dasButcher writes "President Obama is expected to name a new cybersecurity czar sometime soon. This person will be charged with defending the digital boards from attack by hostile nation-states and terrorist organizations. But the question Larry Walsh asks is: Who really wants the job? The previous three people who held the post barely made a dent in solving the security problems. Government bureaucracy and private sector resistance make it nearly impossible to find any measure of meaningful success in this job, he writes." Reader eatcajun contributes a related link to the long-awaited US cyberspace policy review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been seeing a growing realization about the clear conflicts between copyright and freedom of expression -- an issue that has often been brushed aside, but in a world where nearly all communication suddenly is covered by copyright, it becomes a much bigger issue. Michael Scott points us to a UK-based study that doesn't focus on copyright and free expression specifically, but on DRM and how it limits free expression in the UK. While this may not seem directly relevant to copyright law, it absolutely is, especially with the push for global laws that make any circumvention of DRM -- even if for legal uses -- illegal. As such, DRM that prevents freedom of expression is using copyright law to back that up, which can be a violation of First Amendment rights (yes, I recognize the First Amendment is a US issue, and this study is in the UK, but it's likely the results of the study apply to the US as well).

The study says that there hasn't been a catastrophic blockage of free expression, but clearly some had occurred, even though technology measures could have allowed the expression without seriously compromising the purpose of the DRM. More importantly, the study found that those who were stymied from performing legal expression due to DRM rarely used mechanisms provided by UK law to complain. This isn't that surprising, but it does make an important point: gov't officials are probably unaware of how much legal activity is stifled due to DRM, backed via gov't enforcement of copyright laws. While there are many other areas of study to be done around these issues, this is a worthwhile study in looking at how copyright and free expression can conflict.

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Before people came in for Education Day at Maker Faire, I had a chance to talk with Collin Cunningham about the projects he has build and is showing in the Maker Shed.

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I think it's self-evident that there is a lot of value in being on Twitter's Suggested User List, especially for publications that run ads on the pages they link to from posts to Twitter. And many of the most-followed Twitter users do that. You can see that if you look at the main 100TWT site, the posts of the 100 most popular Twitter users.

http://100TWT.com/

I wrote this app so I could get a sense of how these feeds were being used. Some even run outright ads in their feeds, not links to pages that have ads. AdventureGirl, with 493K followers, is an excellent example.

Jacob Harris, a systems guy at the NY Times, wonders if being on the SUL is like being linked to. I don't think so. There is no web equivalent to the SUL. It's as if Google seeded their search engine so that every web newbie, when they searched for anything, got 20 of 200 sites in every response. There would be no correlation between the sites returned and the query. Further, the power of these initial sites in recommending other sites would be almost absolute. New users wouldn't have any other way to find things on the web other than the first few sites they got in their very first Google search. It's so out-there that it's hard to even explain, the web could never have worked that way, people simply wouldn't have gotten the point.

Another experiment would be to walk around the office at the NYT and ask every Twitter user if they would mind having more followers. Don't say why you're asking, just ask. If they all say they don't care how many people follow them, I'll buy every one of them a bagel next time I'm in NY.

I couldn't discuss this on Twitter because there's no way to explore any subtle subject 140 characters at a time. But I'm willing to discuss it here, as long as we're uncovering new ideas, and not rehashing stuff.

Over at Playboy.com, the inimitable Jack Boulware surveys the greatest of the military rock bands. Some are "official" while others, called "kix bands" by the Navy, are in it just for the, er, kicks. From Playboy.com:

Hang Ten aka US Navy Pacific Fleet Rock Band

Based at: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Members: Nine

Official Description: “An extensive repertoire encompassing popular music from the 1960's to today's latest hits…everything from rock and pop to disco and light jazz”

Playlist: Guns N’ Roses, Gwen Stefani, Bob Marley

Original Songs: None listed

Bonus: Navy publicity requested control and approval over this story!

"Battle of the Battle Bands"

miller60 writes "Many companies have saved money by leasing wholesale 'plug and play' data center space instead of building their own facilities. But the credit crunch has slowed the construction of new data centers, and analysts say this will create a shortage of data center space in 2010 in key markets like northern Virginia and Silicon Valley where demand exceeds supply. The situation is already becoming critical for companies with large space requirements, as indicated by a flurry of leasing recently in northern Virginia, where the remaining space may be quickly absorbed by government stimulus projects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just in time for the Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, my Institute for the Future colleague Alex Pang wrote a fascinating essay about tinkering. I love the word "tinker." Back in Cincinnati, my oldest brother Mark, a lifelong maker who is now a research scientist and physician, spent his teen years digging around in an electronics hobbyist supply shop called The Tinker where resistors and capacitors were sold by the pound. From Vodafone Receiver:

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

What is tinkering? Discovering that certain snack tins can be used to make an antenna that extends the range of your wi-fi network, using electric toothbrush motors to power small robots, building a high-altitude balloon that takes video of the edge of space, are all examples of tinkering. It is technical work and a cultural attitude. Tinkering is customizing software and stuff; making new combinations of things that work better than their parts; and discovering new capabilities in or uses for existing products. Despite its fascination with things and bits, it is resolutely human-focused: you don't make things 'better' in some dry technical sense, you make them work better for you. Tinkerers modify everything from cars, computers, and cellphones, to virtual worlds and computer code. They are driven by a desire to experiment, to make existing technologies more useful, and to customize them to better suit users' needs.

According to MIT professor Mitch Resnick, tinkering might look at first like traditional engineering, but it is very different. Both are about designing and making things; but engineering tends to be top-down, linear, structured, abstract and rules-based - a highly formal, organized activity, meant to be carried out in (and in the service of) large organizations. Tinkering, in contrast, is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, practical and improvisational: informal and disorganized, accessible to anyone who is willing to learn (and fail) and it doesn't follow any plan too closely.

"Tinkering to the future"

05.29.09 : feline zen 2009

Sorry I'm Late is a fantastic stop-motion short film by Tomas Mankovsky. It was shot from above using a still camera. (Thanks, Carrie!)

@hellobigfoot. Usually, him one does following, but now it is your turn.

If you don't have any of the books already, do yourself a favor. If nothing else, you can use one as a shield when he sneaks into your tent and tries to make off with all your granola and bullets. Here they are:
* In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot
* Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir
* Bigfoot: I Not Dead

(Thanks, Graham Roumieu, and thanks for turning me on to the books like 5 years ago, Susannah Breslin!)

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

Recently my jeweler daughter, Isabel, made me a great “Swiss Writing Knife” with symbols of seven of the things I’m interested in: A Zhabotinsky scroll (for cellular automata), the Mandelbrot set (for fractals), a robot, A Square (for the fourth dimension), Infinity, a UFO, a Cone Shell (for diving, cellular automata, universal automatism, and SF). It’s gold-colored metal and the little “blades” swing in and out, with the icons in silver-colored metal riveted on.

I tend to adjust the knife according to what kind of story or novel I'm working on, and I keep it by my keyboard as a good luck amulet, or an embodied muse.

Isabel's business, Isabel Jewelry is in Pinedale, Wyoming, and she makes most of her sales over the web. One of her customers was in fact Boing's own Cory Doctorow, who had her custom-make a pair of crypto-device wedding rings.

As a sometime zinester, Isabel has a cool drawings site as well---check out her "Get Back" story about thongs. Isabel's graphic novel, "Unfurling: The World's Longest Comic Strip," will be on display this November at the SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco, all four hundred or so feet of it!

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Much gear is currently being set up, tested, and generally readied for tomorrow's incoming crowds. Already many awesome sites to be seen around the fairgrounds. I grabbed a few pics while surveying the state of affairs - check them out for yourself in the Flickr photoset.

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Turns out you can bend lumber into some pretty amazing shapes if you first soften it by exposure to steam. Just how long it needs to "soak" in the steam varies with the species and thickness of the wood in question, but the necessary equipment is dirt cheap. This great tutorial over at the Dewalt website explains how to build a wood steaming cabinet from a few bucks worth of materials. Author, engineer, and carpenter Tony Maund says:

This entire project took about 4 hours to make and cost less than $20. This should last a number of years or more.

A piece of inexpensive, easy, homebrew equipment that will last for years and let me do amazing new things with wood? Where do I sign?

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ruphus13 writes "Amazon has been one of the early movers in the cloud computing space, with its AWS offerings, including S3 and EC2. Now, there is a lot of chatter around the imminent open sourcing of all its APIs and services and the impact that will have on the other 'clouds' out there — public or private. From the article, 'Amazon faces significant threats from open source cloud computing efforts if it pursues a purely proprietary path [...] Amazon can't ignore the cost advantages and diversity of product offerings that open source players are already offering in the cloud computing space. The company's best move is to open source its tools, which will end up diversifying them, play on a level field in terms of cost with the open source alternatives, and charge for services. Absent these moves, the company will lose potential customers to free, open source alternatives [...] Word is Amazon's legal team is currently 'investigating' open sourcing their various web services API's including EC2, S3, etc.', although these have not been confirmed by Amazon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pick The Perp is a fun site where the aim is pick the perpetrator of a crime from a line up.

"Booking mug shots and related information is gathered from arrest records from open sheriff's web sites in the United States of America. Those appearing here have not been convicted of the arrest charge and are presumed innocent. Do not rely on this site to determine any person's actual criminal record. "

Pick The Perp (Thanks, Steven Leckart!)

Ima Fish writes " Seattlepi.com has a posting on its blog section from "the News Chick" about how broadcast news "plagiarizes" print news. Here's the gist of the complaint:

"Print journalists consider it plagiarism. Broadcasters call it a "rewrite."

Here's how it works in nearly every news market in the country. Print reporters do research and interviews for a story that ends up being about 800 words or so. Broadcasters rewrite and condense the paper's story to around 50 words - sometimes adding their own audio or video - then present it as their own."

Condensing 800 words down to 50 words is not plagiarism, if the word "plagiarism" is to have any real meaning, of course.

The person complaining the most is Seattle's Tri-City Herald editor Ken Robertson. He's careful not to use words such as "stolen" and only goes as far as to say his stories were "lifted." Which makes sense because even he knows he has absolutely no copyright claim on the news itself. But if he knows that, exactly what is he complaining about? That he didn't get his pat on the back when an important news story got wider coverage?!

And I'm reminded of the recent postings involving Aretha Franklin and the producers of Britain's Got Talent. Franklin, the producers, and any newspaper writer got exactly what she or he bargained for. Franklin looked fashionable. The producers got paid for producing their show. And a newspaper writer got paid for writing stories. Why should they be given any credit beyond that? Franklin didn't make the hat fashionable. The producers did not make Boyle an incredible singer. And newspaper writers do not create news, they report on news. The sense of entitlement on such issues is quite bizarre."

