the yes dance
symmetry explorer
i do believe i came with a hat
gawker (timelapse)
there i fixed it
vikings

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter.

The body of a 75-year-old LA area man who died Monday sat decomposing on his balcony for four days because his neighbors figured the corpse was part of a Halloween display. He died of a single gunshot wound to the eye.

Neighbors on the 13900 block of Bora Bora Way told Raishbrook that they noticed the body Monday "but didn't bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy," he said. "The body was in plain view of the entire apartment complex [and] they all didn't do anything," Raishbrook said. "It's very strange. It did look unreal, to be honest."

Dead man slumped on balcony mistaken for Halloween decoration (LA Times)

mowgs points out that Channel 4, over in the UK, has done a deal with YouTube to put all its shows online. Not just clips -- the entire shows. While many people still seem to think that YouTube is just about individuals uploading stuff, it seems like the company has focused on getting a lot more official content on the site as well. While Hulu has some nice features, YouTube still destroys Hulu in traffic -- and unlike Hulu, YouTube doesn't block out visitors from other countries. Recently, even I can't get to Hulu. Because I use a VPN for security purposes, Hulu claims that I'm trying to sneak in from another country, even as I sit here in California (home of Hulu). Why does the entertainment industry always default to "you must be a criminal unless you can prove otherwise" thinking?

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What is Google Wave good for? I don't know! I haven't used it. Above, two Google Wave demo-tainment videos you must watch. YouTube hacker/artist Joe "copyrighthater" Sabia has done it again. Two Google Wave experimental films, Pulp WAVE Fiction, and Good WAVE Hunting.

And, more soberly now: in an extensive feature-by-feature blog post, Daniel Tenner breaks down what purpose Google Wave serves, and why early detractors may be missing the point.

I believe this is partly Google's fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it's a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer. Google calls wave an "online tool for real-time communication and collaboration". The way Google should have advertised Wave is: "it solves the problems with email".

What problems does Google Wave solve? A matter of perspective. (danieltenner.com, via @carr2n)

Smelly Jeffrey writes "The BBC is reporting that the LHC has had all eight of its sectors cooled to 1.9 Kelvin. Their tagline is that it is now 'colder than deep space,' referring to the CMB. LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent the 'quench' condition that caused the LHC to be down for warming, repairs, and re-cooling over the last year. The LHC is now cold enough to begin colliding particles in search of the Higgs Boson. High power collisions won't be started until late December, or perhaps early January. However, a low-power beam through parts of the collider could be tested as early as next week!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smelly Jeffrey writes "The BBC is reporting that the LHC has had all eight of its sectors cooled to 1.9 Kelvin. Their tagline is that it is now 'colder than deep space,' referring to the CMB. LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent the 'quench' condition that caused the LHC to be down for warming, repairs, and re-cooling over the last year. The LHC is now cold enough to begin colliding particles in search of the Higgs Boson. High power collisions won't be started until late December, or perhaps early January. However, a low-power beam through parts of the collider could be tested as early as next week!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And you thought the Neverwas Haul was cool. Here's a giant elephant vehicle/movingbuilding/animatronic thingy, from Nantes, France.

Mechanical elephant in Nantes, France

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Jeff Sonderman points us to the fascinating story of a newspaper in the Czech Republic that is experimenting with making newsrooms into cafes. One of my big complaints about newspapers these days is how little they've done to help enable their community to participate in the news process (whether it's finding, writing, discussing, distributing or sharing the news). However, it looks like Nase Adresa is going a step further than just enabling the community online. It's enabling it in real space as well -- creating a news cafe. It combines both a newsroom and a typical cafe, so people can come and interact with editors and reporters, see the paper being created -- or even chip in and help out as well. And they're also doing more to serve the community than just offering up coffee and bites to eat, but are also holding concerts at the cafes as well (rescuing news and the music industry in one shot?). Apparently circulation is growing -- with 50% of subscriptions coming from people who happened to stop into the cafe.

The other interesting bit is that it appears that each of the cafes is working on producing specialized local content for just that local community -- all supported by a more centralized newsroom/journalist training center in Prague. So, there's a main newsroom, and then each local cafe gets to produce its own version, mixing news from the central source as well as locally produced content. The local papers/cafes need about 5 full-time employees, with plenty of other local volunteers or part-timers. It's still early in this experiment, so I do have some questions about how it functions long-term, but it is still nice to see a newspaper that actually focuses on serving a community directly. Next up? The Techdirt cafe?

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Last night, Federated Media's Neil Chase and I presented at my alma mater, the UC Berkeley Grad School of Journalism, about online publishing. The conversation was all about digital media, so afterwards I was delighted when a student there named Diana Jou came up to me wanting to talk about print 'zines! She has a blog, called Systems of Operation, where she (mostly) posts photos of 'zines, print ephemera, and artists books whose design she digs. Her taste seems to overlap with my own and I hope she starts updating her blog more frequently! The images above come from an instruction manual for an Olivetti typewriter and a booklet from the Society for Scientific Investigations of Anomalous Atmospherical and Radar Phenomena. Systems of Operation blog

