A reader named Frosty840 points out that, if you thought the idea of a good old fashioned "book burning" had gone out of style in the US, a group of offended individuals in Wisconsin are petitioning the local library for permission to burn its only copy of a book called Baby Be-Bop. A book burning? Apparently it hasn't occurred to these offended folks that (beyond the disgrace of wanting to burn books they dislike), this entire action has only served to call a lot more attention to that book. The folks asking for the right to burn the book, are also demanding $120,000 for "being exposed to the book in a library display," which seems likely to (again) only drive much more interest in the book. A book that can cause that much damage? Where can I get my copy?

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Video Link. (thanks, Wes Varghese!).

UPDATE: Here's someone identified as the baby's mom, sharing some funny details about the talkative 12-month-old and the situation in which the video was shot. Here's a better-quality source for the video.

Omomyid writes "In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mick was the first of a few folks who sent in this story about how an Australian music publishing firm, Larrikin Music, is suddenly accusing the Australian band, Men At Work, of "ripping off" a 1930s popular Austrlian children's song, "Kookaburra" with their hit song "Down Under." Why did it take so long? Well, Larrikin only gained the copyright in 2000, but that's still 9 years of nothing. Apparently, they only noticed the similarities when an Australian quiz show brought it up -- which certainly raises questions about any "harm" done by this (if there was any actual copying). Once again, like similar stories (such as the Coldplay/Satriani/Creaky Boards/Cat Stevens battle), it's difficult to see why this even matters. Even if the songs are similar, it's not as if one makes the other any less valuable. If anything, it's only served to drive more attention to the similar songs. This is nothing more than a music publishing company desperate for cash grasping at straws to demand cash from others who have been more successful.

Anyway, for comparison's sake, here's a group of kids singing Kookaburra: And here's the song Down Under: Can anyone tell the difference?

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simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, a new feature article discusses how much money free-to-play MMO games make, with specific real-world stats from game developers willing to discuss how they make money with microtransaction-based PC games. In particular, Puzzle Pirates co-creator Daniel James reveals that 'the average revenue per user (ARPU) is between one and two dollars a month, but only about 10% of his player base has ever paid him anything. As a result, he says, approximately 5,000 gamers are generating the $230,000 in revenue he sees each month.' It's obviously quite a different model from the regular $15/month for World Of Warcraft, but it evidently works for some companies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I was thrilled to get handed a new EMS Labs' business card/target board by Windell at Maker Faire. I have their original ATmegaXX8 card displayed on my desk and it gets comments from nearly everyone who sees it. I haven't used it in a project yet, but I'm dyin' to (I'm dying to have the free time to do any projects -- I have a laundry list of things I want to try). The new Labs card/target board is for the ATtiny2313 AVR chip, the MCU used in such projects as the MiniPOV and the LED Mini Menorah.

Like the original card, our design goals for this project were (1) to make a printed circuit board version of the minimalist target board for the microcontroller, encompassing a place for the chip and a connection to the 6-pin ISP header, (2) to make a minimal and inexpensive circuit board platform that you could use to deploy a single AVR somewhere with without much fuss, (3) to encompass the capacity of a breakout board, giving extra holes to tap into each pin of the AVR and provide labels for every pin, (4) to fit in some small amount of flexible prototyping space, (5) to make it all fit into a neat business-card form factor, and (6) to release it as an open-source project.

Read more about it here.

You can get one of the boards yourself here.

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The Narrative Fallacy writes "With about 4,200 people participating in a US National Security Agency-supported international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components, 20 of the 70 finalists were from China, 10 from Russia, and 2 from the US. China's showing in the finals was helped by its large number of entrants, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers was a finalist. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128. Participants in the TopCoder Open was open to anyone, from student to professional; the contest proceeded through rounds of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas. Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, says the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education. 'We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NetChoice has put together "iAwful," a site tracking the worst proposed internet legislation, ranked by the seriousness of the threat (both the amount of damage the laws can do, and the liklihood of them passing). Some of the proposed laws on the list you'll recognize, as we've discussed them here. Overall, though, this looks to be a great source if you're worried about politicians passing innovation-destroying laws:

Knee-jerk, overly prescriptive laws can destroy whole business models or stifle innovative new forms of communication before they have a chance to emerge. Too many laws are proposed without considering unintended harm they may cause to thousands of Internet companies and millions of Internet users.

NetChoice is dedicated to fighting these attacks on core Internet principles. Through this site, the Internet Advocates' Watchlist For Ugly Laws (iAWFUL) will track dangerous legislation and mobilize citizens to defeat bills and proposals that threaten the future of ecommerce and online communication. The list will be continually updated to reflect the most immediate dangers, based on regulatory severity and likelihood of passage.

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Over the weekend I started a new site with my longtime friend and fellow Berkeleyite, Lance Knobel. The site arose out of a dozen conversations with friends and neighbors. "Does Berkeley have a site that's just about Berkeley?" The answer, always: "I wish there was one." Lately the conversations have been more urgent. Why don't we get off our butts and start one already.

So we did.

http://inberkeley.com/

We all agree, we hope, that Berkeley is a great place, but it means different things to everyone who lives here. To some it's a great university town. To others it's a place to live, or a place to work. To others it's a cultural center. There's a huge freeway that passes through town, and a train line that goes to Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Seattle, Canada, probably everywhere else in the country. We have poverty and wealth. A new shopping district and an old one. Manufacturing, a winery, car dealers, biotech and computer firms. Some of the best public transit in the world. We have artists, scientists, great thinkers, journalists, many of the smartest people on the planet are our neighbors. We voted for Obama but we saw some McCain signs on front lawns. We have strong opinions, but we also value tolerance.

For me, Berkeley is a refuge -- it's a place to live because you have to live somewhere. I tried a lot of places. I spent 20-plus years in Silicon Valley, it was the right place for me when I was an ambitious young man determined to prove his worth. I liked living in Cambridge, the people were great, the intellectual life fantastic, but it was cold. I liked Seattle, but people worked so hard. I loved the beach in Florida, and the people were nice, but their politics were too different from mine.

I tried living on the road, but I needed a permanent place to sleep, write, and a consistent set of friends to hang with day in and day out. I could have had that in a variety of places but I chose Berkeley because it's beautiful, the politics are a good match (not in the cliche sense that rightwingers think) and the people who live here are intelligent, friendly, not pretentious and they don't work too hard, as a rule, so they have time to play.

Tom Hunt, a longtime Berkeley resident said it well. If you take out the university, Berkeley is a small place. The day he said it I ran into three people on the street who I knew on my daily walk. But over time I've given it thought and realize that it's not a small place, but it feels that way, it's approachable.

Now there are things not to like about Berkeley. And I suppose each of us has our own list. For me, it's the black hole that downtown is. I don't like going there. I don't understand why a great city like Berkeley doesn't have a thriving and bustling downtown. With the great public transit and the world-class university, located in the middle of one of the most dynamic metropolitan areas of the world, why isn't the downtown a place more people want to come to, not just from within Berkeley but from all around the Bay Area, the state, the country, the world?

To me, having lived here only three years, most of what I know about Berkeley is how much I don't know about Berkeley. But having a blank page to fill in is one of my favorite things. With my good buddy Lance, and hopefully with a lot of help from friends in and around this great place, I hope InBerkeley.com will become a place to learn and share and grow a greater Berkeley.

TropicalCoder writes "Ray Ozzie says that Google Wave is 'anti-Web,' by which he seems to mean that it is too complex for its own good. In the video he complains about its complexity in relation to Microsoft's Live Mesh: 'If you have something, that by its very nature is very complex, with many goals... then you need open source to have many instances of it because nobody will be able to do an independent implementation of it.' That's its weakness to Ozzie, apparently — that this complexity that can only be overcome by open source. While he heaps high praise on the Google team that came up with this, he feels that the advantage of Microsoft's approach is that '...by decomposing things to be simpler, you don't need open source.' The Register's author summarizes it like this: 'In a way, this is classic Microsoft meets what is emerging as classic Google. Microsoft gives you an integrated stack but all the moving parts are anchored on a single company's vision. Google frees you to work out the bits yourself, but you must rely on your own smarts or those of your chosen tools.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When we started bit.ly, about a year ago, I had a very strong idea of how we'd make money with it. Unfortunately bit.ly never got there. Now a couple of new shorteners are doing it, so I want to tell the story.