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Many people have written to tell us about the patent infringement lawsuit that resulted in a $200 million judgement against Microsoft by a small Toronto firm called i4i. Techdirt has a line on the details of the suit where the patent in question is for "separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document." i4i argues that this covers basic XML editing to the tune of $98 per application. "It's quite troubling that doing something as simple as adding an XML editor should infringe on a patent, but what's even more troubling is that the court somehow ruled that such an editor was worth $98 in the copies of Microsoft Word where it was used. An XML editor. $98. And people say patent awards aren't out of sync with reality?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adafruit has a new posting with a link to their latest Drawdio Instructable, a new Instructables Drawdio group, and an announcement of an exhibit being mounted at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts. They're doing a Drawdio exhibit this summer, from July 25th to September 25th, as part of "Freeze! 2009 International MedTech Art Show." Just post your Drawdio project to the group, all submissions that have some original form factor (even superficial modifications count as original) will be included in the next Drawdio video and one entry will be chosen to be displayed in the Drawdio museum exhibit.

If you're at Maker Faire this weekend, stop by booth number 134 in Expo Hall and meet Drawdio inventor Jay Silver.

Post your Drawdio projects!

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A bunch of folks have been sending in various versions of the fact that News Corps. digital media boss Jon Miller apparently said that "free doesn't work," though that isn't quite what he actually said. He said that ad-supported content doesn't work. Now, it may be true that he's making the (false) assumption that the only way to make money off of free content is advertising, but that's not the same as saying "free" doesn't work. Either way, I'd argue he's wrong. Ad supported free content has been shown for ages to work in various different ways if you do it right. Perhaps the problem is that he's not doing it right. Either way, his suggestions for where News Corp. is heading don't sound very promising:

"It's pretty clear that there has to be some recognition of value," said Jon Miller.... Miller noted that Web companies will have to figure out a way to charge consumers for content they have grown accustomed to getting for free, noting that cable television service providers learned how to charge for television shows. Miller also said he expected to see the rise of Internet micro-payments.

If there's one nearly universal truth out there, it's that you can never go back to charging for content people were used to getting for free. You may be able to charge for new content or services, but never what they're already used to getting for free.

But the real root of the problem is Miller's opening statement. That there needs "to be some recognition of value." There is a recognition of value. Otherwise people wouldn't consume your content. But that doesn't mean they'll pay for it. Notice what he doesn't say. He never says that they need to give people a reason to buy. He's talking about putting up a paywall, not providing a reason to buy. That's destined to fail.

The reason that cable providers learned to charge for television shows was because there was a scarcity there... and even then there's a big push to break out of that and move to free television shows online as well. Trying to cram the internet into that dying model sounds like a terrible idea.

The most ironic thing about all of this is that, if anyone should understand all of this, it's Jon Miller. After all, he was the one who realized that AOL's walled gardens were killing the company, and put in place its strategy of opening up and going free. So now he wants to do the opposite for Fox Interactive? Good luck!

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Hugh Pickens writes "Thomas O'Toole writes that President Obama's choice for Associate Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, authored several cyberlaw opinions regarding online contracting law, domain names, and computer privacy while on the Second Circuit. Judge Sotomayor wrote the court's 2002 opinion in Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., an important online contracting case. In Specht, the Second Circuit declined to enforce contract terms (PDF) that were available behind a hyperlink that could only be seen by scrolling down on a Web page. 'We are not persuaded that a reasonably prudent offeree in these circumstances would have known of the existence of license terms,' wrote Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor wrote an opinion in a domain name case, Storey v. Cello Holdings LLC in 2003 that held that an adverse outcome in an administrative proceeding under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy did not preclude a later-initiated federal suit (PDF) brought under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). In Leventhal v. Knapek, a privacy case, Judge Sotomayor wrote for the Second Circuit that New York state agency officials and investigators did not violate a state employee's Fourth Amendment rights when they searched the contents of his office computer (PDF) for evidence of unauthorized use of state equipment. While none of these cases may mean much as far as what Judge Sotomayor will do as an Associate Supreme Court Justice 'if confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court,' writes O'Toole."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Instructables, they're gearing up for their Art of Sound Contest:

Music is absolutely essential for creativity - it inspires new ideas, helps us to create and build, and provides a soundtrack for life.

That's why we've teamed up with Zalytron, Create Digital Music, and Bleep Labs to bring you the Art of Sound Contest. Show us something amazing and music-related, and win an awesome set of hand-built custom speakers or a musical instrument kit!

This contest is open to any project that creates something beautiful with or around sound. Whether you're into homemade/modified instruments, circuit-bending, speakers, sound activation, or anything else, this contest is for you. Simply create, modify, actuate, craft, decorate, enhance, display, amplify, or visualize sound, and tell us how and why you did it. It can be your take on a classic project, or something entirely new and unique - it's up to you!

Now show us your original instrument, your tricked-out subwoofer, or your sound-responsive wall of LEDs! Be thorough, and document your project well so others can follow in your footsteps. Share your skills and experience to help inspire others, expand the possibilities of both sound and art, and win some fabulous prizes!

Enter for your chance to win one of the speaker sets above, plus more prizes!

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My mom (who has a Ph.D. in early childhood education) sez, "What does teaching and learning look like in the 21st Century? What about 21st Century learning spaces? How can Bloom's Taxonomy be applied to the Digital world? Check out Andrew Churches' wiki where 21st educators are invited to share in this emerging conversation."

Educational Origami (Thanks, Mom!)

Glyn sez, "If you're in Europe you may be considering who you should vote for in the up coming European elections. To help you the Open Rights Group sent a questionnaire to UK MEP candidates, asking them where they stand on digital rights issues."

Does your privacy, fair copyright, data retention and keeping the internet open matter to your MEP candidates? We've asked the main candidates what they think about four issues ORG campaigns on. You can see how the parties have done - both how many have responded, and what they have said. You can then judge for yourself who deserves your vote. You can also help by asking candidates who haven't responded to give us an answer, which we will then display on the website. All the candidate details are publicly available from party or campaign websites, and where we have found them, we have also added these to our site. If you do contact a candidate, please remember to be polite and helpful.

Do Your MEP Candidates Agree with ORG? (Thanks, Glyn!)

Update: Victory! -- the treaty proposal survived this meeting and will be back on the agenda at the next one. We've got a couple months to lobby our governments and make sure that the next time they show up, they don't embarrass us by opposing this.

Right now, in Geneva, at the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, history is being made. For the first time in WIPO history, the body that creates the world's copyright treaties is attempting to write a copyright treaty dedicated to protecting the interests of copyright users, not just copyright owners.

At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages), introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay. This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn't want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it's possible for disabled people to get access to the written word?

The USA, that's who. The Obama administration's negotiators have joined with a rogue's gallery of rich country trade representatives to oppose protection for blind people. Other nations and regions opposing the rights of blind people include Canada and the EU.

Update: Also opposing rights for disabled people: Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway.

Update 2: Countries that are on the right side of this include, "Latin American and Caribbean region including (Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Jamaica) as well as Asia and Africa."

Update 3: Canada is upset with me. That's fine, I'm upset with Canada.

Activists at WIPO are desperate to get the word out. They're tweeting madly from the negotiation (technically called the 18th session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights) publishing editorials on the Huffington Post, etc.

Here's where you come in: this has to get wide exposure, to get cast as broadly as possible, so that it will find its way into the ears of the obscure power-brokers who control national trade-negotiators.

I don't often ask readers to do things like this, but please, forward this post to people you know in the US, Canada and the EU, and ask them to reblog, tweet, and spread the word, especially to government officials and activists who work on disabled rights. We know that WIPO negotiations can be overwhelmed by citizen activists -- that's how we killed the Broadcast Treaty negotiation a few years back -- and with your help, we can make history, and create a world where copyright law protects the public interest.

I am attending a meeting in Geneva of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This evening the United States government, in combination with other high income countries in "Group B" is seeking to block an agreement to discuss a treaty for persons who are blind or have other reading disabilities.

The proposal for a treaty is supported by a large number of civil society NGOs, the World Blind Union, the National Federation of the Blind in the US, the International DAISY Consortium, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D), Bookshare.Org, and groups representing persons with reading disabilities all around the world.

The main aim of the treaty is to allow the cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading disabilities, using special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type. These works, which are expensive to make, are typically created under national exceptions to copyright law that are specifically written to benefit persons with disabilities...

The opposition from the United States and other high income countries is due to intense lobbying from a large group of publishers that oppose a "paradigm shift," where treaties would protect consumer interests, rather than expand rights for copyright owners.

The Obama Administration was lobbied heavily on this issue, including meetings with high level White House officials. Assurances coming into the negotiations this week that things were going in the right direction have turned out to be false, as the United States delegation has basically read from a script written by lobbyists for publishers, extolling the virtues of market based solutions, ignoring mountains of evidence of a "book famine" and the insane legal barriers to share works.

Obama Joins Group to Block Treaty for Blind and Other Reading Disabilities

COPYRIGHT EXCEPTIONS AND LIMITATIONS

Twitter feed for #sccr18

PROPOSAL BY BRAZIL, ECUADOR AND PARAGUAY, RELATING TO LIMITATIONS AND EXCEPTIONS: TREATY PROPOSED BY THE WORLD BLIND UNION (WBU)

Pedro Paranaguá's notes in English and Brazilian Portuguese

Make this low-cost camera stabilizer for smooth, professional looking video.
Thanks go to Johnny Lee for the original article in MAKE, Volume 01.
To download The $14 Video Camera Stabilizer MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the complete $14 Video Camera Stabilizer article in MAKE, Volume 01.
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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[Photo from Connors934 on Flickr]

There are these great bikes at Maker Faire from XtraCycle. There is an extension that is bolted on in the place of the rear wheel. The chain is also extended so that it can reach the rear sprocket. Instead of a rack, there is a huge back deck, and along the sides are some nice panniers. Behind the seat is a set of handlebars for a second rider. The design is similar to the WorldBike.

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Things are going great guns at the fairgrounds and the excitement is palpable. It promises to be an off-the-hook weekend, maybe even several hooks! If you're coming to the Faire, to make sure your travels to and from are not *too* exciting, before you head out, make sure to check the travel info on the Faire site (car | rail, bus, bike) and follow us on our Twitter traffic channel @FaireTraffic. It will include info on both up-to-the-moment traffic conditions and parking info.

Also, check out Becky's Ask MAKE column from a few weeks ago for useful tips on prepping for the Faire in general. A little pre-Faire planning can really make a difference in having a more enjoyable experience.

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MaryBethP writes with some tasty prototype photos and info about the new OLPC spin off "Pixel Qi" that is combining the best of e-ink and traditional LCD displays. "The screen can work as a traditional backlit LCD when indoors, can have that backlight disabled to be perfectly visible outdoors (shown after the break), and, as its pièce de résistance, can be toggled into an energy-efficient 'epaper' mode. How exactly the company is fitting these seemingly disparate slices of technology into a single 10.1-inch screen is something of a mystery, but we're guessing much will be answered next week ahead of a planned product launch by the end of the year. Color us intrigued."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, we pointed out that the RIAA was going around telling district attorneys and other law enforcement folks that they should start looking to see if they could use "piracy" charges as a front to get search warrants of suspected drug houses when there wasn't enough evidence to get a warrant having to do with drugs. It seems that some in law enforcement are following through on that. Michael Scott points us to a troubling lawsuit involving just such a situation. Apparently, narcotics officers were told to try to pull over a certain vehicle on any sort of traffic infraction, on the belief that there were drugs in the vehicle. While there was a tiny amount of marijuana, it wasn't enough to do anything. However... there was a big box of what turned out to be counterfeit DVDs. The guy was arrested and a warrant was issued to search his house -- and eventually he was charged with copyright infringement for the DVDs. The guy argued that the search of his car and house were a violation, but the link above includes an important point by Shourin Sen:

Mere possession of infringing DVDs isn't illegal. You can drive around with a truck full of them. You just can't reproduce or distribute ten or more infringing copies of a copyrighted work which have a total retail value of more than $2,500. If it wasn't the marijuana, what in fact was the Defendant arrested for? And was there probable cause to search the defendants house based only on the possession of material he was legally allowed to carry?

