Gorgonzolanoid notes a post on TorrentFreak reporting that the German Rapidshare is divulging uploader information to rights holders. Record labels are apparently making creative use of "paragraph 101" of German copyright law, which gives them a streamlined process to ask a court to order disclosure of information such as an IP address. "In Germany, the file-hosting service Rapidshare has handed over the personal details of alleged copyright infringers to several major record labels. The information is used to pursue legal action against the Rapidshare users and at least one alleged uploader saw his house raided."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week on the CRAFT blog we saw:

ASCII Heart Necklace

Golden Girls in Glitter (R.I.P. Bea Arthur)

How-To: Coffee Liqueur

How-To: Make Your Own Maracas

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Okay I'm going to get crucified for this, but I found myself saying this on the phone today to Andrew Baron. If I was willing to say it to him, I should have the guts to say it publicly.

Now, I'm not saying the people who retweet are stupid, or the impulse to pass on a link to everyone who follows you is stupid, but...

A retweet is the same as voting up something on Digg or Reddit. It's a piece of metadata about the tweet, and should be stored and displayed with the tweet. When you retweet something, none of the 140 characters should be used in saying that it's a retweet and who it came from.

Digg does it right, Twitter --> wrong.

Another app that does it right is FriendFeed.

Look at this post, it's been liked a lot. When I wrote this it had 225 likes! Like is FriendFeed's term for retweet.

Nothing needs to be done, but I'm glad to get this out there, once and for all.

Hope you're having a happy Sunday!

The New Yorker has a long piece examining the growing trend of healthy people, not diagnosed with any mental condition, taking drugs that enhance mental functioning, including Adderall and Provigil. The profiles include a Harvard student, a professional poker player, a number of brain researchers, and a self-described transhumanist. "Zack [Lynch]... has a book being published this summer, called 'The Neuro Revolution'... In coming years, he said, scientists will understand the brain better, and we'll have improved neuroenhancers that some people will use therapeutically, others because they are 'on the borderline of needing them therapeutically,' and others purely 'for competitive advantage.' ... Even if today's smart drugs aren't as powerful as such drugs may someday be, there are plenty of questions that need to be asked about them. How much do they actually help? Are they potentially harmful or addictive? Then, there's the question of what we mean by 'smarter.' Could enhancing one kind of thinking exact a toll on others? All these questions need proper scientific answers, but for now much of the discussion is taking place furtively, among the increasing number of Americans who are performing daily experiments on their own brains. ... [A cognitive researcher said,] 'Cognitive psychologists have found that there is a trade-off between attentional focus and creativity. And there is some evidence that suggests that individuals who are better able to focus on one thing and filter out distractions tend to be less creative. ... I'm a little concerned that we could be raising a generation of very focused accountants.'"

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.

I know, I know. The recession blows. The job you may soon lose* is stressful and unpleasant. And beards are more popular these days. But before you abandon your fast-paced lifestyle for a quieter, more-cow-filled one, I recommend consulting my book, Be Amazing. There are a few things you need to think about.

1) Can You Tell the Difference Between Amish and Mennonite?
You're never going to endear yourself to your new neighbors if you can't tell 'em apart from their theological cousins down the road. Historically the older of the two sects, Mennonites believed in plain, unadorned living and adult baptism, making them not all that different from the other Christian groups that popped up in Germany and Switzerland in the 17th century. But, around 1693, one of their members, a guy named Jakob Amman, started to get a little rowdy. Amman traveled around the countryside preaching a more hard-line version of Mennonism that called for, among other things, a return to traditional clothing, avoidance of worldly grooming trends like moustaches, mandatory un-cut beards, and the public shunning of excommunicated church members. Taking their name from Amman's, his new followers called themselves "Amish."

Over the next few hundred years, both groups did their fair share of theological off-shooting. Today, there are numerous sub-groups of both Mennonite and Amish, making it difficult to pin them down with generalities. However, in most cases, the easiest way to tell the two apart is to look for a family car--most Mennonites drive them, most Amish don't. But, just because they enjoy a faster mode of travel doesn't mean the Mennonites are ostentatious about their automobiles. In fact, it's common practice to cover any Detroit-installed chrome with black paint, just to let the world know they aren't trying to be flashy.

2) Do You Know the Best Place to Move?
Obviously, your city digs will have to go, but contrary to popular belief, the geographic epicenter of Amish life is not Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Turns out, several counties in east-central Ohio are actually home to the largest Amish community in the world--population 29,000, and growing. Each Amish family has an average of 7 children, so their numbers have seemingly doubled every 20 years since outsiders started keeping records in the 1940s.