An anonymous reader writes to share a report from The Register stating that executives from IBM and Intel have been arrested as a part of insider trading allegations. "According to a report from the Associated Press, six people were arrested today as part of an insider trading case, including Bob Moffat, senior vice president and general manager of IBM's Systems and Technology Group; Rajiv Goel, director of strategic investments at Intel Capital; Anil Kumar, a director at management consultancy McKinsey & Co; and Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the $7bn Galleon Group hedge fund."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For quite some time now, the MPAA has been asking the FCC for permission to break your TV, so you won't be able to record certain movies shown on TV. Specifically, it wants to be allowed to use something called "Selectable Output Control" to tell DVRs that they can't record a show. It's basically the whole "broadcast flag" concept all over again. The MPAA's argument for why it needs this makes no sense at all. It basically makes two arguments, neither of which are true. The first is that they need this in order to be able to put movies on TV earlier. This is not true. There's nothing stopping the studios from putting movies on TV earlier, other than a misguided fear that people will "pirate them." And that's the second problem: even the industry admits that the movies they'd release on TV are already pirated and available on file sharing networks, so it's not like having this would stop that. The movies will still get out there. SOC won't stop piracy at all -- but it will piss off a ton of people who bought a DVR expecting to be able to record what they want to watch.

Consumer rights group Public Knowledge, thankfully, has now sent a letterexplaining all of this to the FCC:

"The MPAA has submitted no proof that grant of the waiver will serve the public interest at all. To the contrary, what proof exists in the record shows that the 'problem' of a longer window for release of movies to MVPDs than for release on DVDs is a business decision made by MPAA's members. Rather than shed crocodile tears for the poor shut-ins and busy parents who must either subscribe to NETFLIX to get the earlier window or wait a whole thirty days, MPAA's members could simply negotiate a shorter release window."

Hopefully the FCC listens.

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I was traveling this week, which, in these days of the abomination that is HLN*, means I spend my hotel mornings watching random non-news cable networks. This time, the choice was HBO Comedy, which is how I ended up watching a great classroom-themed, comedic retelling of American history featuring Robert Wuhl.

I caught a couple of incorrect details here and there, but in general Wuhl was on track and worth watching...if only for his take on the ascendancy of Franklin Pierce and his (in my opinion) pretty insightful overarching lessons:

1) Our understanding of history is "based on a true story"

and

2) "We'll get through it" makes a pretty good philosophy from which to approach American politics.

UPDATE: I should note that there's swearing in these videos. So, play audio with caution in respect to bosses, small children and your own proclivities.

*CNN's "Talk Soup"-ish replacement for the Headline News channel is so horrible, I'm not even going to link to it.

bonch writes "Apple's Grand Central Dispatch, which was recently open sourced, has been ported to FreeBSD and is planned to be included by default in FreeBSD 8.1. Also known as libdispatch, the API allows the use of function-based callbacks but will also support blocks if built using FreeBSD's clang compiler package. There's already discussion of modifying BSD's system tools to use the new technology." The port was originally unveiled last month at the 2009 Developer Summit in Cambridge. Slides from that presentation are available via the Dev Summit wiki.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

In today's episode, you'll meet young Ms. Alexis McAdams, whose winning project was a concept for a kind of "living diorama," called "Dioractive." The idea: re-enact current events (say, the floods in the Phillippines, or the internally displaced refugees in Darfur) with human actors, to help people understand and empathize, and feel motivated to change the world.

Alexis told us she found out about the Digital Open by reading Boing Boing, and she's been a fan of our blog for some time (thanks, cool!). She says the idea for "Dioractive" came from varied sources of inspiration: LARPers (folks who do live-action roleplaying games), Civil War re-enactments (the real-life kind), history-based videogames (her brother's into these), and a diorama project she did in third grade. She digs theater, and learning foreign languages. All of this combined into an idea of how to place ourselves into the lives of the "other," and understand in a more personal way just how interconnected we all are.

Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners.

An anonymous reader writes "Google is taking suggestions for where you'd like to see the new Street View Trike go. Your favorite park, hiking trail, zoo, school campus hangout or outdoor mall could be going online thanks to Google Street View's new 250 pound tricycle, complete with camera and GPS. According to the press release: 'The Street View trike began as a 20% project by Daniel Ratner, a Senior Mechanical Engineer on the Street View team. "I began thinking about building a bicycle-based Street View system after realizing how many interesting places around the world — ranging from historic landmarks to beautiful trails to shopping districts — aren't accessible by car," says Dan. "When I'm riding the trike, so many people come up to me and ask where it's off to next or how they can get imagery of their favorite spot, so I can't wait to see what our users come up with."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rochus Jacob designed this energy-harvesting rocking chair. It works by storing energy while you rock during the day, then lights up the attached OLED lamp at night. It is a neat concept, however there is no reason to wait for future technologies to build one. Just start with this human-powered fan design, add a small generator and a standard LED, grab your whittling project, and you should be set to go. [via gizmodo]

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While more disclosure is generally a good thing, the FTC's new guidelines for blogging disclosure have some pretty massive problems, and probably aren't legal. As more and more people are recognizing this -- and interviews with the FTC folks in charge of this suggest they either haven't put very much thought into this issue or they don't quite know how the world works outside of their government cocoon -- the backlash is growing. Now, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has stepped in with quite the open letter to the FTC, asking them to scrap the rules, while noting (snarkily) how impossible they are to follow, in practice:

So there I was last Saturday, about to send out on my Twitter feed -- which automatically updates my Facebook page and links to my personal blog -- a photograph of this wonderful baked halibut dish I'd just made as a surprise for my wife. I was in the middle of typing a rave review of the recipe, which I'd pulled from my favorite cookbook, Delicioso! The Regional Cooking of Spain by Penelope Casas. But before I could press the "post" button, I stopped and canceled the whole thing.

