Time Warner Cable last week backed off its plans to implement metered broadband plans in several cities, at least until it could figure out how to pitch the plans without attracting so much bad press. But now an interesting post over at GigaOM says that Time Warner is now also rethinking rolling out network upgrades in the cities where it wanted to install the broadband caps. The implication seems to be that the company is saying it's fine if consumers in those places want to complain about the caps, but then they shouldn't expect TWC to upgrade their broadband networks and offer higher speeds. Time Warner and other ISPs like to trot out the line that the cost of providing broadband is surging alongside traffic growth, but it seems that just the opposite is actually happening. So here's some horse-trading for Time Warner: if you don't want to upgrade your networks, or if you want to implement caps, that's fine. But don't expect your customers to hang around.

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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yahoi writes " According to the DarkReading article, 'Researchers have discovered a major botnet operating out of the Ukraine that has infected 1.9 million machines, including large corporate and government PCs mainly in the U.S. The botnet, which appears to be larger than the infamous Storm botnet was in its heyday, has infected machines from some 77 government-owned domains — 51 of which are in the US government. Researchers from Finjan who found the botnet say it's controlled by six individuals, and includes machines in major banks.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I feel the need to make so many disclaimers here.

1. Yes I have been critical of Twitter.

2. I am not on the Suggested User List.

3. I think they're making really big mistakes in managing the community. (That they are even managing the community at all is a bad sign. They should be trying actively to stay out of managing it.)

4. And about a million other things.

But...

I think some of the criticism of Twitter-the-Company has been over the top in the last few days. They've clearly been fighting some huge fires and the order in which they are 1. Acting and 2. Communicating makes sense to me, because I've been on their side of difficult situations, on a much much smaller scale, and my experience is that users don't treat the server guys fairly, no matter how you try to explain that you're doing the best that you can humanly possibly do. I've seen users do some horrible things while the fires are burning, and I see some of that now.

In the last week they've been fighting security issues, hacking, and a huge influx of new users. Any one of these things would be pretty taxing, but all at the same time -- well, it's gotta be hell on their side of the interface.

I've been watching the communication, and I think they're doing a really good job of explaining and their intentions are good.

That doesn't mean I don't think they brought on the stress themselves or that I support other things they're doing. I don't expect to be on the SUL, and I don't want to be. I'm not saying this to kiss up to them. Let's all try to be fair. That's my point.

Tim Biskup is issuing a new bronze sculpture of his popular Pollard character. There are only 44 in the edition.
Bronze "Pollard" Sculpture

hweimer writes "Yesterday at RSA security conference, F-Secure's chief research officer recommended dropping Adobe Reader for viewing PDF files because of the huge amount of targeted attacks against it. Instead, he pointed to PDFreaders.org, a website maintaining a list of free and open source PDF viewers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It really was just three years ago when we were saying we couldn't wait for the MySpace generation to run for office, knowing that the skeletons in their closets wouldn't actually be in their closets at all, but would have been posted online for all to see. While we actually expected that it would lead to a point where people pretty much brushed off and ignored such "youthful discretions," we certainly have't reached that point yet. A guy running for office in British Columbia, Canada, has dropped out of the election after images of him groping a woman's breast (that first appeared on his Facebook page) came to light. It's not clear when the photos in question were taken, but expect to see political candidates and their online presence scrutinized in more and more detail in future elections...

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"Stop action 8mm film Butt Race made with neighborhood kids in 1965 when director was age 14." (Thanks, HC!)

Well, if Episode #005 was the Failure Episode, #006 was the show without a guest. Our scheduled guest, Jeri Ellsworth, was at Notacon. Wires got crossed and she thought the show was on Saturday. Luckily, the whole thing is very casual, so Dale, Mark, and I took it all in stride and just ran with it We talked about our host picks and about the Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition which Mark had just come back from.

Our Hosts Picks:

Mark:

Mark was thoroughly jazzed by the new X-10-based automatic chicken coop door he'd just built for the coop at his new house. Above is a pic of the kind of system he described (from this site).

Mark was also enthusing all over the latest issue of Wired, guest edited by JJ Abrams. The themes are mysteries and puzzles, and now that I've actually seen the issue, I agree with Mark. It's their best one in ages. Some of my favorite issues of Wired are the guest-edited ones. They took a lot of chances with this issue, pushed the envelope, and I think it really paid off. They should do more of this in the future.

Dale:
Dale talked about Maker Faire plans and the upcoming Volume 18 of MAKE. Both are on the theme of ReMake America. As part of making the Faire "greener," we've teamed up with GreenMBA (Master's of Business Administration in Sustainable Enterprise) students at Dominican University of California to develop an Alternative Transportation Plan for the Faire. Last year, with 65,000 attendees, traffic became a problem. This year, with the help of the students, we're developing means of getting the word out electronically about traffic patterns, encouraging use of public transportation, biking to the Faire, etc. We'll have more details on all this as it develops.

Volume 18 is now at the printers and it promises to be a great lead-in to the themes of the Faire (it hits newsstands the week before), with articles on building a rainwater collection system, an inexpensive heat-exchanger, an Arduino-controller garden monitor, the Tweet-a-Watt, and programmable LED nightlights.

Gareth:
I talked about Kacie Kinzer's wonderful Tweenbots project that I'd posted about earlier in the week. On the show, I said the bots navigated Central Park in NYC. It was actually Washington Square Park. Apologies to my smiling cardboard overlords.

I also talked about the Google Radish, the ultra-low-power indoor-solar Cholesteric LCD displays engineers at the company have created to replace paper signage for their conference rooms.

 

Make: Talk Episode #007, Friday April 24, 2009 Our guest this Friday, Friday April 24, at 12-noon PDT, 3pm EDT, will be Nathan Seidle, founder of SparkFun Electronics. He'll be talking to us about SparkFun, what they're going to be showing off at Maker Faire, and about the recent Autonomous Vehicle Competition.

Please join us. And call in! Nobody calls in. Last week, we had a phone listener (which you can do too), but no talkers. Don't be shy. Say something and get free stuff! The call-in number is (646) 915-8698.

And we'll have Jeri Ellsworth on at some point in the near future.

Make: Talk on BlogTalkRadio

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waterboarding.org tells Boing Boing,

The recent White House release of Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos removes speculation by providing the first authoritative description of the waterboarding procedure used by CIA interrogators.

New details include using saline instead of plain water as a safety precaution in the case the subject swallows so much water that it causes hyponatremia - electrolyte disturbances from sodium depletion in the bloodstream.

The CIA waterboarding program originated with instructors from SERE, a training program which prepares American soldiers to resist torture. The official procedures exceeded the original so much in duration, frequency, and severity that Inspector General concluded that "the SERE waterboard experience is so so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant".

The formerly top secret memos describe procedures where Zbu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, exceeding even the OLC's own guidelines.

OLC Memos Define Official Waterboarding Procedure (waterboarding.org). This is part one of a multiple-part series, and this first installment covers basic facts: what it actually is, how they actually did it. Part two will be an analysis of their legal opinion on how the OLC's documented procedure avoids the legal definition of torture.

My friend Sharon Hall sent me some screeners of a new cop show on ABC called The Unusuals. She thought I'd enjoy them, and she was right. I don't watch many police shows, but The Unusuals' offbeat characters appealed to me. A new episode airs tonight. You can also watch the previous episodes for free at the link.

The Unusuals

Al writes "Researchers at Boston University have developed a way to predict the behavior or different DNA segments and make synthetic biology a little bit more reliable. James Collins and colleagues have built libraries of component parts and a mathematical modeling system to help them predict the behavior of parts of a gene network. Like any self-respected bunch of grad students, they decided to demonstrate the approach by making beer. They engineered gene promoters to control when flocculation occurs in brewers yeast, which allowed them to finely control the flavor of the resulting beer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's pretty common for book publishers to send out free copies of their books to book reviewers and publications. It's part of the publicity effort that any new book tends to go through. However, in this day and age, pretty much everyone is a book reviewer thanks to blogs or Amazon... and one author is responding accordingly. ChurchHatesTucker alerts us to the news that author Charlie Finlay is offering a free copy of his book to anyone who promises to review it on Amazon. Basically, he knows that the best way to build buzz around the book is to actually get people to read it, and giving away the book to people who will provide that buzz is probably a cost effective way to get some attention. Now, some might question whether the reviewers will be "fair" because they received the book for free -- but that's true of most professional book reviewers already.

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Here's the trailer for The Garden, which opens in theaters this Friday.

The Garden is an engaging and powerful look at the famous political and social battle over the largest community garden in the US (located in South Central Los Angeles). A follow-up to Kennedy’s award-winning documentary OT: Our Town, the film shows how the politics of power and greed (backroom deals, land developing, green politics, money) tragically intersect with working class families who rely on this communal garden for their livelihood. Equal parts The Wire and Harlan County USA, The Garden exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us. Kenneth Turan of the LA Times said: “It’s tempting to call The Garden a story of innocence and experience, of evil corrupting paradise, but that would be doing a disservice to the fascinating complexities of a classic Los Angeles conflict and an excellent documentary that does them full justice.”

Mike Holdsworth says: "My friends Kim and Tina are traveling to Shanghai at the moment and the following gift pack awaited them."

Bruce Perens writes "Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes in the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. So I decided to change that."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steven Morris of The Guardian reports on a herd cows in Devon that were bred by a pair of brothers who wanted to recreate the aurochs, "an extinct European wild ox" that "features as an important beast in Teutonic mythology."

