This postcard advertising bOING bOING #2 was sent out in 1989 to the 50 or so people who ordered a copy of bOING bOING #1 from the pages of Factsheet Five. I found it today in a box of junk I was cleaning out.

(If anyone still has one of these cards and sends me a scan of what's on the front, I'll send them a Boing Boing T-shirt.)

MAKE subscriber Matthew Sylvester sent us this video of BBC TV presenter Jem Stansfield seeming to climb the side of one of the broadcaster's buildings using a very funky homemade contraption based on a vacuum cleaner. The "stunt" was done as a promo for the upcoming BBC show Bang Goes the Theory [cough... Mythbusters].

And speaking of Mythbusters, they built a similar rig, with far more serious components, and had very lackluster results. This video makes it look suspiciously easy. Hmmm. It'd be interesting to see if he could even lift himself off of the ground without the aid of the climbing harness.

Man climbs building with vacuum gloves

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Krokz sends in an LA Times piece that begins "A warning is bouncing through cyberspace today, landing on the Facebook statuses of many of the social networking site's users. The message: 'Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission.' It continues with a prescription of how you can protect your photos." The attention-grabbing incident in this furor involved a married woman, whose photo appeared in an ad for a dating service that was presented to her husband to view. Fortunately, both husband and wife had a sense of humor about it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "In the aftermath of Microsoft's recent decision to contribute 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community, Christopher Smart of Linux Magazine talked to Linus Torvalds and asked if the code was something he would be happy to include, even though it's from Microsoft. 'Oh, I'm a big believer in "technology over politics." I don't care who it comes from, as long as there are solid reasons for the code, and as long as we don't have to worry about licensing etc. issues,' says Torvalds. 'I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.' Smart asked Torvalds if Microsoft was contributing the code to benefit the Linux community or Microsoft. 'I agree that it's driven by selfish reasons, but that's how all open source code gets written! We all "scratch our own itches." It's why I started Linux, it's why I started git, and it's why I am still involved. It's the reason for everybody to end up in open source, to some degree,' says Torvalds. 'So complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. That's the point of open source — the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the "your" in question happens to be.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A month or so ago at the dump, I helped Michael harvest the optical sensor out of a skiing machine just as closing time descended upon us. As we got hustled away from the picking pile, he mentioned that he needed it to make a speed governor for a wood cutting and splitting machine. A few days later Michael turned up at school to show me the breadboarded version of the circuit. He had all the basics in place, the code and mechanisms were working properly and predictably. Next step was to formalize the design and install it on the automatic log splitter.

Initially throttle position was held constant by holding the throttle body against a hard stop. Throttle position was selected for reasonable loaded performance and safe unloaded operation.See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np9l8YD36d8 for a video clip of the wood processor in fixed throttle mode. As expected, the engine tends to bog down during heavy loads.

Check out Michael's page on the project for more photos, videos and the Arduino code.

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Duemilanove

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Smart grid technology is a hot issue on Capitol Hill, but some are raising questions about the idea. In recent days we've discussed the smart grid's potential exposure to worm attacks, consumers' unreadiness for the idea, and whether the whole concept may need a rethink. A Congressional hearing on Thursday surfaced another reason for caution: the smart grid's vulnerability to EMP. "Electromagnetic Pulse" refers to the damage caused in electrical circuits and systems when a nuclear explosive goes off nearby. The electric grid as it's currently constituted is vulnerable to EMP; the further down the road we go towards a smart grid, the more vulnerable it will become. "It makes a great equalizer for small nations looking to stand up to military Goliaths, argues Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (Rep.-Md.), a former research scientist and engineer who has worked in the past on projects for NASA and the military. All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon. Then fling the device high into the air and detonate its warhead. Such a system might not paralyze the entire United States, he concedes. 'But you could shut down all of New England. And if you missed by 100 miles, it's as good as a bulls eye.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

itwbennett writes "Macs made up a whopping 91 percent of the $1,000-and-up computer market in June. Not so long ago, $1,000 got you an entry-level machine. Today the average computer sells for $701, while the average Windows machine sells for only $515. Still, Macs only make up 8.7% of PC sales. But is that really such a bad position to be in? Consider an Apples to Apples, that is, Macs to iPhones comparison: the iPhone takes only a sliver of the phone market but a much larger share of the profits."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bryan Field-Elliot raises an interesting question in the comments on the rssCloud walkthrough.

"The automatic expiration after 25 hours seems rather arbitrary. If a cloud server is going to have a policy of expiring subscriptions after X hours, I suggest that the value X be published somewhere. Within the <cloud> element perhaps, or, as part of the return value from the pleaseNotify call. That way different implementations of cloud servers can vary this value as they feel appropriate, and different aggregators will have a means to know how often they need to resubscribe."

