Erik writes "Wordpress, the popular open-source Content Management System (CMS) for many thousands of bloggers worldwide, is under attack from a "clever" worm that automatically compromises unpatched versions of the Wordpress system. The particularly nasty bug crawls the web for vulnerable Wordpress installations, installing malware, deleting content, and generally wreaking havoc wherever it can. Today, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg eloquently implored Wordpress bloggers to update more frequently. Originally, updating the Wordpress system was a rather laborious process; however, newer versions offer fast and simple one-click upgrades. The two most recent versions of Wordpress (2.8.3 and 2.8.4) cannot be attacked by the worm discovered this week, and blogs hosted at Wordpress.com are also apparently immune."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DigDuality writes "Dieter@be over at Arch Linux forums, and a release engineer for Arch Linux, got inspired by this post. The idea? To create a browser based on the Unix Philosophy: 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well, programs that work well together, programs to handle text streams because that is a universal interface,' among other points. The result? A low-resource, fast browser named Uzbl, based on WebKit and passes the Acid3 Test with a perfect score. The browser is controlled (by default) by vim-like keybindings, not too dissimilar to vimperator for Firefox. Things like URL changing, loading/saving of bookmarks, saving history, and downloads are handled through external scripts that you write (though the Uzbl software does come with some nice scripts for you to use). It fits great in a tiling window manager and plays extremely well with dmenu. The learning curve is a bit steep, but once you get used to it, it's smooth sailing. Not bad for alpha software. Though built for Arch, it has been reporting to work on Ubuntu."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A MAKE reader sent this is with the title "never to early to start modding" !

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El Royo writes "Today, Palm leaked version 1.2 of the webOS operating system that powers the Palm Pre. According to PreCentral, the new version was inadvertently included in a recovery tool Palm makes available. New features include support for the forthcoming App Catalog changes, copy and paste from Web sites, improved e-mail search and faster boot times."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DesiVideoGamer writes "Over at Overclock.net, a user has posted screen-shots from Microsoft's 'ExpertZone' training course entitled 'Linux vs. Windows 7.' This course is available to BestBuy employees and will make them eligible for a $10 copy of Windows 7 upon completion." The screenshots linked show at least some creative interpretations of the state of Linux vs. Windows on a wide range of things, from media playback and video conferencing to ease of updates to (of all things) keeping your PCs "safer." Most of the claims, though, aren't concrete enough to be perfectly refuted. Writes DesiVideoGamer, "I think I now know why, when I enter BestBuy, the employees say the odd lies that they do."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm sure this must have been a hassle when it happened, but the ticket is a riot. Apparently LOLrioKart will have to stay off the streets/sidewalks at least until it has a proper signaling system.

More:

• LOLrioKART: Dancing in the rain
• Charles Z. Guan and the LOLrioKart

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ScentCone writes "The ELF (Earth Liberation Front) has claimed responsibility for destroying the primary AM towers used by radio station KRKO in Washington state. From their statement: 'AM radio waves cause adverse health effects including a higher rate of cancer, harm to wildlife, and that the signals have been interfering with home phone and intercom lines.' The poor intercom performance must have been the last straw."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Jones writes "As the Linux community looks forward to another kernel release, the kernel hackers have been working on improving the memory management so that the X desktop responsiveness is doubled under high memory pressure. The result is an improved desktop experience. Benchmarks on memory-tight desktops show clock time and major faults reduced by 50 per cent, and pswpin numbers (memory reads from disk) are reduced to about one-third. Another improvement coming with 2.6.31 is kernel mode-setting support for ATI Radeon graphics cards, enabling faster user switching and a more seamless startup experience. Peripheral developments that will also improve the Linux desktop experience include support for the new USB 3.0 specification and a new Firewire stack. Even minor Linux releases have heaps of new features these days!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

coondoggie writes "The aspiration that jets may someday fly at over six-times the speed of sound took a very real step toward reality recently, as the US Air Force said it successfully married the test aircraft, known as the X-51A WaveRider, to a B-52 in preparation for a Dec. 2 flight test. The X-51A flight tests are intended to demonstrate that the engines can achieve their desired speed without disintegrating. While the X-51 looks like a large rocket now, its applications could change the way aircraft or spaceships are designed, fly into space, support reconnaissance missions and handle long-distance flight operations. At the heart of the test is the aircraft's air-breathing hypersonic scramjet system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday at around 5PM, I added the code to the OPML Editor to support Atom 1.0 in River2, my new River of News aggregator. The coding took about an hour.

