Back in July, we wrote about an annoyed videogamer who sued Sony for banning him from the Playstation 3 game "Resistance" for things he said to other players in the game. He claimed it was a violation of his First Amendment rights -- though, as we explained at the time (and, as anyone actually familiar with the First Amendment already knows), the First Amendment only covers actions by the government, not private corporations. Sony has every right to bring down the banhammer if it wants to. It should come as no surprise then, that the judge wasted little time explaining this to him in the process of dismissing the case. However, there is one interesting aspect, as highlighted by Eric Goldman in the link above. The judge rejected the idea that Sony might be covered by the First Amendment as a "company town." Goldman points out that some have suggested this argument in the past, and now there's at least one ruling that totally rejects it:

Sony's Network is not similar to a company town. The Network does not serve a substantial portion of a municipality's functions, but rather serves solely as a forum for people to interact subject to specific contractual terms. Every regulation Sony applies in the Network is confined in scope only to those entertainment services that Sony provides. Although the Network does include "virtual spaces" such as virtual "homes" and a virtual "mall" that are used by a substantial number of users (Pl.'s Reply in Supp. of Opp'n. to Dismiss 1), these "spaces" serve solely to enrich the entertainment services on Sony's private network. In providing this electronic space that users can voluntarily choose to entertain themselves with, Sony is merely providing a robust commercial product, and is not "performing the full spectrum of municipal powers and [standing] in the shoes of the State." Hudgens, 424 U.S. at 519 (quoting Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551, 568-69 (1972)).

Sony does not have a sufficient structural or functional nexus to the government. Plaintiff has not suggested that Sony is part of the state or federal government. The Network was not created to further government objectives. The government retains no permanent authority to appoint any directors of Sony or the Network, or any other private body associated with the Network. There is no indication that Sony has assumed functions traditionally reserved to the government, or that the government had any part in encouraging Sony to create the Network. Count one of the complaint does not state a plausible First Amendment claim for relief, and therefore must be dismissed.

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Several sources are reporting that IBM is facing an antitrust inquiry from the US Department of Justice due to a supposed refusal to issue mainframe OS licenses to competitors. "Part of CCIA's complaint stems from the tech giant's treatment of former competitor Platform Solutions. IBM had little competition in the mainframe market when Platform Solutions, early this decade, began work on servers that could mimic the behavior of more expensive IBM mainframes, CCIA said. Platform Solutions, based on past mainframe agreements between IBM and the DOJ, requested copies of IBM's OS and technical information under a licensing agreement. IBM declined to grant Platform Solutions a license and prohibited customers from transferring IBM software licenses to Platform Solutions machines, said CCIA, which has members that are potential competitors of IBM."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're impatient with the preamble and want to see it work, scan forward to about 0:39. [via Hack a Day]

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Reuters reported last week that Natalie Morton, the teenage girl who died shortly after receiving an HPV vaccination, was definitely not killed by the vaccine. Instead, Morton was the victim of a large, fast-growing and previously undetected tumor in her chest cavity.

These kinds of tumors are very rare, and we don't know much about Morton's case. However, the Daily Mail has a heart-wrenching (and medically fascinating) interview with the parents of another teen who suffered a similar fate...

Inside George's chest cavity was an aggressive and rapidly growing tumour the size of a small football. In the few hours after George had gone to bed, the tumour had grown around his windpipe, cutting off his oxygen and causing irreparable damage to his brain. The tumour, which had started in an organ called the thymus gland in the chest cavity, was also crushing his heart and lungs and constricting the vital arteries supplying his body with blood.

darthcamaro writes "Windows isn't the only piece of Microsoft technology that hackers are attacking anymore. During a presentation at the SecTor security conference in Toronto, a Facetime security researcher revealed numerous methods by which Xbox users are being hacked today. 'Though the Xbox doesn't have the number one market share, it is the top target for hackers,' Boyd said. 'Xbox Live has 17 million plus subscribers, and that service requires payment.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's no secret that the Olympics can be ridiculously over aggressive with trademark claims, often getting governments to pass special intellectual property rules to allow the Olympics special control over certain names or phrases well outside the contours of existing intellectual property law. The various Olympic committees insist they "need" this to protect their revenue stream, but we didn't realize that gov'ts had any responsibility in helping the Olympics make lots of money. The latest move is that the US Olympic Committee is protesting a trademark application for the name of The Olympian, a newspaper in Olympia, Washington (thanks to Erik for sending that in). It would appear that the Olympian has been operating since 1889. That would be seven years prior to the first modern "Olympics" in 1896.

While I am left wondering why the Olympian suddenly decided to try to register the trademark on its name now (leading to the attempt to block the trademark), it does seem pretty ridiculous that the Olympics could suddenly claim that there might be confusion between the two after over a century of the two "brands" living together peacefully.

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Here's the 2010 calendar featuring art from the great jazz record art director and illustrator of the 1940s and 1950s, Jim Flora.

JimFlora.com is offering three hand-printed 2010 calendars sporting comic Flora illustrations. The spunky figures date from the mid-1950s.

The calendars, which were hand-printed by Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress, of Knoxville, and are packaged in clear sleeves, sell for $12.50 (+ shipping) each.

The backing cards are letterpress printed on recycled stock, measuring 10" x 4-1/2". The attached calendar, with 12 pull-off pages, measures 3-1/4" x 4-1/2".

Jim Flora 2010 hand-printed calendars

Scrimshaw is the old whaling art of engraving intricate patterns and images into ivory. If you have some old piano keys hanging around, you can make some interesting art pieces using this scrimshaw tutorial by Paul Baxendale of Providence, RI. Growing up I used to go to Mystic Seaport and learn all about whaling culture, and the scrimshaw and blacksmith stops were right up there in coolness factor with the printing press and ship rigging for me.

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Barence writes "Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 a 128-bit operating system, according to details leaked from the software giant's Research department. The discovery came to light after Microsoft Research employee Robert Morgan carelessly left details of his work on the social-networking site LinkedIn. His page read: 'Working in high-security department for research and development involving strategic planning for medium and long-term projects. Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan. Forming relationships with major partners: Intel, AMD, HP and IBM.' It has since been removed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Building a bit off the "conflusion" (Bravo, btw, insert) post from yesterday, I'm going to launch right into something near and dear to my heart: The way biased and badly done health journalism can really mess up the people who read it.

Biased and badly done are two very different things. I don't have data on this, but I think it's fair to say that, when the main-stream media (which, BoingBoing aside, includes me) gets a health story wrong, it usually isn't trying to be intentionally wack. Trouble is, whatever the intent, it leaves you--the reader--in the same place. Conflused.

Luckily, there are people working to help you. Like, for instance, the good folks at Behind the Headlines, a project of the British National Health System that does Q&A, myth busting and in-depth explanations on the science behind top health news. I first found out about this from Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog, which is, in itself, a great site everybody ought to be reading.

Dr. Alicia White, one of the aforementioned "folks" behind Behind the Headlines, has a wonderful primer on the questions you should be asking yourself every time you read health news. Until we police ourselves into doing a consistently better job, sorting the wheat from the chaff is (unfortunately) up to you. This will help. Plus, it's a fun read:

If you've just read a health-related headline that's caused you to spit out your morning coffee ("Coffee causes cancer" usually does the trick) it's always best to follow the Blitz slogan: "Keep Calm and Carry On". On reading further you'll often find the headline has left out something important, like "Injecting five rats with really highly concentrated coffee solution caused some changes in cells that might lead to tumours eventually. (Study funded by The Association of Tea Marketing)".

Evocative image courtesy Flickr user bdjsb7, under CC.

I have a dirty secret. I probably shouldn't even admit it here, but I just woke up and my judgment is impaired: I did not buy the MAKE: Halloween Special Edition when it came out back in 2007. Am I fired? Is this thing still on?

Shameful, I know. And most embarrassing when the opportunity to cover the Make: Halloween Contest 2009 beat was presented to me back in September. "You can blog about all your favorite projects from the Halloween Special Issue, too," they said. And I was like, "Uh huh, yup, sure will. Got a list of those right here."

