It appears that French President Nicolas Sarkozy still cannot understand why so many people are opposed to a "three strikes" rule for cutting people off the internet. Despite it just being ruled unconstitutional in France, Sarkozy is still standing by the law fully, promising to "go all the way" in getting it implemented. His reasoning, however, is quite bizarre, and shows a very narrow view of creativity these days:

"By defending copyright I do not just defend artistic creation, I also defend my idea of a free society where everyone's freedom is based on respect for the rights of others. I am also defending the future of our culture. It is the future of creation."

That shows a massive misunderstanding of creativity, expression and freedom these days. He's basically saying that freedom of expression shall only apply to "professional" creators, who get rights. Everyone else's rights get trampled. I don't quite see how that's a "free society" at all. It sounds like a corporately owned society, where the rights of certain "professionals" outweigh the rights of individuals.

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Boingo has scored a patent for accessing a Wi-Fi hotspot by a mobile device. The patent, no. 7,483,984, was issued in January, but Boingo only started talking about it recently. The patent application was filed in December 2002. According to the company, the methods covered by the patent include: "...accessing wireless carrier networks by mobile computing devices, where a client software application hosted by the device accesses carrier networks using wireless access points. For example, when a computer — or netbook, smartphone or any other Wi-Fi-enabled device — is in a location where there are multiple signals, the patented technology looks at each signal and alerts the user which signal will work, showing the signal as an understandable name and ID for the user.The patent covers all wireless technologies and spectrums, as well as any mobile device that access wireless hotspots." The company is not saying anything about whether or how they will attempt to wield this patent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boingo has scored a patent for accessing a Wi-Fi hotspot by a mobile device. The patent, no. 7,483,984, was issued in January, but Boingo only started talking about it recently. The patent application was filed in December 2002. According to the company, the methods covered by the patent include: "...accessing wireless carrier networks by mobile computing devices, where a client software application hosted by the device accesses carrier networks using wireless access points. For example, when a computer — or netbook, smartphone or any other Wi-Fi-enabled device — is in a location where there are multiple signals, the patented technology looks at each signal and alerts the user which signal will work, showing the signal as an understandable name and ID for the user.The patent covers all wireless technologies and spectrums, as well as any mobile device that access wireless hotspots." The company is not saying anything about whether or how they will attempt to wield this patent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "SCO lost last year and began the bankruptcy filings a long time ago but PJ has some speculative bad news on what they retain through the bankruptcy proceedings. SCO proposes to sell a number of assets to an outfit called UnXis, which PJ characterizes this way: 'It starts to hint that this is more a renaming, taking in some new management who seem to have financial expertise, and SCO keeps skipping along as unXis, with the dangerous litigation spun off safely into a litigation troll.' In their filings SCO says they retain 'their litigation and related claims against International Business Machines Corporation, Novell, Inc., AutoZone Corporation, Red Hat and certain Linux users which are not material customers of UnXis (excluding certain large-scale users of Linux servers) that are claimed to have infringed against UNIX copyrights.' So that's still a possibility they could go after anyone who is a 'certain Linux user.' And what's even worse is that they'll retain a patent for running multiple Java applications on a single Java virtual machine. We may not be out of the SCO litigation woods yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "SCO lost last year and began the bankruptcy filings a long time ago but PJ has some speculative bad news on what they retain through the bankruptcy proceedings. SCO proposes to sell a number of assets to an outfit called UnXis, which PJ characterizes this way: 'It starts to hint that this is more a renaming, taking in some new management who seem to have financial expertise, and SCO keeps skipping along as unXis, with the dangerous litigation spun off safely into a litigation troll.' In their filings SCO says they retain 'their litigation and related claims against International Business Machines Corporation, Novell, Inc., AutoZone Corporation, Red Hat and certain Linux users which are not material customers of UnXis (excluding certain large-scale users of Linux servers) that are claimed to have infringed against UNIX copyrights.' So that's still a possibility they could go after anyone who is a 'certain Linux user.' And what's even worse is that they'll retain a patent for running multiple Java applications on a single Java virtual machine. We may not be out of the SCO litigation woods yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, today's mobsters are intellectual property lawyers. Back in February, we wrote about a ridiculous lawsuit between the creator of an online game, Mob Wars, and the online creator of the game Mafia Wars, claiming copyright infringement. Of course, the whole claim was silly since the game itself is based on a rather common game concept that was around for ages before either of these games existed. Rather than fighting a silly court battle, why not actually compete on features? So now we've got a new battle, between Zynga (makers of Mafia Wars) and Playdom, the makers of yet another game, called Mobsters, with Zynga claiming trademark infringement due to the way Playdom is running ads for Mobsters.

But the details seem like this is an abuse of trademark law to harm a competitor rather than a legitimate complaint. Zynga's complaint is that Playdom put up an ad that read: "Like Mafia Wars? Click here to play Mobsters. Its [sic] got henchmen, mini games, message boards and sophisticated style." Zynga claims that this is somehow confusing because it doesn't include Playdom's name anywhere. However, it seems abundantly clear that the ad is for a different game and they're just targeting players of Zynga's game. That's not trademark infringement. That's targeted advertising. It's why Pepsi is allowed to run ads trying to get Coke drinkers to switch. You can use the name of your competitor in an ad.

What's especially disappointing is that some of Zynga's investors, such as Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, have long complained about misuses of intellectual property law to stop competition -- and now they're supporting a company that appears to be doing the same thing. It's a waste of money that should be going towards competing and making a better game, rather than worrying about what competitors are saying in their ads.

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In 1374, hundreds of people along the River Rhine compulsively danced for days at a time, swept up in a terrifying mania of mass, compulsive, dancing. The hysteria spread through north-Eastern France and the Netherlands, lasting for months. Similar "dancing epidemics" broke out over the next two centuries. The new issue of The Psychologist features a scientific look at this incredibly strange kind of hysteria. From The Psychologist:

An important clue to the cause of these bizarre outbreaks lies in the fact that they appear to have involved dissociative trance, a condition involving (among other things) a dramatic loss of self-control. It is hard to imagine people dancing for several days, with bruised and bloodied feet, except in an altered state of consciousness. But we also have eyewitness evidence that they were not fully conscious. Onlookers spoke of the dancing maniacs of 1374 as wild, frenzied and seeing visions. One noted that while ‘they danced their minds were no longer clear’ and another spoke of how, having wearied themselves through dancing and jumping, they went ‘raging like beasts over the land’ (Backman, 1952). The hundreds of possessed nuns described in chronicles, legal records, theological texts or the archives of the Catholic Inquisition were equally subject to dissociative trance (Newman, 1998; Rosen, 1968). Some may have simulated the behaviour of the demoniac as a means of eliciting positive attention (Walker, 1981), but the detailed descriptions of astute and cautious inquisitors leave little doubt that most were genuinely entranced.

How might we explain these epidemics of dissociation? Ergot could have induced hallucinations and convulsions in nuns who ate bread made from contaminated flour, but it is highly unlikely that ergotism would cause remorseless bouts of dancing (Berger, 1931). Nor is there any evidence that what the victims of mass possession ate or drank made any difference. Rather, as explained below, there are very strong indications that fearful and depressed communities were unusually prone to epidemic possession. And given that there is a well-established link between psychological stress and dissociation, this correlation is immediately suggestive of mass psychogenic illness.

"Looking Back: Dancing plagues and mass hysteria" (via Mind Hacks)

Saw a piece on the news last night about the increase in urban chicken coops. Here's one quick n' dirty way of creating a coop for your birds. Just make sure some wiseguy doesn't plug it in to see if it still works.

Clothes Dryer Chicken Coop

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My 3-year-old is pretty deep into music -- listening to it, playing instruments, talking about songs, etc. Sometimes it's hard to get him away from his djembe and into the bathtub. My wife found Tub Tunes Water Drums and they are a huge, er, hit with my son. The idea is simple. The plastic drums float on the surface of the water and you can vary the pitch by raising or lowering the water level inside them. The tone is pretty terrific too. They're only $12 to buy on Amazon (or you could probably make your own pretty easily). One caveat: Last night, my son said, "They work even if I'm not in the bath." Indeed.
Tub Tunes Water Drums

Today was Camping Day at Boing Boing Gadgets. Steven and Lisa took some friends and two cars full of gear to Lake Mendocino and churned out a series of reviews, including: * Sleeping bags and technical blankets; * An ultra-light tent and an ultra-roomy tent; * Headlamps; * Camping gear for dogs; * iPhone apps for camping; * A car tarp; * A solar-powered briefcase and power hub; * A gravity-based water filter; and * 10 non-gadget essentials to take with you on a car camping trip. Other stories on the site today include a video of a better British power plug, Joel's analysis of why the reseller market for the iPhone 3G is a lot like that of used Macs, and Lisztomania!

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has a story on the culture of secrecy at Apple (registration possibly required). Secrecy is not just the prevailing communications strategy; it is baked into the corporate culture that had its origin in the release of the first Macintosh. 'It really started around trying to keep the surprise aspect to product launches, which can have a lot of power,' says marketing veteran Regis McKenna who advised Apple in its early days. Today few companies are more secretive than Apple, or as punitive to those who dare violate the company's rules on keeping tight control over information. Employees have been fired for leaking news tidbits to outsiders, and the company has been known to spread disinformation about product plans to its own workers and sue bloggers who cover the company. Apple's decision to severely limit communication with the news media, shareholders, and the public is at odds with the approach taken by many other companies, and many experts agree that the secrecy that adds surprise and excitement to Apple product announcements is not serving the company well in corporate governance. Some say that recent reports that Steve Jobs may have had a liver transplant, still not confirmed by the company, now makes one of Apple's assertions from January — that Jobs was suffering only from a hormonal imbalance — seem like a deliberate untruth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has a story on the culture of secrecy at Apple (registration possibly required). Secrecy is not just the prevailing communications strategy; it is baked into the corporate culture that had its origin in the release of the first Macintosh. 'It really started around trying to keep the surprise aspect to product launches, which can have a lot of power,' says marketing veteran Regis McKenna who advised Apple in its early days. Today few companies are more secretive than Apple, or as punitive to those who dare violate the company's rules on keeping tight control over information. Employees have been fired for leaking news tidbits to outsiders, and the company has been known to spread disinformation about product plans to its own workers and sue bloggers who cover the company. Apple's decision to severely limit communication with the news media, shareholders, and the public is at odds with the approach taken by many other companies, and many experts agree that the secrecy that adds surprise and excitement to Apple product announcements is not serving the company well in corporate governance. Some say that recent reports that Steve Jobs may have had a liver transplant, still not confirmed by the company, now makes one of Apple's assertions from January — that Jobs was suffering only from a hormonal imbalance — seem like a deliberate untruth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo by Left Hand Rotation

Dead tadpoles and frogs were found in fields, gardens, a tennis court, and on car roofs near the Japan Sea coast last week. Was this an example of the classic Fortean phenomenon of animals raining from the heavens? From Discover:

Various objects and animals do occasionally fall from the sky: It’s called “Fafrotskies,” short for “fall from the skies.” These events generally occur when water spouts, storms, and strong winds suck objects from bodies of water and deposit them on land. But because there had been no reports of strong wind, many officials and meteorologists say this explanation can’t explain the torrent of tadpoles.