I tested it on some feeds from Blogger and Google News, fixed a few bugs, and burned it in overnight. It appears to work perfectly. So I released it this morning a little before 9AM.

The point? There were years of strife in the RSS world over this. In the end it took less than 24 hours, beginning to end, to support the new format. We could have saved all that angst. A new format isn't that big a deal.

A teenaged artist who was forced to stop selling his collages when Damien Hirst sent threats to his gallery (the collages incorporated ironic images of Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull sculpture) is now facing a possible jail sentence because he took a box of pencils from a Hirst installation as a prank and offered to return them only if Hirst would let him go back to displaying and selling his art. Hirst claims the box of pencils -- Faber Castell Mongol 482s from 1990 -- is worth GBP500,000, making this one of the gravest modern art thefts in British history.

Taking revenge, Cartrain took the box of pencils that were part of Hirst's sculpture, Pharmacy, which was being shown as part of its Classified exhibition that closed at the end of last month.

He then created a "wanted"-style poster that read: "For the safe return of Damien Hirst's pencils I would like my artworks back that DACS and Hirst took off me in November. It's not a large demand... Hirst has until the end of this month to resolve this or on 31 July the pencils will be sharpened. He has been warned."

Yesterday, Cartrain told The Independent: "I went to the Tate Britain and by chance had a golden opportunity to borrow a packet of pencils from the Pharmacy exhibit. That same day I made up a fake police appeal poster advertising that the pencils had been removed from the Tate and that if anyone had any information they should contact the police on the phone number advertised.

"A few weeks later I went out and I returned home to find out the art and antiques squad from New Scotland Yard had called round with a warrant for my arrest..."

But that is not the end of it. Police also arrested Cartrain's 49-year-old father, who they suspected of harbouring the pencils. "Initially, we arrested his dad but it soon became clear that it was his son who was responsible," said a police source. "We arranged to arrest him by appointment. The act of theft was clearly a stunt to gain publicity."

Damien Hirst in vicious feud with teenage artist over a box of pencils (via We Make Money Not Art)

theodp writes "Writing in Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey has seen the future of college education. It costs $99-a-month, and there's no limit on the number of courses you can take. Tiny online education firm StraighterLine is out to challenge the seeming permanency of traditional colleges and universities. How? Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of its competitors' business: freshman lectures, higher education's equivalent of the classified section. It's no surprise, then, that as StraighterLine tried to buck the system, the system began to push back, challenging deals the company struck with accredited traditional and for-profit institutions to allow StraighterLine courses to be transferred for credit. But even if StraighterLine doesn't succeed in bringing extremely cheap college courses to the masses, it's likely that another player eventually will."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First, thanks to Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet for standing up for RSS. You don't have to be a tech scholar to know that RSS is like XML or HTML or HTTP or text files. It's fabric, permanent, it ain't going anywhere. It's not like the Norweigian Blue, it isn't pining for the fjords or pushing up daisies. Let's keep a sense of humor and a sense of perspective. Some people look at life and see death. I look at life and try to be happy, cause yeah someday we all die, but that day hasn't come yet. (Knock wood and Praise Murphy.)

Richard Forster suggested in a comment on Fred's post that Twitter could have a button that allowed you to add any RSS feed to your Twitter stream.

I said "if they did that they'd have to absorb a significant share of the RSS flow, and that's the problem and why it's ludicrous to think that RSS is anything but the elephant in the room and the 800-pound gorilla combined."

"You can see it in the famous TechCrunch leak piece of the internal Twitter docs. They know they can't handle the load.

"That's why a distributed approach is the only one with any hope of working. The reason RSS could grow so huge is the same reason HTML and HTTP could, it's not centralized. That was the mistake Feedburner made. They thought 'Oh we can make a killing by snarfing up all the RSS.' No way Jose. That's a losing proposition. Luckily they got Google to give them $100 mill before the house of cards collapsed. They too put the brakes on growth."