So, long story short, my copy just showed up in the mail and I read it for the first time. It's great! Among my favorite projects is Edwin Wise's pneumatic spider-web shooter (.pdf) , which turns an ordinary hot glue gun into a faux cobweb-sprayer. It never would've occurred to me to marry a glue gun to an air compressor, and now I've got all kinds of derivative ideas bouncing around in my head. Which, I should've remembered, is why I read MAKE in the first place.

From MAKE magazine:

DIY HALLOWEEN from MAKE & CRAFT!

DIY HALLOWEEN from the editors of MAKE and CRAFT brings you 40-plus DIY projects for the holiday that's made for makers. From the craftiest costumes to amazing animated props and the latest in computer-controlled haunted house effects.

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.

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itwbennett writes "Tomorrow morning at 7:30 EDT, NASA is going to crash a probe into the moon as part of its LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite) mission, the main purpose of which is to discover if there's any water on the moon. 'If you happen to have a 10-12" telescope (or larger) then you might be able to see the plume from your backyard,' says blogger Peter Smith. 'For the rest of us, the impact will be streamed live over the web in a few places. NASA will have a feed, beginning at 6:15 EDT. The NASA feed includes live footage from the spacecraft itself as well as expert commentary and other goodies. Astronomy service SLOOH is offering a double-shot of earth-bound feeds, with one feed from New Hampshire and the other from Arizona. The SLOOH feeds start at 6:30 am EDT.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Next week, Palm Pictures launches a 25th-anniversary Blu-ray release of Stop Making Sense, considered by many to be one of the greatest concert films eve made. Back in 1983, Director Jonathan Demme teamed up with cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth and the Talking Heads to document three nights of shows at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. And what performances they were.

The new set includes lots of bonus material, I'm told. I don't have a device that plays Blu-ray discs at home, but this is the sort of thing that makes me wish I did. As you may already be able to guess from the sheer volume of fannish posts we do on BB about David Byrne, and about solo work from other former members -- 'round here we do love the band whose name is Talking Heads.

Here's an item at the LA Times, and here's a post at bluraywire about the disc set.

Stop Making Sense (Amazon) Trailer video (YouTube).

While some may point out that the bigger issue in this story may be ego, hubris or (perhaps) corruption, the story of Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade, and his $27 million statue has a ridiculous intellectual property twist, as well. Apparently, Wade had the government spend $27 million on a statue with a "heroic" pose -- this is a country where the per capita yearly income seems to be in the low four figures (CIA Factbook says $1,600). Approximately half of the country lives in poverty. So, clearly, what they need is a giant expensive statue. But the IP angle is that Wade is claiming, since the statue was his idea, he, personally, should receive 35% of any tourism revenue, as a royalty. So, just to get this straight -- he appears to have used a bunch of taxpayer money to spend millions on a statue -- and he wants to personally get a huge cut of all tourist revenue. And while this may be driven by corruption, it's the sort of concept that would only occur to someone in a world where such "ownership" and demands for royalties after an idea is put in place are commonplace.

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Photo: Jason Fraser/Muspilli.com.

Let's talk about teeth, baby. Slate is doing a series on the American Way of Dentistry. It's mostly good, but it gets one thing wrong. In a piece on the problems poor people face getting dental care, author June Thomas writes,

The main problem is a lack of decent low-cost options. Chester Douglass, emeritus professor in the department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology at Harvard's School of Dental Medicine, puts it this way: "If you want to buy a good, inexpensive car, Volkswagen proved you could do it, then other people started being able to do it." The Volkswagen of dentistry has yet to be built.

In reality, there is a Volkswagen of dentistry. Or, at least, something close to that. (A Toyota Corolla of dentistry?) Like the Bug, it's an overseas import. But, amazingly, when this program first got going in the United States, the American Dental Association sued to stop it.

Actually, scratch that. What's really amazing about this story is that the little guys won...

A decade ago, Alaskan Aurora Johnson was a stay-at-home mom with a high school education. Today, she's one of this country's first Dental Health Aide Therapists, bringing inexpensive, quality care to a very rural community. Johnson lives in Unalakleet, a coastal town 90 miles south of Nome. It is not exactly a booming real-estate market. Temperatures can dip to -50 F in the winter, freezing rivers into seasonal highways. About 750 people live there, mostly Native Americans, and, until 2005, their only access to dental care was one dentist who came in by plane once a year. Get a cavity a week later, and you were basically up a creek.

Alaska's an extreme case, but in general, it's not easy for rural Americans to see a dentist. Particularly if they're on Medicaid, which often pays far less than the going rate for dental services--as little as half in some states. And a lot of rural Americans rely on Medicaid--more than city dwellers do, in fact. With education loans to pay off and expensive businesses to run, most dentists just can't afford these low-payoff clientele. In the country, it's not uncommon to drive 30, 70, even 100 miles to get to the nearest dentist.

And that's where The Dental Health Aide Therapist program comes in. In a lot of ways, it's similar to using a Nurse Practitioner as your primary care physician. People like Aurora Johnson are recruited to serve the communities they already live in. Their training is much shorter, and less expensive, than a dentist's. But at the end, DHAT's can take care of their neighbors' basic and preventative dental health, and they can afford to charge less for their work. Johnson works with a dentist who still visits once a year and refers bigger problems and complicated procedures to him. It's a system that's worked in 42 countries. In fact, Aurora Johnson and her family had to move to New Zealand for two years while she went through her training. (Today, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium---the organization behind the DHAT program---is training new therapists in Alaska.)

Unfortunately, not everybody thinks this is a good thing. In 2006, the American Dental Association sued the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and the DHATs. They framed it as concern over unlicensed dentistry that could put patients at risk. But Ron Nagel, a dentist who serves as a consultant for the ANTHC, sees another motivation.

"There's a fear in the lower 48, from dentists, that this could somehow tip the rice bowl of their income," he told me. "But there's no evidence of that. If you're in private practice and you can delegate things that don't make as much money to someone who costs less, the economics suggest you could make even more money, yourself."

It's the sort of underdog case where you expect the underdog to lose. But, in Alaska, the narrative got flipped. A court ruled against the ADA in 2007 and the organization chose not to appeal.

But as dental therapist programs spread into the rest of the country, they're facing the same fight all over again. And things are more complicated this time. The Alaska program is by Native peoples, for Native peoples. Other states are looking at broader programs that would need the support of legislatures. And that means an opportunity to scare voters, and politicians, away from the idea. In Minnesota, for instance, the state dental association launched a PR campaign designed to make dental therapists out to be about as skilled and well-trained as the average snake-oil salesman. The slogan: "The last thing you want to hear when you're getting dental care is uh-oh."

In the end, Minnesota did become the second state to adopt dental therapists, but we ended up with a bi-level system. Basic dental therapists have a bachelor's degree (four years, as opposed to the two years of schooling Alaska DHATs get) and can't work if a dentist isn't in the building.

Advanced dental therapists can work alone, but have to have the bachelor's + 2,000 hours experience, complete a master's level program, and pass a board-approved exam.

The legislation only passed this summer, so it's hard to know how, or whether, the changes will affect access to dental care. If dental therapists have to work with a dentist, what does that mean for Minnesota's isolated communities and tribal reservations where there are no dentists? If dental therapists have to have five or six years of education, what does that mean for their ability to take on Medicaid patients and bring dental care to low-income families? I don't know. But I'm hoping for the best.

Image courtesy Flickr user p_x_g, via CC.

