contain rootkit capabilities. Trend Micro security expert Rik Ferguson said: "These components have so far been missing, but could this finally be the 'other boot dropping' that we have all been been waiting for?" Ferguson also suggested that people behind Conficker could be the very same who are running Waledac and created the Storm botnet. "It tallies with some of the assumptions people have made about Conficker — that the first variant was actively trying to avoid the Ukraine because Waledac was Eastern European," Ferguson added."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Build your own multitouch Surface-like computer

The folks at Maximum PC made their own multitouch Surface system:

It all started while we were researching an article on future user interfaces. Touch interfaces are hardly futuristic at this point, but multi-touch hardware like the Microsoft Surface or the iPhone is just starting to become a big deal, and we decided to see what big things are going on in that field. What we found that surprised us the most wasn't anything about the future of multitouch; it was about something that people are doing right now.


There is, it turns out, a whole community of very smart folks out there on the internet perfecting the art of building DIY multi-touch surfaces. The process isn't exactly simple, but the results we saw were stunning: multitouch surfaces with responsiveness rivaling Microsoft's $12,000 offering, built in a garage on a shoestring budget. "Future UI article be damned," we thought, "we've gotta build one of these for ourselves."


Build Your Own Multitouch Surface Computer

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Uniselector clock of unknown origins

uniselectorclock_cc.jpg
uniselectorclock2_cc.jpg

Mike is looking for info regarding an unusual timekeeping device he came across -

At present I have no documentation for this clock, and it has no markings other than the labels for the controls and external connections, such as "LPS OFF", meaning lamps off, "RESET", meaning set the time, etc. Internally it is evidently hand built, with a few of the parts being obviously hand made but most being telephone exchange components. The lamp array is cut from ebonite and the offcuts used as brackets. The standard of construction is extremely high, as good as that seen in high quality test equipment and high end consumer electronics of the period, which I reckon to be mid 1940s, perhaps a little later.

uniselectorclock_calendar_cc.jpg

The two rows of lamps up top display the current time driven by a set of relays. The top row shows the hour while the bottom displays minutes and tens of minutes. The calendar section sounds particularly interesting, using all mechanical parts -

Every 12 hours a lever is pressed and this advances the day dial, e.g. A.M. Mon advances to P.M. Mon. There's also a date dial and a month dial. The month dial has a cam to set the number of days in the month. February has 28 days on the cam, but every 4 years this is advanced to 29 by an extra lever pushed into place by an extra wheel that advances every 6 months and completes one revolution every 4 years. A nice touch!
If you have any clues to its origin be sure to leave a comment. More on its operation can be found on his site.

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AP Harasses Own Member Over AP Youtube Videos

DrEldarion writes "The Associated Press, who has been acting very bipolar lately about Google News (they get paid by Google for their content, and then complain about Google "stealing" that content), has another issue with not knowing what their association is up to: they set up a channel on Youtube, and then threatened an AP affiliate for embedding that content."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plumbing pipe lamp

Boris writes:

A week ago Boing Boing ran a short blarticle about these cool Kozo lamps (what's a Kozo lamp? The name of the designer? Wikipedia fails me here!) from Etsy, made from plumbing fixtures. I really, really liked the look, so I decided to make my own.


New Desk Lamp

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When Does It Stop Being ‘Sexting’ And Start Being Something More Serious?

The debate about "sexting" rages on, both here at Techdirt and elsewhere. One of the major points of contention has been that child-pornography laws don't make any distinction about who creates child porn, meaning that kids who take nude photos of themselves and send them out can be viewed in the same way -- in the eyes of the law -- as child pornographers who abuse and exploit children for commercial gain or personal titillation. The catch is that "the eyes of the law" are really the eyes of human prosecutors, who hopefully should realize that charging kids with child-porn offenses is an overreaction. CNN's got a story touching on this issue, but they didn't find a particularly good example: instead of talking about kids who took pictures of themselves, they lead with the story of an 18-year-old guy who sent out a nude picture of his 16-year-old girlfriend to "dozens" of friends and family after they'd had a fight. The guy was subsequently prosecuted under child-porn laws and has had to register as a sex offender. While it's clear the guy wasn't a commercial porn producer, it's also clear that he went a lot further than teens who take photos of themselves, send them out, and then find themselves in hot water. His actions, while caused by a moment of stupidity, were intended to hurt his girlfriend -- much different than teens taking and sending photos of themselves as an expression of their sexuality. To compare the two seems pretty disingenuous, and it's hard to imagine the guy will attract a whole lot of sympathy, but the story does illustrate the very black-and-white world of child porn laws, and how they can be applied with little distinction (or perhaps common sense) by some prosecutors.