Talking with Scoble last night, he offered that Twitter would have to grow to the size of Google to handle all of RSS. I agreed, but said it would be worse. Twitter would have to grow to be the size of Google overnight and without a revenue stream. Google got to grow with the web. Twitter wouldn't have that luxury relative to RSS. It became a giant long before Twitter even existed.

Which brings us to the Fail Whale.

RSS has grown in a fairly orderly fashion, quietly, without daily articles in the NY Times, or appearances on Oprah, or proclamations by athletes and movie stars. It also grew to huge size without a Fail Whale. RSS, in over ten years, has never gone down. Think about that for a moment. That's because it was designed for growth from day one. Getting on the RSS bus can be as simple as putting a file on your Apache server. It's just another rendering of your content flow. It requires a fairly small commitment, you don't need tens of millions of dollars of venture capital to build out an RSS network. You can rent it from Amazon at pennies per gigabyte.

Anyone who thinks Twitter could replace RSS doesn't understand the scale of the two things. Twitter is a fairly new company that has had trouble meeting the remarkable growth it has achieved. I use Twitter all the time, and I love it. I find that RSS and Twitter are a good combination. And I think news people create controversy for the same reason journalists have always sold war -- it gets people to read their journals, and their ads, and it makes them money. That's all that's going on here.

Interestingly, rather than Twitter absorbing RSS, it may go the other way. Perhaps RSS will absorb Twitter. That's the idea behind rssCloud. That a lot can be gained by creating a loosely-coupled 140-character network. Sure there will be tradeoffs, it'll take up to a minute for you to see your friends' updates. But there would be a lot of advantages, for example -- while one component of the network can fail, the whole thing is as resilient and distributed as the Internet.

An anonymous reader writes "Nokia is worried that networks may reject selling the N900 because it won't allow them to mess with the operating system. Nokia has previously showed the N900 running a root shell and it appears to use the same interface for IM and phone functions. Meanwhile, Verizon is claiming that 'exclusivity arrangements promote competition and innovation.' Is it too late to explain to people why $99+$60/month is not better than $600+$20/month?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

juct writes "Beginning with versions 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 of Firefox, Mozilla is going to check the version of installed Adobe Flash plug-ins and warn users if it discovers an outdated version with potential security holes. Mozilla confirmed this new security feature and said that the Flash version check was part of a wider commitment to 'protect users from emerging threats online.' Just recently, a study confirmed that 80 per cent of users surf with a vulnerable version of Adobe's plug-in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

lousyd writes "Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and current instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: 'You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So you've been having some trouble sourcing supplies for your MAKEcation trebuchet entry? Time to raid your kids' back to school supply cache!

The Office Supply Trebuchet - This is a great little trebuchet that was built by Brandon N. He made it completely out of office supplies and it fires honey roasted peanuts about 20 feet! Nice work here. He has also included a parts list in case you want to make one! Get the pencils and the rubber bands and have some fun!

A box of pencils on back-to-school sale could be their lowest price of the year. Let's get making!

Take some photos of your project and post them to the MAKE Flickr pool with the tag MAKEcation to enter the contest.

Family trebuchet challenge:

• Maker Workshop - Portable Trebuchet on Make: television
• MAKEcation trebuchet bundle in the Maker Shed
  
• Altoids tin trebuchet
  
• Make a Trebuchet - Make: Video Podcast
  
• Make a Trebuchet - Make: PDF Podcast
  
• The MAKEcation Family Trebuchet Challenge!  
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Neat article by Tom Igoe... Idle speculation on the shan zhai and open fabrication...

Strategy & Business magazine has an interesting article on the shan zhai manufacturers in China at the moment. It’s the first business press article I’ve seen in the US that takes a relatively balanced approach to reporting on them. It’s worth a read, as it’s a trend that’s already affecting business, particularly the electronics business. It suggests a new approach to economic recovery as well, one based on small companies well-networked with each other.

I first learned about the shan zhai on a recent trip to Shenzen, China, hosted by PCH International and Bunnie Huang (Bunnie’s got a good blog post describing the shan zhai). The popular image of these companies in the US is that they’re producing cheap knockoff goods based on established multinationals, but there’s more to it than that, as S&B and Bunnie point out.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Matt Beckler posted a handy collection of electronic component symbols in .svg format -

When I need to draw up a circuit schematic, but don't need or want to use a full-blown schematic capture program (Eagle, OrCad, KiCad, etc), I like to use Inkscape to draw simple circuits. I've collected a bunch of frequenly-used circuit symbols and standardized them in SVG format.

