An anonymous reader writes "Help Net Security is running an interview with Rafal Rohozinski, a founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative which investigates, exposes and analyzes Internet filtering and surveillance practices all over the world. Rafal provides insight on the process of assessing the state of surveillance and filtering in a particular country and discusses differences related to these issues in several regions, touching especially the United States and Europe. In the US, censorship is more difficult to implement if for no other reason than the court systems offer greater protections for freedom of speech. However, in both places surveillance is on the rise particularly as law-enforcement agencies become more adept to working in the cyber domain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 - "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome"...

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life's core processes: the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.

The blueprints become transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins: oxygen-transporting haemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar. There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions. They build and control life at the chemical level.

An understanding of the ribosome's innermost workings is important for a scientific understanding of life. This knowledge can be put to a practical and immediate use; many of today's antibiotics cure various diseases by blocking the function of bacterial ribosomes. Without functional ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive. This is why ribosomes are such an important target for new antibiotics.
This year's three Laureates have all generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering.

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

A few weeks ago, reader cofiem sent over a blog post from musician Darren Hayes complaining about recording studios shutting down and blaming "piracy" for it. This morning, our submissions engine is getting overwhelmed with submissions about Wil Wheaton's rant against someone who posted a copy of Wheaton's audiobook, saying the guy is "stealing" from him.

Of course, we see content creators complaining about "piracy" or falsely claiming that it's "stealing" all the time -- but these two cases are slightly different. They're both cases where the content creators seem to be folks who otherwise actually do seem to "get it." They both do an amazing job connecting with fans, and setting up smart "reasons to buy." Hayes, for example, created a DVD "collectors' item" to go with his latest album. And he has a fan club setup, that encourages fans to pay a small fee to get all sorts of valuable (scarce) extras, beyond just the music. Wil Wheaton, of course, has been online for ages, and really interacts with lots of fans, and when he released his audiobook he made it cheap and didn't put DRM on it at all.

In other words, these are both the sort of content creators who are doing all the kinds of "right moves" that we talk about all the time, and seem to be getting rewarded for it. So, of course, it's disappointing to see them overreact and go a bit on the ballistic side when they see people sharing their works in some format -- but it's not that surprising. It's a perfectly natural reaction if you're not immersed that deeply in thinking through the long term implications of these things to simply not like it when people treat your works in a way other than you intended. There's nothing really wrong with that.

However, the question then comes up about what should be done about it. How do you respond to such people? It seems the smartest thing to do is to openly explain the other side of the coin: how these efforts can be embraced to further all of the really smart things that these content creators have already done. It's about getting them to realize that as scary as "the new world" is, one of the things they have to come to accept is that they can't necessarily control what others end up doing with their works. They can't dictate the terms by which fans will be fans. But, what they can do is try to put in place systems and models that benefit them when such things happen. Use that free sharing to encourage people to become stronger, more committed fans, and open up new places and opportunities to potentially offer them a reason to buy -- on their terms -- down the road.

It's never a huge surprise when someone who hasn't thought through this stuff carefully starts ranting about pirates and "stealing." But when it's someone who otherwise seems to get it, the situation is more one of disappointment. However, in most cases, those folks are at least open to listening to reason, and listening to their community, who can explain back to them ways in which they can benefit, rather than complain or blame. And, in fact, with Hayes, it looks like he took some of his community's words to heart and noted that there can be future models where "piracy" isn't necessarily a huge problem (though he's still unsure of how it works). Hopefully Wil Wheaton will listen to his community as well -- and let them point out how many other authors who have put their works online for free have seen that it tends to increase their fan community and increase sales over time.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Today on CRAFT: MAKE reader and father of two kids, Dave Simon contributes a great Halloween tutorial on how to make monster and alien feet.

From the article:

Where I work we cannot have elaborate costume festivities. Only one item of clothing can be "Halloweenish". For instance, one year your hat can be the costume, then another year the shoes you wear can be the costume. I intended to be a duck, and wanted to make the flippers. I took an old pair of foam shoes and carefully sprayed expanding foam around them so that I could carve them. They looked good as craggy monster feet, so instead I painted them as is, with gnarly toes and all. My daughter was always borrowing them so I made a pair for her for her third birthday. She loved them in pink and purple. (Monsters can be pretty, you know.) This Halloween, we'll be making some alien feet for my son.

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

coondoggie writes "Harvard researchers recently got a $10 million grant to create a colony of flying robotic bees, or RoboBees, to (among other things) spur innovation in ultra-low-power computing and electronic 'smart' sensors; and refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines. The 5-year, National Science Foundation-funded RoboBee project could lead to a better understanding of how to mimic artificially the unique collective behavior and intelligence of a bee colony; foster novel methods for designing and building an electronic surrogate nervous system able to sense and adapt to changing environments; and advance work on the construction of small-scale flying mechanical devices, according to the Harvard RoboBee Web site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

coondoggie writes "Harvard researchers recently got a $10 million grant to create a colony of flying robotic bees, or RoboBees to among other things, spur innovation in ultra-low-power computing and electronic "smart" sensors; and refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines. The 5-year, National Science Foundation-funded RoboBee project could lead to a better understanding of how to artificially mimic the unique collective behavior and intelligence of a bee colony; foster novel methods for designing and building an electronic surrogate nervous system able to deftly sense and adapt to changing environments; and advance work on the construction of small-scale flying mechanical devices, according to the Harvard RoboBee Web site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Noted teledouchebag Chris Hanson interrogates unrepentant pedocreep Roman Polanski in this long-lost episode of To Catch a Predator. (Remixed by TNOYF.com, via instapundit)

Josh W points us to an article about Microsoft new mobile phone software that contains an odd quote from Steve Ballmer, responding to a question concerning Microsoft's plans to compete with Google's free Android mobile operating system:

"Free is not a business model," he said. "We are a commercial company, we will look to gain revenue and profit from our activities. You'll have to ask our competitors if they'll make money on free things."

Internet explorer. Bing. Microsoft's new security software. All free. All offered by Microsoft. Is Steve Ballmer admitting that he doesn't know about any of these things... or is he just expecting that the reporter and the readers of the article are flat-out stupid? Clearly, Microsoft seems to recognize that free is a part of lots of smart business models, so why is it's CEO apparently acting clueless on this front? As clearly anyone who thought this through knows, free by itself is not a business model, but free, in combination with a larger business model often makes a lot of sense. That's what Google is doing, and it's what Microsoft is doing as well. So why is Steve Ballmer pretending otherwise?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Saw one of these on Burnet Rd. in Austin today. It's a Piaggio MP3. Apparently the front wheels "loosen up" at speed to allow for cornering, but are stiff at idle so you don't have to hold the bike up with your legs. There are, supposedly, other advantages as well. I'm no bike expert, but it seems like an interesting novelty. Glad, as always, of comments from those in the know.

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

nerdyH writes "Adobe yesterday chummed the waters around Flash and AIR as cross-platform app dev environments for mobile devices. It promised runtimes for several popular mobile OSes, including WinMo, Symbian, Palm webOS, and Android, with future RIM/Blackberry support hinted as well. Moreover, it reiterated its commitment to the Open Screen Project, an Adobe-led industry group that, if you deconstruct its name and look at its membership roster, appears tactically focused on enabling hardware acceleration of Flash/AIR on devices, as part of a larger strategy of making the runtimes ubiquitous as UI development frameworks for essentially every computer-like device with a user interface."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

University of Missouri engineers are building a nuclear battery the size of a penny. Their aim is to develop a long-lasting power source for tiny sensors, actuators, and labs-on-a-chip. While nuclear batteries sound, er, problematic, they're actually relatively common in larger form factors to power pacemakers and instruments aboard space vehicles. From MU News Bureau:

(Professor Jae Kown's) innovation is not only in the battery’s size, but also in its semiconductor. Kwon’s battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.

“The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor,” Kwon said. “By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.”

In the future, they hope to increase the battery’s power, shrink its size and try with various other materials. Kwon said that the battery could be thinner than the thickness of human hair.