KentuckyFC writes "In 1924, the influential German mathematician, David Hilbert, calculated that a stationary mass should repel a particle moving towards or away from it at more than half the speed of light (as seen by a distant inertial observer). Now an American physicist has pointed out that the equal and opposite effect should also hold true: that a relativistic particle should repel a stationary mass. This, he says, could form the basis of a "hyperveolcity propulsion drive" for accelerating spacecraft to a good fraction of the speed of light. The idea is that the repulsion allows the relativistic particle to deliver a specific impulse that is greater than its specific momentum, an effect that is analogous to the elastic collision of a heavy mass with a much lighter, stationary mass, from which the lighter mass rebounds with about twice the speed of the heavy mass. Unlike other exotic hyperdrive proposals, this one can be tested using the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC, which will generate beams of particles with the required energy (abstract). Placing a test mass next to the beam line and measuring the forces on it as the particles pass by, should confirm the theory--or scupper it entirely."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Biologists have newly identified seven mushroom species that glow-in-the-dark. (The mushrooms may look psychedelic, but they are not in the psilocybe genus.) San Francisco State University biologist Dennis Desjardin found the glowing fungi in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico. From National Geographic:

Desjardin and colleagues scouted for mushrooms during new moons, in rain forests so dark they often couldn't see their hands in front of their faces, he said.

But "when you look down at the ground, it's like looking up at the sky," Desjardin said. "Every little 'star' was a little mushroom--it was just fantastic."

From SF State News:

These latest findings shed light on the evolution of luminescence, adding to the number of known lineages in the fungi family tree where luminescence has been reported. "What interests us is that within Mycena, the luminescent species come from 16 different lineages, which suggests that luminescence evolved at a single point and some species later lost the ability to glow," Desjardin said. He believes some fungi glow to attract nocturnal animals that aid in the dispersal of the mushroom's spores, which are similar to seeds and are capable of growing into new organisms.

"GLOWING MUSHROOM PICTURES: Psychedelic New Species Seen" (National Geographic)
"New glowing mushroom species" (SF State News)

Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

Okay, so New York is supposed to be the city of big commerce, literary culture, and high art - no room here for woo-woo spirituality, the odor of patchouli, or anyone who capitalizes words like Light or Truth. Well, actually not. This Sunday, October 11th I'll be conducting a walking tour of occult New York -- and hopefully giving participants a new way of seeing the city: As a once-upon-a-time laboratory for alternative spiritual ideas, which it helped to export to the rest of the world back before there was a New Age. Here are a few of the historic sights - familiar and obscure - we'll be viewing...
• The Lamasery (8th Ave and 47th Street). This is the five-story building that in the 1870s housed the famed salon of the Theosophical Society, whose earliest members included inventor Thomas Edison, Major-General Abner Doubleday, and the mysterious Russian noblewoman (and one-time New Yorker) Madame Blavatsky. This understated apartment building is where Civil War Colonel Henry Steel Olcott claimed to encounter Hidden Masters of wisdom and from which the nascent Theosophical Society launched a new vogue in occult ideas.

• The New York New Church (East 35th street). This beautifully restored Renaissance-revival Swedenborgian church was a wellspring of mystical ideas in America in the mid-nineteenth century, its pulpit presided over by Spiritualist-Swedenborgian minister George Bush - ancestor to the Bush presidential clan. Congregants included Henry James, Sr., and Al-Anon founder Lois Wilson

• Grand Central Station. This crowning edifice of the beaux-arts architectural movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries forms a temple of occult imagery, including magnificent statues of Hermes, Athena, Hercules and a domed ceiling featuring the images of the zodiac, the equinox, and a variety of ancient symbols. Grand Central sits on Pershing Square, named for the American World War I general who patronized the work of Manly P. Hall, the renowned esotericist who completed his Secret Teachings of All Ages steps away at the New York Public Library.

• Marble Collegiate Church (5th Ave and 29th street). From the pulpit of this Romanesque church - one of America's earliest congregations - the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale spread the esoteric-rooted philosophy of "positive thinking" across the nation in the mid-twentieth century. More than any other figure, Peale shaped the contemporary culture of self-help. The pioneering minister is enshrined in a life-size bronze statue at the gates of this landmarked building.

• New York Theosophical Society (East 53rd street). The site of New York's premier library on matters of the esoteric and occult, and home to the New York branch of the oldest occult organization in America. This stop will include time to browse the building's emporium of esoterica, The Quest Bookshop.

For more information visit the New York Open Center -- but please note that registration is nearly full. We may plan a second run of the tour in the near future.

Also see:
New York, Bastion of the Occult
God, Mystics, Yoga: What Americans Believe
Occult America

Be ready when the zombies come! From silohome.com:

NY's Adirondack State Park - During the late 1950's and early 1960's when the Cold War was escalating, the U.S. government built hundreds of Atlas-F missile silos (each for 18 million in 1961, with the rising cost of construction today one could barely fund the excavation.) to prepare the country for an attack that never came. Today, most of these silos lie abandoned and filled with water, monuments to a bygone era of American history and left to waste. But now, thanks to two entrepreneurial cousins, Bruce Francisco and Gregory Gibbons, one of these silos located in beautiful Adirondack State Park near Lake Placid is finding new life as a luxury home safe haven getaway complex accessible by plane or car. The real estate includes 20 acres of land with approximately 78 acres available as 10 approved building lots. The home is conveniently located to Montreal, Lake Placid and Plattsburgh and boast such outstanding year round activities as golfing, hunting, fishing, boating, hiking and world class skiing.

The price, regrettably, is north of two megabucks. But when I finally marry that wealthy heiress this place is at the top of my shopping list. Bruce was nice enough to provide us with a high-resolution scan of the plan view, above, which (for the time being anyway) is exclusive to the MAKE blog. You can click on the image above to see it at 1000 pixels wide.

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It sometimes feels like every time we mention a big company's products or services here, it's to shame them for doing something terrible or making something awful. But every now and again, you get something wonderful out of a big company, and it's worth celebrating, loudly.

This time, it's IBM's Global Services, who do the ThinkPad service contracts for Lenovo. I switched to ThinkPads a few years back when I went Ubuntu Linux, at the suggestion of Chris DiBona, a senior free/open source guy at Google. The ThinkPads are moderately priced, come in a wide variety of models with different characteristics, are incredibly well-built with fantastic keyboards (the mid- to high-range machines have water-proof keyboards that have special, sealed drainage channels running to the laptop's underside) and rugged frames. They run GNU/Linux really well, too. I've been happier with ThinkPads than I've been with any other make of laptop (though there have been occasional hiccups, see below).

I'm hard on my equipment, so I knew that I'd want to get the world-wide, on-site, next-day replacement service, which costs about $100/year. This is exactly what it sounds like: if you have a hardware fault (even one due to dropping or knocking the machine), they will generally have a tech show up with a replacement part the next day, anywhere in the world. When I was an Apple user, hardware failures often meant standing in line for 40 min to drop off a Powerbook at a Genius Bar, then coming back a week or two later and waiting 40 minutes again to reclaim it.

My latest ThinkPad, an ultralight X200, just experienced a hardware fault in the built-in SD card reader. I tried booting it from a couple different Ubuntu versions and then installed the original Vista HDD and tried that (the ThinkPad hard-drives can be swapped in about two minutes with a single Phillips screwdriver, which makes it easy to buy giant third-party drives and install them when the ThinkPad arrives, building Linux on them and leaving the original drive intact for easy troubleshooting). It was definitely hardware. I called the service-center, got through in about two minutes, explained my problems to a level-one tech who nevertheless understood what I meant by "Linux" and "hard-drive swap" and ordered the service call after about five minutes of my describing the problem.

Today the service tech came by my office. He phoned ten minutes beforehand to let me know he was on his way, then sat down at my desk, spread out a lint-free cloth, and, in about 20 minutes, fixed the SD slot, replacing the daughtercard that it lives on. He didn't care that the Linux drive was in the bay, and let me boot it and show him that it was working to my satisfaction -- he didn't insist on my swapping in the original Vista drive.

This is basically perfect. Exactly what I want from my critical infrastructure. Without my computer, I can't do anything productive. I've got edits due on my current novel by Friday afternoon, and a complete disassembly and replacement of a laptop daughter-card just took place without substantially disrupting my schedule. I only had to walk as far as the reception at my office building.

So, with all that good news, let me add in a couple of caveats: first, once Lenovo end-of-life's a model, they stop making parts for it and switch to refurbed parts, and those parts aren't so good. My old X60 had to have three defective motherboard replacements before the service center just upgraded me to a new, faster, in-production model (on the other hand, this swap was done by the head manager at IBM Global Service's UK division, who drove into London to personally handle the case).