Download available over on Matt's site.

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An anonymous reader sends along this update to the ongoing patent battle between Microsoft and i4i involving XML formatting in Word. "Microsoft's motion to stay an injunction has been granted; the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has allowed the company to keep selling Word as it appeals a patent ruling from last month. The injunction had an effective date of October 10, but the motion to stay blocks the injunction until the appeal process is complete. If upheld, the injunction wouldn't stop existing users from using Word, but it could prevent the software giant from selling Word 2003 or Word 2007, the most common versions of Word currently on the market, and would require the company to significantly tweak Word 2010, which is slated for the first half of next year. The victory is a small one for Microsoft; the company still has the whole appeals process to go through. 'We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'Microsoft's scare tactics about the consequences of the injunction cannot shield it from the imminent review of the case by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal on the September 23 appeal,' said i4i chairman Loudon Owen in response to the court's decision."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese gamers shut down the relaunch of "Hot Blooded Legend," a beloved, classic game, by massing their avatars at city gates and stopping others from entering. They were upset that the relaunch didn't do justice to the original.

Many years ago, the online game Hot-blooded Legend had been the classic game that touched an entire generation of games. As all types of new games rushed onto the market, the Legend players gradually dispersed. Today, these players returned with great hopes for the new game. But when the found out that the new games was over-commercialized and not the "original flavor" as advertised, they felt cheated and used the method of blocking the gates and passages of the various "cities" to protest.

"Chu Yu" is the nickname for a netizen. Eight years ago, this second-year university student registered the user name "Chu Yu" in the Hot-blooded Legend game. For the next three years, he fought on in this virtual world. For his first year, he cut classes for one year as he played a knight, slaughtered monsters, got promoted, attacked cities and traveled around. In April 2003, he won a green necklace. While his fellow students were attending ancient Chinese classics class, he was screaming and yelling in the Internet cafe and almost smashing his keyboard. In September, he met the female Taoist "Xiao Xiao." One late night during the game, they rode horses to the seaside to gaze at the blue water. He told her that they will go to Beijing to watch the Olympics. Then he took her into the city and bought her a purple Taoist robe.

The Legend Returns

An opinion piece on Gamasutra looks into the common perception that a first-person view provides a much more immersive experience in shooters. The author argues that this concept needs to be reconsidered, as immersion nowadays is more dependent on what you see, rather than how you see it. The question is further complicated by ever-improving technology and new control schemes. "It's important to realize that making a first-person game almost necessarily means making a game for the dedicated gamer. Innovations on the interface side could help lower the casual block, perhaps through the Wii, Project Natal, or the PS3's new motion controller. Regardless, it will take a lot of work and concerted effort to penetrate the casual audience with a first-person camera. The question is whether we even need to, when there are so many camera systems that games have yet to fully explore."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lord Northern writes "According to several news sources, NASA's Kepler mission is said to be able to detect habitable moons orbiting planets in other star systems. Kepler is a space telescope designed to detect exoplanets. Its mission will have it orbiting the Sun for 3.5 years, after which we'll be able to tell if any of our neighboring stars actually have planetary systems around them. However, apparently we will be able to detect not only exoplanets, but also exomoons orbiting those exoplanets. The Kepler team came to that conclusion after running a computer simulation which found that the telescope was sensitive enough to detect the gravitational pull of an orbiting moon (PDF). This means that the data expected by the end of the mission is going to be very rich, and it is said that moons as small as 0.2 times the mass of earth could be detected. Further details about the Kepler mission are available from NASA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Afrigadget has a wonderful post on two ingenious blacksmiths in Lamu, Kenya, whose bellows have been improvised from cement sacks.

Lamu Cement-bag Bellows (AfriGadget) from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

Adam and Abdul make all types of items, but they told me that their main products are anchors, which range from small to large (2000-5000/= or $26-65) and, chisels and coconut shellers. They create a lot of the small metal pieces on the local dhows, and also make doors and window frames for the homes in the town. Really, they can make just about anything that you desire, like experienced metal workers anywhere in the world. What's amazing is what they do it with.