Derek Gow believes Heck cattle - which, he says, "look prehistoric" - could one day have an important conservation role, taking the place of aurochs in the environment. "They would be ideal for a reintroduction programme in Britain because they don't need human attention."

He added: "They are an important part of the ecosystem because each cow produces its own weight in dung a year. That is excellent for the whole food chain, from dung beetles upwards."

Nazi-bred super cows roam farm in Devon

Brian Jepson was the editor of the new book iPhone Hacks: Pushing the iPhone and iPod touch Beyond Their Limits. He says: "It shows you how to do some of the usual hacks like jailbreaking, but it also goes completely off the rails in Chapter 12 and shows you how to get the iPhone talking to Arduino and also gets into wiring some sensors up to the iPhone. I think it could be one of the freakiest books I've worked on.

With iPhone Hacks, you can make your iPhone do all you'd expect of a smartphone -- and more. Learn tips and techniques to unleash little-known features, find and create innovative applications for both the iPhone and iPod touch, and unshackle these devices to run everything from network utilities to video game emulators. This book will teach you how to:

Import your entire movie collection, sync with multiple computers, and save YouTube videos.

Remotely access your home network, audio, and video, and even control your desktop.

Develop native applications for the iPhone and iPod touch on Linux, Windows, or Mac.

Check email, receive MMS messages, use IRC, and record full-motion video.

Run any application in the iPhone's background, and mirror its display on a TV.

Make your iPhone emulate old-school video game platforms, and play classic console and arcade games.

Integrate your iPhone with your car stereo.

Build your own electronic bridges to connect keyboards, serial devices, and more to your iPhone without "jailbreaking"

iPhone Hacks explains how to set up your iPhone the way you want it, and helps you give it capabilities that will rival your desktop computer. This cunning little handbook is exactly what you need to make the most of your iPhone.

iPhone Hacks: Pushing the iPhone and iPod touch Beyond Their Limits

We've discussed in the past attempts to serve court documents via Facebook, but apparently others are making use of such tactics as well. A few people alerted us to the story of a bill collector, apparently hired by JPMorgan Chase, who supposedly tracked down the MySpace account of the daughter of someone who was behind on some car loan payments, and posted the debt collection notice on the kids' MySpace page. In the past, people would stop answering the phone or the doorbell to avoid debt collectors. Will they start locking down their social networking profiles as well?

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An anonymous reader writes "Over on the PC World blog, Keir Thomas engages in some speculative thinking. Pretending to be writing from the year 2025, he describes a world of 'Good Enough computing,' wherein ultra-cheap PCs and notebooks (created to help end-users weather the 'Great Recession' of the early 21st century) are coupled to open source operating systems. This is possible because even the cheapest chips have all the power most people need nowadays. In what is effectively the present situation with netbooks writ large, he sees a future where Microsoft is priced out of the entire desktop operating system market and can't compete. It's a fun read that raises some interesting points."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, on EMS Labs, they run through some fun and even useful things you can do with magnets. And who doesn't love magnets?

Make almost anything (ferromagnetic) into a building set With magnets as connectors, you can build tins into anything you like. (Just be sure to get Bawls Mints, not Bawls Buzz).

Extract batteries from stubborn holders
We've all got things that take batteries. Some of them are well designed, and some of them are not. The worst offenders are electronic toys that take (say) half a dozen AA batteries, all of which must be inserted with the correct orientation-- spring side first-- and pried out, well, somehow. Rather than risk puncturing your batteries by prying them out with something pointy, just use a magnet to lift them out.

17 cool magnet tricks

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adeelarshad82 writes "Amazon's wildly popular Kindle 2 got a good old fashioned tear-down from the folks at market research firm iSuppli. According to the organization, the Kindle 2's manufacturing cost is almost half as much as its retail price."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Wilson posted a neat video that explains how he built a bunch of modified praxinoscopes (kind of like a zoetrope) to make Moray McLaren's "We Got Time" video.

The making of Moray McLaren's "We Got Time" video (Thanks, Joseph Francis!)

It's down to the wire for copyright term extension in Europe: the EuroParl votes tomorrow morning on whether sound recordings are going to get extra decades of copyright. This, after all the actual economic and policy experts have weighed in to say that this won't generate any substantial income for artists (but will put hundreds of millions of euros into the pockets of a few giant record companies), and will doom huge swaths of European musical history to obscurity because no one will be able to figure out who it belongs to, so no one will be able to re-issue it.

Term extension has been a failure around the world. In the US, it's created a disastrous mountain of "orphan works" -- more than 98% of the works in copyright, according to findings from the Supreme Court's hearing of Eldred v Ashcraft -- that can't be brought back to life and will likely disappear before they enter the public domain.

Make no mistake: most artists will receive as little as &Euro;0.50 from this measure, and the major labels that screwed them will get millions. And the public will pay those millions for music that, by all rights, should now be free after having had its full 50 years in copyright.

Some of the particular problems are:

The extension of copyright to 95 or even 70 years will increase the revenue of trust funds of deceased performers instead of living performers.

Many performers cannot produce proof for the performances they participated in during the past decades. It then becomes difficult to assess their rights to payments.

The proposed regulation could cause legal uncertainty for all existing audiovisual productions as it will be unclear if the material used is subject to sound copyright.

There is a risk that all material that is not commercially viable will not be marketed by the copyright owners and will become inaccessible for public use.

Small record companies currently publishing copyright-free material risk going bankrupt.

Europeans: it is never too late to act. Get in touch with your MEP before the vote and let them know you support a sound copyright policy for Europe.

Act now for Sound Copyright: instructions for contacting your MEP

European Parliament Votes on Copyright Term Extension Tomorrow (Thanks, Rufus!)

Aaron sez, "My girlfriend knows that I like strange stuff, so she picked up two bottles of lemonade from this guy who sells them at a farm in Malibu. Here is what you could find on the labels:"

THANK YOU FOR INVESTING IN MY MOVIE!

My name is Matthew and I am one of the best screenwriters in Hollywood. Unfortunately, the television networks and movie studios don't know that yet. As it stands, the decision of which films get produced are left in the hands of emotionally-immature, substance-abusing ex-lawyers who live in dread paranoia that everyone in the universe is out to get them. They spend the bulk of their time spying on their fellow executives, composing nasty counter-intelligence rumors and spreading them through their network of FA-BU-LOUS, yet cunning assistants.

Much of the actual work, like "reading" is left to a gaggle of twenty-something interns who are all the product of George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" policy. To these bimbos, nothing in the world existed before 1995, and the most reading they've done has been through text messages. They believe that good writing is something that fits into 160 characters, all performed with the thumbs. :)LOL!

Needless to say, I'm making my own damn movie and you just helped! All of the profits from this amazingly refreshing drink are going into my independent film. Why? Because I believe in the spirit of America - CONSUME AND DESTROY! POOR=BAD/RICH=GOOD! WAR IS PEACE! YOU-ESS-AY! YOU-ESS-AY! YEE-HAW!

Any-hoo, if you work in "THE INDUSTRY" as a common below-the-line slob and would like to work on my film for less than you're worth for no other reason but to satisfy my giant ego, send your resume to: malibu.monkey@verizon.net.

If you're a producer with a distribution deal, somewhat sober, and capable of actually reading a screenplay by yourself, shoot an email to me as well. I'll be happy to send a script to you along with your stupid submission release agreement boilerplate wank-rag.

If you are an actor, congratulations on making it this far. It's a lot of words. Who's a good boy? You! And you are very special. Plus, you serve specials at the restaurant. Special food served by special people to special people. Okay, I admit it. I'm just jealous because you are better looking than me and get all the hotties. Girls who go for me are all smart 'n' junk. Plus, they sag. And you're in SAG. Isn't that special?!

Agents, entertainment lawyers, managers and all other Pimps of The Antichrist can do us all a favor by simply killing yourselves. If you can, try to attempt a single moment of original, creative thought by finding an entertaining way to do it. Like performing seppuku with a champagne flute during the lunch rush at The Ivy. Or hang yourself from one of "O's" in the Hollywood sign with a noose made from your Kabbalah strings and rubber cancer-awareness bracelets. Either way, die bloodsucker! Die!

Cheers!

This guy is the embittered Dr Bronner of the west coast soft-drink trade. ALL ONE ALL ONE ALL ONE! We should introduce him to Mr Time-Cube.

THANK YOU FOR INVESTING IN MY MOVIE! (Thanks, Aaron!)

Julie188 writes "A researcher recently released proof-of-concept code for an exploit that allows a hacker to overrun an Intel CPU cache and plant a rootkit. A second, independent researcher has examined the exploit and noted that it is so simple and so stealthy that it is likely out in the wild now, unbeknownst to its victims. The attack works best on a Linux system with an Intel DQ35 motherboard with 2GB of memory. It turns out that Linux allows the root user to access MTR registers incredibly easily. With Windows this exploit can be used, but requires much more work and skill and so while the Linux exploit code is readily available now, no Windows exploit code has, so far, been released or seen. This attack is hardware specific, but unfortunately, it is specific to Intel's popular DQ35 motherboards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just a couple weeks ago, I received a ridiculous PR pitch from the entertainment industry lobbying group Arts+Labs, suggesting that a story that "hasn't really gotten the attention it deserves" is the "threat" from P2P software being used to "expose private documents to the world." The PR guy offered to help walk me through the process of downloading Limewire and finding such "exposed documents." Of course, what the PR guy left out is the reason this story hasn't received that much attention: because it's a bogus story that's been debunked for years -- but it's a favorite of the entertainment industry and its lobbyists in trying to come up with any reason to get Congress to issue laws against file sharing software.