I remembered that the book was a freebie, sent to me by an editor at the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house 13 years ago. And I didn't want you guys to haul me into court and fine me for violating the rules you've just promulgated to muzzle social media.

While this may seem silly, it really does highlight the problems with the FTC's rules. They're totally unclear and absolutely could concern things like this. Getting a free book here or there happens all the time -- and the FTC actually claimed that if people don't return them, then they may face sanctions. That's ridiculous. Last month, we ran a fun contest for people to win free copies of a Kevin Smith book. If the winners from our comments mention that book anywhere online, do they need to mention they got the book for free? If they mention it to a friend, do they need to do the same thing? Because most of the time when posting stuff online, people really are just talking to their friends.

Again, it's not clear why people can't just sort this out themselves. People who post bogus reviews of things because someone pays them to, or because of something "free," are going to get called out on it eventually and lose their credibility. When people talk amongst friends, they don't reveal where they got the products they talk about, or if they happened to get a promotional sample -- and that's fine. While you can understand where the FTC is coming from, it really has gone overboard with these rules.

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CWmike writes to mention that the "Windows Presentation Foundation" plugin that Microsoft slipped into Firefox last February apparently left the popular browser open to attack. This was among the many things recently addressed in the massive Tuesday patch. "What was particularly galling to users was that once installed, the .NET add-on was virtually impossible to remove from Firefox. The usual 'Disable' and 'Uninstall' buttons in Firefox's add-on list were grayed out on all versions of Windows except Windows 7, leaving most users no alternative other than to root through the Windows registry, a potentially dangerous chore, since a misstep could cripple the PC. Several sites posted complicated directions on how to scrub the .NET add-on from Firefox, including Annoyances.org."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes to mention that the "Windows Presentation Foundation" plugin that Microsoft slipped into Firefox last February apparently left the popular browser open to attack. This was among the many things recently addressed in the massive Tuesday patch. "What was particularly galling to users was that once installed, the .NET add-on was virtually impossible to remove from Firefox. The usual "Disable" and "Uninstall" buttons in Firefox's add-on list were grayed out on all versions of Windows except Windows 7, leaving most users no alternative other than to root through the Windows registry, a potentially dangerous chore, since a misstep could cripple the PC. Several sites posted complicated directions on how to scrub the .NET add-on from Firefox, including Annoyances.org."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cool video from the folks at MonkeyBasic.com who are selling an add-on to Brookshire's Visual Show Automation (VSA) package. The software is tracking the head movements of an operator wearing a special IR-active headpiece, and translating them into real-time motions of an animatronic skull.

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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We've written a few times about the legal battle in Australia between ISP iiNet and anti-piracy group AFACT. The actual trial's been going on -- and we haven't written much about the day-to-day, figuring we'll wait until there's a verdict. However, Jason sent over an interesting side note. Some had noticed that there was a flurry of Twitter reporting from the courtroom, as various reporters have been using Twitter to get real-time info out about the trial. Apparently, the fact that some had called attention to this scared off The Australian, who told its reporter to stop Tweeting from the courtroom, wondering if it might get them in trouble.

Not so much, apparently. When asked about it, the court basically said it was fine. While it admitted that it hadn't really put too much thought into potential downsides, on the whole, it viewed portable technology as a good way to quickly inform the public:

The practice is relatively new and -- as such -- the court has not had the opportunity to consider any possible adverse implications. It is entirely at the discretion of individual judges how they conduct matters in their court room. We would, of course, be concerned if any device was used that disrupted proceedings.

Nevertheless, on what we know so far, the use of twitter does not seem to have caused any problems and maybe a useful way of informing the public very quickly about what is happening in a court room. The court itself -- through its e-services strategy -- supports the use of portable technology. New portable devices provide a range of functions -- in addition to being a phone -- and are increasingly used by many in the ordinary course of business because they are so efficient.

It's nice to see a court not freak out about such things, but recognize that they're increasingly common and often quite useful.

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Sabotage...from the future?

That's the theory being put forward by two top physicists. Even they admit it's a little weird. The idea could be groundbreaking. Or, it could be a valuable lesson that even scientists can fall prey to the very human tendency to see patterns in actually random events.

Some people have this experience and come away believing in astrology. Instead, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have ended up with the theory that the Future is trying to stop us from creating a Higgs boson particle.

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle."
...While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

Above, a 1943 amphibious vehicle test in Detroit's Rouge River (Photo: Charles E. Steinheimer./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images). Life's Ben Cosgrove emails:

As Time's site has it: "For the next year, Time Inc. journalists will cover all aspects of the Motor City. Because the future of Detroit affects all of us." I believe that. I've always liked Detroit -- my first visit to the amazing Detroit Institute of Arts remains one of the most wonderful cultural surprises of my life; I was a callow jerk, expecting little, and was utterly blown away by DIA's collection -- and I thought I knew a little bit about the city. But somehow I never knew anything about Detroit's central role in helping the Allies win WWII. Well, when I did finally hear about it, I thought a gallery was in order.