Like a lot of other developers I'm hooked on Amazon. It started with their storage system, S3. Now I use EC2, and hope to find an application for SimpleBase. I'm using many of the other smaller features of their cloud. It's great stuff.

However, there are a couple of components I'd like to see added to Amazon's cloud.

1. Internet-level notification. I'd really like them to offer the basic notification facilities of Twitter. See this piece that says that like it or not Twitter is becoming an essential part of the infrastructure. It's true. We need them to have competition, and it should come from Amazon, and many other places.

2. URL-shorteners. They're a fact of life. But I should have my own shortener at my own domain, so I control the future of the URLs. That way if the service I use should go down, I could switch to another. I also want to generate stats from the URLS.

Bit.ly was supposed to do #2. My plan for the developers went like this. When you have a question how to do something, do it the way Amazon does it. I want the API to be like theirs, the docs, and most important -- the pricing.

If Amazon did a URL-shortener, they would charge by the URL, and they would charge for each access. The prices would be very low, but they would add up. The same way they do it for S3 and EC2. Bit.ly was to be the URL-shortener that Amazon would have made.

Now today I learned of two URL-shorteners that are offering to host domains for you. One charges a flat rate of $49 per year and is available today. Another promises to do it for free, but it's available soon.

Watch this area closely, it's important.

I love this idea and think it's a great use of the web. On the Make: Talk episode with Erik and Wendy of Homegrown Evolution, we were talking about the fact that, frequently, too many people in a neighborhood have too many of the same vegetables in their garden (e.g. everybody has tomatoes and basil). This is a great way to coordinate and distribute your bounty, in this case, the fruit that grows in your yard. For instance, I have really good Concord grapes, more than we can eat. I might try and trade for some other fruit.

Neighborhood Fruit

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I remember reading a while ago how if you look at the extremists in diametrically opposed political parties, they tend to have a lot more similarities rather than differences. It seems that may be happening in the proprietary and open source worlds as well. We've discussed how silly it is for companies and individuals trying to understand "free" business models to worry about freeloaders. The fact is, yes, some people will get stuff for free and not contribute anything back. In fact, it may be a lot of people. But if the end result is that you are actually making more money overall from those who aren't freeloaders, who really cares? In some cases all those "freeloaders" are actually giving back in other ways, such as by amplifying and promoting your message for you, and bringing in new potential customers that wouldn't have known about you otherwise.

For the most part, I assumed this was an issue for those with "proprietary" content/software. But, suddenly it's an issue that's getting attention in the "open source" world, with supporters of open source complaining about "freeloaders" who use open source software, but don't contribute back. This is silly. As Joel West points out, the whole point of open source software is that it can be used for any purpose. So, just as proprietary content creators shouldn't worry about freeloaders and focus on those who actually do contribute, the same is true for open source developers. Sure, some will freeload, but don't worry about them. Let them do what they want, and focus on providing more value for those who do contribute. In the end, the overall benefit will be much greater.

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Koko loved watching Mr. Rogers on TV and was happy to see him in person. (Via The Sound of Young America)

theraindog writes "The number of different CPU models available from AMD and Intel is daunting to say the least. The Tech Report's latest CPU review makes some sense of the landscape, exploring the performance and power consumption characteristics of more than two dozen desktop processors between the $999 Core i7-975 and more affordable sub-$100 chips. The article also highlights the value proposition offered by each CPU on its own and as a part of the total cost of a system. The resulting scatter plots nicely illustrate which CPUs deliver the best performance per dollar."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The breastlight is a medical gadget that allows women to examine suspicious breast lumps.

Malignant lumps have an increased blood supply to feed them so any dense areas may indicate an abnormality. Fluid filled cysts, however, will not absorb the light.

I don't think they are sold in the US, but in the UK they cost £77.50.

Breastlight Helps Augment At-Home Self Exams

The first time my 11-year-old got a bloody tongue from licking a Tootsie Pop, we thought it was a fluke. The second time it happened, we examined the Tootsie Pop and figured out that the voids that had formed in the pop had sharp edges. Anyone else have this happen to them?

eldavojohn writes "The Hubble Constant is used for many things in astrophysics: from determining how fast things are moving away from us, to the total volume of the universe, to predicting how our universe will end. The current best value for the Hubble Constant is 74.2 ± 3.6 (km/s)/Mpc according to recent conventional methods and the recently restored Hubble Telescope. Most astronomers agree that that's within 10% of its actual value. Researchers now claim that they might be able to get to 3% using water molecules in galactic disks to act as masers that amplify radio waves, to analyze galaxies seven times as far away as the current measurements. The further away the 'standard candle' is, the more assured they can be that local effects are not skewing the measurements. From one of the researchers: 'We measured a direct, geometric distance to the galaxy, independent of the complications and assumptions inherent in other techniques. The measurement highlights a valuable method that can be used to determine the local expansion rate of the universe, which is essential in our quest to find the nature of dark energy.' Once the Square Kilometer Array is completed, they hope to get even closer to the actual value."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Think of it as a Minty Big-Boost. Micah and a buddy are leaving on a cross-country trip and they don't want their handheld gaming systems to run out of juice along the way, so he put together this battery powerpack using 12 Volt 7 AH Lead-calcium battery. They're hoping to get some 30 hours of juice out of the thing.

"Luggable" power pack [via lady ada]

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Another election using e-voting machines... and another set of stories concerning massive problems. Slashdot points us to the news that a local election in Rapid City, South Dakota, was about to go to a runoff after no one hit the 50% mark, when someone finally noticed that the 10,488 vote total seemed a bit high. So, they went back and recounted the actual ballots, and discovered only 5,613 people voted, but the software added up the votes incorrectly. Once again, we're left wondering why it's so difficult to do simple arithmetic -- and why e-voting companies like ES&S are so against allowing experts to look at their source code and maybe help catch some of these bugs before they totally screw up an election.

ES&S, of course, has been especially bad when it comes to transparency, despite numerous stories of glitches. It's also the company that had an employee stop by here on Techdirt, call us all "idiots" while insisting that the machines were perfectly fine and that the machines are "extremely scrutinized and very reliable" and anyone questioning their reliability was simply relying on "conspiracy blogs." Of course, his focus was on the idea that the machines were "hacked" -- a charge we never made. Our concern -- and the concern of many others -- are that the machines are unreliable, prone to errors and have serious security and process flaws. Considering how many stories we've seen of problems with those machines in real elections, that seems to be proven fact -- not "conspiracy."

And yet, ES&S has always resisted any real scrutiny. When California looked to investigate e-voting machines more fully, ES&S was the one vendor who held out for months beyond the deadline, before finally submitting its source code along with a threatening letter about how it would personally sue the Secretary of State if any of its trade secrets got out. Of course, soon after this, we found out that even its certified code didn't much matter, since it had given California machines with uncertified code for an election. In the end, not surprisingly, ES&S machines were found to have significant problems, and were decertified in California. Perhaps South Dakota should have taken note.

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If you happen to be in Los Angeles on the evening of June 10, the underground cinema appreciation group Cinefamily is hosting an evening of weird, mutant fun that is quintessential Boing Boing. "Michael Winslow, Man of 1000 Noises," who you may recall from Police Academy (see clip above), will perform a live "score" for an assortment of silent films...

You know him best as Officer Larvell Jones, the irrepressible burbling, beep-borping human Foley machine that was a mainstay character in the Police Academy repertory company. Be it helicopters, electric guitars, cop sirens, the inner workings of robots, barking dogs, squishing soggy sneakers, roaring jets, spine-tingling scratches on a chalkboard, screaming guitars, cell phones, kung fu dubbing--he is truly the man of a thousand noises, at the very least. He captured the juvenile fascinations of a generation with his uncanny talent for imitation, and tonight, Winslow takes the Cinefamily stage to embark on a new venture: a never-before attempted challenge that only he could possibly fulfill. Yes, Winslow will be providing a live music-and-effects track to a varied sampling of classic and not-so-classic shorts from the silent era. Not so silent anymore.

I know only a small portion of Boing Boing readers are in Los Angeles, but this event was so cool, I had to post. And -- hey, if you can't make it, there's the YouTube video, above, for a sampling of Winslow's insane skillz. Link to Event Info on Cinefamily site, here's the official Michael Winslow site, and here's his Wikipedia entry. (Thanks, Hadrian!).

Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com discovered that the same photo of "Kevin Heoffer" -- the guy who has ads on Facebook and SurftheChannel about "How I Started Making $7,500 a Month Working An Online Part-Time Job from Home" -- also appears on a box for a barbecue grill. You know what that means, but it's fun to read Rob's take on it.

I Caught Kevin Heoffer Barbecuing at Costco

An anonymous reader writes "An interesting (and profane) writeup of one frustrated user's discovery that Comcast is actually intercepting DNS requests bound for non-Comcast DNS servers and redirecting them to their own servers. I had obviously heard of the DNS hijacking for nonexistent domains, but I had no idea they'd actually prevent people from directly contacting their own DNS servers." If true, this is a pretty serious escalation in the Net Neutrality wars. Someone using Comcast, please replicate the simple experiment spelled out in the article and confirm or deny the truth of it. Also, it would be useful if someone using Comcast ran the ICSI Netalyzr and posted the resulting permalink in the comments.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in April, the state of Minnesota tried to force ISPs to block certain gambling websites. Similar attempts had been tried in a few other states, and quickly shot down by the courts -- and it didn't take long for a lawsuit to emerge in Minnesota. However, the good news is that the state has apparently agreed to back down rather than trying to fight a bogus and costly lawsuit. Basically, it sounds like enough lawyers explained to state officials that their likelihood of winning was pretty slim -- so the state just folded. At least they didn't keep trying to waste taxpayer money trying to fight for such censorship.

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There's something I'm not getting here.

A few weeks ago I tried to get a very simple script working with the Tumblr API. I kept getting a return value that said the API was down. I waited and waited for it to come back up before finally throwing my hands up in frustration. I tried everything I could think of. Turns out this was an error in the proxy server, the API was still up. Tried some more still couldn't get it to work.

Today I started fresh. Got the same result. Here's the URL that I'm POSTing to. (The password is xxx'd out.)

Here's the response I get.

I really would like to get past this, so if anyone has working code could you check to see what I'm doing wrong. TIA.

franknagy writes "This announcement message has appeared in all the news groups on the AT&T/SBC News Server: 'Please note that on or around July 15, 2009, AT&T will no longer be offering access to the Usenet netnews service. If you wish to continue reading Usenet newsgroups, access is available through third-party vendors.' So what free or low-cost alternatives are available for Netnews and the NNTP services for clients?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nathan Hickson made this short montage of some fun things he saw at Maker Faire. I missed most of these things myself!

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eldavojohn writes "MIT's Technology Review has the scoop on the first annual Consumer Genetics Show starting today in Boston and it looks like the rage these days is genetic testing sans the middle-man physician. And it's getting more prevalent and more available: 'A number of companies offering direct-to-consumer genetic testing have cropped up in the past two years to capitalize on these advances, from 23andMe and Navigenics, which offer genome-wide scans to identify specific disease-linked genetic variations, to Knome, which offers whole-genome sequencing to the wealthy. Any doubts that personal genomics is making its way into the mainstream can be assuaged with a look at Interleukin genetics, a startup that sells genetic tests for heart-disease risk, B vitamin metabolism, and other factors through Amway, the direct-sales company.' Over-the-counter genetic tests may be much closer than you think. The article raises concerns that this information will be misused/misinterpreted or even provide a false sense of security. We've discussed some states prohibiting this last year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Above, an earlier a rough cut of the film Invisible Children. The movie appears to be an ongoing work in progress, and as much an advocacy movement as much as it is a work of filmmaking. Richard Metzger writes,

This is one of the most fucked up things I have ever heard of: A Ugandan warlord by the name of Joseph Kony kidnaps children from their parents who are powerless to do anything about it. He is feared as if he has voodoo powers and any kids trying to escape from his army have their tongues cut out or are killed.

The young guys who organized the "How it Ends" event made the film. I saw it on Rick Sanchez's CNN show last month at the gym and it is WEIRD and disturbing. I ran home and looked it up.

The interesting thing about their movie (much of it online at their site) is that they were these these young guys from San Diego who made skateboarding videos and were best friends. They had the idea to go to Africa to have an adventure and shoot it for a movie. What they found was Joseph Kony's child army. The story had not been really been told before that. They brought it back with them and started a movement. They've been on Oprah and Larry King. They're heroes, full stop.

It's riveting scary, stuff. A nightmare. A human rights disaster of the worst kind.

The film: Invisible Children
The event in DC: How it Ends
And: Night of the Rescue.

Mark Rosedale points us to an interesting blog post from singer/songwriter Shaun Groves, where he discusses how the music business is changing, and how it's the artists that need to change, by focusing on different kinds of relationships:

The music business is about relationship. And now it's the artist's turn to have one.

Success in the music business once hinged on only a handful of relationships: a publicist and a magazine, a salesman and a bookstore, a radio promoter and a radio station, a booking guy and a promoter, an artist and a manager, a writer and a publisher. If all these relationships were working, if all parties' interests were respected and pursued, if no personalities collided to the point of impeding progress, then the project or artist they were tied to would succeed (from a business standpoint.)

But, today, that equation has changed, and artists need to learn how to have very different types of relationships -- and it's difficult for some:

Technologies can foster relationships. But not without a lot of personal investment and intentionality from an artist.

This is a big shift in thinking for artists, especially at the top levels of this industry. Artists aren't accustomed to being so accessible, accountable and out of control. Artists are accustomed to being in front of audiences that care about what they do, audiences they know are fans and they keep in the seats for a couple hours by charging a ticket price. But on-line, where spending time with an artist is free, anybody can wander into the crowd, boo, change the subject, or walk out. And they will.

Also, artists are used to hiring people to handle their relationships for them. That's at least 90% of what a manager does. Labels congratulate and critique through a manager, for instance, who adds his own diplomatic spin to every word so the artist's feelings aren't hurt and the relationship is preserved. Not so on-line. Someone can be hired to hit the "publish" button on a blog post that gets e-mailed over, invite people to a Facebook event and even write to people for an artist and signed their name (it happens), but no one can convincingly be the artist every day in post after post or interact with commenters regularly. Artists can't hire anyone to be them 24/7 and the internet demands those kind of hours.

I know that whenever we write stories about artists successfully connecting with fans, we get angry messages from music industry folks about "what if artists don't want to connect with fans." What Shaun is suggesting here is that if they don't, then they're not going to have the type of relationships necessary in the modern music world. In some ways, saying "what if musicians don't want to interact with fans" is the equivalent of saying "and what if Widget Co.'s employees don't want to interact with customers." That's fine... but then they can't complain when their widgets don't sell. Shaun concludes by stating:

If the music industry dies it won't be because everything changed. It will be because artists didn't. Artists today have to - no, we get to - do what the rest of the industry and human race has been doing for eons: We get to be real human beings spending time with other real human beings. There's no shortcut for that.
<br The Man was afraid to tell us artists this before: It was never about our music. And it's not about new technology now. It's always been about people. All that matters is.

This is a fantastic point. In my MidemNet presentation about how Trent Reznor connected with fans and gave them a reason to buy, one point I raised briefly (which got a laugh from the audience) was the crazy idea that some of Reznor's actions made him "seem human," and how rare that was in the music industry. It's a point that bares repeating, so I'm glad Shaun called it out (and that Mark alerted me to it). Nearly every success story we've discussed has had that in common: it's about making the artists seem human -- and that helps people feel like they want to help the artists out and they want to pay for things, rather than feeling pressured or coerced into paying.

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Goths. Whatever do they do when it's warm and sunny out?

All that makeup, long black leather and rubber must get very sticky. I think we should show our respect for these poor unfortunates, struggling to stand out from the vanilla crowd despite blazing temperatures and sunshine that puts the rest of us in shorts and vest tops. Join me in celebrating the majesty of the Goth, who, eschewing any practicality whatever, still has the commitment to don a full length leather trenchcoat, stupid New Rock boots, and half a Superdrug counter of makeup. All hail the Hot Goth!

gothsinhotweather.com (via @richardmetzger, via coilhouse.net)

Sub Pop is giving away a bunch of its songs as MP3s. The download page they created for it is funny a take-off on 1996-era Web design, with lots of animated gifs and nauseous backgrounds.