I responded as follows (and reposted here because I wanted to make sure it gets proper consideration):

It's an interesting question.

On the pro side -- it would add flexibility.

On the con side -- it would also add complexity. Another thing to test, another thing to break.

The subscriber should poll anyway, periodically. If it detects a change that it wasn't notified of, it can resub. No harm if already subbed. In my implementation of rssCloud that gives you another 25 hours.

I'm not sure I shouldn't give you another 25 hours anytime I detect that you're alive, for example, you respond to a notification.

The point is to give the cloud a rule for when it's okay to clean out garbage. It's really hard to imagine why someone would want a different value.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

Normally, the sign for a driving school isn't the sort of thing that haunts your mind, drawing you deeper and deeper into its depths, trying to puzzle out a narrative from its teasingly specific set of clues. A muffler shop, maybe, but not a driving school.

Except this one, on Venice Blvd. in Los Angeles. I'm not sure of the name, or really anything about the driving school, except that they have a wonderfully bizzare mural:



So let's look at what we have here: two figures in a car that resembles a Goggomobil Dart, license plate reading "K.D.S.", which I think must stand for Ksomething Driving School. The passenger, based on his careful rendering, is likely the owner of the school, and is pointing a solid-looking hand forward. The other hand clutches a burning torch, the property of Lady Liberty, taking time off from her wretched refuse welcoming duties to come down to LA and learn how to drive. The pair of Asian entrepeneur and colossal bronze woman are speeding down on what appears to be a giant French flag that curves in from beyond the horizon. The beach is to one side, both Hollywood and the World Trade Center (?) recede behind them, and on the ochre highway next to them, Uncle Sam waves a hapless wave from a convertible, vainly trying to keep up. The treatment of the car's headlights also suggest a possible mechanical Sentience.

Hot damn. That's a mural.

suraj.sun sends along this quote from Information Week: "The government wants to use cookies to offer more personalized web sites to citizens and better analytics to Webmasters. ... The federal government has drafted changes to its outdated restrictions on HTTP cookies, and wants the public's input. Under the plan, detailed in a blog post by federal CIO Vivek Kundra and... Michael Fitzpatrick, federal agencies would be able to use cookies as long as their use is lawful, citizens can opt out of being tracked, notice of the use of cookies is posted on the Web site, and Web sites don't limit access to information for those who opt out. ... The Office of Management and Budget is considering three separate tiers of cookie usage that will likely have different restrictions for each, based on privacy risks. The first tier of sites would use single-session technologies, the second multi-session technologies for use in analytics only, and the third for multi-session cookies that are used to remember data or settings 'beyond what is needed for web analytics.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This video is a couple of years old, but I just read about it on Forgetomori last night. It shows a folded piece of paper, balanced on an upright toothpick, under a glass bowl. The guy in the video shows how he can make the paper spin with his "psychic powers."

Before he starts making it spin though, he first blows a hair dryer around the bowl to show that the apparatus inside can't be affected by moving air, and then he moves a powerful magnet all around the bowl to show that there's no magnetism involved. The he sits down in a meditative pose and makes the paper spin in one direction, and then another.

You can read the video creator's explanation here. Before you read it though, try to think how he might have accomplished this.

PsiWheel Under a Glass Container video

storagedude writes "This article suggests that most RAID controllers are completely unprepared for solid state drives and parallel file systems, all but guaranteeing another I/O bottleneck in data centers and another round of fixes and upgrades. What's more, some unnamed RAID vendors don't seem to even want to hear about the problem. Quoting: 'Common wisdom has held until now that I/O is random. This may have been true for many applications and file system allocation methodologies in the recent past, but with new file system allocation methods, pNFS and most importantly SSDs, the world as we know it is changing fast. RAID storage vendors who say that IOPS are all that matters for their controllers will be wrong within the next 18 months, if they aren't already.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gollum123 writes "David Pogue of the NYTimes wonders why Congress is worrying about exclusive handset contracts when there are more significant things that are broken, unfair, and anti-competitive in the American cellphone industry. He lists text messaging fees, double billing, handset subsidies, international call rates, and 'airtime-eating instructions' among the major problems not being addressed by Congress. 'Right now, the cell carriers spend about $6 billion a year on advertising. Why doesn't it occur to them that they'd attract a heck of a lot more customers by making them happy instead of miserable? By being less greedy and obnoxious? By doing what every other industry does: try to please customers instead of entrap and bilk them? But no. Apparently, persuading cell carriers to treat their customers decently would take an act of Congress.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

Wild monkeys in India have grown so out of control that the state government is planning to build a school for rogue monkeys.