WWII: How Detroit Won The War

mariushm writes "Peter Cooper, the author of Beginning Ruby, breaks down how he gets paid for the book, including the advance and royalties, giving a nice clean explanation of how authors get paid for their books. He also describes the negotiations over the second edition of the book, in which he begged his publisher, Apress, to offer the ebook version for free, believing (strongly) that it would promote sales of the paper book. He even notes that the original version's ebook barely had noteworthy sales, so it seemed reasonable to offer up the ebook for free to drive more attention. No dice. Even though Apress has done that with other similar titles, it wouldn't agree. As he retains the copyright for the actual text, he encourages people to buy the book and create an online version of it without covers, contents table and indexes, promising not to enforce his copyright over the new work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at the Artificial Infinite, old-school bOING bOING pal Alan Rapp posted a critical essay about the state of architectural photography. The provocative essay is accompanied by absolutely incredible images by Tim Griffith, an architectural photographer who I wasn't familiar with. His hazy, atmospheric images of our strange built environments are sure to turn up in my dreams. From Alan's essay:

...The current practice of architectural photography has in many ways evolved more toward art. Fairly conceptual photographers such as Iwan Baan and Frank van der Salm are regularly tapped by the titans of the architecture industry—OMA, Herzog & De Meuron—to create photographs of their projects that seem to violate most of Molitor’s tenets.

A brief exploration of the work of Tim Griffith provides further example of this new “artistic” approach to architectural imaging and the shifting state of architectural photography. Giffith’s work, recently included in the Ballarat International Foto Bienniale, depicts some of the most prominent architectural projects of our age. Australian-born and US-based, Griffith explores the parallels and tensions inherent in this yoking of architecture and photography; his work is formed by professional rigor yet inflected toward art, hypertechnological in subject and approach, yet suggestive of an already fading moment.

"Architectural Photography is Art Photography"

I'm posting geek "yo momma" jokes to my Twitter feed, and people who think that sort of nonsense is amusing have been replying with even funnier ones that I'm retweeting in an infinite circle of endless insult lulz. Here are a few selections.

• Yo momma so ugly, she make goatse cry for a unicorn chaser. (@xenijardin)
• Yo momma so fat THX can't even surround her. (@mustardhamsters)
• Yo momma so dumb, she went to the dentist and asked for a bluetooth.(@seanbonner)
• Yo momma so stupid, she thinks the Large Hadron Collider is a gay porn film.(@xenijardin)
• Yo momma's so big and ugly she lies dreaming in R'lyeh.(@Orlovsky)
• Yo momma so fat she doesn't just have a low center of gravity, she has an elliptical orbit.(@seanmoriva)
• Yo momma so old, she's an arguing point between Creationists and Evolutionists. (@Nightwyrm)
• Yo Momma so fat, even Ralph Lauren's Photoshop team can't help her ass. (@rawkreative)
• Yo momma so old she goes on carbon dates. (@sfslim)
• Yo momma so dense she got her own event horizon. (@sfslim)
• Yo momma so weak physicists have unified her with electromagnetism. (@sfslim)
• Your momma is so fat NASA shot a rocket into her ass looking for water. (@tbias)
• Yo momma so fat, she took geometry in high school just cause she heard there was gonna be some pi. (@MatthewMors)
• Yo mamma so fat, China uses her to block the internet. (@thelizupdate )

Follow me for more if you like. I promise not to tweet other crap at least for the rest of the day, so you can tune in to nothing but yo momma jokes without having to endure me talking about what I ate for lunch or what I'm the mayor of, or whatever.

Tobi Leingruber, artist and Firefox hax0r, made this skatekeyboard (art piece) that's full of cognitive dissonance and neon, two of my favorite things.

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A four pound hunk of metal crashed through the roof of Peter and Mair Welton's home in Hull, UK. The Royal Air Force first thought the debris fell off an airplane but now they say it came from space. From the BBC News:

It was not known where the metal had come from but it seemed likely that it was "space debris", investigators said.

The RAF Flight Safety Branch said it was the only incident of this kind it had dealt with for five years.

Couple's home hit by space metal

We recently wrote about Ralph Lauren's DMCA notices about bad Photoshopping, making a model impossibly (and sickly) skinny. While the company apologized for the bad photoshopping, it never apologized for the bogus DMCA takedowns. And, now the other shoe has dropped. The model in the picture has spoken up and noted that she lost her job with Ralph Lauren, because they felt she wasn't skinny enough, despite being 5'10" and 120lbs. So, rather than showing her as is, apparently the company decided to digitally alter her and then try to find someone who actually is closer to the impossible image they put in their ad.

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Last Saturday, I brought you a video of horrible gummi bear torture. Now, I want to set the record straight. Some of my best friends were* gummi bears. I swear.

To make it up to the gummi bear community, I present to you, their life story: From the early days in Bonn, Germany, to being an inspiration for breast implants. Gummi bears have had a full and happy life before we get to them. And don't let PETA tell you otherwise.

Pictured: Stalwart, brave gummies save their comrades from what might otherwise have been a tragic mountaineering accident. Flickr user iwona_kellie captured the event on film. Used here via CC.

*Some friends are tastier than others.