"MU Researchers Create Smaller and More Efficient Nuclear Battery"

Tired of listening to the moon? Then take your ears to the stars with Jim Bumgardner's Wheel of Stars. Jim grabbed a bunch of freely-available data from the Hipparcos mission, and set it up like a music box to see what the sky might sound like. This is accomplished by making a projection of the stars as they appear from earth, then slowly spinning it around the north star, as illustrated below. The stars act like the pins on a music box, and are triggered when they cross the red line. The particular sound each makes is based on temperature, brightness and distance from the North Star. [via boingboing]

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

Toward the Sentient City is a new exhibition in New York that explores the broad theme of urban computing, where sensors, mobile devices, pervasive wireless, and the GeoWeb intersect with city streets. The exhibit runs until November 7 at the Architectural League of New York. While it seems like one of those "you had to be there" experiences, the Web site has a ton of detailed information about the five fascinating and provocative projects commissioned for the show. There are also nearly a dozen other existing works identified by the show's curators, including BB pal Eric Paulos's Citizen Science research. Here are summaries of the five new pieces, from a University of Buffalo press release:

• "Too Smart City" is a set of three street furniture pieces that come to life with embedded intelligence and robotic systems. The Smart Bench (image above), for instance, is described by its creators as "a gorgeous two seater that recognizes vagrancy and is capable of lifting people up and dumping them."

• "Amphibious Architecture" presents two networks of floating interactive tubes, installed in sites in the East River and the Bronx River, that house a range of sensors below water and an array of lights above water (image above). The sensors monitor water quality, presence of fish and human interest in the river ecosystem. The lights respond to the sensors and create feedback loops between humans, fish and their shared environment. An SMS interface allows citizens to text-message the fish, to receive real-time information about the river and to contribute to a display of collective interest in the environment.

• "Natural Fuse" harnesses the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants to create a city-wide network of devices that act as both electric outlets and resources that offset CO2 generated in the production of electricity.

• "Trash Tank" focuses on how pervasive technologies can expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. The project uses hundreds of small, smart, location-aware tags, a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust -- networks of tiny, locatable and addressable micro-electromechanical systems. These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city's waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real-time visualizations.

• "Breakout!" (co-created by my IFTF colleague Anthony Townsend -dp) uses three sets of special tools to explore the dynamic possibilities of a single question: what if the entire city was your office? Drawing inspiration from the shared office spaces of the co-working movement, "Breakout!" creates alternative venues for collaborative work outside of traditional office buildings by injecting lightweight versions of essential office infrastructure into urban public spaces.

Toward the Sentient City exhibition

owl in box [Reynen's Livejournal] Thanks, Dean!

coondoggie writes "NASA scientists have recalculated the path of a large asteroid known as Apophis and now say it has only a very slim chance of banging into Earth.. The Apophis asteroid is approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields and updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million, NASA stated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big year for flu suit fashion... In Japan -

The company has produced 50,000 of the suits and will start selling them on Thursday, according to a company spokesman. The suit is coated with the chemical titanium dioxide, which reacts to light to break down and kill the virus when it comes into contact with it, according to Junko Hirohata. The chemical is a common ingredient in toothpaste and cosmetics. The suit - which is indistinguishable from any other worn by Japan's legion of "salarymen" - comes in four colours and styles, which are medium grey, charcoal, navy and a grey pinstripe.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in News from the Future | Digg this!

Reader tail.man points out this press release from Debian which says that the port of the Debian system to the FreeBSD kernel will be given equal footing alongside Debian's several other release ports, starting with the release of Squeeze. Excerpting from this release: "The kFreeBSD architectures for the AMD64/Intel EM64T and i386 processor architectures are now release architectures. Severe bugs on these architectures will be considered release critical the same way as bugs on other architectures like armel or i386 are. If a particular package does not build or work properly on such an architecture this problem is considered release-critical.Debian's main motivation for the inclusion of the FreeBSD kernel into the official release process is the opportunity to offer to its users a broader choice of kernels and also include a kernel that provides features such as jails, the OpenBSD Packet Filter and support for NDIS drivers in the mainline kernel with full support."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The sponsors of this year's Halloween contest have sent us a bundle of, er, bundles to give away in the weeks leading up to the 31st, and we're gonna start chucking 'em up in the air pretty fast now. Beginning at noon PST today, and closing at noon PST tomorrow, we will be accepting comments, below, describing the Halloween-y use (or uses) to which you would put the prize bundle consisting of one Microchip Technology PIC10F Cap Touch Demo Board and one MCP1650 Multiple White LED Demo Board. The winner will be announced tomorrow afternoon at the bottom of the comment thread.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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

JWZ found this description of a button on the remote for his new projector: "If the picture size is compressed or enlarged by using the 16:9 aspect ratio when the projector is used for profitable purpose or in the presence of an audience (for example, in a coffee shop or at a hotel etc.), it may infringe the rights of the copyright owner of the original picture."

All that from one little button! Who knew that Congress passed a special 16:9 = piracy bill?

The manual for my video projector

Wil Wheaton's Dungeon-Mastering a pair of Dungeon Delves (45-minute speed-dungeons) at RinCon next weekend in Tucson, at $50/head to benefit Child's Play, a charity that sends toys, games, books and cash to sick kids. Sounds like a blast!

First, some history: Way back in the olden days, when 8 bits were enough to blow your mind on a 13-inch television and digital watches were a pretty neat idea, the concept of the Dungeon Delve was born. It's pretty straightforward: a group of players and a Dungeon Master sit down together, and the players have 45 minutes or so to make it through the end of a short dungeon, while the Dungeon Master does his best to kill them. The delve ends when the players defeat the final boss (or solve the final puzzle, or something like that), the time limit is reached, or the players all die horrible but noble and heroic deaths.

It's different from the collaborative storytelling experience that we experience in my regular D&D games, but it's still a hell of a lot of fun, and the time limit makes it perfect for running at conventions.

Wil Wheaton's 2009 Dwarven Dungeon Delve of Doom! Benefitting the Child's Play Charity

Check out this solar food deydrator made from reclaimed materials, and get started on your dried fruit recipes!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

This mini-dress sold on Etsy looks just like a pair of 3D glasses. The seller marked it as a Halloween item, but I think it's actually kind of cute for everyday wear... maybe? 3D glasses dress

tabascoj writes 'The announcement of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry is the latest reminder that fundamental components of biology are being increasingly, and aggressively, patented. A commentary, from yalepatents.org, focuses on the research and subsequent patents, held by Yale and Thomas Steitz, one of this year's laureates.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When I was visiting BoingBoing last spring, I told y'all about some research being done by Lewis Ziska from the USDA and Jackie Mohan from the University of Georgia on how poison ivy responds to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (Answer: In a way that kind of sucks for people.)

What I didn't tell you was how the scientists figured out that CO2 makes ivy grow incredibly fast, and problematically poisonous. While some of the evidence comes from controlled studies done in a tidy, little lab, there's more to it than that.

These look a bit like high-voltage electricity transmission towers, or a Stonehenge-style monument built for some forest-dwelling version of Burning Man. Suffice to say, they are neither. Instead, they're actually giant structures of PVC pipe that Ziska, Mohan and their colleagues built to test the effects of CO2 on wild forest. The base rings are a 100 feet in diameter and vertical piping goes up to the very top of the forest canopy. Six towers total, in use from 1998 until 2004. Three blowing air. And three blowing a heady mix of air and carbon dioxide that pumped parts of the forest up to the ambient CO2 levels predicted for the year 2050.

And that was how the team learned something really neat. When I posted about this research before, somebody here asked whether other plants, besides poison ivy, got the same growth spurt from CO2 exposure. At the time, I didn't know. But talking to Mohan more, I found out that there's at least some basis for comparison. In particular, let's talk trees, turkey.

Both trees and poison ivy grew faster, when exposed to higher concentrations of CO2, than their oxygen-only counterparts. But poison ivy grew faster than the trees--150% faster, in fact, compared to a 20% increase in tree growth. The difference, according to Jackie Mohan, is that poison ivy, like all vines, is a bit lazy.