However, it was obvious that this PR campaign was a setup: something bigger was underway... and, indeed, now we find out that these entertainment industry lobbyists have had a chance to bubble up yet again this silly idea to Congress, leading to yet another investigation of file sharing services, with a specific focus on Limewire. Of course, we did this already. Two years ago, there was a bunch of grandstanding in Congress against Limewire because some gov't officials had leaked documents possibly (though, not definitely) via Limewire. But, of course, the target was wrong. It wasn't Limewire that was the problem, it was government employees being stupid and setting up private government documents in their shared folders and poor government computer security systems that allowed this to happen. But rather than blame bad gov't computer security or clueless users, the government set upon Limewire as the problem (encouraged, of course, by the entertainment industry's lobbyists).

The PR campaign and the Congressional investigation didn't happen in the same month by accident. You can pretty much assume that the whole effort was orchestrated by these lobbyists as yet another misguided attack on file sharing software, playing up the ridiculous idea that it's the software that's responsible for people leaking documents, rather than user stupidity and bad security.

It's nice to see some in the mainstream press not fall for this bogus story. The LA Times notes how pointless this effort is, pointing out how the whole thing is misguided, and accurately noting:

Perhaps the real motive here is to find grounds to ban the software outright, which would please Hollywood but wouldn't solve the problem.

Of course, not all mainstream publications bothered to figure that out. Five days after Arts+Labs pitched me on the "Limewire-is-a-security-leak-problem" story, the WSJ published exactly that story, including (of course!) a quote from Arts+Labs, and no quotes from anyone who would point out what a made up story it is, and how it's been planted by the entertainment industry in an effort to create a moral panic against P2P software. I thought the mainstream press was supposed to be where real journalists did their homework rather than just parroting the story lobbyists hand them?

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Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Energy Circle, a sort-of Consumer Reports for cost-effective energy efficient gadgetry, announced a new project today that I find absolutely fascinating.

We have been monitoring our home energy use for several months now, using our preferred whole house energy monitor TED, The Energy Detective. With Earth Day 09 as our starting point, we are going to make our electricity use public on EnergyCircle. We have adapted the TED to make it capable of streaming our household's data directly to the Internet. (A somewhat sophisticated hack inspired in part by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone's Tweet-A-Watt. We'll open source it in the next day or so).

What I love most about this, is that the building in question isn't the sort of green industry "House of Tomorrow" thing that bears more resemblance to Epcot Center than to the places you or I live now. By following Energy Circle's data, you'll see how the average American home uses energy, and you'll see the changes in energy use that happen (or don't happen) when the bloggers try out new energy-saving ideas and products. In fact, they're not just posting all this data, they're annotating it. You'll know whether that spike in use is their dryer or their hot water heater. And you'll know what was going on behind-the-scenes to cause a dip in use.

But, beyond being a really cool experiment, does this matter? Hell, yeah. What you'll be seeing at Energy Circle is a living example of how consumer awareness of energy use cuts consumer energy use. And that's a big, fat, hairy deal. According to the DOE, electricity use in one average single-family home accounts for more CO2 emissions than two average cars. Studies have found that monitoring home energy use, and giving the people who live there access to that information, can end up cutting use by anywhere between 5-to-15%---and those reductions connect directly back to the amount of CO2 being pumped into the air.

Very zippy stuff, indeed.

Here's my latest column for Internet Evolution: "Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996" explains how the entertainment industry's greedy, naked lobbying tactics will be their undoing, since these victories end up backfiring because they arouse such public ire.

It's not that these companies can't get their laws on the agenda, and not that they can't cook the process to make it run favorably for themselves. For example, when Canada was considering its own version of the WCT, the entertainment giants saw to it that the parliamentarians in charge of the process only talked to multinational entertainment giants, without conducting any kind of embarrassing public consultation. They wouldn't even talk to the Canadian record companies -- just the multinationals.

The proposed laws -- Bill C60 and Bill C61 -- were complicated and took a lot of explaining. But here's what didn't take any explaining at all: "Your government is about to introduce sweeping, controversial regulations to the Internet, and they won't talk with anyone except the jerks who are suing all those music downloaders in the States about it -- they won't even talk to Canadian record companies!"

This made the Canadian lawmakers who backed the proposal look like sellouts (which they were); made the laws look like conspiracies (which they were); and made the geeks who cared about this stuff look like heroes (which they were). The complicated story about the law became a simple story about the process.

Likewise in New Zealand, where a new copyright provision called "Section 92A" made every geek in the country freak out in unison. 92A allows a rightsholder to have your Internet connection terminated by filing three unsubstantiated accusations of copyright infringement against you. No judge and no jury: just a rightsholder standing over you, able to administer the death penalty to your participation in electronic life without showing a shred of evidence.

Now, this is a little easier to explain to the general public -- the entertainment lobby isn't just stupid about process, they're also greedy in what they ask for -- but 92A was rammed through Parliament in a dodgy process that got those people who weren't interested in copyright or the Internet outraged anyway.

New Zealand's brilliant, tireless geeks organized around the clock, mounted a huge, high-profile global campaign through Twitter and blogs (they probably tripled the amount of international coverage New Zealand received), and forced the government to back down on its plans, sending the entertainment industry packing.

In France, the "colorful" Nicolas Sarkozy faced a revolt after trying to pass the New Zealand law there -- where it was called HADOPI -- and having it rejected by his own government.

Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996

The Playing For Change project made this film of buskers around the world playing "Stand By Me" (it's part of a project that raises funds to build schools). I found the performances here is very touching -- beautiful editing.

Playing For Change: Song Around the World "Stand By Me" (Thanks, Dalvenjah!)

The Institute for the Future has partnered with Sun and Boing Boing Video to create The Digital Open, an online tech community and competition for youth around the world, ages 17 and under.

The top project in each category will earn a fantastic prize pack and be featured on Boing Boing Video! Collaboration is encouraged! Remember, the future is yours to make! We want to hear your ideas, inventions and plans for changing the world through technology.

Top projects in each of the eight categories will be selected by a panel of judges, including Eric J. Wilhelm (Instructables), Lawrence Lessig (Harvard/Creative Commons), Jane McGonigal (Institute for the Future), David Pescovitz (Boing Boing), and Dale Dougherty (MAKE). Winners will receive prizes including a PeeCee mini laptop running the OpenSolaris OS, a video camera, a solar-powered flashlight, and other cool stuff.

The Digital Open

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James Snyder took this striking photo of a frog that ate a small light bulb. It was featured in National Geographic's "Daily Dozen."

This is a Cuban tree frog on a tree in my backyard in southern Florida. How and why he ate this light is a mystery. It should be noted that at the time I was taking this photo, I thought this frog was dead having cooked himself from the inside. I’m happy to say I was wrong. After a few shots he adjusted his position. So after I was finished shooting him, I pulled the light out of his mouth and he was fine. Actually, I might be crazy but I don’t think he was very happy when I took his light away.

(Via bangocibumbumpuluj)

Above is a small piece of an amazing panoramic photo of a street of abandoned houses in Detroit.

Last week I read in the morning paper about a street here where 60 out of 66 homes were vacant or abandoned on a single block. The reporter called it a "ghost street." Yesterday I found myself in the area. Other than an errant sofa, the street was completely empty, almost peaceful. I took a photo of every house on the north side of one block and then stitched them together. If you were to compare the current international housing crisis to a black hole sucking the equity out of our homes, this one-way street near the northern border of Detroit might just be the singularity: the point where the density of the problem defies anyone's ability to comprehend it. These homes started emptying in 2006.

(Via The Agitator)

Anita Kuno writes "I suggested Head First Rails to a friend before I even finished it. He was asking me questions that I didn't have time to answer, and I knew the book could explain better than I. My friend is impatient, and I was uncertain what his experience would be. At first he was frustrated, but I assured him the answers were in the book. The incremental style of Head First Rails includes some exercises that are designed to fail to reinforce the learning process. I was confident that his answer would be found in the pages and he trusted me enough to go back and continue the exercises. He later told me he is very happy with the book and grateful that I suggested it." Read on for the rest of Anita's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hannah Perner-Wilson's limpet shells, which contain either an LED or vibrating motor that is activated when you push down on the shell, have no purpose other than to delight the person who happens upon them. Limpet Shell Electronics

The Mt. Holly Mayor says: "Chris Zubryd, the director/editor of 'The Pitch, Poker & the Public,' the 30 min doc the original Joel Bauer clip was pulled from, sent me a link to the full clip. I haven't been this creeped out since The Men Who Stare at Goats!"

This video asks the question "Can you go corporate without losing your soul?” It explores some of the advertising and influence industry's giants through the lens of the greatest persuader of them all; P.T. Barnum. As it turns out he never said, "There is a sucker born every minute". Hear why you think he did, hear how Joan Jett's career was launched by the man [Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History] who launched it, hear from the creator of the Marlboro man and from the greatest pitchman alive today as well as one of the greatest Texas hold'em players to sit at the poker table. These men have been in the business for decades and have learned valuable things about creating perceptions to turn a profit.