The problem of rogue monkeys is particularly severe in towns close to India's north-western border with Pakistan. Officials accuse them of a variety of bad behaviour from terrorising children, snatching food from people and destroying property... The proposed new monkey school will take in the "worst offenders" and put them through a crash course in good manners.

Indian school for rogue monkeys (via Monkeywire)
(Photo: Peter Garnham)

An ambitious effort to arrange a financially happy marriage between TV and Hollywood, Phonevision gives TV set owners a chance to order movies by telephone, at $1 each. Once the order is placed, a simple gadget attached to the TV set and connected to the home telephone unscrambles the movie on the TV screen. Hollywood collects its profit and the set owner is charged on his telephone bill. Last fall Hollywood released for the Chicago test more than 90 films made during the past three or four years.

The above was from Time magazine, January 8, 1951.

In engineering, fabricating and good all-around making, it is very useful to know the basic drawing styles. This will help you get your ideas out of your head and onto the napkin or into your notebook so that you can bring your idea into the world. Architects, planners, designers, engineers and others use drawing to help communicate their ideas clearly and accurately to the people who will carry out their designs. Drawing is also a great way to communicate with yourself, since you can draw a picture of it to help clear up the parts of the idea before moving to the next steps of your design.

Here are a few drawing techniques that will help you speak in a common visual language:

Orthographic
If you are thinking in terms of a floor plan, or a straight on view to an object's face, that's an Orthographic view. In this technique, you are showing the details of the face, where the edges are, if there are holes or visible cuts in the surface, you would show them as solid lines. If those holes or cuts are in another face and not visible from your viewpoint, they would be shown with dashed lines.

An object could have six orthographic views, top, bottom, right, left, front and back. One way to help visualize the six sides is to take a cardboard box and cut windows in each of the sides. Label the sides and place an object inside the box. When you look straight at the object on one side, that is the view you would draw. You wouldn't try to include any information from another side.

Multiview Orthographic
Sometimes, you will have a complex object that has information on more than one side. You will want to show the relationship between the sides in a Mutltiview Orthographic drawing. Here, what you want to do is line up usually two or three corresponding views. Normally, you would show the top view above the front view. The features of the object visible in the top view would line up with the features in the front in a two view drawing. If the side also has details, you would draw the side so that it lines up with the front view.

Isometric
So you want to show several faces of the object, but don't want to make a whole bunch of individual drawings? You want to know about Isometric Projection! This technique has you placing the object at an imagined 30 degree angle and drawing the three faces that are visible. In isometric, all the sides have parallel edges, just as they would in the real object. The object can be drawn accurately enough to pull measurements. Since three sides are visible at once, you can get a real sense of the object by looking at the drawing.

Scale
If you hope to build directly from these drawings, you would want to do them accurately and with a scale in mind. There are many different scales, or ratios of drawing to object available to you. Some are pretty simple, like 1:1, full size, 1:2 or 1/ 2 size or 1/4 size. There are lots more, and rather than figure out how far apart to draw the marks to accurately show 3 inches in 1/4 scale, you can use an architects' or engineers' scale, which translates feet and inches down to the smaller scale. When you are drawing to scale, a person could put the corresponding scale right down on your drawing and pull out the measurements, which should match your notations.

Sketching
If you just want to get your idea out of your head, sketching is the way to start. Here, what you do is take your paper in hand and draw out your idea using one of the techniques above. With sketching, it is more about the speed of showing your imagined or observed shape than precision and accuracy. Usually, with sketching you would only use a pen or pencil on the paper. The straightness of the line comes from your hand, not from using guides. Get the idea out. You can refine it through revisions, bring it into a drawing program, draft it accurately with drafting tools, but all that comes later, after you have put it on the page. Sketching is quick and helps you see the relationships of the shapes and parts.

Looking for more? Try out the simulation at the bottom of the Teacher Support page of the Engineering the Future curriculum from Boston's Museum of Science. In Sketchup and other Computer Aided Design programs, you can go to the view menu to see each of these views. But really, the best way to build this into your head is to pick up a pencil or pen and start drawing. Draw the objects on the table in front of you, one at a time. Show them in orthographic, multiview and isometric. There are drawing papers available with square and isometric grids printed on them to help guide your drawings.

In the Maker Shed:

Pick up The Maker's Notebook ($19.99) for all your big ideas, diagrams, patterns, etc. Exclusive to the Maker Shed: Sticker sheets and a band closure to customize your book.