An alternative explanation is that birds who eat tadpoles and fish carried the animals in their mouths, then dropped them while flying. Still, some bird experts say that if this had happen, the tadpole carnage would have covered a more sizable area.

"It's Raining Tadpoles?" (Discover.com)
Falling fish and frog news round-up (Cabinet of Wonders)

I'm leaving tonight for Copenhagen to participate in the Reboot conference. This will be my third Reboot. It's a very nice group of people, very far away from Silicon Valley, and I always have fun. Looking forward to partying with Thomas and his posse and Paolo, Stowe, and everyone else. I'll be leading a talk on Thursday evening on Rebooting the News.

After Copenhagen, I'll spend three days in Berlin, then head back to the US via Chicago on July 1.

See you on the other side of the world, tomorrow night!

PS: I recorded a podcast with Phil Windley of IT Conversations last Monday. A little bit of time has gone by but I think it's pretty good. We talked about the technical side of Rebooting the News.

The Orbo doesn't work, reports a jury of scientists and engineers selected by perpetual motion company Steorn to analyze its technology.

Twenty-two independent scientists and engineers were selected by Steorn to form this jury. It has for the past two years examined evidence presented by the company. The unanimous verdict of the Jury is that Steorn's attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy. The jury is therefore ceasing work.

The blogger who runs a blog about Steorn says:

As I see it there have always been three possibilities for Steorn: either they truly have free energy technology, or they're a fraud, or they're mistaken and delusional. Today's development can be taken as weighty evidence that they are, in fact, mistaken and delusional.

Steorn Jury Announcement

We've pointed out a few times that, no matter how cool a device the Amazon Kindle may be, it's got some serious DRM problems, highlighting that, unlike with a real book, you don't actually "own" the books on your Kindle. Yet another example of why is getting some attention this week. Consumerist points us to a guy who suddenly was having trouble redownloading ebooks he had bought, despite the fact that Amazon supposedly allows you to download the books again and again. At first, he was told that some publishers put a secret-hidden-nobody-can-tell-you limit on how many times you could download, but then after multiple confusing discussions with multiple different Amazon customer service reps, the guy thinks the real issue is actually that some publishers can put a secret-hidden-nobody-can-tell-you limit on how many devices you can download the books to.

While the "updated" version isn't as bad as the original, it's still pretty bad. These are secret limitations on what people bought that were not clearly laid out at all -- and, in fact, which seem to contradict what customers have been told about the ability to do multiple downloads of a purchased book. Furthermore, the fact that you would need multiple customer service reps -- many of whom provided the wrong info -- to try to figure out why you can't access a book you purchased legally means you've got a problem. Every time you think that content providers have learned that DRM is a bad thing that does nothing but harm customer value, it crops up again, with someone believing that it actually has some sort of benefit.

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Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

If you've never seen the BBC show Connections with James Burke, you are missing out. Aired in 1979 the show attempted to connect various elements of history of science into a narrative web. I adore the show and in an homage I am going to try and do a few small Atlas version of connections, taking two disparate places, and finding an unexpected connection that links them together. Here goes!

1. Colossal Squid on display at the New Zealand Te Papa Museum

The San Aspiring, a New Zealand fishing boat, caught the colossal squid in February 2007. "The crew were fishing with longlines - single lines with many baited hooks - for a large species of fish, the Antarctic toothfish. But on one line they caught more than they bargained for! There was a toothfish on the line, but eating the fish was a colossal squid - nearly 500 kg of it." The Colossal squid, featuring one of the largest beaks in nature, is now on display at the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand.

2. Cuban Perfume Museum

In Old Havana stands the perfume museum, a collection of bottles, ingredients, and historical artifacts all related to perfume. The museum has a collection of French perfumes, including Chanel No. 5, as well as great Cuban perfumers Gravi, Sebatés and Crusellas. Most of the Cuban perfumes on display predate 1960, with the exception of one large collection. Suchel Fragrencia is the state perfume and soap maker, and the official state perfume produced in the country. The museum has their complete collection.

The Connection: Whale excrement

Squid, be they giant or colossal, make up between 50 and 70% percent of a sperm whale's diet. Unfortunately for the whale those sharp, pointy squid beaks can irritate their stomaches. It seems that some whales develop a rather curious response. Their intestines coat the beaks in a fatty goo and expel the resulting substance. (Recent consensus is that it generally goes out the back, unless too large and then it is vomited up.)

Known as Ambergris and used in Chanel No. 5 and other famous perfumes the whale excrement was, and still is, one of the most valued ingredients in scent making. Though it stinks terribly when first expelled "over time, the odour becomes softer and more perfumistic." Ambergris costs upwards of 4000 dollars a pound and is still used today in high end perfumes.

So it is that the smell of the Chanel No. 5 found at the Cuban Perfume Museum is, in part at least, the smell of "the inglorious bowels of a sick whale" caused by the beaks of colossal squid, like the one on display at the New Zealand Te Papa Museum.

Godefricus writes "Outrage ensued among Dutch techie and media websites, after a government report advised that the dwindling print media industry should be financially supported by the online industry (Google translation; Dutch original here). The idea is to help the old media fund 'innovative initiatives.' The suggested implementation of the plan is by taxing a percentage of each ISP subscription, and give the money to the papers. The report, which was solicited by the Dutch parliament and written by a committee of its members, specifically states that 'news and the gathering of news stories is not free, and the public must be made aware of that.' The report is not conclusive, but from here it's just one step toward a legislative proposal. Both industries are largely privately owned in The Netherlands, and the current government is center-left wing. Who needs an RIAA if you can build one into your government? And hey, why invest in the future if you can invest in the past?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Godefricus writes "Outrage ensued among Dutch techie and media websites, after a government report advised that the dwindling print media industry should be financially supported by the online industry (Google translation; Dutch original here). The idea is to help the old media fund 'innovative initiatives.' The suggested implementation of the plan is by taxing a percentage of each ISP subscription, and give the money to the papers. The report, which was solicited by the Dutch parliament and written by a committee of its members, specifically states that 'news and the gathering of news stories is not free, and the public must be made aware of that.' The report is not conclusive, but from here it's just one step toward a legislative proposal. Both industries are largely privately owned in The Netherlands, and the current government is center-left wing. Who needs an RIAA if you can build one into your government? And hey, why invest in the future if you can invest in the past?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ThinSkin writes "Slashdot readers may recall Loyd Case's series of articles illustrating his experiences after switching to solar power for his family home. Loyd shared his one month update, a six month update, and now finally concludes his series after one year of solar power. Despite the $38,000 initial cost for the setup, Loyd is very optimistic after a $3,000 savings in one year, meaning that in about 12 years he will break even — though he suspects ten years is a better estimate considering other factors. Other reasons such as feeling 'green,' increasing the property value of his house, and the 'spousal acceptance factor' all support Loyd's decision on why he'd do it all over again if he had to." The article is spread annoyingly over multiple pages, like everything at the site, and the print version omits the graphs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ThinSkin writes "Slashdot readers may recall Loyd Case's series of articles illustrating his experiences after switching to solar power for his family home. Loyd shared his one month update, a six month update, and now finally concludes his series after one year of solar power. Despite the $38,000 initial cost for the setup, Loyd is very optimistic after a $3,000 savings in one year, meaning that in about 12 years he will break even — though he suspects ten years is a better estimate considering other factors. Other reasons such as feeling 'green,' increasing the property value of his house, and the 'spousal acceptance factor' all support Loyd's decision on why he'd do it all over again if he had to." The article is spread annoyingly over multiple pages, like everything at the site, and the print version omits the graphs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

George Pendle wrote the highly-recommended Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons, the biography of rocket pioneer Jack Parsons (whom I profiled in MAKE, Volume 13). In Saturday's Financial Times, George writes about the Materials Library at King's College, London.

Deep in the bowels of a brutalist concrete building on the Strand, long shelves are packed - crammed, really - with some of the world's strangest substances, from the past, present and sometimes, it seems, the future. Take Aerogel: the world's lightest solid consists of 99.8 per cent air and looks like a vague, hazy mass. And yet despite its insubstantial nature, it is remarkably strong; and because of its ability to nullify convection, conduction and radiation, it also happens to be the best insulator in the world. Sitting next to the Aerogel is its thermal opposite, a piece of aluminium nitride, which is such an effective conductor of heat that if you grasp a blunt wafer of it in your hand, the warmth of your body alone allows it to cut through ice. Nearby are panes of glass that clean themselves, metal that remembers the last shape it was twisted into, and a thin tube of Tin Stick which, when bent, emits a sound like a human cry. There's a tub of totally inert fluorocarbon liquid into which any electronic device can be placed and continue to function. The same liquid has been used to replace the blood in lab rats, which also, oddly enough, continue to function.

A library of the world's most unusual compounds [via Boing Boing]

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If you've been following the news of the protests in Iran over the past few days, you've no doubt heard about the story of Neda Soltani, who was shot and killed on video, and has become, as some news reports have noted, "the face of Iran's struggle." Not to get into the politics of it all, what is quite fascinating is the news that the photo that many individuals and news sources are using for Soltani isn't just of a different Neda Soltani, but it's due to confusion over how Facebook works (found via Mathew Ingram).