3) Can You Find Where the In-Crowd Hangs Out?
Earn your dirt-road cred by taking a shopping trip to Spector's. This department store in Middlefield, Ohio caters to Amish customers. Since 1937, they've dealt in things like quilting supplies, fabric, and the other necessities of Amish life that can't be easily made on the farm. And with several locations around the state, it may well be the world's first Amish-centric chain store.

4) Will You Be Able to Buy a Farm?
It's harder than it sounds. There are two things working against you. First, that whole population growth issue means that every generation sees even more young men in need of a farm of their own. The other problem, however, comes from the outside. Across the country, the rural areas the Amish inhabit are rapidly becoming exurbs, and what was once farmland is being sold to make way for subdivisions and Wal-Marts--making raw land, even when it is available, prohibitively expensive. In Lancaster County, for instance, 100 acres cost as much as $1 million in 2007. Things may be a bit easier now, though, what with the bursting of the real-estate bubble. So, if you can get your hands on some good farmland, do be ready to build a lot of barns. You probably already know that Amish construct their own, and their neighbors', in massive 24-hour barn raising parties. But, because many Amish groups don't believe in using "worldly" devices like lightning rods, those hand-built barns often end up having to be re-hand-built.

The Electric Amish really are a band, and you should listen to their music.

*ETA: Thanks for the heads-up on my grammar brain-fart. It's Saturday. My brain takes the day off today.

Photo from svofski on Flickr in the MAKE Flickr pool

I made this from cardboard, old velvet jeans (for light-tight cover). The shutter is made from the back of an old 35mm camera. To start an exposure, you slide it down the plastic rails (barely visible). The pinhole itself is made in a foil shim.

Thanks to the large format and shallow depth, this camera is extremely wide angle and light falloff is severe.

image from svofsk on Flickr

Making your own camera is fun stuff, thanks for sharing your project!

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There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: Strung Out . You can view the video here, or subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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mallumax sends word from the NYTimes that US government officials today declared a public health emergency over increasing cases of the swine flu first seen in Mexico. Here is additional coverage from CNN. From the Times: "American health officials [say]... that they had confirmed 20 cases of the disease in the United States and expected to see more as investigators fan out to track down the path of the outbreak. Other governments around the world stepped up their response to the incipient outbreak, racing to contain the infection amid reports of potential new cases from New Zealand to Hong Kong to Spain, raising concerns about the potential for a global pandemic. The cases in US looked to be similar to the deadly strain of swine flu that has killed more than 80 people in Mexico and infected 1,300 more." Reader "The man who walks in the woods" sends a link to accounts emailed to the BBC from readers in Mexico. While these are anecdotal, they do paint a picture of a more serious situation than government announcements have indicated so far.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This NYT article from 1897 about Canadian music piracy is awfully familiar sounding -- search-and-replace "Canadian" with "Swedish" and "post office" with "ISP" and you get...

The Long War: Music Piracy in 1897 (NYTimes)

Reader resistant sends in an update to our discussion a month back on the possibility of violent space weather destroying power grids worldwide during the upcoming solar cycle. Wired is running an interview with Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End," and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech. The piece brings two new threads to the discussion: the recently discovered presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield, magnifying our vulnerability, and possible steps we can take over the next few years to make the power grid more robust against solar flares and coronal mass ejections. There's also that whole Mayan 2012 thing. Quoting John Kapperman: "What we're proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers' ground connections. The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid. In its simplest form, it's something that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine. ...we think it's do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That's less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer. [In the US] there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. ... We're talking about $150 million or so. It's pretty small in the grand scheme of things."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "June marks the launch across Brazil of Zeebo, a console that aims to tap an enormous new market for videogaming for the billion-strong, emerging middle classes of such countries as Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and China. Zeebo uses the same Qualcomm chipsets contained in high-end smartphones, together with 1GB of flash memory, three USB slots and a proprietary dual analogue gamepad. It plugs into a TV and outputs at a 640 x 480 pixel resolution. 'The key thing is we're using off-the-shelf components,' says Mike Yuen, director of the gaming group at Qualcomm. This approach means that, while Zeebo can be priced appropriately for its markets — it will launch at US $199 in Brazil compared to around US $250 (plus another US $50 for a mod chip to play pirated games) for a PlayStation 2 in the region — and next year the company plans to drop the price of the console to $149. But the most important part of the Zeebo ecosystem is its wireless digital distribution that gets around the low penetration of wired broadband in many of these countries, negates the cost of dealing with packaged retail goods, and removes the risk of piracy, with the games priced at about $10 locked to the consoles they're downloaded to. Zeebo is not meant to directly compete with powerful devices like Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or the Wii. 'In Latin America, where there's a strong gaming culture, that's what we'll be, but in India and China we can be more educational or lifestyle-oriented,' says Yuen. One Indian gaming blog predicts Zeebo will struggle, in part due to the cultural reluctance toward digital distribution and also the lack of piratable games."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image from the Library of Congress