These are all good questions...

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Last month, I discovered that underground grotesque comics virtuosoBasil Wolverton had produced a series of Biblical illustrations, collected by Fantagraphics in a volume called The Wolverton Bible. Fantagraphics were kind enough to send me a review copy of the book and all I can say is "Holy cats!"

Wolverton wasn't just a funnybooks illustrator: he was also a member of a millenarian evangelical church called the Worldwide Church of God, a sect that believed in obeying Old Testament lifestyle laws and the literal truth of Revelations. So it was natural that Wolverton ended up with a regular, paid gig illustrating a series of Bible stories for kids and adults published in the Church's magazines like Plain Truth and in booklets with titles like Prophecy and The Book of Revelations, overseen by Church leader Herbert Armstrong, who had converted Wolverton to his faith.

Wolverton appears to have had little trouble squaring his faith with his legendary grotesque drawings (his notorious Life Magazine spoof for MAD was so freaky it inspired legal threats) -- he felt that the secular was secular, and could be lighthearted and weird as you wanted -- but he was also clearly a believer in the gravitas of the faith, as can be seen from these drawings.

Wolverton and Armstrong wanted to create a set of illustrated Bible stories that went beyond the whitewashed, cheerful kids' books of the day, to show the Old Testament for what it is: a book full of blood, thunder and revenge. Accordingly, Wolverton's illustrations, done in the same unmistakable, stippled style that characterized his grotesqueries, show off the grim, the violent, and the destructive in the Old Testament, putting the blood and guts in the spotlight.

The result is like no illustrated Bible you've ever seen. Goliath is a horrific giant cyclops; the drowning sinners trying to claw their way onto Noah's Ark are caught in flashbulb moments of terror and agony; Saul's army rends the raw meat of their slaughter as they try to avoid starvation; the mutilated corpses of Baanah and Rechab dangle from nooses in Hebron; the boiled heads of donkeys emerge from the cooking pot as starving Israelites look on with hungry eyes; Daniel's horned beast crushes a mountain of screaming men and women as it stalks the land; and in Revelations, the rains of fire, floods and famine lay waste to cities as horribly burned famine victims scream and claw at their flesh.

And the Passover story, of course, gets its own grisly treatment. This isn't your grandfather's Haggadah, is what I'm trying to say.

This is a side of Wolverton I never suspected, but it is perfectly him, humorous, grisly, mad and wonderful.

The Wolverton Bible

Mad Prophet (blog post with nice scans from the book)

An anonymous reader writes "The monetization of Java has begun. Sun released the Java 1.6.0_14 JDK and JRE today which include a cool new garbage collector called G1. There is just one catch. Even though it is included in the distribution, the release notes state 'Although G1 is available for use in this release, note that production use of G1 is only permitted where a Java support contract has been purchased.' So the Oracle touch is already taking effect. Will OpenJDK be doomed to a feature-castrated backwater while all the good stuff goes into the new Java SE for Business commercial version?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun writes to mention that ASUS has just designed their own monster graphics card based on the GeForce GTX 295. While the card retains the GeForce GTX 295 name, same device ID, and remains compatible with existing NVIDIA drivers, ASUS has made a couple of modifications to call its own. "the company used two G200-350-B3 graphics processors, the same ones that make the GeForce GTX 285. The GPUs have all the 240 shader processors enabled, and also have the complete 512-bit GDDR3 memory interface enabled. This dual-PCB monstrosity holds 32 memory chips, and 4 GB of total memory (each GPU accesses 2 GB of it). Apart from these, each GPU system uses the same exact clock speeds as the GeForce GTX 285: 648/1476/2400 MHz (core/shader/memory)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We mentioned recently that Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association, is a good friend of those who are worried about companies taking away consumer rights in the tech field. For years, he's been a strong voice against entertainment companies trying to expand and extend copyright laws to cut off innovative new products. Now he's written up a worthwhile rant on how copyright is being used to hold back innovation. He points out that he's been fighting this battle for his entire career, as his first job was working on the famous Sony Betabmax case, where Hollywood tried (and, thankfully for everyone including Hollywood, failed) to outlaw the VCR. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's an excerpt:

The "fair use" right to manage content has allowed the Internet to grow and new companies to be created. But the content lobby disagrees. They told Congress that copyright should stop an individual from sharing an email without the creator's permission. They argued that computers copy when storing temporarily and thus that many computer functions are illegal. They kept trying to sell multi-song CDs when consumers wanted only one song. They fought rentals of movies insisting that consumers buy movies. In short, they have tried to restrict, tax or bar every type of recording technology.

Thankfully, politicians said no and courts generally stood by the Sony Betamax principles. For these reasons we have the Internet, camcorders, digital cameras, MP3 players, DVRs, removable computer storage and copy-and-edit functions on computers. And thus we have world-leading companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, TiVo and Apple.

American innovation is not just about content creation. It is also about inventions that allow society to benefit from the uses of content, for which Congress grants a limited monopoly in the form of a copyright. The right to control this content does not include the right to [limit] invention and innovation. This is what the Supreme Court held in 1984, and this is why we have these inventions today.

"Piracy" is not every unauthorized use of content. Nor does copyright grant a monopoly over all uses. Someone who legitimately acquires content (buys a CD or DVD) should have the right to use that content so long as it is not for a commercial purpose. Calling unauthorized uses "piracy" and equating such use with "theft" - as if it were stealing clothing - is sloppy. If you steal a dress from a shop owner, then the shop owner cannot sell that dress. If you use a copyrighted work without permission, then at worst the creator has lost an additional potential sale - unlikely if someone is simply excerpting from their own CDs.

But defenders of expanded copyright restrictions imply that content owners have been on a losing streak and have few tools at their disposal. Wrong.

Copyright owners have successfully intimidated entrepreneurs with ideas that involve fair use of content. Billions of dollars of "damages" for no harm? Yes. Copyright laws and damage provisions have mushroomed to create huge potential liability for good-faith innovation.

Consistently, lawmakers raise the stakes for infringement, even if there is no evidence of harm to content owners. A single infringement found later to be "willful" can cost $150,000. Multiply that by each work in a service provider's library that a personal computer, a software program, or a DVR might be claimed to "infringe" and you are into the tens of billions of dollars. This chokes innovation and begs a more reasonable law that protects small business and products and software, offered by legitimate companies, with new uses not yet evaluated by the courts.

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Techdirt got wind of a secret meeting by newspaper execs, complete with antitrust lawyers, to discuss how to proceed on the issue of implementing paywalls going forward. Of course, if newspapers decide to all lock away their content that just means the rest of us will have a bunch of great journalism talent to pick from soon thereafter. "You may have noticed a bunch of stories recently about how newspapers should get an antitrust exemption to allow them to collude -- working together to all put in place a paywall at the same time. That hasn't gone anywhere, so apparently the newspapers decided to just go ahead and try to get together quietly themselves without letting anyone know. But, of course, you don't get a bunch of newspaper execs together without someone either noticing or leaking the news... so it got out. And then the newspapers admitted it with a carefully worded statement about how they got together "to discuss how best to support and preserve the traditions of newsgathering that will serve the American public." And, yes, they apparently had an antitrust lawyer or two involved."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm proud to announce an upcoming exhibition, Open Source Embroidery:

Open Source Embroidery is a major exhibition of new work and commissions at BildMuseet in Sweden and Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, USA.

The Open Source Embroidery exhibition presents contemporary artwork which uses embroidery and code as a tool to investigate participatory production and distribution methods. The project explores how the open source software development model has been incorporated into the language of cultural participation, involving interdisciplinary approaches to skill-share and collaboration. The exhibition includes material and digital works that make visible the physical characteristics of technology and social communications networks.

The Open Source Embroidery exhibition brings together individual and collectively made artworks by artists, crafts people, makers, computer programmers and html users which explore the relationship between craft and code, physical and digital space. The artworks experiment with interdisciplinary approaches to modifying patterns, the DIY culture of hacking and sampling in sound, GPS and mobile technologies.

The exhibition brings together several international artists, and I'm excited to be one of them!

Open Source Embroidery

BildMuseet, Umeå University, Sweden

June 6 to September 6, 2009

More:

Electronic Embroidery

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Wired is reporting that Palm's new handheld device, the Pre, will be able to sync automagically with Apple's iTunes. Thanks to a team of ex-Apple engineers the Pre will sync everything but iPhone applications and some of the older Fairplay DRM music. "It does it by faking out iTunes, making the jukebox software think that it is connected to a real iPod. Hook it up and you'll be given three options: USB mass storage device, charging only or iTunes sync. This is a ballsy move from Palm, and we totally love it: a big fat middle finger at Apple. Apple will, we are sure, be readying its legal attack dogs as I write, and don't be at all surprised if an iTunes update pops up around June 6th. This fight just got a lot more interesting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday I soft-launched a little project I'm working on called twdsc.us. Today the service gets a little more real, because now you can create discussions around tweets too, and not just your own tweets, anyone's. In other words, this could get interesting.

For example, I just started a small discussion around a post by WNYC's Brian Lehrer. Apparently they had a power outage, and that's interfering with all kinds of things, including their ability to post a podcast. Maybe someone in the community can help.

And if you look in the right margin of that page, you'll see a very brief HowTo explaining how to create your own discussion pages. If you have any questions, post them here, and I'll build how this blog post and turn it into documentation.

PS: A million thanks to the guys at Disqus who provide a wonderful and flexible tool, and support it like pros.

While Radiohead's manager has noted that file sharing is great for music and should be legal, it appears that his counterpart, Paul McGuinness, is sticking to his guns that it's evil, evil, evil... and it's all those darn ISPs' fault. He kicked this off over a year ago when he gave a speech blaming everyone but the recording industry for the industry's problems. You see, the problem was that ISPs, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook weren't coming up with ways of just giving the record labels money. Apparently McGuinness has such a sense of entitlement that he thinks it's everyone else's responsibility to fix his broken business model. Since that time, he's continued to stand by this position even claiming that no other business models were possible other than having ISPs hand over money to any content creator.