Meanwhile, over at the WSJ, the "Numbers Guy", Carl Bialik, has taken a look at the survey that has been widely cited in sexting stories, claiming that 20 percent of teens have taken and sent nude photos of themselves. Bialik points out that the survey was conducted online, calling into question just how representative of the wider teen population the sample was. To ask teens about their online behavior, but only ask teens who are online, seems suspect. But hey, the stat sells the story, right?

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



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U2’s manager wants the power to cut off your Internet connection

JZ sez,
The Guardian looks at the French Three Strikes law, whose final discussion will happen today in both chambers of the French parliament. I thought you might be interested into making a reply to it. It's pure mantra and doesn't talk about the most disturbing points:

- it gives the entertainment industries the power to police the internet by themselves

- the whole procedure is based on immaterial, unverifiable, unopposable proofs (IP address listings)

- you cannot claim your innocence before the sanction is ordered.

Innocents will inevitably be disconnected.

As the NYT reported today: "Nonetheless, Internet advocates call the French proposal legally unsound on the ground that there are inadequate the provisions for challenging an action, and because it gives industry groups the power to police the Internet. Others question whether the law would unfairly penalize those whose wireless broadband accounts are misused by others. The French law tries to anticipate this by making it a civil infraction for citizens to fail to 'secure' their broadband accounts by using approved filtering technology."

The Guardian piece consists of U2's manager talking about how it would be great if private corporations -- phone companies and music labels -- got the power to take away your Internet connection on the basis of unproven accusations of copyright infringement.

I've written about this subject rather a lot here (see below), but I think this is the most cogent response:

In the past week, I've only used the internet to contact my employers around the world, my MP in the UK, to participate in a European Commission expert proceeding, to find out why my infant daughter has broken out in tiny pink polka-dots, to communicate with a government whistle-blower who wants to know if I can help publish evidence of official corruption, to provide references for one former student (and follow-up advice to another), book my plane tickets, access my banking records, navigate the new Home Office immigration rules governing my visa, wire money to help pay for the headstone for my great uncle's grave in Russia, and to send several Father's Day cards (and receive some of my own).

The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It's only vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day).

This trivial bit of kit is so unimportant that it's only natural that we equip the companies that brought us Police Academy 11, Windows Vista, Milli Vanilli and Celebrity Dancing With the Stars with wire-cutters that allow them to disconnect anyone in the country on their own say-so, without proving a solitary act of wrongdoing.

Why France has the solution to online piracy (Thanks, JZ!)
Previously:


Pocket phonograph: the proto-walkman

Here's a sweet video of an early walkman ancestor, the Mikiphone pocket phonograph, a superb gadget that unpacks and assembles in seconds, quickly filling the room with the dulcet tones of your be-bop combo.

Mikiphone Pocket Phonograph (Thanks, Bill!)

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: the Freakonomics of conservation, climate and energy

David JC MacKay's "Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air" may be the best technical book about the environment that I've ever read. In fact, if I have any complaint about this book, it's in how it's presented, with its austere cover and spartan title, I assumed it would be a somewhat dry look at energy, climate, conservation and so on.

