mattOzan writes with this excerpt from H-online: "At Black Hat USA 2009, Austrian IT security specialist Peter Kleissner presented a bootkit called Stoned which is capable of bypassing the TrueCrypt partition and system encryption. The bootkit uses a 'double forward' to redirect I/O interrupt 13h, which allows it to insert itself between the Windows calls and TrueCrypt."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dv82 writes "I teach circuits and electronics at the undergraduate level, and have been using the free student demo version of OrCad for schematic capture and simulation because (a) it comes with the textbook and (b) it's powerful enough for the job. Unfortunately OrCad runs only under Windows, and students increasingly are switching to Mac (and some Linux netbooks). Wine and its variants will not run OrCad, and I don't wish to require students to purchase Windows and run with a VM. The only production-quality cross-platform CAD tool I have found so far is McCad, but its demo version is so limited in total allowed nets that it can't even run a basic opamp circuit with a realistic 741 opamp model. gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows, and is nowhere near as refined as OrCad. I would like students to be able to run the software on their laptops without a network connection, which eliminates more options. Any suggestions?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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 his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I love a good hoax, and this one seems particularly well done: essentially, Renier Hubert Ghislain Chalon, a historian, researched the sorts of books that Europe's most noted book collectors would find irresistible. He then made up a Count, Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, who had a book collection of only one-of-a-kind books. If another was found of any book, the Count would burn it, insuring he held the only known copy. Each of the 52 books listed in the catalog was specifically designed to appeal to a particular collector.

The eager collectors were instructed to arrive in the Belgian town of Binche for the auction, where they were all roundly zinged. They all descended on the town, a long, difficult journey for many of them, only to find that the town had decided to buy the incredible collection for their library. Only none of the locals knew about the count, the books, or even their town having a library. All the noted collectors, many of whom bore heated rivalries with one another, had all been led on a wild goose chase, and were now crammed, fuming, in the local tavern. Eat it, mid 19th-century noted rare book collectors!

There's more details here as well, from a 1909 book of "literary curiosities."

Peter writes "Toyota researchers have unveiled a new humanoid robot that can run at 7 km/h, which is faster than Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO. Toyota's robot can also keep itself balanced when pushed, as shown in the video."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Big Blue may know what you did last summer. Or at least who you called. In a move out of the NSA's playbook, IBM Research has been scrutinizing the call-detail records of 'one of the largest mobile operators in the world' (pdf). By analyzing who calls who, and for how long, IBM claims its patent-pending snooping software can now identify circles of 'friends' who tend to exhibit the same profit-threatening behavior. 'We believe that our analysis is a first of its kind that exploits the underlying social network in a telecom call graph,' boasted a team of IBM researchers and a UMD prof. For now, IBM seems to have focused on using the info to see if your friends are churners, so you can be dealt with pro-actively lest you follow their lead and bolt. However, IBM suggests its SNAzzy data mining technology (Social Network Analysis for Telecom Business Intelligence) has a bright future, noting it 'is also capable of analyzing any kind of social network or graph, not just Telecom networks.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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 his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

Last Saturday, the day of no rules, I posted a video made by my old comedy group, the Van Gogh-Goghs that took the old Knight Rider conceit and added a colostomy bag. This week, we're taking the Spiderman story and replacing the spider with a pack of radioactive bears, who do something worse than biting.

So, people with decency, you've been warned. Of course, it's probably NSFW. To be safe, I'll include the video after the jump. If possible, enjoy.

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday at Black Hat USA 2009, a talk entitled MD5 Chosen-Prefix Collisions on GPUs (whitepaper) (Both PDFs) presented an implementation written in assembly language for ATI video cards that achieves 1.6 billion MD5 hash/sec, or 2.2 billion MD5 hash/sec with reversing, on an ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2. This is faster than the much-publicized 1.4-1.9 billion hash/sec figure that was supposedly reached on a PlayStation 3 by Nick Breese at Black Hat Europe 2008 (he later noticed an error in his benchmarking tool). Compared to the cluster of 215 PlayStation 3s that was used to create a rogue CA in December 2008, Marc Bevand claimed a cluster of 12 machines with 24 video cards would be a bit faster, consume 5 times less power, and be 10 times cheaper."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soychemist writes "Print some thermochromic ink onto a sheet of paper, put metal heating elements on the other side, and you have a rudimentary color-changing display. Chemists in the Whitesides Group at Harvard think that the devices could be used to provide a simple readout from cheap medical tests and kits that check water for pollutants. In the past year, the same scientists have made a three-cent medical test and improvised a centrifuge with an egg beater. Their aim is to invent useful gizmos with everyday materials."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Sept 2008 Mike Arrington over on TechCrunch said that no matter how bizarre the setup over at the App Store, I would "keep developing for the iPhone," even though I had never developed for it. Obvious nonsense. Even if it was a wide-open platform I would have only considered investing in iPhone apps. I wouldn't have gotten the skill myself because it looked like a dead-end, and by Sept 2008 we knew it was headed toward the mess it has now become. You heard it here first.