In a new interview with News.com's Greg Sandoval, he stands by this position, even when Sandoval asks him about the examples of Radiohead and Trent Reznor. McGuinness totally ignores Trent Reznor -- which is too bad, since his business model experiments are a lot more complete and well thought out than Radiohead's little experiment -- and simply says:

I admire what Radiohead have done tremendously in seeking a new model. They would take the view, and I would share it, that perhaps price has been a big problem for the music business. The music business has tried to hold onto a price that was unrealistic for a long time now. I think wider distribution of lower priced things is probably the future.

But that didn't answer the question. He says Radiohead is "seeking" a new model... ignoring that they found one and that it worked amazingly well, without requiring an ISP tax. I'm wondering if he's simply ignorant of Trent Reznor's wide-ranging experiments.

But from there, he starts saying a bunch of questionable things, including the claim that we somehow need big record labels:

It's important to remember that the traditional worldwide star-making functions of the big record companies. There's nothing on the horizon to replace that.

Oh really? Has he not been on the internet? It's true that so far nothing has been able to totally replace big record labels' marketing clout, but there are plenty of interesting new services and tools out there that are quickly improving and quickly changing the marketing equation. To claim that there's "nothing on the horizon" simply suggests he hasn't been looking at the horizon very closely. If he wants a pair of binoculars, he should call us and we'll ship him a pair and even point him in the right direction of where to look.

Amusingly, when asked about the role of new technologies, McGuiness again displays his ignorance of technology. He doesn't discuss how it's made it much cheaper to perform, record, promote, distribute and share music. Instead, he only focuses on one thing: how can tech companies give bands money:

I would really like them to willingly go to the movie studios and the music companies and say this is how we can collect money from the people who are listening to your stuff and watching your movies. We acknowledge that it's the fair thing to do and we have some responsibility for doing it. Let's do it together and let's make some money.

How about he goes to those companies and explains why he isn't paying them for decreasing the costs of recording, promoting and distributing U2's music... all of which has helped to keep the band in the headlines, selling out concerts allowing them to bring in hundreds of millions. Earlier this year, we noted that Bono had said he was upset about piracy but didn't want to complain because he was too rich. Apparently McGuinness refuses to recognize that part of what helped make them all so rich were these tools that help promote and distribute U2's music for free.

And then, of course, he pulls out the old myth: that this somehow removes money from the hands of artists:

Artists are entitled to get paid, whatever kind of art they do, the same way technologists are entitled to get paid.

You know how technologists get paid? It's not because of any entitlement... but because they build a product with a business model that makes sense. There's no entitlement. There's simply setting up a business model that makes sense. And it works for musicians too -- big, medium and small.

And then he turns it into a "moral" issue:

I'd like to get a moral tone into the discussion. I think there is a big moral question for civilization.

To which there's an obvious response: where is the moral question when embracing these trends is making artists better off? All if the artists we've seen who have embraced these trends and smart business models finds themselves better off than they were before.

And then, amazingly, he tries to claim that the copyright lobbyists are simply outnumbered and out-gunned.

One official in Brussels, a senior Brussels civil servant, came up to me after I made the speech. I was there with a small group of lobbyists and he said to me 'In Brussels there are probably five or six lobbyists representing the content worldwide. There are thousands representing the ISPs, telcos and the technology industries.' He said it's really overwhelming the forces you have against you.

Basically, that civil servant lied. The entertainment industry has more lobbyists on this issue than anyone on the "other" side. And he makes it out as if all the ISPs are against him -- but some of the biggest, including AT&T are in agreement with the entertainment industry lobbyists. There are very few lobbyists (and they have much smaller budgets) fighting for the rights of consumers.

And then there's one final attack on "free" spoken from a position of supreme ignorance of how "free" works:

I started to glimpse the politics of it at that stage. I hope that our politicians, our journalists our media gain a sense of how much we stand to lose if free prevails. Ultimately free is the enemy of good.

What do we stand to lose? Restriction on how we can use products we legally purchased? Artificial restrictions on the enjoyment of content? New and wonderful business models that allow actual content creators to benefit, rather than siphoning money off to middlemen? Free is not the enemy of good. Free is a tool that, when used properly, has tremendous advantages. Many have already figured this out. The fact that McGuinness seems unable to do so isn't everyone else's problem. It's his problem.

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N!NJA sends in word of Hulu's new beta section, Hulu Labs, which is now showcasing Hulu Desktop, a client that runs on both Windows and Mac. The author believes that Hulu Desktop explains why Hulu has been so touchy about Boxee. "This clearly explains why Hulu has been so persistent in blocking Boxee — an open-source media-center application for Macs, Apple TVs, and other devices — from including its content. Since Hulu provides free, ad-based mainstream content from the largest studios and networks in the business, they are under tight constraints imposed by these major players. We have already seen good examples of where Hulu is heading with integrated advertising inside the browser. A desktop client produced in-house will be much more conducive to monetizing Hulu using these kinds of campaigns."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader points out that the Security Fix blog is running a feature looking at the different ways hacked/cracked computers can be abused by cyber scammers. "Computer users often dismiss Internet security best practices because they find them inconvenient, or because they think the rules don't apply to them. Many cling to the misguided belief that because they don't bank or shop online, that bad guys won't target them. The next time you hear this claim, please refer the misguided person to this blog post, which attempts to examine some of the more common — yet often overlooked — ways that cyber crooks can put your PC to criminal use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panasonic has announced a firmware update for its Lumix DMC-LX3 digital compact camera. Version 1.3 improves auto white balance and general performance of the camera. It also rectifies minor operational issues. The latest version will be made available for download on the 1 June, 2009.

Here's a well-illustrated guide to electrolytic rust removal by Instructables user ToolNut, which could come in handy for restoring those flea market tool finds.

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Last year, we wrote about a somewhat horrific court ruling against MGA Entertainment, the makers of Bratz dolls, after getting sued by Mattel. If you don't follow the doll business, Bratz is really the first doll to successfully compete against the massively successful Barbie franchise in ages. However, the guy who came up with Bratz had worked at Mattel prior to going off on his own. Of course, this is the history of many different innovative companies. If you come up with a better idea while working at one company, it's a good thing that you can go off and build your own company. As we pointed out at the time, this is the story of plenty of successful tech companies. Steve Wozniak was at HP when he built the first Apple computer (and continued to work there for some time after Apple was moving forward). Robert Noyce helped found Fairchild (and later Intel) after growing frustrated at Shockley Transistor. Hell, William Shockley founded Shockley Transistor after feeling he didn't get enough respect at Bell Labs. Yet, here's a toy designer at Mattel who's entire operation is getting shut down because he came up with the idea while still employed at Mattel?

Even if you grant the somewhat troubling premise that the concept for the dolls was created at Mattel, at best you could make an argument that Mattel had some rights to an injunction and profits from the first generation of those dolls. Yet, the judge not only ruled that, but also that MGA had to give up all such dolls, and hand over all sorts of confidential info, including "all related products, designs, customer information and 'know-how' for a planned 2010 Bratz line." It's difficult to see any justification at all for forcing them to hand over future plans that had nothing to do with what the guy created while still at Mattel. MGA has now filed an emergency appeal, noting that if it does hand over such info and assets, it would have "devastating and irreversible consequences," which seems quite accurate. All in all, this seems like Mattel simply trying to stop competition, and it's a shame that the US court system seems to be helping.

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codesmythe writes "The Fates, through SGI nee Rackable, have granted a new beginning to Silicon Valley's once darling Silicon Graphics. Despite old mistakes and economic misfortunes, Silicon Graphics' engineering contributions are legendary: their systems (oh, the systems!), and software such as the well known OpenGL and the little known Performance Co-Pilot. PCP is an enterprise-class open source system monitoring, measurement, and visualization infrastructure — overlooked in last fall's monitoring tool discussion. Since its proprietary beginning in 1993, PCP has been re-released as open source and ported to all major operating systems. Readers of Slashdot's recent Beginning Python Visualization book review will be pleased to hear there are Python interfaces to PCP data sources. Here is an example of using Python and Blender to visualize PCP data (registration may be required). The PCP dev community is well and active, and includes several of the original team members."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Manhattan-based radio reporter and podcast producer Jon Kalish has a story about DIY'ers in northern California airing on The California Report, tomorrow on KQED. (It will also be broadcast on many public radio stations around the state). On KQED, the show can be heard at 4:30pm, 6:30pm, and 11:00pm. And, I assume it can also be heard via their website (though I'm not certain).

The California Report

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Hugh Pickens writes "Andy Rubin, senior director for Mobile Platforms for Google, has announced that by the end of the year there will be 18 to 20 phones using the Android OS made by 8 or 9 different manufacturers. Google will offer three different versions of Android OS: a completely free and generic flavor with no pre-loaded Google applications; a slightly customized version that comes pre-loaded with Google apps like Gmail and Google Calendar; and a completely 'Google-fied' Android OS bearing all sorts of Google branding and integration with Google's services. Will Park reports that the expectationi is that 12 to 14 of the upcoming Android phones will use the slightly-customized version of Google's Android OS requiring the manufacturer to agree to a distribution deal with Google that would allow the handsets to come pre-installed with Google-ware. The remaining 5 or 6 Android phones will come to market completely decked out with 'The Google Experience' and a Google logo on the phone. This third option provides risk and reward opportunities because the openness of the store could be a hit with consumers, but could also lead to poorly constructed or offensive applications that could give Google a taint. When it comes to apps, Rubin says: 'We want to abide by the law, but not rule with an open fist.'" Yes, it seems he really said "open fist," though he probably meant "iron fist."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may have noticed a bunch of stories recently about how newspapers should get an antitrust exemption to allow them to collude -- working together to all put in place a paywall at the same time. That hasn't gone anywhere, so apparently the newspapers decided to just go ahead and try to get together quietly themselves without letting anyone know. But, of course, you don't get a bunch of newspaper execs together without someone either noticing or leaking the news... so it got out. And then the newspapers admitted it with a carefully worded statement about how they got together "to discuss how best to support and preserve the traditions of newsgathering that will serve the American public." And, yes, they apparently had an antitrust lawyer or two involved.

In the end, though, it won't matter. If a bunch of newspapers decide to lock up their content, they will only be digging their own graves. Smart newspaper execs will stay away and get all of the traffic. The wire services that compete with the Associated Press (such as Reuters, and CNN's new wire service) would be well served to put out a press release now hyping up the fact that their content is free. Other, smaller providers of news should trumpet how much they want people to come to them for news instead of paying, and then watch in amusement as the newspapers (whether it's an antitrust violation or not) discover both their advertising and their subscription money disappear.

Whether it's antitrust or not, it sure looks like collective suicide.

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Al writes "Nicholas Fang and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created the first acoustic superlens, which could be used to create high-resolution ultrasound images, and perhaps ultimately make subs and ships invisible to sonar. Researchers have previously developed materials that bend light in ways that appear to violate the laws of physics, creating so-called optical superlenses. The acoustic superlens consists of an aluminum array of narrow-necked resonant cavities filed with water — the dimensions of the cavities are tuned to interact with ultrasound waves. When ultrasound waves move through the array, the cavities resonate and the sound is refocused."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make this low-cost camera stabilizer for smooth, professional looking video.
Thanks go to Johnny Lee for the original article in MAKE, Volume 01.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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Richard Kaufman won one of the Dover Paper Architect books we gave away in a contest back in February. I love that he's doing the projects and tweeting the results. Nice going, Richard!