Sub Pop Cybersex Digital Sampler (Via Very Short List)

Last month, President Obama vowed to bar the release of photographs that depict torture (or detainee abuse, depending on your truthspeak) at military prisons during the Bush administration. Today, this news, about transcripts of those torture videotapes that were destroyed by the CIA in 2005. I'm seeing a pattern here...

The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts.

In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called "sensitive operational information" about the interrogations.

CIA Urges Judge To Keep Bush-Era Documents Sealed (Washington Post, via @dangillmor)

Leia Clancy and Sam Goodman, two of the English students who staged a strike when they discovered CCTV cameras had been installed in their classrooms have written an impassioned-but-reasoned op-ed about their desire to be educated without surveillance. I was so inspired by these kids' story that I asked my British publisher, HarperCollins, to send them a case of copies of Little Brother, my novel about young people who fight off government surveillance.

It turned out that our entire class was angry or confused over the cameras. Out of a class of 18 students, 17 felt uncomfortable with the idea and decided to boycott the room until the issue, and the students, were addressed. This was a difficult decision as we were three months away from exams and we had five lessons a fortnight in the room. The student body was supportive and a petition gained over 130 signatures from the sixth-form...

Many users suggested that cameras were a good idea because they could be used to keep an eye on bullying and student behaviour, we were accused of been "narcissistic megalomaniacs" angry at "being nabbed for our churlish troublemaking". This stereotypical and frankly ignorant view ignores the fact that Davenant Foundation School produces some of the best exam results in Essex. Violent behaviour among pupils is simply not an issue, making the justification for putting cameras in our classrooms more surprising.

Adults are often quick to define the youth of today as stereotypical troublemakers and violent offenders - generalisations which are prompted by the media - when in fact the majority of students at our school are as responsible and arguably better behaved then the majority of adults. Some commentators insinuated that we overheard adults talking about rights and repeated it. That notion isn't worth the space it was typed upon. We are A-level politics students who have been studying civil liberties as part of the curriculum for the last two years...

Eroding standards in schools and deteriorating discipline are down to a broken society and the failure of the education system. The truth is that we are whatever the generation before us has created. If you criticise us, we are your failures; and if you applaud us we are your successes, and we reflect the imperfections of society and of human life.

We don't need no CCTV in our classroom (Thanks, Cassidy!)

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos Magazine: "Light pollution has caused one-fifth of the world's population — mostly in Europe, Britain and the US — to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky. 'The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage,' said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Yet 'more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the US population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steelcase announced its Sit-to-Walkstation, which "combines a complete, low-speed treadmill with an electric, height-adjustable worksurface, so it’s easy to add movement and burn calories as you work, whenever you want." It costs $4,899, minus the chair.

(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the author of several books including Backyard Ballistics, and the recently published Absinthe and Flamethrowers. Twitter: @wmgurst)

Paris - Premier Clemenceau, as he was leaving his residence to-night, was attacked by a man who raised a cane to strike him. A policeman sprang forward and overpowered the man.

He is proved to be an aged street hawked, (sic) who, it is believed, was half crazed by absinthe.

-- New York Times article from exactly 100 years ago

In Absinthe and Flamethrowers, I shed some light on the traditions, mysteries, and fallacies surrounding the world's most misunderstood alcoholic beverage. As part of the rigorous and assiduous research that went into writing this book, I was compelled to sample over a dozen different brands of the stuff, resulting occasionally in a somewhat intimate embrace with the green fairy.

Yesterday, a bottle of Kubler Distillee Au Val-De-Travers arrived in the mail. Kubler is a Swiss Absinthe, pale white in color. I had some last night. Ah, those Swiss. They do not produce good comedy (smallest book in the world: The Treasury of Swiss Humor) but they do make a fine absinthe. Kubler has a pronounced anise aroma. Pleasantly sharp initial taste, quickly trailing off into subtle wormwood bitterness. Louches well. As good as Taboo, but in a much different way.

Above, award-winning television writer Norman Stiles. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Old Jews Telling Jokes. (thanks, Eric Spiegelman)

Last year, when the recording industry in the UK was pushing for ISPs to act as copyright cops, Charles Dunstone, the head of Carphone Warehouse and its TalkTalk ISP, stood up and bashed the recording industry for even daring to suggest that the ISP should be responsible for the recording industry's own inability to adapt. As he said at the time of the recording industry:

"They're not just shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted -- the horse has left town, got married, and started a family."

As numerous people are submitting, Dunstone is back at it, stating the obvious to a recording industry that needs to hear it. He's trying to explain to them that, no matter how hard it tries, it can't stop unauthorized file sharing, noting that "the pirates will always win" and any attempt to stop them is simply "naive":

If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid....

If people want to share content they will find another way to do it.... It is more about education and allowing people to get content easily and cheaply that will make a difference. This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive.

Of course, this is what plenty of people have been saying for years. There have been plenty of opportunities for the recording industry to embrace opportunities, and they've failed almost every single time. Instead, as always, they want to complain about the "pirates" and the "thieves" while other companies build the new music industry around them.

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Recently on Offworld we took a longer look at what Apple's WWDC keynote -- most obviously, the announcement of the new 3GS model iPhone -- means for gamers and indie devs, and what, more specifically, Apple didn't announce to create a better landscape for the latter. We also saw that Microsoft's Kodu (above) -- it's 21st century LOGO-like package meant to help children learn game/programming logic by assembling their own 3D games -- is due for a release in just a few short weeks, and saw Rare's Nintendo 64 GoldenEye 007 spiritual sequel Perfect Dark officially coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Elsewhere we saw a new Twitter tool tracking gaming trends, vinyl wall decals invading our space, Blitz Arcade's 70s kung fu film inspired Invincible Tiger, watched the latest drip-fed chiptune video to come out of the 2007 BlipFest, saw more of Media Molecule's crossover-collab bringing Ico to LittleBigPlanet, and the day's 'one shot's: Hollis Brown Thornton's fine art meditations on Space Invaders, and a wonderful new iPhone wallpaper from Mikko Walamies for the upcoming Rolando 2.

Take a peak inside MAKE, Volume 18 in the preview video highlighting some of our favorite projects. It's all about remaking America with DIY energy, home and garden, and electronics projects. We're thrilled to bring you this collection of great projects, perfect for your summer MAKEcation.

You can start reading MAKE right now if you're a subscriber in our digital edition, or sign up and get going right away! Use code CMAKE to get $5 off!

Subscribe to MAKE in iTunes, or download the m4v or mov video.

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Keldrin_1 writes "The discovery of 24 security vulnerabilities may have contributed to the death of the chief of LxLabs. A flaw in the company's HyperVM software allowed data on 100,000 sites, all hosted by VAserv, to be destroyed. The HyperVM solution is popular with cheap web hosting services and the attacks are easy to reproduce, which could lead to further incidents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the author of several books including Backyard Ballistics, and the recently published Absinthe and Flamethrowers. Twitter: @wmgurst)

Tautonym -A word or name composed of two identical parts; e.g. pawpaw, yo-yo, tutu, bye-bye.

For a long time, I had planned to name my first child, irrespective of gender, Gurstelle Gurstelle. But I knew he would never be able to type his name in MS Word without the spell checker forever putting a squiggly red line under the poor kid's name. I worried that the constant digital reproof could lead to self esteem problems. So we named him Ben instead.

Last week, in Walla Walla, Ben and I walked into a Chi-Chi's where he ordered couscous. I Love Lucy was on (I think Ricky Ricardo is a hoot.) Anyway, who do you think walks in but Lando Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams! He sat down at Boutrous Boutrous Galli's table. They got into a literary debate, something about whether Ford Madox Ford's characters were as richly crafted as those of William Carlos Williams. Then they argued about who was a more interesting character, Humbert Humbert in Lolita or (Major) Major Major in Catch 22.

Finished, they turned the channel to ESPN classic sports, just in time to watch Cubs slugger Billy Williams interview ski jumper Eddie (the Eagle) Edwards.

By the way, Sirhan Sirhan is still in jail, isn't he?

P.S.: There must be some females who are tautonymically named, but I can't think of any.

It's been a long five years since it was orginally published, but last month month a new Web Standards Solutions, Special Edition was released by Friends of ED.