Al Benedetto writes "I stumbled across this article which analyzes the YouTube audio content identification system in-depth. Apparently, since YouTube's system has no transparency, the behaviors had to be determined based on dozens of trial-and-error video uploads. The author tries things like speed/pitch adjustment, the addition of background noise, as well as other audio tweaks to determine exactly what you'd need to adjust before the fingerprinter started mis-identifying material. From the article: 'When I muted the beginning of the song up until 0:30 (leaving the rest to play) the fingerprinter missed it. When I kept the beginning up until 0:30 and muted everything from 0:30 to the end, the fingerprinter caught it. That indicates that the content database only knows about something in the first 30 seconds of the song. As long as you cut that part off, you can theoretically use the remainder of the song without being detected. I don't know if all samples in the content database suffer from similar weaknesses, but it's something that merits further research.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul McCartney is making some news by speaking out in favor of The Pirate Bay verdict, claiming he thought it was "fair," but the details of his comments suggests he is speaking about these things without being particularly knowledgeable about what The Pirate Bay does or is.

"Anyone who does something good, particularly if you get really lucky and do a great artistic thing and have a mega hit, I think you should get rewarded for that. I'm in favour of that sort of thing."

He says that as if there is anyone out there who claims that artists shouldn't get "rewarded" for doing something great. The problem is no one is saying that. We're just debating how they will (not should) get rewarded. And, of course, plenty of artists who embrace things like The Pirate Bay are getting rewarded for doing so. Claiming that they're not is simply false and suggests ignorance of the subject.

"The problem is you get a lot of young bands coming up and some of them aren't going to last forever so if they have a massive hit that's going to pay their mortgage forever. They're going to feed the children on that and if they don't get that money, if they don't see that money, I think it's a bit of a pity."

It's a pity that they might actually have to continue working, rather than living off one single hit? Perhaps we have different ways of thinking about things, but I think it's a much bigger pity when you think about all the musicians in the past who didn't have a wonderful free promotion and distribution system, and were unable to make any money because they were limited by gatekeepers known as the major record labels.

The fact that new musicians are popping up today and getting attention and (yes) making a living by embracing these tools and using them to their advantage, again, suggests that McCartney is speaking from a position of ignorance rather than knowledge.

"I've been very lucky because my main era with the Beatles was at a time when everyone did get paid."

That's simply not true. Most bands of his era did not get paid. That's because the only path to getting paid was to sign to a record label, and many bands were unable to do that. Today, on the other hand, bands have many more options to create their music, to distribute it, to promote it and to get paid for it. And one of those tools is The Pirate Bay... which McCartney wants to take away.

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Ronald Dekker made this "mixed signal" LED clock. He writes:

The term "mixed-signal" is usually reserved for circuits and ICs that process both analog and digital signals. In that sense the title "A mixed-signal LED clock" is perhaps misleading since this is a digital clock from beginning to end. However, the readout is analog and since the beast had to be given a name, I a called it my "mixed-signal" clock. A (literally) striking feature about this clock is that it has a real mechanical bell which strikes the hours. It gives the clock quite an homely appearance, and it has became a much valued member of our household.  

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Rep. Jane Harman (D-California) thinks warrantless wiretaps are swell. Now she is upset that the government eavesdropped on her private conversations. I guess she must be mad that they used a warrant. From Salon's Glenn Greenwald:

So if I understand this correctly -- and I'm pretty sure I do -- when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was "both legal and necessary" as well as "essential to U.S. national security," and it was the "despicable" whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials. But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power. Behold Jane Harman's overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist.

Jane Harman: Angry, partisan, civil liberties extremist

Mike Pusateri shows how he made bacon from pork belly.

The first step is curing the pork belly with a dry cure of salt, sugar, and pink salt (sodium nitrite). The main purpose of the cure is to prevent any bacterial growth on the meat and draw out some water.

Let's remember that refrigeration is a relatively new invention. In the past, a big life problem was finding ways to preserve meat for use long after it was killed. Curing by salting, smoking, and drying are methods to prevent meat from spoiling. Making bacon was a way to save the pork belly for later use. Pork belly was also the main ingredient of salt pork, a mainstay of the military diet for centuries.

Homemade bacon

Parz writes with word that new information is emerging about the much-anticipated BioShock 2. Eurogamer has a detailed write-up about the game, saying that it raises curiosity and exhibits plot-depth in a manner similar to the first game. Gamespot has a video interview with some of the developers, in which they talk about some of the new environments and how they're able to do more with the story in a sequel by not having to explain the fundamental characteristics of the setting. In an interview with Gameplayer, Lead Level Architect Hogarth de la Plante said, "You'll see locations in BioShock 2 that are completely flooded interior structures that you can walk through out in the ocean." A gameplay trailer was recently released, and screenshots are available as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Fact: Unicorns and Narwhals are mortal enemies. Everybody knows this. But did you know how the conflict began?

How the Conflict Began
It was a simple case of mistaken identity, turned deadly. The Narwhals--basically mid-sized whales with a bad case of bucktooth--were just swimming around in the sea, minding their own business, when medieval Europeans began to cut a swath of destruction, killing Narwhals in order to sell the animals' unique tooth as a "unicorn horn".

Which is a shame, both because of the needless Narwhal deaths and because the Narwhal tooth is actually pretty zippy on its own, even without trying to pass it off as a piece of mythology. The tooth of the male Narwhal is the only known tooth in the world to grow in a spiral shape. It's also constructed very differently from other animals' teeth. Instead of having hard material on the outside, and soft stuff within, the Narwhal's tooth structure is completely reversed. Weirder still, each of these tooth-tusks, which can reach up to 8 ft. in length, has more than 10 million exposed nerve endings. Harvard University professor/dentist Martin Nweeia thinks the tooth might actually be a sensor, helping Narwhal navigate through Arctic waters by monitoring changes in pressure, temperature and water chemistry.

The Video Documentary of the War
In 2006, CalArts student Adrian Molina captured the glory and aftermath of an epic Unicorn vs. Narwhal battle as his junior year film project.

Take the Fight Home
Now you can act out your own Unicorn v. Narwhal battle scenes on your bedroom floor, using this action figure play set.

According to the packaging, which, I am certain, is every bit as reliable a source as Dr. Nweeia, Narwhal horns can "conjure sea demons, kill vampires and are self cleaning."

Unicorns, on the other hand, can merely "deflect lighting bolts" and "shoot rainbow beams" with their chocolate-filled horns. Plus, while biologists estimate there are about 50,000 living Narwhal, these same biologists do not even believe a single Unicorn exists.

I think I know whose side I'm on.

Oh yeah, and Unicorns also have the disadvantage of having made other animal enemies, for much the same reasons as their conflict with the Narwhal. You can read about the Elasmotherium, another beast that is surely gunning for Unicorn hide, in my book, Be Amazing.

Instructables user Monkeybrad made this chair from a 55 gallon plastic barrel. They're always available on craigslist for free or super cheap, and also make great compost containers or rainwater collectors.

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[Image from Smart Home USA]

Want to get on the smart grid bandwagon without having to wait for the mature technology to be delivered by your utility? Here are some features you can add to your house now that will allow you to remotely control and schedule your energy use. If you can control the time and duration of your usage, you can get a better handle on your expenses and your carbon footprint.

Programmable thermostats are one of the best ways to control your energy usage. These devices allow you to turn your home's heating plant on or off when you know you'll be home and awake. I have used one for more than ten years and am amazed that more people don't. Mine came as the result of an energy audit, paid for by the energy conservation surcharge on my utility bill. Newer thermostats have features that allow you to control them with a computer, but even the simpler, older ones like mine use a clock and allow you to set a schedule for heating by day and hour. Turning your house on before you wake up can at least make for a more pleasant trip to the kitchen first thing in the morning, if you've turned the heat down for the night.

[Image from Home Power]

Home Power Magazine has a decent collection of low-tech solutions. While not exactly "smart," you can go a long way by deploying these techniques before jumping into a more complex home energy-management project.

DIY Home Automation has a round-up of energy saving resources:

Home automation technology is becoming as synonymous with sustainability as it is with convenience. Incorporating smart home technology into a new or existing structure makes it easier to reduce energy consumption and the carbon footprint (your impact on the environment) a home or business creates. Why go green? Our actions over the last 50 years, such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, have led to increased greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide emissions and methane) which in turn cause global warming. Environmental responsibility is everyone's responsibility, so do your part by making simple changes that not only help the earth, but will also save you money and add convenience to your home. With many new easy to install home automation products readily available, it's now simpler than ever to automate your home and go green at the same time!

X10 can be a good starter system, but it does have some drawbacks. X10 is easy to set up. Basically, you just plug in a few modules and start using it to control lights and other devices in your home. It uses the wiring in your home as its communications network. When I used some X10 modules in a previous home, it didn't work out very well, because of the trickle-charge killed off a number of compact fluorescent light bulbs. There are usually some good starter deals at X10.com which allow you to try it out for a small investment. You can control devices with remote control clickers, and also through computer-based modules.

The Museum of Science and Industry has an exhibit of a model smart home. Their resources section provides some good leads and reads.

The award-winning Tweet-a-Watt, from adafruit industries, helps you monitor and share your electricity usage via Twitter. There are a number of ways for you to store, monitor, distribute, and display your energy usage data. As the collection of electricity data grows, the project will be enriched by a community of dedicated volunteer and professional participants. [Editor's note: Look for the full project details on building your own Tweet-a-Watt modules in MAKE, Volume 18.)