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Hucko writes "Ars Technica has a story about a study by Cambridge law professor Patricia Akester that suggests (declares?) that DRM and its ilk does persuade citizens to infringe copyright and circumvent authors' protections. The name of the study is 'Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment.'" The study itself is available for download (PDF); there's also a distillation here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you've been following the mightyOhm's series on building a WiFi radio, you'll enjoy these pictures of the finished radio cabinet. He's going to showing off the finished project at Maker Faire, so if you get a chance, stop by Expo Hall Booth 166 and check it out.

Sneak peak at my finished Wifi Radio project!

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A new study from the UK says that people who listen to soccer matches on the radio while driving behave more erratically and dangerously than non-listeners. Indeed, says one of the researchers, "It is widely accepted that the distraction of talking on a hand-held mobile phone may lead to accidents but other activities may have a similar impact – such as listening to sport on the radio." Since the UK's already banned talking on the phone while driving, will it now push for a ban on listening to sports while driving? After all, if "other activities may have a similar impact", they're all worthy of their own bans, aren't they? Here's a novel idea: instead of creating bans on one single activity after another, just crack down on unsafe driving with existing laws, regardless of the cause.

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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An anonymous reader writes "The old joke is that fusion is the power of the future and always will be. But it's not looking so funny for ITER, an EU10 billion fusion experiment in France. According to Nature News, ITER will not conduct energy-producing experiments until at least 2025 — five years later than what had been previously agreed to. The article adds that the reactor will cost even more than the seven parties in the project first thought:'...Construction costs are likely to double from the 5-billion (US$7-billion) estimate provided by the project in 2006, as a result of rises in the price of raw materials, gaps in the original design, and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement. The cost of ITER's operations phase, another 5 billion over 20 years, may also rise.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of folks sent in variations on the story about Microsoft losing a patent infringement lawsuit to the tune of $200 million to a small Toronto firm (the ruling also came right on the heals of another ruling against Microsoft in a patent case, for $388 million). Since both rulings will certainly be appealed, it seemed a bit early to pay too much attention, but Joe Mullin has dug into the details of the $200 million ruling, and it's fairly startling. The patent in question is for separating the manipulation of content from the architecture of the document, which the company, named i4i argues, covers basic XML editing. It's quite troubling that doing something as simple as adding an XML editor should infringe on a patent, but what's even more troubling is that the court somehow ruled that such an editor was worth $98 in the copies of Microsoft Word where it was used. An XML editor. $98. And people say patent awards aren't out of sync with reality?

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CNETNate writes "It's a global first for Microsoft, and massive news for Xbox owners. Redmond and the largest pay TV service in the UK — Sky, owned in part by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp — has tied a deal that brings simulcast TV, sports, entertainment shows, pay-per-view movies and back catalogue television to the Xbox 360. It's an entirely streamed service, offering no download-to-own content, and partly rivals the BBC iPlayer, which is available on UK PlayStation consoles and the Nintendo Wii. The service will go live later in the year at no cost to existing subscribers, and screenshots show it fits in seamlessly with the Xbox Live interface."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "EFF Board Chair Brad Templeton has made a brilliant Downfall remix. The video is interesting not just for being funny, but also for the troubles Brad had creating it. In order to avoid any DMCA violations, he had to make it without circumventing encryption, which naturally led to multiple headaches. We have a short post on the EFF blog about what this says about the need for DMCA exemptions for remix artists"

Unfortunately for Brad, he found in making his parody that creating a fair use like this -- and doing so legally -- is not as easy as it ought to be. As a high profile advocate for digital rights, Brad naturally wants to avoid breaking any laws. And while fair use protects his parody from charges of copyright infringement, he wanted to ensure that he didn't accidentally violate other laws -- in particular the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing encryption.

This meant that Brad couldn't just rip a copy from the his own legally purchased DVD. Instead, just to be safe, he would have to make a copy of the film using the "analog hole," a form of copying that has been recognized by the courts as legally permissible.

When Fair Use Is Fairly Difficult

Hitler tries a DMCA takedown

(Thanks, Hugh!)

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said this week that US mobile networks can't keep up with all the data traffic being spawned by smartphone users. This is something Stephenson's got a lot of first-hand knowledge about. Earlier this month, AT&T blocked the SlingPlayer app for the iPhone, saying it didn't have the capacity to support it, while the company annoyed lots of geeks with blogs when its network in Austin couldn't keep up with the influx of iPhone users during the SXSW conference in March. Stephenson says the company is taking steps to address the problem by upgrading its 3G network to HSPA+ technology that will double its throughput. The logic here isn't completely clear, though: the new technology will require new device hardware, and furthermore, the real issue is capacity not speed. And capacity doesn't just apply to the mobile network -- each individual cell site's backhaul connection needs to be beefed up, too. But the real solution AT&T and other operators employ to fix this issue may not be a technological one. Stephenson hints that flat-rate data plans could be on their way out, with variable-use pricing on its way back in. By bringing back per-unit pricing, operators will hope to increase their revenues from data-hungry users, but all they'll really do is end up stifling mobile data use -- just like they did before they went to flat-rate plans.

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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Probably way too much,* by the standards of Oxford physics professor Josh Silver, who has developed a wearer-adjustable set of eyeglasses that use water-filled plastic bags as lenses. They're so cheap that they can be distributed freely in underdeveloped and impoverished communities, which is exactly what Silver is doing, to the tune of 30,000 units so far. No visit to the optometrist and no custom lens grinding, just a standard pair of specs that you adjust once to your own visual comfort, using a small syringe, and then seal shut. A nice reminder that Making isn't just about scaring away impressing potential mates with your flatulence-tweeting office chair. link

*In all fairness to the noble discipline of optometry, if you are able to visit a proper eye-doctor you probably should. Silver's lenses can only correct for spherical, not cylindrical, defects in the eye, which is to say that if you have an astigmatism (as 1 in 3 adults does, per one study) you still need traditional lenses for full correction.

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Evil Mad Scientists Lab has a new iteration of their sugar-based 3D printer, the CandyFab 6000! This is my favorite 3D printing concept, bar none. Demented and sweet!

It's a brand new CandyFab-- still in beta. A clean break, designed from the ground up with almost no parts in common with the original, the CandyFab 4000. All new mechanics. All new electronics. All new software. Smaller but still big: the build volume is more than 10 liters, but it's now small enough to fit on a desk top...

The new modular electronics control platform is called Zuccherino-- that's italian for "Sugar cube." One Arduino-compatible circuit board per axis. (Our prototype above shows X,Y,Z, Heat, and Air axes, plus a master board.)

It's an expandable system for all kinds of motion control projects, and we'll be making kit versions of all of the Zuccherino boards later this summer.

We've also got new cross platform control software -- called CandyFabulous underway, and it's looking sweet.

The CandyFab 6000 (via Make)

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories just released a new version of their sugar 3D printer, the CandyFab 6000. It's smaller than previous models, enough so to fit on a tabletop, but still has an impressive 10 liter build volume. From the site:

Here's one of the first objects that we fabbed on the CandyFab 6000: a drilled sphere, about two inches in diameter and layer thickness of 1/15 inch. There's plenty of room for improvement, and finally we have a machine that can be improved.

The machine is designed so that it can be made from scratch-- i.e., without dumpster diving for old HP pen plotters. Three axes of quadrature-encoded DC servo motor control. Timing belts and acme lead screws. Food-safe sugar containment. The body is made from laser-cut plywood with acrylic highlights and stainless steel hardware. (Steampunk-compliant brass thumbscrews where appropriate, too.)

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Here's a wonderfully goofy old British phone-company video on the future of the phone and teleworking!

The perils of futurology

bigwophh writes "Despite the fact that Windows 7 is based on many of the same core elements as Vista, Microsoft claims it is a different sort of animal and that it should be looked at in a fresh, new light, especially in terms of performance. With that in mind, this article looks at how various types of disks perform under Windows 7, both the traditional platter-based variety and newer solid state disks. Disk performance between Vista and Win7 is compared using a hard drive and an SSD. SSD performance with and without TRIM enabled is tested. Application performance is also tested on a variety of drives. Looking at the performance data, it seems MS has succeeded in improving Windows 7 disk performance, particularly with regard to solid state drives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt sez, "Got any questions for Michael Moorcock? Tachyon Publications just released a career spanning collection of this living legend's very best work, and to kick things off, we thought it would be fun to offer Boing Boing's readers a chance to interview the author. If you've ever wanted to ask him anything, now is your opportunity. Just leave your questions in this post's comments. Boing Boing's editors will then select the very best of the batch and forward them on to Moorcock. Just to make things fun, we'll give three lucky Boing Boing readers free copies of The Best of Michael Moorcock. "

The Best of Michael Moorcock (Thanks, Matt!)

OK, so, it's not exactly a song. It's more like a clicky, morse-codey, geiger-countery sort of buzz. Nonetheless, it is generated by an electric fish, and you can hear it yourself just by wiring a piezoelectric earphone across the water in your fish tank. Provided, of course, that said water contains said electric fish. If that seems like too much work, then you can just download the sound from here. While you're at it, read all about the details of the so-called "Elephant Nose Fish" and its so-called "electric organ." I'm not making any of this up.

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Dead Air sez, "At the Science Fiction Message Board we're preparing for another of our semi-regular "Group Book Reads", which is due to start in just a few days now. For a little bit of fun, we're deviating from the harder SF this time for a bit of alternate history. We've decided to choose the 2008 Hugo Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear - and the book of hers we'll be perusing together is New Amsterdam, a series of linked stories: six novelettes and novellas about Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett and Don Sebastien de Ulloa, who are, respectively, a forensic sorcerer and an amateur detective in a turn of the century contrafactual history set (mostly) on the East Coast of North America. But let the publisher's blurb work its magic on you:"

Abigail Irene Garrett drinks too much. She makes scandalous liaisons with inappropriate men, and if in her youth she was a famous beauty, now she is both formidable--and notorious. She is a forensic sorceress, and a dedicated officer of a Crown that does not deserve her loyalty. She has nothing, but obligations.

Sebastien de Ulloa is the oldest creature he has ever known. He was no longer young at the Christian millennium, and that was nine hundred years ago. He has forgotten his birth-name, his birth-place, and even the year in which he was born, if he ever knew it. But he still remembers the woman who made him immortal. He has everything, but a reason to live.

In a world where the sun never set on the British Empire, where Holland finally ceded New Amsterdam to the English only during the Napoleonic wars, and where the expansion of the American colonies was halted by the war magic of the Iroquois, they are exiles in the new world--and its only hope for justice.

Summer 2009 Group Book Read: New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear (Thanks, Dead Air!)