Late last year, I gave the manuscript a little freshening up, mostly reviewing things in the crop of browsers that have been released since the initial version. I'll stress that this was not a large overhaul of the book (hence Special Edition rather than Second Edition), so if you've already read the original, or own it, you're better off spending your dime on another book.

But while it wasn't a giant update, it was nice to give it some extra attention, and pass it through through tech editing, copy editing, compositing and proofreading cycles once again. In the end, I'm really happy it just made the book that much more solid for folks that haven't read it—and hopefully still a good introduction for those getting started with semantic markup and CSS.

In other book news, I've been toiling away on something brand new, and look forward to sharing much more about that very soon.

TechCrunch used to do an annual list of Web 2.0 services they couldn't live without. The list wasn't about which apps are cool, but which ones are so useful that you build your online life around them. Products that becomes mainstays, apps you use all the time, tools that would cause panic if they went away.

Examples of Web 2.0 services I can't live without: Flickr, GMail, Twitter, Kayak, (though it pains me to say this) TechMeme, FriendFeed, Mininova, Amazon. I'm sure I'll think of others. But that's about Web 2.0, today I'm asking a different question.

Are there any Twitter apps that you couldn't live without? If so, what are they?

I'm fairly sure most of the apps will be clients, tools that read and post to Twitter from the desktop that in some way work around a limit of the Twitter web app. Tweetie is very popular. Seesmic, TweetDeck, the curiously named Destroy Twitter.

What are the others?

Barence writes "Novell plans to bring the wealth of open-source software to everyday users through an 'open-source apps store.' 'I would compare what's happening on netbooks with what's happening to the smartphone,' Holger Dyroff, vice president of business development at Novell told PC Pro. 'There's a core experience, but then the ability to customise that experience. On the user end, all they'll see is an open-source applications store with one-click downloads of new software. Unlike the other stores though, they won't have to pay for any of those applications, which will be very attractive.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan have cobbled together from existing parts a truly unique device. It's part netbook, part tablet. They started by gutting an HP Mini 1000 and replaced the Intel Atom chip with a Via processor running XP SP2. They then removed the standard display and replaced it with a tablet of the same size running Android. Pop the tablet out of its holder and you've got a fully functional Android tablet. Slide it back into the base with the keyboard and you're running XP.

via howtobemobile

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Alex from Worldchanging sez, "You mentioned the problem of fake drugs being passed off in Nigeria. The problem is widespread. By coincidence, we recently published a story about mPedigree, an innovative new system which helps poor people verify the legitimacy of the drugs they're buying with tools they have at hand, namely, a cell phone and text messaging. It's pretty damn cool:"

The program combines mobile phones, scratch-off drug labels and text messaging into a simple, effective way for consumers in places like Accra to find out if the medicines they purchase are the real deal or counterfeit.

Here's how their method works: mPedigree provides pharmaceutical manufacturers with specially coded labels, which are affixed to individually packaged medicines. At the drugstore counter, the purchaser scratches off a label to reveal a unique code, which he or she texts to a four-digit number. An automated service looks up the code in a database. On the spot, the consumer gets a reply message indicating whether the drug is genuine or fake.

The idea puts drug authentication into the hands of consumers, "who are the ones with the most to lose," Gogo points out. By empowering end users, he aims to ultimately create safer pharmaceutical distribution networks throughout the developing world."

mPedigree: Putting Safety into Consumers' Hands (Thanks, Alex!)

(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the author of several books including Backyard Ballistics, and the recently published Absinthe and Flamethrowers. Twitter: @wmgurst)

Bullwhip artist Robert Dante brings the spirit of Indiana Jones to life on the steps of the Natural History Museum in London on Thursday, June 11.

Dressed as the whip-wielding archeologist, Dante will attempt to break his own Guinness World Record for "Most bullwhip cracks in one minute." ... Dante is billed as "the real Indiana Jones" because of his expertise with bullwhips, which feature prominently in the four Indiana Jones films.

Since 2003, Dante has set three Guinness World Records, with his most recent attempt in October 2008 resulting in 254 whip cracks in 60 seconds.

Robert is the fellow who taught me how to crack a whip. He's no young whipper-snapper but he's awfully good. Here's what 250 beats per minute sounds like. Just imagine doing that with bull whips instead of drum sticks!

Part of my intent for Absinthe and Flamethrowers was to survey a wide variety of "Golden Third dangerous activities" and provide enough information for readers to try them out and learn the art of living dangerously. But for those wanting to delve deeper into whip handling, see Robert's book: "Let's Get Cracking! the How-To Book of Bullwhip Skills"

When Microsoft launched its new Bing search engine recently, we didn't really know what to say about it. Some of us felt like Microsoft was trying to win the last battle against Google, rather than looking ahead to the next one; others pointed to pieces saying that Bing seemed more about knocking off Yahoo than Google, which it looks to have already done; others still pointed to all the next great search engines that have emerged over the years, and failed to unseat Google (remember Cuil?). But none of us mentioned Microsoft's apparent efforts to grab lots of search traffic by making Bing better at delivering porn results. There's been a minor flap over the way Bing displays videos in search results: users can access videos directly from the Bing site, and play a thumbnail version of them by putting their mouse over a preview image. This means that companies, schools or anybody else who wants to block the porn with web filters would have to block Bing completely (Microsoft has given a workaround, but it's pretty cumbersome). The uproar comes despite the fact that it's not all that different to the results delivered by other engines when searching for porn, although Bing seems to be a bit more, uh, comprehensive. While this sounds like a juicy mistake, the more cynical out there might see it as an intentional effort by Microsoft to grab search-engine market share by making Bing great for porn surfers. After all, it only delivers the videos -- and other sexual content -- to users from certain countries, so it seemingly is possible for Microsoft to keep at least some of it out. But with all the attention Bing's grabbed because of the uproar, and not to mention the traffic from porn surfers, it's hard to imagine they're too bothered.

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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Hugh Pickens writes "Last year California spent $350m on textbooks so facing a state budget shortfall of $24.3 billion, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled a plan to save money by phasing out 'antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks' in favor of internet aids. Schwarzenegger believes internet activities such as Facebook, Twitter and downloading to iPods show that young people are the first to adopt new online technologies and that the internet is the best way to learn in classrooms so from the beginning of the school year in August, math and science students in California's high schools will have access to online texts that have passed an academic standards review. 'It's nonsensical — and expensive — to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,' writes Schwarzenegger. 'As the music and newspaper industries will attest, those who adapt quickly to changing consumer and business demands will thrive in our increasingly digital society and worldwide economy. Digital textbooks can help us achieve those goals and ensure that California's students continue to thrive in the global marketplace.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linistepper is a stepper motor controller/driver for small to medium sized 5-, 6-, or 8-wire unipolar (not 4-wire bi-polar) stepper motors, featuring "ultra smooth old school linear microstepping" combined with active current regulation from an on-board PIC microcontroller.

The folks at PIClist are offering both PCBs and full kits for sale.

Linistepper

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robotsrule sends in a follow-up to our earlier discussion of the bankruptcy of Ugobe, maker of the Pleo robotic dinosaur: "Jetta Company Limited, based in China and Hong Kong, the company that manufactured the Pleo baby robot dinosaur for Ugobe, has bought the intellectual property rights and other assets at the Ugobe bankruptcy sale that occurred on May 21. Jetta is an established company with a 32-year history in manufacturing. They have issued a short press release announcing Pleo's rebirth. Steve Ohler, the US liaison for Jetta, confirmed the news, saying that the company is firmly committed to re-launching Pleo and continuing the line including producing accessories such as the vital battery and charger components. Jetta, as the original manufacturer, is the best possible company to have acquired Ugobe's intellectual property and to announce plans to re-launch Pleo. Ohler remarked that all of the equipment needed to produce Pleos and accessories is still intact and ready to go."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been plenty of coverage about the potentially antitrust-violating meeting of newspaper execs in Chicago recently, and late last week reports came out about some of the recommendations put forth by the American Press Institute at that meeting. The API apparently handed out two whitepapers, both of which are amusing, only in that someone actually thinks they're useful. The first was effectively saying: "Craigslist really sucks, so let's try to beat up on Craigslist." The second, more thorough whitepaper, rehashes a bunch of debunked ideas about how newspapers should lock up their content in order to charge for it, including such gems as: "Establish that news content online has value by charging for it." Apparently someone at the API is unfamiliar with the difference between price and value. You don't establish value by putting a price on things. You are able to put a higher price on things by creating scarce value. But the industry isn't looking to do that. It's looking to pretend its content has value, by locking it up. Unfortunately for the newspapers (but good for everyone else), economics doesn't work that way.