It's not. This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics: an accessible, meaty, by-the-numbers look at the physics and practicalities of energy. MacKay, a Cambridge Physics prof, approaches the subject of carbon and sustainability with a scientific, numeric eye. First, in a section called "Numbers, not adjectives," he looks at all the energy and carbon inputs and outputs in Britain and the rest of the world: this is how many kWh of energy are needed to power all of Britain's vehicles. This is how many kWh you would get if you covered the entire British shore with windmills, or wave-farms. This is Britain's geothermal potential. Here's how much carbon vegetarianism offsets. Here's how much carbon unplugging your idle appliances saves (0.25%, making the campaign to switch off energy vampires into a largely pointless exercise -- as MacKay says, "If everyone does a little bit, we'll get a little bit done"). This is the carbon-footprint of all of Britain's imports, gadgets, office towers, and so on.

Using a charming, educational style that teaches how to think about this kind of number, how to estimate with it, and what it means, MacKay explains these concepts beautifully, with accompanying charts that make them vivid and clear, and with exhaustive endnotes that are as interesting as the text they refer to (probably the best use of end-notes I've encountered in technical writing -- they act like hyperlinks, giving good background on the subjects that the reader wants to find out more about while allowing the main text to move forward without getting bogged down by details).

Next, in "Making a Difference," looks at what it would take to balance Britain's (and, eventually, the world's) energy budget so that the consumption is sustainable (that is, so that it uses only renewables or fuels that would last for 1000 years -- and emits so little carbon that we avert a 2C' rise in global temperature). He looks realistically at conservation, considering the theoretical limits on efficiency for rail, electric cars, air, as well as factories, home design and so forth, giving examples ranging from better insulation to tearing down all the housing in Britain and rebuilding it for maximum efficiency (factoring in the energy and carbon costs of the new building, of course).

This chapter also has a lot of sensible personal advice for things you can do to reduce your energy consumption -- especially identifying those few badly designed devices in your home whose idle power-draw really is punitive and replacing them (one Ikea lamp he cites draws nearly as much switched off as running, because of a transformer design that was one penny cheaper to manufacture than a more efficient one would have been).

Finally, in a long technical appendix, MacKay delves into the physics of maximal performance in transport, manufacturing, housing and energy generation, explaining it in a way that I -- who have not studied physics since I was 18 -- was able to follow.

This reminded me of nothing so much as Saul Griffith's wonderful talk on climate change as an engineering problem. Add up all the energy we can make if we harness every erg, every photon. Subtract all the energy we want to use. Examine this difference and come up with strategies for bringing the two into balance. Once you get this approach, it becomes a lot simpler to figure out what is and isn't worth doing.

My only complaint about this book is its packaging: if it were tarted up to look like the transformative, important popular science book that it really is, I think it would be at the center of the environmental debate today.

The entire book is available as a free 10MB PDF download so you can start reading immediately

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (US)

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (UK)

Without Hot Air -- MacKay's site for the book, including the whole book as a free download

Previously:


Andrew Lloyd Weber Trashes The Internet As ‘Somalia Of Theft And Piracy’

Nathan was the first of a few folks to send in the news of Andrew Lloyd Weber's quotes complaining about how the internet is the "Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy." Funny. I thought Somalia was the "Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy." Lloyd Weber seems to make the same basic false economic assumption that many other folks have made: believing that the only way to make money is through the direct sale of recorded music. So he bemoans the fact that sales are down, and immediately blames piracy and (of course) ISPs for enabling it. He doesn't take into account things like how internet connectivity has actually made the market more efficient (which should lower prices) and the overall competition for entertainment dollars has increased greatly (while the music industry has done little to give people more reasons to buy). But, most importantly, he seems totally unaware of the fact that there are other business models beyond just selling recorded music. His claim that the music industry in the UK will be dead in 10 years is silly. Does he think that no one will pay him to write music for plays anymore? Oh... whoops, right there is a perfect example of a different way to pay for the creation of music.

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Olympus releases firmware update for E-3 DSLR

Olympus has released a firmware update for its top-of-the-range digital SLR, the E-3. The update notes specify that Version 1.4 improves the autofocus performance of the camera. As usual, users can download and install the latest firmware using Olympus Master or Studio software.