This project involved hacking a common Kill-a-Watt power meter to transmit data wirelessly usign an Xbee to my computer (Mac), and then upload the data to two different websites (Pachube.com & Google App Engine) to display graphically...

A much simpler and more useful alternative to plotting with Google is to use Pachube. Pachube allows you to upload your live data and share it with others. Likewise, you can use other people's data feeds to control something locally or use many feeds to make composite plots, etc. The data is submitted using a fairly simple protocol called Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) which you can learn about at Pachube.

 

[Image from Agilewaves]

Brad suggests Agilewaves for monitoring electricity, and Lutron for lighting and shade control.

Set bedroom shades to open at precisely the moment you wish to rise -- next best thing to a personal valet Custom shades and drapes can operate automatically, according to the time or day or light level, or with the press of a single button.

 

[Image from Wired]

Looking into the future, Wired has a good feature on smart grids and their place in present and the future.

A smart grid requires smart electric meters that let households track and manage their power consumption in real time. The Obama administration wants 40 million homes to have technology like this installed within the next three years. But smart meters require smart consumers--or at least attentive ones--and most people don't think about their energy use until it's time to pay the bill or until the lights go out.

 

What are you using to control your energy usage? Is it more important to see it as a financial challenge or an environmental solution? Here in the States, we generally have flat-rate electric metering, but in other countries, time-of-day metering is more common. If you live in a place where you're charged peak and off-peak rates, maybe you could share your experiences with that system.

---

Editor's Note: This post is part of a series of posts sponsored by GE. GE had nothing to do with the content of the article and no control over Make: Online editorial. -Gareth

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Remember back in the days of surreptitiously installed adware/spyware? For the most part, those days are gone, driven out by better security, FTC crackdowns and more sophisticated users. However, one of the big companies in the space, Zango, hung around for years, and finally shut down.

The company, which was originally known as 180Solutions, raised millions from VCs who didn't seem to recognize just how hated the company was, and just how many of its installs weren't by choice, but through annoyance. Then, for years, the company kept trying and failing to shake the "spyware" label, always blaming "bad actors" in its distribution network, but doing little to actually stop any of those bad actors. At times, it even rewarded them or making ridiculous claims about how its software couldn't be used for sneaky installs any more, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Incredibly, the company merged with another infamous adware firm and renamed the new company after the firm's most hated app Zango. And, then, of course came the lawsuits and a settlement with the FTC, which the company didn't appear to live up to. Most recently, the company was supposed to have "reinvented itself" in the "casual gaming" market.

Of all things, I'd actually run into some folks from the company at a conference last year, where they were pitching their "innovative advertising solutions," but would clam up or use misdirection any time you asked them for specifics about who would see the ads and how the software had gotten on their computers in the first place. In the meantime, one of the company's founders has written up something of a post mortem, where he suggests that only 4% of their installs early on where "completely silent," but doesn't note how many weren't necessarily "silent," but were done through trickery or a lack of full info. He also blames others in the space for being worse, and getting a bad rap because of their actions. Eventually, he also admits that the company also never provided much value in exchange for the advertisements, and at least is willing to admit that the company's management "was brain-dead" and should have recognized this early on. It's a fairly open and honest piece on what happened, though I think he doesn't give nearly enough blame to the company itself. It was quite evidence how problematic the company's actions were from a very early stage, and the fact that it continued right up until recently suggests this wasn't just a case of a few small mistakes, but a systematic culture at or around the company that encouraged those types of actions.

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Combat Wombat brings news that the legal battle between the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) and a host of major tech corporations has come to end, with a large settlement going to the CSIRO. The fight was over a patent on wireless LAN technology, which already earned the CSIRO a victory in court over Buffalo Technology and a settlement with Hewlett-Packard. The remaining 13 companies, which include Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Nintendo, have now chosen to settle as well. "[The CSIRO] will use the money won from a Wi-Fi technology patent battle to fund further research. ... It is unclear how much money has flowed to the CSIRO, but experts say the technology would be worth billions of dollars if royalties were paid on an ongoing basis."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For those who would like to talk with dead folks but haven't had much luck, perhaps this technical manual may be of some help.
Spiricom: An Electromagnetic-Etheric Systems Approach to Communications with Other Levels of Human Consciousness (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Recently on Offworld, the biggest story was, of course, the site's new Concept Album feature, which kicked off with full-resolution concept art of EA's excellent DS puzzle/platformer Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure featuring worlds, enemies, and bosses that never made it into the game, including, best of all, Evil Benjamin Franklin. We also saw the first images of the latest game in Q-games PS3 downloadable art game series PixelJunk, and an early look at two very non-traditional games coming to Xbox Live Arcade from Final Fantasy creators Square Enix, including cubist arena-shooter Project: Cube and apparently google-maps enhanced shooter 0 day Attack on Earth. Elsewhere we saw what it will mean to have Fallout 3's ending essentially undone with its latest DLC pack, saw Stephen Fry return for more work on LittleBigPlanet, and saw the world of Rock Band officially collide with the world of Lego, and were relieved to hear that Sony Japan's excellent looking Tetris-meets-trash-compacting game Gomibako was headed to the U.S. Finally we saw Left 4 Dead T-shirts only Francis could hate, coveted the first NES in a purse, and, curiously, played classic Sierra adventure games in our web browsers where each area is given a unique URL and features newly added passive multiplayer aspects.

Here's the Blue Marble, on December 7, 1972. From NASA:

View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. This is the first time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south polar ice cap. Note the heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost the entire coastline of Africa is clearly visible. The Arabian Peninsula can be seen at the northeastern edge of Africa. The large island off the coast of Africa is Madagascar. The Asian mainland is on the horizon toward the northeast."

Snowblindeye writes with this excerpt from the European Southern Observatory: "Well-known exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet, 'e,' in the famous system Gliese 581, is only about twice the mass of Earth. The team also refined the orbit of the planet Gliese 581 d, first discovered in 2007, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist. Planet Gliese 581 e orbits its host star — located only 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra ('the Scales') — in just 3.15 days. 'With only 1.9 Earth-masses, it is the least massive exoplanet ever detected and is, very likely, a rocky planet,' says co-author Xavier Bonfils from Grenoble Observatory. Being so close to its host star, the planet is not in the habitable zone. But another planet in this system appears to be. ... The planet furthest out, Gliese 581 d, orbits its host star in 66.8 days. 'Gliese 581 d is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material, but we can speculate that it is an icy planet that has migrated closer to the star,' says team member Stephane Udry. The new observations have revealed that this planet is in the habitable zone, where liquid water could exist. '"d" could even be covered by a large and deep ocean — it is the first serious "water world" candidate,' continued Udry."

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Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century is one of those popular science books that leaves you feeling a lot smarter after you finish it. Specifically, it makes you feel smart enough to feel kind of dumb and humble -- to feel like your received wisdom about the world and your place in it needs to be rethought.

Slater traces the history, personalities and science of ten momentous psychology experiments, from the infamous Stanford obedience experiment to experiments on the construction of false memories, the experimental use of lobotomy, experiments on addiction, compassion and indifference. You've probably heard of many of these experiments -- for example, Elizabeth Loftus's notorious "Lost in the Mall" experiments on false memory -- but if you're like me, you only retained a cursory impression of the experiment and its conclusion. Here, Slater fills in the whole story: the experimenter's personal history, the social upheaval arising from the conclusions drawn, the detractors' arguments. Where possible, Slater interviews the actual experimenter -- when that can't be done, she tracks down experimental subjects, mentors, spouses, anyone who can provide the context.

The book opens with Slater's quest to find Deborah Skinner, BF Skinner's daughter whom "everyone knows" was raised in a sterile, experimental transparent box, and grew up to be a mad broken person, a memorial to her father's terrible hubris. What she discovers is Skinner's descendants, living happy and well (including the supposedly deceased Deborah), and the truth about the Skinner box: it was designed to maximize personal attention from parents, to maximize experimental play by the baby, to minimize harm and punishment arising from a baby's first clumsy gropings. A psychiatrist herself, Slater turns to Skinner's reviled works on political theory -- the supposedly reductionist, cryptofascist tracts that show how a population can be trained into docility -- and discovers in them a humanist streak that matches well with the most progressive ideas of today.

From here, Slater moves on to Milgram's obedience experiments, uncovering the identity of one of the subjects in the experiment as well as Milgram's former lab assistants, and unpicks the conclusions of the experiment, and discovers the untold story of the experiment: the subjects, scarred by the simulated execution to which they'd been a party, spent the rest of their lives thinking for themselves, refusing to go along to get along.

From there, Slater goes on to look at Rosenhan's psychiatric diagnosis experiment (normal people go to a mental ward, complaining of a voice saying "thud" and are diagnosed as insane, medicated, and finally released "in remission") -- and then re-enacts it, going to many emergency rooms complaining of the same symptoms, to see what happens (she's given antipsychotics, but not held). This is a springboard to discuss Slater's own mental health history (she was institutionalized as a teen), and the ways that diagnosing mental illness have become more concrete and less impressionistic in response to Rosenhan's research.

And on: research into how and why we freeze in emergencies, into how bystanders could allow Kitty Genovese to be brutally murdered while they watched from their apartment windows, on Festinger's extraordinarily cruel experiments on separating monkeys from their mothers and the compassionate results that he came up with, on Bruce Alexander's shocking conclusions on the biological basis for addiction, and then onto the use of drugs and surgery to alter the brain.