Apparently part of the plan to get around anti-trust issues is to create an intermediary, sort of like an ASCAP for the newspaper industry, which suggests a near total misunderstanding of the differences between news and music -- but if that's where the industry wants to go, why not let them and watch smarter business folks mop up the mess for profit.

In the meantime, an absolutely fantastic teardown of the API's whitepapers comes from John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the now defunct Rocky Mountain News. If anyone were susceptible to the backwards looking "let's try to recreate the way things were" argument, you would think it would be him. But, instead, he responds to the API's reports by describing just how backwards looking it is and why it should scare anyone in the news business:

Imagine you're a young business school graduate trying to decide where you want to start your career. (OK, I know there are no jobs, but imagine it anyway.) You attend a newspaper industry summit and hear one of the big ideas from an organization at the heart of this world is to compete with Craigslist. What do you think you would think? Talk about an industry looking in the rear view mirror. Isn't that an idea that might have had legs, oh, maybe five years ago? How could it represent in the eyes of that young business school graduate any kind of exciting opportunity today? The advice boils down to, "Let's win back our business from the guy who's eating our lunch." How is the newspaper industry going to attract any of the best and brightest into its ranks if its ideas are stale, at best?

What might even be more troubling about this proposal is how newspaper people seemed to denigrate the Craigslist brand, when all they need to do is talk to people -- including in their own buildings -- to find out that most of those who've used the site seem to genuinely value it. Why? Because it gets results and it's free.

Temple also points out two big problems with the API's suggestions. The first is that it's suddenly trying to get people to pay for what they're used to getting for free -- without adding any additional value worth paying for. And, the second (though related) is that they're not actually looking to do anything really new or unique to embrace what the internet enables. While plenty of other websites and services are embracing the technological power of the internet, the best this report suggests is "people who work at newspapers should start experimenting with social networks":

Of course leaders should always be learning. That's a given. But are they serious? Isn't this a little late? If newspaper industry leaders aren't doing this already, do they really belong in their positions? Why should shareholders pay executives to learn all they can when they should be able to find ones who already know what they're doing? If people need advice like this, should they be running newspaper companies?

All in all, the meeting itself, and the recommendations from the API certainly show an industry that's not looking to compete or add value. It's looking for ways to rebuild the walls that let it exist without competition in the past. It's a recipe for suicide.

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Sam Branton describes his "Erotica Beastia" drawings as "a cross between Hieronymus Bosch, Ren and Stimpy, and the Maltese Falcon." I really like them (though I wish the online versions were a little bigger and sharper). He's showing them at the Sesame Gallery in London from the 16th of July.

Erotica Beastia (Thanks, Sam!)

[Image: Creative Commons Attribution photo from Adactio's Flickr stream]

Do you have a Babbage Difference Engine in dire need of servicing? Fret no more! Reg Crick of the London Science Museum has put together this handy "INSTRUCTION MANUAL to Operate and Maintain Charles Babbage's 2nd Difference Engine," written in 1991 to help keep the Engine built at the museum (to mark the bicentennial of Babbage's birth) in tip-top calculating condition.

INSTRUCTION MANUAL to Operate and Maintain Charles Babbage's 2nd Difference Engine [via Boing Boing]

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A bunch of folks have been sending in various versions of this story about how the Idaho Potato Commission owns the trademark on the use of the word "Idaho" in conjunction with any potato products, and has forced The Idaho Fry Company to change its name. Lawyers pointed out that The Idaho Fry Company could fight back -- and likely win -- but that it was a lot more costly than just changing its name, so the owners went with the latter option and caved in to the Idaho Potato Commission. The Potato Commission explained "we have to protect the name." Of course, the spokesperson left out the fact that you can't hold a trademark on a descriptive phrase -- and it would seem like Idaho being used to accurate name the state in which something was made is descriptive.

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avajcovec points out a brief note on Collider.com that Comedy Central has ordered 13 new episodes of Futurama. Quoting: "Though still technically a rumor at this point, word is that 'Futurama' production offices have already opened and that casting is about to move forward. This should be a welcome surprise to fans of the show who have already gone through the series' cancellation and resurrection as direct-to-DVD movies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a really interesting solution to a relatively common problem of implementing a whole house intercom system. Keep in mind, many of today's phones already have an intercom feature, but it isn't nearly as satisfying to use as one based on an Arduino. You can really learn a lot about electronics and micro controllers by reading about this project. Check out the link for the circuit diagram, code, and very detailed description of the entire build process.

The intercom temporarily disconnects premises telephones from the Telco line, and rings them with a distinctive cadence. After a suitable ringing period, pick up your phone and wait for someone to answer. When you take your phone off hook, (or someone else on premises goes off hook,) the intercom stops ringing and supplies premises phones with talk current. All off-hook parties can converse. When all premises phones go back on hook, the intercom re-connects them to the Telco line.

More about the Arduino based telephone Intercom [Arduino forums]

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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For years, we've scolded ICANN for its bizarre policies when it came to new top level domains (TLD) (the things like .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info etc.). For the most part, the whole process seemed like a big money grab, where each new TLD was being introduced not because of any need, but because it would generate extra cash. Take, for example, the creation of the .jobs domain. It's designed to be the place where people can go to find job openings for a company. As if it wasn't easy enough to either go to the site directly and look for the "jobs" link, or to do a quick Google search (though, we must admit to an adolescent snicker, when someone recently pointed out that RIM had amazingly signed up for the unfortunately named rim.jobs).

On the whole, though, there seemed to be no legitimate reason for dribbling out TLDs in this manner. If the world needed more TLDs, why not open the process up entirely, and let people use whatever TLD made the most sense. Last year, it looked like it was making a step in that direction, by announcing plans to offer such generic TLDs, but at the astronomical price of somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000. So, once again, it was all about the money grab, rather than anything useful.

However, with overwhelming opposition to the idea of super high priced generic TLDs, ICANN has delayed the entire project and some are wondering if ICANN should drop the idea entirely. Personally, it still seems like the real plan should be not to do away with generic TLDs entirely, but to just open up the system, so that any TLD can be used, but that you can register for one at the regular domain price, rather than one that's many orders of magnitude higher.

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There's a whole geopolitical story lurking here: Indian trade reps sending stern diplomatic letters to the Chinese embassy over fake drug sales in Nigeria:

Last week, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) of Nigeria issued a press release stating that a large consignment of fake anti-malarial generic pharmaceuticals labelled `Made in India' were, in fact, found to have been produced in China.

New Delhi has registered ``strong protest'' with the Chinese mission and China's foreign trade ministry, according to sources in the commerce ministry.

Chinese passing off fake drugs as 'Made in India'

(Download MP4)

In today's episode of Boing Boing Video, space/aviation/tech reporter Miles O'Brien speaks with me about the role of technology in the recent Air France crash.

He answers a number of questions posed here on Boing Boing by commenters on our previous episodes: how "black boxes" work, why they're not built to float, whether they would be more effective if they streamed data constantly while in use, and whether more training in the "lower-tech" aspects of piloting could have helped.

Since we taped this two-way conversation on Friday, recovery teams off the coast of Brazil have recovered some 16 bodies, and wreckage from the crash.

Here's a snip from his latest blog post about the disaster, over at True Slant.

The Air France 447 mystery may never be solved beyond a shadow of doubt, but there are some telling, tragic clues to consider based on what we know about the airplane systems and the extreme weather and aerodynamic conditions it encountered before it went down a week ago.

First, a bit of aerodynamics: The doomed Airbus A-330-200 was flying ever so close to its maximum altitude - in a zone pilots call the "Coffin Corner". It refers to the edge of so-called "flight envelope" of an aircraft. At this altitude, the air is much thinner and that significantly narrows the swath of speed at which the airplane can safely operate.

Read the whole post: "The 'Coffin Corner' and a 'Mesoscale' Maw." And speaking of True Slant, check out these two articles about the recently-launched site, a rare refuge for hardcore journalism in these hard times: Washington Post, and Associated Press.

If you're interested in this story -- or in aviation and space news in general -- you really should also follow Miles on Twitter to see his thought-stream unfold in real time.