There are all sorts of questions about Lifelock, the company that claims to help protect you from identify theft. There were the stories that the founders of the company had previously been involved in identity fraud operations. And, of course, there's the whole issue with the company's CEO becoming a victim of identity fraud, while out promoting the service, by happily displaying his social security number in ads. In response to this, rather than letting the police handle the situation, the CEO hunted down the guy who impersonated him with a camera crew and coerced a "confession" out of the guy. This basically ruined the police investigation and they gave up prosecuting the case, saying that the evidence was tainted. Oh yeah, and there's the matter of the class action lawsuit against the company from customers who realized that Lifelock doesn't do much to actually prevent identity theft.

However, it's still surprising to find out that a court has ruled that Lifelock's fraud alert services are illegal. The lawsuit was brought by Experian, one of the big credit rating agencies, complaining that Lifelock abuses the fraud alert process. By law, the credit ratings agencies need to agree to put a free fraud alert on an account at the request of the account holder if they feel they're at risk of identity fraud. The alert requires anyone trying to open a new line of credit to first confirm with the customer before being able to extend the line of credit (basically, if someone tries to open a new credit card, the cardholder gets a call to make sure they really wanted it).

This is a free service, which lasts for 3 months -- at which point you need to proactively renew it. One of Lifelock's services is putting that alert on your accounts and promptly renewing it when the 3 months are up. Even though anyone can set their own up for free, for some people it's worth paying Lifelock to manage that process. Experian claimed it was an abuse, well beyond what the law was intended for, and that it was costing the company a ton of money to manage all of these requests. The judge agreed, noting that the lawmakers did not appear to intend for individuals to have middlemen place and manage fraud alerts.

While I'm somewhat skeptical of Lifelock, the idea that a company can't manage such alerts for an individual seems somewhat silly and counterproductive. The issue, though, probably isn't so much with the ruling, but with the law. Perhaps Congress should simply fix it and make it clear that if you want to pay some company to manage such alerts for you, that's perfectly fine.

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PaulR sez, "Swedish, poet, novelist and scholar Lars Gustafsson blogged his reasons for voting for the Pirate Party in the next Swedish election to the European Parliament, to be held on 7 June 2009."

Intellectual and personal integrity for the citizens, briefly speaking an internet that has not been transformed into a government channel by lobby-marinated courts and EU politicians in leashes, is arguably more important than the needs of a primarily industrial scene of literature and music, which is rapidly crumbling away already within the lifetime of the authors. The need of being read, of influencing, to formulate one's times, may but does not need to get in conflict with the wish to sell many copies. When the both needs are getting in conflict, the industrial interest must be put aside and the great intellectual sphere of the arts must be defended against threats.

The essential interest of artists and authors, given that they are intellectually and morally serious in hat they are doing, must certainly be to get read, to let their voice become heard in their generation. How that goal is attained, that is, how to reach the readers, is in this perspective of secondary importance.

The growing defence of the internet's expanded freedom of speech, of the immaterial civil rights, that we are now witnessing in country after country, is the start of an - just as the last time in the early 18th century - liberalism that is carried by technology and therefore emancipated.

Therefore, my vote goes to the Pirate Party.

Lars Gustafsson: "Why my vote goes to the Pirate Party" (English translation of today's text (Thanks, PaulR!)

If you're in NYC for Internet Week (June 1 - 8), be sure to check out the "global hackday" for tangible interfaces, computer vision, and creative use of OSC/LusidOSC, featuring the open-source, free, multi-platform Trackmate project developed at the MIT Media Lab. The event will be on Saturday, June 6, 11:00am - 9:30pm Eastern time; hacking 11-7 for coders and makers, party 7-9:30 for everyone else.

Hands-On Tangible Interfaces: CDM + New Work City Hackday, June 6

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A verb for the 21st century:

Re-nonymize, or renonymize, V,. To discover, using data from an "anonymized" data set (a data set from which the explicit identifying data has been removed) which specific individuals generated the data. Usage: ". . . companies claim they're releasing an anonymous dataset, only to discover later that it's not so difficult to re-nomynize it."

Word of the Day: renonymize

In the early days of large scale data leaks online, the mantra one heard over and over again was "encryption, encryption, encryption!" Yet, encryption alone doesn't do much good, if you tape the passwords to decrypt the data to the storage device itself (found via Michael Scott). Yet, whaddaya know? That's exactly what happened in a recent data breach in the UK, though I'm sure similar breaches happen all over the world. This is what happens when someone preaches a specific action in security, rather than actual secure thinking and planning.

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Whenever I start a new project, I find it helpful to define several key items. These typically involve defining what the customer requirements are, and what tools are available to meet those requirements.

The customer for this project is a friend who recently converted a shuttered electronics supply warehouse into an 8000 square foot mixed-used building. The first floor office is designed to be net-zero office space, making it Rhode Island's first and only net-zero facility. Yes, I do live in a small state. Fortunately, that provides me access to a unique building and its owner for this project. More details about the building can be found here.

You'll notice that I said "designed to be net-zero." A claim is only as good as the data that backs it up, and obviously claiming net-zero is only possible if you can show that the office tenants use less energy than on-site renewable generation provides. This provides our primary customer requirement: I must continuously track and display energy generation and usage. I also want the ability to display this information in real-time, or to display historical trends based on stored data.

Electricity for this building is generated by a photovoltaic array, and solar thermal devices provide hot water for building heat and domestic hot water. There is a backup high-efficiency gas boiler in case of an unusually long and rainy winter (which occasionally happens in Rhode Island). These are the energy sources I want to measure. I also want to know what environmental forces were driving energy usage. This requires measuring temperature and humidity, both inside and outside the building, and possibly measuring wind as well. Since this building is grid-tied, it is possible for the office tenants to use more electricity than is generated. I would like to measure power at each outlet, but I'll settle for a single point of measurement.

For additional details on the plans for this project, see my complete posting on the SPARK Project blog.

More:
Sponsored projects series with Windows Embedded CE

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This SPARK Your Imagination Make: Windows Embedded project series is sponsored by Microsoft Corporation.

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El Reg writes "Showing a new-found resolve to crack down on self-serving edits, Wikipedia has banned contributions from all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology. According to Wikipedia administrators, this marks the first time such a high-profile organization has been banished for allegedly pushing its own agenda on the 'free encyclopedia anyone can edit.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some grumpy old editor at the New York Times must really be upset about all these damn kids and their cell phones. First, earlier in the week, it ran a story in its health section talking about how texting is destroying teenagers' thumbs and ruining their minds; now, it's got a piece on how texting at the dinner table is the latest epidemic of bad manners. There's the obligatory quote from a mental-health professional, as a therapist weighs in to say that texting while eating has become "a major issue" among couples in counseling. It also has etiquette writers keen to push their latest book by touting the need for proper gadget etiquette, as if being rude or inconsiderate has somehow changed since we got cell phones. It seems like for years, people have been saying how American families never eat dinner together anymore, but apparently that problem's been solved. Now if it weren't for those damn texts...

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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(Version en Español aquí)

GUATEMALA CITY: Earlier this month, a Twitter user in Guatemala was arrested, jailed, and fined the equivalent of a year's salary for having posted a 96-character thought to Twitter. The tweet related to an ongoing political crisis in Guatemala sparked by allegations that president Álvaro Colom ordered the assassination of an attorney, and claims made by this attorney that government officials engaged in illegal, corrupt transactions through the country's largest bank.

Jean Ramses Anleu Fernandez, or @jeanfer as he's known on Twitter (at left), has since been released from jail. He is under house arrest while the Guatemalan government pursues charges against him. Jean is an unlikely public figure: a shy, soft-spoken I.T. guy who studies systems engineering and loves books. He has since become something of a popular hero online, and Twitter itself has become a force in the country's current upheaval.

Guatemala's Supervisor of Banks, Édgar Barquín, wants Jean to face charges of up to 10 years in jail for "inciting financial panic" through the tweet in question. Barquín this week also proposed new restrictions on internet use in Guatemala -- for instance, that people who use internet cafés be required to present national IDs ("cedulas") before logging on.

I interviewed @jeanfer this week, here in Guatemala. Among the details he shared: Guatemala's Ministry of Banks created a Twitter account to "follow" him, in the course of interrograting him at his home. And while he was in jail, he dreamed of Kafka, and wished he could turn himself into a cockroach, to escape. Jean's final words in the interview:

The point is that this case represents something we must not lose. Without freedom of opinions and speech, there is no democracy. I hope this case sets a precedent about freedom of thought.

I've left most of the interview intact, so it's long (+2000 words). Continued in entirety after the jump. Special thanks to @thevenemousone for assistance with translation.

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@XENIJARDIN: How were you using Twitter, and who were you mostly communicating with on Twitter when all of this happened?

@JEANFER: ?I used to chat among a circle of Guatemalan friends in a book club I belong to, and others from the same social group who were interested in the web, and information technology.

@XENIJARDIN?: Nearly all of your blog posts were about books, too. I remember thinking when i first saw your personal blog that you were clearly a person who loves reading books.

@JEANFER: ?With all my heart. I have a beautiful little library in my home. In my house, my study, my bathroom, even in my phone -- every wall is covered in bookshelves. I read lots of different kinds -- but historic novels are my favorite. I read biographies, poetry, history, theology...

@XENIJARDIN?: You were one of many people in Guatemala who were talking about the political crisis on Twitter in that first week after the Rosenberg video was released.

@JEANFER: ?Yes, one of many.

@XENIJARDIN: ?And you posted this one fleeting thought about the crisis, and the bank. 96 characters. What happened?

@JEANFER: ?What happened was that these past days in Guatemala have been extremely turbulent. We have been trying to figure out what is going on, because we are worried about our country. I love Guatemala. So, we were exchanging the information we knew among our groups, with people we knew and were close to. We were all sharing fleeting thoughts as things were happening.

@JEANFER: That day in particular, May 12th, started with news of the MP (Public Ministry, government body charged with investigations) arriving at the bank (background here and here). My first tweet related to this matter is made at noon, after that happened. The only people following me were a small group of friends who understand that my tweet was not an incitation. I even used quotation marks, to specify that this was overheard dialogue.

If you notice, my tweet has three parts. "Primera acción real" (First real action) is the title I use to designate what is happening around the whole #escandalogt issue. This was the first real action that had taken place after Rosenberg's video surfaced. Second, "sacar el pisto de  [redacted/bank's name]" (withdraw the money from [redacted/bank's name]) - is the quotation of what someone else is saying. And lastly, what I thought that first action meant to do: "quebrar al banco de los corruptos" (bankrupt the bank of the corrupt). Notice that I didn't mean that the bank or their officials are or were corrupt, but that maybe other people were infiltrating within the bank... I don't know. This was the opinion of many people in Guatemala.

[The officials who arrested me] took this information and claimed firstly, that I've said it at a public hearing; secondly, that this information is at anyone's reach; and lastly, that it is meant to be an incitation.

@XENIJARDIN?: So at first, just a few friends would have seen this. But within a couple of days, anyone who was discussing the crisis was also retweeting it.

@JEANFER: ?Yes. When the online community finds out about what happened with me, they start retweeting this en masse -- not on my request, since I could not communicate with the outside world [after I was detained]. It happened in a spontaneous way, and other people have amplified the message...

@XENIJARDIN: ?You're not a very public person, you're saying.