The iPhone should have run the same software as the Macintosh. When I first heard about it, I misunderstood and thought I'd be able to write Frontier scripts that ran both on my desktop and the phone. I was a Blackberry user at the time, and I found the idea of a MacPhone truly inspiring. From there, it went downhill, and downhill and downhill. This platform was Apple's revenge on developers. Everything under their control. You couldn't even ship a product that Apple didn't approve of! Obviously that was going to be abused, and it has been, but finally it's become so ridiculous that it's obvious, even to Mike, that it can't work.

I've been through this loop many times, this is Mike's first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that's the Internet.

Steve Jobs is the anti-Internet. The Internet is utilitarian, it works, but it's ugly. Jobs's stuff is so beautiful that when taken to its logical conclusion, and he's almost there now, it's so dazzling, so beautiful that you fail to see that it is useless.

There's still a ton of Woz in the Mac, I am typing this on a gorgeous unibody MacBook Pro, which is probably the most lovely computer I've ever used. The software I'm using has never been approved by Apple, and can be downloaded from the Internet. Next to it is an iPhone, which I use only as a phone, an IM device and a communicating camera. It sucks as a phone. The IM is okay and the camera is really nice. But as a platform it's a complete total disappointment.

Anonymouse writes with this excerpt from SemiAccurate: "Apple keyboards are vulnerable to a hack that puts keyloggers and malware directly into the device's firmware. This could be a serious problem, and now that the presentation and code (PDF) is out there, the bad guys will surely be exploiting it. The vulnerability was discovered by K. Chen, and he gave a talk on it at Black Hat this year (PDF). The concept is simple: a modern Apple keyboard has about 8K of flash memory, and 256 bytes of working RAM. For the intelligent, this is more than enough space to have a field day. ... The new firmware can do anything you want it to. Chen demonstrated code which, when you put in a password and hit return, starts playing back the last five characters typed in, LIFO. It is a rudimentary keylogger; a proof of concept more than anything else. Since there is about 1K of flash free in the keyboard itself, you can log quite a few keystrokes totally transparently."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SeanCier writes "We're a small (two-person) iPhone app developer whose first game has recently been released in the App store. In the process, we've inadvertently stepped in it, bringing up a question of the GPL and free software ethics that I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help us clear up, one way or the other. XPilot, a unique and groundbreaking UNIX-based game from the early/mid nineties, was a classic in its day, but was forgotten and has been dead for years, both in terms of use and development. My college roommate and I were addicted to it at the time, even running game servers and publishing custom maps. As it's fully open source (GPLv2), and the iPhone has well over twice the graphics power of the SGI workstations we'd used in college, we decided it was a moral imperative to port it to our cellphones. In the process, we hoped, we could breathe life back into this forgotten classic (not to mention turning a years-old joke into reality). We did so, and the result was more playable than we'd hoped, despite the physical limitations of the phone. We priced it at $2.99 on the App store (we don't expect it to become the Next Big Thing, but hoped to recoup our costs — such as server charges and Apple's annual $99 developer fee), released the source on our web page, then enthusiastically tracked down every member of the original community we could find to let them know of the hoped-for renaissance. Which is where things got muddy. After it hit the App store, one of the original developers of XPilot told us he feels adamantly that we're betraying the spirit of the GPL by charging for it." Read on for the rest of Sean's question.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're in the process of working on a new area of Make: Online that we're really excited about. It's called the Make: Science Room. We'll have a full announcement and launch in a few weeks. In the meantime, we thought we'd give you a teaser of the type of content we'll be offering. The following article, by Bob Thompson, author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, should help you in deciding which type of microscope is best for you. If you didn't want/think you needed a microscope before, you will after you see all of what we have in store in the Make: Science Room and the Maker Shed! Stay tuned...