Check out the great photos from the 1930s-40s in Color set at the Library of Congress on Flickr.

These vivid color photos from the Great Depression and World War II capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created the images between 1939 and 1944.

Image from the Library of Congress
The project is described on the Library of Congress' web site.

Photographers working for the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 made approximately 1,600 color photographs that depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working.

Image from the Library of Congress

These photos are pretty neat and could be a fun addition to any hacker space or hands on classroom. The files are pretty high res, so they could be blown up nicely, or they could be used as a derivative work. Most, if not all, are legitimately free and have no known copyright restrictions.

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Death Metal tips news that the Irish government has announced their decision to abandon e-voting and return to a paper-based system. "Ireland has already put about $67 million into building out its e-voting infrastructure, but the country has apparently decided that it would be even more expensive to keep going with the system than it would be to just scrap it altogether." John Gormley, Ireland's Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, said, "It is clear from consideration of the Report of the Commission on Electronic Voting that significant additional costs would arise to advance electronic voting in Ireland. ...the assurance of public confidence in the democratic system is of paramount importance and it is vital to bring clarity to the present situation." He added that he still thinks there is a need for electoral reform.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week in the Maker Shed we continued our Spring-cleaning sale with some amazing discounts and free shipping on orders over $100 (details here). Also, we are continuing to work with kit makers on a lot of really cool products. Do you have something that you think would make a great kit for the Maker Shed? If so, send us an email at kits@makezine.com, we are always looking for cool stuff.

More about the Spring-cleaning sale in the Maker Shed

New product this week:

The new Make Controller 2.0 & Interface Board kit from the Maker Shed is a great way to get up and running with this micro-controller. Adding sensors and motors has never been easier.

The Make Controller is built around the AT91SAM7X256, and adds the essential components (like the crystal, voltage regulator, filter capacitors, etc.) required to run it, while bringing almost all the processor's signal lines out to standard 0.1" spaced sockets. The software environment remains constant no matter what you plug the Make Controller into - the firmware libraries are organized and documented, making it clear which are compatible with the Controller and Application boards. The Interface Board makes it easy to connect and communicate with your favorite devices with up to 35 general input/outputs, 2 serial ports, TWI, CAN, SPI along with Ethernet and USB. All pins are 0.1" spaced for easy insertion into your prototyping breadboard.

More about the Make Controller 2.0 & Interface Board kit

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theodp writes "Just days after his daughter Nikki's death in a devastating car crash, real-estate agent Christos Catsouras clicked open an e-mail that appeared to be a property listing. Onto his screen popped his daughter's bloodied face, captioned with the words 'Woohoo Daddy! Hey daddy, I'm still alive.' Now he and his wife are attempting to stop strangers from displaying the grisly images of their daughter — an effort that has transformed Nikki's death into a case about privacy, cyber-harassment and image control. The images of Nikki, including one of her nearly-decapitated head drooping out the shattered car window, were taken as a routine part of a fatal accident response and went viral after being leaked by two CHP dispatchers. 'Putting these photos on the Internet,' says the family's attorney, 'was akin to placing them in every mailbox in the world.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Think the economy is showing signs of recovery? The Economist says it's going to get a lot worse, for a long, long time, before it gets better. Read it and weep.

Thanks to massive--and unsustainable--fiscal and monetary transfusions, output will eventually stabilise. But in many ways, darker days lie ahead. Despite the scale of the slump, no conventional recovery is in sight. Growth, when it comes, will be too feeble to stop unemployment rising and idle capacity swelling. And for years most of the world's economies will depend on their governments.