Lenovo's ecommerce ordering and build system isn't nearly as good as IBM's service department. They lost the original order for this X200, waited two weeks to tell me, then told me I'd have to wait two more weeks to get the machine. Then they found me someone else who could get it to me in 24 hours, but I ended up paying a couple hundred pounds more than I'd been quoted from Lenovo themselves. They argued mightily about paying me back this sum, eventually promising to do so, but they never did.

So that's it: be prepared for some glitches when you order a machine, and watch out for refurbed parts. Apart from that, the ThinkPad with extended warranty can't be beat. I'm on my fourth laptop and I've loved every single one of them down to its adorable little trackpoint.

For the record, I have no affiliation with Lenovo or IBM Global Services. I have not been offered any sort of discount or reward for this post. They are not Boing Boing advertisers (though, seriously, IBM/Lenovo: we'll gladly run your ads! You folks kick ass!). This is entirely self-motivated, because, you know what? These machines and the service plan just rock.

ThinkPlus™ and Lenovo CareSM Maintenance and Protection Services

alphadogg writes "Researchers at the University of Washington think it's finally time to start paying some serious attention to the question of robot security. Not because they think robots are about to go all Terminator on us, but because the robots can already be used to spy on us and vandalize our homes. In a paper published Thursday the researchers took a close look at three test robots: the Erector Spykee, and WowWee's RoboSapien and Rovio. They found that security is pretty much an afterthought in the current crop of robotic devices. 'We were shocked at how easy it was to actually compromise some of these robots,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, a University of Washington assistant professor, who co-authored the paper."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nk497 writes "The FBI and Egyptian authorities have arrested 100 people in what they're calling 'the largest international phishing case ever conducted' as part of a wide-scale investigation called Operation Phish Phry. The criminals used phishing to get access to hundreds of bank accounts, stealing $1.5 million. 'This international phishing ring had a significant impact on two banks and caused huge headaches for hundreds, perhaps thousands of bank customers,' said Acting US Attorney George S. Cardona."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've already noted my general problems the FTC's new disclosure rules, but as others look into the details, the worse they seem and the more you realize the unintended consequences may be pretty bad. Jeff Jarvis makes some key points concerning how this could be seen as a restriction on free speech. And that's because the FTC seems to be viewing blog posts as if they are media, rather than straightforward communication. As we've pointed out in the past, for many, blogging is often no different than a conversation. It's not journalism. It's not reporting. It's having a discussion with people:

Second, the FTC assumes -- as media people do -- that the internet is a medium. It's not. It's a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don't think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they're making media. They're connecting. They're talking. So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media -- as they explicitly do -- is the same as sending a government goon into Denny's to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.

As such, you could make a case that the new rules are an unconstitutional law hindering First Amendment guarantees on freedom of speech. As I noted originally, it seems like these things get sorted out in the marketplace of ideas -- whereby those who do something so stupid as to sell their "views" on things face the potential of a substantial loss in credibility. But suddenly demanding people reveal the sourcing of some product they mention in blogs leads to all sorts of silly results, amusingly mocked by Mark Cuban in a blog post, where he wonders what sorts of disclosures he'll have to make if he mentions a breakfast at IHOP where the managers comps the breakfast. And while he's mocking the overall situation, it's not so silly. You shouldn't have to confer with your lawyers to figure out how you mention any particular product, just because you got a freebie or a sample somewhere.

And, what's really scary? It appears that even the FTC isn't sure what the policy actually means, and hasn't thought through any of the unintended consequences or fuzzy borders.

Separately, Eric Goldman highlights another massive problem with the new guidelines that no one else seems to have picked up on yet: that in some cases it's the company providing the product that will be liable -- ridiculously blaming the company if a blogger makes claims about its products that are not true. As Goldman points out, there's no way the FTC would be successful in going after companies for that, as Section 230 clearly would protect the advertiser from bogus statements by someone else. But, even assuming that the FTC never considered the Section 230 issues, why would the FTC ever think it's reasonable to fine an advertiser for statements made by someone else?

Despite tons of feedback and discussion when the FTC first proposed these new rules a few months ago, it really feels like no one at the FTC put much time into actually thinking through what these sorts of rules would actually mean in the real world.

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Most wood-fired pizza ovens I've seen are built to last. The folks over at Machine Project built this temporary oven for a recent event and self proclaimed pizza fanatic Mike Senese of Catch It Keep It fame was kind enough to document its construction. [Thanks, Max!]

I attended a fantastic pizza making event at Machine Project (instructor: Michael O'Malley) that included the construction and firing of a DIY temporary brick pizza oven - the ultimate in pizza cooking. Hugely educational and inspiring, even for a committed pizza fanatic such as myself. The oven, built, fired up, and torn down over the course of an afternoon, worked amazingly well - I cooked the best pizza I've ever made, by far.

More:

• DIY Brick Pizza Oven


• How-To: Pizza earth oven


• Sculpt Your Own Earthen Oven

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angry tapir writes "The head of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has stopped banking online after nearly falling for a phishing attempt. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he recently came 'just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam' after receiving an e-mail that appeared to be from his bank."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I was literally raised on Conan stories. My dad was a Conan fan, and when I was a kid, he would spin out half-remembered Conan tales for me on long car trips, changing Conan into a gender-diverse trio called Harry, Larry and Mary, who would vanquish evil rulers and then create a dictatorship of the proletariat in their wake (Dad was, and is, a Trotskyist, after all).

When I was old enough to start reading on my own, I fell in love with heroic fantasy and with RPGs, and I went out and devoured the whole Conan canon on my own, buying stacks of used paperbacks from Bakka in Toronto, reading and re-reading them indiscriminately -- the Robert E Howard originals, the L Sprague De Camp books, all of it. The first book I ever attempted to write, at the age of 12, was a blood-soaked homage to Conan, in which the phrase "mighty thews" appeared in practically every paragraph. (As I recall, I also talked my mom into reading some of the Conan stories aloud for bedtime and when I was sick, which speaks volumes about her patience!).

But I haven't read any Conan in, oh, decades. Nevertheless, when legendary science fiction and fantasy scholar John Clute told me that he'd just finished editing Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan a new collection of hand-picked Robert E Howard stories, spanning Howard's astonishingly prolific career as a pulp adventure writer of everything from westerns and boxing stories to the legendary Conan tales, I found that I was overcome with an urge to revisit the heroic tales of my boyhood.

I did, and I am every bit as delighted by them as I was when I was 10 years old.

Somehow, I never knew much about Howard. I had a dim recollection that he had killed himself, but that was about it. So it was with incredulity and a little bit of awe that I read Clute's superb introduction to the collection, and acquainted myself with the biographical facts of Howard's life. He was a driven, small-town Texas boy, a boy who loved his wasting, tubercular mother and applied himself to literary hackdom like no other in order to support her. Howard wrote and sold more than 160 pulp adventure stories between 1928 (when he was 22) and 1935 (when he was 29). He typed these stories in a fury all night long, screaming the words aloud as he pounded them into the keyboard (to the horror and bemusement of his neighbors). He had few friends and only one short romance. When his mother died, he stopped writing. Not long after, he blew his brains out.

Clute's analysis of Howard's work and life (drawing on Howard's extensive correspondence with HP Lovecraft) is a fascinating read, and it sets up the stories wonderfully. The stories themselves sample some of Howard's most iconic creations -- Kull the Conqueror and Solomon Kane -- and span many genres, including a wonderfully brutal short western novel, Vultures of Wahpeton.

The final third is given over to Conan stories: "The Tower of the Elephant," a tense dungeon-crawl; "Queen of the Black Coast," a smouldering, sexy pirate epic; "A Witch Shall Be Born," a blood-soaked revenge-play; and the novel-length "Red Nails," a story of decadent fallen tribes waging war on one another in a dead walled city.