---

Choosing a Microscope by Robert Bruce Thompson

Ask any scientist to name the single most important tool for scientific study. Chances are, the answer will be a microscope. Without a microscope, we are limited to what we can see with the naked eye. Using a microscope reveals entire worlds that would otherwise be invisible to us. Obviously, a microscope is essential for the serious study of biology and forensics. Less obviously, a microscope is also an important tool in disciplines as diverse as chemistry, Earth science, and physics.

Every home scientist should make it a high priority to acquire a good microscope. The question is, which one? This article explains what you need to know to choose a microscope appropriate for your needs and budget.

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str8edge sends word that Lance Davis, the CentOS project administrator who had mysteriously gone absent, has now returned and is working with the development team to get things back on track. From their announcement: "The CentOS Development team had a routine meeting today with Lance Davis in attendance. During the meeting a majority of issues were resolved immediately and a working agreement was reached with deadlines for remaining unresolved issues. There should be no impact to any CentOS users going forward. The CentOS project is now in control of the CentOS.org and CentOS.info domains and owns all trademarks, materials, and artwork in the CentOS distributions. We look forward to working with Lance to quickly complete all the agreed upon issues. More information will follow soon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marilyn sez, "Bobby McFerrin uses the pentatonic scale and an audience's expectations to demonstrate neural programming at the World Science Festival 2009"

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale (Thanks, Marilyn!)

MTV Splash Page blog editor Rick Marshall says, "I interviewed Stan Lee during Comic-con, and asked him about that late-'90s deal that almost had him and Michael Jackson buying Marvel Comics. During his response, he mentioned that Jackson wanted to buy the rights to Spider-Man so he could make a movie... or possibly to star in it?! It's an intriguing "What If?" scenario, if nothing else." Neat video of Mr. Lee's reply to that odd question is here: What If Michael Jackson Made 'Spider-Man'? Stan Lee Explains How It Almost Happened!

We just got back from a pleasant morning at the London Zoo in Regent's Park with the baby. Just before we left, we stopped at the cafe for a snack. I took care of the kid while Alice lined up to buy some goodies. As the queue moved along, she grabbed a packet marked "Carrot Stix" thinking that they must be, you know, carrot sticks. Or maybe dried carrot sticks. Something that was, approximately speaking, food.

After all, the company that makes it is called "Organix." And they have a "No junk promise." And they say that there's "reduced salt" and "reduced fat."

Wait, what?

I didn't know carrots had fat or salt.

In fact, they don't.

That's because "Carrot Stix" are not, in fact, carrot sticks.

They're cheezy-poofs: deep fried powdered corn/potato snacks, dusted with "powdered carrots." They are not, in fact, carrots.

They're not even food.

Caveat emptor.

Carrot Stix

7-Vodka writes "Xcel Energy customers who have their own solar panels are worried about a new fee being proposed by the company. A monthly fee to pay for transmission and distribution of energy would be charged to customers who have solar panels, irrespective of their energy use for the month. An Xcel Energy spokesman said the fee is to ensure that regular customers don't subsidize the 'connectivity fees' for the solar panel customers who don't pay when they generate as much as they use. When pressed, the spokesman admitted that nobody actually pays a 'connectivity fee,' yet they wanted to prevent the mooching from occurring in the future (presumably when they hit everyone with such a fee). He also called the absence of a connectivity fee for solar customers a 'double subsidy' because many solar customers receive rebates to install the panels."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Svippy writes "As we discussed earlier, 20th Century Fox Television was attempting to recast Futurama. As it turns out, this was just part of a big negotiation ploy, and the original cast have now completed their deals to return with the show's new episodes. For those of you who did not follow the story, a chronology of the events and reactions from the cast members are available at Infosphere and Voice Actors in the News. Series creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen said, 'We are thrilled to have our incredible cast back. The call has already gone out to the animators to put the mouths back on the characters.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun writes with an update to the news from a few days ago about Apple pulling Google Voice apps for the iPhone. Their actions have raised the interest of the FCC, which is now beginning an investigation into the matter. "In a letter sent to Apple, the FCC asked the company why it turned down Google Voice for the iPhone and pulled several other Google Voice-related programs from the iPhone's only sanctioned online mart. The FCC also sent similar letters to both AT&T — Apple's exclusive carrier partner in the US — and Google, asking both firms to provide more information on the issue. The FCC's letter asked Apple whether it rejected Google Voice and dumped other applications on its own, or 'in consultation with AT&T,' and if the latter, to describe the conversations the partners had. In other questions, the FCC asked Apple whether AT&T has any role in the approval of iPhone applications, wants the company to explain how Google Voice differs from any other VoIP software that has been approved, and requested a list of all applications that have been rejected and why."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