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Over at Dangerous Minds, Tara McGinley posted this fantastic skateboard series featuring the Miles Davis Quintet, as illustrated by Ian Johnson. "Miles Davis Quintet Skateboards"

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year CS curricula and considered by some to be the 'latin of programming,' is really the best first language for a young programmer. As he sees it, the essentially write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — excellent for teaching programming but 'lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a computer do stuff on his own.' And though the 'hacker ethic' may in fact be harming today's developers, McAllister still suggests we encourage the young to 'develop the innate curiosity and love of programming that lies at the heart of any really brilliant programmer' by simply encouraging them to fool around with whatever produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, 'what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,' and inventing effective software solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a sprinkling of luck. 'If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BotScout writes "Following in the footsteps of other traditional media executives who just don't get it, Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, and that's that. The media and technology executive said it's 'mythology' to view the Internet as a system of free communications. 'It is not free, and is not going to be,' Diller said yesterday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, California. Companies from Disney to New York Times Co. are seeking ways to extract revenue from the Internet. The latter recently said that it's considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper's web site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BotScout writes "Following in the footsteps of other traditional media executives who just don't get it, Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, and that's that. The media and technology executive said it's 'mythology' to view the Internet as a system of free communications. 'It is not free, and is not going to be,' Diller said yesterday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, California. Companies from Disney to New York Times Co. are seeking ways to get extract revenue from the Internet. The latter recently said that it's considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper's web site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dasButcher writes "Network Solutions, the domain registration and hosting service company, suffered a massive security breach that lasted three months and exposed tens of thousands of credit card numbers of its customers and of the businesses that use its hosting and online payment processing service. The company is just beginning the victim notification process. 'There is no information on how the code was planted on the sites. While examination of the code shows that it had the ability to ship data off to a third party, and Network Solutions believes that it did just that, the exact code is not available for public review. There is also no public information as to where the data believed to be stolen was sent.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit writes "A eukalyptus-like tree from New Zealand is still waging a battle that should have ended over 500 years ago. The tree continues to sport evolutionary adaptations, such as barbed leaves, to protect it from a large, flightless bird known as a moa. There's just one problem: the moa went extinct around 1500 AD."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

My exceptionally awesome local hardware store is at it again - the annual Crest Hardware Art Show takes work from a clever collection of local talent and presents it all along side their usual retail stock. Read on for the slideshow - plus more pics from last year's offering.

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I believe we will get beyond Twitter's very simplistic and limited Suggested User List, which I have written about so many times.

What sealed it for me was reading Glenn Greenwald's piece in Salon about Cheney's plan to use US troops inside the US.

Here was my thought process:

1. I'm going to pass this link on to my readers.

2. A very small number compared to the overall size of the Twitter base.

3. There are probably a few hundred thousand people who use Twitter who would want to know about this story, maybe 60K who would read it, as I did.

4. So how will this gap be filled? How will they find out about this story?

Well -- they won't.

But -- if there was a service they could subscribe to that alerted them to stories that would be of interest to them, based on their profile, a lot of people would give it a try.

In other words, I'm sure there's a place for editorial products delivered via the loosely-coupled 140-character network.

I tried this with NewsJunk, but it was either too early or there was something wrong with the way we did it.

It will happen.

Condobolin sends in an update to the Australian government's ongoing efforts to implement ISP-level filtering. One of the hurdles they had to overcome was to build a system that would allow them to filter content without impairing other internet usage. A trial of the system has just concluded, and the results are positive — at least, for the government. Quoting: "More than half of the Internet service providers (ISPs) taking part in the Federal Government's ISP filtering trial have reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems. Of the nine participating ISPs, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect told ARN they had seen no slowdowns in Internet speeds or problems with the filtering solutions in place. Of the remaining four ISPs, Tech2U and Highway1 were unable to respond by time of publication while Unwired and Optus refused to comment. ... 'From a technical perspective we're more than confident that if the government decided to roll out a mandatory Internet filter based on or around an Australian Communications and Media Authority blacklist or subset thereof, then it can be done without any impact whatsoever to the speed of the Internet,' [said Webshield managing director Anthony Pillion]."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex at Tinkerlog has been enamored with Braitenberg vehicles recently. Here's his latest batch of "tiny Braitenberg vehicles."

I was hugely inspired and influenced by Valentino Braitenberg's book (Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology) when it first came out in the early 80s, so I love to see people experimenting with the different "emotions" that can be perceived in machines via very simple sensor-reaction rule sets, whether hardwired or via a few lines of code.