Olympus releases firmware update for E-3 DSLR

Olympus has released a firmware update for its top-of-the-range digital SLR, the E-3. The update notes specify that Version 1.4 improves the autofocus performance of the camera. As usual, users can download and install the latest firmware using Olympus Master or Studio software.

Microsoft Ordered To Pay $388 Million In Patent Case

jeffmeden writes "BusinessWeek reports today that Microsoft suffered a loss in federal court Monday. The judge rendering the verdict ordered Microsoft to pay $388 Million in damages for violating a patent held by Uniloc, a California maker of software that prevents people from illegally installing software on multiple computers. Uniloc claims Microsoft's Windows XP and some Office programs infringe on a related patent they hold. It's hard to take sides on this one, but one thing is certain: should the verdict hold up, it will be heavily ironic if the extra copies of XP and Office sold due to crafty copy protection end up not being worth $388 million."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Order To Pay $388 Million In Patent Case

jeffmeden writes "BusinessWeek reports today that Microsoft suffered a loss in federal court Monday. The judge rendering the verdict ordered Microsoft to pay $388 Million in damages for violating a patent held by Uniloc, a California maker of software that prevents people from illegally installing software on multiple computers. Uniloc claims Microsoft's Windows XP and some Office programs infringe on a related patent they hold. It's hard to take sides on this one but one thing is certain, should the verdict hold up it will be heavily ironic if the extra copies of XP and Office sold due to crafty copy protection end up not being worth $388 million."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another Day, Another Patent Lawsuit Against Apple Over The iPhone

Steve Jobs definitely invited it in hyping up the fact that the iPhone was covered by 200 patents, but it seems like every other week or so, we hear about yet another firm suing Apple for violating its patents with the iPhone. Apple has been sued over the iPhone over and over and over and over and over again. And now it's happened yet again. People talk about how every high tech product today is likely to violated hundreds, if not thousands, of patents, and the iPhone seems to be on its way to proving that point. At some point, doesn't someone realize how this highlights how much patents hinder innovation? It's the tragedy of the anti-commons, where any innovation today seems to require paying hundreds to thousands of tollbooths. It drives up the cost of innovation, almost always consisting of situations where the patent in question was not relied on for the newer innovation at all. It's a flat-out negative cost to society, which is the exact opposite of what the patent system is supposed to encourage.

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EFF attorney explains Obama DOJ’s radical authoritarian position on wiretapping immunity to Olbermann

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kevin Bankston doing a kick ass job on Keith Olbermann's show, discussing the Obama DOJ's radical interpretation of the PATRIOT Act that says that the president can't be sued for anything he does, even if it's illegal.

EFF's Kevin Bankston on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann"

Previously:


Copyright Doesn’t Just Grant The Content Creator Rights

Whenever copyright system supporters create "copyright guides," they seem to conveniently leave out the part that protects consumers rights as well. The worst cases are when the entertainment industry creates materials for schools to use to teach children about copyright, as they're almost always heavily misleading. But, sometimes everyday "guides" to things like copyright can be misleading as well. That's why it's good to see the folks at the Copyright Advisory Network fixing up and correcting a Reader's Guide to Copyright, that seemed to only focus on the rights of the content creator -- leaving out important rights of others, such as fair use and first sale rights.

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Design the Hugo Award logo, win $500 and a ticket to WorldCon

The Hugo Awards -- one of science fiction's leading honors -- have a beautiful trophy, a silver, streamlined rocket-ship. What they don't have is a logo that can be used on things like anthologies of Hugo-winning fiction, the spines of Hugo-winning books, and so on.

So they're holding a contest to design a Hugo logo. You have to use the rocket-ship, and you get $500, a ticket to the Worldcon and a signed Neil Gaiman book if you win. Judges are Neil Gaiman (3 time Hugo Award-winning author), Chip Kidd (graphic designer, author, editor), Geri Sullivan (SF Fan and graphic designer pro) and Irene Gallo (art-director for Tor).

