I've done a lot of building on the tr.im url-shortener, as have quite a few other developers. They just announced that they're shutting down. It's not clear what the timeframe is and how long we have to transition. Nor is it clear what will happen with all the tr.im urls that are already out there, will they break, and if so, when?

The mess this creates makes me feel pretty queasy. I wish this were someone else's problem so I could watch from afar and think "There but for the grace of Murphy go I." But this time the problem is mine. I've done a fair amount of building on tr.im, and I have at least a few users, Nieman and Jay Rosen among them, who are using my tr.im-based tool. Really glad I didn't open up the 40twits app for broader use.

If there are any url-shorteners out there that support the same functionality as tr.im, please post a comment here.

And Twitter, when your DDoS problems are cleared up, please take a look at obviating the need for url-shorteners. This is a harbinger of much more serious problems down the road, should bit.ly prove not to be a profitable business, as tr.im has proven.

techmuse writes "AT&T has changed its terms of service (including for existing contracts) to prevent class action suits. Note that you are already required to submit your case to arbitration, a forum in which consumers are often at a substantial disadvantage. Now you must go up against AT&T alone." This post on David Farber's mailing list provides a bit of context as well.

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This week at CRAFT we kicked off Augusts "Home Sweet Home" theme, celebrating home decor and food. Here are some of my favorites this week:

How-To: Elder Scottish Rose Cocktail

Backyard Garden + Recipe: Pasta Primavera with Garden Zucchini and Herbs

Cooking While Camping

Book Excerpt: Digital Textile Design by Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac

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An anonymous reader writes "The Smoking Gun recently published a story on their investigation and outing of Pranknet, an online cabal that aims to take pranks to the next level. Their legacy includes thousands of dollars of damage, and many harassed souls. Many of the pranks have clear criminal implications. Reading their report may send chills down your collective spines." From the linked article: "Coalescing in an online chat room, members of the group, known as Pranknet, use the telephone to carry out cruel and outrageous hoaxes, which they broadcast live around-the-clock on the Internet. Masquerading as hotel employees, emergency service workers, and representatives of fire alarm companies, 'Dex' and his cohorts have successfully prodded unwitting victims to destroy hotel rooms and lobbies, set off sprinkler systems, activate fire alarms, and damage assorted fast food restaurants. But while Pranknet's hoaxes have caused millions of dollars in damages, it is the group's efforts to degrade and frighten targets that makes it even more odious ..."

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The TB-007 robot is outfitted with a metal detector for locating hidden treasures on the beach. The wireless camera allows the maker to monitor the bots treasure-hunting progress from the comfort of his deck. Check out the link for a lot more information about the build.

More about TB-007: Metal detecting robot

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Personal information shared by users with corporate websites is nothing new; you probably routinely log in to sites to which you've provided information about your age and location, or provided a credit card number in order to buy merchandise. At least sometimes, some of that information is shared in ways that the typical user would probably neither anticipate nor appreciate. David Vladeck, new head of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, has signaled recently that he's interested in tighter regulation of personal information shared online, even when it falls under the often-sweeping language of privacy agreements and sites' terms of use. An interview at the New York Times provides some insight into the regulatory environment that companies operating online may face in the course of the present administration — and it looks more stringent than online businesses have faced before, even while Vladeck shies away from saying that he supports "new rules."

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Ponca City, We love you writes "The Telegraph reports that researchers using tests originally designed to demonstrate the development of language, pre-language and basic arithmetic in human children have found that dogs are capable of understanding up to 250 words and gestures, can count up to five and can perform simple mathematical calculations putting them on par with the average two-year-old child. While most dogs understand simple commands such as sit, fetch and stay, a border collie tested by Professor Coren showed a knowledge of 200 spoken words. 'Obviously we are not going to be able to sit down and have a conversation with a dog, but like a two-year-old, they show that they can understand words and gestures,' says Professor Stanley Coren, a leading expert on canine intelligence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Dogs can tell that one plus one should equal two and not one or three,' says Coren, adding that dogs 'can also deliberately deceive, which is something that young children only start developing later in their life.' Coren believes centuries of selective breeding and living alongside humans has helped to hone the intelligence of dogs. 'They may not be Einsteins, but are sure closer to humans than we thought.'"

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HangingChad writes "Dell has retired their 12-inch Intel Atom-powered netbooks, they said today. The official reason — 'It really boils down to this: for a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for netbooksLarger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful.' Or is the real reason that 12-inch displays on netbooks cut into Intel's more profitable dual-core market and Dell's profit margins on higher-end machines?"