"Vines don't need to devote so much of their CO2 resources to growing these big, woody trunks," she says. "Instead, they can devote that to growing more green leaves, which increase photosynthesis some more. And it becomes a cycle."

This study was the first time the effects of CO2 had been researched like this in the wild. The next step will be to see how the growth of poison ivy differs between rural areas and cities, where CO2 levels are naturally higher thanks to a higher concentration of cars and industrial pollution. Mohan is working on that now. It's too early to tell, but she expects to find that the urban ivy is bigger and tougher than its country mouse cousin.

All images courtesy Jackie Mohan and Duke University.

Over the past year, we've noticed an explosion in ridiculous attempts by music collection societies (often totally clueless about technology) to extend their ability to collect for positively ridiculous things (while also looking to significantly increase their collection rates). The latest, sent in by Dennis Laumen, is that the Dutch collection society, Buma/Stemra, is claiming that it's going to start charging bloggers 130 euros for every 6 videos they embed. This is, of course, technologically clueless. The embedding of a video doesn't change the fact that it's actually playing from and hosted at the original site (such as YouTube). All embedding does is allow the video to appear via the other page, even though, technically, it's all still happening at its original location. Claiming that this is somehow a "new" publication of the content is technologically incorrect.

This is somewhat similar to ASCAP's recent technologically clueless claim that embedding YouTube videos should count as a public performance (along with its other recent claims that iTunes 30-second previews and your mobile phone ringtones should also be counted as public performances). You sort of get the feeling that many of these collection societies came to the conclusion about two years ago that they're functionally obsolete, and rather than adapt to the times, they've all agreed to the same basic principle of going out in a blaze of glory. They're trying to vastly increase rates while covering any and ever attempt to use music in any way, bleeding everyone dry while making it that much more difficult for up-and-coming acts to get heard (since venues that promote them can't pay the crazy rates) and (even better) setting up their payout mechanisms to massively favor the top acts.

For the most part, these collection societies are simply being greedy, without putting a single thought towards actually helping composers and songwriters. They're looking for every single penny they could possibly collect today, and ignoring the medium and long-term impact of trying to charge for any sort of promotional behavior.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

A friend once told me that famed astronomer and noted head Carl Sagan wrote notes from his high self to his sober self to trust in his stoned revelations. I haven't confirmed that, but Sagan was definitely into the wacky tobaccy. In 1969, Sagan contributed a piece about his marijuana use for the book "Marihuana Reconsidered." Sagan wrote under the pseudonym of Mr. X, but he was later confirmed as the author.

From Marihuana Reconsidered:

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

"Mr. X by Carl Sagan" (via Dose Nation)

samzenpus writes "A 27-year-old man serving six years for stealing £6.5million using forged credit cards over the internet was recruited to help write code needed for the installation of an internal prison TV station. He was left unguarded with unfettered access to the system and produced results that anyone but prison officials could have guessed. He installed a series of passwords on all the machines, shutting down the entire prison computer system. A prison source said, 'It's unbelievable that a criminal convicted of cyber-crime was allowed uncontrolled access to the hard drive. He set up such an elaborate array of passwords it took a specialist company to get it working.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm digging the rocks supporting this 'Agua Table' by designer Domingos Tótora. Though they look totally real, they are actually made of recycled paper and glue. His website is made of unlinkable flash, however Contemporist has a nice set of photos showing how they are made.

The table is pretty nice, but I think I would want to make a giant boulder and roll it towards my anthropologist friends. What would you make out of fake rock? [via curbly]

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

Mother Jones shared the joy of "One Nation Under God," an epic religious painting by contemporary artist Jon McNaughton. You can scroll over the painting to ID the various folks, ranging from historical figures to symbolic characters such as the "Liberal News Reporter" who embodies how "most of the media today are biased towards the left and try to shape the thinking and actions of Americans in that direction." My favorite is the "Professor" gripping his copy of "Origin of Species." According to McNaughton, the Professor "represents the liberal lefts control of our educational system." Hidden in the shadows is none other than... Satan! "One Nation Under God" by Jon McNaughton

Zarrot writes 'If Sony's recent 3.00 PS3 firmware update bricked your console, you may now have legal recourse thanks to a class action suit against Sony. The complaint alleges that thousands of users (PDF) were affected by the update, and in some cases the PS3 hardware itself was damaged. It continues, 'For owners who sustained hardware damage from the Sony-required update, Sony is charging a $150 repair fee per unit. Sony, responding to the numerous complaints about the unacceptable effects of the defective update, released a further, optional update that it claimed "improves system stability" — yet performance problems continued, and the new update did nothing to remedy the systems of users who sustained hardware damage.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, here we go again. As you may recall, Eolas is a company that claimed to hold a patent (5,838,906) on browser plugins. The company sued Microsoft, and a long drawn-out battle ensued. Even though web inventor Tim Berners-Lee presented prior art and asked the USPTO to invalidate Eolas' ridiculously broad and obvious patent, the USPTO eventually upheld the patent (after initially rejecting claims). Even as Microsoft began presenting evidence that it actually had made use of the technology in question before Eolas applied for its patent, losses in the courts and the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case eventually resulted in Microsoft agreeing to settle rather than continue to fight.

Since then (two years ago), plenty of people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, concerning Eolas' plans to sue others. Now we know why it waited. It's now received a new patent -- a continuation patent, which is often used to abuse the patent system by putting forth a broad patent, then filing for continuations to make changes that let an earlier "invention" cover technologies that later become popular. In this case, the new patent (7,599,985), which basically just extends the earlier patent on browser plugins, and extends it to javascript widgets. Yes, those embeddable widgets used all over the web? It appears that Eolas thinks that those are infringing and everyone should pay up.

The new lawsuit has been filed against Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube. Apparently, starting small isn't part of the plan. Not surprisingly, Eolas filed in Eastern Texas using McKool Smith -- one of the most popular law firms representing patent holding firms in East Texas.

I am honestly curious how patent system defenders, who are also programmers, can defend this. I'm sure non-programmers will claim that the patent is valid, but I can't imagine how anyone who has any knowledge of basic programming principles can claim that such a patent is valid. In the meantime, tons of companies doing an incredibly basic thing on the web will now have to waste millions of dollars fighting a ridiculous patent lawsuit. How is this promoting innovation in any way shape or form?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Every other week, MAKE's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.

By Eric Chu, engineering intern

Let's admit it. We've all had thoughts of building our own robot of mass destruction. Well, I was able to do just that for my college class Engineering 102: Robotics Design Challenge ... sort of.

Last spring my class used the Lego NXT robotics platform to solve two engineering challenges. The first was to build a robot that can cross a pit filled with ping-pong balls, racquetballs, and mini whiffle balls. The second was to build a robot that navigates through a maze, distinguishes between orange and blue balloons, and pops all the orange balloons. Both challenges had a time limit of 2 minutes.

Meet Poke-e, my team's balloon-popping, maze-navigating robot:

Poke-e is made completely out of Lego Mindstorms NXT parts, except for the straight pins that are attached with green duct tape (generously donated by my friend, Dan). I felt horrible putting the non-Lego parts on, but at least it looked pretty killer afterward!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Intern's Corner | Digg this!

The Killing

Earlier this week I remarked on Twitter how much I enjoyed Stanley Kubrik's 1956 movie about a race track heist, The Killing. Jack Shafer replied, "Okay, now you're ready for Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer). It will change your life."

I checked Netflix and learned that Detour isn't available there. But I remembered that archive.org has a large collection of public domain movies, so I looked there and lo and behold, they had it. I downloaded the highest resolution version watched it. The quality was quite good, aside from a couple of wobbly parts and a second of missing dialogue.

Detour

Jack steered me straight. This 1946 black-and-white film is as grim, hard-boiled, and twisty as any film noir title I've ever seen. Al (Tom Neal) plays a talented pianist stuck in cheap joint in New York. He's got an attitude to match the atmosphere (when a patron gives him a ten-dollar tip after he plays an insanely complex piece, he remarks that it's just "a piece of paper crawling with germs.")