Howard's writing is muscular, unapologetically dramatic, and, for all that, innocent and genuine, without a hint of self-reflexive hesitation or doubt. Just look at this:

In an instant he was the center of a hurricane of stabbing spears and lashing clubs. But he moved in a blinding blur of steel. Spears bent on his armor and swished empty air, and his sword sang its death-song. The fighting-madness of his race was upon him, and with a red mist of unreasoning fury wavering before his blazing eyes, he cleft skulls, smashed breasts, severed limbs, ripped out entrails, and littered the deck like a shambles with a ghastly harvest of brains and blood.

Invulnerable in his armor, his back against the mast, he heaped mangled corpses at his feet until his enemies gave back panting in rage and fear. Then as they lifted their spears to cast them, and he tensed himself to leap and die in the midst of them, a shrill cry froze the lifted arms.

Imagine a haunted Texas lad in his crappy apartment in the middle of the night, screaming those words at the wall as his fingers tortured the keys! What romance! What adventure!

Robert E. Howard, Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan

I sent this link over to Becky for the CRAFT blog but I got jealous after she put it up and had to post it here, too. Chillingworth may be the coolest stuffed animal I have ever seen. He was made from an antique bodice by Ann Wood of Brooklyn.

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It sometimes feels like every time we mention a big company's products or services here, it's to shame them for doing something terrible or making something awful. But every now and again, you get something wonderful out of a big company, and it's worth celebrating, loudly.

This time, it's IBM's Global Services, who do the ThinkPad service contracts for Lenovo. I switched to ThinkPads a few years back when I went Ubuntu Linux, at the suggestion of Chris DiBona, a senior free/open source guy at Google. The ThinkPads are moderately priced, come in a wide variety of models with different characteristics, are incredibly well-built with fantastic keyboards (the mid- to high-range machines have water-proof keyboards that have special, sealed drainage channels running to the laptop's underside) and rugged frames. They run GNU/Linux really well, too. I've been happier with ThinkPads than I've been with any other make of laptop (though there have been occasional hiccups, see below).

I'm hard on my equipment, so I knew that I'd want to get the world-wide, on-site, next-day replacement service, which costs about $100/year. This is exactly what it sounds like: if you have a hardware fault (even one due to dropping or knocking the machine), they will generally have a tech show up with a replacement part the next day, anywhere in the world. When I was an Apple user, hardware failures often meant standing in line for 40 min to drop off a Powerbook at a Genius Bar, then coming back a week or two later and waiting 40 minutes again to reclaim it.

My latest ThinkPad, an ultralight X200, just experienced a hardware fault in the built-in SD card reader. I tried booting it from a couple different Ubuntu versions and then installed the original Vista HDD and tried that (the ThinkPad hard-drives can be swapped in about two minutes with a single Phillips screwdriver, which makes it easy to buy giant third-party drives and install them when the ThinkPad arrives, building Linux on them and leaving the original drive intact for easy troubleshooting). It was definitely hardware. I called the service-center, got through in about two minutes, explained my problems to a level-one tech who nevertheless understood what I meant by "Linux" and "hard-drive swap" and ordered the service call after about five minutes of my describing the problem.

Today the service tech came by my office. He phoned ten minutes beforehand to let me know he was on his way, then sat down at my desk, spread out a lint-free cloth, and, in about 20 minutes, fixed the SD slot, replacing the daughtercard that it lives on. He didn't care that the Linux drive was in the bay, and let me boot it and show him that it was working to my satisfaction -- he didn't insist on my swapping in the original Vista drive.

This is basically perfect. Exactly what I want from my critical infrastructure. Without my computer, I can't do anything productive. I've got edits due on my current novel by Friday afternoon, and a complete disassembly and replacement of a laptop daughter-card just took place without substantially disrupting my schedule. I only had to walk as far as the reception at my office building.

So, with all that good news, let me add in a couple of caveats: first, once Lenovo end-of-life's a model, they stop making parts for it and switch to refurbed parts, and those parts aren't so good. My old X60 had to have three defective motherboard replacements before the service center just upgraded me to a new, faster, in-production model (on the other hand, this swap was done by the head manager at IBM Global Service's UK division, who drove into London to personally handle the case).

Lenovo's ecommerce ordering and build system isn't nearly as good as IBM's service department. They lost the original order for this X200, waited two weeks to tell me, then told me I'd have to wait two more weeks to get the machine. Then they found me someone else who could get it to me in 24 hours, but I ended up paying a couple hundred pounds more than I'd been quoted from Lenovo themselves. They argued mightily about paying me back this sum, eventually promising to do so, but they never did.

So that's it: be prepared for some glitches when you order a machine, and watch out for refurbed parts. Apart from that, the ThinkPad with extended warranty can't be beat. I'm on my fourth laptop and I've loved every single one of them down to its adorable little trackpoint.

For the record, I have no affiliation with Lenovo or IBM Global Services. I have not been offered any sort of discount or reward for this post. They are not Boing Boing advertisers (though, seriously, IBM/Lenovo: we'll gladly run your ads! You folks kick ass!). This is entirely self-motivated, because, you know what? These machines and the service plan just rock.

ThinkPlus™ and Lenovo CareSM Maintenance and Protection Services

joseph franklin writes in to point out that this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to some researchers who helped uncover some of the basic building blocks of life, ribosomes. Figuring out how to model these was great, but Franklin's concern is that not only did these researchers get a Nobel Prize for it, they got a patent as well:

The patent holders and licensees surely believe that these products will be life-saving, and profitable, and I hate to rain on the Nobel Prize parade. But should research so fundamental to life, such as the ribosome structure, be locked up for commercial gain -- like Dynamite? Should a private institution, such as Yale, have the only say over how ribosomes may be developed into new biomedical technologies?

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Samyang Optics has announced a delay in production of its new 14mm f/2.8 IF ED MC Aspherical lens. According to the company, the delay is due to partial redesigning of the lens construction and further improvements. The lens will now be available in the first quarter of 2010.

T Murphy writes "A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry links daily consumption of candy at the age of 10 to an increased chance of being convicted of a violent crime by age 34. The researchers theorize the correlation comes from the way candy is given rather than the candy itself. Candy frequently given as a short-term reward can encourage impulsive behavior, which can more likely lead to violence. An alternative explanation offered by the American Dietetic Association is that the candy indicates poor diet, which hinders brain development. The scientists stress they don't imply candy should be removed from a child's diet, although they do recommend moderation. The study controls for teachers' reports of aggression and impulsivity at age 10, the child's gender, and parenting style. The study can be found here, but the full text is behind a paywall."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 4-Bit Microcomputer Kit from Gakken features a 20-key keypad, a 7-segment LED, and 7 individual LEDs. It comes pre-programmed with 7 different applications, and you can even program your own via the keypad. It's a fun retro kit, just begging to be hacked! Don't forget to check out Gakken magazine 4-bit computer rollout party in Tokyo.

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Go Senator Al! Al Franken successfully introduced legislation that denies federal contracts to companies that have policies -- anywhere in the world -- that punish employees for complaining about rape or discrimination on the job. This is in response to a KBR/Halliburton employee in Iraq who was drugged and gang-raped by co-workers and denied justice or even medical treatment, then locked in a storage container for 24 hours and told that she'd lose her job if she left the country to get medical help. She was also prohibited from suing or seeking criminal justice because her Halliburton contract forbade seeking any justice apart from private arbitration.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) tried to block the amendment, saying that it was a "a political attack directed at Halliburton." Franken replied, "This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court."

Sessions' brave defense of the right of private companies to deny justice to drugged and gang-raped employees should not be forgotten. Truly, the man is a model of moral principle.

[Franken]: "The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law ... And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. ... The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen..."

Appearing with Franken after the vote, an elated Jones expressed her deep appreciation. "It means the world to me," she said of the amendment's passage. "It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it."

Franken Wins Bipartisan Support For Legislation Reining In KBR's Treatment Of Rape (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Sigma has released a firmware update for its DP2 large-sensor digital compact. Version 1.03 improves accuracy of the camera's auto white balance and decreases occasional freezing. The firmware is available for immediate download from Sigma's website.

A group of Swedish sixth-graders filed a complaint against Toys R Us over the company's 2008 Christmas catalog, decrying the gender stereotyping in the product photos. Their curriculum includes a long-term project on gender roles.