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HangingChad writes "Dell has retired their 12-inch Intel Atom-powered netbooks, they said today. The official reason — 'It really boils down to this: for a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for netbooksLarger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful.' Or is the real reason that 12-inch displays on netbooks cut into Intel's more profitable dual-core market and Dell's profit margins on higher-end machines?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the years I've seen ideas that show up over and over in various different forms, and when we discover one, we give it a name. Examples. Jay Rosen came up with Atomization. Doc Searls said Markets Are Conversations. David Weinberger has so many -- including Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Transparency is the New Objectivity. Clay Shirky says Here Comes Everybody. Jay and I together came up with Rebooting The News. Some of mine are Sources Go Direct, River of News, We Make Shitty Software, Checkbox News, People Come Back to Places that Send Them Away, Ask Not What the Internet Can Do For You, The Platform with No Platform Vendor, It's Even Worse Than It Appears.

Now I'm going to add one, and provide a fantastic example. It's the title of this piece -- Narrate Your Work.

Narrate Your Work is something I used to tell my team at UserLand Software, because we were a virtual team, with people in Seattle, Boston, Vancouver, Germany and California. But it would have applied even if we were all working in the same office. As a manager, I wanted to know where my people were, because if they were completing a project I needed to be thinking about their next steps and how their deliverables fit in with other stuff that was coming online. And if they were late I needed to understand why. We even developed technology for this, and Hutch Carpenter discovered the docs for it, and was excited about the discovery, and I was excited for his excitement.

Brent Simmons, who was on our team at UserLand, went on to write NetNewsWire and other gems after leaving the company. Brent uses Twitter, to this day, to narrate his work. You'd have to ask Brent why he does it, but I'm glad he does. I like how his mind works, I learn from him. He's also a friend and a guy I respect, so I like to stay in touch, and this is one way to do it.

Twitter is very much a Narrate Your Work environment, in addition to the many other things it is. In a way its question What Are You Doing? is what Narrate Your Work asks of you too.

So that's what Narrate Your Work means. I wouldn't waste your time with all this theory unless I could show you how all this fits in with Rebooted News and the News System of the Future. Here's a recital of what happened.

1. As you may know, at roughly noon Eastern time yesterday a plane crashed into a helicopter over the Hudson River in NY, killing all nine people aboard both.

2. I was away from my computer when it happened, didn't check in until about an hour later, and on Twitter there was a mess of conflicting stories, and lots of individuals "breaking" the news even though it happened over an hour ago.

3. I clicked on the page of NYT editorial people on Twitter that I keep and I saw something very different, and this is the point of this story. I saw a news organization at work. Careful to say what they do and don't know. Informing each other on experience with similar stories in the past. Whether they were all reading all of the others' posts, I don't know. They were reading and passing on reports from other Twitter users, even those that didn't work at the Times. They were coordinating the work of a larger community than just people who work at the Times.

4. I took a snapshot of the page at that time so we could all look at this.

Now why do I think this is so important? Because it's a big part of the future Rebooted News system, imho. Today's reporters don't think the public wants to see inside their process, but they are wrong about that. Many of us totally want to look inside and watch them at work for a variety of reasons:

1. We thirst for instantaneous real-time news. The cable networks have been simulating it for decades, but not delivering very often. Go back to the Gulf War, and how we were all glued to CNN watching for any hint of new information. It became an obsession that was repeated in the 2000 election and in the aftermath of 9-11. Now we try to grab for that sense of immediacy whenever possible, and they market to us on that basis even naming their show The Situation Room, when it is nothing of the sort.

2. But cable news isn't where it started, it started with the idea of news. It's not history or analysis, it's what's happening now. Think about how the Iran Hostage Crisis spawned Nightline and how the networks covered the Nixon resignation, or the moon landing or the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. (In the recent spate of bios of Walter Cronkite I learned that he broadcast from the room he worked in at CBS News, not from a set on a stage. It's as if he was prepared to go on the air at any time and it wasn't appearances that mattered. At that time, to CBS, news was a functional thing.)

3. We also want to feel to be a part of the news process. Again this is something the networks are playing lip service to. But the Times people on Twitter aren't just pretending to use sources outside their own newsroom, they are actually doing it. And you can see it.