Squiff writes to mention that despite being based on the Open Handset Alliance's Android platform and using several open source components, HTC are effectively refusing to release the source for the GPL parts of their "Hero" Phone code, saying that they are "waiting for their developers to provide it." It has been called an "object of lust," it's beating the iPhone for awards, and it seems to be the first Android phone that really is "the phone to have," to hear some people tell it. It has also just become available in the US after a June release in Europe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Squiff writes to mention that despite being based on the Open Handset Alliance's Android platform and using several open source components, HTC are effectively refusing to release the source for the GPL parts of their "Hero" Phone code, citing that they are "waiting for their developers to provide it." It has been called an "object of lust," has been beating the iPhone for awards, and seems to be the first Android phone that really is "the phone to have" to hear some people tell it. It has also just become available in the USA after a June release in Europe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Geist sez,

C-27 is the Canadian anti-spam bill that comes out of committee on Monday. The opposition Liberals have proposed amendments which appear to have been drafted by copyright and telecom lobbyists. They would allow for surreptitious installation of computer programs and - even more outrageously - would allow copyright owners to secretly access information on users' computers.

The bill contains an anti-spyware provision, yet the Liberal motion would allow for the collection of personal information on a computer without authorization if the collection is related to a "investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada." Note that that is private sector surveillance, not the police.

On top of these provisions, the Liberals have also tabled motions to extend the exemptions for telecom providers including allow telecom providers to engage in a host of activities - right down to scanning for and removing computer programs - without permission.

With the hearing on Monday, it is critical for Canadians to speak out - yet again - to ensure that C-27 does not leave the door open to private surreptitious surveillance.

Michael has links to contact the relevant MPs with your comments. Yes, we have to keep doing this, because the second we stop, they'll break the goddamned Internet, put spyware on your computer, and start listening in on every click and email.

The Copyright Lobby's Secret Pressure On the Anti-Spam Bill

Why is Larry Weiss fascinated with hygiene? Well, he believes that it is a human engineering problem that society has attempted to solve chemically, with poor results. So, instead of fighting a loosing battle trying to convince people about this, he is working to produce a non-toxic alternative to common cleaning products. Find out the whole story in our exclusive interview with him.

Larry's talk is the latest installment in our Fascination series of interviews with notable scientists and technologists, sponsored by Dow Chemical.

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As tends to happen, it appears that Missouri has decided to overcompensate for the mess with the whole Lori Drew/Megan Meier tragedy. After realizing that Lori Drew hadn't committed any actual crime, Missouri passed a new law making it a potential felony for being a jerk online. And, of course, with that new law in place, Missouri prosecutors have wasted little time in filing charges against all sorts of people. The latest involves the arrest of a teenager for creating a mean website about another student. Now, I'm not condoning the behavior of this student, which does seem despicable -- but arresting the kid seems really extreme. Aren't there less draconian methods for dealing with this sort of thing? Kids can be mean and, yes, they do stupid things at times -- but arresting kids every time they're a jerk online is going to lead to a pretty busy judicial system.

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DARPA has awarded a $31 million contract to megacorp Lockheed Martin which will, with some assistance from Microsoft, attempt to reinvent the Internet and make it more military-friendly. "The main thrust of the effort will be to develop a new Military Network Protocol, which will differ from old hat such as TCP/IP in that it will offer 'improved security, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level.' Lockheed will be partnered with Anagran, Juniper Networks, LGS Innovations, Stanford University and — of course — Microsoft in developing the MNP. Apart from that, Lockheed's own Information Systems & Global Services-Defense tentacle will work on amazing new hardware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Collectors Weekly published a fascinating interview with Scott Buckwald, the original prop master for Mad Men. Buckwald is a fascinating character and his work on Mad Men is obsessively awesome. For Mad Men, Buckwald and his team sought out vintage taxicab meters, constructed lipstick display cases, printed TV Guides of the era, reproduced a 1960 Sara Lee cherry cheesecake box, and even cooked hamburgers that matched the time period. From The Collectors Weekly:

Collectors Weekly: When it came to the Mad Men office scenes, did you have to get vintage typewriters and pencils and pens?

Buckwald: Well, pencils are pencils. There's no change in the pencils, and a lot of offices were using ballpoint pens. Fountain pens had largely disappeared. Certainly for formal use, the fountain pen was still there, but not as an everyday office tool.

I thought Mad Men made a big mistake on the typewriters. They knew what the right history was, but they ignored it. The secretaries at that advertising firm would have still been using vintage-style typewriters, but they used IBM Selectrics simply because the producer liked the way they looked and they made less noise on set. So we got many letters about how they were wrong, but, again, that's his call. And right or wrong, it's his show. He can do whatever he wants with it.

There was a typewriter repairman in North Hollywood, California. He couldn't believe it when all of a sudden someone deposited 24 vintage typewriters on his doorstep and said, "Make them look new." He probably hadn't had that much work in the last 25 years. He was probably just about ready to hang up the "Going out of business" sign and cursing the arrival of the laptop computer when all of a sudden here I come with 24 typewriters...

Collectors Weekly: If someone is drinking Coca-Cola in Mad Men, would you have to get the actual Coca-Cola bottle from 1960? Buckwald: Yes. Vintage Coca-Cola bottles are pretty easy to get, so I would get the bottles, fill them up with Coke, and use a bottle capper to press the original caps back on. We did an episode when the first canned Coca-Cola was coming out. Coke was trying to promote its first cans, but they were nothing like today's cans. There's nothing similar to it. Even the material of the can was different. It was steel as opposed to aluminum. So I had to remake the original Coke can, which was a blast.