Basically, a woman named Amy Beam, who was interested in the Neda Soltani in the video contacted other Neda Soltani's found on Facebook, and one communicated back with her, and eventually they "friended" each other on Facebook. Soon after, the "living" Neda Soltani posted a translation of an article about the killed Neda Soltani on Amy's Facebook "wall." However, the way this works, is that along with the post on the wall, it includes the poster's own avatar/profile photo -- in this case the living Neda Soltani. From that, others who were friends of Amy saw the name Neda Soltani, the story about the killed woman, and the photo of the living woman -- and assumed they were all the same woman... and from there the photo started spreading like wildfire, including websites, TV, banners and elsewhere. And the really scary part is that the living Neda Soltani is now quite afraid for her life, since she's suddenly become "the face of the face of the struggle in Iran" despite not being the woman who was shot.

Certainly, bad information flows at incredible speed in this day and age, but the series of events and confusion that led to this result is quite fascinating, if a bit scary (especially for the living Neda Soltani). There's an effort under way to alert everyone using the wrong photo to change their images, but you have to wonder how effective that will be.

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digitalderbs writes "A problem plaguing most people with multiple computers is the arduous task of synchronizing files between them: documents, pictures, code, or data. Everyone seems to have their own strategies, whether they involve USB drives, emailed attachments, rsync, or a distributed management system, all of which have varying degrees of success in implementing fast synchronization, interoperability, redundancy and versioning, and encryption. Myself, I've used unison for file synchronization and rsnapshot for backups between two Linux servers and a Mac OS X laptop. I've recently considered adding some sophistication by implementing a version control system like subversion, git, or bazaar, but have found some shortcomings in automating commits and pushing updates to all systems. What system do you use to manage your home directories, and how have they worked for you for managing small files (e.g. dot configs) and large (gigabyte binaries of data) together?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

digitalderbs writes "A problem plaguing most people with multiple computers is the arduous task of synchronizing files between them: documents, pictures, code, or data. Everyone seems to have their own strategies, whether they involve USB drives, emailed attachments, rsync, or a distributed management system, all of which have varying degrees of success in implementing fast synchronization, interoperability, redundancy and versioning, and encryption. Myself, I've used unison for file synchronization and rsnapshot for backups between two Linux servers and a Mac OS X laptop. I've recently considered adding some sophistication by implementing a version control system like subversion, git, or bazaar, but have found some shortcomings in automating commits and pushing updates to all systems. What system do you use to manage your home directories, and how have they worked for you for managing small files (e.g. dot configs) and large (gigabyte binaries of data) together?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

knuckles904 writes [by way of adafruit]:

Ok so I, after much research, have been able to read the gyro data of the new Wii Motion Plus peripheral with the Arduino microcontroller. With this code and the code previously developed for the Wii Nunchuck, we are able to create a 6 DOF IMU for under $40. Thanks Nintendo! Best of all, everything is I2C so only 2 analog inputs (A4 and A5 needed for the wire library) are needed to read 6 sensors and no ADC conversion happens on the Arduino board.

Wii Motion Plus + Arduino = Love

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(Download MP4)

Boing Boing Video today debuts a new music video: "Ssshhhh," by Hess is More, from the new album "Hits." Produced and directed by m ss ng p eces. "Playful techno" artist Mikkel Hess hails from Denmark, and currently calls New York City his home -- and that's where these guys shot this quirky, colorful video, using some interesting camera gear.

Ari Kuschnir, Producer and co-founder of m ss ng peces, on the shoot:

Shhhhh is such an intense, infectious beat that -- we wanted the video to complement the arc of the track. I've been a big fan of HESS since 2006, and we've collaborated on a number of projects. Knowing that the single and album were his official US debut, we wanted to show HESS running through NYC and training to earn his 'spot' in the US charts.

We chose to shoot at 59.97 frames per second on the Panasonic HPX-170 to give it a crisp 'video' look. The Bodymount (by Doggicam) we attached to HESS for a number of scenes was brought in to match the energy and tempo of Shhhh.

More from director and m ss ng peces co-founder Scott Thrift:

The first time i heard Shhhhhh I was experiementing with a resistance work out using large rubber bands. I imagined HESS using the same workout, training his arms to be a great drummer. The music video format is a lot of fun to play with. Right now, we're putting the finishing touches on our next music video for DFA Records' outstanding new band Free Energy.

You really gotta watch it in HD -- select the higher-quality option in the embed above, or try the MP4 download. The visual progression of the video got stuck in my head as much as the catchy, poppy, nerdy tune. I really love this piece.

NYC folks: Don't miss Hess is More's upcoming live shows in Brooklyn at Coco66 and the Sycamore. Details here.

Below, another use of the body-mounted camera chosen to create the unique look and sense of motion in this video. - XJ

The Associated Press has been going on quite the rampage over the past few months about all those evil online sites that are "stealing" its content, demanding that those who use its content absolutely must pay for it. We joked in response that the AP and other newspapers complaining about people "stealing" their coverage should actually be paying the people who make the news. After all, aren't they really creating the "content"? That was meant as a joke, but sometimes you have to wonder if people at the Associated Press even realize the double standard they've set for themselves.

After all this complaining about others using its content for free, Valleywag points out that the AP was asking people to submit free accounts, pictures and videos of the train crash in Washington DC this week. Apparently "free" only works in one direction with the AP. If it's outbound, it's stealing. If it's inbound... that's reporting.

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That's like Be Kind Rewind.

And of course everyone retweeted this and everyone clicked.

Nothing here. Move along.

You know how high traffic density always seems to lead to self-perpetuating traffic jams that have no visible cause other than the fact that everyone has slowed down? There's math to describe it:

The mathematics of such traffic jams are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions, said Aslan Kasimov, a lecturer in MIT's Department of Mathematics. Realizing this allowed the reseachers to solve traffic jam equations that were first theorized in the 1950s. The MIT researchers even came up with a name for this kind of gridlock - "jamiton." It's a riff on "soliton," a term used in math and physics to desribe a self-sustaining wave that maintains its shape while moving.

The equations MIT came up with are similar to those used to describe fluid mechanics, and they model traffic jams as a self-sustaining wave...

The MIT team found speed, traffic density and other factors can determine conditions that will lead to a jamiton and how quickly it will spread. Once the jam forms, the researchers say, drivers have no choice but to wait for it to clear. The new model could lead to roads designed with sufficient capacity to keep traffic density below the point at which a jamiton can form.

Kasimov found that jamitons have a "sonic point," which separates traffic flow into upstream and downstream components, much like the event horizon of a black hole. This sonic point prevents communication between these distinct components so information about free-flowing conditions just beyond the front of the jam can't reach drivers behind the sonic point. Ergo, there you sit, stuck in traffic and have no idea that the jam has no external cause, your blood pressure racing toward the stratosphere.

MIT Hopes to Exorcise 'Phantom' Traffic Jams (via Futurismic)

Baxil writes "For years now, Javascript munging has been a useful tool to share email addresses on the Web without exposing them to spammers. However, Google is now apparently evaluating Javascript when assembling summary text for web pages' listings, and publishing the un-munged email addresses to the world; and spammers have started to take advantage of this kind service." Anyone else seen this affecting their carefully protected email addresses?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Baxil writes "For years now, Javascript munging has been a useful tool to share email addresses on the Web without exposing them to spammers. However, Google is now apparently evaluating Javascript when assembling summary text for web pages' listings, and publishing the un-munged email addresses to the world; and spammers have started to take advantage of this kind service." Anyone else seen this affecting their carefully protected email addresses?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm very happy to blog that our two-year-old, Webby-honored video project has undergone a web makeover, thanks to the fine design talents of Boing Boing Gadgets' Rob Beschizza. We have a new url shortcut that's a little easier to remember, too: boingboingvideo.com.

You'll notice a large Flash video embed at the top of the new layout -- yeah! A big fat 962 pixel doublewide, baby! This is what video on the web is all about! And, a number of new video-centric, visually pleasing ways to search through our archives. You can sort by category, too: "animation," "sci-tech," "music video," and so on.

The new UI is still under development, and we're sorting out some kinks here and there, so feel free to provide feedback in the comments or by email: boingboingvideo@boingboing.net. By way of that email address, we also welcome suggestions on stuff you'd like us to cover in future episodes, content submissions if you've created something yourself, and, (gotta pay the bills, y'all) -- sponsorship inquiries.

Here's a feature I'm super excited about: We've launched a guest-curated sidebar blog, @BBVBOX, where people whose taste in internet video we dig can tweet short pointers to web clips they like. The team right now: Sean Bonner, Susannah Breslin, Andrea James, Richard Metzger, R. Stevens, Jesse Thorn, Robin Sloan and Laughing Squid, aka Scott Beale. The @BBVBOX archives are here.

Huge thanks to all who made the makeover possible -- Rob Beschizza, Dean "mustardhamsters" Putney, Joel Johnson, and our tireless and awesome sysadmin Ken Snider, among them! Big thanks also to our hosting and distribution partners, including YouTube, iTunes, Miro, Plex, Boxee, Dotsub (where we'll begin uploading daily videos soon for foreign language subtitling!), and Episodic.com.

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

George Pendle has done a nice write-up of the Materials Library at King's College London for the Finanical Times. It's a place I badly want to visit on my next trip to London:

Deep in the bowels of a brutalist concrete building on the Strand, long shelves are packed - crammed, really - with some of the world's strangest substances, from the past, present and sometimes, it seems, the future. Take Aerogel: the world's lightest solid consists of 99.8 per cent air and looks like a vague, hazy mass. And yet despite its insubstantial nature, it is remarkably strong; and because of its ability to nullify convection, conduction and radiation, it also happens to be the best insulator in the world. Sitting next to the Aerogel is its thermal opposite, a piece of aluminium nitride, which is such an effective conductor of heat that if you grasp a blunt wafer of it in your hand, the warmth of your body alone allows it to cut through ice. Nearby are panes of glass that clean themselves, metal that remembers the last shape it was twisted into, and a thin tube of Tin Stick which, when bent, emits a sound like a human cry. There's a tub of totally inert fluorocarbon liquid into which any electronic device can be placed and continue to function. The same liquid has been used to replace the blood in lab rats, which also, oddly enough, continue to function... All these, and more than 900 others, including everyday materials suchas aluminium, steel and copper, are here for one purpose - to instil a sense of wonder in the visitor.