Shot through this is Slater's life story, the conflicts with her family, and her compassion for the researchers, even the ones who are unequivocal monsters. Her style is lush, bordering on florid, filled with poesy and metaphor, and though it sometimes gets in the way, it mostly does its job and makes every detail vivid and memorable, every puzzle fascinating and frustrating.

This is a great book, about great things, many of them done by bad people. The ten experiments that Slater investigates have shaped the world we live in, informing our theories of the mind, our penal system, government, education, relationships, employment -- all of it. I love secret histories, and this one is a doozy.

Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (US)

Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (UK)

Update: After its initial publication in 2004, this book generated a lot of controversy; this Salon article does a great job of summing up both sides of the debate (Thanks, Goldfroggy!)

This surveillance camera image depicts a thief who stole several surveillance cameras from a car wash in Clearfield, Utah. The culprit was smart to wear a mask, but I bet someone will still identify him or her.
"Thief rips off cameras from Clearfield car wash" (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)

Via Against Monopoly comes an opinion piece from the EE Times suggesting that engineers who recognize how harmful the patent system can be should go on a patent strike:

Stop filing patents. Refuse to sign employment contracts that give your employer sole title to your inventions. Don't participate in any due diligence efforts on patent portfolios.

Basically, his argument is that most engineers recognize how harmful the patent system is, but are pushed into patenting by lawyers and management, and the only way to get the message out is to stop assisting with anything having to do with patents.

It's a nice idea, and if a lot of folks really got involved it might get some attention, but I have a hard time believing it could actually be effective. While many people do recognize the problems with patents, an awful lot either don't care or don't know enough to care about it -- and they'll just keep patenting away. It's similar to calls to "boycott" RIAA music or similar such things. It sounds good, but it's effectively impossible to make such a process really work in practice.

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RU Sirius has a new book out, titled Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars On Drugs. Judging by the excerpt on 10 Zen Monkeys, the book seems to be filled with gossip, debauchery, and shock... as any good rock-and-roll book should be. From the post, titled "Eight Druggiest Rock Star Stories:"

Blood of the Stooges
In 1969-1970, Iggy Pop and his seminal proto-punk band the Stooges lived together outside Detroit in a house they nicknamed "Fun House." (They also named an album for it.) Besides writing and recording music, they were injecting massive amounts of drugs, mostly heroin. When setting up a hit, the Stooges would squirt the blood out of their syringes and shoot it all over the walls and ceilings. After a while, enough blood had accumulated on the apartment's walls to create a sort-of degraded smack addict's Jackson Pollock mural. Ron Asheton, the only Stooge member who was not a junkie and who lived elsewhere, described it "...a lot of times there would be fresh stuff. Then it would dry on to the table or on the floor.... I wish I was smart enough to take pictures of it because it would have been a masterpiece."

But Why Is Elton "Still Standing?"
In his mid-1970s heyday, Los Angeles declared "Elton John Week." To celebrate, the glam rock pasha invited his relatives out to L.A. to celebrate. Allegedly, Elton took 60 Valiums, jumped into a hotel pool, and shouted, "I'm going to die." His grandmother was heard to comment: "I suppose we're going to have to go home now."

"Eight Druggiest Rock Star Stories" (10 Zen Monkeys)
Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars On Drugs (Amazon)

jabjoe writes "Groklaw is highlighting a new document from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (PDF) about the history of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Quoting: 'ECIS has written it in support of the EU Commission's recent preliminary findings, on January 15, 2009, that Microsoft violated antitrust law by tying IE to Windows. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the issue of Microsoft's patent threats against Linux have been framed in a context of anti-competitive conduct.' The report itself contains interesting quotes, like this one from Microsoft's Thomas Reardon: '[W]e should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps.' It also has the Gates 1998 Deposition"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

<img src="http://gadgets.boingboing.net/JL33_lg.jpg"

• Apple suffered from premature application -- the billionth one sold, that is.

• Dude, you're getting a hell!

• Artoo is more than a droid: he's a cheap laptop!

• Amazing stereographic images of Tokyo baffle.

• Pleo is extinct. In millions of years, robots will debate whether their ancestors walked by his side.

• Xeni reviewed the PrAna Revolution Yoga mat.

• How many kilobytes does a human conscioussness require? Can it be lossy-compressed?

• iHouse's SmartFaucet is perhaps too much so.

• Rob reviewed the slotRadio and Lenovo's S10 netbook.

• The pocket protector, it transpires, was invented 40 years earlier than believed.

• Brain-Twitter interface invented at UW Madison.

• iWood if iCould but iCan't so iWont.

• What the heck is Electronic Mail?

• There was a cookout. Charbroil!

• Fluid structures from plastic tubing thrum.

Nat got a taste of project building with Arduino while creating this rather clever photo frame -

Last month my friend Rony and I built a picture frame that can display three images on a single piece of paper. Two of the images are mapped to the red and blue channels and linearly combined, and the third image (the word MARCH in the video) is projected onto the paper from behind using a stencil.

This was my first Arduino project, and I really fell in love with the simplicity of the platform. It definitely won't be my last!

Nice work - and welcome to the club Nat! Soon you'll likely find yourself searching for a project which wouldn't benefit from the lil' blue board. Read more project deets on Nat's blog.

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FathomIT sends in a NY Times profile of Shai Agassi, owner of a company named Better Place, who is working to build the infrastructure to support large numbers of small-scale charging spots for electric cars, as well as fast, automated battery swap stations. "The robot — a squat platform that moves on four dinner-plate-size white wheels — scuttled back and forth along a 20-foot-long set of metal rails. At one end of the rails, a huge blue battery, the size of a large suitcase, sat suspended in a frame. As we watched, the robot zipped up to the battery, made a nearly inaudible click, and pulled the battery downward. It ferried the battery over to the other end of the rails, dropped it off, picked up a new battery, hissed back over to the frame and, in one deft movement, snapped the new battery in the place of the old one. The total time: 45 seconds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just Posted: Our review of Sony's new superzoom: the HX1. Superzoom is a fitting name for a camera that features a 20X zoom range of 28mm to 560mm equiv. It also features ultra-fast 10 fps continuous shooting speed, 1080p HD video recording and a sweeping panorama mode. All this built around a new 9 Megapixel CMOS sensor. How does this impressive sounding package perform? Find out in our review.

These paper sculptures by Jill Sylvia blow my mind. If Brian Dettmer and Jen Stark had a love-child... With all three of these artists, I just can't get over the anality involved, the obsessiveness and precision required.

Jill Sylvia
[via Boing Boing]

More:
Book Sculptures by Brian Dettmer
Old books sculptures
Jen Stark - Construction Paper Coolness!

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Just as the various broadband providers are ramping up their bogus astroturf attempts to convince the world that broadband caps are necessary and good for customers, Saul Hansell has been digging deep into the numbers and can't find any justification at all for the caps. All those stories about overwhelmed networks and exponential traffic growth? Not happening. If anything, the evidence is that the opposite is happening: advances in technology means that it's become cheaper for broadband providers to meet the needs of their customers. And those needs are growing, but that growth rate has been slowing, and is quite manageable. So, basically, the broadband companies are hyping up a problem that just isn't there. There is no crunch. There aren't bandwidth shortages that require cutting off heavy users. The only reason to set up such tiers is to squeeze more money out of customers without providing any improvements in service (actually, while providing less service). And it's all possible thanks to the lack of competition in the marketplace.

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An anonymous reader sends word of a new cybersecurity project to defend US networks from attacks and strengthen the government's "offensive capabilities in cyberwarfare." Right now, the most likely candidate to lead the project is the Director of the NSA, Keith Alexander, who was quick to assert that the NSA itself wouldn't try to run the whole show (something they've been criticized for in the past). Quoting the Wall Street Journal: "Cyber defense is the Department of Homeland Security's responsibility, so the command would be charged with assisting that department's defense efforts. The relationship would be similar to the way Northern Command supports Homeland Security with rescue capabilities in natural disasters. The NSA, where much of the government's cybersecurity expertise is housed, established a similar relationship with Homeland Security through a cybersecurity initiative that the Bush administration began in its final year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

National Geographic News has a great little slideshow up today, featuring photos taken on the first Earth Day, back in 1970. They're calling it "Bell Bottoms and Gas Masks", but "Saving the Planet in Double-Knit Polyester" would also be a good title.

The information that goes along with the slideshow is fascinating, particularly if you've ever wondered what happens behind-the-scenes of a national-scale political movement. It's a little awe-inspiring to see the pics of thousands of people on the Mall in D.C. and then realize that it was all put together by nine people with a $125,000 budget. Oy.

But I think the photo that stood out the most to me was this one, taken the day after Earth Day.

So there's your cynical, cautionary tale for the day, kids. As you get up to Earth Day antics today or this weekend, do remember that what you leave behind for the cleanup crews and the landfill matters every bit as much (if not more) than the fact you attended the rally to begin with.