Believe or not, we actually found a peanut jar in the New York area that was the same size and shape of a Coke can. It was metal on the top but the sides were cardboard. We made a decal of a Coke label and wrapped it around the jar. By the touch, you could tell that it wasn't made out of metal, but on camera it looked like a metal Coke can.

It's always turning one thing into another. That's what I love about doing this. It's always last-minute thinking and being innovative--being the mad scientist. It never gets boring because everything is different. In Mad Men, I was a 1960s advertising executive. In The Prestige, I was a 1890s magician. In You Again, I'm a 2009 wedding planner. I've been a policeman. I've been a doctor. I've been a lawyer. I've been a gynecologist. I get to step into other people's lives.

An Interview with Scott Buckwald, Prop Master for the Hit TV Show Mad Men

Andorin writes "Ars Technica writes about the recent work on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and reveals that while the public does not have access to the text of the agreement, a handful of lawyers representing Big Content and numerous companies and organizations do. 'Turns out that... ACTA will include a section on Internet "enforcement procedures" after all. And how many people have had input on these procedures? Forty-two. ... Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) found out in September that the US Trade Representative's office had actually been secretly canvassing opinions on the Internet section of the agreement from 42 people, all of whom had signed a nondisclosure agreement before being shown the ACTA draft text.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If anyone in the rssCloud community is marketing against PubSubHubBub, we will ask them to stop. My position, and I hope that of the community is that these are non-commercial efforts, no one is going to profit (or lose) based on the success of one or the other protocols.

I see adoption of PubSubHubBub as a win for the Internet, and believe strongly their advocates should see adoption of rssCloud the same way. If they feel pressure from rssCloud, it should result in them more fully embracing RSS, which I felt they weren't doing when I first reviewed their efforts. Once that happens the differences will probably melt away and everyone will be happy.

Personal attacks in furthering advocacy are totally unacceptable and should not be tolerated. I hope this goes without saying, but unfortunately it appears it still needs to be said. Please.

Here's a complete run of National Lampoon covers from 1971 - 1998. The August 1971 cover depicts American war criminal William Calley as the imbecilic Alfred E. Neuman, painted by the inimitable science fiction illustrator Kelly Freas.

National Lampoon cover gallery (Via Jack Shafer)

It's been a really rough month for me, personally, and that has stalled some of the forward motion in rssCloudLand. I was able to find a little time between crises to implement both of the proposed changes, and to outline an open discussion page.

Originally I had planned to have four or five days between the implementation and updating the rssCloud walkthrough, but then Father's Day happened, and well, all my cards went up in the air. I'm still not firing on all cylinders, so please check my work carefully, but it is time to clear the space for more deployment of what amounts to a crucial feature for rssCloud implementers.

This morning I updated the walkthrough document to allow for:

1. An optional domain parameter on the REST request for notification.

2. If the notification request included the optional domain parameter, the verification process works differently.

Windell of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories noticed that the "Blueberry Blast" candies he picked up contained red cabbage extract, which, as every evil mad scientist knows, is a classic homebrew pH indicator. So he dunked three samples in baking soda solution, neutral water, and vinegar. Sure enough, visible color changes.

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pistol alerts us to an interesting post from Peter Cooper, the author of Beginning Ruby, where he breaks down how he gets paid for the book, including the advance and royalties, giving a nice clean explanation of how authors get paid for their books. It's pretty typical, but nice to see a clean breakdown.

But what's a lot more interesting, is towards the end, he describes the negotiations over the second edition of the book, where he begged his publisher, Apress, to offer the ebook version for free, believing (strongly) that it would promote sales of the paper book. He even notes that the original version's ebook barely had noteworthy sales, so it seemed reasonable to offer up the ebook for free to drive more attention. No dice. Even though Apress has done that with other similar titles, it wouldn't agree. So, his response is to tell people that he doesn't mind if you download unauthorized copies of the book... even if he's not sure what Apress would do:

My reaction to seeing other Apress books getting the free, electronic version treatment is: I'm good with you pirating my book! Now, of course, I can't actively participate in pirating my book but, heck, it's around on plenty of "free e-book" sites and on RapidShare. There are even links on Twitter to torrents like this. I am happy for you to pirate my book, but I'm NOT A LAWYER, and I can't guarantee what Apress would do about it - so you'd be doing it off your own back! So, uhm, don't pirate it? ;-)

He also goes on to point out that, technically, he owns the copyright on most of the content in the book, so there may even be a loophole there:

Now, according to my contract, I own the copyright to the entire book except for the cover, table of contents, and the indexes. My contract also states that I have exclusively allowed Apress to publish and reproduce my content. So.. I suspect that if you took my book, removed the cover, contents and indexes, and turned it into a PDF with a cover of your own creation, Apress couldn't do anything about it because everything would be my copyright. Now, I cannot allow you to do this, but I would not pursue you or enforce my copyrights if you did ;-) So, er, don't do it!

Of course, something is seriously wrong with the way things are set up when an author has to go behind his own publisher's back to tell people to "pirate" his own book. Eventually publishers will begin to recognize how to embrace new business models, but until then, it seems like it may be quite a struggle for many publishers (there are, of course, a few exceptions -- and, for you supporters of Baen books, yes, we know about them, no need to keep pointing them out).