A Library of the World's Most Unusual Compounds

As any new or vet iPhone owner will know, trying to wade through the App Store's overwhelming selection of games and apps is a daunting process, so we've whipped together this guide to the first 15 games you should seek out, with another 30 to consider (from a wider variety of genres [shooting, word games]) thrown in for good measure, which should hopefully better ease you into what the device has to offer. Elsewhere we looked at more iPhone games about to make their way to the store -- Hand Circus's trip into the savage/Indy Jones-ish wild in their Rolando sequel, and a revival of EA's classic board/strategy game Archon (which is indeed now live). We also saw Rockstar's formerly DS-exclusive Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars making the leap to the new PSP Go, new stickers from Offworld-favorite illustrator Jon Burgerman coming to LittleBigPlanet, hand-crafted drink coasters to commemorate the worst day of your gaming life, and beautiful new King of Games T-shirts celebrating Q-games' PS3 PixelJunk franchise. Finally, we listened to the chiptune remixes coming to the PS3 revival of Katamari Damacy, and our 'one shot's for the day: Fez, paused, and accidentally gorgeous long-exposure phone-cam photos of Galaga.

Skapare sends word from TorrentFreak that Norway's Simonsen law firm has lost their license to pursue file sharers. "Just days after Norway's data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it's now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won't be renewed." Skapare adds, "Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy seriously. Maybe they've been watching the abuses in the USA. More info on the Norwegian perspective in this Google translation from Dagbladet.no."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Skapare sends word from TorrentFreak that Norway's Simonsen law firm has lost their license to pursue file sharers. "Just days after Norway's data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it's now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won't be renewed." Skapare adds, "Sounds like Norway's government treats privacy seriously. Maybe they've been watching the abuses in the USA. More info on the Norwegian perspective in this Google translation from Dagbladet.no."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clay Shirky made an offhand comment on Twitter recently that's way too good to leave to just the Twitterverse and not expand upon (hopefully Shirky himself will expand upon it -- but in the meantime, you're stuck with me). In commenting on a chart showing how Amazon seems to be growing while the rest of retail is shrinking, Shirky notes "AMZN's growth happens because its not a retailer with a web presence, its a search engine with a warehouse."

This needs to be unpacked in a few ways, but it's such a unique insight that it deserves lots of attention. Many people look at Amazon and think that it's just an "online store," but the reason that Amazon works is not because it took the concept of a store and put it online, but because it has always done things that only the internet allows it to do. That is, from its very early days, Amazon was never just about about being a store in a web browser, but in using the web to do interesting and unique things built on top of a commerce core. Things like online user reviews and recommendations may now seem commonplace, but Amazon revolutionized them. And it added so much convenience that many people now use Amazon product pages as default info pages on a product -- I know I do. To me, Amazon isn't just a store, but it's a database of products and reviews -- and that's what Shirky's getting at in saying it's a "search engine with a warehouse." Of course, the cool thing is that when you start thinking about Amazon in those terms is you realize how much more it can do. Those who think they're retailers are going to keep missing where Amazon is heading unless they start thinking the same way.

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(Download MP4 / YouTube)

Google Apps and Virgin America are teaming up for a day of cloud computing in the clouds: "Day in the Cloud," Wednesday, June 24.

Boing Boing will be on board -- me, Rob Beschizza from Boing Boing Gadgets, and our friend Jane McGonigal, of Avantgame and Institute for the Future.

In this Boing Boing Video episode, I speak with Porter Gale of Virgin America, and Jen Mazzon, a "digital mom" from Google, about the in-flight game smackdown planned (one plane competes against the other to win a litter of brand-new netbooks), and about how always-connected data experience could change our lives.

Folks at home are also invited to play:

All you'll need is a net connection, a Google Account, and the warm, comforting glow of your computer screen. Become one of the top scorers and we'll set you up with your own personal "Year in the Cloud," complete with a brand-new HP netbook and 1 terabyte of Google Account storage for your photos and mail--all of which will come in handy when you fly free for a year on Virgin America with complimentary WiFi.

Virgin has long been a partner of Boing Boing's video efforts -- Boing Boing Video episodes are offered in-flight on Virgin America planes, and we'll soon be announcing a new, cool upgrade to this in-flight BB Video experience.

Virgin produced a short, funny promotional video for Day in the Cloud which is also worth a watch, below.

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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."

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(Special thanks also to Boing Boing Video's hosting partner Episodic.)

Seen here is a gear that's just 1.2 nanometers in diameter. For comparison, a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers in diameter. Developed by researchers from A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore, the gear is reportedly the smallest in the world with controllable rotation. From ScienceDaily:

(Professor Christian) Joachim and his team discovered that the way to successfully control the rotation of a single-molecule gear is via the optimization of molecular design, molecular manipulation and surface atomic chemistry. This was a breakthrough because before the team’s discovery, motions of molecular rotors and gears were random and typically consisted of a mix of rotation and lateral displacement. The scientists at IMRE solved this scientific conundrum by proving that the rotation of the molecule-gear could be well-controlled by manipulating the electrical connection between the molecule and the tip of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope while it was pinned on an atom axis.

Said Dr Lim Khiang Wee, Executive Director of IMRE, “Christian and his team’s discovery shows that it may one day be possible to create and manipulate molecular-level machines. Such machines may, for example, walk on DNA tracks in the future to deliver therapeutics to heal and cure.

World's First Controllable Molecular Gear At Nanoscale Created

Kimberly Vlaeminck, 18, made headlines when she claimed last week to have woken up from a tattoo session with 56 stars on her face. She said she had asked for just three small ones. Turns out though, Vlaeminck was lying. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

"I asked for 56 stars and initially adored them. But when my father saw them, he was furious. So I said I fell asleep and that the tattooist had made a mistake," Ms Vlaeminck told Dutch TV.

(Tattoo artist Rouslan) Toumaniantz - who is covered in tattoos and piercings - had insisted Vlaeminck wanted 56 stars tattooed on her face.

But he had said he would pay for half of the laser treatment to remove the tattoos, The Telegraph said.

"Kimberley is unhappy and it is not my wish to have an unsatisfied client," Mr Toumaniantz said.

But after Ms Vlaeminck's confession he had withdrawn the offer, The Telegraph said.

Girl who said she woke up with 56 tattoos on her face admits lying

Glyn sez, "The Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement [ed: a secret, non-UN treaty that rich countries are cooking up that will criminalize copyright infringement, sending non-commercial file-sharers to prison; authorize border guards to search your hard-drive and personal electronics for copyright infringements; and require governments to give media giants the power to decide who should and shouldn't have Internet access, without having to prove anything in a court of law] has been making its way in secret for some time, a coalition of consumer groups have now demanded that the text of the directive be made public.

The resolution calls for a halt to the plurilateral negotiation of an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) led by the United States, until the negotiating texts are made available to consumer groups and other conditions are met.

TACD wants future negotiations to be respectful of civil liberties such as the right to privacy and also demands the inclusion of developing countries in ACTA negotiations as the stated intention is to extend and apply the treaty to them. The resolution offers recommendations to ensure IP enforcement policies and practices address issues such as transparency, evidence and process, competitiveness, consumer protection, human rights, access to knowledge, and digital rights.

The resolution reflects discussions TACD had with representatives from the EU and the US government on 9 June, during the TACD 10th annual meeting in Brussels (IPW, Enforcement, 11 June 2009). But the resolution was released for the first time on 18 June and forms part of a larger effort by TACD to push back on the IP rights enforcement issues, according to consumer representatives.

EU, US Consumer Groups Issue Resolution On Enforcement; Demand Role In ACTA (Thanks, Glyn!)

Tarver's instrument is unique to say the least. I recently spent some time with him to witness his invention first-hand and was taken aback. High above his loft, entangled into the foundation, sits his creation. It is a beautiful expression of do-it-yourself ingenuity that is one part concrete and two parts found objects. The interlocking elements and nautical details distinguish its custom look and feel. Tarver's ability to reconcile the geometry of its construction proves necessary in achieving musical harmony. Witnessing the instrument being played can only be described as extraordinary.

Tarver, details the precession involved in achieving the sublime resonance which bellows from the instrument:

The main beam was built up with a pair of 2x8's glued together at the outside edge, blocking a short way in along the joists, a 3/8" plywood stress-skin bottom, and concrete fill in the cells. The platform is not supported with any post(s) from the ground, but rather suspended from the I-beam in the ceiling with the 2-inch square hollow steel bar. The steel post terminates in a concrete finial which supports eight steel wires that go from corner to corner. The rings which anchor the wires are supported with railway spikes.

A big thank you to all those involved. Check out the rest of the photos on Flickr.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

abenamer writes "Some reporter at a recent White House press briefing just asked the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, this question: Was 'the White House....considering beaming broad capability into Iran via satellite so the opposition forces would be able to communicate with themselves and the outside world?' 'Gibbs said he didn't know such a thing was possible. (Is it?) But he said he would check on the technological feasibility and get back with an answer.' I'm not sure what the reporter meant by beaming broadband into Iran: Do they even have 3G? Would we bomb the Iranians with SIM cards that would allow them to get text messages from the VOA? Or somehow put up massive Wi-Fi transmitters from Iraq and beam it into Iran? How would you beam broadband into Iran?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

abenamer writes "Some reporter at a recent White House press briefing just asked the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, this question: Was 'the White House....considering beaming broad capability into Iran via satellite so the opposition forces would be able to communicate with themselves and the outside world?' 'Gibbs said he didn't know such a thing was possible. (Is it?) But he said he would check on the technological feasibility and get back with an answer.' I'm not sure what the reporter meant by beaming broadband into Iran: Do they even have 3G? Would we bomb the Iranians with SIM cards that would allow them to get text messages from the VOA? Or somehow put up massive Wi-Fi transmitters from Iraq and beam it into Iran? How would you beam broadband into Iran?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I wrote my first RSS aggregator in 1999.

Believe it or not the core of that aggregator is what's behind the aggregator I've been shipping in the OPML Editor. Since then I've written all kinds of specialized aggregators, and it turns out it's not that much work these days.

Rather than live with all the decisions I've made over the last 10 years, I started over. The result is River2.

I just completed the first version, which I'm calling the "designer's release."

Every design element can be changed through CSS.

You just save your change, refresh the page, see the result.

The web server runs on your desktop, inside the OPML Editor.

To get an idea of what you're working with, my copy of River2 saves its home page to a public server every ten minutes. Yours will look like this too, until you change the design!

So if you're interested in designing the look of a River of News aggregator, it's ready for you to try it out.

http://newsriver.org/river2

If you have questions or comments, leave them here, or in the comment section on the page above.