@JEANFER: ?Exactly. I am just not like that, in fact, I try to avoid situations like these.

@XENIJARDIN?: When did the problems related to this tweet begin?

@JEANFER: ?It all starts on May 14th, when [the officers] arrive at my house with the search warrant.

I feel somewhat frightened by the number of policemen that arrived, but told them they may come inside, and search for whatever they need to. They ask me to show them where my computer is, and I take them to my bedroom. They ask me if I have a blog, and I answer that I do. They ask me if I wrote the comments, I look at them and say that I did, and then I try to explain. I tell them repeatedly that my tweets have no intention to incite.

They go and meet privately for a while, and they talk and talk, mentioning something about emails. They return and I try to explain once again that [the tweet] can only be seen if you decide to go to the Twitter site, create an account, and follow my account on Twitter...

@XENIJARDIN?: Did they understand what Twitter was, as opposed to a blog?

@JEANFER: ?No. There are recorded declarations in which the attorney is outside of my house, explaining to the press that they have found evidence in my computer of mass emails I have sent that have damaged the bank's reputation. And actually, there ARE indeed people sending this kind of emails, condemning  [redacted/bank's name] or Colom. I have received a couple myself, and I hate this kind of messages as they are nothing but spam. Every time a message of this kind gets into my inbox, I delete it immediately, as most people do.

@XENIJARDIN?: Then what happened?

@JEANFER: ?I was taken into the Justice Court so my fingerprint records could be taken. I was there for at least two or three hours, without knowing what was going to happen. Some media started to come in, which is why there are pictures of me in the basement of the Justice Court. After a while, my mom and my sister arrived.

(Click for larger size. The Twitter account believed to have been created by agents of Guatemala's Ministry of Finance for the purpose of gathering evidence about @jeanfer's activities on Twitter)

@XENIJARDIN?: Did the authorities take your computer, or copy information from your computer, before taking you into detention?

@JEANFER: ?No. They returned to their offices to create a twitter account (@ubag03), look for my Twitter account, follow me, and search my timeline of tweets to print and present them as evidence. This is why it took them 4-5 hours to return. Then, they take me directly to the Court to wait for my case to be heard by a Judge so a sentence can be made. As it is known publicly, that very same afternoon a Judge defined my current legal situation.

@XENIJARDIN?: The judge determined that you were guilty of "inciting financial panic"?

@JEANFER: ?The Judge rules that I am to be subjected to a process, which means that firstly, the Public Ministry must investigate the case and secondly, that I am under house arrest. Then it means I am in confinement, and I cannot leave the country.

I am taken then to the "Preventivo" [the local Guatemalan prison], and placed temporarily before being put in sector one with other prisoners that night, on the 14th. Then, on the 15th, I was transported back to the Justice Court at around 7am and confined in a place along other prisoners to wait until the hearing happened, which did at 11:30am. My bail was paid with the help of a loan made by a local company, which now represents a debt for me. I signed all documents I need to in order to ensure my liberty, and thought I was going to go home, but instead I had to return to the prison one more time and wait, since the prison procedure states that prisoners can only be released after 11pm.

@XENIJARDIN?: And you were handcuffed the entire time?

@JEANFER: ?Almost the whole time, yes.

@XENIJARDIN?: So within a day of being arrested, you're taken before a judge, and he fines you the equivalent of about US $6,500?

@JEANFER: ?Yes. Since I didn't have the bail money right away I am taken into the local prison, where I have no clue of what is going on or what will happen with me, and I have no chance to speak to anyone.

@XENIJARDIN?: Your employer eventually loaned the money so you could be released.

@JEANFER: ?Yes, a company whose name I would like to keep out of the public eye.

On May 15th, the day after, I was among the prisoners to be transported to the Justice Court. I was handcuffed, but I must say that there are very nice people everywhere and someone there helped loosen the handcuffs, because they were hurting me a lot when I had my hands behind my back for so long.

Once in Court, my lawyer arrived at 10am and I ask her about what is happening, and what are we going to do. She tells me about the loan. Then, I go upstairs, and there, I encounter my mother and sister, who embrace me when they see me once again, but cry when they see how tired I look. They cried and hugged me.

@XENIJARDIN?: They were afraid for you.

@JEANFER: ?We are still afraid.

@XENIJARDIN: What happened after you were detained? How did you find out about all of the support for your case on Twitter?

@JEANFER: ?We all go to the fourth floor, and I find some friends that came to support me, and they hug me as well.

When I go up, there was a moment in which I was waiting to go into the hearing, and I'm just leaning on the wall.

I look next to me and I see a couple of guys with concerned faces. They come closer, and I suddenly recognize them as some of my Twitter friends, who say that they have found out about the whole situation and that they are supporting me, that there are 17 more people just like them downstairs.

I ask them (as a precaution to them) to not come up and be seen, but they all insist to stay and stick with me. This is when I began to feel extremely touched by all their actions.

When they told me they were staying, I felt so touched - I wanted to cry when I saw what they were doing. I hug them and thank them, and they say that it's not a problem, and that they will be taking turns to come upstairs in pairs, which they do until the time my hearing with the Judge began. About five of them stay for the hearing, and take pictures of the process.

When the Judge ruled his sentence, I was in shock. I could not believe it.

And then, I noticed other people's reactions in the courtroom - all the same as mine. After this, I go back to the prison as I mentioned earlier, spent the night, go back into the courthouse the next day, pay the bail, and go back once more to the prison as the procedure states. At 11pm on May 15th I am finally released. I leave the prison making several stops in various checkpoints, in which I have to answer questions about my felony, the Judge that gave the sentence, the courtroom that resolved the issue and the reason for my being released. I finally arrive home on May 16th at 1:15am.

@XENIJARDIN: ?What was it like when you came home? What were you feeling?

@JEANFER: ?I go back to my study, see my books, put on my glasses and thank God.

Although the nightmare is not over, I feel like one does when you leave the country for several weeks and miss your home. You miss your house, the familiar smells, the sound of your neighbor's dog, your window, air.

I didn't sleep. I stayed in my bed, a bed I have in my study, with the lights off and my eyes opened, enjoying this space I have.

When I was in prison, I saw a cockroach - I saw it crawl through the walls, come and go, sneak through the window's bars and leave. And I thought about Kafka's book, [Metamorphosis], and I wanted to be that cockroach.

@XENIJARDIN?: What have the days since you came home -- to serve house arrest -- began been like for you personally?

@JEANFER: ?I don't sleep well. About three hours a day. I can't read anything that is not related to the legal case. I have the Eleanor Rigby book, unopened -- before all of this happened, I was so excited I had finally obtained a copy.

When I work, I try to make a mental block and not think about all of this, and I work. But only for about four hours at a time. After that I lose focus.

@XENIJARDIN: ?Is there a book that this experience reminds you of?

@JEANFER: ?Humiliated and Insulted, by Dostoyevsky.

Now I try to live my life normally while we wait for the investigation by the Public Ministry to continue. A six-month period has been established for them to do so. We have presented a challenge with evidence, but they still have six months to search anything they want about me and use it against me in this case, in order to put me back into jail.

@XENIJARDIN: ?Why should people care what happens in your case?

@JEANFER: The point is that this case represents something we must not lose.

Without freedom of opinions and speech, there is no democracy.

I hope this case sets a precedent about freedom of thought.

# # #

[EDITOR'S NOTE, May 28, 2009: This article was edited after publication to remove the name of a commercial institution, at the request of Jean and his lawyers.]

(Photo by Jorge Mota)

(Version en Inglés aquí)

CIUDAD DE GUATEMALA: Hace un par de semanas, un usuario de Twitter fue arrestado, encarcelado y multado con el equivalente de un año de salario por haber publicado una opinión de 96 caracteres a Twitter. El tweet estaba relacionado a una crisis política que vive Guatemala actualmente, dada a raíz de alegatos hacia el Presidente Álvaro Colom, su supuesto involucramiento en el asesinato de un Abogado y denuncias acerca de funcionarios públicos del gobierno involucrados en transacciones ilegales y corruptas en uno de los bancos más grandes del país.

Desde entonces, Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, o @jeanfer como es conocido en Twitter (en la foto), ha sido liberado de prisión. Actualmente está bajo arresto domiciliario mientras el gobierno de Guatemala realiza las investigaciones para presentar cargos formales en su contra. Jean no es realmente una figura pública: es un hombre tímido y tranquilo, que trabaja en IT, con estudios de Ingeniería en sistemas y amante de la lectura. Desde entonces, se ha convertido en un popular héroe de la web, y el mismo Twitter se ha convertido en una fuerza de poder durante los recientes hechos en el país.

El Superintendente de Bancos de Guatemala, Edgar Barquín, desea que Jean enfrente cargos de hasta 10 años en prisión por "Incitar al pánico financiero" mediante el tweet en cuestión. Barquín ha propuesto también varias restricciones nuevas para regular el uso de Internet en Guatemala - por ejemplo, que sea necesario presentar la cédula de vecindad (identificación nacional de Guatemala), en los Café Internet para poder navegar.

Esta semana he entrevistado a @jeanfer acá en Ciudad de Guatemala. Entre algunos detalles, menciona que el Ministerio Público crea una cuenta de Twitter para "seguirlo", durante el interrogatorio realizado cuando su hogar es allanado, para conseguir evidencia. Y mientras estuvo en prisión, dice que sueña con Kafka, y deseó poder convertirse en cucaracha, para escapar. Las palabras finales de la entrevista de Jeanfer son:

"El punto es que este caso representa algo que no debemos perder. Sin libre opinión no hay democracia. Este caso va a sentar un precedente sobre la libre emisión del pensamiento."

He dejado la mayoría de la entrevista intacta, así que es bastante larga (2000+ palabras). Continúa en su totalidad luego del salto. (Gracias a @thevenemousone por su amable asistencia con la traduccion).

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@XENIJARDIN: Cómo había estado usando Twitter, y con quién se estaba comunicando?

@JEANFER: Si, lo utilizaba sobre todo para compartir con mi circulo de amigos del grupo de lectores chapines, y otros del mismo ámbito de web e informática. (Continúa...)

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@XENIJARDIN: Casi todos los posts de su blog, y todas las imágenes eran acerca de libros. Recuerdo que lo primero que pasó por mi mente al ver su blog personal fue que usted era alguien que realmente amaba los libros.

@JEANFER: Con todo mi corazón. Tengo una bonita biblioteca. En mi casa, en mi dormitorio, en mi estudio, en el baño, en mi teléfono -- cada pared cubierto con libros. Leo varios tipos, pero novelas históricas sobre todo. Biografías, poesía, historia, teología...

@XENIJARDIN: Usted fue uno de varias personas en Guatemala que estuvo hablando acerca de la crisis política de su país en Twitter durante la primera semana luego de que el video de Rosenberg fuera divulgado.

@JEANFER: Si, uno más.

@XENIJARDIN: Y usted publico este fugaz pensamiento sobre el crisis, y el banco. 96 caracteres. ¿Qué pasó?