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Behold the french fry coated hot dog, a Korean treat. (Via Kristie Lu Stout)

"Lampreys don't charm most people," begins a pamphlet from the Minnesota Sea Grant.

Truer words, my environmental research friends, truer words.

Yes, it's hard out there for a lamprey. Already cursed with a face not even their mothers (who die shortly after spawning) could love, these fish were further saddled with 50 years of bad PR brought on when one invasive species, the sea lamprey, moved into the Great Lakes and wreaked a trail of parasitic havoc from New York to Minnesota. Lost in the shuffle were several native lamprey species, some of which aren't even parasitic. Despite living in the Great Lakes for 1000s of years in co-evolved cooperation with other fish, non-invasive lamprey have paid the price for their cousin's misdeeds.

The problem stems from the (really fascinating) lamprey life cycle. Instead of having a short childhood and many years of maturity, lamprey basically spend most of their lives as larvae, buried in the mud at the bottom of stream beds*. They survive this way, feeding on microorganisms filtered out of the water, for anywhere from three to seven years, depending on the species. (Insert your own joke about college students here.) The adult stage of life, in contrast, can be as short as a single breeding season. In fact, some non-parasitic species don't even eat after becoming adults. Their digestive tracts just wither away and they use stored fat for energy during the short time they have left on Earth.

Lamprey's bottom-feeding phase basically creates a captive audience, in so much as "captive audience" means "conveniently having lots of lamprey in one place so you can poison them."

Now, before you call PETA, there's a good reason for the lampreycide. Sea lamprey are an invasive species that first entered the Great Lakes probably around the 1930s, when canals were opened allowing the lamprey to swim around Niagara Falls. Sea lamprey are big, and hungry, feasting on the blood of fish. And, for all but the largest fish, the embrace of the sea lamprey usually means death. (Native parasitic lamprey, by contrast, are much smaller and usually don't kill fish.) The Departments of Natural Resources in several states have been poisoning the streams favored by invasive sea lamprey larvae in order to save native fish since the 1950s.

The good news: The poison used is pretty lamprey specific and (again, because of that long larval cycle) DNR officials usually only need to poison a given stream once every four years or so.

The bad news: The poison will also kill native lamprey (which often live in the mud alongside the sea lamprey). The natives haven't been driven to the point of species endangerment by lamprey poisonings, says Phil Cochran, lamprey expert and chair of biology at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. But geographic populations of these friendly, neighborhood lamprey have been threatened, and even wiped out.

So, over the last several decades, the DNR has been working to improve their aim, using both new control methods and a better understanding of native lamprey habitats. For instance, Cochran says, today we know that native lamprey often live further upstream than sea lamprey, so control crews can apply the poison at a point in the stream where it won't affect most of the native larvae.

And new, poison-free, methods of control are under research. One idea is to catch male sea lamprey and chemically sterilize them. "You release those males into wild populations and they dilute the breeding effort," says Cochran. "It will take a while to see whether this works with sea lamprey, but it's been used successfully on insects before."

Pheromones are also a possibility. Adult lamprey are attracted to chemicals released by larval lamprey. In fact, Cochran says these chemical signals might be the thing that helps lamprey make their way from lakes to the breeding grounds in streams. Scientists don't yet know whether these chemicals are specific to species but, if they are, they could be used to lure sea lamprey into a trap. (Insert Admiral Akbar joke here.)

*I, for one, will be thinking twice about squishing my toes through the mud at the bottom of stream beds from now on.

Image courtesy Flickr user edans, via CC.

As if Vegas casinos don't already rake in enough money from suckers, now they are developing technology to automatically detect people who count cards.

The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual "count" of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in the action. If a player is betting big when the count is indeed favorable, and keeping his chips to himself when it's not, he's fingered by the computer... and, in the real world, he'd probably receive a visit from a burly dude in a bad suit, too.

The system reportedly works even if the gambler intentionally attempts to mislead it with high bets at unfavorable times.

Computers to crack down on card counters

Kicking off a new series of weekly round-ups of the most essential just-released games (spanning retail, indie, downloadable, iPhone, freeware, and all otherwise), this week takes us on a trip through heavy metal fantasy, jellybean puzzle solving, rusted robot worlds, and Indian-spiced psychadelic shooters. Brutal Legend (Double Fine, PS3/Xbox 360) Certainly one of the highest profile games of the season, Double Fine's Brutal Legend (at top) has been garnering all the media acclaim it richly deserves following its release earlier this week. Created by former LucasArts adventure vet Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango) and starring Jack Black alongside a league of metal legends (Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, and, of course, Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne), the studio's open-world/driving/lite real-time-strategy opus is every medieval-apocalypse album cover brought to glorious life, finally fulfilling the wishes of two generations of disaffected patched-jean-jacketed and notebook-cover-doodling Hessians. A Boy and his Blob (WayForward, Wii) On the polar opposite of the spectrum, WayForward's A Boy and his Blob is a spiritual sequel to a game that, even if you aren't directly familiar with, you will appreciate the lineage of, having been the 8-bit NES platforming debut of David Crane, former Activision designer behind genre-defining Atari 2600 game Pitfall. Blob's essentially ludicrous premise (the titular boy's titular sidekick transforming into a series of helpful level-navigating utilities after eating one of many various jellybeans) is softened by its gorgeous cel-animated art-style, which itself belies the challenges you'll find within. It's also one of the first (but hopefully not near the last) games released to contain a dedicated 'hug' button, a detail which should seal the deal for many. Machinarium (Amanita, PC/Mac) Amanita's point and click adventure was featured at much greater length here earlier in the week, but suffice it to say the studio's third major release is well worth the wait, and well worth showing your support for a group of indies trying to keep the limping genre alive with true hand-polished passion. Gridrunner Revolution (Llamasoft, PC) Finally, cheating the system just a bit to mention a game that's fallen between the cracks for the past few weeks, Gridrunner Revolution -- the latest evolutionary chapter in creator Jeff Minter's decades long quest for the psychedelically sublime -- would be a worthy choice for weekend gaming if only for a dose of the eye-searing light-show seen above. But the truth is that behind its happily harrowing hallucinogenics and ungulate-fancy are surprisingly complex mechanics (see Minter's 'Sheepintology' video for an introduction to those) that's made it one of the most rewarding indie shooters of the year. Don't pass this one up if you have already -- download the demo version for PCs here.