This is great. For a few months now, I've been intending to write up a post that highlights how much of Shakespeare's work would have run into copyright trouble today if he (or whoever wrote his stuff, for those who believe it was someone else) were faced with today's copyright laws and/or today's technologies. While I haven't found the time, Groklaw has stepped up and done it for me -- at least with regards to King Lear, noting how unlikely it is that King Lear would be written today under the same circumstances, since there would be numerous potential copyright claims:

If the current US Copyright Law had been in effect over Shakespeare, I think he could have been sued by many authors for copyright infringement for writing that masterpiece.

Count how many lawsuits there could have been just for King Lear alone:

Shakespeare's play is based on various accounts of the semi-legendary Celtic mythological figure Lear/Lir. Shakespeare's most important source is thought to be the second edition of The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed, published in 1587. Holinshed himself found the story in the earlier Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which was written in the 12th century. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, published 1590, also contains a character named Cordelia, who also dies from hanging, as in King Lear.

Other possible sources are A Mirror for Magistrates (1574), by John Higgins; The Malcontent (1604), by John Marston; The London Prodigal (1605); Arcadia (1580-1590), by Sir Philip Sidney, from which Shakespeare took the main outline of the Gloucester subplot; Montaigne's Essays, which were translated into English by John Florio in 1603; An Historical Description of Iland of Britaine, by William Harrison; Remaines Concerning Britaine, by William Camden (1606); Albion's England, by William Warner, (1589); and A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, by Samuel Harsnett (1603), which provided some of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness. King Lear is also a literary variant of a common fairy tale, in which a father rejects his youngest daughter for a statement of her love that does not please him.[5]

The source of the subplot involving Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund is a tale in Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, with a blind Paphlagonian king and his two sons, Leonatus and Plexitrus.[6]

How many lawsuits do you see? At least a half dozen? I even see some methods and concepts claims, if we view it with modern copyright owner eyes. Remember J.K. Rowling's litigation over methods and concepts that Darl McBride and Chris Sontag cited? I suppose he could have raised a transformational fair use claim. But what if he accessed the prior works in digital format? Does fair use exist there? Or maybe they'd have been DRM'd. He'd maybe then never have read them.

Of course, what really would have happened is there never would have been a King Lear written. It would have been too legally risky. You can go to jail for copyright infringement, after all, even if you are noncommercial, if you distribute a DVD, and if we are imagining, let's imagine Shakespeare did that. Shakespeare wasn't even noncommercial. And there are criminal sanctions under regular Copyright Law, too.

If Shakespeare had plenty of money, he could have contacted all the copyright owners and paid them whatever they asked, but if he didn't have enough money, the result would have been he would have been unable to afford to write King Lear. Do we want a world where Shakespeare can only write King Lear if he has money? If you think I exaggerate, remember what happened to internet radio? And if one song is worth $80,000, is the sky not the limit, if you are a copyright owner and hold all the legal cards and can get Congress to keep upping the ante to suit you?

Incidentally, has anyone done a study to see how many songs in the history of the world earned $80,000 for their authors?

If King Lear had been written anyway, despite the odds, Shakespeare could have been sued for copyright infringement, one case after another, and his reputation would have been ruined, probably being branded a willful copyright infringer instead of an artistic genius, which he was, willfulness being assumed under the law, a rebuttable presumption, and he'd have likely faced damages equivalent to a lifetime of indentured servitude.

Indeed. This is a point that needs to be repeated again and again -- and yet for some reason, industry execs, politicians and even many in the press seem to buy (hook, line and proverbial sinker) the idea that copyright is somehow necessary for the creation of great works, and that such punishment is reasonable under the law. They'll claim that Shakespeare (or his modern equivalent) should simply write something different -- though ignoring how this would rid the world of King Lear. Shakespeare didn't rely on copyright to earn a living. Copyright is one form of enforcing a business model, but it is hardly the only one.

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bdcny7927 writes with an excerpt from CIO.com to inspire some caution before your next job switch: "IT workers have their choice of many great US cities for work and play (Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle), but what are the cities that you probably should avoid? Here's a very unscientific, highly subjective and unapologetically snarky list of our least favorite US tech job locales."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bdcny7927 writes with an excerpt from CIO.com to inspire some caution before your next job switch: "IT workers have their choice of many great US cities for work and play (Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle), but what are the cities that you probably should avoid? Here's a very unscientific, highly subjective and unapologetically snarky list of our least favorite US tech job locales."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The most sublime and disturbing weirdo-comedy show on the planet is now in its fifth season on Adult Swim, and Tim and Eric are also about to release a DVD of season three.

If you don't get it, nothing I can blog here will convince you. Go ahead and crab in the comments about how much they suck, I won't disemvowel. But if, like me, you are already a devotee? You know what you must do. For your technologies.

(via @ericwareheim and @timheidecker)

Randy Sarafan writes:

Standard fuzz pedals were just not fuzzy enough for me. Only the fuzziest fuzz pedal was going to be suitable for my musical endeavors. I searched high and low for the fuzziest fuzz pedal in the land, but I couldn't find it. Finally, I resolved that if I wanted a fuzzy fuzz pedal, I was going to have make my own. After much careful analysis and planing, I can confidently say that I have made the fuzziest guitar fuzz pedal ever to grace this planet Earth. If that's not enough to wet your whistle, it's squishy too.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

Harry writes "The unfortunate news about Apple rejecting a Commodore 64 emulator from the iPhone App Store inspired me to compare the C64 to the new iPhone 3G S, in more detail than any rational person is likely to compare them, ever again. If nothing else, it's a snapshot of just how far technology has come since the C64's release in August of 1982."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harry writes "The unfortunate news about Apple rejecting a Commodore 64 emulator from the iPhone App Store inspired me to compare the C64 to the new iPhone 3G S, in more detail than any rational person is likely to compare them, ever again. If nothing else, it's a snapshot of just how far technology has come since the C64's release in August of 1982."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reporters Without Borders says three more arrests in Iran today brings the total confirmed number of journalists and bloggers picked up and imprisoned since the recent presidential election to 26.

A crackdown against journalists and cyber-dissidents is continuing in Iran with both Iranian and foreign journalists caught in the eye of the post-election storm, Reporters Without Borders said. Among the latest arrests was that of a correspondent for the US magazine Newsweek, Maziar Bahari, picked up at his home in Tehran on 21 June.

"The authorities are using all possible methods to drive foreign journalists out of Iran, where they are unwanted witnesses to bloody repression," the worldwide press freedom organisation said. "The arrest of the Newsweek correspondent is a clear sign of the regime's determination to intimidate journalists whether Iranian or foreign, local or international newspaper correspondents."

Repressive mania continues : three more journalists arrested and related: Press freedom violations recounted in real time (RSF.org)

In the New York Times, this thoughtful piece by Noam Cohen on the links between online communication tools and political crises -- namely, the ongoing turmoil in Iran:

# Tweets Are Generally Banal, but Watch Out

"The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful," says Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor who is an expert on the Internet. That is, tweets by their nature seem trivial, with little that is original or menacing. Even Twitter accounts seen as promoting the protest movement in Iran are largely a series of links to photographs hosted on other sites or brief updates on strategy. Each update may not be important. Collectively, however, the tweets can create a personality or environment that reflects the emotions of the moment and helps drive opinion.

# Buyer Beware

Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).

Twitter on the Barricades (New York Times)

We've had a few stories recently of school administrators trying to stop the publication of a school publication because they didn't like the contents. In some cases, the students just route around the administrator and publish online. But, an even bigger point is, what good do the administrators think they're doing in trying to censor content in the first place? Take, for example, the story of a principal blocking the publication of a student magazine at Orange High School in Orange, California. Apparently, the principal was upset about a cover story about tattoos, claiming (bizarrely) that the photo on the cover, of a (faux) full back tattoo that included the magazine's name ("Pulp") and the school's mascot, glorified "gangster" culture, specifically because the text was spelled out in old English lettering. Really.

However, the details show that the real concern had nothing to do with "gang" issues. The principal wanted the article to include extra information about how tattoos were permanent and not easily removed. As Lee Baker at the Citizen Media Law Project points out:

Although it may be helpful for students to be reminded of the difficulty of tattoo removal, such a concern should not give a school principal the legal right to suppress student speech.

Still, the bigger issue from my perspective is understanding exactly who the principal think he's preventing from "harm" in this action. It's not as if students don't know about tattoos or how to find out more info on tattoos. Those students have access to this wonderful thing we call "the internet." They can also probably walk into any number of tattoo parlors. Blocking the publication in a school magazine because the principal doesn't like tattoos hardly seems likely to actually stop anyone from getting a tattoo.

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Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

As a lifelong glasses wearer, I'm intrigued by this image from the National Museum of Spectacles in Amsterdam, posted to the Atlas Obscura by CPilgrim:

The National Museum of Spectacles is itself something of a spectacle, fittingly located above an old optician's office in a building that dates back to the mid-1600s. The house's two floors overflow with monocles, lorgnettes, and the once-beloved Roosevelt style pince-nez. Exhibits detail the 700-year history of eye wear and the role that spectacles have played in art and fashion. Included among the museum's extensive holdings are the glasses of such bespectacled luminaries as Buddy Holly, John Lennon, Elvis Costello, and Franz Schubert.

The family that runs the museum has a store selling antique frames on the ground floor. Having watched my current plastic-rimmed specs oxidize to an unpleasant, mottled gray, I've been thinking about going back to metal frames, or trying out an altogether different material. I just did a little googling and discovered a company called Urban Spectacles that handcrafts modern frames out of wood (even, it appears, a pair of scissors glasses like the ones above). I'm looking over their web site, appreciating the incredible craftsmanship, when, lo and behold, I discover a celebrity endorsement from none other than... Cory Doctorow.

L. Gordon Crovitz has an interesting piece in the WSJ about China's on-again-off-again-on-again decree that starting on July 1, all computers sold in China must come installed with government-designed censorware.

"Green Dam-Youth Escort" will block political and religious websites and kill apps when users input "sensitive terms. The tool will also monitor personal communications, and track where users go online.

As noted in a previous BB post, the app has a secondary effect of exposing users to serious security vulnerabilities.

Snip from Crovitz' piece in the Journal:

In essence, bureaucrats in China want the world's computer makers to make it easier for their Thought Police to block access to news and information from the outside world, and to punish citizens for the sites they visit and the views they express online.

The pressure is on companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, plus Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business and whose largest shareholder is the Chinese government. The computer companies have kept a low profile, relying on trade associations to lobby Beijing to reconsider the regulations. Technologists would prefer just to be in the business of business, but politics is a fact of business life in China. (And even Chinese people who don't care about blocked information about Tiananmen or anonymity online will object if their new computers have kludgy software that is prone to crashing operating systems.)