@JEANFER: Ocurrió que los ultimos días en Guatemala han sido muy convulsionados. Todos hemos estado tratando de saber que es lo que pasa, porque estamos preocupados por nuestra nación. Yo amo Guatemala. Y estuvimos intercambiando la información que conocíamos entre nuestro grupo, con quienes somos muy unidos. Entonces todos hacíamos pensamientos fugaces, mientras ocurrían las cosas.

Ese día en particular, el 12 de mayo, comenzó con las noticias del MP (Ministerio Público) llegando al banco (parte 1 + parte 2). Ocurre antes, pero es publicada a las 10 con 03 minutos. La radio lo informa antes. Mi primer tweet relacionado se da a las 12, después del evento, dentro de un grupo reducido de personas que entienden que mi tweet no es una incitación -- es mas, he utilizado " ", comillas, para especificar lo que alguien mas ha dicho.

Si te das cuenta, mi tweet tiene tres partes. 'Primera acción real' esto es el titulo con que designó a lo que ocurre en torno a todo. Hay una primera acción real. Segundo, "sacar el pisto de [redactado]" -- la citación de lo que alguien mas dice. Y por ultimo lo que a mi juicio esa acción real pretende, 'quebrar al banco de los corruptos,' en donde no digo que el banco o sus funcionarios sean corruptos. Pero que quizás otras personas están infiltrando, o no se, pero -- la opinión de muchos en la comunidad.

(Ellos) Toman esa información y hacen ver que lo he dicho, primero, en una audiencia publica; segundo, que se encuentra al alcance de cualquiera, y tercero que lo he hecho como una incitación.

@XENIJARDIN: Así que al principio, solamente algunos amigos habrían visto esto. Pero unos días después, mucha gente fuera de tu círculo social comenzó a re-twittear este último tweet, y recuerdo que, de repente, casi todos los que estaban discutiendo la crisis estaban re-twitteando este mensaje específicamente.

@JEANFER: Si, el día 14. Cuando la comunidad se entera y comienzan a hacerlo -- no a petición mía, no puedo comunicarme con el exterior. Ocurre de una manera espontánea, otra gente lo han amplificado...

@XENIJARDIN: Usted está tratando de decir que no es una persona muy pública.

@JEANFER: Así es. No tengo una personalidad así, de hecho trato siempre de evadirla.

@XENIJARDIN: ¿Cuándo comenzaron los problemas relacionados con este tweet?

@JEANFER: El día 14 cuando (los oficiales) llegan a mi casa, con la orden de allanamiento. Yo me siento asustado por el despliegue policíaco, pero les digo que con todo gusto pasen adelante. Me piden que les señale en donde esta mi computadora y los llevo a mi dormitorio. Me preguntan si tengo un blog y les digo que si. Me preguntan si yo escribí los comentarios, los veo y les digo que si y les explico como se dieron las cosas. Les digo que mis tweets no tienen ninguna intención como ellos lo toman.

Se reúnen por un largo rato, hablan y hablan, que si están los correos dicen. Vuelven y les explico nuevamente que eso solo puede verse si uno decide buscar la pagina de twitter, darse de alta, y decide seguir mi cuenta en Twitter... Y estar al pendiente de lo que digo momento a momento.

@XENIJARDIN: ¿Entendieron ellos lo que es Twitter, a comparación con un blog?

@JEANFER: No. Hay declaraciones en las que el fiscal sale de mi casa indicando a la prensa que han encontrado evidencia en mi computadora de los emails masivos que he enviado desprestigiando al banco. Y la realidad es que SI hay personas mandando emails que condenan a [redactado], o a Colom, tengo copias y yo odio esa clase de mensajes. Saturan el Internet. Cada vez que alguno llega a mi correo lo borro inmediatamente.

@XENIJARDIN: ¿Qué pasó después?

@JEANFER: Fui conducido a la torre de tribunales para que se tomaran mis huellas digitales. Estuve alli al menos dos o tres horas sin saber que iba a ocurrir. Comenzaron a llegar medios y de alli que existan fotos mias en el sotano de la torre de tribunales. Luego llega mi madre y mi hermana para acompañarme.

@XENIJARDIN: Tomaron ellos su computadora, o copiaron información de la misma antes de llevarlo detenido?

@JEANFER: No. Ellos fueron a la fiscalía a crear un usuario de twitter, a buscar mi usuario, seguirlo, y buscar mis comentarios en el timeline para imprimirlos y presentarlos como prueba. Por eso se tardaron como 4 o 5 horas en volver. Me llevan directamente a los tribunales a esperar que mi caso sea conocido por un juez para que decida y como es de tu conocimiento ese mismo día por la tarde el juez define mi situación jurídica.

@XENIJARDIN: ¿Determina entonces el Juez que usted es culpable de "incitar al pánico financiero"?

@JEANFER: (El Juez determina) Que estoy ligado a proceso en primer termino lo cual significa es que el caso debe ser investigado por el ministerio publico, segundo que tengo arresto domiciliario. Luego que tengo arraigo.

Soy llevado al preventivo y puesto en un lugar antes de ser colocado en el sector 1 con otros reos esa misma noche, la noche del 14. En la mañana del día 15 fui trasladado a temprano a la torre de tribunales alrededor de las 7am y confinado en un sitio con otros reos hasta esperar la audiencia de las 11 y 30, en donde se realizo el pago de la fianza por el préstamo que hizo una empresa y que ya representa para mi una deuda. Firme los documentos correspondientes a mi libertad, y pensé que me iba de una vez a casa pero debía regresar al preventivo una vez mas para esperar por el procedimiento carcelario que establece que se sale libre solamente a partir de las 23 horas.

@XENIJARDIN: Y ¿Estuvo usted esposado durante todo este tiempo?

@JEANFER: Si, casi todo el tiempo.

@XENIJARDIN: Así que, en el mismo día de su arresto usted es llevado frente a un juez y este le impone a usted una multa equivalente a aproximadamente US $6500.

@JEANFER: Si, al no tener el dinero de la fianza me llevan al preventivo en donde no tengo conocimiento de nada ni de que pasara conmigo, sin poder hablar con nadie.

@XENIJARDIN: La empresa en donde labora eventualmente le presta el dinero para que usted pueda ser liberado.

@JEANFER: Si. Una empresa que deseo mantener al margen. Al día siguiente a las 6am soy incluido entre los reos que serán trasladados a la torre de tribunales, esto es el día 15. Me llevan esposado, debo decir que hubo gente buena en todas partes y estas personas buenas se ocupaban de no ponerme las esposas muy apretadas, ya que me molestaban mucho al tener las manos detrás de la espalda. Una vez allá, mi abogada llega a las 10am y le pregunto que paso, que hay, que vamos a hacer? Y me cuenta lo del préstamo, luego al subir las gradas encuentro a mi hermana y mi madre, que me abrazan al verme nuevamente, pero cuando me ven parece que me ven cansado, y me abrazan y lloran.

@XENIJARDIN: Ellas tenían miedo de lo que le podía suceder.

@JEANFER: Todavía lo tenemos.

@XENIJARDIN: Y como aprendió usted del apoyo de los otros tuiteros?

@JEANFER: Subimos al cuarto nivel y allí encuentro también a mis amigos que me saludan y me abrazan. Al subir a tribunales en un momento que me encuentro esperando entrar con el señor juez y me encuentro divagando recostado en una pared veo a un lado y hay dos muchachos que están con sus rostros demudados. Se acercan a mi y los reconozco como amigos, y dicen que se han enterado, que están conmigo, que abajo hay 17 personas mas. Les pido que no suban y que no los vean, pero ellos insisten en quedarse, y es entonces cuando empiezo a conmoverme Cuando se quedan me siento conmovido -- me dieron ganas de llorar por su acto. Los abrazo y les agradezco. Me dicen que no les importa y que van a subir de dos en dos, y así lo hacen hasta el momento de presentarme ante el juez. Que se quedan como cinco en la audiencia y toman fotografías.

Al momento del fallo me siento en shock por la resolución. No lo puedo creer. Y noto la reacción de otros -- y es igual.

Luego ocurre lo que te he comentado de ir al preventivo, paso la noche allá, vuelvo a tribunales al día siguiente, se paga la caución económica, y debo volver al preventivo por el procedimiento.

A las 11 de la noche recibo el llamado a libertad. Salgo haciendo varias paradas en varios puntos de control en donde soy interrogado sobre mi delito, el juez que resolvió, la sala que resolvió y la razón de mi libertad. Llegó a casa el día 16 a las 00:15.

@XENIJARDIN: ¿Cómo fue cuando usted pasa por la puerta de su casa, regresando nuevamente? ¿Qué sintió?

@JEANFER: Voy a mi estudio, veo mis libros, me pongo mis lentes y le doy gracias a Dios.

Aunque la pesadilla no ha terminado, me siento como cuando uno sale de su país por varias semanas y extrañas a los tuyos. Extrañas tu casa, al perro del vecino, la ventana, el aire. No dormí. Me quede en mi cama, en una cama que tengo en el estudio, con la luz apagada, y los ojos abiertos disfrutando ese espacio que tenia.

En prisión vi una cucaracha -- la vi rondar las paredes. Ir y venir, y luego escabullirse por la ventana a través de los barrotes e irse. Y pensé en el libro de Kafka, ["Metamorphosis"], y quise ser esa cucaracha.

@XENIJARDIN: ¿Cómo han sido los días desde que ha regresado a casa - a servir arresto domiciliario - para usted?

@JEANFER: No duermo bien. Tres horas diarias. No puedo leer otra cosa que no sea esto del caso. Tengo el libro de "Eleanor Rigby" sin poder abrirlo y estaba tan encantado de haberlo conseguido. Cuando trabajo, trato de hacer un block, y funciono. Pero solo por unas cuatro horas. Luego pierdo el focus.

@XENIJARDIN: ¿Hay algún libro que le recuerde esta experiencia?

@JEANFER: "Humillados y Ofendidos," de Dostoyevsky. Ahora trato de hacer mi vida normal en tanto esperamos que la investigación por parte del MP siga. Se ha abierto un plazo de 6 meses para tal efecto. Hemos presentado una reacusación con pruebas como tienen seis meses para buscar todo lo que quieran sobre mi y usarlo en mi contra en este caso para devolverme a prisión.

El punto es que este caso representa algo que no debemos perder.

Sin libre opinión no hay democracia. Este caso va a sentar un precedente sobre la libre emisión del pensamiento.

# # #

[28 de Mayo, 2009: Este artículo fue redactado a petición de jeanfer y sus abogados. - XJ]

(Photo: Jorge Mota)

A new study from a Cambridge law professor says that DRM doesn't stop piracy, but rather prompts users to illegally download DRM-free pirated content (via Boing Boing). In short, the study found that users get frustrated by the restrictions put on legally purchased content by DRM and copy-protection technologies. Instead of rolling over and accepting this, they often change their behavior -- choosing to download unrestricted, illegal content in the future. This goes along with what's been pretty clear for a long time. DRM doesn't work at stopping piracy, it makes products less valuable and less attractive to users, and in turn leads them to look elsewhere for unrestricted content and products they can use how they best see fit.

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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