diegocgteleline.es writes "Valerie Aurora, a Linux file system developer and ex-ZFS designer, has posted an article with great insight on how Btrfs, the file system that will replace Ext4, was created and how it works. Quoting: 'When it comes to file systems, it's hard to tell truth from rumor from vile slander: the code is so complex, the personalities are so exaggerated, and the users are so angry when they lose their data. You can't even settle things with a battle of the benchmarks: file system workloads vary so wildly that you can make a plausible argument for why any benchmark is either totally irrelevant or crucially important. ... we'll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of Btrfs on many levels — technical, political, personal — and trace it from its origins at a workshop to its current position as Linus's root file system.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The video of a couple's awesome dance-number wedding entrance I posted last week featured Chris Brown's song "Forever," used without permission. Instead of suing or having the video taken down, Brown's label opted to add a link to buy the track to the page. And made a truckload of money.

So many of the record industry giants are publicly traded companies. Why aren't their shareholders howling for more stuff like this -- which actually makes money -- and less pointless Grand Guignols to extract a couple grand from some hapless teen, alienating a future customer and her family and friends for life?

This traffic is also very engaged -- the click-through rate (CTR) on the "JK Wedding Entrance" video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading "Forever" goes beyond the viral video itself: "JK Wedding Entrance" also appears to have influenced the official "Forever" music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.

So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown's "Forever" has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon's best selling MP3 list. We've seen similar successes in the past with partners like Monty Python.

I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study

Evan from Toronto's Coach House Books sez, "After three decades in business, indie bookstore Pages Books and Magazines is shutting its doors on August 31, but not without a proper farewell from Toronto. On Tuesday, September 8, 'Afterword: A Celebration of 30 Years,' will bring together friends and family of Pages to share their stories and images, which we're asking you to submit for consideration for the event."

For the past thirty years, Pages Books & Magazines has been a place where the culturally engaged citizens of Toronto met one another, conspired, fell in love, debated aesthetics and, occasionally, bought books. Skyrocketing rent, not a drop in sales, has forced Proprietor Marc Glassman to close his iconic indie shop at Queen and John streets on August 31, 2009.

We are collecting material to be presented at 'Afterword: A Celebration Of 30 Years', an event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Coach House Books, Gladstone Hotel, NOW Magazine, Spacing Magazine, and This is Not A Reading Series, to be held at Gladstone Hotel on Sept 8. What has Pages Books meant to you? Tell us your tale. Do you have photos? We'd love to see them!

SEND YOUR STORIES AND IMAGES TO: my.pagesbooks.story@gmail.com.

DEADLINE: August 24, 2009

Pages requests memories for send-off bash (Thanks, Evan!)

(Image: Matthew Kim)

These beautiful high-voltage towers in Istra, Russia, near Moscow are the Experimental Grounds for High-Voltage Generation. They still light up and fire streaks of lightning into the night.

Creepy High Voltage Installations (Thanks, Bill!)

(Image: Master Z Great)

Sony Online's multiplayer game The Matrix Online is now dead, as of yesterday. But rather than simply announcing that they were pulling the plug and then watching the players dwindle away as D-day approached, Sony decided to work the shutdown into the storyline of the game, changing the game's graphics so that they decayed and crumbled. The last weeks of The Matrix Online were a party, with all players -- past and present -- invited along.

It's a rare institution that contemplates its own orderly demise. Think of all the clubs and mailing lists and communities you've been a part of that have gone out with a whimper, bleeding out by drips, until there's nothing left. Kudos to Sony for giving a proper send-off to a place that so many people had loved and played in.

This week is the last week for The Matrix Online and all former subscribers are welcomed to come back to play one final time before the machines pull the plug for good. The Matrix crashes on July 31st, so be sure to be logged in on that day to be assaulted by pretty much everyone and everything until everyone's RSI is smashed into a tiny, tiny ball.

