net_shaman writes in with word of a Seattle man who was arrested for taking a photo of an ATM being serviced. "Today I was shopping at the downtown Seattle REI. I was about to buy a Thule hitch mount bike rack. They were out of the piece that locks the bike rack into the hitch. So I was in the customer service line to special order one. It was a long line and while I was waiting, I saw two of guys (employees of Loomis, as I later learned) refilling the ATM. I walked over and took a picture with my iPhone of them and more interestingly of the open ATM. I took the picture because I'm fascinated by the insides of things that we don't normally get to see. ... That was when Officer GE Abed (#6270) spun me around and put handcuffs on me."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Protests are taking place today in Guatemala City to demand justice for an attorney who was assassinated on Sunday, and who claimed in a posthumously released YouTube video taped before his death that if he were to die, it would be at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom.

Quick background: The slain attorney, Rodrigo Rosenberg, represented a man who refused to take an assigment by Guatemala's president to serve on the board of a bank widely known as a money laundering hub and a shelter for narcotrafficking spoils. This whistleblower client of Rosenberg, Khalil Musa, was assassinated in March. On Sunday, after reportedly refusing to participate in the corruption and the coverup, Rosenberg himself was assassinated.

Protesters are at the presidential palace today. Libertópolis is streaming the action on Ustream.tv, as I type, though the stream is going on and off as armed military police swarm in.

Twitter users are marking conversations about today's protests, and about the case in general, with the hashtag #escandalogt. To take this sort of public action in Guatemala is not something one does lightly, and the young people at the center of these protests are placing their lives at risk.

I'm seeing some Guatemalan Twitterers spreading word that "chicken bus" drivers will gather tomorrow in the capital for another round of protests. Why? These same transportistas have long been the target of ever-escalating assasinations and extortion from narco gangs. The same corruption Rosenberg and Musa attempted to expose fuels this cycle of violence.

I don't have factual confirmation, but Guatemalan BB readers and Twitterers are saying that coverage of this story on the Guatemalan television networks is actively censored by the state (and that the recently declared "swine flu emergency" in a country with only 3 confirmed H1N1 cases was little more than a thinly disguised attempt by the state to exert more control). Claims of censorship there have historic precedent, and it makes the existence of these online "citizen TV" transmissions all the more significant. (via deztyped and many others)

Previously: Guatemala - In YouTube Video Shot Before His Death, Attorney Blames President for His Assasination

Update, 3pm PT, May 12: CNN now has an item on the story.

Update, 330pm PT, May 12: Photos from the protest are here. And here is audio from the protest. And here is a website demanding the president be impeached and brought to trial.

On Monday, with the help of the folks at SageScape who came up with the idea and put the whole event together (and did all the hard work), we helped put on the very first Free! Summit -- an attempt to dig into this question of how "free" economics impacts business models. As mentioned, a core component of this was recognizing, as we started, that free doesn't mean no business model, but that you needed to understand how "free" works in order to properly design your own business models.

We had two separate keynote talks (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) from the author of the upcoming book on Free, Chris Anderson, which I think really helped frame the discussion and certainly provided many of the important points around which many of the other discussions revolved. Not surprisingly, Anderson's book is likely to be required reading for many -- and, yes, there will be free versions available. A key takeaway for me during his talks was the idea that when you have abundance, it's not just that waste can occur, but that you almost have a moral obligation to waste, because that waste creates value that expands a market.

The rest of the morning focused on real world examples -- with three quick case studies of companies (Ooma, YouSendIt and Practice Fusion) who are embracing free as a part of their business models in very different ways. What struck me as most interesting was that all three companies have extremely different business models, but all face some similar issues. Ooma sells hardware and then offers service (VoIP) for free. YouSendIt has a variety of business models, most of which fall into the "freemium" mode, whereby you can pay for advanced features. Practice Fusion has stayed away from the freemium model for its totally free high-end e-healthcare records solution, and focused on alternative models, including advertising and revenue sharing deals with partners.

Yet... the one similarity that all three found? Free is sometimes a barrier to adoption. That is, all three often found themselves needing to explain and educate their customers or communities why they were offering things for free, because many people who come from a world of scarcity rather than abundance intrinsically distrust free. They assume there's a catch or that the service is somehow of lesser quality. This is an interesting point that deserves more exploration -- though, a part of me wonders if it's really generational and will fade over time.

After that, we brought back the Techdirt Greenhouse Idea Workshop -- where we had four companies (ISleptThroughClass.com, Justin.TV, Ad-Village and PhoneVite) all do short 5 minute presentations not just about what they do, but about the biggest challenge they face in continuing to grow their free-based business models. From there we broke out into smaller groups and each room discussed the challenge presented by one of the four presenters over lunch. I was able to float between the rooms and heard some really great discussions. As we've seen in previous Techdirt Greenhouse events, this sort of interactivity really gets people involved and thinking and generates some fantastic ideas.

After lunch, we got back together to discuss the results, and what struck me was how many of the discussions went towards traditional marketing issues: customer segmentation and positioning were two things that seemed to come up in every workshop discussion -- which only reinforces the idea that once you get past the "fear" of free and start to understand its benefits, the challenges that come up are ordinary business challenges, rather than some totally new world of upside down economics, as some have implied.

In the afternoon, we heard a somewhat dissenting view from Alex Iskold, who talked about the the "dangers" of free, in how it could be used by companies to drive others out of business, potentially dampening innovation. This kicked off a good and vibrant discussion including (not surprisingly) me challenging Alex on why some of this was actually bad. For example, he stated that if Google started offering free cars, everyone would agree that this would be a bad thing that needed to be stopped. However, I thought exactly the opposite. If a company (Google or not) can come up with a reasonable business model that subsidizes free cars, that could actually be quite valuable in a variety of ways.

We also had two industry specific panels -- both of which sparked a lot of discussion (way more than we had time for). The first, on the music industry involved myself, Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge and Dave Allen from Nemo and a founding member of the band Gang of Four. Dave provided examples of how bands are embracing free models and doing quite well, while Gigi talked about the lengths to which the incumbent entertainment companies were going to use political and legal maneuvers to limit how effective those upstart business models could be. While the audience raised a good point, noting that the legacy guys were going to die off eventually anyway, so why focus on them, Gigi correctly noted that the fear is that while they die, they can do a tremendous amount of damage to creativity and to consumer rights. She also noted, in passing, the importance of paying attention to the Cablevision remote DVR lawsuit, which is currently being appealed to the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court reverse the appeals court decision, it would be a massive blow for all sorts of innovative online services that could enable unique business models.

The final panel, moderated by the always entertaining Kara Swisher, focused on the media industry, and included Dan Gillmor presenting a discussion on new models for news and journalism that were up and coming, which matched up well with MIT/BU professor Marshall Van Alstyne discussing the business models related to these new forms of journalism. Playing more of a skeptic's role was Alan Mutter, who worried about where the journalism world was heading -- though (thankfully) he wasn't about to blame anyone but the folks who run the newspapers themselves.

All in all, there was a lot to talk about -- too much in fact. Due to the massive amount of content, it all too often felt like we were cutting fascinating (and sometimes contentious) discussions short, before we had a real chance to dig into some unique and insightful points. It's always a challenge with events like this, but hopefully some of the discussions will live on in a variety of ways, from the connections made at the event to future posts here on Techdirt and on other sites as well. In the future, though, we'd love to try to create more such gatherings, and will do our best to structure them in a way that allows for even more discussion and participation. Hopefully SageScape agrees and decides to do more such events (and invites us to participate as well). Thanks to everyone who came and to everyone who helped make the event possible.

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rgarbacz writes "The US will stop funding research on automotive fuel cells and redirect the work towards stationary plants, because of slow progress on the research. Developing those cells and coming up with a way to transport the hydrogen is a big challenge, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in releasing energy-related details of the administration's budget for the year beginning Oct. 1. Dr. Chu said the government preferred to focus on projects that would bear fruit more quickly. The industry and the National Hydrogen Association criticized the decision and declared their intention to fight for funding. Dr. Chu also announced that funding for a coal gasification pilot project, cut by the Bush administration, will be reinstated. The Obama administration will also drop spending for research on the exploration of oil and gas deposits because the industry itself has ample resources for that, Dr. Chu said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using the compass and accelerometer in the G1, Jubei has turned his Android handset into a Wii-style controller.

[via androidguys]

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After reading Tom's description of PopCap's Plants Vs. Zombies on Offworld, I downloaded it and played it with my six-year-old daughter over the weekend and last night.

The game is a classic "tower defense" game. Brain-eating Zombies on the street are shuffling towards your house. The only way to defend your family against the rotting cannibalistic invaders is by sowing seeds of different species of fast-growing plants designed to stop or slow them down.

At this point, everyone else in the house is sick of Jane and I talking about how much fun Plants Vs. Zombies is and what we'll need to do keep the zombies from overtaking us when we play again (as soon as she gets back from Kindergarten class today).

Plants vs. Zombies

Seen above are parasitic wasp embryos, which apparently inspired the "alien birth" in Alien. From National Geographic's photo gallery of "'Extreme' Animal Embryos Revealed'":

In a biological attack unique in the animal world, the unassuming embryos (injected by their mother into a caterpillar) use a virus in their DNA to paralyze their host. They bite their way out of the caterpillar and begin spinning cocoons.