Yet when the interests of foreign businesses coincide with the interests of the Chinese people, the kowtow may not be the only corporate option.

High Tech's Great Leap Backward: Will the world's computer makers kowtow to the Thought Police in Beijing? (Wall Street Journal, via @Rmack)

eldavojohn writes "CNN is running an article on a new angle of attack to reducing greenhouse gases. After meeting with the US Department of Energy on the concept, the researchers revealed the details that each 'tree' (really a small building structure in the concept design) would cost about as much as a Toyota and remove 1 ton of CO2 from the air per day. Don't worry, they're accounting for the energy the 'tree' uses to operate: 'By the time we make liquid C02 we have spent approximately 50 kilojoules [of electricity] per mole of C02. Compare that to the average power plant in the US, which produces one mole of C02 with every 230 kilojoules of electricity. In other words, if we simply plugged our device in to the power grid to satisfy its energy needs, for every roughly 1,000 kilograms [of carbon dioxide] we collected we would re-emit 200, so 800 we can chalk up as having been successful.' Each unit would remove 20 automobiles' worth of CO2 from the air and cost about as much as a Toyota... so the plan might be a five percent surcharge on automobiles to fund these synthetic tree farms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "CNN is running an article on a new angle of attack to reducing greenhouse gases. After meeting with the US Department of Energy on the concept, the researchers revealed the details that each 'tree' (really a small building structure in the concept design) would cost about as much as a Toyota and remove 1 ton of CO2 from the air per day. Don't worry, they're accounting for the energy the 'tree' uses to operate: 'By the time we make liquid C02 we have spent approximately 50 kilojoules [of electricity] per mole of C02. Compare that to the average power plant in the US, which produces one mole of C02 with every 230 kilojoules of electricity. In other words, if we simply plugged our device in to the power grid to satisfy its energy needs, for every roughly 1,000 kilograms [of carbon dioxide] we collected we would re-emit 200, so 800 we can chalk up as having been successful.' Each unit would remove 20 automobiles' worth of CO2 from the air and cost about as much as a Toyota... so the plan might be a five percent surcharge on automobiles to fund these synthetic tree farms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikileaks has published what is said to be proof that computers compliant with "Green Dam" can be maliciously controlled, using vulnerabilities in that censorware.

Green Dam is a new Chinese state censorship program mandated to be provided with all PC's sold in China after July 1, 2009. The program "complements" the existing internet censorship system, and extends it to many third party applications, such as Skype and text editors which are monitored for the use of forbidden phrases such as "falun gong". This ZIP file provides a web page and associated computer code that can be used to remotely take control of any computer system running the Green Dam software. The only requirement is that the user is enticed to look at a site hosting a copy of the exploit page. The technique used is a buffer-overflow using Microsoft's ".net" encoding.

Chinese Green Dam censorship system exploit, 22 Jun 2009 (Wikileaks, via @ClayShirky)

Jonathan Edman tweets: "I deeply understand how crippling 140c is, but what is the right number? Don't you run into the same problem at almost any num?"

Since my answer is too long to fit in 140 chars, I answered here.

Jonathan, I don't know what the "right" number is, but I have some ideas.

First, almost anything above 140 would be seen by power Twitter users as an improvement, and a cause for celebration. It would be a sign that someone is listening. And it would immediately give us relief. It's as if, in 1981, Apple found a way to give us 72K instead of 48K. There would be a burst of creativity like the Summer of Love.

Now, here's what I would do first, to try to come up with the right number.

Read the feeds of the NY Times, BBC, and a few other professional news sources for a few weeks, and count the characters in the <description> elements of each <item>. Average the number. Double it. That's what I would go with.

The theory being, if professional writers can summarize a whole news article in, X characters, then the average person should be able to express an idea in 2X characters.

In my new River of News, I cut the intros off at 280 chars, arbitrarily, and it seems to work pretty well. Previous versions included full posts, and that was a problem, because some sites, like OpenLeft, write whole books in their posts. I also strip out markup. I'm tired of all the huge pictures people are throwing into the river. I see it as a gimmick to try to get more attention. I say let their ideas compete with everyone else's on a level playing field.

Ryan Bavetta, of Crazy Builders, bolted a 3.7 HP model airplane engine onto the back of a skateboard to create this rocket board.

Propeller Powered Skateboard [via PopSci]

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I had the fortune of meeting the great Ed Koch at one of the conferences I put on with Jason Calacanis nine years ago in New York. Thems were the days. Ed, get better, we love you.

Ed Koch was the Mayor of New York City from 1977 through 1989. When I asked him to do a joke for the site he responded that he doesn't tell jokes, he tells anecdotes. Always quick on my feet, I said, "you can do whatever you'd like Mr. Mayor."

Old Jews Telling Jokes: Ed Koch (oldjewstellingjokes.com, thanks, E. Spiegelmann!)

mcgrew writes "The Bush administration had plans in place to use spy satellites to spy on American citizens. This morning the AP reports that new DHS head Janet Napolitano has axed those plans. 'The program was announced in 2007 and was to have the Homeland Security Department use overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites for homeland security and law enforcement purposes. The program, called the National Applications Office, has been delayed because of privacy and civil liberty concerns. The program was included in the Obama administration's 2010 budget request, according to Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat and House homeland security committee member who was briefed on the department's classified intelligence budget.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mcgrew writes "The Bush administration had plans in place to use spy satellites to spy on American citizens. This morning the AP reports that new DHS head Janet Napolitano has axed those plans. 'The program was announced in 2007 and was to have the Homeland Security Department use overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites for homeland security and law enforcement purposes. The program, called the National Applications Office, has been delayed because of privacy and civil liberty concerns. The program was included in the Obama administration's 2010 budget request, according to Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat and House homeland security committee member who was briefed on the department's classified intelligence budget.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This TV preacher uses irrefutable logic to prove that only the Christian's god is real.

"Have you ever seen somebody working on a fence and takes a hammer and hit their thumb and go "Awww... Buddha!" You ever see them do that? How many hit a gold ball like I hit a golf ball and they go "Ohhh... Mohammed!" Why do they call that name? You know what they do? They go "Jesus Christ!" "Jesus Christ!" Why do they call that name? Because I believe when a person gets hurt or they get angry, they wanna blame who? They want to blame God.

I guess that settles it!

Gareth Branwyn (who sent me the link to this video) told me this preacher's line of reasoning reminds him of his grandfather's argument against hippies. Gareth's grandpappy used to say, "If God had wanted men to have long hair, he would have given it to them."

The preacher also shares many other equally profound insights with his rapt audience: Satan uses LPs to control people, and burn victims are lucky because they've gotten a taste of hell.

(Thanks, Gareth!)

We all knew it was coming, but it's still sad -- particularly for photographers who loved the medium. Kodak has discontinued the production of Kodachrome film, and Glen E. Friedman, who shot the classic images above and below, laments its death in a blog post right here.

As far as quality products that mean something to me this one ranks above all else, even Apple.

This is like losing your favorite paint brush or camera lens or guitar, forever. Their are others, but none will be the same at all.

Perhaps one day in the future some one will invent a Kodachrome mode in digital photography....

These photos from Glen, featured in several Boing Boing Video episodes this year, were shot on Kodachrome.

A conveniently simpler approach to the spider-catching problem, Clark's design uses a cassette tape case, PVC pipe, and string to capture unwanted arachnids unharmed. See the project's page for the relevant step-by-step. [via EMSL]

If you require heavier duty hardware please refer to the Spider Rifle -

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In this how-to Alberto Ricci Bitti shows you how to design a greenbox no-waste charging station for your mobile phone that will lower your utility costs and environmental impact. The simple and elegant design makes unplugging a power draining wall wart very easy and instinctive.

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I love telling stories, especially ones with happy endings.

Once upon a time, way back in the early 80s, a young man (me) had written a program called ThinkTank. It ran on the Apple II, which only had 48K of memory -- not very much when you consider that an average PC today has 1 gigabyte -- or 21,845 times the memory if you can believe that!

That's like comparing a single 140-char tweet to the Library of Congress.

The Apple II had an infintesmally small memory, but its disk was a little larger. So the operating system I used, the UCSD P-System, did "overlays," which allowed big chunks of code to stay on disk until they were needed. When code in an overlay was called, the OS would throw out another chunk of code and replace it with the one you called. So, in the worst case, if a command needed code in two overlays to solve a problem that involved looping, the disk light would stay on for a long time while the computer "thrashed" out the answer.

This isn't unlike the way an Amazon Kindle keeps part of your library on its computer and part of it on the Kindle itself. When you want to read one of the books on their computer it just downloads it again, replacing something you haven't read in a while.

This business of writing code in overlays was very taxing to the developer, because thrashing wasn't very good for the usability of the code, so you're always moving code between overlays, or making a copy of an often-used routine, all to prevent the disk light from coming on and thrashing the app (and its user) to a standstill.

This clever code-writing is a lot like writing 140-character tweets today. You delete and abbreviate, throw out important ideas, all to fit into that tight little space. And then your readers, like the disk light, thrash with confusion, and think you're a fool, because you have to be a genius and a mind-reader to figure out the gibberish you wrote to fit in 140. Oy!!

So, with the app in the Apple II days, it was often too much trouble to add the feature. With Twitter, it's often easier just to say nothing. And that's not the goal of blogging, macro or micro. The goal is to provide a platform for saying what you have to say, not for not saying what you have to say!

Anyway, the Apple II story had a happy ending. It was called the IBM PC. Instead of 48K it had 640K. So when I recompiled my app for that machine I just threw out the overlays and let all the code reside in memory and the thing ran like a bat out of hell! I was finally able to finish the features I wanted, and instead of thinking the program just had potential, people loved it, and it sold, and we raised money, and everyone was happy.

The End.