4. Weinberger says we should seek transparency, and of course I agree -- it's my theme song too. You can see real reporters dealing with a true breaking story not just a simulation of a breaking story, let their hair down and share everything they know with the world. This is the impulse of news, it's not about hiding things until they're ready, but when you know something for a fact, you want it out there as quickly as possible. And as long as something is clearly labeled as speculation it's every bit as true as a fully vetted fact.

5. Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future. A key component of this system is that it is used both as the back room for narrating news work and for the finished delivered news product. It's this duality that makes electronic news vital. I first saw this in the LBBS and MORE software I did in the 80s, then in Manila in the 90s, and I believe we will see it in the news system that comes out of Twitter. You have two modes of viewing the content, the editorial view and the finished product view -- but it's important that the are just views on the same data, so when a change is made to one, it automatically appears in the other. This was the key concept in Manila's Edit This Page function.

6. Lenn Pryor at Microsoft figured this out a few years back when he started the Channel 9 website. Channel 9 is the audio channel on airplanes that allows you to listen to the cockpit conversation. Pryor set out to create that kind of experience for users of Microsoft products. Lenn is a creative guy who went on to work at Skype. He also coined the term unconference for the format we were using at BloggerCon.

Update: The Times stays with the story.

teknoviking writes "Gen Con Indy is coming up on August 13-16th, and if you are planning on attending, especially if you have an idea you want to pitch to one (or many) of the vendors, artists, or developers at the Con, you should check out this great series of articles by writer and game designer Jess Hartley. She covers the basics of proper planning and making a good impression, and she has some practical tips about how to promote your idea, and what you should do to follow up afterward."

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Eric Weinhoffer made this owl wrap for his Skullcandy Ink'd in-ear headphones on his Makerbot.

Owl Headphone Wrap

More:
John Park's earbud owl
3D-printed 7-piece puzzle cube

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Every 15 Earth years, Saturn has its equinox — the time during which its rotational axis is perpendicular to the rays from the sun, so that the sun is always directly "overhead" of Saturn's equator. This is significant because Saturn's rings orbit over the equator, so during the equinox, light from the sun hits them edge-on. This means that any objects wider than the rings, or orbiting above or below them, cast long shadows and are much easier to see. For the first time, we're able to get detailed images of these objects, thanks to Cassini. A moonlet, perhaps 1,300 feet in diameter, has been discovered in the B-ring, and the Bad Astronomy blog points out another object that seems to be bursting through the F-ring. Quoting: "The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it's casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what's with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed into the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every 15 Earth years, Saturn has its equinox — the time during which its rotational axis is perpendicular to the rays from the sun, so that the sun is always directly "overhead" of Saturn's equator. This is significant because Saturn's rings orbit over the equator, so during the equinox, light from the sun hits them edge-on. This means that any objects wider than the rings, or orbiting above or below them, cast long shadows and are much easier to see. For the first time, we're able to get detailed images of these objects, thanks to Cassini. A moonlet, perhaps 1,300 feet in diameter, has been discovered in the B-ring, and the Bad Astronomy blog points out another object that seems to be bursting through the F-ring. Quoting: "The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it's casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what's with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed into the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peace Corps Library writes "BBC reports that two rival environmental groups are lining up supporters to try to take control of the new .eco domain aimed at green groups. In March, former US vice president Al Gore backed a bid by the California group Dot Eco to operate the .eco TLD, but now a Canadian environmental group known as Big Room has launched a competing bid to manage it. 'We're two different applicants with two different business ideas. Ours is to sell domain names to raise funds for organizations who can effect change,' says Minor Childers, co-founder of Dot Eco. The group has already entered into contracts with its supporters — such as the Sierra Club and the Alliance for Climate Protection — to give away 57% of its profits from sales. Big Room also plans to generate money from the sale of .eco domain names to fund sustainability projects around the world, however, the consortium, which includes WWF International and Green Cross International — founded in 1993 by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, also believes that .eco could be used as a labeling system to endorse companies with green credentials. Despite having differences about a model for .eco, both groups will 'definitely have to sit down' together at some point, says Childers. 'We could be one of the biggest contributors to environmental causes anywhere in the world.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mortimer.CA writes "Even though things aren't great in the economy, it's prudent to plan ahead to when things (hopefully) pick up. In light of that, I'd like to update a previously asked question in case things have changed over the last four years: What do you ask every new (prospective) employer? When you're sitting in the interview room after they've finished grilling you, there's usually an opportunity to reciprocate. There will be some niche questions for specializations (sys admin, programming, PM, QA, etc.), but there are some generic ones that come to mind, such as: what is the (official) dress code?" Similarly, what questions should you avoid? Read on for the rest of Mortimer.CA's thoughts.