In the latest issue of MAKE, Volume 19, the robot issue, I have a piece where I interviewed robot engineers and enthusiasts on what's currently exciting them in the world of robotics. Mark Tilden, BEAM and Robosapien inventor, says that he's thrilled that the AI community has finally decided that "emotion" is not a dirty word and that it's now okay to explore robots with feelings. Braitenberg was playing with this decades ago (and W. Grey Walter, whom I profile in the issue, even decades before that).

Tiny Braitenberg vehicle

More:
Arduino-powered Braitenberg vehicle

From MAKE magazine:

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and plenty more, in MAKE, Volume 19! If you're a subscriber, your copy should be shipping in the next few days; newsstand date is August 18th.

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Mr.Bananas writes "Reuters reports that 'Russia's most powerful business lobby moved to clamp down on Skype and its peers this week, telling lawmakers that the Internet phone services are a threat to Russian businesses and to national security.' The lobby, closely associated with Putin's political party, cites concerns of 'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators,' as well as a fear that law enforcement agencies have thus far been unable to listen in on Skype conversations due to its 256-bit encryption."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Super cute robot drummer - Let's make robots.

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Kevin Kelly has written up yet another must read discussion -- this one looking into the inevitability of Moore's Law. In it, he looks not just at Moore's Law, but how a variety of different technologies have all found similar "laws" where they get better/smaller/cheaper/faster at an exponential rate, at a pace that sticks so closely to an observed curve as to seem predetermined by fate. DNA sequencing, magnetic storage, semiconductors, bandwidth, pixel density all seem to follow this same thing, and Kelly notes that each case is separate. While some may influence others, it's not a case where one is dependent on another.

He notes that this certainly doesn't apply to all technologies -- but it does seem to be limited to technologies that scale down at microscopic sizes, rather than technologies that scale up (i.e., improvements to airplane or automobile technology aren't seeing any such rate of change). His argument is that this is due to energy requirements. Scaling up requires more energy, which greatly limits growth. But scaling down does not.

But where this gets most interesting is that, the more Kelly explores the issue, the more convinced he is (and he makes a compelling case) that this sort of technological progress is pretty much inevitable. It can be slowed down by bad policy, but it can't be stopped. And, what's most compelling to me is that this sort of progress isn't dependent on anything like patents. It's happening no matter what. The advancement of technology happens for a variety of reasons, little of which has to do with "protecting" the ideas. In fact, within that "protection" there's little benefit.

Everyone recognizes these curves and where they're headed, and how following along the path of that curve creates so many off-shoot benefits (what some might call externalities), that the idea of hoarding a concept or an idea is actually counterproductive. The benefits to staying on the curve in some way or another are so great that people implicitly recognize that helping others (even competitors) keep everyone on the curve isn't a bad thing -- but in many cases a very good thing. That's because everyone is better off, and the opportunities increase across the board as you stay on such a curve. And, in fact, this is where all that research on noncompetes comes in. While it's rarely official company policy (they all still talk up patents and trade secrets and such), it's quite common when there are issues in getting to that next level, engineers start sharing ideas or more importantly jump ship from company to company, so the ideas get spread that way. Advancement continues, and the world is better off -- not because of patents, but because of a more free flow of information.

Kelly doesn't get into that aspect of the discussion -- focusing just on the inevitability of the growth rate -- but it's a key point. Notice that none of what he's discussing really involves some major breakthrough discovery or some brilliant invention. There are lots of breakthroughs and lots of brilliant people involved, of course, but they're all progressing in the direction where they need to go. One may get there first, but that's hardly the breakthrough. Lots of others are all progressing along those same lines. The progress isn't driven by patents, but by the technology itself and the massive opportunity its advancement creates. In many ways this relates back to our discussion of how, throughout history, nearly every major scientific "breakthrough" has occurred to multiple independent people at almost the exact same time. It's the natural progress of applying ideas to problems, and following where the technology allows you to go.

As such, there's an argument to be made that patents get in the way of this sort of progress. Since much of the progress is, in fact, a progression, rather than a "breakthrough," and it's done by a variety of different people (or teams of people), everyone is actually better off not in limiting that progress by holding back an idea or requiring a tollbooth to be a part of the process, but in lowering the barriers to it, and letting that true pace of advancement quicken.

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Reader Ben points us to a well done article over at GameIndustry.biz warning the industry to start understanding how "free" plays a role in digital economics. It does a great job summarizing the key points associated with "free" infinite goods, such as the fact that it really has little to do with "piracy," though the "piracy" may be an early indicator of where the market is heading:

The notion of Free isn't new in economics, of course. It's well understood that as a commodity becomes less rare, its value tends towards zero. When something becomes sufficiently commonplace, you can no longer charge a notable price for it - unless you artificially create a market based around image and prestige (bottled water) or find a way to add value (pure oxygen canisters, flavoured water).