Hugo Awards Logo Contest Official Rules (via Tor)


Associated Press threatens AP affiliate over YouTube channel

The Associated Press, in its zeal to keep the news a secret, has begun to send legal threats to itself. WTNQ-FM, an AP affiliate in Tennessee, received the legal threat over its YouTube channel, through which it makes its/AP's material available to its listeners. When WTNQ-FM's Frank Strovel called up the AP exec in charge of the anti-YouTube campaign to discuss this, he discovered that "nobody told the A.P. executive that the august news organization even has a YouTube channel which the A.P. itself controls, and that someone at the A.P. decided that it is probably a good idea to turn on the video embedding function on so that its videos can spread virally across the Web, along with the ads in the videos."

Strovel: And we're an A.P. affiliate for crying out loud! I stumped him on that one. . . . What is really shocking is that they were shocked that they've got a YouTube channel that people are embedding on their Websites. He seemed shocked by that. 'Oh, I am going to have to look into that" is what he told me.

Grantham: What an idiot!

Strovel: I know, I know.

A.P. Exec Doesn't Know It Has A YouTube Channel: Threatens Affiliate For Embedding Videos (via Memex 1.1)
Previously:


Report from protest for blind rights at Authors Guild yesterday

Tim from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez,
Yesterday, hundreds of people gathered in front of the headquarters of The Authors Guild in New York City to protest the removal of text-to-speech capabilities in Amazon's new Kindle 2 ebook device.

You may remember a few months ago, when The Authors Guild claimed (falsely) that the text-to-speech feature violated copyright law, and forced Amazon to disable it.

Now, the people who would have benefited most from the new feature -- the blind, and others with reading disabilities -- have made it clear that they're not going to stand for it.

We've got photos and more on EFF's Deeplinks blog.

Disability Access Activists Gather to Protest Kindle DRM (Thanks, Tim!)
Previously:





Can't see the video? Click here





CodeCon: biohacks and running code, San Francisco, Apr 17-19

Ben "OpenSSL" Laurie sez, "Wonder if Codecon might be of interest to your readers - always a fun conference, the basis has always been 'bring working code', though not necessarily open source. This year adds a new twist with 'or bring working biohacks' which I think is going to be fascinating - if only I didn't have to be somewhere else! Anyway, I was on the program committee and I think we have a pretty interesting lineup this year. Cheap ($82.50)! Only guaranteed to get in if you buy in advance!"
CodeCon 2009
San Francisco
April 17-19, 2009
Cellspace
2050 Bryant Street

...

15:15 BioHack! - Homebrew Genetic Testing - Read your own source code - at home!
15:45 Q&A
16:00 Helios Voting - The first and only web-based voting system that enables voters to verify their vote and the overall tally with cryptographic certainty.
16:30 Q&A
16:45 Switzerland - a semi-P2P system for detecting forged and modified IP packets between clients

...

CodeCon 2009 (Thanks, Ben!)
Previously:


Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11

Over at Dinosaurs and Robots, Todd Lappin reviews Brian Floca's stunning kids' book Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, "a vivid retelling of mankind's first mission to the moon."

Floca says:

200904082206 I researched Moonshot by reading books, flight plans, NASA photographs and charts; watching NASA footage, and basically absorbing everything I could get my hands on about the Apollo 11 mission. That probably sounds excessive for a book with so few words, but in a visual book an incredible amount of information — some of it obscure — can go into any given picture. There's always a tug of war between the big themes of space travel on the one hand, and the temptations of toggle switches and ignition sequence codes and elapsed mission times. I want all those details in the book, and I want to get them right, but I can't overwhelm the story.

There was a large service structure that was part of launch preparation for the Saturn V rockets, called the Mobile Service Structure. It was positioned right up against the rocket during much of the launch preparation and then, of course, it was moved out of the way. But moved to where? A Douglas Aircraft Saturn V Payload Planners Guide finally revealed where the thing was parked at liftoff; if you look for it on the page in Moonshot that shows the long view of the rocket lifting off, you can find it, though there’s not a word about it in the book.