Cement-bag Bellows in Lamu

Glyn sez, "The British Government's official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable research commissioned by the music industry, the BBC has revealed. The BBC then went on to show how 136 people saying they used file-sharing software was turned into 7 million illegal file sharers - the figure now being used by the government to justify a proposal to disconnect internet users based purely on accusation, no evidence required."

The Advisory Board claimed it commissioned the research from a team of academics at University College London, who it transpires got the 7m figure from a paper published by Forrester Research.

The More or Less team hunted down the relevant Forrester paper, but could find no mention of the 7m figure, so they contacted the report's author Mark Mulligan.

Mulligan claimed the figure actually came from a report he wrote about music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research. That report was privately commissioned by none other than the music trade body, the BPI...

The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software - in other words, only 136 people.

It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air" but based on unspecified evidence.

How UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal file sharers (Thanks, Glyn!)

Holy awesomesauce, there is some incredibly fantastic stuff in the B3ta steampunk remix challenge. Shown here, "Fornication Sidearms" by The Great Architect) and "Amazon 1821" by Tonsil.

Steampunk Challenge (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

The winner of this year's "oldskool demo competition" at the Assembly 2009 (a festival of low-level assembly programming) is this sweet animation, "3½ inches is enough" by Unreal Voodoo, which is apparently running on some kind of monochrome 68K classic Macintosh.

3½ inches is enough by Unreal Voodoo (via JWZ)

The Canadian government's copyright consultation has received over 4,000 submissions from Canadians (it's not too late to send yours!). Of these, the overwhelming majority are in favour of more liberal copyright, against extending the term of copyright, against stiffer penalties for infringement (only three submissions advocated this) and against US-DMCA-style rules protecting DRM.

There have been three recent attempts to reform Canadian copyright law without public consultation, and each one provided for stricter copyright enforcement, protection for DRM, stiffer penalties, etc -- in other words, each one tried to implement a law that was the opposite of what the Canadian public asked for, when it was given a chance.

So now what? What kind of copyright law will the Canadian government introduce now that the public has spoken?

Copyright Consultation Submission Summary: Over 4,000 Posted Through August 31st

Core77 has a two part roundup of incredible cargo bikes; very inspiring!

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I got a kick out of the special Google logo I just spotted on their home page. It links to a search for "unexplained phenomenon."

Back in July, Amazon faced public outrage over their decision to delete ebook copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of customers who purchased them. Shortly thereafter, CEO Jeff Bezos offered an apology, acknowledging that Amazon handled the situation in a "stupid" and "thoughtless" manner. Now, they're offering something more substantial: anyone who had an ebook deleted can now have it restored, apparently with annotations intact. Any customer who isn't interested in a new copy can get either an Amazon gift certificate or a check for $30.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DIY 8-bit flames on a 2009 Prius via Jalopnik. Technically it should be electric bolts or sparks, but that's ok :)

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A couple years ago, law professor Wendy Seltzer used the NFL as an example of sports leagues performing copyfraud, by claiming copyright control beyond what is allowed by law. Specifically, she was talking about the warning mentioned at some point during every game. For the NFL it was: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited." In Seltzer's case, amazingly, the NFL sent a DMCA takedown of her posting that clip to YouTube -- giving her another "teachable moment" on copyright abuse.

And yet, sports leagues still continue the copyfraud. One of the fine folks over at Consumerist, Phil Villarreal, found the wording of Major League Baseball's warning quite questionable:

"Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, is prohibited,"

Unlike the NFL one, at least it didn't say "descriptions," but "account" is pretty close. So, Villarreal contacted MLB to request "express written consent" to provide an "account" of the game he had watched to a friend. To its credit, MLB responded and asked him to call someone in its business development department... who (perhaps reasonably) thought it was a joke and did not provide the written consent (and stopped responding to calls and emails).

Now, obviously, this is a bit of a joke (and a funny one), but it does highlight a rather serious problem. Copyright holders are pretty regularly claiming significantly more rights than they actually hold over content, and many people simply assume that they can do this. This leads to them to think that they don't have basic rights concerning not just "fair use" but stuff that is obviously not covered by copyright, such as an "account of this game." There really should be sanctions against such copyfraud.