As a final insult to the injured host, the caterpillar--apparently brain-addled by the virus--builds a silky blanket over its attackers and defends them against predators until the wasps emerge, fully formed, and take to the skies.

"IN THE WOMB: 'Extreme' Animal Embryos Revealed"

Here's a motorized mountainboard built by some mechanical engineering students from Colorado State. I love the hand-controller/horn cased inside of a hair dryer. A downloadable PDF has the build notes and parts list.

Gadget Freak Case 140: Motorized Mountainboard

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Maximum Prophet recommends a NY Times piece on the growing phenomenon of unauthorized digital versions of copyrighted books showing up online. The problem has been growing exponentially, fed in part by the popularity of reading devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone. The article features the odd photographic juxtaposition of Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin, who take opposite views on electronic editions, authorized or not. Ms. Le Guin: "I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?" Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity." "Doctorow, a novelist whose young adult novel 'Little Brother' spent seven weeks on the New York Times children's chapter books best-seller list last year, offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover. He believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maximum Prophet recommends a NY Times piece on the growing phenomenon of unauthorized digital versions of copyrighted books showing up online. The problem has been growing exponentially, fed in part by the popularity of reading devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone. The article features the odd photographic juxtaposition of Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin, who take opposite views on electronic editions, authorized or not. Ms. Le Guin: "I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?" Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity." "Doctorow, a novelist whose young adult novel 'Little Brother' spent seven weeks on the New York Times children's chapter books best-seller list last year, offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover. He believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom was the first of a few to send in this account from the developer of the iPhone game iCombat on his experience with "pirated" versions of the app. Basically, he didn't try to block them, but put in a way to track authorized vs. unauthorized uses, and at a certain level pushed the unauthorized users to a splash page, asking them to purchase the game. His conclusion? Piracy really isn't a huge deal, and probably not worth wasting too much time trying to stop:

• The goal behind launching an app isn't thwarting pirates, it is getting users and generating sales so leave the "making a point" anti-piracy measures to the big guys. The competition is so fierce to get noticed in the App store that any attention is good attention....
• In most cases there is not a direct cannibalization of your sales by people using cracked copies - unless you have a high priced niche app the cost is negligible and the market is not zero sum....
• There is a ton of anger and energy spent thinking about pirates.... this energy should be put into creating better apps and focusing on the top line potential. In my case there are design issues that I should have focused on rather than trying to spoil the pirate's experience.

This is certainly the same general conclusion we've seen in other areas as well. Focusing on "piracy" rather than providing more value for your real customers almost always backfires.

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"Gone."

Cory and I both have raved about The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead Compendium Volume 1 collects the first forty-eight issues, which focus on human beings trying to survive in a world taken over by flesh-eating zombies.

The only downside to this 1088-page zombie-apocalypse graphic novel is that the book literally weighs five pounds. They need to make a Kindle version of it.

Despite the burdensome weight, I couldn't help opening it to re-read the series from the beginning. My high opinion of it hasn't diminished since the first time I read it -- this is a hell of a great comic book.

r0nc0 writes "My company (a Fortune 15 company) has recently required everyone that accesses the company portal to accept or decline an 'agreement' that governs the use of social networking. It basically states that any discussion of the company or any of the work that you do, whether at the office or at home, must be governed by their rules of social networking. Naturally these rules are that you never say anything bad or negative about the company, nor do you say anything bad or negative about anything. It's presented like a EULA, but if you decline more than 3 times your manager is notified. Naturally I declined it each time until my manager complained to me about all the email he was getting about me not accepting the agreement, so I went ahead and accepted, knowing that anybody who cares would just post anonymously anyway. This is the first time I've run into a forced agreement about social networking, and the agreement is so broad that it can't possibly be enforced. I've tried pointing out that agreements like that only drive people away and aren't necessary anyway, but I might as well talk to a brick wall. Has anyone else out there run into social networking behavioral agreements like this?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Scott points us to someone asking how come the limitations that Microsoft puts on computer vendors who are selling netbooks with XP installed don't constitute an antitrust violation. I'm sure others may differ, but I can't quite see where the antitrust violation would be here. First, there are alternatives. Linux-based netbooks are still decently popular, so if Microsoft's limits were a real problem, then there are other ways to go. Second, I would imagine that someone could buy XP through third parties and install it on any machine they want. It's just that if they want to get a wholesale deal directly from Microsoft, the company puts certain limitations on it. So I don't see it as an antitrust issue.

That said... I have to admit that I don't understand why Microsoft puts these limitations on netbooks that run XP. My guess is that it's because they really, really, really want to move people off of XP and onto Vista (or Windows 7 eventually), and they're afraid that if they let more powerful netbooks run XP, that they'll start to become full laptop replacements -- and Microsoft's grand strategy of moving customers to the latest and greatest will stall out. However, that seems hard to support. It makes little sense to try to limit customers -- especially those who really want to buy your product. If Microsoft XP makes a computer more valuable to someone, why limit that choice?

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The June issue of The Atlantic has an article about a 72-year-long study at Harvard about how different experiences affect the health and happiness of people. Video above, full text of article here.

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

A BBC news video reports that Canada's pot industry makes $7 billion a year.

Canada's booming cannabis industry ranks alongside tourism and forestry as a money earner and employer but the illegal trade has angered its US neighbour.

(Via TYWKIWDBI)

MAKE was at the ITP Spring Show 2009 earlier this week. This is a compilation video of just some of the cool projects that were on display. Later in the week I will be writing about some of my favorite projects in more detail.

Subscribe to the MAKE podcast | Download for iTunes

More about the ITP Spring Show 2009

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Omomyid was among several readers writing in about the production of microscopic amounts of ultra-dense deuterium by scientists at the University of Gothenberg, in Sweden. A cubic centimeter of the stuff would weigh 287 lbs. (130 kg). UDD is 100,000 times more dense than water, and a million times more dense than deuterium ice, which is a common fuel in laser-ignited fusion projects. The researchers say that, if (big if) the material can be produced in large quantities, it would vastly improve the chances of starting a fusion reaction, as the atoms are much closer together. Such a D-D fusion reaction would be cleaner than one involving highly radioactive tritium. Many outlets have picked up the same press release that Science Daily printed pretty much verbatim (as is their wont); there doesn't seem to be much else about this on the Web. Here's the home page of one of the researchers. The press release gives no hint as to how the UDD was produced. Reader wisebabo asks: "I can easily imagine a material being compressed by some heavy duty diamond anvil to reach this density, the question is: what happens when you let the pressure off? Will it expand (explosively one would presume) back to its original volume?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE contributor Steve Lodefink has posted the details on the building of his recent cigar box guitar.

Cigar Box Guitar

Speaking of cigar boxes, check out this cool cigar box amp posted (sadly, with no additional info) on Cigar Box Nation (via Dinosaurs and Robots).

More:
See all of the cigar box projects on Make: Online

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UPDATE, May 12, 1PM PT: Protests for Rosenberg are taking place at the presidential palace in Guatemala City, and some protesters are streaming video live from their laptops in the streets: BB post link.

- - - - - - - - - -

Boing Boing reader "Tricky" in Guatemala says,

I'm writing you this email to let you know about the video testimony of Rodrigo Rosenberg that has been uploaded to YouTube. He was a lawyer in Guatemala City, and he was murdered this past Sunday, May 10. He left this video, taped before he was killed, in which he names his murderers: President Alvaro Colom, his wife and his private secretary.

Part 1 of his posthumous video, and here is part 2. Here is an account in El Periodico, the Guatemalan newspaper that published the story.

The local TV channels are avoiding the story altogether, and have been on a campaign for awhile now trying to discredit the written press. I'll try to summarize the El Periodico story and his last words.

Rosenberg was the legal representative of two murdered Guatemalans: Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa. Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom approached Khalil Musa and asked of him to work in the board of Banrural, one of the state banks in Guatemala. Khalil Musa accepted the job but the government didn't put him in the post, after three months he told the president that he was resigning to the position he never took, because his good name was being used to say that no more strange transactions were happening within the bank. Musa was murdered. and the police and judicial system didn't find anything about the murderers, as a matter of fact, they said that it was their own factory workers that murdered them, finally saying in private to members of the family of the murdered Khalil Musa, that it was indeed because of the corruption that was going on at Banrural and that it was their own fault.

Rosenberg filmed and wrote this document, because he didn't want to shut up.

Now I'm thinking also of why the "state of calamity" was proclaimed here in Guatemala last week, that uses the swine flu outbreak as an excuse, with only 3 confirmed cases. The state's reaction to only 3 confirmed cases of H1N1 seemed a bit much, but makes more sense when you consider that same "state of calamity" imposes restraint on freedom of the press.

Part 1 is above, Part 2 is below. Here is a related item in English, from the Associated Press. An anonymous BB commenter has kindly translated the document written by Rosenberg for posthumous release, in the comments below.

It was quite a surprise when French politicians rejected a "three strikes" (or, as Bill Patry calls it: "the digital guillotine") law that would have ISPs disconnect file sharers from the internet on three accusations (not convictions). However, seeing as French president Nicolas Sarkozy was a huge supporter of this idea (despite the fact that he had no problems infringing copyrights himself), you knew it would come back. And, indeed, it's back. France's National Assembly has now approved a three strikes law by a vote of 296 to 233. It's expected that the upper house of the French Parliament will approve it tomorrow.