Naturally, Al falls for the house singer, but she won't marry him because he doesn't have enough money. When she goes to Hollywood to try to become an actress, Al quits his job and starts hitchhiking across the country to be with her. He doesn't know it, but when a flashy loudmouth in a big car picks him up, Al's fate is sealed. Ann Savage, playing a femme fatale who seethes with bitter poison, is a show stealer.

It turns out that Archive.org has a collection of 43 film noir titles. If you've seen any of them, I'd appreciate it if you added your recommendations in the comments.

Archive.org's Welcome to Film Noir: expressionistic crime dramas of the 40s and 50s: tough cops and private eyes, femme fatales, mean city streets and deserted backroads, bags of loot and dirty double-crossers.

nandemoari writes "It seems as if the massive phishing campaign reported yesterday was not specific to Hotmail, as was initially believed. According to a report by the BBC, many Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts have also been compromised. Earthlink, Comcast, and AOL were also affected. While the source of the latest attacks has not been determined, many are pointing to the same bug that claimed at least 10,000 passwords from Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail. Microsoft has done their part in blocking all known hijacked Hotmail accounts and created tools to help users who had lost control of their email. An analysis of the data from Hotmail showed the most common password among the compromised accounts to be '12345.' On their end, Google responded to the attacks by forcing password resets on the affected accounts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen. A work by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger. [via Neatorama]

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

(Re)cycler is the sequel to Lauren McLaughlin's fantastic debut YA novel, Cycler, an sf story about Jill McTeague, a high-school senior who turns into a boy for four days every month. Like Cycler, (Re)cycler is a smart, sensitive story about gender, sex and sexuality, leavened with a lot of wit and sass.

(Re)cycler picks up where Cycler left off, with Jill and her two best friends leaving small town Massachusetts for parts elsewhere. Jill lands in Brooklyn with her pal Ramie (who is also dating her male alter-ego, Jack) and commences to come of age in a setting that is frightening, dangerous, exciting and exotic.

Both Jack and Jill's voices are carried off fantastically in this story, coming across as confused but confident, and both characters grow in ways that are unexpected and extremely satisfying.

There's plenty of YA literature that treats sexuality as a problem to structure a morality play, but McLaughlin transcends cliche, and delivers instead a book that is sexy, smart, surprising and fun, without skimping on the hard emotional stuff.

(Re)cycler

New research from the Netherlands explores a placebo effect around high-definition TV. Of course, HD does look sharper, but the mind apparently can easily be tricked into thinking that regular TV is HD. From New Scientist (Wikimedia Commons image):

Sixty people in turn were shown the same video clip on the same television. Half were told to expect clearer, sharper pictures thanks to HD technology: an impression backed up by posters, flyers and the presence of an extra-thick cable connected to the screen. The other half were told to expect a normal DVD image.

Questionnaires revealed that the people who had been led to expect HD reported seeing higher-quality images. "Participants were unable to discriminate properly between digital and high-definition signals," says Lidwien van de Wijngaert at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, who carried out the study with colleagues from Utrecht University...

The results of the experiment might have been different had it taken place in North America, though, where conventional television uses the NTSC instead of the PAL technical standard. Picture quality is lower with NTSC, "so the difference compared with HD is much larger than for Europeans", says van de Wijngaert.

Think yourself a better picture

An anonymous reader writes "Engadget points out one of the more interesting ways to use a multitouch table surface so far. Researchers at Norrkoping Visualization Centre and the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization in Sweden have fitted such a device with stunning, volume-rendered visualizations of high-resolution MRI data. If you've ever wondered what the inside of a human being really looks like, but lacked the grit or credentials to watch an autopsy in the flesh, check it out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Engadget points out one of the more interesting ways to use a multitouch table surface so far. Researchers at Norrkoping Visualization Centre and the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization in Sweden have fitted such a device with stunning, volume-rendered visualizations of high-resolution MRI data. If you've ever wondered what the inside of a human being really looks like, but lacked the grit or credentials to watch an autopsy in the flesh, check it out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Animator/illustrator Giles Timms, whose short films we've featured on Boing Boing Video before, has just released a new video with a song by Ceri Frost.

The short version? "Enchanted by a pixie, a child called Yorick enters a magical kingdom, but when Yorick returns he finds his world ravaged by time." The video is set in a hand-drawn pen-and-ink world inspired by Edward Gorey, animated in a "paper cut-out" style.

Dead All Along (YouTube).

Will they never learn? Issuing bogus DMCA takedowns to get content down that you don't like, rather than which is actually infringing, is going to backfire. Badly. Last week, the website Photoshop Disasters put up a post showing a ridiculous Ralph Lauren ad with a woman who was too skinny to be alive. Boing Boing put up a post about it, along with the tag line "Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis." While some have questioned whether the ad is even real, one thing is clear: Ralph Lauren was not pleased. The company's lawyers at Greenberg Traurig sent DMCA takedown notices concerning both posts. Despite Blogger's new DMCA policy, Google still quickly took down the post at Photoshop Disasters, causing the site to ask whether or not Ralph Lauren or its lawyers have ever heard of the Streisand Effect (yay). BoingBoing's host, however, doesn't automatically take content down and passed along the info to BoingBoing, who quickly pointed out that this was clearly fair use (commentary, criticism, etc.) and the DMCA takedown wasn't being used to stop infringing content, but to stifle speech.



So, not surprisingly, BoingBoing put up a nice post explaining the whole thing, including a nice quote from lawyer Wendy Seltzer about fair use... and, of course, another version of the image, and dared Ralph Lauren to sue. Hopefully Ralph Lauren and its lawyers get the message and offer a quick apology. In the meantime, it makes you wonder what the hell anyone was thinking in sending out such a bogus DMCA. Do people really not recognize the consequences?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Just writing to say that Scripting News is on a hiatus this week. Not sure when I'll be writing again. But I'm still here, doing the best I can.

And thanks to everyone who wrote for the kind wishes.

Here's yet another fun way to lace your shoes using the loop-back method, if you're tired of the way you've got 'em now!

More:

Shoe Lacing Methods

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

Last month, Xeni blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body ("Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis"). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc.

However, Ralph Lauren's marketing arm and its law firm don't see it that way. According to them, this is an "infringing image," and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada's Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.

This one doesn't.

So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them. Hence this post.

As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, "Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that's different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I've rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter."

So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:

a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;

b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and

c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.

Update: Looks like Photoshop Disaster's ISP caved to a similar notice.

DMCA Infringement Notification

the_arrow writes "Scottish artist Edwyn Collins wanted to stream one of his own songs on MySpace, but it seems that copyright misunderstandings make him unable to do so. According to the article, 'Management for the former Orange Juice frontman have been unable to convince the website that they own the rights to A Girl Like You, despite the fact that they, er, do.' Collins said, 'I found a nice lawyer guy at Warners, very apologetic, promised to get it sorted, but all these months later it isn't.' His wife added, 'MySpace are not equipped to deal with the notion that anyone other than a major [label] can claim a copyright.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When I saw this picture last summer on the Awkward Family Photos blog, I had to know where it came from. Most of the commenters were convinced the answer was "a really freaky, messed-up hippie family." But one intrepid denizen of the Interwebs offered a better explanation.

In reality, these hand-knit people suits--made from angora--are the work of artist Anna Maltz. She makes them in the aforementioned "natural" version, but also in muppet-esque blue, mermaid, and Superman styles. Then she takes photos of people wearing the suits.

This video from San Francisco's KQED takes you along on one of Maltz's shoots.

And, if that's not enough to make her completely awesome, in 2004 Maltz apparently wrote an essay about her work called "Don't Be the Bunny." "Urinetown" references = +1000!