---

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

zoobab writes "Hackers from all over Europe will meet at the end of the month (27-30 June) at the second Hacker Space Festival in Paris. The four-day schedule includes conferences and workshops on: Metasploit, HostileWRT, FPGA for beginners, ICT disaster recovery, software patents in Europe, Hadopi, and many other topics. The future of Hacker Spaces will also be debated. The event will be hosted by the first French hackerspace /tmp/lab, located in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Paris."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There have been a bunch of lawsuits lately testing the boundaries of various "shield laws" that protect journalists from having to give up information on sources. There was one recent case that found that even comments on online newspaper articles could be protected by shield laws, as those commenters represented a source. However, a professor in Montana is suing to try to find out the identity of some commenters on a local news article (found via Citizen Media Law Group). The professor had recently lost a lawsuit, and believes that one of the commenters was on the jury -- and that particular comment (which was posted before the case was decided) suggested he had done independent research and believed information (that was false) in making his decision. So, in seeking a new trial, the professor wants the identity of the commenter in question. Attorneys for the professor claim that the juror admitted to writing the post in an affidavit, though the juror now says he did not. Either way, apparently the strong shield laws in Montana mean that the newspaper probably won't have to give up the info.

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Help Emru Heal Someone sez,

Beginning June 8, the first 46000 people to sign up to the National Marrow Donor Program in the United States can do so for free. While there are ways to register for free or at a lower price during the year, you often have to know the ins and outs, and it is uncommon to be able to register online and get a kit sent directly to your home at no charge. For those who are eligible, the most daunting part of considering becoming a donor are the unanswered questions and misconceptions of the registration, matching, and donation process (which is why I have linked to the NMDP's FAQ).

Here are some things you may or may not know:

-Over 70% of people will not match someone in their family and will search for a registered stranger to be found as a match.

-In most of North America, you can register using a simple cheek swab test to determine your profile.

-Most people will never donate, because it is very hard to find a match, but the procedure is low-risk and not lengthy.

-Your ethnicity plays a large role in determining a match. Many people are in underrepresented donor pools, but no one is guaranteed a match.

-2 in 10 patients with active requests will find an unrelated match.

FAQs about Joining the Registry (Thanks, Tamu!)

Jason sez, "GE bought a patent for a device called a Stamet Pump that was developed with significant taxpayer money by DOE and then refused to share the device with other firms or the public at large. DOE argued unsuccessfully that the patent should be part of the public domain. This device has tremendous potential in aiding gasification of certain types of coal, something that would pave the way for carbon sequestration from coal-fired power plants. DOE argued with GE execs that they should either release the technology to the public domain or license it to multiple other firms in the interest of the public, since it was funded with public money. Also intriguing in this story is that the state of Wyoming has partnered with GE to build a $100 million gasification test center using this technology--Wyoming is chipping in half of the money from federal funds that were released to the state after a long battle by coal-friendly legislators. Wyoming released the documents detailing the partnership with so many pages blacked out because of "intellectual property, commercial, and trade secrets" that no one can figure out the answer to questions like "what does Wyoming get for its $50 million?" GE and Wyoming decided to start a new test center after DOE officials, upset at GE's selfishness, pulled the plug on other gasification research based on the device and instead shifted their funding to a competitor who would presumably be more willing to share the fruits of taxpayer research dollars."

$100-million GE-Wyoming Coal Project Found Willing, Discreet Partner In Wyoming (Thanks, GE!)

Cameron from Creative Commons sez, "Brett Gaylor and the crew at Open Source Cinema are running an awesome promotion to get yourself included in the NYC theatrical debut of 'Rip! A Remix Manifesto'. Simply edit yourself into Javier Gutierrez's Times Square photo (available at OSC's site) in place of one of the advertisement billboards and they will compile and animation of Times Square being overrun by Free culture activists as opposed to advertisements."

Remix NYC: Get Your Face In The Opening NYC Screening of "Rip! A Remix Manifesto" (Image: Times Square, J Gutierrez | CC BY)

JF sez, "Canadian law professor Michael Geist recently appeared before a Canadian Senate committee for a no-holds-barred testimony on the sorry state of Canadian broadband and wireless. The opening statement is a must-read as is the full transcript as Senators from across the country begin to realize just how bad the current situation is."

This is great -- open spectrum, net neutrality, surveillance and packet-shaping, the whole shebang, laid out with the legal, economic and ethical arguments:

First, Canada is relatively expensive, ranking fourteenth for monthly subscription costs at $45.65. By comparison, Japan costs $30.46 cents and the U.K. is $30.63. Second, the Canadian Internet is slow, ranking twenty-fourth out of the 30 OECD countries. It is truly a different Internet experience for people in Japan, Korea and France, where the speed allows for applications and opportunities that we do not have. Moreover, Canada lags behind in fibre connections direct to home fibre with 0 per cent penetration, according to the OECD. By comparison, Japan sits at 48 per cent, Korea at 43 per cent, Sweden at 20 per cent and the United States, which has been slow in this area, is at 4 per cent. Third, when you combine speed and pricing, Canada drops to twenty-eighth out of the 30 OECD countries for price per megabyte. In other words, as consumers, we pay more for less -- higher prices, slower speeds. Fourth, in addition, Canada is one of only four OECD countries where consumers have no alternative but to take a service with bit caps. That means the service provider caps the amount of bandwidth that the consumer can use each month. In almost every other OECD country, consumers at least have a choice between providers that use bit caps and those that do not.

What can be done about this issue?

We need a firm commitment to universal broadband access akin to the same type of commitment that we once had to universal telephone service. As I say, it is the price of admission for much that the Internet has to offer. All Canadians should have access to reliable, high-speed networks. In addition, we need a strategy for faster networks because it is clear that we cannot rely on our existing networks as we slip further and further behind. This might mean more competition, market-based incentives and potentially community-based networks as local communities take this issue into their own hands.

THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS (Thanks, JF!)

The Yorkshire Ranter recasts terrorism as an "auto-immune war" -- a war intended to inflict maximum damage by getting the host's defense mechanisms to overfire, damaging the host well beyond than the actual terrorist attacks:

Specifically, auto-immune war is a strategy, but its tactical implementation is the creation of false positive responses. Security obsession gums up the economy with inefficiencies. Terrorism terrorises the public; security theatre keeps them that way. As Kilcullen points out, every day, millions of travellers are systematically reminded of terrorism by government security precautions. Profiling measures subject entire communities to indignity and waste endless hours of police time. Vast sums of money are spent on counterproductive equipment programs and unlikely techno-fixes. National identity cards and monster databases are the specific symptoms of this pathology in the UK, just as idiotic militarism is in the US.

Accidental Guerrilla; Part 2, Strategy (via Futurismic)

Wondering if your government's investment in GM will ever pay off?

It won't.

So $83,000,000,000 is what New GM would have to be worth in order for us to break even on our investment.

But $56,000,000,000 is what GM was worth at its all time peak in 2000.

And it's only worth about $7,300,000,000 now.

0.000000435% (via Kottke)

Heinz's Beanzawave is a USB-powered microwave that operates in concert with Heinz's "Snap Pots" individually-sized baked beans cups. This is all so that you can eat baked beans at your keyboard without having to burn unnecessary calories getting up and walking to the kitchen or break room. I wonder if Heinz will follow this up with other bean-delivery innovations -- for example, they could carbonate the beans by including one of those CO2 cartridges that you get in cans of Guinness: fizzy bean desk-snax for everybody!

Beanzawave: The World's Smallest Microwave (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

We talk about task lighting a lot, but I've never seen anything like these arm lights by Instructables user Ookseer. They'd make a good alternative to a headlamp when you don't want to mess up your hair or want to continue bobbing your head to your music while doing detail work.

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We were just discussing if a security auditor should be liable for giving a company a passing grade if there's later a security breach. Considering that it's pretty much impossible to be perfectly secure, and there were always some things that could go wrong, it seemed like a bad idea to hold auditors liable, except in situations where there was obvious fraud or gross negligence. And now, there's evidence that security professionals may try to trick auditors, raising even more questions about why auditors should be liable. Michael Scott points us to the news that a recent survey of security pros found that 20% admit to having cheated or knowing others who cheated in order to pass a security audit. Now, the phrasing can be misleading -- by saying that "they did or they know someone who did" it could (in theory) just be one guy who cheated... who happens to know a lot of other security professionals. So, it would certainly require a bit more research to determine how widespread the cheating is. It's also not clear how many times the cheating occurred. If it's every audit, that's one thing. If it just happened once and the issue was fixed, that's quite different. Still, it's more evidence that you can't just blame the auditors -- especially when the security pros at the company may not be completely truthful in providing info to the auditors.