You can also create artificial scarcity to keep prices high, although there are obvious moral problems with doing that with anything other than luxury items - and markets, like networks, interpret this kind of interference as damage, and usually find a route around it.

The whole thing is worth reading, and does a good job laying out the issues. It doesn't, however, suggest much of a solution -- though, there are plenty of potential solutions for the video gaming industry, focusing on finding scarcities to provide that can't be had for free. So, for example, giving away the core game for free, but charging to play multiplayer versions on an authorized server. As many are finding, that can be quite a nice business. Unfortunately, it does seem like some think the answer is to sell virtual goods within a game, but that has the potential to face the same eventual issue (the goods are really infinite, and will face the same deflationary economic pressure). But the fact is there are always additional scarcities created, which will present opportunities.

Figuring out just how to break out those scarcities from the infinite goods was the point of that economic series I wrote up a few years ago, which we're now offering nicely packaged as the Approaching Infinity book (as a part of our CwF+RtB experiment) -- which actually helps demonstrate the point. You can read most of the basic content for free online in the series, or you can buy the physical (scarce) book in a nice readable package which has been updated and expanded with more material and edited to better flow as a book (and you get a t-shirt as well). You can always take infinite goods and find a scarcity... whether it's with blog posts or with video games. So, yes, free is important to understand, but equally as important is understanding how to use it to your advantage, rather than just worrying about how it may hurt your old business model.

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Jeremy A. Hansen writes "NIST just announced their selections for algorithms going to the second round of the SHA-3 competition. Quoting: 'NIST received 64 SHA-3 candidate hash function submissions and accepted 51 first round candidates as meeting our minimum acceptance criteria. We have now selected 14 second round candidates to continue in the competition. Information about the second round candidate algorithms will be available here. We were pleased by the amount and quality of the cryptanalysis we received on the first round candidates, and more than a little amazed by the ingenuity of some of the attacks. ... In selecting this set of second round candidates we tried to include only algorithms that we thought had a chance of being selected as SHA-3. We were willing to extrapolate higher performance for conservative designs with apparently large safety factors, but comparatively unforgiving of aggressive designs that were broken, or nearly broken during the course of the review. We were more willing to accept disquieting properties of the hash function if the designer had apparently anticipated them, than if they were discovered during the review period, even if there were apparent fixes. We were generally alarmed by attacks on compression functions that seemed unanticipated by the submitters.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier today we wrote about the AP's plans to DRM the news, explaining what a backwards plan it was. The story is getting lots of play elsewhere, with many pointing to a NY Times report, where the AP's CEO Tom Curley makes some amazing statements:

"If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we're going to do that," Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

First of all, someone should sit Curley down and explain to him fair use -- a concept of which he appears to be ignorant. This whole exercise seems to be an attempt to pretend that you can take away fair use rights via metadata. You can't. But, more importantly (from a business perspective) this shows a near total cluelessness on how Google works. Yes, Google built a multi-billion dollar business out of "keywords" but they did so not by forcing people to pay, but by adding value to people who did pay. That's the opposite of what Curley's trying to do. If you can't understand the difference between positive value and negative value, you should not be the CEO of a major organization.

Meanwhile, Ryan Chittum, at the Columbia Journalism Review says that people should chill out because the AP isn't going after bloggers, he seems to miss a few points. First, the AP might not be "going after bloggers" now, but it certainly has shown a willingness to do so in the past. At some point, you can bet it will happen again. Furthermore, the AP claims that it's really only going after "wholesale misappropriation." Hmm. How is that defined?

"We want to stop wholesale misappropriation of our content which does occur right now--people who are copying and pasting or taking by RSS feeds dozens or hundreds of our stories."

Dear AP: your RSS feed is for syndicating your stories. If you don't want the content out there, don't syndicate the content!

But, honestly, the bigger issue is that the AP actually thinks that these spam sites rerunning the AP RSS feed (which, I'll note, links to AP stories directly) somehow harms them. These are spam sites at best. The AP claims (totally unbelievably) that such sites are taking "tens if not the hundreds of millions" of revenue away from the AP. Really? Prove it. These are tiny spam sites that get no traffic. They're not making you lose any money. If your entire business can be undermined by someone copying your headline and a snippet of your first sentence from your own RSS feed, then you have failed in business. The AP needs to hire someone who understands basic business tenets, not to mention basic technology, law and economics. The amazing thing is that I've heard from a couple AP reporters who are sickened by this as well, and feel that Curley is destroying the organization. They know this is a huge mistake.