According to the youngsters, the Toys"R"Us Christmas catalogue featured "outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive", according to a statement from Ro.

The group's teacher explained to the local Smålandsposten newspaper that filing the complaint was the culmination of more than two years of "long-term work" by the students on gender roles.

Thumbing through the catalogue, 13-year-old Hannes Psajd explained that he and his twin sister had always shared the same toys and that he was concerned about the message sent by the Toys"R"Us publication.

"Small girls in princess stuff...and here are boys dressed as super heroes. It's obvious that you get affected by this," he told the newspaper.

"When I see that only girls play with certain things then, as a guy, I don't want it."

Toys"R"Us scolded for gender discrimination (via Wonderland)

Declaring that "Today's models weigh around 23% less than normal women," and "The whole model industry is anorexic," Germany's top women's magazine, Brigitte has announced that it will no longer work with professional models, because they have to devote substantial resources to photoshopping added weight to them in order to make them resemble their readers.

Lebert said the magazine would call on German women to put themselves forward as models for fashion and makeup articles.

"We're looking for women who have their own identity, whether it be the 18-year-old A-level student, the company chairwoman, the musician, or the footballer," he said, adding that he wanted a mix between prominent and completely unknown women and would look out for politicians and actresses interested in modelling.

Brigitte, Germany's most popular women's mag, bans professional models (via Wonderland)

BioWare's upcoming RPG, Dragon Age: Origins, is set to launch on November 3rd. Today they announced details about some of the downloadable content they have planned for the game. In fact, it's scheduled to become available on the same day the game launches, at a cost of $7. (The PS3 version will be slightly delayed). "Called the Warden's Keep, the DLC will add a dungeon-based quest to the game along with six new abilities, a variety of items, and a base where players can trade with merchants. It will feature a supernatural storyline set in an ancient — and possibly haunted — fortress once used as a redoubt by the Grey Wardens, the ancient order at the center of Origins' main storyline." There will be two additional bits of DLC that are available for free to people who have purchased the game new. One "adds a stone golem character to the player's party from the beginning of the game, unlocking numerous story options," and the other increases a character's defense against some attacks in-game.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the follow-up to Freakonomics coming out, as part of the plan to promote SuperFreakonomics, the books' authors are auctioning off the very 1st printed copy on eBay for charity. The winner of the auction gets a signed copy of this book, as well as a verification letter and a limited-edition SuperFreak t-shirt. Clearly, the economists behind this offer understand the value of scarce goods, and they've tried to increase that value with a couple extra goodies (as well as a matching donation up to $5,000 from Stephen Dubner). But wouldn't it be more interesting to see additional "reasons to buy" around the content, along with typical "freakonomic" analysis of what works and why? Dubner has already suggested (tongue-in-cheek) that the winner won't suffer from winner's curse, but will there be more practical lessons to be learned from this auction? How would the results of this charity auction be different if it did a Dutch auction (like xkcd did recently)? Auctioning off another copy of the book without the charity aspect would be an interesting test, too. And are there other scarce items that Stephen Dubner or Steven Levitt could offer for their book sales?

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couch_warrior writes "The Register is carrying a story on the early design efforts for the next generation of high-energy particle accelerators. They will be linear, and will collide matter and antimatter in the form of electrons and positrons. The obvious question will be: once we have a matter-antimatter reactor, how long till we have warp drive, and will the Vulcans show up for a sneak-peak?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This video of an elephant giving birth gets a little intense at the moment of actual delivery and immediately thereafter, but it also made my heart swell in my chest. There is something just goddamned wonderful about mammal and avian reproduction (insects and bacteria not so much), and it's not just the insanely awesome sight of the baby elephant clambering to its feet and grinning like a holy fool.

Not sure what the narration's like (it's 5AM here in London and everyone's asleep, so I'm on mute), but the visuals are a strong and healing tonic.

Elephant Birth - The Dramatic Struggle for Life (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's law that grants him immunity from prosecution has been overturned. Berlusconi, a media tycoon who uses his control over the press to stay in office (I've met dozens of Italian activists who uttered the improbable phrase, "Thank God for Rupert Murdoch, Berlusconi can't bully him," which should give you an idea of what sort of person he is), passed the immunity law, arguing that he couldn't govern effectively if he could be sued or criminally prosecuted for wrongdoing. Several pending lawsuits will now go forward.

The appeal to the Constitutional Court was launched by prosecutors including those from the Mills case.

They contended that immunity put Mr Berlusconi above the law and needed to be reversed.

Mr Berlusconi argued that immunity allowed him to govern without being "distracted" by the judiciary.

This is the second time Italy's highest court has thrown out Mr Berlusconi's bid for immunity, after an earlier attempt in 2004 failed.

Of the Constitutional Court's 15 members, five are selected by the president, five by the judiciary, and five by parliament.

They voted 9-6 to in favour of lifting Mr Berlusconi's immunity, the BBC's Duncan Kennedy says from Rome.

Berlusconi immunity law overruled (Thanks, Pico!)

(Image: The Economist)

Shawn sez, "The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association is aiding two activists in suing the City of Vancouver over a 2010 Olympic bylaw which may encroach on free speech and violate Canada's Charter of Rights."

With David Eby of The B.C. Civil Liberties Association representing them, Chris Shaw, a UBC professor of ophthalmology, neuroscientist (and Vancouver Observer blogger), and The Olympic Resistance Network's Alissa Westergard-Thorp,announced this morning that they have filed a statement of claim against the City of Vancouver in the Supreme Court of BC. Their lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of an Olympic bylaw limiting free speech during the 2010 Winter Games that was passed by council in July, Eby told reporters this morning.

The BBCLA, with plaintiffs Shaw and Westergard-Thorp, claim their rights to free speech and freedom of movement will be denied once the Winter Games by-laws passed by city council take effect. They say the bylaws, commonly referred to as the omnibus bylaws, will infringe their Charter rights and are unconstitutional....

The bylaw includes a passage entitled "prohibitions regarding city land," which includes a clause that will almost surely trigger a Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge. Clause 4B makes it illegal during the Winter Games without authorization to:

"(a) bring onto city land any
(i) weapon,
(ii) object, including any rock, stick, or glass or metal bottle useable as a weapon, except for crutches or a cane that a person who is elderly or disabled uses as a mobility aid,
(iii) large object, including any bag, or luggage that exceeds 23 x 40 x 55 centimetres;
(iv) voice amplification equipment including any megaphone,
(v) motorized vehicle, except for a motorized wheel chair or scooter that a person who is elderly or disabled uses as a mobility aid,
(vi) anything that makes noise that interferes with the enjoyment of entertainment on city land by other persons,
(vii) distribute any advertising material or install or carry any sign unless licensed to do so by the city."

Protest signs usually are made using sticks, often are larger than subsection (iii) allows (as are puppets and other protest devices), demonstrations almost always employ megaphones or other voice amplification devices, and can well "interfere with the enjoyment" of the Olympic spectacle by who chose to be so offended. Protesters often pass out leaflets as well. Thus, any of the dozens of protests I've attended over the last few years would easily be in violation of five of seven subsections.

BCCLA Files Lawsuit Against City For Violation of Charter Rights, VO Blogger Chris Shaw Key Plaintiff (Thanks, Shawn!)

(Image: Support the 2010 Games, a Creative Commons Attribution image from Silly Gweilo's Flickr stream)

Tony sez, "Caricaturist Bill 'Weg' Green has made a career of capturing faces, and his skills helped lead to the capture of the man who broke into his home."

"I thought (the drawing) might be a stick figure or something like that."

Seconds later, Mr Green -- who still works daily drawing private, AFL and other corporate caricatures, as well as running a gallery -- provided a detailed drawing of the burglar's face.

"It was amazing, the likeness was just fantastic," Senior Constable Roche said.

Fifteen minutes later, Croydon police picked up the burglar for an unrelated crime.

Weg makes a mug of a robber (Thanks, Tony!)