Consider what that means. Much of the rich world will see jobless rates that reach double-digits, and then stay there. Deflation--a devastating disease in debt-laden economies--could set in as record economic slack pushes down prices and wages, particularly since headline inflation has already plunged thanks to sinking fuel costs. Public debt will soar because of weak growth, prolonged stimulus spending and the growing costs of cleaning up the financial mess. The OECD's member countries began the crisis with debt stocks, on average, at 75% of GDP; by 2010 they will reach 100%. One analysis suggests persistent weakness could push the biggest economies' debt ratios to 140% by 2014. Continuing joblessness, years of weak investment and higher public-debt burdens, in turn, will dent economies' underlying potential. Although there is no sign that the world economy will return to its trend rate of growth any time soon, it is already clear that this speed limit will be lower than before the crisis hit.

A glimmer of hope? (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Danelle Eckert, the mother of Colin Byars, a 24-year-old teacher who died after being punched in the head, is being harassed by Colin's former landlord, who wants to impose an "early termination" fee on her because her son died before his lease ran out.

The landlord is CCRT Properties in Brookfield, WI.

She said the apartment's property manager told her that they knew Byars had been killed. But the woman told Eckert the management company had been advised by their legal representative that they should go after the rent and fees.

"I said you might be able to do this, but should you do this?" Eckert said. The early termination fee makes her especially angry. "How was my son supposed to know he was going to be killed?" she asked.

Byars was a popular young special education teacher and coach at McKinley Middle School. He was in his first year as a full-time teacher after graduating from college. He died when, according to witnesses, he got into a dispute outside a tavern and was struck in the head. The man who hit him, Martin Walker, has been charged with murder.

Landlord demands dead victim's late rent, fees (via Consumerist)

(Image: KENOSHA NEWS PHOTO BY KEVIN POIRIER)

Earthquake Retrofit writes "Brian Krebs has a story about cybersquatting on social networking sites. He cites cases of people being impersonated and reports: 'A site called knowem.com allows you to see whether your name or whatever nickname you favor is already registered at any of some 120 social networking sites on the Web today. For a $64.95 fee, the site will register all available accounts on your behalf, a manual process that it says takes one to five business days. Whether anyone could possibly use and maintain 120 different social networking accounts is beyond my imagination. I would think an automated signup service like knowem.com would be far more useful if there was also a service that people could use to simultaneously update all of these sites with the same or slightly different content.' Is it time to saddle up for a new round of Internet land grabs?" A Schneier blog post earlier this month pointed out a related story about how not establishing yourself on social sites, combined with the frequent lack of validation for friend requests, can provide identity thieves with a tempting target .

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

zxjio recommends a pair of articles in The Economist discussing television over broadband, and the effects of DVR use. "Cable-television companies make money by selling packages of channels. The average American household pays $700 a year for over 100 channels of cable television but watches no more than 15. Most would welcome the chance to buy only those channels they want to watch, rather than pay for expensive packages of programming they are largely not interested in. They would prefer greater variety, too — something the internet offers in abundance. A surprising amount of video is available free from websites like Hulu and YouTube, or for a modest fee from iTunes, Netflix Watch Instantly and Amazon Video on Demand. ... Consumers' new-found freedom to choose has struck fear into the hearts of the cable companies. They have been trying to slow internet televisions steady march into the living room by rolling out DOCSIS 3 at a snails pace and then stinging customers for its services. Another favorite trick has been to cap the amount of data that can be downloaded, or to charge extortionately by the megabyte. Yet the measures to suffocate internet television being taken by the cable companies may already be too late. A torrent of innovative start-ups, not seen since the dot-com mania of a decade ago, is flooding the market with technology for supplying internet television to the living room." And from the second article on DVR usage patterns: "Families with DVRs seem to spend 15-20% of their viewing time watching pre-recorded shows, and skip only about half of all advertisements. This means only about 5% of television is time-shifted and less than 3% of all advertisements are skipped. Mitigating that loss, people with DVRs watch more television. ... Early adopters of DVRs used them a lot — not surprisingly, since they paid so much for them. Later adopters use them much less (about two-thirds less, according to a recent study)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo from Connors934 on Flickr

Do you have a phone with a touch screen? have you tried out some music applications and found the thing a bit awkward to hold? Last year I saw some people messing with guitar application on their phones at the Boston Fab Lab and it got me thinking. When I finally got around to getting a phone, making a PhoneTar was up high on the list of things I 'needed' it for. I did some early testing with the laser cutter for sizing and fit, and the project sat for a while.

When I saw the video of "Kids," the project got reactivated.