Warcraft Horde masks


These World of Warcraft Horde masks certainly would spice up the game-play -- and they'd be a great way of communicating your passion for the game to your co-workers if worn at your desk or on the line. Who know? Maybe some of them play "for the Horde," too!

Tauren Overhead Latex Mask - Licensed World of Warcraft Costume Accessory (via Wonderland)

Black sky

Black sky

Sonicator upgrade

sonicatorseanragan.jpg

Sean Ragan writes:

Working in a chemistry lab will spoil you to the use of certain tools. An ultrasound bath is one of them. While a proper laboratory sonicator is a fairly pricey piece of equipment, by amateur standards, there are ultrasonic cleaners designed, marketed, and priced for the home market. They are primarily intended for cleaning jewelry, spectacles, and other small parts. The cheapest one I've found is manufactured by "Chicago Electric," a Chinese manufacturing concern, and sold through Harbor Freight. This model, unfortunately, is not equipped with a timer, and as manufactured it will only run for 3-minute cycles: You push the button, you get three minutes of ultrasound. If you want more than that, you have to come back at the end of three minutes and push the button again. This in stark contrast to my old laboratory sonicator, which featured a timer switch that would run the bath for as long as an hour without supervision. So I modified my home sonicator, first by opening the control panel and soldering the start button closed. As shown in the picture, the timer switch is mounted in an expedient plastic case. I've run the sonicator for the timer's maximum period of one hour many times with no problems whatsoever. I'm obliged to disclaim, however, that this device was not intended to run continuously for that long and it may not be smart to wander very far away while it's in operation.

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

South Park Creators Given Signed Photo of Saddam Hussein

Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a very special gift by US marines: a signed photo of Saddam Hussein. During his captivity, the marines forced Saddam to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as the boyfriend of Satan. Stone said, "We're very proud of our signed Saddam picture and what it means. It's one of our biggest highlights."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Can Mobile Broadband Solve the UK Digital Divide?

MJackson writes "Lord Carter's interim Digital Britain report recently proposed a new Universal Service Obligation (USO), which would effectively make it mandatory for every household in the UK to have access to a broadband service capable of 2Mbps by 2012. Since then there has been much talk about Mobile Broadband (3G, 4G) services being used to bridge the UK Digital Divide, but is that realistic? The technology has all sorts of problems from slow speeds and high latency to blocking VoIP, MSN Instant Messaging and aggressive image compression ... not to mention connection stability."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One string diddley bow


I found this video of Wade playing his homemade one-string diddley bow on Cigar Box Nation. Fantastic.

Only the best pallet wood, chicken can and drywall screws money can buy to build this fine instrument. This is an off the cuff song I came up with to go with this mean piece of wood.
Be sure to check out the other videos of one, two, three, and four-stringed homemade musical instruments.

Is The Idea Of Embracing ‘Piracy’ Finally Going Mainstream?

For many years, a small group of people has been trying to explain to the world of folks who freak out about "piracy" that there really are tons of opportunities in not trying to prevent it, but simply flipping it around, and using it to your own advantage as a part of your business model. The steps to doing so really aren't that difficult, but since many people have a natural aversion to "piracy," it's sometimes difficult for people to see beyond the big fat "free" to the huge opportunity right behind it.

Might that finally be changing?

MIT's Technology Review has an article about how a variety of companies are finally starting to push the idea that content providers should embrace piracy, and put together business models that take advantage of what piracy really can be: a free input into a larger business model, that provides free promotion and free distribution, while enabling a number of new (previously impossible) business models. Nothing in the article will be all that new to folks who've been around here for a while -- but it's somewhat encouraging to see the concept getting slightly more widespread acceptance.

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Podcast about Hollow Earth theorist Dr. Raymond Bernard

200904082019 Nate DiMeo says: "I'm a public radio reporter in L.A., I've got a podcast of history stories. it's latest episode tells the story of Hollow Earth theorist/wonderful crazy person, Dr. Raymond Bernard."