Everybody's favorite Xeni recently linked to this cool collection of slayer kits from around the web. Many of these are antiques and have sold for large sums at major auction houses, but I remain dubious as to how serious anyone ever really was about the whole business. [via Boing Boing]

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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

caffiend666 writes with news that scientists using the Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a very large, previously unknown ring around the planet Saturn. According to NASA, if the ring were visible to the naked eye from Earth, it would cover a patch of sky roughly twice the angular diameter of the Moon. "The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers. One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material. Saturn's newest halo is thick, too — its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring. ... The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. Spitzer's infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band's cool dust. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 107 million kilometers from Earth in orbit around the sun."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wonder what healthy baby-poo looks like? Wonder no more: here's a gallery of normal, healthy steaming baby excreta:

This photo guide to baby poop will give you a good idea of what's normal and what's not as your newborn grows, drinks breast milk or formula, and starts eating solids. You'll find out when not to worry and when it's wise to be concerned.

As a general rule, if you see anything completely out of the ordinary in your baby's diaper, play it safe and call the doctor.

Fair warning: These are pictures of real baby poop! Please view only if you're comfortable with that. If not, you can read this description without photos instead.

Baby poop: A visual guide (via Neatorama)

(Image: Diaper pail, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Ingamun's photostream)

Take a bite out of this, bitch. A mere $25,000 apiece! The very same cupcake art cars I zoomed around in for this Boing Boing TV episode are now offered for sale at upscale (and econopocalypse-beleaguered) retailer Neiman Marcus. Congrats to Lisa Pongrace and her fellow designers and builders bakers. Customized Cupcake Car (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

With the judge tossing the Veoh/Universal Music lawsuit last month, it certainly appeared that Viacom might be on weak ground when it came to its lawsuit with Google over YouTube infringement. As with the Veoh suit (which was nearly identical) the DMCA's safe harbors on service providers almost certainly should protect the service provider from the actions of its users (which is a good and reasonable thing). However, I'd been hearing rumors for a little while now of a "smoking gun" from Viacom, and Greg Sandoval is now reporting on the same thing: that during discovery Viacom came across emails showing that YouTube employees "knew" and discussed infringing content on the site and did nothing about it. On top of that, some YouTube employees supposedly uploaded infringing content as well. The key question, then becomes, did YouTube have "actual knowledge" of infringement, and if so, does that remove the DMCA's safe harbor provisions.

But, of course, nothing is that simple. When you're talking about a corporation, what constitutes "actual knowledge"? Is it one employee knowing about things? Is it one executive? And how does fair use play into all of this? Even if YouTube employees saw content that was uploaded in an unauthorized manner, were they then supposed to make a fair use determination as well? And, of course, none of this is particularly simple. According to Sandoval, the same discovery process may have turned up the fact that Viacom employees were also caught uploading infringing materials. This then opens a whole new can of worms. If even Viacom can't determine what's infringing or what's legit, why should YouTube be expected to have that knowledge. On top of that, if YouTube saw that people at Viacom were uploading such content, then how was it possible for YouTube to have any idea that Viacom didn't want the same content uploaded by others? Finally, even if this does constitute "actual knowledge," wouldn't it then mean that the liability for YouTube was limited to the few files of which they had knowledge, rather than the wider spectrum of infringing content? Does knowledge of a single infringing content take away all safe harbors on the other content?

Suddenly, the lawsuit may have become a lot more interesting in that it may address some of those questions...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I'd like to reassure everyone that Stormdrane is not paying me under the table. But public denials cost an extra $50 and he won't pony up the dough. So you're just gonna have to wonder. Seriously, I think I can't stop clicking through his blog because I'm looking for a "practical" excuse to tie one of these awesome knots. So far, this is the best one I've found. I may actually have to cave in and buy some neon paracord.

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

alphadogg writes "Microsoft appears to have reached an agreement with the European Commission that concludes an antitrust battle that has lasted a decade, Europe's top competition regulator said today. A proposal the company offered in July to address charges of monopoly abuse were dismissed as insufficient by the Commission, as well as by rivals in the software industry. But the latest iteration appears to have mollified the EC's regulator. 'We believe this is an answer,' said competition commissioner Neelie Kroes in a press conference. 'I think this is a trustful deal we are making. There can't be a misunderstanding because it is the final result of a long discussion between Steve Ballmer and me.' The new settlement offer addresses charges that Microsoft distorted competition in its favor in the market for web browsers, by giving its Internet Explorer browser an unfair advantage over rivals." The Register points out this interesting quote from the materials Microsoft released on the subject: "Microsoft shall ensure that third-party software products can interoperate with Microsoft's Relevant Software Products using the same Interoperability Information on an equal footing as other Microsoft Software Products."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dotnaught writes "Solid Oak Software, maker of Internet filter CYBERsitter, on Monday filed a $1.2 million copyright infringement lawsuit against CBS Interactive's ZDNet China for distributing the Green Dam Internet filtering software. Green Dam was going to be mandatory on all PCs in China starting in July, but widespread criticism, including reports of stolen code, forced the Chinese government to reconsider. The lawsuit, if it succeeds, could force companies to give more thought to the risks of complying with mandates from foreign governments that violate US laws."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The twice-monthly Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those just slightly off to the side). Every other Wednesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" was also the theme of MAKE, Volume 17

---

One of the cool things about doing this column is discovering lost technologies myself, things I knew nothing about before bumping into them while poking about the virtual attics and basements of cyberspace, looking for things to write about. For instance, I knew nothing about stick chart navigation before covering it here. And I'd certainly seen timbrel vaulting before, but didn't know that's what it was called, or how it worked.

We got such a great response to my last column on wire-wrapping (which was awhile ago, thanks to a most unwelcomed medical absence). There were site comments, emails, tweets, and Flickr photo pointers of people fondly, or not so fondly, remembering this disappearing art of circuit assembly. Several people mentioned cable lacing and that I should do a column on that next. I had no idea what cable lacing was, but one of the commenters pointed me to the Wikipedia page and another to Impulselabs' amazing photos on Flickr. Impulselabs describes the practice very succinctly:

The bundling is done with a technique called "cable lacing". A series of knots and stitches from a continuous piece of wax impregnated cotton or twine are used to bundle cables together. It takes some practice, but it'll outperform zipties in that it won't crush the insulative jackets on wiring and that it's not going to shift axially on you if it's loose. Likewise, my bundles have a rectangular cross section. Zipties can't conform and keep bundle shapes other than ellipses.

Cable lacing was cable management technique before zipties, used in the telecom industry, aerospace, marine applications, and elsewhere. The thin cord used is traditionally a waxed linen. Modern materials used today in flat "lacing tape" include nylon, polyester, and Nomex. There are different methods of lacing, such as the common marline hitch, seen here:

Here's an illustration from an old ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook, showing the marline hitch:

This one is another common lacing method, the "NASA-style" spot tie. Not nearly as elegant as a marline, but I guess it gets the job done:

Here's a page from "Workmanship and Design Practices for Electronic Equipment," showing different lacing and tying methods.

And here's a how-to on the Historic Naval Ships Association website.

There's not much more out there on the practice. If you do a search, you will find some images on various discussion boards of computer modders and others trying their hand at cable lacing the wiring inside of their computers and between the gear of their home media centers. It's nice to see that at least some folks are keeping the art alive.

 

More:

• Wire-wrapping
• Lost Knowledge: Stick chart navigation
• Lost Knowledge: Timbrel vaulting
• Lost Knowledge: Online resources
• Lost Knowledge: Homemade electronic components
• Lost Knowledge: Island tricks
• Lost Knowledge: Airships
• Lost Knowledge: The Catalog
• Lost Knowledge: The Antikythera Device
• Lost Knowledge: Village tech in West Papua, Indonesia
• Lost Knowledge: Neon lights
• Lost Knowledge: Reanimating Dead Media
• Lost Knowledge: Manual typewriters

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

Our friends over at iFixIt.com just couldn't keep their screwdrivers and spudgers off of the new Coolpix S1000pj, the digital camera with a built-in video projector. They just had to find out how Nikon fit all that bleeding-edge tech into that tiny camera case.