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About four years ago, I signed up for AT&T CallVantage VoIP service and ditched my traditional POTS landline phone service. This was back when AT&T was actually betting on CallVantage and using it as a (many reviews claimed) better alternative to Vonage. Then, of course, SBC bought AT&T and wanted nothing whatsoever to do with CallVantage. It neglected the service, and quality got worse and worse until it announced a few months ago that it was shutting the service down completely. Fair enough. I contemplated going strictly with a combination of Skype and my cell phone for phone service, but I've found both to be somewhat unreliable at times -- and for unexplained reasons my new laptop has terrible microphone inputs -- so everyone I've called via Skype insists they can't hear me at all (and I've tried both USB and the mic inputs, and multiple microphones -- no luck).

So, after hearing about some friends who were using it and doing some online research, I decided to try "MagicJack." You may have seen their late night commercials that are hard to avoid (even if you use a DVR). It's basically a much cheaper VoIP option that's not that unlike Vonage/CallVantage, except that instead of getting a VoIP router to hook up to your broadband modem directly, it's just a USB dongle that connects directly to your computer. I read some reviews online, and they all basically said the same thing: when it works, it works great, but don't expect any customer support if things go wrong. And, oh yes, hold your nose at the infomercial sales process and the constant upsell attempts. Still, I figured it was worth a shot and ordered a free trial (you have 30 days). Of course, to get through the process, you have to decline something like 30 upsell attempts (my favorite: $4 to have them ship it faster -- I declined and the thing still showed up in two days).

I've been using it for about a week, and it's not too bad. There are some annoyances, but the call quality works fine. I think there's a slight delay, which gives calls that old long distance pause between people speaking that used to be common, but I can live with that. The actual call quality seems better than my old CallVantage.

But today, MagicJack appears to be breaking the law. Every Friday we have a staff call at Floor64. Since not everyone here works locally or in the office every day, we have a conference call using every startup's favorite: FreeConference.com. So I called in this morning, and MagicJack refused. Instead, it gave me a recording telling me that I needed to use MagicJack's own free conferencing solution. That might be fine for setting up conference calls, but this was a call that was already going on, and which people were waiting for me to dial into. And there was no way to get around it. MagicJack simply refuses to let you call FreeConference.com.

Now, it's not hard to figure out why. This issue cropped up two years ago, when a bunch of small telcos started blocking calls to FreeConference.com, because FreeConference is actually a big regulatory arbitrage scam. MagicJack itself is a CLEC that most likely benefits from some kind of regulatory arbitrage, so it's just another small telco blocking FreeConference to push its own services. But, just because telcos don't like competition, it doesn't mean it's legal for them to block others' services. After widespread complaints in 2007, most telcos backed down and stopped blocking calls to FreeConference, and the FCC started looking into the matter -- though I don't believe it ever came out with a ruling on the matter. I'm pretty sure there are still a smattering of lawsuits out there about the whole thing.

But, considering how many conference call invites I get these days that use FreeConference, it's quite a pain to find out that my own phone line can't dial into it. Other MagicJack users have been discovering the same thing, and MagicJack's customer service response has been hopelessly inept. They just keep repeating that you need to use their own free conferencing service, and if you finally find someone who understands that you're trying to call into someone else's conference they just say sorry, you can't do that.

In the past, of course, the FCC has indicated that it's a violation of federal rules to disallow phone calls to get through just because you don't like the numbers being dialed, and it seems that when you promise people free unlimited local and long distance phone calls throughout the US, then you need to live up to that promise. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep the MagicJack after this trial period, but this is a huge strike against it. Who knows what other numbers they might not let me call next week?

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I like the design of this clock by designers Biegert and Funk. It tells the approximate time by illuminating the correct words. Could be a fun re-make!

[via core77]

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An anonymous reader brings word of a new application for PageRank, Google's link analysis algorithm: monitoring the food web in an ecosystem. A team of researchers found that a modified version of PageRank can predict with great accuracy which species are vital to the existence of others. Quoting: "Every species is embedded in a complex network of relationships with others. A single extinction can cascade into the loss of seemingly unrelated species. Investigating when this might happen using more conventional methods is complicated, as even in simple ecosystems, the number of combinations exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. So, it would be impossible to try them all. Co-author Dr. Stefano Allesina realized he could apply PageRank to the problem when he stumbled across an article in a journal of applied mathematics describing the Google algorithm. 'First of all, we had to reverse the definition of the algorithm. In PageRank, a web page is important if important pages point to it. In our approach, a species is important if it points to important species.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every few months or so, we read about some freaked out reporter/columnist/pundit/politician complaining about how the internet and texting are destroying kids' ability to write. Yet, pretty much every study on the subject has found the opposite to be true. Study after study after study after study after study have all found that kids today are better writers than in the past.