Reminder: Check out The Matrix Online before it decompiles (via Wonderland)

RobotsDinner writes "Anil Dash has a thoughtful exploration of Apple's notorious devotion to secrecy, and argues that not only is there a limit to its feasibility, but that recent events show Apple has reached that limit already. 'If the ethical argument is unpersuasive, then focus on the long-term viability of your marketing and branding efforts, and realize that a technology company that is determined to prevent information from being spread is an organization at war with itself. Civil wars are expensive, have no winners, and incur lots of casualties.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user d_malakian_69 writes:

When you are an aspiring musician you don't have a lot of money to buy expensive equipment and you have to record the best sounding demo with cheap recording tools. When I realized that popping is a common problem when recording vocals on any kind of mic, and when I saw that a good pop filter was about 50 bucks in my country I decided to make one myself.

Check out the instructions for this DIY microphone pop filter.

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katarn writes "General Fusion is a startup proposing they can create commercially viable fusion using acoustic shock waves, triggered by 220 precisely controlled pneumatic pistons. Their approach is based on a US Naval research concept called 'Linus' and old research done by General Atomics. They feel we now have the high-speed, digital processing capable of pulling off this feat, where decades ago the technology was not available. I think we can hold off on the 'vaporware' claims for a bit; everyone is aware of the horrible track record for turning fusion concepts into reality, but they don't claim to be the first with the idea or that there are not substantial challenges in the way. If nothing else, it is a fascinating concept." Los Alamos National Laboratory has further details on this type of fusion, and longtime LANL researcher Ronald Kirkpatrick did an external assessment (PDF) of General Fusion's plans. Popular Science had a lengthy story about the company a while back. The reason they're back in the headlines now is that they've secured enough funding to begin work on a prototype reactor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our pals released a very interesting presentation about smart parking meters at the Black Hat Briefings USA, Las Vegas, Nevada, yesterday... Good presentation to review on how they figured out the security (or lack of) on parking meters...

Throughout the United States, cities are deploying “smart” electronic fare collection infrastructures. In 2003, San Francisco launched a $35 million pilot program to replace approximately 23,000 mechanical parking meters with electronic units that boasted tamper resistance, payment via smart card, auditing capabilities, and an estimated $30 million annually in fare collection revenue. Other major cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Diego, have made similar moves. This presentation details our evaluation of electronic parking meters, including hardware disassembly, smart card protocol emulation, and silicon die analysis.

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Don't waste time on other people's qualities, intelligence, hypocrisy, honor. Distractions. What matters is what you do.

With our CwF + RtB experiment in full swing, we've asked some of the participating artists/authors to provide some guest posts about their own experience with new business models and new promotions. Amanda Palmer, one of the artists involved in our Techdirt Music Club, is someone you're hopefully familiar with by now. She's really been at the forefront of experimenting with these sorts of business models and agreed to write a guest post about her experiences.

As part of this, we're also doing an early announcement of the special promotion that we'll be running next week only. If you don't want the entire Techdirt Music Club, you can just order Amanda Palmer's part: the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book of photographs and short stories -- signed by both Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman -- and Amanda's signed CD as well. That's available now... but only through August 10th until midnight PT.

And here's Amanda's post:

i've been talking with a lot of folks lately about "why this works". the things i find myself saying over and over to people is that twitter and the new networking technologies are simply new tools for artists who have been super-connecting with their fans all along.

i started my band in 2000. we didn't play rock clubs. we played in our friends houses, in our own houses, in art galleries, in lofts, at parties. then we gradually brought the party indoors, into clubs that would book us once they knew we'd bring in 50 drinking/paying bodies. i treated our email list like gold. i obsessively stayed up all night and added named after every show. we took the time to meet every single fan who wanted to meet us after every show (i still do this, and i know that brian does it in his current punk band, world/inferno). but this wasn't because i felt it was mandatory....i did this because we LIKED it.

i got into music-making in the first place because i was so hungry to just CONNECT WITH PEOPLE. to me, the meeting&greeting was part of the reward, not a chore. but not all bands think like this. we were lucky. we liked it.

i'm still lucky, because i STILL LIKE IT. i actually love sitting down for an hour or two and bantering back and forth with my fans on twitter. they're all intelligent, funny, cool people. very few of them are mundane or obnoxious. very few of them ask stupid questions. there's a huge amount of respect between me and the fans and between the fans themselves. i feel proud that my music has brought all these freaks together, and i still like attending the party.

for artists who have NO desire to do this, it's quite a quandary nowadays, because many fans have come to expect it.

it's a slight catch-22: it's impossible to hide and it's impossible to fake.