Update: If 140 is too little, what's the right number?

tramm writes "I've released an extension for the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR's video mode to enable functions that are useful for independent film makers. While the camera produces a great movie out of the box, the audio is a severely limited. My code adds features that should have been in the software, like on-screen stereo audio meters, live audio monitoring, reduced audio noise and crop marks for different formats. An introductory video shows the new features in use and an audio evaluation compares it to the stock firmware with very good results. It's similar to the incredibly flexible CHDK software for Canon's point-and-shoot cameras, but targeted at the film makers using the 5D. The Magic Lantern firmware is GPLed and new features will be written to make the camera even more useful on set. There is a wiki for documentation and development."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tramm writes "I've released an extension for the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR's video mode to enable functions that are useful for independent film makers. While the camera produces a great movie out of the box, the audio is a severely limited. My code adds features that should have been in the software, like on-screen stereo audio meters, live audio monitoring, reduced audio noise and crop marks for different formats. An introductory video shows the new features in use and an audio evaluation compares it to the stock firmware with very good results. It's similar to the incredibly flexible CHDK software for Canon's point-and-shoot cameras, but targeted at the film makers using the 5D. The Magic Lantern firmware is GPLed and new features will be written to make the camera even more useful on set. There is a wiki for documentation and development."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At a time when we're supposed to be looking to entrepreneurs to bring us out of today's financial crisis, it's too bad to hear that our draconian intellectual property laws are driving people elsewhere. You may have noticed that the original file sharing success stories were in the US -- Napster, Grokster, Streamcast. But following the legal attacks, the more recent success stories have all been foreign: The Pirate Bay, Mininova, isoHunt. That's not a coincidence.

Will the same thing start happening due to over-aggressive patent litigation, as well? We recently covered how enforcement of some very basic patents against tons of small photo hosting sites was threatening to put a bunch of small businesses out of business. Joe Mullin has now revisited the subject and noted that at least one of those companies is considering relocating outside of the United States because of all of this. This is a guy who came from Russia, because the US represented opportunity and freedom from crazy Russian bureaucracy and monopolies. And, here he finds himself in a similar mess -- dealing with patent infringement lawsuits for things his company had on the market well before these patents were even filed. Yet, to defend against such an attack it so costly that it's easier to just leave the country. Driving entrepreneurs out of the country isn't exactly "promoting the progress" now, is it?

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Instead of letting it fall by the tech wayside, Josh D recased his old iPod in lovely wood & brass -

My finished wood ipod mini. This has been such a fun project for me. It's handmade (with special thanks to my 8yr old dremel) from Australian red cedar, Camphor Laurel for the clickwheel, brass plates, brass screws and the guts from the first ipod i ever had.

[…]

I wanted to not use any glue at all with the wooden shell, and fortunately i was able to secure it all together just using the brass screws. Especially because I'd like to be able to replace the ipod's battery in the future, and possibly add a higher capacity flash hard drive.

The wooden clickwheel is simply stuck down on the sensor with very thin double sided tape.

More pics in the Flickr photoset.[via Boing Boing Gadgets]

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torrentami writes that Verified Identity Pass, operator of the "Clear" program, which allowed pre-screened passengers faster access to US airport gates, "sent out emails to its subscribers today informing them that as of 11 p.m. PST they will cease operations. Clear was a pioneer in speeding customers through security at airports and had planned on expanding to large events. The service, where it was available, offered a first class security experience for travelers willing to fork over $200 a year and their biometrics. Customers are now left holding their Flyclear cards with encrypted biometrics. The question now becomes, what happens to all that information? This is not the first time Clear has been in the news. A laptop containing customer records was reportedly missing from the San Francisco International airport recently but then turned up shortly thereafter. Another casualty of the recession's downturn in business travel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

torrentami writes that Verified Identity Pass, operator of the "Clear" program, which allowed pre-screened passengers faster access to US airport gates, "sent out emails to its subscribers today informing them that as of 11 p.m. PST they will cease operations. Clear was a pioneer in speeding customers through security at airports and had planned on expanding to large events. The service, where it was available, offered a first class security experience for travelers willing to fork over $200 a year and their biometrics. Customers are now left holding their Flyclear cards with encrypted biometrics. The question now becomes, what happens to all that information? This is not the first time Clear has been in the news. A laptop containing customer records was reportedly missing from the San Francisco International airport recently but then turned up shortly thereafter. Another casualty of the recession's downturn in business travel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

torrentami writes that Verified Identity Pass, operator of the "Clear" program, which allowed pre-screened passengers faster access to US airport gates, "sent out emails to its subscribers today informing them that as of 11 p.m. PST they will cease operations. Clear was a pioneer in speeding customers through security at airports and had planned on expanding to large events. The service, where it was available, offered a first class security experience for travelers willing to fork over $200 a year and their biometrics. Customers are now left holding their Flyclear cards with encrypted biometrics. The question now becomes, what happens to all that information? This is not the first time Clear has been in the news. A laptop containing customer records was reportedly missing from the San Francisco International airport recently but then turned up shortly thereafter. Another casualty of the recession's downturn in business travel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Halifax "angular jazz" musicians Gypsophilia have just released their new album, "Sa-ba-da-OW!" and it's fabulous, a jazz-era sound that has plenty of straight-ahead melody in addition to some really weird, interesting side-jaunts. The band is known for throwing beautiful, decadent debauchery parties in 1930s style in Halifax, and the music carries over that party mood. Be sure to check out the title track for something really special.

Sa-ba-da-OW!

Antique bottles have always fascinated me. Here's an amazing site with pretty much everything you need to know about identifying and dating "historic bottles." The site is maintained by the Bureau of Land Management.

Historic Glass Bottle Identification & Information Website

More:

• More sea glass hunting
• The sea glass of summer
• HOW TO - Make a Sea Glass Necklace (Craft: Blog)
• Beach glass

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Czmyt sends the excellent news that one of the US's most notorious spammers has pleaded guilty and could serve 6 years in jail. "Five individuals pleaded guilty today in federal court in Detroit for their roles in a wide-ranging international stock fraud scheme involving the illegal use of bulk commercial e-mails, or 'spamming'... Alan M. Ralsky, 64, of West Bloomfield, Mich., and Scott K. Bradley, 38, also of West Bloomfield, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. ... Ralsky and Bradley also pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael put some stepper motors to work playing back MIDI tracks by way of Arduino -

The data for the music is taken from a MIDI file I made. The code for interpreting the data and moving the motors was written by me over the course of a few days.

The sound you're hearing is coming entirely from the motors. The motors are screwed into some pieces of aluminum from an old project to help them resonate. I'm taking requests for other songs to play.

Currently, the information for the song is stored on the Arduino. Plans for implementing a realtime MIDI stream are underway. Eventually I'll be able to plug in a keyboard and play the motors as though I were playing piano.

Quite awesome. You can see video the project's earlier version here. [via Adafruit]

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Talk about a bad idea in action. We've seen plenty of stories about the growing "surveillance" society that we live in these days -- with cc cameras showing up pretty much everywhere in large cities. But who watches the cameras? Well, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, apparently the answer is anyone who volunteers to do so. First, the city decided to install a ton of cameras -- more than either San Francisco or Boston, despite a massive difference in size. Then, recognizing how difficult it is to monitor everything, the city turned over the managing of the cameras to a private entity who is employing an army of volunteers to not just watch, but control the cameras, and having them "report" any suspicious activities. The article notes that studies have shown such cameras may be limited in their effectiveness (there's no evidence of a decrease in violent crime from them, but some evidence of a decrease in "property" crime).

Still what's really bizarre is allowing unpaid volunteers to man the cameras -- with even the officials from the city admitting that training for the camera operators has been "informal," but that they try to "weed out voyeurs and anyone who might use the tapes for blackmail or other illegal activity." Well, phew. Doesn't that make you feel more comfortable? And then there's this lovely quote from a local business owner who likes the program: "There's nothing wrong with instilling fear." Er... actually, there are lots of things wrong with it...

This actually reminds me a bit of Jay Walker's (of Priceline fame) old idea of allowing individuals at home to monitor secure locations via video streams to their desktop. The idea there was quite a bit different though. It wasn't to watch over people wandering around a downtown area, but to put the cameras on secure areas where no one should ever be -- and the idea was that multiple people would all have the same boring screens up at the same time, and if suddenly someone did show up, hopefully people would notice it and hit the "someone's there" button, to alert security. That idea didn't go very far, but at least it was limited to areas where there weren't any privacy issues. The Lancaster plan, on the other hand, is just scary.

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Rosemarie Fiore makes a different kind of fire art. She uses controlled detonations of fireworks on paper to disperse bursts of saturated color. Rosemarie tells MAKE how she does it:

I bomb blank sheets of paper with different fireworks including color smoke bombs, jumping jacks, monster balls, fountains, magic whips, spinning carnations, ground blooms, rings of fire, and lasers. As I work, I create imagery by controlling the chaotic nature of the explosions in upside-down containers. When the paper becomes saturated in color, dark and burned, I take it back to my studio and collage blank paper circles onto the image to establish new planes and open up the composition. I then continue to bomb the pieces. These actions are repeated a number of times. The final works contain many layers of collaged explosions and are thick and heavy.

She's also made art with a lawnmower, a car windshield wiper, a pinball machine, and a waffle iron.

Rosemarie Fiore

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We've been talking a lot about how musicians are discovering good business models in connecting with fans, and giving them a reason to buy, but clearly the model works in other areas as well. In a recent interview with writer/director Kevin Smith (probably most well known for Clerks), he talks about his rather constant interaction with fans:

Once media was created that allowed a dialogue to open between filmmakers and audience, there was no way I couldn't embrace it. This is a communications medium, film. We do this to get a reaction and hear what people have to say about our work. It's enormously flattering when someone (or lots of someones) are interested in you enough as an artist to wanna know about your life and opinions beyond the actual work that brought you to their attention in the first place.

And, because of that, he knows that that loyal fan base will at least be interested in what he has to offer:

What I get from the fan base is unconditional support. They may not like all the flicks I do, but they'll give each one a shot--which is the most you can ask for from any audience. Contrary to what the haters think, the fan base doesn't lounge around like a giant caterpillar, taking hits off the hookah of my collective body of work; they're normal people with normal lives who just relate to what I write/say. And the relationship doesn't end at the theater: These are folks I play poker with. I spend my birthdays with them (onstage or at a home-made prom). I played hockey against and beside them just last week in Brantford, Ontario, at Walter Gretzky's 3rd Annual Street Hockey Tournament. It makes sense we'd all get along, as we share a common interest: Kevin Smith films. But, Jesus--you can only talk about those for so long. And when the "Then what'd Jason Lee say?" chatter dries up, you find they're more friends than fans.