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angry tapir sends in a piece from Down Under which begins "Mozilla is readying a program that will allow companies to build their own customized browsers based on the next version of Firefox, which will be out in a few weeks. ... Through the Build Your Own Browser program, which will start sometime soon after Firefox 3.5 is released at the end of June, companies can use a Web application provided by Mozilla to specify certain customizations for the browser, such as bookmarks to certain sites or corporate intranets or portals. ... The bulk of enterprises still use Internet Explorer if they mandate a browser for company use, because Microsoft provides provisioning and installation software for IE that makes it easy for enterprises to control browser settings and install across all corporate desktops, said Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish. Mozilla has not historically done this, but something like the Build Your Own Browser program is a good start to encourage enterprises to use Firefox over IE."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's been pointed out time and time again, that if a government (or a corporation) puts together a big database of information on people, that database will be abused. It's just what happens. Yet, with the UK gov't looking to store (or have ISPs store for it) all sorts of info, it's worth noting that its current ID card database was apparently being abused to look up info on celebrities. Yes, the people doing the snooping were apparently caught and fired, but it still highlights that these sorts of databases are never really private, and someone with access will always try to use them for purposes beyond what was intended.

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Michael_Curator writes "It's no secret that commercial airplanes are heavily computerized, but as the mystery of Air France Flight 447 unfolds, we need to come to grips with the fact that in many cases, airline pilots' hands are tied when it comes to responding effectively to an emergency situation. Boeing planes allow pilots to take over from computers during emergency situations, Airbus planes do not. It's not a design flaw — it's a philosophical divide. It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information. It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems. As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robert Oschler of RobotsRule writes:

Jetta Company Limited, the company that manufactured the Pleo baby robot dinosaur for Ugobe, has bought the intellectual property rights and other assets at the Ugobe bankruptcy sale that occurred on May 21. Steve Ohler, the United States liaison for the company, confirmed the news saying that the company is firmly committed to re-launching Pleo and continuing the line including producing accessories such as the vital battery and charger components. Jetta is the original manufacturer and therefore the best possible company to have acquired Ugobe's intellectual property and re-launch Pleo. Steve remarked that all the equipment needed to produce Pleos and accessories were all still intact and ready to go. Jetta is an established company with a 32 year history in manufacturing based in China and Hong Kong, and as part of their illustrious manufacturing history they have produced parts for members of iRobot's consumer robot line.

His post with the original press release from Jetta Company Limited.

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[Photo by Scott Beale]

Dan Chiles is a member of Springfield City Council in Missouri. He visited Maker Faire and wrote about it in the Springfield News-Leader. I think he does a fine job, in a brief piece, of capturing the wonder and inspiration (and the delightful wackiness) of a Maker Faire:

I saw a fire truck that belched fire, and a mammoth mechanical fist powered by shrieking diesel motors and controlled by two guys who sent us colorful hand signals, and a skating Barack Obama robot pulling a human in a cart.

I saw hundreds of homemade rockets hissing into the sky and parachuting to earth, and giant mechanical cupcakes motoring between weird mutant bicycles, and a guy building round aquariums to display gently undulating jellyfish. I saw a $700 machine that reads your computer design and makes an object out of plastic ... or sugar!

I saw Star Wars technology morph with Jules Verne Victorian imagination into an alien art form known as "Steampunk." There were Steampunk belly dancers in a magic show and they drove a car shaped like a giant mechanical copper snail. Teams of young blacksmiths hammered out Steampunk artifacts for wide-eyed kids.

The two guys who made jetting streams of Mentos and Diet Coke famous were there spewing on legions of laughing spectators.

There were buildings full of kids assembling robots, electronics and gadgets. There were buildings of kids tearing apart electronics, gadgets and appliances to see what was inside.

Art cars covered with ink pens and pinwheels or shaped like a shark prowled the parade grounds.

Human beings rode on human-powered amusement rides and listened to rock bands powered by ranks of laughing men and women pedaling bicycle generators.

And I love the Dale Dougherty quote he ends with:

"Do you like what you see here? Then go home and make your own Maker Faire."

Are you ready to remake America?

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Mobile Health is a growing trend in the mobile application industry. There is a lot of interest around the potential to use mobile devices as medication reminders, and as local hubs of a Personal Area Network (PAN or BAN for 'Body') which can relay body sensor data to a central system, or medical personnel. Imagine a glucose sensor affixed to a diabetic tracking real-time blood sugar levels and relaying those to a doctor or a parent. With that, the MobileHealthNews blog has sprung up to cover the sector, and I read a good interview there with Jitterbug CEO David Inns. Jitterbug makes a phone that is pictured at the preceding link, which is designed to be easy to use for seniors, and provides associated services which older subscribers may find useful. Good. I have a lot of respect for a good segment strategy.

But when I saw them at trade shows, Jitterbug managers would say: "No, we're not just for older people, we're really for anybody who wants a simple experience." I reply "No, you're not. You boast bigger keys, a wizard interface, simple Yes No buttons, an audible dialtone, a three button model, hearing aid compatibility, operator assist, one touch 911 calling, and large fonts. Ergo, you're targeting seniors." They would deny it, so I'd pursue, "OK, so where's your marketing spend. I've seen you in AAA magazine, but haven't come across your ads on MTV yet. Where else do you advertise?" Knowing full well they advertise in the AARP magazine and launch products at AARP conferences [pdf]. But no soup for me. For years, I couldn't get the Jitterbug reps to admit that it was a phone for old people. I'll give them points for rigorous PR training, and keeping on message, but I don't agree with the strategy.

I get it. Great Call (Jitterbug) has decided that they don't want to look "uncool" by identifying their segment. But I'm not sure that is good business. If you're embarrassed about your customer base, are you likely to be serving it as well as you could? Is it that you are worried about scaring off young potential customers because your product "smells like old people"? Get over it. Most young people don't want a Jitterbug, just as most seniors wouldn't want a Nokia N95. If you completely believed in market segmentation, you'd get over yourselves, and get real.

That's why the recent interview with the CEO was such fun. The potential revenue of the Mobile Health sector is a powerful lure, but it's hard to play a central role when you are in denial of your attractive customer base of aging baby boomers. As a result, Jitterbug is scrambling to finally admit -- nay, boast of -- who their customer base is. CEO Inns says, "So many examples of wireless health services are being shown running on iPhones,... [is opportunity] really with the 30-year-olds? ...If you want to get serious about tackling the healthcare problems in this country where they actually exist, which is in the 60+ age group, then you should be working with us to develop services that are easy to use so they get compliance."

Jitterbug has built a community that has value, but has distanced itself from that community. That's not the way to open up opportunities in the 21st century, and that notion just clicked back at the Jitterbug Boardroom. Thank you, Jitterbug. It's taken about four years, but you've finally admitted who your customers are. Was that so bad?

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

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All is not sweetness and light in the wake of the Apple WWDC kickoff announcements, especially concerning the evolution of the iPhone. Reader Hugh Pickens writes: "AT&T will offer the new iPhone 3G S when it debuts later this month at a cost of $199 and $299 for the 16GB and 32GB models, but only to new customers and those who qualify for the discounted price. AT&T subscribers with an iPhone 3G who are not eligible for an upgrade — those not near the end of their two-year contracts — will have to pay $200 more — $399 for the 16GB model and $499 for the 32GB model. 'This is ridiculous and slap in the face to long-time loyal iPhone customers like me who switched from T-Mobile and the only reason was the iPhone,' writes one unhappy iPhone customer. 'We have to mount a vigorous campaign to change this policy. Call your local AT&T and ask for the manager and complain. Send e-mails and post in forums everywhere.' The issue is spurring heavy debate on support discussion forums, with some customers supporting AT&T. 'The option you have is to honor the contract you freely committed yourself to,' says one forum member. 'If you want to upgrade early then you will have to pay full price with no subsidy discount. You can't blame anyone but yourself for your predicament.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.