Either way, I'm still wondering why the AP's competitors, such as Reuters and CNN (which is starting a similar wire service) haven't been a lot more vocal in trying to get more sites to look at them as a friendly alternative. We recently noted that Reuters appeared to have a much more clued-in understanding of the internet, and Chris Ahearn, the President of Reuters Media said today: "Reuters stands ready to help those who wish an alternative to the AP." That's definitely a start, but it was just in a Twitter message directed at Jeff Jarvis, rather than a much more outspoken statement. Why not be blatant about it? Post a public statement/blog post/Twitter message/Facebook message etc. that says something like:

Dear internet: We love our friends over at the Associated Press, but we believe they are making a grave mistake in trying to limit linking and fair use of content. This seems to go against the very principles of the internet and the free flow of information, in which we believe. Therefore, we encourage you to link to our work, to paraphrase it and use it to develop your own commentary. We have our RSS feeds out there because we expect you to use them, and we expect you to do great things with them. We believe our content stands on its own in quality, and see no reason to try to hide it or lock it up when we know that through cooperation and sharing we can all build on the information -- and that improves the situation for everyone. We look forward to linking, sharing and conversing with all of you.

It's time for Reuters, CNN or any other news wire to stand up and publicly tell people to switch their links away from the AP and to their own content.

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JY Stervinou had a great idea today.

He started by posing a question...

"If a decentralized microblog is represented by an RSS feed, how to represent the microblog avatar?"

Ahhhhh...

There is already a tag for this.

I added an <image> to both of my test feeds.

Great work JY!!

Viorel Firoiu, 48, of Romania claims that it was constipation that lead him to get two hammerheads stuck in his rectum. (Sure that was the reason.) Doctors had to surgically remove the two items. From Austrian Times:

Dr Cristina Bontescu, spokeswoman for the local hospital where he turned up at the emergency unit, said: "He was a bit drunk and said he had been eating cherries that had left him badly constipated. He said he had a few drinks to dull the pain and then came up with the idea of poking a hammerhead up his backside in the hope of sorting out the constipation. "But the hammerhead got stuck and then he came up with the idea of using a second hammerhead in order to try and get out the first - but then he lost the second one as well."

"Heavy metal cure for constipation"

Looks like a bunch of things are happening in South Korea concerning copyright law there, as I keep seeing new (seemingly unrelated) stories pop up having to do with changes in South Korea. We'd already discussed how South Korea had agreed to a three strikes plan a little while, and how other oddities in the new copyright law were leading Google to forbid uploading any music to blogs for fear of running afoul of an incredibly, broadly-worded law.

It appears that Google's not the only one. Basically any kind of copyright infringement can get you a "strike" -- meaning all kinds of the typical "unintentional infringement" that people do every day that are really harmless can now get you kicked offline. So, all sorts of social networking sites are basically warning their users not to do anything potentially infringing. No homemade videos with music in the background. No mentioning song lyrics. On top of this, South Korean search engines have agreed to stop accepting ads for any sort of P2P file sharing service -- even if it has perfectly legitimate uses.

About the only slightly reasonable thing we've heard is that South Korea is changing the rules for handling lawsuits against those accused of file sharing, basically shifting it from a full trial to something more akin to a small claims court, with the idea being that if someone is found guilty to give them a small fine, rather than the ridiculous numbers the industry usually requests. There was one interesting quote in explaining the reasoning why:

The police say targeting youngsters is unfair because the parents are usually unaware of the illegal activity, and then desperate to come up with the money, the kids resort to theft or other crime to come up with the settlement money demanded by copyright holders.

Nice work, recording industry: apparently you've been driving kids to real crime in your effort to stop file sharing. That said, now that the industry has a massively broad three strikes tool to use, it probably doesn't even need to take as many kids to court. It can just kick them offline.

The crazy thing about this, too, is that the music industry in South Korea has actually been doing a really good job adjusting to the changing market. A huge percentage of folks in South Korea have broadband connections (by which we mean real broadband connections, not what they call broadband in the US), and smart entrepreneurs like JY Park have adapted by changing the business model, recognizing that selling music directly no longer makes sense, but there are plenty of other business models that do. And by embracing that, he's been able to create some massive stars, and bring in a ton of money. So why do we need this drastic change in the law?

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I just posted a tweet saying I don't view the Gates matter through a racial lens, I view it through a Harvard lens. I want to explain, and I'll try to do it briefly.

First, I've had my share of run-ins with cops. When I was young, I liked drugs and street politics, and that meant lots of confrontations with NY cops. Never got arrested because I was lucky and because I was fully submissive when stopped by cops. They scared the shit out of me. I knew they had lethal force, and they must teach them how to be terrifying, because they are. Very.