Indeed. You can count me among those in that group. I haven't necessarily liked all of Smith's movies, but his is one of the few podcasts I listen to, and I know that whenever stuff he works on comes out, I'll take a look and see if I'm interested in buying. In adding the connection element -- even though I've never communicated with him in any manner whatsoever -- I'm automatically that much more interested in buying what he has to offer. And, he tends to make it worthwhile. He doesn't talk about it in the interview, but he and his team/friends have always made sure that the extras they offer are totally worth buying, such as by adding all sorts of extra DVD features, a book about his life (taken from his blog) and various videos of his legendary Q&A sessions (which this interview was a warmup for). Just another example of the value of connecting with fans in some manner or another.

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Nicola Asuni writes to let us know about a new resource for hardware hackers: a wiki about pinouts — hardware interfaces of modern and obsolete hardware. "Created with the same MediaWiki software that was developed for the Wikipedia project, AllPinouts.org is a wiki that allows users to get and share information about hardware interfaces, including pinouts of ports, expansion slots, and other connectors of computers and different electronic devices (i.e. cellular phones, GPS, PDA, game consoles, etc.). All text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and may be distributed or linked accordingly. The 'pinout' (or 'pin-out') of a connector identifies each individual pin, which is critical when creating, repairing or hacking cable assemblies and adapters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nicola Asuni writes to let us know about a new resource for hardware hackers: a wiki about pinouts — hardware interfaces of modern and obsolete hardware. "Created with the same MediaWiki software that was developed for the Wikipedia project, AllPinouts.org is a wiki that allows users to get and share information about hardware interfaces, including pinouts of ports, expansion slots, and other connectors of computers and different electronic devices (i.e. cellular phones, GPS, PDA, game consoles, etc.). All text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and may be distributed or linked accordingly. The 'pinout' (or 'pin-out') of a connector identifies each individual pin, which is critical when creating, repairing or hacking cable assemblies and adapters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sigma has posted a firmware update for its DP2 large-sensor digital compact. Version 1.02 improves autofocus performance and allows you to access magnified live view with a single button press when in manual focus mode.

I'm one of the keynoters at next week's EuroPython convention in Birmingham, England -- looks like a hell of a show, with further keynotes by Bruce Eckel and Professor Sir Tony Hoare and a whack of great talks and tutorials.

Being a Community Conference means that EuroPython is run entirely by volunteers, that means us the participants. Many of the things that have to be done to run a successful conference can be carried out remotely, and every year Pythonistas from all over Europe help...

EuroPython aims to provide inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere, designed to help people build contacts and learn from each other's experiences. EuroPython 2009 offers a talks programme oriented around the following themes:

* Python Language (featuring Python 3, Python implementations (IronPython/Jython/PyPy) and Python packaging)
* Python in Action (Python projects and deployments in government, industry and beyond)
* Mobile Computing (Python in mobile and embedded devices)
* Large Scale Python (Python in research, distributed computing, scientific computing)
* Web Programming (Python on the Web: Zope 3, Django and everything else)
* Database Programming (object-relational mappers and data management techniques)
* User Interfaces (across or beyond the Web, the desktop and the device)
* Games (featuring pygame, pyglet and other game-making technologies)

EuroPython : a Python Conference

John Rogers of AP profiled 77-year-old Paul Krassner, co-founder of the Yippies and publisher of The Realist, the newsletter that was a big influence on bOING bOING.

He was once a child music prodigy and in the decades since, Paul Krassner has been everything from political satirist to author, editor, anarchist and an advocate for both peace and pornography.

But the title he may favor is one he found buried in his FBI file.

"To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute," a letter in the file said in response to a favorable magazine interview with the co-founder of the Yippie Party, the group that notoriously disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. "He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut."

So Krassner titled his autobiography "Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut."

"I figured I might as well make use of it," says the author, smiling broadly as he sits in the living room of his modest tract home in this sandy, sagebrush-dotted corner of the Mojave Desert on a scorchingly hot morning.

Paul has a new book coming out, called Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today. Yippie founder Paul Krassner still testing limits

One of the things that is truly amazing is how difficult it has been for anyone to accurately predict what happens as bandwidth becomes more and more commonplace. Most of the original assumptions were based on faulty views of old technology -- i.e., the internet would become more like "tv" since it could handle the bandwidth. While there has been some of that, the more interesting elements have actually taken advantage of what the internet is good at: multi-directional communication, rather than one way broadcast communication. We already have television. We don't need another one. But a platform that allows anyone to communicate with anyone -- and with higher bandwidth? That starts to get interesting...

But, even now, as average bandwidth rates are orders of magnitude above what they were just a decade ago, people are having trouble recognizing the next revolution -- when bandwidth is effectively infinite. However, it's time to start thinking about what that allows, because bandwidth is only going to increase, and it's only going to increase unique opportunities, applications and services. The article discusses a connected-Coke machine, which may seem like a small thing, and nothing to get excited about, but as you think about the progression, from simply alerting the company to when the machine was low, to increasing information about a variety of factors, to allowing customers to interact with the machine, you begin to recognize how the entire concept of even a basic "soda machine" starts to change. And those are all still low bandwidth exercises. What made that work wasn't the increase in bandwidth, but the increase in general connectivity. If you start to increase the size of the pipe significantly as well, you start to get even more possibilities.

So, all these arguments over "net neutrality" and "metered billing" are missing the point. Bandwidth is going to increase. Those who attempt to cap it or limit it are only going to make their own pipes significantly less valuable. However, those who recognize how empowering more bandwidth can be, and how approaching "infinite bandwidth" opens up the possibility for new services and apps that we can't even fathom today, will start to realize that providing ever more bandwidth increases value and clamping down on bandwidth kills value.

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Barence writes "Satnav firm Mio is launching a device with an integrated TV tuner. The Mio Spirit range includes a digital television tuner that is intended to be used 'during breaks in the journey or at their final destination.' However, safety campaigners fear there's little to stop the television being used at the wheel. When the system is first turned on a warning message is displayed, telling the user not to watch television while driving. If this is ignored, a secondary warning message kicks in if the GPS chip detects the vehicle is moving at more than 5mph. But that's it!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Satnav firm Mio is launching a device with an integrated TV tuner. The Mio Spirit range includes a digital television tuner that is intended to be used 'during breaks in the journey or at their final destination.' However, safety campaigners fear there's little to stop the television being used at the wheel. When the system is first turned on a warning message is displayed, telling the user not to watch television while driving. If this is ignored, a secondary warning message kicks in if the GPS chip detects the vehicle is moving at more than 5mph. But that's it!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now that you've cleaned out your garage or sold your extra carport-needing car, you can make a greenhouse from your old portable metal carport!

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Jebediah sez, "This is a tour of impressive American train stations that were demolished in recent decades -- with photos of the original buildings are "after" pictures showing what's at the various sites today. It's a strange contrast in most cases between the grandeur of the train station and shabby replacement structure. In some cases it's just a parking lot. The most famous example, of course, is NYC's old Penn Station. But there are many other notable cases, including Memphis's amazing station that was replaced with a bunker of a postal facility surrounded by barbed wire."

Demolished! 11 Beautiful Train Stations That Fell To The Wrecking Ball (Thanks, Jebediah!)

Hell yeah: production stills from Tim Burton's lush-looking Alice in Wonderland adaptations!

Update: New Images From Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland! (via Tor.com)

Patrick sez, "Unlike most of us, it looks like @PatrickMeier knows what he's talking about. He should, considering he's doing a PhD at Harvard on 'The Impact of the Information Revolution on Authoritarian Rule and Social Resistance: From Information Revolution to iRevolution?' Patrick has an excellent guide on How To Communicate Securely in Repressive Environments. He keeps it up to date based on his studies and input from readers, and will provide a more detailed guide on request (my guess is that not all requests will be handled equally). If you're a Farsi speaker, please translate it and email me, I will post it (or maybe Patrick will want to post it next to the original)."

Mobile Phones

* Purchase your mobile phone far from where you live. Buy lower-end, simple phones that do not allow third-party applications to be installed. Higher-end ones with more functionalities carry more risk. Use cash to purchase your phone and SIM card. Avoid town centers and find small or second-hand shops as these are unlikely to have security cameras. Do not give your real details if asked; many shops do not ask for proof of ID.

* Use multiple SIM cards and multiple phones and only use pay-as-you go options; they are more expensive but required for anonymity.

* Remove the batteries from your phone if you do not want to be geo-located and keep the SIM card out of the phone when not in use and store in separate places.Use your phone while in a moving vehicle to reduces probability of geo-location.

* Never say anything that may incriminate you in any way.

How To Communicate Securely in Repressive Environments

A reader writes: "A photographer for Dallas' local alternative weekly was handcuffed and detained while photographing an old B24 Liberator (with permission, mind you) on father's day." (He wandered slightly ahead of the unmarked permitted zone, cops drew guns and rousted him):

Waiting for the plane to take off, I was surprised by the Addison police. An officer unholstered his gun, then handcuffed and held me until Homeland Security cleared my name.

I was not arrested, but according to Officer Pierce, I did break federal law and a report would be sent to Homeland Security. I will be hearing from them. I apologized to every one involved. The pilot told me the airport was shut down for a short while.

But according to one of the crew, they had ID'd me as one of theirs, and the tower knew and tried to call it off. But once the wheels were set in motion, it could not be stopped. The pilots were pretty much cool and laughed at me and were even willing to escort me to take more shots. One old-timer gruffed under his breath, "It's the U.S.A., not U.S.S.R. -- I didn't fight to protect this shit." One even offered me his seat on a ride.

How a Heartwarming, Kick-Ass Father's Day Photo Shoot Ended Up Face Down in Handcuffs on the Addison Airport Tarmac

Over on Offworld, our Brandon's got exciting news about a remix of the music from the Katamari games, some of the coolest, most infectious video-game music ever recorded.

Kicking off a series of official posts for Sony's PlayStation blog on Namco's upcoming PS3 'tribute' release Katamari Forever, producer Kazuhito Udetsu relays a message from longtime series (and Noby Noby Boy) sound designer Yuu Miyake, who explains the process of collaborating with various Japanese acts to remix classic Katamari tracks.

Saying he wanted a split between 'organic' and 'electric' sounds, Miyake highlights oft-blogged NES-samplers YMCK and the chiptune swing of their "A Crimson Rose and a Gin Tonic" remix. Unfortunately, we don't get the whole track, but we do get enough to hear that it's going to be another must-buy collection.

Listen: YMCK remix classic Katamari for PS3's Katamari Forever

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