Here's some of what they discovered in their testing and teardown:

* A room has to be quite dark to view the projector's image properly. We expected as much given the size of the projector, but the image quality is mediocre at best. Anything that's projected looks like it was shot in the '70s.

* Surprisingly, both the front and rear outer cases are machined out of aluminum. It's quite a solid camera.

* The speaker pumps out some pretty solid sound when the camera is in projector mode.

* Like most compact digital cameras with no externally telescopic lenses, the S1000pj's internal zoom lenses move perpendicular to the front face.

* Light has to travel through at least four glass lenses until it shines on the CCD sensor. What a journey!

* Disassembling this camera is not for the faint of heart -- Nikon definitely did not intend this device to be user serviceable. We had to de-solder a bunch of components including the camera cover actuator, projector LED, and flash bulb.

* Light for projecting images is supplied by a very powerful LED that even has its own heat sink to conduct heat to the aluminum front panel.

Nikon Coolpix S1000pj Teardown

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

Toe, The writes "On Tuesday, AT&T announced it will allow Apple to enable Voice over Internet Protocol applications, such as Skype, to run on its 3G wireless data network. Apple stated, 'We will be amending our developer agreements to get VoIP apps on the App Store and in customers' hands as soon as possible.' And Skype, while happy over the move, also stated, 'the positive actions of one company are no substitute for a government policy that protects openness and benefits consumers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of folks have sent over the incredible story of how the FBI investigated well-known programmer Aaron Swartz, after discovering that he had installed a perl script on a computer at the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago, to cycle through PACER documents and upload them to an Amazon S3 account. Basically (as we've discussed in the past), court documents -- which are in the public domain -- are mostly locked up in the gov't's PACER system, which costs $0.08/page. However, since the documents are public domain, once you get them, you're free to do what you want with them. The Government Printing Office started an experiment last year, offering free access to PACER in certain libraries. Swartz just went to one and then installed his script to cycle through and upload those documents. The library's IT staff eventually noticed the issue (it took a few weeks) and alerted the FBI who began an investigation of Aaron, after Amazon handed over his info. While you can sorta understand why the FBI might look into why someone had installed a program on a court library computer, once it became clear that it was only accessing public domain documents, it seems pretty silly to have continued onward -- including driving by his home and considering a stakeout.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

You remember that Ralph Lauren marketing image featuring an implausible thin model whose head is bigger than her pelvis? The one that prompted Ralph Lauren's marketing arm to send us a legal threat because we made fun of it?

Yeah, that one.

Well, Natasja Capelle, a freelance designer, has detouched the image to restore the model to something like a healthy, well-proportioned stature. Want to play along? Make your own detouched image, post a link in the comments. The best images will receive (possibly) a legal threat from Ralph Lauren and an entirely virtual but nevertheless highly valuable appreciative ovation from all over the world.

The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn't want you to see! (Thanks, Natasja!)

Reader oranghutan brings us another in Computerworld's series of interviews with icons of the programming world, this one with Brian Kernighan, who helped popularize C with his book (co-written with the creator Dennis Ritchie) The C Programming Language, and contributed to the development of AWK and AMPL. In the past we've chewed over a few other interviews in this series, including those with Martin Odersky on Scala and Larry Wall on perl. "In this interview, Brian Kernighan shares his tips for up-and-coming programmers and his thoughts on Ruby, Perl, and Java. He also discusses whether the classic book The Practice of Programming, co-written with Rob Pike, needs an update. He highlights Bill and Melinda Gates as two people doing great things for the world enabled through computer science. Some quotes: 'A typical programmer today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps. There are more languages in regular use and programs are often distributed combinations of multiple languages. All of these facts complicate life, though it's possible to build quite amazing systems quickly when everything goes right.' 'Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've come across some pretty cool headphones, but most of them lack the mic and remote of the newer Apple earphones that come with the iPhone. This mod is pretty much what you'd expect, but sometimes a good visual cue helps trigger the creative process. In the accompanying video Andreas Ødegaård walks through swapping out the inferior Apple drivers for a set of Sennheiser CX300 drivers from a broken pair. Not only does this create a superior product that could never be purchased in a store, but it re-uses something that would otherwise have been thrown out with the trash.

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

A recent article at Bitmob sought to tackle the question of whether games could carry political meaning, arguing the negative since "The money, the media representation, and the general shadow of 'triviality' will always trail the word 'game,' because that is what makes it open to all markets." An opposing viewpoint has been posted by Lee Bradley, who says, "Perhaps the most profound shift in the games industry in the last few years has been the explosion of co-op. Not only are developers dedicating more and more time to providing co-op experiences in their games, they are also finding new ways of exploring the dynamic within it. ... Even in games where the co-operative element of co-op is less pronounced, the ideology is the same; you are not on your own anymore, you are part of a team. What's more, that team is more than likely multi-cultural and/or multi-gender. ... Now, this isn't to say that the lone white-guy hero has been eradicated. Far from it; the bald, white space-marine is one of the most over-used characters in modern gaming. But it increasingly rare that they are lone heroes. A shift towards team-based, co-op featured games is undeniable. In this way, mainstream video games, even those seemingly void of political statement, are implicitly political. While for the most part they are not designed to tackle political issues head-on, or carry overt political messages, they do reflect the values and the popular ideology of the culture in which they were created."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm working on a new project and I need an electrical connection that can rotate 360 degrees. I could purchase a slip ring, rotating electrical connector, or better yet a rotary transformer. Then again, I could just try to make one from a DC motor. Do you have any suggestions for making, or *gasp* buying, a slip ring connectors? If so leave them in the comments. Thanks!

In the Maker Shed:


MiniPOV kit

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Dave Title recently had a post on his My Media Musings blog, where he talks about a student "lip dub" music video, which he notes almost certainly violates copyright law, but that it would be really dumb for the copyright holder (in this case, whoever holds the copyright on music by the Black-Eyed Peas) to enforce. Then Title busts out a line that should be repeated often:

Protecting a copyright often seems to fly in the face of good business.

Bingo. This is an argument we've been making for over a decade. There are many in both business and law who seem to assume that because you can enforce a right, it means that it always makes business sense to enforce that right. And yet, as we see over and over and over again, it's quite often not the case at all. In an awful lot of cases, very strong arguments can be made that the reverse is true and that protecting your copyright actually does a lot more damage than good.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Absinthe & Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. Need we say more? Written for reasonable risk takers and suburban dads who want to add more excitement to their lives. This daring combination of science, history, and DIY projects explains why danger is good for you and details the art of living dangerously.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

Spotted in the wild by the inestimable Fipi Lele, a modded US dollar bill with extra juvenile hilarity. I've seen lots of variations on this theme, but these two gags are new to me.

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Warren Ellis has put an open call out to Whitechapel readers who have Etsy stores for their crafts to pimp their offerings for early Xmas shopping. So far, we've got wool candy, steampunk jewellery, surreal paintings, paintings of demon cats, handmade jewellery, custom toys, fashion, goggles, felted dissected animals, hand-dyed wool, chainmail, etc etc. Instant clicktrance!

Warren's Pub Table: [Sticky] Etsy People Stand Up (late 2009)

(Image: Knitted Fetal Pig Biology Project)

A reader writes, "Disney's Imagineers realize that the eyes convey emotions and a two-foot eye prototype showcases the newest concept for animatronic models."

Imagineers realize that the eyes convey emotions and a two-foot eye prototype showcases our newest concept. It's a new type of mechanism that uses electromagnets to create realistic eye motions. There is only a single moving part -- the eye itself -- and no wear points. That means faster, more realistic movement and longer life.

As Disney Parks continues to experiment and innovate, as with our newest Autonomatronics technology, we'll certainly be talking about it on this blog. Stay tuned.

Hands, Eyes Convey Emotions For Disney's Audio-Animatronics Technology

Bre sez, "Fynflood used his MakerBot [ed: 3D printer] to create a ring and then proposed with it! She said yes!"

The ring I printed, and then used to propose to my girlfriend.

I printed it with black ABS, and then printed a small white cube and set it with some magic glue eagleapex left at Hive.