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Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major, because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years from 1980 to 2000, when worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. 'All you had to do was show up and not goof it up,' Siebel says. 'All ships were rising.' Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent. His explanation for the sharp decline is that 'the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.' In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was 'where the action was' when he finished graduate school, he says, 'if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.'"

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Laptop stand modded for coolness [above, top-left]

• Toy control panel is an awesome gift [above, top-right]

• The speaker phone (no, not that speakerphone)

• The office crossbow [above, bottom-left]

• Humans, bees, wasps living together [above, bottom-right]

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happierr writes "The gaming industry has been struggling in the last few months, and it is about to struggle even more when OnLive and Gaikai launch later this year. The new services are both a step in the right direction to counter piracy and provide easily-accessible gaming to people with low-end PCs. They might even do for PC gaming what the Wii did for casual gaming; greatly expand the market and draw interest from people who would not ordinarily play games. The services are a real threat for the Big Three video game companies (Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo). How will they combat these revolutionary services? There are a few steps that the Big Three are taking to combat the New Two, such as an increased reliance on peripherals and vision cameras, exclusivity deals, and more online multiplayer features, which OnLive and Gaikai will have a hard time matching."

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Wow, how cool are these bridges, "grown" by training roots to grow into the shapes you want for your structure.

In the depths of northeastern India, in one of the wettest places on earth, bridges aren't built - they're grown.

The living bridges of Cherrapunji, India are made from the roots of the Ficus elastica tree. This tree produces a series of secondary roots from higher up its trunk and can comfortably perch atop huge boulders along the riverbanks, or even in the middle of the rivers themselves.

Living Root Bridges [Via Miekal And's FB page]

More:
Houses woven out of trees

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There's been much media attention this month around Manson family: August, 2009 marks 40 years since the Tate/La Bianca murders. One former Manson Family member, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, is scheduled to soon be released on parole from a federal prison in Texas. She has served 34 years for attempting to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975, and did not participate in the murders for which Manson and others were imprisoned in 1971.

Paul Krassner was investigating the story of those murders back in 1971. Over at the Huffington Post today, he retells the tale of how he came to drop acid with Ms. Fromme at a house in Los Angeles before she tried to bump off the president, and before she went to jail for that act. It's a fascinating read. Snip:

Manson had stepped on Sandy's eyeglasses, thrown away her birth control pills, and inculcated her with racist insensibility. Although she had once been a civil rights activist, she was now asking me to tell John Lennon that he should get rid of Yoko Ono and stay with "his own kind."

"But," I said, "they really love each other."

"If Yoko really loved the Japanese people," Sandy replied, "she would not want to mix their blood."

The four of us ingested those little white tablets containing 300 micrograms of LSD, then took a walk to the office of Laurence Merrick, who had been associated with schlock biker exploitation movies as the prerequisite to directing a sensationalist documentary, Manson.

Squeaky's basic vulnerability emerged as she kept pacing around and telling Merrick that she was afraid of him. He didn't know we were tripping, but he must have sensed the vibes. He may even have gotten a touch of contact high. I engaged him in conversation about movies. We discussed the fascistic implications of The French Connection.

My Acid Trip with Squeaky Fromme (HuffPo)

Image: Dick Schmidt, Sacramento Bee. "Sacramento Police and Secret Service men handcuff Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme under a Capitol Park tree after she tried to shoot President Gerald Ford Sept. 5, 1975."

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

FullBandwidth writes "Paper-thin batteries that can be printed onto greeting cards or other flexible substrates have been demonstrated at Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems in Germany. The batteries have a relatively short life span, as the anode and cathode materials dissipate over time. However, they contain no hazardous materials."

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Amazing maker-made sandwich creations @ Funky Lunch.

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The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post reports that online swindling takes dedication even in the best of times but succeeding in the midst of a worldwide economic meltdown takes patience, resolve, and hard work. 'We are working harder. The financial crisis is not making it easy for them over there,' said Banjo, 24, speaking about Americans, whose trust he has won and whose money he has fleeced, via his Dell laptop. 'They don't have money. And the money they don't have, we want.' US authorities say Americans — the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers — still lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. 419 is cemented in Nigerian popular culture. and the scammers, known as "yahoo-yahoo boys," are glorified in pop songs such as 'Yahoozee,' which gained even more fame after former secretary of state Colin L. Powell danced to it at a London festival last year."

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