Of course, there are significant questions about the legality of the law. Considering that the EU just said that such a three strikes policy is not allowed, you have to imagine that we haven't heard the last about whether or not this new law is considered legitimate.

Still, the thing that is most amusing about this is how supporters of such three strikes rules somehow seem to think that this will suddenly make people buy again. There's no evidence that this is true, whatsoever. But the main backer of this bill in France claims that this is:

"an important step toward preserving cultural diversity and the industries threatened by piracy."

How? By kicking fans of the work offline? The most telling part of this statement is that it's about preserving the industries "threatened" by piracy, not the actual creators of content. That's because this is a law to protect legacy industries, not content creators.

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Ryan North's The best of Dinosaur Comics: 2003-2005 A.D. had me howling with laughter and passing the book around to whomever I could lay hands on to point out particularly good strips.

Dinosaur Comics is an unlikely gem of a webcomic -- the same six panels every week featuring three dinosaurs and a house, a car and a woman in danger of being smushed. What changes from strip to strip is the dialog, and man, there's a lot of it.

This is a wordy comic. The jokes are often erudite, sometimes just plain goofy. The creator, Ryan North, is mining this odd little visual vein and coming up with a seemingly bottomless well of extremely funny material. Some of it relies on the visuals, some would work nearly as well as text.

Every now and again, Satan appears and drones on about his favorite video games. Then the T-Rex will explore (in his charming, naive way), philosophy and religion. Then there's a strip about polyamory. Then several strips about etymology and word choices. Funny jokes about comic books. Then God appears and T-Rex is the only one who can hear him. Then cuttlefish move in next door and behave in a threatening manner. Fan-culture and the canon make an appearance. And so on.

This strip is so improbable, so unconventional -- and so wonderful. It's like a distillation of the funniest stuff on the web, improbably combined with clip art, unapologetically weird and interesting and fantastic.

The best of Dinosaur Comics: 2003-2005 A.D.

Dinosaur Comics

pfleming writes "Microsoft quietly, or not so quietly, raised some cheap cash in bond sales yesterday. For a company that already has a huge cash war chest and doesn't carry debt, what is the incentive to sell nearly $4 billion in bonds? From the article: 'Microsoft is sitting on $25 billion in cash, so the company doesn't need the bond proceeds "unless they have something big in mind," says Reena Aggarwal, professor of finance at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New slab serif version of House Industries' Neutraface. Very nice, and I'm digging the addition of the Stencil style. #

Here's a sweet little student project from ITP: a clock that counts up to a hundred years and falls apart:

Showing 'Time in Six Parts,' the clock "rotates once every second. The following pulley rotates once every 5 seconds (1:5 ratio). The next rotates once every 60 seconds or 1 minute. Then 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, and 1 decade. The decade wheel carries the load of the large arc. The large arc rotates once every century. The final ratio between the 60-RPM motor and the large arc is approximately 1:31.6 billion. Each wheel is marked with a black nut to highlight a position that could be tracked over time. Along the arc, 100 lines mark the divisions of each passing year. When the clock finally reaches the end of a 100-year cycle, the arc falls off its track onto the floor."

The 3.16 Billion Cycles Clock, with the time in six part series, is perhaps an attempt to present time in a prospective like never seen earlier. If with this the designer intended to take time beyond our consideration and explore its new realms, he has by far succeeded in his effort, but still the clock remains routed to the core, by living every second till eternity (we aren't living an age to see a 100 years pass).

The 100-Year Alarm Clock lives every second (via Cribcandy)

I'm on a quest to find a good free OS to put on a beater laptop for the baby (15 months, obsessed with computers!) to play with. Sugar is a little too old for her, I think. I described it in my podcast some time ago -- easy UI, lots of cool sounds, BabySmash-style keyboard mappings, easy access to bookmarked, downloaded YouTube videos, etc.

Qimo looks like it's in the right ballpark -- anyone else got a good "BabyBuntu?"

Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up. Qimo's interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.

Qimo (Thanks, @jonobarel!)

Michael Geist sez,

The Business Software Alliance is out today with their annual report on global piracy in 2008. The data shows declining numbers in many countries (the report covers 110 countries), though there is an overall increase due to very high rates in parts of the world.

Two keys - first, it points to the growing importance of open source software, which the report says commands 15 percent of the market...

68% of the countries that the BSA tracks that have ratified the WIPO Copyright Treaty have shown no change or only a minor increase or decrease in software piracy rates. The three countries that showed a significant decrease are Russia (which only ratified in February), China (which ratified in 2007), and Qatar (which ratified in 2005). Russia and China are important markets, yet their numbers remain very high (68% in Russia and 80% in China) and few would argue that the big declines are as a result of anti-circumvention legislation. Moreover, the average software piracy rate among WCT ratifying countries is 62% and, as mentioned, only five countries that have ratified the WCT have software piracy rates lower than Canada's.

Does The WIPO Copyright Treaty Work? The Business Software Association Piracy Data (Thanks, Michael!)

One of our readers sent us a link to this commercial product, the Kitty Cot, a cat window perch, and writes:

Window + suction cups + cloth + PVC = So MAKE-able.

Kitty Cot: World's Best Cat Perch

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Mike writes "An ambitious Arizona company has recently revealed plans for a solar powered bullet train that will streak across the desert at 220 mph, traveling from Tuscon to Phoenix in 30 minutes flat. Proposed by Solar Bullet LLC, the system comprises a series of tracks that would serve stations including Chandler, Casa Grande, Red Rock, and Marana, and may one day be extended to Flagstaff and Nogales. The train would require 110 megawatts of electricity, which would be generated by solar panels mounted above the tracks." Local coverage of the plan takes a harder look, noting that Solar Bullet LLC is two guys who are now asking local governments in the towns at which such a train would potentially stop for $35K for a legal and feasibility study. Total cost is estimated at $27B.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A couple years ago, we wrote about a research paper looking at how often you infringe on copyrights in an average day to show just how ridiculous copyright law has become. Now, riffing on a recent post we did about how people take different views of copyright depending on whether they're making use of others' content or having their own content repurposed, one of our commenters has written up a blog post for Dvorak.org, discussing how hard it is to not infringe on copyrights, noting that the original system was not built for a digital world:

As copyright was originally enacted, it was next to impossible to accidentally infringe. In the good old days in order to infringe on a copyright you had to physically publish a song or a book without permission by printing it onto paper via a printing press. There was no other way to copy or infringe on a song or a book and there was no such thing as a performance right protected by copyright.

Nowadays we infringe copyrights numerous times throughout the day without even thinking about it. Watching an unauthorized SNL clip on YouTube. Playing the radio in the background at work where customers can hear. Loaning a copy of your Finding Nemo DVD to play at your kids' daycare. Downloading clip art to use in a personal scrapbook. Scanning your own wedding photos. Forwarding a funny photograph to a friend. Loaning a co-worker some software. Etc., etc., etc...

Copyright laws are so utterly pervasive in our lives that we simply cannot reasonably function without at least some innocent infringement. I personally think it'd be easier to avoid jaywalking and speeding than it would be to avoid infringing. So my question to you guys and gals, how long do you think you could last without infringing a copyright?

Indeed. It's interesting to note that some have compared copyright to speeding, but it's true that people are probably "infringing" a lot more often than they speed... and lots of people speed quite a bit.

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In his first column for Seed magazine, my Institute for the Future colleague and pal Alex Pang looks at efforts to create software that doesn't just support scientific discovery, it actually does new science. From Seed:

Older AI projects in scientific discovery tried to model the way scientists think. This approach doesn’t try to imitate an individual scientist’s cognitive processes?—?you don’t need intuition when you have processor cycles to burn?—?but it bears an interesting similarity to the way scientific communities work. (Cornell professor Hod) Lipson says it figures out what to look at next “based on disagreement between models, just as a scientist will design an experiment that tests predictions made by competing theories.”

But that doesn’t mean it will replace scientists. (Cornell graduate student Michael) Schmidt views it as a tool to see what they can’t: “Something that is not obvious to a human might be obvious to a computer,” he speculates. A program, says Schmidt, may find things “that look really strange and foreign” to a scientist. More fundamentally, the Cornell program can analyze data, build models, and even guess which theories are more powerful, but it can’t explain what its theories mean?—?and new theories often force scientists to rethink and refine basic assumptions. “E=mc2 looks very simple, but it actually encapsulates a lot of knowledge,” Lipson says. “It overturned a lot of older preconceptions about energy and the speed of light.” Even as computers get better at formulating theories, “you need humans to give meaning to what the system finds.”

Why We're Not Obsolete: Alex Pang in Seed

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

Paul Krassner posted an interesting response to the attacks on Jon Stewart for having called Harry Truman a "war criminal" and then apologizing. 

I also feel compelled to disagree with Jon Stewart. I think that Harry Truman was indeed a war criminal. Actually, I believe that in most wars, both sides harbor top-level war criminals, but that the victor determines who they are. As Lenny Bruce said in 1962 at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, "If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls...." Lenny was arrested for obscenity that night. One of the items in the police report complained: "When talking about the war he stated, 'If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls.'"

Huffington Post

Sam & Dave's "Hold on I'm Coming" performed by Italian scarecrows in a Kubrick-like warehouse.