I drew the 2d shape in gimp, then had a friend render it in 3d using sketchup (I fail at 3D). I made some adjustments using Blender for the final print.

She said yes! Now to get our MakerBot to print with white gold.

MakerBot LOVE (Thanks, Bre!)

Eileen Gunn sez, "Michael Swanwick and I have dragged steampunk kicking and screaming out of the Victorian era, slapped it about a bit and tossed it, still writhing, into an Art Deco cityscape. Tor.com editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden described our story, Zeppelin City as "a stew of Metropolis, King Kong, Brazil, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme" and has published it as part of Tor.com's Steampunk Month. Michael and I worked on this story for so long that-- well, suffice it to say, as Michael does, that when we started it, the technology was cutting edge. Is it really steampunk? You decide. The fabulous illustration for the story, by Benjamin Carre, totally captures the cityscape with autogyro and zeppelin."

Zeppelin City (Thanks, Eileen!)

GOOD's executive compensation infographic shows the compensation levels of the business world's top execs, with the number of minimum wage earners each super-suit's take-home pay would support.

Top 8 of 2008 CEO Compensation

(via Digg)

Ravensblight has a great collection of free spooky papercraft models, just in time for Hallowe'en.

free Human Skull paper model (via Paper Forest)

Reader JC just submitted this fantastic haunted house prop to our Make: Halloween Contest 2009. It's a recreation of the always-lovely female lead from 1962's sci-fi camp classic The Brain That Wouldn't Die, immortalized in 1993 as Mystery Science Theater 3000's experiment 513 (and, arguably, before that by Steve Martin's The Man with Two Brains).

"She won't be doing any heavy lifting for awhile..."

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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

In Australia, a court wrapped up day one of what promises to be a 4-week trial of media interests against ISP iiNet. Reader bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft investigators claim to have recorded almost 100,000 instances of Australian internet service provider iiNet users making available online unauthorized copies of films and TV programs, lawyers for the film industry said in the Federal Court in Sydney today. The lawyers for the film industry claimed iiNet had done 'nothing' to discourage copyright infringement on its network. iTnews also has a background piece on the case, with a Flash-y graph."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Australia, a court wrapped up day one of what promises to be a 4-week trial of media interests against ISP iiNet. Reader bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft investigators claim to have recorded almost 100,000 instances of Australian internet service provider iiNet users making available online unauthorized copies of films and TV programs, lawyers for the film industry said in the Federal Court in Sydney today. The lawyers for the film industry claimed iiNet had done 'nothing' to discourage copyright infringement on its network. iTnews also has a background piece on the case, with a Flash-y graph."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justin Zak sends in a photo he took of what's apparently the Austin American Statesman's latest attempt to convince people that a hardcopy newspaper has more value than an online newspaper: If you can't read it, that little ad block at the bottom reads: "Newspapers Make Great Umbrellas." That'll convince the online masses...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Tony sez, "Attached is a stop-motion video my filmmaker friend Justin Grizzoffi and I made a couple of years ago. It was super easy to make - we simply edited together a couple hundred still photos of Post-Its stuck to a wall and scored it using samples from an old Casio SK1 keyboard."

Post-It Note Atari (Thanks, Tony!)

Rina writes,

Saturday is Litquake Day! And we have a very special reading for you.

Color Me SF: The Science Fiction Worlds of Octavia Butler and Carl Brandon

Our guests reading will be Jewelle Gomez & Claire Light. There will also be discussion on Butler and Brandon,and Q & A moderated by Terry Bisson. We will be charging $5 at the door, with all of the money going to the Octavia Butler Scholarship. Bar proceeds for the night will also go to the Scholarship. Tips, as usual, will go to Variety Children's Charity of Northern California.

At The Variety Preview Room, The Hobart Bldg., 582 Market St. @ Montgomery, 1st floor of The Hobart Bldg. Entrance is between Quiznos and Citibank
Doors Open 6:00pm
Readings start 7:00pm
Seating is limited; first come first seated; we will have the event miked so that you can hang in the lounge and listen.

Saturday is Litquake Day

Joe sez, "My friend Julia is a choreographer who is doing some really interesting work looking at how sampling and fair use questions apply to the world of dance. This link is an artist's statement on an upcoming show, Punk Yankees:

I had the good fortune of receiving a choreographic fellowship from the Maggie Alessee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) to support the research and initial development of Punk Yankees, which is the title of our anniversary concert. While at MANCC, I began working with the ensemble to address my research questions: What defines "fair use" in dance? Is it permissible to "borrow" choreographic devices if the movement is reinvented? If the dancers can't execute the movement in the way it was originally intended, is there something interesting about that failure? If someone "stylistically" references a choreographer, should it be acknowledged as a derivative work, or is it what naturally occurs through dance education and lineage? Ultimately what we created was a work-in-progress that experimented with meta-theatrical devices and formal conventions to elucidate these provocative questions with transparency and humor.

The title Punk Yankees came from some research I was doing online about piracy and art. Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate's Dilemma, talks about the fact that piracy and appropriation (in the sense of intellectual property) has historically been linked to the creation of new markets, which he calls a form of "punk" capitalism. He also traces the word "Yankee" to an old Dutch slang word "Janke," meaning pirate. Ironically, Matt Mason was recently a keynote speaker at Dance/USA's Annual Conference in Houston, TX (June 3-6), in the session "Fair Use and Piracy: How They Each Support a Sustainable Dance Field."

How do appropriation and copyright inform your work?

Steal this Dance

valderost writes "Out-law.com reports on a finding of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, in favor of an individual reselling Autodesk's AutoCAD software in 'his claim that he owned the software and had the right to sell it on.' The decision hinges on some technicalities in the Autodesk license and conflicting precedents involving a Vanessa Redgrave film, but it's good news for the idea that a software purchase is just that. 'The Court said that it had to follow [the film] case's precedent because it was older than another conflicting ruling, and that it could not choose a precedent based on the most desirable policy. "The court's decision today is not based on any policy judgment. Congress is both constitutionally and institutionally suited to render judgments on policy; courts generally are not," the Court ruled. "Precedent binds the court regardless of whether it would be good policy to ignore it."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oh, the unfortunate irony. The annotations on this Google Map are all in Chinese, so it's of little utility for a non-Chinese-speaker like myself -- but it's the most extensive such documentation I've seen about the jail locations of persons in China imprisoned for online dissidence. (via @rmack)

The groovy video for this new track "Sunlamp Show" by The Aliens is Yellow Submarine-esque madness. A Scottish band, The Aliens feature Gordon Anderson, John Maclean, and Robin Jones, formerly of Beta Band. The Aliens' new album, Luna, was released in the US today by Birdman Records. The Aliens (Thanks, DKN!)

One good thing in US copyright law compared to other countries is that we don't allow copyright on pure facts or on gov't produced information. Other countries aren't nearly as good about that, with ridiculous concepts like "Crown Copyright." Over in the UK, for example the Royal Mail has apparently bullied some site for making postal code data available. The info has now been taken offline, as the site claims it doesn't have the legal resources to fight this. The Royal Mail says that it was a violation of its intellectual property, and, of course, wants to license the database of postal codes at a mere £4,000 per year -- a bit steep for smaller community or non-profit sites. So, can anyone explain how copyright makes sense here? Was copyright really the incentive necessary to create postal codes?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

German expressionism meets film noir meets Saturday morning cartoon funnies. Quickdraw Noir. "The rare noir episode of Quickdraw McGraw that featured Peter Lorre. With music by Andy Prieboy." Created by the great Merrill Markoe, who is perhaps best known as David Letterman's original head writer -- she won 5 Emmys for the show. She oughta get one for this, IMHO. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

Rad...

Astronaut Mike Massimino became the first human to tweet from space on his final trip to repair the Hubble telescope. It was no contest, however, that he recently also became the first astronaut to reach one million followers on Twitter (@Astro_Mike).

Who will be the first chemist to have 1 million followers? Measuring things by twitter is silly, but still - it's encouraging.