Photo by Bob Daugherty/AP, posted under fair use.

iago-vL writes "Despite having their domain blacklisted by Conficker, the folks at Nmap have released version 4.85BETA8, which promises better detection of the Conficker worm. How? By talking to it on its own peer-to-peer network! By sending encrypted messages to a suspect host, the tools will get Conficker.C and higher to reveal itself. This curious case of using Conficker's own tricks to find it is similar to the last method that we discussed. More information from the author is available, as well as a download for the new release (or, if you're a Conficker refugee, try a mirror instead)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tweet A Sound let's you design and share synth patches by way of the ever-popular Twitter. The software represents your patch via a compact string of numbers. The 140 character limit keeps your tweakable parameter count relatively low, but this could be welcome if you've ever found yourself overwhelmed by the deluge of options common to software synths. With a few adjustments to one of the presets, it's easy to eke out a quick "wow" -

#tas 0 10 4796 61 7010 40 8507 25 9720 12 9999 0 0 0 2258 80 7999 69 9999 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 587 2 2 21 59900 1 652 70 80 1059 844 34 81 11 2

Built with Max/MSP, the app will become exponentially cooler once MIDI control is fleshed out. Grab the free download for Mac available on the site. [via Create Digital Music]

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stinkymountain writes "Pre-standard 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet products — server network interface cards, switch uplinks and switches — are expected to hit the market later this year. Standards-compliant products are expected to ship in the second half of next year, not long after the expected June 2010 ratification of the 802.3ba standard. Despite the global economic slowdown, global revenue for 10G fixed Ethernet switches doubled in 2008, according to Infonetics. There is pent-up demand for 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, says John D'Ambrosia, chair of the 802.3ba task force in the IEEE and a senior research scientist at Force10 Networks. 'There are a number of people already who are using link aggregation to try and create pipes of that capacity,' he says. 'It's not the cleanest way to do things...(but) people already need that capacity.' D'Ambrosia says even though 40/100G Ethernet products haven't arrived yet, he's already thinking ahead to terabit Ethernet standards and products by 2015. 'We are going to see a call for a higher speed much sooner than we saw the call for this generation' of 10/40/100G Ethernet, he says."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've pointed out in the past how silly it is to be worried about various spam/scraper sites that take content from sites (including ours) and repost it on their own. Those sites never add any real value, but just repost the content. They get no significant traffic and retain no real audience. They tend to come and go pretty quickly. Worrying about them is a total waste of time (time that can be used making sure your own site is more valuable). Yet, apparently a group of publishers has put together a "Fair Syndication Consortium" that has decided that rather than go after these sites directly, it will simply try to get the ad networks that serve ads on such sites to hand over some money to the original content creators. As far as I can tell, that's basically the content creators saying "well, if others can monetize our content better than we can, we deserve some of that cash."

That makes no sense to me. If you can't monetize your own content better than other sites, you don't deserve to be in business. If other sites are actually getting traffic and ad revenue that you think you deserve, it means you're doing a bad job giving people a real reason to visit your site and to interact with your community. Simply demanding money from the sites that have done things better makes no sense. Of course, the reality is that most of these sites haven't done things better, and don't make any money. So the whole grandstanding seems rather wasted effort.

Focus on making your own site worth visiting. Stop worrying what others are doing with your content.

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Here's an intriguing project that comes with the usual cautions about not working with AC house power unless you know what you're doing, and an extra caution about the risk of burning your house down by trying to roll your own light bulbs. This builder decided to risk all that to reuse the "ballast cases" and Edison bulb screw connectors from dead CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) to create his own 7-bulb LED lights. Pretty cool, if you don't electrocute yourself, cut yourself, expose yourself to Mercury, or burn your house down. Oh, and that's not a standard or safe way of using or powering a breadboard. This guy obviously like to live on the edge. (Check out some of his other projects, like the broken incandescent bulb lamp.)

CFLED Lamp (Version 1)

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CWmike writes "Criminal cybergangs must be harried, hounded and hunted until they're driven out of business, a noted botnet researcher said as he prepared to pitch a new anti-malware strategy at the RSA Conference in SF. 'We need a new approach to fighting cybercrime,' said Joe Stewart, director of SecureWorks' counterthreat unit. 'What we're doing now is not making a significant dent.' He said teams of paid security researchers should set up like a police department's major crimes unit or a military special operations team, perhaps infiltrating the botnet group and employing a spectrum of disruptive tactics. Stewart cited last November's takedown of McColo as one success story. Another is the Conficker Working Group. 'Criminals are operating with the same risk-effort-reward model of legitimate businesses,' said Stewart. 'If we really want to dissuade them, we have to attack all three of those. Only then can we disrupt their business.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In honor of Earth Day, Scott Matthews of Electro-Harmonix digs up an interesting project from the company's early days - a mobile demo/showroom powered by umbrella turbine -

The inside of the truck was actually a small demo space where guitar players could try out the latest Electro-Harmonix gear (that's Mike in the white shirt). The truck drove around the city, randomly picked people up, let them play, and dropped them off. The electricity for the demo space was provided by the wind-powered generator, and the wind was provided by (damn you, First Law of Thermodynamics!) a colossal diesel engine.

Still there's always something special about machinery driven by an umbrella rotary - and it's a cleverly kooky way to raise some energy awareness. Bob Myer, the original engineer of the project, was recently asked to join his town's 'Green' committee. After deciding to pull the generator out of storage, he was pleased to find it fully functional. Read more on the EHX blog.

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...It was at this point that Chester realized maybe not ALL pedal-powered tools were "appropriate" technology.

Happy Earth Day!

PPPM: Pedal Powered Hacksaw

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Some of us use proxy servers for VPN purposes, because it's just good security. However, the US Sentencing Commission was recently considering whether or not the use of a proxy server should be considered "sophisticated means," such that it could increase jailtime in sentencing for a crime. As the EFF notes, the Commission has rejected this concept for now, though, it's not entirely clear why or if this will change at a later date. However, for now, rest assured that using a proxy server doesn't automatically mean you deserve greater jailtime than if you don't.

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<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rGscXF1HxoQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&fmt=18
"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rGscXF1HxoQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&fmt=18
" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="600" height="486">
These recycled milk bottle lights look cool and seem to work really well. You can make a basic version with a simple on/off switch, or you can make a deluxe version that uses an Arduino to add fading and sequencing to the lights. Check out the link for complete build instructions and the source code for these funky recycled LED lights.

LED lighting in milk bottle caps. The PPE makes for good diffusion. They're controlled by an Arduino Mini hooked up to a potentiometer. The arduino looks at the analogue reading from the pot and then depending on the value carries out instructions on which lights to turn on or off.

More about the Arduino controlled milk bottle LED lights

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Ricoh has released a firmware update for the GR Digital II compact camera. Version 2.30 includes manual flash control as well as the ability to to save white balance compensation values under 'my settings'. A new feature, 'Today's Shots' displays the number of images recorded on a particular date when the power is turned off. The update follows the recent firmware update (v1.16) for the CMOS-based CX1 which rectifies a few minor issues.

Okay, here's the deal. We've a huge amount of new inventory arriving at the backdoor to our warehouse in anticipation of Maker Faire. The problem is, we share a warehouse with the rest of O'Reilly and we need to clear out space to make room for the new stuff.

So...we've sharpened our pencils and for the next two weeks, we are rolling back the prices on over a hundred of our existing products. Most around 50% off, but some of them discounted as much as 75% off! Once they're gone they're gone. This is a limited time spring-cleaning sale from now through midnight April 30th (midnight on our San Francisco clocks).

Use code BLOWOUT at checkout for the FREE shipping on orders over $100. (Contiguous US)

Check out all the products that are on sale now!

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schnucki brings word of new research which claims roughly one in twelve American children between the ages of eight and 18 are "pathologically addicted" to video games. The study, conducted by Douglas Gentile, director of the National Institute on Media and the Family at Iowa State University, says that "pathological status was a significant predictor of poorer school performance even after controlling for sex, age, and weekly amount of video-game play." However, Professor Cheryl Olson, who has conducted her own research into video game use, questioned Gentile's methodology, saying, "The author is repurposing questions used to assess problem gambling in adults; however, lying to your spouse about blowing the rent money on gambling is a very different matter from fibbing to your mom about whether you played video games instead of starting your homework."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot points us to an interview with Luis von Ahn (who we're a big fan of), where he talks about how spammers who are frustrated by various types of CAPTCHA tests have set up their own sort of "innovation prize," offering up somewhere in the range of $500,000 for software that can automatically pass CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA reading tests (the things where you have to fill in a series of letters to sign up for a service or post a comment). As von Ahn points out: "If [the spammers] are really able to write a programme to read distorted text, great -- they have solved an AI problem." It is, effectively, an "X Prize" for optical character recognition. Not that we like to encourage spammers, but it is rather fascinating how the underground business seems to mirror the above ground innovation world as well.

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Over the past few months there have been a variety of stories about restaurant chains offering special "free" promotions and people keep submitting them -- such as this one about Denny's recent experiences with free food promotions. I haven't been posting such stories, because the economics of free food is very different than the economics of free content -- and I'm not sure there's really that much to learn from the restaurant examples. For the chains that have done this, it's been somewhat successful (Denny's especially, for leading the way). The free food has ended up bringing in more paying customers in addition to the "free riders," so it's paid off. However, it does seem a bit riskier than using "free content" in a business model. The marginal cost of offering up free content is nothing. The marginal cost of free food, however, can be substantial. So, while it's an interesting model to look at -- and the success of the experiments so far shows how "free" can absolutely work as a promotion -- I'm not sure the free food promotions really teach us all that much about the use of free in the digital realm.