SoundGuyNoise sends in a story that brings into relief just how unsettled is the question of whether police can use GPS to track suspects without a warrant. Just a couple of days ago a Wisconsin appeals court ruled that such tracking is OK; and today an appeals court in New York reached the opposite conclusion. "It was wrong for a police investigator to slap a GPS tracking device under a defendant's van to track his movements, the state's top court ruled today. A sharply divided NY Court of Appeals, in a 4-3 decision, reversed the burglary conviction of defendant Scott Weaver, 41, of Watervliet. Four years ago, State Police tracked Weaver over 65 days in connection with the burglary investigation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's segment from a documentary about early 1970s groupies, featuring famous groupie Pamela Des Barres (who wrote the entertaining memoir, I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie). I don't think this is from the documentary Groupies, but I may be mistaken. Anyone know where it comes from?

Douglas Rushkoff - the author of Life Inc. - is a guest blogger.

GM made this short stop-motion animation in 1939 (long before Lego's little people who look like this were ever around), to promote the concept of Free Enterprise. "Round and Round" is a 'what-me-worry?' approach to economics, suitable for anyone who wants to know how it all works without ever finding out why it doesn't all work like that.

This is best visualization of what I imagined to be going through George W's mind when he talked about taxes and business.

Earlier this month, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that defendants accused of drunk driving have the right to inspect the source code of the breathalyzers used in their arrest. This is the right decision for a number of reasons - not only have studies shown that breathalyzers are poorly coded, potentially leading to inaccurate results, but in a legal system with the right to confront one's accusers, being able to examine the source code for errors seems like a fair digital extension. Given that more and more law enforcement is being done through shoddy technical tools, assuring fair procedure in code is no different than doing so for police officer behavior.

However, the breathalyzer manufacturer, CMI, is refusing to turn over the source code, claiming that doing so would reveal "trade secrets." Ed Felten points out that this is logically inconsistent with CMI's assertion that the source code is straight-forward calculations. If that is so, secrecy isn't what is stopping competitors from emulating CMI's product. The more likely reason for not revealing the source code, of course, is the same reason e-voting is so controversial: the code is crappy.

The obvious answer was posited years ago by Eric S. Raymond - given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The source code for breathalyzers, e-voting machines and other technical law enforcers should be open source to ensure that secrecy doesn't obscure important imperfections.

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

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(Download MP4, or watch on YouTube)

In today's Boing Boing Video (brought to you in part by WEPC.com), director Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow , Black Snake Moan ) talks to us about his latest project: the MTV online series $5 Cover, which chronicles the internet-age lives and dreams of struggling musicians in Memphis, Tennessee.

$5 Cover is described as "a rough-and-tumble show set in the clubs, bars, and all-night cafes of present-day Memphis," and follows "young musicians as they fight for love, inspiration, and money to pay the rent." These are real people, but this is not reality schlock.

When I first saw clips of the series in production during a visit to the MTV offices, I knew it was going to be great. I grew up an MTV teen, but am not generally a fan of MTV's present-day on-air programming. I've felt for some time like the network no longer produced stuff I'd find interesting.

But this is different. Maybe part of what allowed something this authentic and engaging to incubate at MTV is the fact that this is primarily an online series.

And then there's the fact that Brewer is at the helm. I'm a big fan of his big-screen work, and he clearly loves the stories at the heart of $5 Cover -- the lives and art of musicians who are his own community, in Memphis.

Boing Boing asked Brewer how the internet is changing what it means to be an independent artist, and how technology is changing the nature of what "local music" means. He talks to us about why he created the show, how this is different than directing for film or television, and why all of this matters so much to him.

When MTV sent us a DVD of the completed episodes, Boing Boing Video's editor and I watched them all, back to back, and then vowed to buy some of the music online. I'm not kidding, it's that great. We went particularly nuts about Amy Lavere, an artist featured in the first part of the Boing Boing Video episode. She's from Memphis, by way of TX and Louisiana. Al Kapone was another personal fave.

More about $5 Cover: New episodes premiere Friday nights at midnight on MTV and at Fivedollarcover.com throughout May. There are mini-documentaries about what went on in each week's episode here, and Flipside Memphis gives you an even deeper dive into the Memphis culture. The entire video series, along with music videos and other related video, is available on iTunes for download to own. The soundtrack is available digitally through services including iTunes and Rhapsody, and I've been googling my way to the artists' websites and myspaces and discovering lots more on my own.

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RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic)

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Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing Video is brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

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Archie McPhee sells fun Li'l Sideshow play sets, like the Frog Girl and Lobster Boy set seen above. Also available for $13.95 each are the Bearded Lady, World's Tallest Man & Smallest Man, and Strong Man. Archie McPhee action figures

nandemoari writes "Hackers have reportedly infiltrated restricted computer databases at the University of California Berkeley, putting the private data of 160,000 students, alumni, and others at risk. According to UC Berkeley, computer administrators determined on April 9, 2009 that electronic databases in University Health Services had been breached by overseas criminals. The breakins began in October 2008. Information contained on the breached databases included Social Security numbers, health insurance information, and non-treatment medical information such as records of immunization and names of treating physicians."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joanna at Morbid Anatomy just pointed to a stunning Pink Tentacle post about 19th century Japanese anatomical models of pregnancy.

Canon U.S.A. has announced a series of tuition sessions around the US, under the 'Live Learning' education program banner. Live Learning is split into two levels with the 'EOS Essentials' events being held in eight US cities and including sessions with Canon-sponsored professional photographers.

The China Times reported that a snake emerged from a toilet and bit a Taiwanese man on the penis. From Yahoo!:

"As soon as he sat down, he suddenly felt a knife-like pain and reacted instinctively by standing up," the China Times said. "When he looked down, he saw the big snake."

The 51-year-old man, from Nantou County, was under medical care with minor injuries, a director at Puli Christian Hospital said.

"Toilet snake attack: urban legend comes true?"

An anonymous reader writes "After lots of turmoil, including a surprise rejection and a European amendment against it, Sarkozy's 3 strikes law has just been passed by the French Assembly [in French]: 'The first warning mails ... should be sent in the coming fall. In case of second offenders, the first disconnections should start beginning 2010.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Writing about open formats got me in the heady mood of the 90s. Back then we believed the Internet would be a free speech engine of democracy. I still do, to this day, but it doesn't dominate discourse the way it did back then. Today, money is more important. The purity of the early vision has been tainted by abominations like "user generated content" and "crowd sourcing." In the 90s, our websites had blue ribbons which stood for freedom. One of mine still does, to remind me of those days.

Anyway...

NPR is having its pledge drive, so I gave my money -- $150 for the year, and I encourage you to give what you can. I listen to NPR, and watch PBS. I like FreshAir, All Things Considered, Frontline, Nova, Bill Moyers. And I admit that when there's a new Frontline, I download it via BitTorrent, and I seed it to make sure it's available for others. This adds to my $150 annual contribution. I'm giving some of my bandwidth to make sure people who live outside the US and who may not be near a PBS station, can get this stuff. I want them to know how we see ourselves in the US.

Is this legal? I don't know. Does PBS object? Again, I don't know. Until now, I've never asked.

If they do, I'd encourage them to look again. BitTorrent is a very rational technology. It's a perfect fit for PBS. And it's not well understood by even some tech companies like Apple, who is banning it from the iPhone. And it's being throttled by ISPs, when they can.

Now here's the pitch. If PBS actively promoted the BitTorrent distribution of their programming, the same way it distributes podcasts of the NPR shows, it would become a celebrated cause of the net. I tell people to give, but now I could give them another reason. PBS is embracing the Internet, and helping develop the platform in a way only they can do.

Think about it.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

I've been obsessed with South Korea since visiting there earlier this year for a story on pro gamers.

Beyond or perhaps encouraging cultural/national stereotypes, South Koreans do make unique technological contributions, in uniquely South Korean ways. There's an intensity of thought and attention to production detail in some of their 'wonderful things' that demands admiration and even awe.

That's why I'm planning to make a quick tour through the KoreanNovation trade show this week in New York. Not only to see stuff like the high-temperature-resistant RFID tag, or the "mask for nasal insertion" (a surgical mask worn in the nose, which I assume works if you remember to keep your mouth closed...) but also to talk to the people who think of and then go make such things.

Thanks, Jeff, for the link.

Slashdot alerted us to the bizarre story that Santa Rosa Junior College was supposedly sending out threatening emails to students and staff who used private email accounts that included the initials SRJC (so, for example, using nameSRJC@gmail.com or whatever). Oddly the original article pointed to has been taken down (though, the comments remain...). But, the same newspaper has published another article where the school stands by the policy and says it will continue to crack down on the "misuse" of its name... though it says it won't take anyone to court, despite the threat letter saying "to avoid any future legal action..."

The school officials still don't see why it's a big deal that they're threatening students. However, their reasoning makes very little sense. "The reason for it is so the college doesn't get misrepresented in some way or make it look like the college is endorsing a product or issue," according to Santa Rosa Junior College President Robert Agrella. But that makes no sense. If a student uses an actual address from the university, wouldn't that risk be much greater? In other words, does the college really think that it's a bigger risk for someone to say something that the college does not endorse from nameSRCJ@gmail.com or name@santarosa.edu? Because it seems fine with the latter, but not the former. The whole thing smacks of college administrators who don't understand technology and have way too much free time on their hands.