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

(Update: From a French documentary film, says this 2004 snopes item.) This minute-and-a-half long YouTube video appears to show a mommy giving birth to her baby in a pool of water, while a curious dolphin swims and pokes around. What I don't know: Is this real life? Is it viral marketing? A film trailer? Fodder for some new furries fantasy site? Is the idea of a dolphin poking around the mom's ladyregions cute or disturbing? What does the infant think? How long can infants breathe underwater while connected via umbilical cord? Where did the video come from? Why can't I stop watching? Discuss. (via @tara, and others)

Jim Bumgardner has created a lovely sound project that brings to life the music of the spheres: "Wheel of Stars."

I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars.

The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

Sean Bonner, upon whose blog I discovered this, says, "I highly recommend fullscreen and the use of headphones. Listening to this is hypnotic. I want it to play constantly in the background of my life."

netbuzz writes "No longer will those applying to MIT have to write the storied 'long' essay — long as in 500 words. 'We wanted to remove that larger-than-life quality to that one essay and take away a bit of the high-stakes nature of that one piece,' says the dean of admissions. Not everyone agrees with the bow to brevity, including a current MIT student who penned a scathing critique in The Tech and offers up her own essay as an example of what the form can provide to both MIT and the applicant." [125 words, including these.]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave points us to a recent interview with Lester Brown, who's been pushing for alternative energy for years. I'd actually heard about his book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization a few months ago when someone pointed out that he was giving away his book for free, but I hadn't heard much more about it. Yet, in the interview, he mentions that the book can be downloaded, which appears to surprise the interviewer, who seems to assume that this means the guy is willing to give up revenue to get his ideas out there by noting "you do feel strongly about this." But then Brown points out that it's not hurting sales at all, but quite the opposite:

Dr. BROWN: No problem. Incidentally, "Plan B 4.0" is online at earthpolicy.org. It can be downloaded free of charge.

FLATOW: No kidding.

Dr. BROWN: Yeah.

FLATOW: Wow. You do feel strongly about this.

Dr. BROWN: Yeah. And it's interesting, people think this must reduce sales. In fact, it increases sales.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Dr. BROWN: Just between the two of us

Of course, this is hardly the first author to recognize this, but add another one to the pile. It's about recognizing that obscurity is a bigger risk that piracy, and then figuring out how to get more attention and then giving people a real reason to buy on top of that attention.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

"It", in this case, referring to "The Right Stuff". Brandon Keim at Wired Science had a great post yesterday about attempts by NASA contractors to get women into the space program during the late 1950s. The (ultimately unsuccessful) charge was led by Randy Lovelace--the doctor responsible for putting together health tests for astronaut hopefuls during the original Mercury 7 selection process--and Donald Flickinger--an Air Force general. Flickinger founded the Women in Space Earliest program in 1959, Keim writes...

But the Air Force canned it before testing even started, prompting Lovelace to start the Woman in Space Program. Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts. Thirteen of them -- later dubbed the Mercury 13 -- passed "with no medical reservations," a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as any of the men

It's pretty fascinating stuff, I just wish Keim had included more biographical information on the women involved. Unlike the male astronaut candidates, they couldn't have come from the Air Force (and 1959 seems a little late for women who'd been with the WAC in World War II to be in prime physical condition), and yet, the women were trained, experienced pilots. There's some great stories fluttering in the shadows around this piece. I, for one, would love to know more.*

*Read: I would kill to interview one of these women. If you, your mom, or your grandma were involved, email me. Seriously.

Fall is the perfect time for hiking, it's not too hot and not too cold. Last weekend I took a day trip to hike up High Mountain in New Jersey and activate SOTA summit W2/NJ008. It's really easy to set up an HF portable radio and not a whole lot to carry up the mountain. This video shows how to get set up including how to hang the antenna in a cluster of trees and making contact with Italy.

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

Too lazy to actually get out and take pictures? Then you might want to check out Photosketch, an interesting research project by researchers at Tsinghua University. Starting with a basic sketch consisting of shapes and tags describing what you want, the software searches a database of images and finds things that will fit.

Their site is suspiciously down, at the moment, however kottke posted a link to their research paper. Hopefully this actually gets released!

[Thanks Stuart!]

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

Given all the talk in DC lately about anti-competitive exclusive cellphone distribution arrangements, it's very interesting to see a rumor broken by the Globe and Mail about the iPhone in Canada. According to The Globe, Rogers will soon lose its iPhone exclusive as both TELUS and Bell Mobility add the iconic device to their Christmas line-up. Bell and TELUS are migrating away from the CDMA technology they have used up to 3G, towards the more globally compatible GSM evolutions. To minimize costs, the two carriers are building a single shared-infrastructure network, on which they will both sell services. While Rogers, the long-time GSM user, will have the wider network footprint and offer iPhones fall-back to their 2G data networks when out of 3G coverage, that advantage is countered by TELUS and Bell offering 3.5G HSPA+ speeds to Rogers' 3G. Under current coverage conditions, iPhone urbanites might prefer the new entrants, while sub-urbanites may prefer Rogers.

What is most interesting here is the break from Apple's conventional one-country-one-carrier strategy, which has attracted the attention of more than a few countries' regulators. The Canadian case will be the first market where competing carriers offer the iPhone, without a regulator forcing Apple's hand. Perhaps Germany will follow Canada: there are rumors that T-Mobile will lose their exclusive deal with Apple by year's end, and British/Spanish carrier O2 will enter the market with preferable iPhone plans. In the USA, most of the hot water Apple is swimming in is because the FTC isn't happy with the iPhone app approval process, which nixed the Google voice app. But while the FTC branch is focused on the App Store, some Congressional Reps are voicing their displeasure at the exclusive iPhone deal with AT&T. Governments around the world aren't sure what to make of exclusive phone distribution deals - which, strangely, never seemed to raise an eyebrow until the iPhone. In France, the Orange-Apple 5-yr exclusive was smacked down by the feds who argued that an exclusive arrangement would add "a new element of rigidity in the sector which is already suffering from a lack of competition." But here's where I'm not so clear.

I agree that exclusives, when examined in isolation, are anti-competitive. But overall, I'm not clear on how a 2007 new entrant (Apple), with a disruptive device that lit a fire under the incumbent vendors, could be perceived as "anti-competitive" in terms of net results. In fact, the exclusivity has undeniably forced the competing carriers to work their butts off to come up with a comparable device, seeking it from the likes of Nokia, Samsung (which are scrambling to respond, though they'd never admit it), or newer players like HTC or INQ. The exclusive deals seem to be spurring competition. In contrast, in a world where every telco carries the iPhone, the telcos actually can worry less about offering something else that's equal or better. I suppose someday it could make sense to go after Apple exclusives, but why not wait until the net effect on society is actually negative in some measurable way? A good rule for government should be, "When in doubt, leave it alone."

Meanwhile, the Canadian case will certainly offer Canadians more choice among iPhone providers, and most notably iPhone plans. Canadians tasted the bitter flavor of inadequate competition when iPhone data plans were first announced there in mid 2008. Three-year contracts, no unlimited data plan, high per-MB pricing, and a triple lock-in. Yes, Canada may soon see more service competition around the iPhone -- but will Canada see more or less device competition?

Derek Kerton is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Derek Kerton and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Pickens writes "The BBC reports that researchers are digitizing the captains' logs from the voyages of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle, Captain Cook from HMS Discovery, Captain Bligh from The Bounty, and 300 other 18th and 19th century ships' logbooks to provide historical climate records for modern-day climate researchers who will use the meteorological data to build up a picture of weather patterns in the world at the beginning of the industrial era. The researchers are cross-referencing the data with historical records for crop failures, droughts and storms and will compare it with data for the modern era in order to predict similar events in the future. 'The observations from the logbooks on wind force and weather are astonishingly good and often better than modern logbooks,' says Climatologist Dr. Dennis Wheeler from the University of Sunderland. 'Of course the sailors had to be conscientious. The thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right!' The logbooks will be online next year at the UK's National Archives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.