Later, as a college student, I'd occasionally get drunk (in New Orleans, everyone does it) and once even got picked up and put in jail for a night to sober up. No record, but I'll never forget it.

Hitch-hiking in Calif, I got stopped by police in Tracy, and was fined exactly the amount I had in my pocket. I paid it, and wondered where the money went, but I didn't make a stink. I just left and never went back.

I once had two cop cars come to my house in Woodside, and I had to prove that I lived there. I did. Kept my mouth shut except to say "Here" as I handed over my driver's license. I owned the place. Didn't matter. Until they left they owned my ass.

A couple of years ago driving from Calif to Denver, I got stopped in Winnemucca. I was speeding. Really speeding. Stupidly speeding. I accepted my ticket graciously. Drove slowly the rest of the way and got stopped in every major town in Nevada. Never expressed any irritation. Just begged for them to let me leave the state. Promised never to return.

I say all this to point out that I have some experience with cops, and I'm white, and I would never in a million years think of yelling at a cop. Never have, and if I ever do, I expect to be arrested.

Now Gates says he didn't yell at the cop. I don't believe him. Too many other people who were there say he did. I'm pretty sure when you're yelling at a cop who's doing his job he's supposed to arrest you for disorderly conduct. I think that's more or less what disorderly conduct is.

I also think yelling at a cop is stupid. He's got a gun. If it's so much worse being black with cops (and I believe it is) you'd think blacks would be 100 times more careful about it than a white guy.

Now, the second part of the story...

In addition to being hassled by cops, sometimes deservedly and other times not, I also spent 1.5 years at Harvard as a research fellow. I was not at the level of Gates, but I had an office in Harvard Yard and a very nice ID card that got me into all kinds of great places. Being in Harvard gives you an Ivy League feeling, you're one of the Special people. It's very nice.

Imho what we're seeing here is not black outrage, but Harvard outrage. As a piece in Salon pointed out today, if he were anyone else, white or black, no one would have cared, and he probably wouldn't have been so vocal in his rage. What he's saying over and over is "Hey I'm a tenured Harvard professor. I just got back from China where I was on a PBS show. I'm a big dude. You don't treat me this way."

But I'd like to say to the Harvard prof what the Salon guy said to him. Shut up Prof Gates. You're just like the rest of us. When a cop gives you an order, you do what he says. If you have a beef with it, that comes later. And let your lawyer speak for you, and be sure you're right.

theodp writes "Should Mark Zuckerberg want to identify a snitching Facebook employee, Elon Musk wish to set a trap for loose-lipped Tesla employees, or Steve Jobs want to 'play Asteroid,' they'll be happy to know that a new IBM 'invention' makes it easier than ever to be paranoid. In a newly-disclosed patent application for Embedding a Unique Serial Number into the Content of an Email for Tracking Information Dispersion (phew!), Big Blue describes how it's automated the creation of Canary Traps with patent-pending software that makes ever-so-slight changes to e-mail wording to allow you to spy on the unsuspecting recipients of your e-mail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, we've completed our first week of our MAKEcation programming, "Teach Your Family to Solder." We hope we've inspired you to take up the firesticks, grab some noxious metal on a spool, and start dripping beads of molten alloy all over sensitive electronic components. Good, clean fun for the whole family!

Win awesome booty!
If you and family members DO decide to learn soldering, document it. Take photos and/or video and send us the links. Load them onto the MAKE Flickr pool and tag them with "MAKEcation." At the end of August, the Maker Media staff and soldering Camp Counselor Dave will be choosing the most interesting, entertaining, creative entries. Our favorite will get a $100 Gift Certificate to the Maker Shed! Five other entries will get a choice of a copy of The Best of MAKE or The Best of Instructables. We'll also be giving away some Maker's Notebooks too. So gather the family 'round and get crackin'

Don't forget:
You can send any questions, comments, suggestions, and links to your MAKEcation media to Camp Counselor Dave at campcounselor@makezine.com.

And: We have a specially priced "Teach Your Family to Solder" bundle in the Maker Shed, with three easy-to-build beginner kits in it, a copy of MAKE, Volume 01 (with soldering tutorial), and a Maker's Notebook). A significant deal at only $36.

Here's a wrap-up of the week's soldering-related content:

Let's take a Summer MAKEcation!

MAKEcation: "Teach Your Family to Solder" week

Super learn-to-solder roundup

Camp counselor Dave's soldering tips

YOUR soldering tips

Lucas learns to solder

A brief history of my soldering experiences

Toolbox: Soldering essentials, part 1

Toolbox, Soldering tools, part 2

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