Mine is the G1 model of PhoneTar, and though I haven't found many instrument apps for it, I have found that it works fairly well as a stabilizer when taking pictures. It can also work on the dashboard as a way of holding the phone while showing maps, but it would need a way different profile for that.

Want to give it a try? Here is a zip file with the Open Office Draw document I used to cut the part and a pdf of it as well: phonetarorg1tar.zip

To turn it into an iPhoneTar, iTouchTar or possibly a BerryTar wouldn't be too hard, you would need to get measurements of your phone, and change the size and possibly the location of the hole. Different models will have alternate locations for the headphone jack as well.

Looking into the future for the project, I see a need for the right hand to do something. A module down there for strumming or touching contacts would be nice, and could probably be connected to the phone with bluetooth or maybe even usb. It would also be nice to have a sound scoop behind the speaker so that it directs the audio towards the audience. A built in amplifier would be festive as well. It could also be configured for use with the Arduino and Drawdio, both of which can be found in the Maker Shed.

This is not intended to be about a finished project, but rather a step in the Design Process. It does work, but there are many ways it could go from here. My hope is to stir you to action (if your are so inclined) and imagine a new way of seeing your music, phone or other devices. If these ideas gets you thinking, give it a shot and let us know what you come up with!

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

• The 'cracker box' amp subwoofer

• Boombox becomes a bot [above, bottom-right]

• USB tape drive [above, top-right]

• LED matrix in acrylic

• Self-propelled bot makes its own moves [above, bottom-left]

• How-To: Make a toy car launcher[above, top-left]

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sciencehabit writes "'Researchers have developed a material that almost instantaneously (30 ms) changes from clear to dark blue when exposed to ultraviolet light, and it just as quickly reverts to clear when the light is turned off. The new material, one of a class called photochromics, could be useful in optical data storage as well as in super-fancy sunglasses.'" A comment to the article notes some of the potential dangers of quick-change sunglasses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 2008 Nebula Awards were announced last night in LA:

Best Novel: Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin
Best Novella: "The Spacetime Pool" by Catherine Asaro
Best Novelette: "Pride and Prometheus" by John Kessel
Best Short Story: "Trophy Wives" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Script: WALL-E Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter
Andre Norton Award: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S. Wilce Solstice Award: Kate Wilhelm, A.J. Budrys and Martin H. Greenberg.
SFWA Service Award: Victoria Strauss
Bradbury Award: Joss Whedon
Grand Master Award: Harry Harrison
Author Emerita: M.J. Engh

Congrats to all the winners!

(Yup, I didn't win -- win some, lose some! Honor just to be nominated. All that stuff. But a giant, heartfelt thanks to Wil Wheaton for attending on my behalf, and to all the writers who nominated and voted for Little Brother!)

2008 Nebula Awards

When The Pirate Bay was ordered shut down by the Swedish courts because it linked to infringing torrents on the Internet, many people pointed out that Google links to whole mountains' -- whole planets' -- worth of infringing stuff. Now, to make the point, comes The Pirate Google, a Google mashup that finds torrent files: "The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites."

The Pirate Google (via Everything is Miscellaneous)

theodp writes "Over at the WSJ, Bill Gates Sr. describes what it took to turn an unruly 12-year-old into Microsoft's founder and the world's richest man. This included throwing a glass of cold water in the boy's face when he was having a particularly heated argument with his mother at the dinner table. 'He was nasty,' says Libby Armintrout, Bill's younger sister. 'I'm at war with my parents over who is in control,' Bill Gates recalls telling a therapist, who told his parents that their son would ultimately win the battle for independence, and their best course of action was to ease up on him. The rest, as they say, is history. The accompanying Gates Family Album is also worth a look."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rastos1 writes "The European Parliament extended the copyright in the EU for the performers of musical works from 50 to 70 years. The legislation will be reviewed in 3 years. The European Commission will consider extending the scope to audiovisual works too." So performers will collect for 20 more years from the date of performance; composers' rights already extend to 70 years beyond their deaths.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Accurate face recognition is coming. Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a face recognition start-up spun out from Carnegie Mellon University, has posted a tech demo showing an analysis of the entire original Star Trek series using face recognition. The online visualization includes various annotated clips of the series with clickable thumbnails of each character's appearance. They also have a separate page showing the full data of all the prominent characters in every episode including extracting thumbnails of each appearance." Their software can recognize frontal or near-frontal face instances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.