(Image: Craig Abraham)

EFF's Fred von Lohmann explains with a great deal of clarity and precision why MediaFire is out of its mind to send legal threats over a Firefox plugin, SkipScreen, that auto-clicks through its ad-screens. It comes down to this: your browser is your browser, and you can auto-click, rewrite, block, display or manipulate what shows up on your screen as much as you like and it's no one's business but your own.

Yes, Boing Boing is ad-supported and yes, SkipScreen is an ad-blocker. So what? We're not dumb enough to think that just because we've decided to earn our living from ads means that you have to give up your rights to control what's on your screen. That's what principle is: what you believe in even when it's not convenient.

MediaFire's arguments to the contrary are entirely misguided. First, they suggest that SkipScreen somehow lets users "steal bandwidth." That's wrong on the facts: SkipScreen just automates the exact process that the user would otherwise have to do themselves in order download a file. No "extra downloads," no additional bandwidth for MediaFire. Second, MediaFire argues that the use of SkipScreen violates MediaFire's "acceptable use policy." That's wrong on the law: users who follow a link to a MediaFire download never click-through or otherwise agree to any "acceptable use policy," so there's no contract here that prohibits a user from using whatever browser she likes (including whatever plug-ins she likes) to download a file.

Sure, MediaFire probably would prefer that we all sit, transfixed, while they display ads for us, just like certain Hollywood executives wish we would never leave the couch or hit FFWD when commercials run during our favorite TV shows, and certain websites wish they could ban Firefox ad-blockers. Fortunately, there's nothing in the law that says that by simply visiting a website, I give up the right to control my desktop.

It's My Browser, and I'll Auto-Click if I Want To

Randy Farmer's short essay "The Dollhouse Mafia, or 'Don't Display Negative Karma'" explores the well-known problem in reputation systems in which users abandon accounts that get negative feedback, and shows just how bad the consequences of this design can turn out to be.

That feature was fine as far as it went, but unlike other social networks, The Sims Online allowed users to declare other users untrustworthy too. The face of an untrustworthy user appeared circled in bright red among all the trustworthy faces in a user's hub.

It didn't take long for a group calling itself the Sims Mafia to figure out how to use this mechanic to shake down new users when they arrived in the game. The dialog would go something like this:

"Hi! I see from your hub that you're new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply. If you think I'm kidding, look at your hub-three of us have already marked you red. Don't worry, we'll turn it green when you pay..."

If you think this is a fun game, think again-a typical response to this shakedown was for the user to decide that the game wasn't worth $10 a month. Playing dollhouse doesn't usually involve gangsters.

The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma" (via Raph)

Dave sez, "I'm an American who blogs about life in New Delhi. I recently published an essay about 'jugaad': the semi-untranslatable practice and philosophy of jerry-rigging that is one of the prides of India. Once you look for jugaad in India, you see it everywhere: water pumps converted into cars, wrappers converted into rope, and so on. This essay also explores the broader implications of a culture that embraces jugaad. Jugaad is how so many people can survive with such stoic patience in conditions that would drive Americans like me crazy. "

No two jugaad vehicles are the same, because each one is an improvised solution using unlikely parts. These vehicles are the purest representation of this spirit of ingenuity, and everyone we spoke to swelled with pride at India's capacity for jugaad. "We are like that only," my boss Murali would tell me when describing solutions to situations that would send most goras scurrying for the nearest five-star hotel.

The variety of solutions to seemingly intractable problems we saw supported this patriotic esteem: motorcycles chopped in half and welded to carts to create centaur goods haulers. The way families would fit mother, father, and three kids onto a single scooter. The clever repurposing of used water bottles as cooking oil containers. Rope spun from discarded foil packets. Cricket wickets made from precariously balanced stacks of rocks. And, as Anurag sardonically pointed out in a political statement I don't understand but assume to be insightfully hilarious, Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government: a duct-taped coalition of thirteen political parties.

As one blogger put it when describing those diesel water pump trucks, "these vehicles reflect the true spirit of innovation in rural India."

jugaad (Thanks, Dave!)

(Image: Jugaad in action, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Chromatic Aberration's Flickr stream)

nk497 writes "With businesses increasingly using digital tech like virtual worlds and Twitter, their staff will have to be given guidelines on how they 'dress' their avatars, according to analysts. 'As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, enterprises need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the enterprise or the enterprise's reputation,' said James Lundy, managing vice president at Gartner, in a statement. 'We advise establishing codes of behavior that apply in any circumstance when an employee is acting as a company representative, whether in a real or virtual environment.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Berlin Reunion @ The Big Picture - Boston.com 35 massive photos...

Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled "The Berlin Reunion". Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by "land and sea monsters". The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult - but successful - expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart

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A bunch of folks have sent in the news that the Economist appears to be putting up something of a paywall, locking up all archival content older than 90 days, while also locking up one version of the magazine (the one that is made to look just like the physical paper layout). I have to be honest: I don't see how this makes any sense at all. In our experience, somewhere between 25% to 30% of our daily traffic is to archival content, usually in the form of search engine traffic -- or occasionally other sites picking up on an older story. Archival content is perfect Google fodder, driving traffic (and ad views) to pages that otherwise would get no traffic at all. In many ways, that's a big part of the value of having widespread archives -- to bring in such traffic for those who care about it. The chances of such a "drive by" viewer paying up for a subscription to view that content seems incredibly slim -- and it seems quite likely that the decline in traffic (and ad dollars) would almost certainly outweigh the number of new subscribers added. This doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Does The Economist have any information economists on staff?

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Wow, I didn't really want to believe this, but playgrounds really did look a lot different in the 70s. Dangerous, metal... fun. Post your memories up in the comments!

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Italian scientist Luigi Garlaschelli recreated the Shroud of Turin, supporting his claim that the artifact is a fake and not the cloth that laid on the body of Jesus Christ before his burial. Believers claim that the image on the cloth is the miraculous Holy Face of Jesus. Garlaschelli will present his research and the, er, Shroud of Luigi, at the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims on the Paranormal's conference. This whole thing makes me want a Shroud of Turin blanket. I didn't find one of those, but this golf towel is kinda nifty! Anyway, from CNN:

Luigi Garlaschelli created a copy of the shroud by wrapping a specially woven cloth over one of his students, painting it with pigment, baking it in an oven (which he called a "shroud machine") for several hours, then washing it...

"Basically the Shroud of Turin has some strange properties and characteristics that they say cannot be reproduced by human hands," he told CNN by phone from Italy, where he is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia.

"For example, the image is superficial and has no pigment, it looks so lifelike and so on, and therefore they say it cannot have been done by an artist." His research shows the pigment may simply have worn off the cloth over the centuries since it was first "discovered" in 1355, but impurities in the pigment etched an image into the fibers of the cloth, leaving behind the ghostly picture that remains today.

"The procedure is very simple. The artist took this sheet and put it over one of his assistants," he said.

"Scientist re-creates Turin Shroud to show it's fake"

Providence, Rhode Island is home to many larger than life characters. One that has special meaning for me, and is arguably one of the most iconic characters, is New England Pest Control's giant blue mascot, Nibbles Woodaway. I've always found programming fun and interesting, but the true challenge for me is trying to figure out why a program doesn't work the way I want, and then figuring out how to fix it. I often find myself thinking about the exterminators at New England Pest Control celebrating their profession with a monster sized termite while I dive into the nooks of my programs to eliminate bugs that prevent proper execution (and eat into my sleep schedule!)

Last week, I set up my iCop SPARK hardware and got a simple "Hello World" program running. That process took some time, but wasn't too difficult. Of course, sending text to a console window is not very useful for controlling my iRobot Create. I need to add serial send and receive functionality to my code in order to control the robot. So this week I put together a simple program designed to send and receive characters over the serial port.

Read more about it in the full post here.

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BB pal Gareth Branwyn has a really cool post up over at Make about the "lost knowledge" of cable lacing. This method of cable management preceded zipties, and was used in "the telecom industry, aerospace, marine applications, and elsewhere," he says. Gar's post includes some wonderful detail photos, and notes from readers explaining how it works. Impulselabs sez:

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.