and artists who have huge walls about what they're willing to share can end up seeming irritated....and letting someone else tweet for you is the kiss of death. the last tweet a fan ever really wants to see is : "hey THE ARTIST'S fans!! check out THE ARTIST'S new single, available now on itunes!!!" people hate that shit. not when you know you can go somewhere else and get: "fucking hell, let me share with you guys i'm feeling..."

re: the connecting to fans, and giving them a reason to buy....

what i've found is that once people trust and love you as an artist, some percentage of them will buy ANYTHING if they know the actual exercise is to simply put money in the artist's pocket. case in point: when i did my hock-weird-shit-from-my-apartment webcast auction a few months ago, fans wrote in asking if they could bid on the glasses and wine bottle we were drinking from. the answer: fuck yes. why not? they sold for a few hundred dollars each. the reason? these fans knew that it wasn't the objects themselves that were important. they knew that i was raising rent money, and they wanted to help; wine bottle was pure symbolism.

another fan tweeted in that they'd love to get involved by buying a signed postcard for $20...would i do that? when i told them that sure, i'd do it, 70 other fans wrote in and wanted one for themselves.... and most of them KNEW that i have a section of my website that states clearly that if you simply send me your address, i'll send you a signed postcard...FOR FREE!

but they wanted to help. and be involved. and involved them i did...before ending the webcast i read off a list of all their names. i knew they'd dig that...and i hadn't promised anything. i just knew that being recognized means so much when you're sitting randomly alone behind your computer, watching a webcast, feeling only slightly connected.

so:
connecting with fans, if they LIKE YOUR ART, automatically gives them a "reason to buy", even if it's NOT ART, because they want to SUPPORT YOUR HABIT.

i think we're going to see more and more of that as fans come to realize that the music is free but comes with the emotional price-tag of supporting the artist in any way the artist puts their proverbial hat out (merch, mementos, special packages, literal/web-based tip jars...or wine bottles).

how much do you think the hardcore fans who buy the $300 vinyl/art-print bundles would simply buy a random pretty book of monochrome prints by an unknown artist in a bookstore?

my guess: they will look at the bundle book a few times, admire it, appreciate it, put it on the coffee table or the bookshelf. and they will listen to the vinyl....probably. but are most of those people vinyl-philes? art print collectors? the point is, they will get two other things that are more important: bragging rights and the knowledge that they were singlehandedly involved with and supporting an artist's personal enterprise. because they love the artist, and they want to support him/her, period.

but the nature of fandom & its responsibilities is going to have to change to the same extent that the musicians are going to have to look at their lives & livelihoods (as "working musicians") more honestly.

as musicians rely more and more on fans/listeners/audience within this kind of honor system, the fans/listeners/audience will have to ante up or the system just won't work.

my hope is that the future culture of music will equate the pleasure of hearing a brand new band in a teeny club with the moral responsibility to toss them a few bucks to keep going, instead of just walking into the night, feeling lucky.

p.s. i created this video about a month ago with my fans at the beach at the tail end of a twittered flash-gig in LA. watch it, it's awesome. Thanks Amanda! To get the signed book & CD check out the Amanda Palmer Special, or get the entire Techdirt Music Club for just a little more. Or, if you want to go all out before midnight PT on Monday the 3rd, if you buy both the Techdirt Music Club and the Techdirt Book Club before midnight PT, August 3rd, we'll throw in a free Techdirt hoodie, or a free lunch with Mike Masnick.

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We've had a bunch of stories about Apple's rather arbitrary nature in rejecting iPhone apps it doesn't like -- including ones where it claims that they're not allowed because they compete with Apple. However, Apple's recent decision to reject Google's Voice application didn't just attract general public interest in Apple's policies, it appears to have awoken the latest crop of FCC bosses. Yes, the FCC has requested more info from Apple, AT&T and Google concerning Apple's rejection of the Google app. I wonder how the random Apple drone who made that decision is feeling right now?

Either way, this isn't good for anyone. The FCC's reasoning is that it:

"has a mission to foster a competitive wireless marketplace, protect and empower consumers, and promote innovation and investment."

That's actually a bit of a stretch on the FCC's actual mandate. And as ridiculous as I think Apple's actions are here, having the FCC get involved doesn't seem good for anyone either. The FCC shouldn't be involved in deciding what applications get put on phones. Apple's decision has angered a bunch of people, with some swearing off the iPhone because of it. In those cases, those people have other options and other phones to go to. The situation doesn't require the FCC to get involved. It should just require Apple coming to its senses and getting rid of its silly policy of outright rejections of apps it doesn't like.