Women Meat Pioneers, 1943

200904081559

The new "Pioneer Woman" in MEAT. It sounds like the name of a Damien Hirst work, but it's an advertisement from the 1 November 1943 issue of LIFE magazine. John Ptak says: "This ad is innocent enough: it was simply encouraging the modern housewife to go adventuring into cuts of meat that had been deemed unacceptable before rationing and the war, which brought about a meat drought." Women Meat Pioneers, 1943

Climate Engineering As US Policy?

EricTheGreen writes "The Associated Press has an article featuring Obama administration science advisor John Holdren discussing potential climate engineering responses to global warming. Among the possible approaches? His own version of Operation Dark Storm — shooting micro-particulate pollution high into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. I'm sure the rest of the world would have no issue with that at all, of course. Yikes ..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cell Phones Make Another Move On The Landline

The shift away from landline phones to mobile phones has been growing for several years, as many people find landline service redundant. Fixed-line operators have done very little to update landlines and keep them relevant, preferring instead to rely on inertia to maintain subscriptions, alongside forcing landlines into bundles or making them a requirement for DSL. This has worked, to some extent, especially as landlines still did hold some benefit for families, or in situations where people wanted to call a place as opposed to a particular person. But mobile operators are innovating and narrowing this gap. For instance, MetroPCS has announced a new "family line" product, which gives families a single number alongside their additional phone number. When this number is called, all the family members' individual handsets ring, and anybody who answers gets placed into conference with the caller, mimicking a landline with multiple extensions. The number can also be used within the family to enable easy conference calls. It's not a huge technological breakthrough, and it's also not a service that's likely to be a big deal to tons of users -- but it does illustrate how even with as old a product as voice, the mobile side of the telecom business is trying to push forward, while landline voice remains largely stagnant.

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



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Online Only Investigative Reporting Group Wins Investigative Reporting Award

We still haven't quite figured out why some newspaper folks insist that you need print newspapers to do investigative reporting. A few weeks ago, we noted that there were a growing number of quite successful online only investigative reporting organizations. One of which was VoiceOfSanDiego.com -- funded by a bunch of local businesses who felt there wasn't enough local investigative reporting in San Diego. Now Nick writes in to let us know that VoiceOfSanDiego.com has won a top award in investigative reporting, the IRE or Investigative Reporters and Editors award. The award was for online investigative reporting, but it clearly wasn't limited to just online-only publications, since at least one traditional newspaper was included in the finalists.

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Segway PUMA


And you thought the Smart Car was Lilliputian! Segway has been showing off its latest "experimental" vehicle, a collaboration with GM, at the New York International Auto Show this week. Called the PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), the self-balancing two-wheeler can go about 35MPH top speed. S.E. Kramer from DVICE said it's like driving around in a Ferris wheel gondola.


Second Opinion: Hitching a ride in GM and Segway's PUMA

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Teaser Trailer for Fanfilm Auteur Sandy Collora’s “Hunter Prey” (think: “Predator” meets “Conair”)


Earlier this week, science fiction blog io9 got an exclusive peek at the teaser trailer for "fanfilm" director Sandy Collora's forthcoming feature "Hunter Prey." Annalee Newitz says,

Collora created the now-legendary fan film "Batman Dead End," which got him into a pretty heartbreaking copyright battle with Warner Bros. and Comic-Con. But he's back on his feet and continues to break new ground by bringing slick production values to shoestring-budget fan films. "Hunter Prey" is a feature film based on an original premise, and is fascinating not just because it's going to be action-packed fun, but also because it's a look into the future of high-quality amateur filmmaking.
Here's the io0 blog post, with a higher-quality video than what I've embedded here, and more on the project. Looks pretty amazing!