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jd writes "The BBC is reporting that the United Nations' World Digital Library has gone online with an initial offering of 1,200 ancient manuscripts, parchments and documents. To no great surprise, Europe comes in first with 380 items. South America comes in second with 320, with a very distant third place being given to the Middle East at a paltry 157 texts. This is only the initial round, so the leader board can be expected to change. There are, for example, many Sumerian and Babylonian tablets, many of which are already online elsewhere. Astonishingly, the collection is covered by numerous copyright laws, according to the legal page. Use of material from a given country is subject to whatever restrictions that country places, in addition to any local and international copyright laws. With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered. There is nothing on whether the original artists get royalties, however."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marilyn sez, "An old 747 was converted into a restaurant in the city of Mokpo, South Korea, and then abandoned. Sad looking on the outside, but still cool looking inside."

Abandoned Boeing 747 Restaurant (and Other Plane Conversions) (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Writing in The Independent, John Clute, an eminent scholar and historian of science fiction, eulogizes JG Ballard. I ran into Clute over the Easter weekend and he mentioned that as the designated writer of science fiction obits for The Independent, he keeps a file of pre-written -- and oft-updated -- obits for older writers and writers in poor health. I was shocked at this -- it seemed a little gruesome -- but John said, "The last thing I want is for a good friend to pass while I'm travelling or busy and for me not to be able to write them the good, full and complete obituary they deserve." Here's the results -- an obit every bit as good as a titan like Ballard deserved.

The most complete unfolding of his later sense of things can probably be found in a quite astonishing book-length interview published by the magazine Research as the self-standing Research No 8/9 (1984) but he remained unfailingly eloquent until the end of his life, as the interviews assembled in Conversations (2005) attest. "At times", he said in 2004, "I look around the executive housing estates of the Thames Valley and feel that [a vicious and genuinely mindless neo-fascism] is already here, quietly waiting its day, and largely unknown to itself ... What is so disturbing about the 9/11 hijackers is that they had not spent the previous years squatting in the dust on some Afghan hillside ... These were highly educated engineers and architects who had spent years sitting around in shopping malls in Hamburg and London, drinking coffee and listening to the muzak."

He continued to live in Shepperton. In 1985, he had a copy made of a lost Paul Delvaux painting - in truth, not a very good one - and kept it propped against the same wall in his work-room for the rest of his life. He refused an OBE in 2003, as the whole rackety world of gong-bestowing seemed to him a "Ruritanian charade" designed to "prop up" the Royals. He continued to act with dignity and insight the role of a public man of letters, publishing reviews and comments frequently - A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996) assembles some of this work. Miracles of Life is a memoir of piercing clarity; a projected posthumous volume, Conversations with My Physician, may continue Ballard's engagement with the facts of his mortality.

His late novels never flinch from addressing the "elective psychopathy" that increasingly riddles the anaesthetised world we are now beginning to inhabit. It is a fate Ballard had been predicting for half a century. His fiction was perhaps too invariant for him to rank as the greatest literary figure of his generation but of all the writers of significance in the last decades of the 20th century, he was maybe the widest awake.

J.G. Ballard: Writer whose dystopian visions helped shape our view of the modern world (via Making Light)

I just received my copy of the Japanese edition of Massimo Banzi's Getting Started with Arduino. Big thanks to Hideo Tamura from O'Reilly Japan for sending this on. This book is really beautiful: dust jacket, belly band, separate paper stock for the appendix, endpapers, and it's just gorgeous.

Flickr set | O'Reilly Japan catalog page for Arduino??????

In the Maker Shed
Getting Started with Arduino

This valuable little book offers a thorough introduction to the open source electronics prototyping platform that's taking the design and hobbyist world by storm. Getting Started with Arduino gives you lots of ideas for projects and helps you get going on them right away. To use the introductory examples in this book, all you need is a USB Arduino, USB A-B cable, and an LED. By Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino Project.

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Hannah Perner-Wilson put a small push button, battery holder, and LED/vibrating motor inside these little limpet shell. She writes:

I've always liked collecting seashells, and have always wanted to do something more with them than accumulate them in my parent's garden. So now I want to see how far I can go to integrate small electronic circuits inside them. Limpits are nice to work with because they are totally open on one side and the bigger ones even offer some depth.

The limpit buttons are very simple, they use a push-button to trigger LED light or a vibration motor. I decided to use a push-button rather than a switch so that they are only active when touched/pushed.

Limpet push-button

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A few folks had sent in the LA Times story on the band Metric last week, as yet another example of a band that had ignored the "old ways" of doing things and found they did much better on their own, but I'd thought that maybe we'd seen enough examples of this sort of thing already. However, judging from the fact that more people kept submitting it all weekend and into this week, I figured perhaps it is worth pointing out, as well. Perhaps one of these days we won't find it so surprising that a band tends to do much better by embracing some reasonable choices and ignoring some of the bad old ways of doing things.

In this case, the band decided to ignore the label route and go on its own -- and while the sales numbers don't seem all that exciting based on traditional metrics, in terms of the metric that counts the most to the band (money made), it's already made much more than its last record label album. And it did this in just a few weeks, compared to four years of sales on the old album. Not surprisingly, the band focused on a tiered solution that we've seen work so successfully for so many bands -- selling direct off its own site, including a $65 "deluxe" package. In this case, the band had hoped to sell 500, but sold out all 500 in 48 hours, and is now making another batch. While the band didn't make the music available for free (I'd argue they could have done even better if they had), they did allow people to put a widget on a website that would stream the whole album.

One other interesting aspect: in order to pay for the production of the album, the band took out a loan, which they note they'll be easily able to pay off. That seems like a much better deal than the record label contract where it provides what's effectively a loan (an "advance") and then takes pretty much all of the profits from the album itself. While this particular loan was offered by a specific music foundation, you would think that it might make sense for a new business to specialize in these types of loans, helping bands that are likely to be able to repay the loan based on innovative business models.

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In going through the regular complaints from newspaper folks about the supposed (but not really) "death" of newspapers, we've criticized the industry for almost never suggesting ways to actually improve the product -- only ways to limit the online competition. However, there's a second point that's worth exploring as well: they rarely look at ways to make their own jobs more efficient. We've questioned the wisdom of massive redundancy in foreign bureaus among newspapers, and Ana Marie Cox is similarly wondering about what a waste the White House Press corp. is these days. As she notes, they sit around "waiting to be told things." The White House press corp. never seems to break any stories, other than the ones just handed to them, and then you have all of the press corp. simply parroting the same talking points from the White House. That's not needed, nor efficient. At some point, newspapers will realize that there are more efficient ways of covering the news rather than stationing yet another reporter in a bureau where there are already a ton of stenographers who can do the same thing. That's neither efficient nor is it adding value.

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Hugh Pickens writes "Erick Schonfeld has an interesting story in TechCrunch about a consortium of publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico that plans to take a new approach towards the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher's work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google's AdSense, and Yahoo. One precedent for this type of approach is YouTube's Content ID program, which splits revenues between YouTube and the media companies whose videos are being reused online. How would the ad networks know that the content in question belongs to the publisher? Attributor would keep track of it all and manage the requests for payment. The consortium is open to any publisher to join, including bloggers. It may not be the perfect solution but 'it is certainly better than sending out thousands of takedown notices' writes Schonfeld."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As part of our ongoing Pinky and the Brain-worthy plot to take over the world, or in our case, make over the world, we're thrilled to announce Make: en Español, a version of Make: Online for the Spanish-speaking world.

Welcome to the Maker Media family editor Mauricio Gómez and his staff of writers. We look forward to seeing what great projects and participation we get from makers in Mexico, Central and South America, Spain, and the entire Spanish-speaking world. ¡Hola!

Here's a message to MAKE readers from Mauricio:

Me complace darles la bienvenida a Make: en Español. Mis amigos y yo hemos trabajado arduamente para llegar a este día, para realizar nuestro sueño. Creemos que, siendo el español uno de los idiomas más hablados en el mundo, se puede lograr con este proyecto divulgar toda esta fuente de información que representa Make a cientos de personas que están interesadas en encontrar proyectos que enriquezcan su conocimiento, aprendizaje y sobre todo entretenimiento. Desgraciadamente, hoy en día y para muchos, el idioma aún sigue siendo una limitante para obtener y compartir información que se puede encontrar fácilmente en la red. Es por esto que en Make: en Español, estamos dispuestos en apoyar y motivar a todos los Makers de todas las edades de Latino América y España para que compartan con la comunidad sus proyectos y trabajos. Todos en el equipo en español nos sentimos muy contentos en formar parte de Make.

Muchas gracias a todos y bienvenidos.

Make: en Español

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Earlier this year, we were quite troubled by news reports out of South Korea, concerning a (formerly) anonymous blogger who had been arrested for his financial commentary online that had been so good that it moved markets. He was charged with "spreading false rumors," when in reality the problem was that the info he was spreading was pretty accurate, and that was the problem. But, the good news is that he's now been acquitted, as the court noted that there was no evidence that the guy intended to spread false information, and that he appears to have believed the content he was writing. Of course, the case may not be over yet, as many expect the government to appeal.

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With the entertainment industry all excited about the supposed "win" in The Pirate Bay case in Sweden, it appears that some in the media are recognizing what plenty of people have been pointing out for years: you can find most of the same stuff via Google. This was actually a point brought up during the trial, to which the industry responded that Google took down links on request -- which is true, but doesn't change the fact that similar links pop back up just as quickly. At some point, eventually, you'll have to believe that the industry will go after Google for this, and Google will have a much stronger defense. It certainly doesn't violate the Grokster made-up "inducement" standard. It's pretty clearly protected by DMCA safe harbors otherwise. So, what will the industry come up with next? It'll be some novel legal theory, certainly, but somehow it won't be a novel business model. The industry doesn't do that sorta thing.

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