Clive Thompson writes about even more research on the subject, talking to a professor who suggests that, rather than "the death of writing" this is a renaissance:

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization."

That's because people are constantly writing. Almost all of this communication actually involves writing. In the past, outside of school -- or certain job functions, many people barely wrote at all. And, yes, kids use txt spk at times, but every generation changes and morphs the language. But, more importantly, kids are smart enough to know what's appropriate when in most cases:

Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

But there's also an interesting philosophical shift that he highlights. Since the type of writing and the audience is different than in the past, many younger people today approach writing in a different manner, and even have rethought what they consider to be good writing:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This is really fascinating when you think about it. Historically, many people haven't been that concerned about their writing, because it didn't matter. But, the more it matters, the more seriously they take it. This certainly doesn't mean that everyone has become a good writer -- far from it (just view any open comment forum). But, when people really care about what they're saying, they tend to get better at it, and the internet gives more people more reasons to care. As for all the bad writing out there? It's not a sign of the destruction of written English. Those people probably wouldn't be writing much at all without the internet. So it's actually a step up, relatively, from what they would have been doing in an alternate internetless universe.

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Interactive Flood Maps show us how familiar land contours will change as the oceans rise. (via Tim O'Reilly)

Over at Wired's Danger Room blog, news that an environmental nonprofit has obtained photos of the Department of Energy's "specially designed trucks" used to transport nuclear material around the United States. They pretty much look like any other transport truck, which is a little creepy, considering what they contain while they're rollin' down the highway. Just this week, a similar vehicle carrying missiles overturned -- so, safety concerns are in the air right now. Snip:

"The trucks carrying nuclear weapons and dangerous materials such as plutonium pass through cities and neighborhoods all the time and the public should be aware of what they look like," says Tom Clements of the Friends of the Earth group based in Columbia, South Carolina, which obtained the photos through a Freedom of Information Act request. "Release of these photos will help inform the public about secretive shipments of dangerous nuclear material that are taking place in plain view."

Here's the original news on the Friends of the Earth website.

In its continuing effort to make up for deleting unauthorized George Orwell ebooks from the Kindle, Amazon is apparently now offering $30 to those who lost their books. Well, actually it's a $30 check, gift certificate or they'll redeliver the book they deleted. Of course, assuming the ebooks cost less than $30 (Kindle's version of 1984 costs $9.99), it's difficult to see why people wouldn't just take the cash and rebuy the book themselves, if they wanted it.

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Looking for a way to liven up your maker classroom? How about some spiffy posters? No shipping hassles, here, these are pdf downloads. The files are on the large side, so your size limitation will be on finding a printer big enough to get the size you want. They look like 11" x17" should be no problem.

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Over at GrindEFX, they've put together a nice column discussing 5 Reasons Why Nobody is Buying Your Music, which touches on all the basics that we tend to talk about here. You should go read the full details, but the short list is:

1. Does anyone know?
2. Is your music up to scratch?
3. Are you giving your fans options?
4. Are you giving your fans a reason to buy?
5. Are your prices reasonable?

It's a good list -- and these days, I'm getting requests from too many musicians to respond to (though I try!), asking for help with improving their business models, so I may start pointing them to this list as well. My one quibble with the title is the focus on "selling the music." I think musicians need to get beyond that. By focusing on selling "the music" it keeps you away from the mindset where you realize you might be better off giving the music away for free, and having it promote something else (something scarce) that you can sell.

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Urchin writes "Shor's quantum algorithm, which offers a way to crack the commonly-used RSA encryption algorithm, has been demonstrated on a silicon chip for the first time. The algorithm was first demonstrated on large tabletop arrays 3 years ago, but the photonic quantum circuit can now be printed relatively easily onto a silicon chip just 26 mm long. You can see the abstract from the team's academic paper in the journal Science; the full text requires a subscription."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.