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If you look at the archive of Scripting News for May 1999, ten years ago, you'll see how important open formats are.

At the time, a large company, Netscape, had done deals with major content vendors, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Motley Fool and several others, to provide a flow of news for their new web app, my.netscape.com.

They didn't have to make this information public, they could have done private deals with each of the content sources. But they didn't. The format was documented publicly and the feeds were available to anyone who wanted to build on them.

At the time, I liked the river format, not the newpaper format that Netscape was using. Because the feeds were out there for anyone to use, I didn't have to do deals with the content companies.

They were open in another important way -- anyone could flow their content through my.netscape.com, not just the big pubs. Suppose they had never heard of you, but you wanted your webzine to be part of their system. Because the format was open, and because their web app was too, anyone could join. This was important because at the time something new was happening -- weblogs, and they could be part of the flow because of this openness. If you had to get approval, maybe only the weblogs that Netscape liked could be part of their system. That would be wrong, imho.

And when Netscape was acquired by AOL at roughly this time, all the work could continue, even though their app was gone, and the people who worked on it had moved on. It truly was a coral reef, and for me as a technologist, there is no higher praise.

Today, Facebook is nowhere near as open as Netscape was in 1999. If I had a different vision for Twitter, I'd more or less have to start from scratch. If Apple doesn't like or understand your app, you can't ship it for the iPhone. And if Google failed, we'd all be up a creek without a paddle. Now you might observe that those companies are alive and Netscape is gone. Maybe you can't be open and keep your franchise going. But what's the point of being alive if you're not free? And we don't know the outcome yet for most of these companies.

Regardless, I think it's important to honor the contribution that Netscape made in laying the foundation for all the great stuff that has happened with RSS and is still to come. Thanks Netscape!

Ten years later, we now know how well RSS worked. And let it serve as a lesson for all who follow. Let others compete with you, encourage it even. It's how you stay sharp and it's how you build markets, not just companies.

sobral writes "Following the announcement of the LGPL license model, since yesterday the Qt source code repositories are open to the public together with their roadmap. The contribution model is online and will enable developers from the community to submit patches through a single click process, avoiding the previous hassle of sending in signed paperwork. The code is hosted at qt.gitorious.org and an instant benefit of this launch is that Qt Software has been working together with Gitorious maintainers for the last four months to improve Gitorious and all these new features are already submitted upstream."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Life Inc., is a guest blogger.

No, not an essay from me about the end of money, but a great new book from Thomas Greco called The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, out last month from Chelsea Green. It's a comprehensive look at the bias of centralized currency, as well as the history of other approaches to money and why some of these other models should be resurrected.

Of the many books approaching this subject matter (I read a ton of them; this one wasn't available yet) this is the most straightforward explanation I've yet seen of everything from usury to inflation, credit clearing to web-based trading, local self-determination to complementary exchanges.

Very few people realize that the nature of money has changed profoundly over the past three centuries, or--as has been clear with the latest global financial crisis--the extent to which it has become a political instrument used to centralize power, concentrate wealth, and subvert popular government. On top of that, the economic growth imperative inherent in the present global monetary system is a main driver of global warming and other environmental crises.

To me - as you can tell from my posts here - most of this should be common knowledge. Unfortunately, it is still considered as questionable by many as, say, the theory of evolution. But instead of "balancing" a description of economic reality with faith-based "facts" from the other side, our job as writers is to tell it like it is, and refuse to pretend that it's all a matter of interpretation. Greco rises to that challenge.

If you're more interested in the recent credit crisis, what really happened, and how we might best respond to the fraud and cynicism that characterized the last few years of banking and policy, check out another Chelsea Green title, Les Leopold's new book, The Looting of America; How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It. Here's Leopold in his introduction, explaining the growth of the finance industry:

The financial sector, up until the 2008 crash, was one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, generating approximately 20 percent of our gross domestic product. It also accounted for 27.4 percent of all corporate profits. Finance grew as manufacturing declined, thereby dominating the real economy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1940 there were 7.1 manufacturing jobs for every job in the financial service industries. The ratio increased to 7.7 in 1950. Then the slide started, as you can see in chart 1 . By November 2008, there were only 1.6 manufacturing jobs per financial services job. Until the current meltdown, the financial industry produced almost 10 percent of all the wages and salaries in the country, up from 5 percent in 1975. In a few years, provided that the system doesn't collapse entirely, the finance sector is going to be larger than the manufacturing economy.

Mark this day on your calendar.

After years of saying that instead of emulating print newspapers, Internet-based news should present the newest stuff first. I don't want sections, I want flow.

It never seemed to me it should work any other way. Almost exactly 10 years ago, on May 9, 1999, we put up a web app called my.userland.com that ran off the same content flow as my.netscape.com, using a then-new format called RSS. Their aggregator allowed you to lay out your own newspaper on the screen of your Mac or PC. UserLand's aggregator presented it as a flow, which I later called a "river of news" -- last-in-first-out. Want to know what's new? Visit the site and scroll until you're caught up. If something catches your fancy, click and read. When you're done, hit the Back button and resume the scroll.

So this period is important because ten years ago RSS happened.

And today is important because today the NY Times joined the party. They're now presenting their news flow as a flow. Gone is the pretense that news on the Internet works like news on paper. Welcome to the NY Times river of news, as presented by the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/timeswire/

I've had my own version of this flow for a few years. I knew this was coming, a source at the Times briefed me on it, privately, a few weeks ago. I turned off my flow, and will leave it there for the forseeable future. Go get the river at the Times website so they can get the ad revenue. Seriously. And congrats. Let's go do the other thing now, get the Times to carry news written by people who don't work at the Times. Then we'll be ready for the future.

See the next post for a note on why open formats are so important.

Gijs writes:

This sequencer scans images, and plays the image as midi notes. It uses LDRs to measure the gray-scale of specific point of a image, and triggers midi notes from a selected threshold. When the threshold is reached the velocity will be set by the darkness at that point. the darker point the higher the velocity will be. The sequencer has 24 LDRs that are read into 3 ADC ports of the arduino, via 3 4051 ics.

Via Adafruit.

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Back by popular demand, we've just printed a fresh batch of Charge tees, and they're now once again available in all sizes. Just in time for Summer, the Charge tee is printed on heather gray "Tri-Blend" shirts by American Apparel, which is a soft, lightweight, super-comfortable shirt. We also think @wrycoder said it best when he declared:

Softest shirt ever. Like being hugged by kittens.

Couldn't agree more. Also, check out the Charged Up pool at Flickr for photographs of fine folks wearing a fine garment.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Last August I reported that the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had defeated the MPAA's attempt to label as copyright infringement a cable operator's storing video for later reuse at the request of its subscribers, in Cartoon Networks v. CSC Holdings. The MPAA has petitioned the US Supreme Court to review that holding. According to a recent interview with Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge, the High Court has not yet decided whether to grant the MPAA's petition seeking review. What I found odd about the 2nd Circuit decision (PDF) is that (a) although "fair use" was the most logical defense to be employed in view of the Supreme Court's holding in SONY Betamax, upholding a VCR's 'time shifting' of a broadcast television show as a 'fair use', the defendant in Cartoon Networks has stipulated to waive 'fair use', and (b) although the easier legal theory for plaintiff to prove would have been secondary, rather than primary, copyright infringement (i.e. Cablevision's encouraging and inducing its customers to make unauthorized copies), the MPAA has stipulated to waive that line of attack. I.e. neither plaintiffs nor defendants seized the 'low hanging fruit'. In her interview, Ms. Sohn discusses the fair use defense, but I'm not sure why she does, since as I recall the defendant has waived it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's always amusing to see what people feel they "deserve." Reader Brad writes in to point out that Aretha Franklin apparently told a radio reporter recently that she deserves royalties for any sales of the famous hat she wore to the inauguration. It's unclear if she was joking (one hopes she was)... But it does seem to be a common theme, where people suddenly think they automatically deserve a cut of something, despite not having set up an agreement for that beforehand. Newspapers want a cut of Google's revenues. Record labels want a cut of ISP revenue (and Apple's revenue). It just happens so often that it's worth calling out -- even in a totally ridiculous discussion about a hat. No one deserves a cut of anything if they didn't actually negotiate it beforehand.

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In this latest adafruit tutorial, Limor shows you how to create a "pager scanner" that allows you to feed incoming pager network data to a Windows computer over a serial port. It looks super easy to do and fun to see what you can still find on these data networks.

Also check out her earlier video on Reverse engineering a pager

HOW TO - Make a cheap "pager scanner"

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ArduinoFun has a how-to on building this simple two-servo Arduino walker that's a great starter robot project for kids. The body and legs were ordered from Ponoko. Shawn of ArduinoFun writes:

My son is 11 and daughter is 5 and they really enjoyed doing this. I was amazed at my daughter already thinking of new ideas to do with the servos. For example she wants to put a princess doll on a servo and use the Arduino to make a music box.

Arduino Simple Walker

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Dr. Leonard Shlain, surgeon and author of the groundbreaking books Art & Physics, Alphavet vs. The Goddess, and Sex, Time, and Power, died this morning after a long battle with brain cancer. Len was 71 and had just completed his fourth book, Leonardo's Brain. Len's knowledge, wisdom, curiosity, and humor will be remembered by everyone who had the pleasure of meeting him. His books are a permanent, timeless, and beautiful reminder that the line between art and science is imaginary and that the world is full of wonder if we just open our eyes and minds to it. Len's legacy -- his children, grandchildren, books, and the thousands of people he helped as a physician -- are a testament to who he was. Our thoughts are with the extended Shlain family.