Read and view more: Lost Knowledge: Cable lacing (makezine.com)

The Consumer Electronics Association has been building up its excellent Innovation Movement effort -- designed to help educate people (most importantly: politicians) to be aware that regulations can have a serious (and potentially negative) impact on innovation. The goal is to get people to really think through the potential impacts on innovation of any new legislation. Given how rarely anyone in DC seems to really think about how all the legislation they pass will impact innovation, this is an important effort.

As a part of that, CEA is now launching an Apps for Innovation Developer Contest. The goal is to get developers to create one of two kinds of useful apps:

1. Apps that illuminate with data how innovation and entrepreneurial activity are at work across America.

   Examples: An app that mashes up Federal Communications Commission broadband data over a Google Map to show the need for high-speed Internet deployment in rural areas. Or, perhaps an Apple iPhone app that uses Department of Commerce data to let people track how international trade agreements impact the U.S. GDP. Another option would be to create an app that measures the number of venture-backed start-ups in cities across America (hint: the National Venture Capital Association keeps that data).

2. Apps that will help the members of the Innovation Movement advance policy goals that support innovation.

   Examples: This could be an app that allows members of the grassroots movement to better communicate with members of Congress -- or perhaps its an app that allows members to see how members vote on various policies that protect or hinder innovation. Points are awarded for creativity!

There are a variety of prizes, including thousands of dollars and a free trip to CES in January. It's a cool program, and I'm thrilled that CEA asked me to be one of the judges in the contest. I'm hoping to see some really creative and innovative apps!

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OzPeter writes "Last week I won an Xbox 360 Pro. However, I am not a gamer, and after looking at the current MS offerings, I am not tempted to become one. But I am in the market for a Media Center PC that I can use for streaming TV shows off the 'net as well as general web browsing and displaying video through the HDMI port. With that in mind, I again looked at MS and saw they seemed to have positioned the Xbox as an adjunct to a separate Windows Media Center PC and not as a stand alone unit (which is not what I want). So, once again, I did some more research into the Xbox homebrew scene and discovered things like Xbox Linux. But after reading that site, it is apparent that MS is trying to beat down the homebrewers, and I am left wondering how much hassle it would be to go down that path. So my question is: how should I re-purpose my Xbox? Is it worthwhile doing the Homebrew/Linux option (and can anyone share any experiences)? Are there other ways of re-purposing the device that I haven't considered? Or should I just keep it boxed up as a Christmas present for a favorite nephew?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OzPeter writes "Last week I won an XBox 360 Pro, however I am not a gamer and after looking at the current MS offerings I am not tempted to become one. But I am in the market for a Media Center PC that I can use for streaming TV shows off the 'net as well as general web browsing and displaying the video through the HDMI port. With that in mind I again looked at MS and saw that they seemed to have positioned the XBox as an adjunct to a separate Windows Media Center PC and not as a stand alone unit (which is not what I want). So once again I did some more research into the XBox homebrew scene and discovered things like Xbox Linux. But after reading that site it is apparent that MS is trying to beat down the homebrewers and I am left wondering how much hassle it would be to go down that path. So my question is how should I re-purpose my XBox? is it worthwhile doing the Homebrew/Linux option (and can anyone share any experiences)? Are there other ways of re-purposing the device that I haven't considered? Or should I just keep it boxed up as a Christmas present for a favorite nephew?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week's flashback has actually been in two MAKE publications past: MAKE Volume 03 and Make: Halloween Special Edition. The author, Eric Wilhelm, is no stranger to DIY, as he runs Instructables. Eric's favorite holiday is of course Halloween, and so is ours. We've got just over 3 weeks left for you to get all your haunted house components synced up and ready to scare. Eric's article will no doubt come in handy. For more where this came from, you can still pick up Make: Halloween in the Maker Shed. And be sure to enter our Make: Halloween Contest 2009!

Haunted House Controller
Build a relay board that lets your computer synchronize lights, motors, and other devices to a scary soundtrack!
By Eric J. Wilhelm

For the last 12 years, I've been perfecting my technique of scaring kids. This project shows you how to build a tool I use in my haunted houses: a relay board that switches on electrical devices in time to an audio file that's playing on a laptop, connected via parallel port. Using this setup, you can write code that synchronizes lights, motors, fog machines, pumps, laser pointers, and other devices to cues in a spooky soundtrack.

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The Associated Press is considering charging an extra fee for early access to its stories. The AP's Tom Curley believes that news organizations like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, would be willing to pay a premium for a 20-30 minute head start on scoops. Now, lest some of you compare this product with Techdirt's own Crystal Ball offering, there is a key difference. AP's product depends on the timeliness of its stories, whereas Techdirt's stories are more focused on analysis -- we do not focus on breaking stories, but when we do, we do not hold them back for the Crystal Ball subscribers to view them. In any case, while this may sound like an enlightened idea for the AP, I'm not really sure it makes much sense. Currently, all of AP's licensees get all of the scoops at the same time, off the same wire. With this system, what the AP is doing is effectively weakening that existing product, and then creating a "new" product that, when the dust settles, is really what most of the customers were getting in the first place. It's not that the scoops are released 20-30 minutes sooner, but rather, if you don't pay the premium, you get the stories you would normally get later. Now, there's nothing wrong with this model, for example, stock quote services have long been able to charge more for real-time information, but for the AP to market this as a premium service seems like disingenuous marketing. Furthermore, given the AP's track record for trying to claim ownership over the news that it reports (like creating a DRM system for news), what happens when the now-hamstrung AP wire is scooped by a reporter who was tipped off by AP's own product?

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Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calender. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calender!

Coming up this week:
reMake Lounge (soft circuit workshop)
San Francisco, CA
Saturday, Oct 10, 2009, 12:30pm - 3pm

Nonsense NYC 10th Anniversary Show
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Oct 10, 2009, 7pm - 1am

Make:SF meeting
San Francisco, CA
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009, 6:30pm +

Innovation Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Wednesday, Oct 14, 2009 - Tuesday, Oct 20, 2009

Twin Cities Maker Monthly Meeting
Minneapolis, MN
Wednesday, Oct 14, 2009, 7pm - 9pm

Fire the Lazzzor! Learn to rapid prototype using the 35 Watt Epilog Laser.
Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, Oct 11, 2009, 2pm - 5pm

Start planning for:
Milton Keynes Science Festival
Central Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Saturday, Oct 17, 2009 - Sunday, Oct 25, 2009

Manchester Science Festival 2009
Manchester, United Kingdom
Sat, October 24, 2009 - Sunday, Nov 01, 2009

Video Editing in iMovie '09
Pittsburgh, PA
Saturday, Oct 24, 2009, 2pm - 4:30pm

Mobile Art && Code
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Nov 6 to Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, all weekend

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UPDATE: The server for the Science-Based Medicine blog is now back online, so the link in this story does work now. Hooray!

It seems like just yesterday we were all freaking out together about the discovery of H1N1. And now, here we are at flu season and our little pandemic is all grown up. In the meantime, there's been a lot of good work done on clearing up the questions surrounding this illness, but misinformation still abounds.

If you, or a loved one, are suffering from flu confusion, I prescribe this handy primer on the basics. Written by Dr. Joseph Albietz, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado, Denver, and The Children's Hospital, it starts at the very beginning (seriously, the first question is, "What is Influenza?") and provides a great overview of the flu in general, and H1N1 in particular.

Even if you feel like you've successfully graduated from Flu 101, there's a lot of great higher-level discussion and Q&A going on in the comments of this post. Enjoy, and happy learning!

Scientists at NASA say they've figured out a way to extract water from moondust, using the same old ordinary microwave ovens you and I use to extract "lunch" from frozen pizza-bricks:

"We believe we can use microwave heating to cause the water ice in a lunar permafrost layer to sublimate - that is, turn into water vapor. The water vapor can be collected and then condensed into liquid water. "Best of all, microwave extraction can be done on the spot. And it requires no excavation -- no heavy equipment for drilling into the hard-frozen lunar surface."

Microwaving Water from Moondust (NASA)

Image: Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean holds up a thermos full of moondust. (courtesy NASA)