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eldavojohn writes "A new study has found that game characters tend not to reflect cultural diversity. According to the paper from researchers across four universities (PDF): 'A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. ... The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly.' The researchers also note that games 'function as crucial gatekeepers for interest in science, technology, engineering and math,' and that without these groups represented properly, 'it may place underrepresented groups behind the curve.'"

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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.

Someone called Joester is purporting to show us how to block out gmail ads by using magic words in email messages, such as 9/11 or "suicide."  In other words, the ads that appear when your email is catastrophe-free:

...are gone when the email you receive contains trigger words:

But it's not as easy as it sounds. Putting the key words in a signature file doesn't work; the ads return. Also, writes Joester:

If the message runs long google turns the ads back on. However, if you add another "sensitive" word they go off again. After extensive testing I've discovered you need 1 catastrophic event or tragedy for every 167 words in the rest of the email.

Questions remain. What are all the trigger words? How do you avoid scaring the people who receive your emails with your seemingly pointless references to incest and gang rape? More importantly, shouldn't this be more accurately described as a method for helping the people who you email who have gmail avoid ads?

Link (via Adlab)

Dan sends in yet another story about copyright gone wrong. Apparently the small town of Greenville Michigan has a strong Danish heritage, and wanted to show that off with some artifact representing Denmark. It chose the iconic Little Mermaid statue, based on Hans Christian Andersen's story, and a similar iconic statue in Denmark. Apparently, however, the family of the artist who created the statue in Denmark is trying to clamp down and is demanding a lump sum payment or that the statue be taken down. The actual artist died in 1959... but thanks to recent extensions in copyright (yippee), copyright now lasts life plus seventy years.

Of course, I'm wondering if the statue even violates the copyright at all. While the town says it was inspired by the one in Denmark, the actual statue is different:

At about 30 inches high, it's half the size of the original and has a different face and other distinct features, including larger breasts. "We've gotten a lot of heat about that too," he says

Considering that so much of the statue is different, is it even a copyright violation at all? Apparently, this isn't the only town that's faced problems over such statues. The article notes, amusingly, that Vancouver, British Columbia -- after failing to get permission from the artist's estate -- instead put up a statue entitled "Girl in a Wetsuit" and even added swimming fins and goggles to get the point across. It's hard to believe that this one artist, whose been dead for fifty years, should have total control over statues of mermaids, but that's what today's copyright law gives us. Isn't it great?

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Another day, another lawsuit for the Pirate Bay team. This time, it's taking place in Italy, where the local recording industry associations FIMI (Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana) and FPM (Federation against Musical Piracy) have announced plans to sue three of the individuals believed to be responsible for The Pirate Bay. This isn't a huge surprise. A year ago, after complaints about The Pirate Bay, a court ordered ISPs to block access to the site, only to have a court overturn that ruling. And, of course, in the end all it really did was bring a lot more attention to The Pirate Bay in Italy. Considering that The Pirate Bay doesn't appear to have any operations in Italy either, it's not entirely clear that this lawsuit actually matters. And, also, there's the issue that the three guys being sued here claim to not have any ownership of The Pirate Bay at all.

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hugmeplz writes "The third annual Pwnie Awards took place last night at Black Hat in Las Vegas, and a full list of the winners has been posted. 'Most Epic Fail' honors went to the notorious Twitter/Google Apps hack from earlier this month that raised all sorts of questions about cloud computing security. Red Hat got skewered with the 'Mass 0wnage' award, also known as the 'Pwnie for Breaking the Internet,' for issuing a version of OpenSSH that left a backdoor open to hackers. The Linux development team earned 'Lamest Vendor Response' recognition for 'continually assuming that all kernel memory corruption bugs are only Denial-of-Service.' Naturally, Microsoft didn't slip past judges' eyes. Its vulnerability that enabled the Conficker worm to do its thing earned honors as the 'Most Overhyped Bug.' On the more positive side, the Pwnie Awards recognized security pros Wei Yongjun, sgrakkyu, Sebastian Kramer and Bernhard Mueller for accomplishments such as discovering bugs and demonstrating exploits. The Pwnie for Best Song went to Doctor Braid for his song Nice Report. Solar Designer snagged the Lifetime Achievement Award, for among other things, being the first to demonstrate heap buffer overflow exploitation, according to the Pwnie Awards Web site."

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