Dr. Leonard Shlain

mike writes "I have been ripping all my movies and TV shows for easy viewing through a media PC. Because I would rather not rip everything again I'm looking for a simple backup solution. I'm considering a hard drive dock and several internal hard drives to use as 'disks' to back things up every once in a while but I don't know what the best way to store internal drives would be in the meantime. Could they sit together in any empty box an be OK or would a number of externals be worth the slightly higher cost with fewer worries about storing them in the meantime?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seamster put his collection of scrap wood to good use in the form of the above-seen DIY pinball machine, even reusing the ball from an old computer mouse -

With some parental help, this can be a kid-friendly project. Building a solid table with a functioning paddle assembly requires some basic woodworking skills, and may be fairly difficult without proper guidance and appropriate tools. But once the paddle assemblies are in place, just about anyone can build ramps and jumps or anything else they can imagine for the upper part of the table. To me that's where the real fun lies--creating various obstacles and then seeing a ball bounce around all over and through them, somewhat under your power.

This is a great project for parents and kids to take on together!

Certainly looks to be a fun project for a family team to take on - adding a nice theme/paintjob could be quite awesome as well. Hit up the project's instructable for more of the build process.

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siloko writes "An alliance of so-called 'Creative Industries,' including the UK Film Council, have signed a joint statement asking the UK government to force ISPs into banning users caught sharing illegally. In an 'unprecedented joint statement,' the alliance predicted a 'lawless free-for-all' unless the government ensured the 'safe and secure delivery of legal content.' The previous tactic of pursuing individual file-sharers in the courts appear to have been abandoned. 'Instead, [the government] should provide enabling legislation, for the specific measures to be identified and implemented in an Industry Code of Practice,' it recommends. One wonders how they remain 'creative' in their vocation when they keep on trotting out the same old story backed up by imaginary statistics (they claim 50% of net traffic in the UK is illegal content but provide no evidence for this figure). The BBC also has a blog entry dissecting their statement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday, a 747 at LAX sucked an entire baggage-cartcontainer into one of its engines. No one was hurt:

The incident occurred yesterday afternoon as Japan Airlines Flight 61 to Narita was pushing back from the terminal gate. A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, Ian Gregor, said a baggage cart was being towed by at the same time and the engine ingested one of the containers.

Airport officials told the Los Angeles Times the vacuum created by the air intake of the left outboard engine was so strong it pulled the empty container off the baggage cart. The object was lodged in the outer left-side engine of the four-engine jet.

Baggage container sucked into Boeing 747 engine at LA airport

Seems the Lizards Liquid Lounge in Chicago is the place to be this Saturday - The Midwest Experimental Electronics Showcase features a nice lineup including several sound makers we've mentioned here in the past -

• Tim Kaiser (as seen on Make: television)
  
• Talking Computron (of GetLoFi)
  
• Todd Michael Bailey (EE madman, creator of the WTPA sampler)
  
• Michael Una (Beep-It creator, Make contributor)

Check out the events page for the full roster. Definitely a must-see for area synthers, benders, and the like.


More:

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An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Guardian: "Distinctive brain patterns could become the latest subject of biometric scanning after EU researchers successfully tested technology to verify identities for security checks. The experiments, which also examined the potential of heart rhythms to authenticate individuals, were conducted under an EU-funded inquiry into biometric systems that could be deployed at airports, borders and in sensitive locations to screen out terrorist suspects." The same article says that "The Home Office, meanwhile, has confirmed rapid expansion plans of automated facial recognition gates: 10 will be operating at major UK airports by August." I wonder what Bruce Schneier would have to say about such elaborate measures.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The driver of a Boston trolley that caused a crash that injured about 50 people was apparently sending text messages at the time of the accident, despite a transit authority ban on such activity. This latest incident comes after the horrible crash in California last year that killed scores of people, in which the train conductor was said to be texting, and highlights how bans like this, whether covering the drivers of trains or cars, really aren't effective. A reasonably intelligent person driving a trolley or other mass-transit vehicle doesn't need a ban to tell them that texting while driving isn't such a good idea. If they aren't smart enough to figure that out, they're probably just going to ignore the ban anyway, like this driver in Boston, undermining the point of the rule. Again, it goes back to personal responsibility, something that politicians and rulemakers won't be able to conjure up out of legislation, try as they might. This isn't to say that people like trolley drivers should be allowed to text while working -- far from it. But to think that putting a ban into place will, in itself, simply and easily eliminate the problem and make everybody safer is misguided.

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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Bruce Damer, The EvoGrid, Dorkbot-SF, 2009-04-08 from pronoiac on Vimeo.

Here are a couple of talks from recent Dorkbot SF meetings. The first one is MAKE contributing author Dave Matthews, talking about "software as the new hardware." His talk his entertaining and thought-provoking as always.

The second talk is of Bruce Damer, speaking about meteors, meteoric threats to Earth, asteroid mining, creating new lifeforms, sustainable space travel, and other related topics. Bruce is behind a project that really fascinates me, called the EvoGrid, which seeks to use computers to simulate "pre-biotic emergent complexity" as it may have arisen on an evolving Earth.

Dorkbot SF

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Hugh Pickens writes "In a surprise corporate move, after Rackable Systems received bankruptcy court approval on April 30 to close its purchase of SGI, the company announced on Monday that the deal had closed and that the combined company would be called SGI — short for Silicon Graphics International instead of the original Silicon Graphics Inc. The revival of the SGI brand will certainly please people in Silicon Valley with a historical bent, as SGI has been one of the area's true icons. However, some consider this a curious turn of events, considering that Rackable has come to represent the new guard in the server market, while SGI has struggled for years. Executives hope the name change will help it expand its business overseas, where SGI is a better-known brand. The new SGI will also continue to develop and support the high-performance computing systems that Silicon Graphics was known for, says Rackable's president and CEO. 'There should be no disruption to Silicon Graphics customers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Luke BrownGold makes the bending experience a bit more accessible to the younger set -

Currently I am attending Parsons school of Design. This is a prototype for a toy called the BachBot 9000. It is made children who may be too young to get into circuit bending. Made with an arduino the Bach Bot front can pull off to reveal it's plush "circuitry". By pressing to points on its front the user can create circuit bending effects to the tune of Ode to Joy by Bach.

Get 'em started young - before you know it, they'll be hacking the baby monitor into an amp.

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Bruce Schneier's announced the winner of his annual "movie-plot threat" contest, the competition to come up with ridiculous security threats of the sort that are used to justify banning photos in public places or liquids on airplanes:

Though recent shooting sprees in churches, nursing homes, and at family outings appear unrelated, a terrifying link has been discovered. All perpetrators had small children who were abducted by terrorists, and perpetrators received a video of their children with hooded terrorists warning that their children would be beheaded if they do not engage in the suicidal rampage. The terror threat level has been raised to red as profiling, known associations, and criminal history are now useless in detecting who will be the next terrorist sniper or airline hijacker. Anyone who loves their children may be a potential terrorist.

Fourth Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner

Someone did a lovely job on this Fender amp built into a cigar box.

Cigar Box Amp Powered by Fender (via Dinosaurs and Robots)

This cross-stitch Tube-map is surprisingly successful and sounds simple to do.

Geek + maps + craftiness = (via Wonderland)

In this interview with designer Jack Schulze (which also contains this great aphorism: "No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say."), a magnificent list of stuff he wishes he'd designed:

There are products I wish I'd designed because I like them and then people would think I'd done them and like me more. This list is massive. Off the top of my head: I wish I'd directed and conceived the perfume commercial where a guy on a helicopter kisses a woman at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and a Channel commercial with Little Red Riding Hood shooshing the wolf. I'd like to have been the first to take the photomontages Hockney produced in the 60s. I wish I'd written The Filth by Grant Morrison. I wish I'd conceived and made Super Mario Galaxy. I love the table-top skirmish game called Necromunda in the Warhammer universe, although I only played it once, because the social negotiation of the rules that always happens around the game, are embedded back into the rules. I think Formula 1 television coverage is visually completely remarkable. I have no idea what is going on, but it's so good I can watch it just for the optics. It's like injecting Photoshop filters straight into your eyeballs.

Six Questions from Kicker: Jack Schulze (via Beyond the Beyond)

City of Heroes, a multiplayer superhero game, decided to allow its users to design their own levels. While some users created some fun and imaginative levels, the majority produced incredibly easy treasure-hauls, the sort of quest we used to call "Monty Haul dungeons" in the D&D era.

There's something weird and paternalistic about the relationship between gamers and game-designers. It goes like this: "I will deny you reward until you complete some arbitrary tasks of my devising, because I know that this will make you happier than simply giving you the rewards right away" (what's more, the designer is generally right about this).

This authority and arbitrariness is simpler to navigate when you're playing D&D with some friends around a table -- the GM is a pal of yours in whom you've put your trust for a few hours, and if she doesn't deliver the promised fun, she can be ousted and replaced. The GM doesn't even have to stick to the rules: if she thinks that the game's fun will go up if she ignores the outcome of a dice-roll behind her screen, she can make up an epic save or fail.