Can't see the video? Click here





Chimpanzees Exchange Meat For Sex

the_therapist writes "A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast and discovered that chimpanzees enter into 'deals' whereby they exchange meat for sex. Among the findings are that 'male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.' They also found this to be 'a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pentagon Cyber Defense Bill Comes To $100M For 6 Months

coondoggie writes "Protecting defense departments networks cost taxpayers more than $100 million over the past six months, US Strategic Command officials said yesterday. The motives of those attacking the networks go from just plain vandalism to theft of money or information to espionage. Protecting the networks is a huge challenge for the command, Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton told a cyber security conference in Omaha, Neb., this week. 'Pay me now or pay me later,' Davis said. 'In the last six months, we spent more than $100 million reacting to things on our networks after the fact. It would be nice to spend that money proactively to put things in place so we'd be more active and proactive in posture rather than cleaning up after the fact.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gentleman in New Orleans Loses Chunk of Arm in Possible Zombie Attack

The headline is a keeper: "Metairie man says stranger chewed, swallowed after taking bite out of his arm." The story is horrible, but more frightening still, it suggests the imminent threat of a worsening zombie onslaught.
Lancellotti said he tried to defend himself with a garden rake. As the men struggled over the rake, the stranger bent over and bit Lancellotti on his right forearm, the report said. Lancellotti's flesh ripped away as he fell to the ground. The man then got on top of Lancellotti and began choking him, the report said.

It was then that neighbor Chantal Lorio, a podiatrist and director of the Wound Center at East Jefferson General Hospital, came out to check on Lancellotti. Lorio said Monday that she first thought Lancellotti was having a heart attack and the other man was trying to help him.

The stranger was still gripping Lancellotti as Lorio noticed her neighbor was lying in a pool of blood. She didn't learn what happened until she began dressing the wound -- with the stranger still clutching her neighbor's shirt.

"He said, 'He bit my arm, chewed the flesh and swallowed it in front of me,' " Lorio recalled. She said the bite measured almost 3 by 1 1/2 inches, and was less than 1/4-inch deep.

Metairie man says stranger chewed, swallowed after taking bite out of his arm (Nola.com, thanks Jonno!)

The Dark Side of Dubai


(Image: "Dubai Metropolis," The Business Bay Executive Towers in Dubai. From the CC-licensed Flickr stream of "twocentsworth." )

An incredible piece by Johann Hari in the UK Independent about hard times hitting in the Arab city-state "built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery." A long read, but you won't want to miss a word. Toward the end of the piece, Hari boils his impression of the place down to these six words: "Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City."

The feature starts with a vignette about an expat named Karen Andrews, who now lives in her Range Rover, camped in the parking lot of one of Dubai's finest hotels. Her troubles began when her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor, lost his job, and the couple quickly slipped into debt. Snip:

One doctor told him he had a year to live; another said it was benign and he'd be okay. But the debts were growing. "Before I came here, I didn't know anything about Dubai law. I assumed if all these big companies come here, it must be pretty like Canada's or any other liberal democracy's," she says. Nobody told her there is no concept of bankruptcy. If you get into debt and you can't pay, you go to prison. "When we realised that, I sat Daniel down and told him: listen, we need to get out of here. He knew he was guaranteed a pay-off when he resigned, so we said – right, let's take the pay-off, clear the debt, and go." So Daniel resigned – but he was given a lower pay-off than his contract suggested. The debt remained. As soon as you quit your job in Dubai, your employer has to inform your bank. If you have any outstanding debts that aren't covered by your savings, then all your accounts are frozen, and you are forbidden to leave the country.

"Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of our apartment." Karen can't speak about what happened next for a long time; she is shaking.

Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six days before she could talk to him. "He told me he was put in a cell with another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn't face the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in front of him."

Karen managed to beg from her friends for a few weeks, "but it was so humiliating. I've never lived like this. I worked in the fashion industry. I had my own shops. I've never..." She peters out.

Daniel was sentenced to six months' imprisonment at a trial he couldn't understand. It was in Arabic, and there was no translation. "Now I'm here illegally, too," Karen says I've got no money, nothing. I have to last nine months until he's out, somehow." Looking away, almost paralysed with embarrassment, she asks if I could buy her a meal.

She is not alone. All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars.

"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship."

The dark side of Dubai (via monochrom/@Johnannes)

Previously:


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