But it's different when the "GM" is a bunch of rules programmed into a computer by an engineer working at a multinational. In that universe, if the rules are bent for the sake of fun, it's cheating. And the social contract that comfortably defines the relationship between friends stretches and tears when it's applied to the relationship between customers and corporations.

When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few "developer's favorite" quests, it's very hard to find the "fun but not exploitative" missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity.

This was not what the designers hoped for. Somehow they had convinced themselves that the number of exploiters would be relatively low -- certainly not the vast majority of the users. But they were wrong, and now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. They feel they must counteract these abusive quests, "for the sake of balance". But how? Well the first step is to ban people who make cheaty content. But what's cheaty? Do they explicitly list every possible exploit condition? What if they miss one? Nah, then the problem would start all over again. Instead, how about if they just issue blanket threats that they'll ban missions that seem "exploitative", without actually explaining what is and isn't "exploitative"? They went with the latter.

User Generated Quests and the Ruby Slippers

A report from "CryptoHippie" (don't know anything about this person/group) has created an index to surveillance states, ranked from worst to best. What's especially notable about this report is its concise, intelligent definition of "Electronic Police States:"

The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these:

1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.

2. It is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it - the evidence is already in their database.

Perhaps you trust that your ruler will only use his evidence archives to hurt bad people. Will you also trust his successor? Do you also trust all of his subordinates, every government worker and every policeman?

The worst offenders are China, North Korea, Belarus and Russia, followed by the UK, the US, and Singapore.

The Electronic Police State

Maker Jan-Piet Mens has fashioned a rather useful network monitoring device using an Arduino Duemilanove, Arduino Ethernet Shield and S65 shield. Since the Naguino is stacked together the device does not require soldering. Messages are sent over HTTP POST and include service state and a 21 character color-coded message. You can use the rotary encoder on the S65 shield to page the messages up and down as the display fills up. Full source code and instructions on how to configure Nagios are included.

Naguino network monitor

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These XBox controller soaps from Etsy seller Digitalsoap are scented with essence of Mountain Dew for a caffeinated clean. There's also a line of Playstation, NES and Wii controller soaps, as well as phone and iPod soap.

Realistic Xbox replica soap (via Red Ferret)

Andrew sez,

I've interviewed Australian writer and youth radio host Craig Schuftan, who has just released a new book called 'Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!' It's an exciting, discursive analysis, which at its heart compares emo, pop and rock n' roll to the philosophies of the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century.

The two part interview is almost as wide-ranging and certainly as interesting as the book (if I do say so myself). He's a culture sponge and we discuss (among many other things) Nietzsche's philosophy, Weezer's lyrics, ludditism, the create font of melancholy, and whether the anti-depressant generation will have trouble expressing themselves artistically.

My Chimerical Romanticism: Part One (Thanks, Andrew!)

Jill sez, "Here's a chair made from 297 recycled tennis balls. Fun, bouncy and surprisingly comfortable! I just discovered it at the BKLYN Design show in NYC, and thought you might like it."

Hugh Hayden's FUNature Tennis Ball Chair (Thanks, Jill!)

Steampunk paradise: an entire museum of Victoriana being auctioned off:

The entire collection of the Shambles, a museum of Victorian life recreated as a small town on an acre of land, has been split into 2,300 lots and is up for grabs. Collectors, other museums looking to add to their collections and lovers of curiosities are expected to descend on Newent, Gloucestershire, to bid for everything from boxes of Victorian soap to scary veterinary implements.

The Shambles was opened 20 years ago by Jim Chapman and his wife, Holly, both keen collectors of Victorian memorabilia. They laid out the museum as a town, complete with pub, police station, shops and workshops, and have been attracting 40,000 visitors a year.

Entire collection of the Shambles museum on sale

Auction of the Shambles Village Museum

(Thanks, Taikonaut!)

It would appear that the Canadian Parliament is no big fan of transparency. When some activists started posting video and audio of various Parliamentary committee proceedings online, in order to both increase transparency and to comment on those proceedings, lawyers apparently sent them a cease and desist, claiming it was "contempt of Parliament." They've also been sending takedowns to YouTube and other video hosting sites, claiming that this content is somehow proprietary, covered by "crown copyright" (something, thankfully, we don't have in the US) and subject to severe licensing restrictions. While it sounds like some Canadian politicians recognize the need to change, in the meantime, they're making a travesty of any sense of governmental openness.

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KIllagouge writes "Just days before the release of Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes, SquareEnix sent a Cease & Desist letter to Chrono Compendium to stop everything to do with Crimson Echoes. People might remember when they did this with Chrono Resurrection. Seems to be the growing trend; instead of listening to their fans, which would net them even more money, game developers continue to lock down old gaming IP. A copy of the C&D letter is available online." The fan project had been in development since 2004 and was 98% complete.

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DJRumpy writes in to alert us that Apple's new OS, Snow Leopard, is apparently nearing completion. "Apple this past weekend distributed a new beta of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that altered the programming methods used to optimize code for multi-core Macs, telling developers they were the last programming-oriented changes planned ahead of the software's release. ...Apple is said to have informed recipients of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build 10A354 that it has simplified the... APIs for working with Grand Central, a new architecture that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of Macs with multiple processing cores. This technology works by breaking complex tasks into smaller blocks, which are then... dispatched efficiently to a Mac's available cores for faster processing."

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Fortune has a story that's getting plenty of attention claiming that Google "seriously considered" an opportunity to purchase 19% of the NY Times that is being held by hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners. Of course, no one seems to explain why Google would seriously consider such an investment. It seems like any analysis, whether serious or not, would suggest that such an investment would make almost no sense for Google, and almost certainly would cause more trouble than it was worth. It would, for example, freak out other newspapers, who despite their sudden desire to get Google to fund them, would claim that Google was unfairly favoring the NY Times at their expense. It would also raise all sorts of questions about how Google runs a content play. While Google has experimented with content plays with things like Knol, the company's focus has always been on enabling content creation -- not on funding content itself. In fact, it's this fundamental misunderstanding that has newspapers incorrectly thinking Google is trying to kill them, rather than recognizing it's actually helping them.

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Recently on Offworld we saw the addition of a new guest blogger, with Mike Nowak bringing us Rome's Il Creatore and his lo-fi Commodore 64, SIDStation, talk-box, and vocoder pixel pop, and saw The Wire's Clay "sheeeit" Davis re-emerge as Doc, the coach of Punch-Out!! revival star Little Mac (above). We also saw the fruits of Klei Entertainment's labor in bringing the full weight of traditional animation to their beat-em-up Shank, moved on the last chance to pick up another gloriously cartoon-y game, The Behemoth's Alien Hominid, and found and fancied another fantastic Grim Fandango custom vinyl toy. Finally, we saw grandfather of home videogame Ralph Baer take on the retro-futurist version of his original creation in style, a low-bit mountain climbing game design loosely based on an Akira Kurosawa short, and the creators of the masochistic arcade game PainStation return with the MoshPit Amp, a music peripheral that cranks its tubes to 11 the harder you headbang until the echo effect builds to the point that the pyrotechnics flair and the amp moshes itself. And our 'one shot's for the day: the gorgeously ultra-vivid early days of similarly moshable metal game Brutal Legend, and the founder of Harvard College reimagined as Halo's Master Chief.

Holdstrong writes "New Hampshire's iconic natural rock formation, the Old Man of the Mountain, fell from its mountain-side perch back in 2003. Award-winning architect Francis D. Treves is proposing a monument to replace it. His idea would feature a replica of the Old Man made out of 250 suspended glass panels and would allow visitors to enter the structure in order to gain views of the valley below. The design has received harsh criticism from the public, in part, Mr. Treves believes, due to the fact that quality images and accurate information about his design have been hard to come by. Replacing a beloved natural monument with a man-made one is sure to bring out emotions. Will a clearer understanding of the design help sway public opinion?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While lots of lawyers like to dump trademark law into the same category as patents and copyright as "intellectual property," it's somewhat misleading. They come from entirely separate parts of the law and the purpose of trademark is entirely different than patents or copyright. Patents and copyright is to create incentives to create. Trademark is designed as consumer protection. Lumping them together, unfortunately, has made companies look to treat trademark law more like patents and copyright, and that's been a problem. Unfortunately, over the past few decades, this has resulted in an extension of trademark law beyond its original intentions (specifically the whole concept of "dilution" which is a relatively recent addition to trademark law).

Of course, it's also true on the flipside, that criticism of trademark is coming from the same folks who criticize copyright and patent law. The latest, as sent in by many of you, is an interesting piece in PC World suggesting that the open source community should be just as angry about trademark law as they are about patents and copyrights. I'm not sure that's true. While I do agree they should be angry about the misuse of trademark law, and any attempt to make it more like copyright or patents, the fundamental nature of trademark law (to avoid consumer confusion and potential harm from that confusion) still makes sense. The problem is when people falsely believe that trademark law allows you total exclusion, rather than only in cases likely to cause confusion. So, let's absolutely fight against the abuse of trademark law... but it's not necessary to throw out its initial intended purpose.

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This chap eats rocks, sand, and bricks.

It must be mighty cold where these people hail from.

Gallery of people in heavy knit clothing

I'm incredibly impressed with this video of a few English youngsters hacking together some Arduino + plush toys to make their imagined scenarios. Peter Kirn put it best when it wrote about it on Create Digital Motion:

Media artists and design houses around the world: you've got nothing on this group of eight to eleven-year old English girls, bravely exploring interaction design, soft toy hacks, and physical computing using the open source Arduino platform to animate cats, mice, and elephants.

Just how comfortable are these kids with technology? Comfortable enough that a robotic, killer elephant with glowing eyes is "cute."

Give them a couple of decades, and I think they'll invent Cylons. I can't wait.

Now I have to sing "I believe that children are our future..."

Take it from me, one of the only female writers for Make: Online, when I say "you go, girls!" (Yes, I believe that's the only time I've ever used that expression.)

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Perhaps the most notable thing about mobile TV is how it's been right on the cusp of huge market success (if you believe its cheerleaders) for about five years. The fact remains that mobile TV isn't popular, and people just don't seem interested. But don't worry: the 2010 World Cup will make mobile TV popular, at least in Africa, says an exec from Nokia Siemens. Of course, that's the same thing people said before the Beijing Olympics, before the Euro 2008 soccer tournament, and before the last World Cup in 2006. What's different this time around? Apparently the fact that it's being held in South Africa will drive mobile TV adoption on the continent -- but in markets like Kenya, where the average monthly mobile spend is $4-$7, it's still hard to see much future for the services.

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

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gerddie writes "Cryptohippie has published what may be called a first attempt to describe the 'electronic police state' (PDF). Based on information available from different organizations such as Electronic Privacy Information Center, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom House, countries were rated on 17 criteria with regard to how close they are already to an electronic police state. The rankings are for 2008. Not too surprisingly, one finds China, North Korea, Belarus, and Russia at the top of the list. But the next slots are occupied by the UK (England and Wales), the US, Singapore, Israel, France, and Germany." This is a good start, but it would be good to see details of their methodology. They do provide the raw data (in XLS format), but no indication of the weightings they apply to the elements of "electronic police state" behavior they are scoring.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a recap of recent episodes of our daily original video program, in case you missed them in the firehose of blog fixins that is Boing Boing.

* The Throbbing Gristle Interview (Download MP4 or watch on YouTube): Richard Metzger and I interview the godfathers (and mothers) of Industrial Music once dismissed by a British lawmaker as "wreckers of civilization." Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge speak with us about the technical and creative underpinnings of the legendary "art damage" ensemble. We dig into some of the hacked-together synth and sound modification machines built back in the early 1970s, like "Thee Gristleizer."

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* ARPANET turns 40, and Vintage Computers in Slovenia (Download MP4 or watch on YouTube):

ARPANET turns 40 this year, so we're celebrating internet history in the months to come with a look back at the people, devices, and places that are part of our shared internet history. We revisit an episode hosted by monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner at the "Cyberpipe" museum of internet history in Slovenia, where computers and networking devices from those early years can be found.

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* Ninja Assassin - John Gaeta on Hybrid Entertainment Merging Film and Games (Download MP4 or watch on YouTube).

Academy Award winning visual effects guru John Gaeta (Matrix, Speed Racer) offers a sneak peek inside his newest project, Ninja Assassin. Along the way, we explore a broader realm of questions about the future of games, movies, and interactive entertainment. Includes super badass stunt footage!

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Where to Find Boing Boing Video: RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic).

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Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing Video is brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

jamie found this visualization of air travel, which might be usable in some sort of proxy for the spread of flu virus (to choose a random application). Jer Thorp, an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada (and a former geneticist), searched Twitter for the phrase "Just landed in" and obtained lat/lon coordinates for both the indicated airport and the Twitter user's home location, as recorded in their Twitter profile. He them produced videos of multi-hour stretches of air travel that had been latent in the Twitter information stream.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Having written about copyright issues for so long, we've started to notice some trends. For instance, many people try to twist copyright law to the point where it only applies when it helps them, and suddenly doesn't apply when it helps them not to have it apply. In fact, this is so common that many people falsely assume that the same is true of us -- claiming that we'd be pissed if people copied our content (it's the usual retort to those who are unsure of copyright's benefits). Of course, for us, it's not true. If people want to copy our content for fun or for profit, they're free to do so. Yet, it is true that we often see people who should know better freak out when it's "their content" being used. These scenarios never make anyone look good.

You may recall the group NOM, an advocacy group fighting against gay marriage, that we talked about on this site a few weeks ago because of a bogus takedown notice it sent to YouTube on content that it almost certainly did not own the copyright on. NOM also seemed to have no sense of fair use.

How quickly things change.

NOM had no problem then taking 3 seconds of a clip from the blogger known as Perez Hilton and putting it in an advertisement. Perez Hilton the played the role of the copyright bully, sending a highly questionable takedown notice, claiming the 3 seconds was copyright infringement. Except, as pretty much anyone would tell you, the use was almost certainly fair use, and if anyone should know that, it's Perez Hilton. Yet, it was rather amusing to see NOM, just weeks earlier a staunch questionable takedown notice issuer, suddenly finding themselves on the flipside, defending fair use against a DMCA takedown.

And, how quickly things change again. Because just as Hilton is claiming that using 3 seconds of his own video is copyright infringement and not fair use, Ben Sheffner notes that Hilton has posted a 10 minute video of CNN footage, including his own Perez TV overlay and his own pre-roll ad at the beginning, along with a single sentence beneath the video.

Personally, I think both uses should be perfectly fine (the law, as it currently stands, is more likely to accept NOM's use, but not Hilton's), it's still illustrative of the way many people view copyright. It's an issue to protect you, but it's a hindrance when it gets in your way. Of course, we see this quite often with politicians. It's why Nicolas Sarkozy, who is pushing for incredibly strict new laws relating to copyright in France was found to have ignored copyright law when it suited him. We saw the same thing last year when a Canadian politician who was pushing for the Canadian DMCA was caught infringing on copyright himself.

While some claim it's just hypocrisy, I think it actually represents one of the fundamental flaws of copyright itself (or, really, any monopoly system). Monopolies aren't being used to create incentives to create. They're used to stifle others and to "protect." These days, almost everyone uses them and views them as tools of protection rather than an incentive to create. When you get so far away from the entire purpose of copyright law, you have a system ripe for widespread abuse.

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Love this kid-friendly Mr Bump ice cold-pack -- a perfect merch tie-in!

Mr. Men Bruise Soothers. Mr. Bump

A reader writes, "Cornell University Library just announced that it will now allow free reuse of public domain works copied from its collection without the permission and license fees it formerly required."

"The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks."

The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell's donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

"Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works."

Cornell University Library Removes All Restrictions on Use of Public Domain Reproductions

Lyse, a wildly successful Norwegian ISP, is getting fiber into peoples' houses by getting them to dig their own trenches:

Lyse's business model is different from companies like Verizon, which is currently rolling out fiber across its service area and then trying to sign up customers. Lyse instead sends people into unserved areas, knocks on all the doors, and passes out information on the new fiber service. Only when 60 percent of the people in an area sign up in advance for the service does Lyse start the actual fiber install...

In addition to entering an area with tremendous support already lined up, Lyse also does something innovative: it allows prospective customers to dig their own fiber trenches from the street to their homes. In return, customers can save about $400. "They can arrange things just the way they want," says Herbjørn Tjeltveit of Lyse, which makes for happier customers; apparently, nothing angers a Norwegian more than having some faceless corporation tunnel through his flower garden.

Norwegian ISP: dig your own fiber trench, save $400

Ofcom, the UK equivalent to the FCC, has a new report that identifies baby monitors and other wireless devices as serious interferers with urban WiFi. I've got WiFi and a baby-monitor in my tiny London flat and I can't say I've ever noticed the issue -- on the other hand, my spark-gap generator seems to really do some interesting stuff to the network.

"There is a view that some domestic users generate excessive amounts of Wi-Fi traffic, denying access to other users," claims the report from wireless specialists, Mass Consutling. "Our research suggests that this is not the case, rather the affected parties are almost certainly seeing interference from non-Wi-Fi devices such as microwave ovens, Audio Video senders, security cameras or baby monitors."

"The greatest concentration of different radio types tends to occur in urban centres, so interference tends to increase with population density.

"However, interference also occurs in low population density areas. It only requires a single device, such as an analogue video sender, to severely affect Wi-Fi services within a short range, such that a single large building or cluster of houses can experience difficulties with using a single Wi-Fi channel."

Baby monitors killing urban Wi-Fi (via /.)

One of the Pirate Bay's founders has vowed to pay off his court-ordered fine (if it isn't successfully appealed, I assume) by getting net-users to send tiny sums to the entertainment industry's law-firm, thus swamping them with transaction fees that could cost them millions:

A friend of anakata told Blog Pirate that the bank account to which the payments are directed has only 1000 free transfers, after which any transfers have a surcharge of 2 SEK for the account holder. Any internet-fee payments made after the first 1000, which includes the law firm's ordinary transfers, will instead of giving 1 SEK, cost 1 SEK to the law firm. Since Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå is a small firm, all the transactions are handled by hand. Handling all payments will be time consuming, costing the law firm in productivity. Maybe it will even affect their success in other cases...

Additionally if after paying the internet-fee you determine that your payment was erroneous, Swedish law states that you can request the money back, putting an additional load on Danowsky's law firm.

Pirate Bay Founder Devises DDo$ Attack (via /.)