Mario Caicedo Langer just posted a bunch of pics to the Make: Flickr Pool showing off his "Battlizer."

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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carusoj writes 'The way traffic moves over the Internet has changed radically in the last five years. Arbor Networks next week will present the results of a two-year a study, drawing on more than 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, that found that the bulk of international Internet traffic no longer moves across Tier-1 transit providers. Instead, the traffic is handled directly by large content providers, content delivery networks, and consumer networks, and is handed off from one of these to another. You can probably guess what some of these companies are: Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Arbor says there are about 30 of these 'hyper giant' companies that generate and consume about 30% of all Internet traffic.' Here is the Arbor Networks press release on the report.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

According to Slashfood, an Australian brewery has reportedly set off the alarms in Disney's legal department with a Raspberry Ale ad campaign featuring Ho White, an "anything but sweet" character who blows smoke rings while reclined in bed with the seven dwarves.

Gears, clocks, metallic icing, and fondant made me smile at Cake Wrecks' roundup of steampunk cakes. [Thanks, Rachel!]

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When thinking about the future, something I've spent a lifetime training myself to do, I try flipping the classic question around. Instead of asking "Do you think X will happen?" try this -- "Can you imagine X not happening?" It doesn't always yield a breakthrough, but it often does. It helps you see past the limits of today.

Anyway, I'm giving a 10-minute talk to open Jeff Pulver's Twitter conference in LA on the 27th. The title of my talk, suggested by Carla Casilli, is: "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fail Whale." It's a ripoff of the sub-title of one of the greatest movies of all time, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. In his version, they replace the Fail Whale with The Bomb. In the 50s, 60s and 70s people were as obsessied with nuclear weapons as they are today with Twitter (that's only half a joke).

Anyway, today a tweet is 140 characters with an ever-evolving cadre of metadata marching alongside. And it's about the metadata that I wish to ask the inverted question. But first, I'd ask you to click on the small picture below, and go to Flickr and look at all the metadata that's assembled around a picture of my aunt and uncle taken by my mother sometime in the late 70s or early 80s.



What a rich collection of information there is. Yet you could imagine more, yes? If you read the paragraph that introduces the picture you'll see that there's some data that isn't reflected in the Flickr database. It was taken by my mother, and the two people in the picture are related to both of us. One by blood (the man, my uncle Ken) and one because she is married to the other (my aunt Dot). That data is missing probably because Flickr stopped actively evolving before social networking had fully gained a foothold in online culture. Same with the web itself. Wouldn't it be cool if a pointer could imply a familial relationship? I know that's what TBL has been talking about. Maybe we're getting closer to actually having it.

Anyway, if you go crazy and try to imagine what Twitter might become, you can see that a lot of what it is is in the Flickr metadata without the thing in the middle -- the picture. I've been urging Twitter to support payloads for years now. I can't imagine why they're not doing it. One piece of metadata is all that's needed, minimally, the URL pointing to the picture. Today we have to cram it into the 140 characters. Meanwhile they're advancing, adding geographic data and lists and retweets, all of which add little bits of data to a tweet, but for some reason they won't add the url. Which gets back to the question. Can you imagine that Twitter will never get this feature? No, of course not. It will someday get it. Why not get it over with?

CWmike writes "Google announced on Thursday that next year it's launching an online e-book store called Google Editions where users will be able to buy digital books that can be read on a range of gadgets, including e-book readers, laptops, and cell phones. Press reports out of Germany, where it was announced, note that Google plans to offer up half a million e-books from the get-go. Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said, 'The market leader, Amazon, built its position with a closed device, Kindle, which is limited to reading and buying eBooks. It will be interesting to see how well it stacks up against Google's strategy of delivering e-book capabilities via the Web to any device that can connect to the Internet. This gives Google a vastly larger addressable market than what Amazon has built up with Kindle so far.'" The price per book will be set by the publishers, Google says. Google willl turn over 45% of what they take in to the publisher and "the vast majority" of the rest to retailers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Singer Garth Brooks got some attention for sorta kinda unretiring, and in answering some questions he made some bizarre comments about how the government doesn't protect musicians from piracy:

"Our government's not doing anything about piracy. Until we can hear what a day of radio is like with no music, until this place sits silent because the music creators and the artists and copyright (holders) are not happy because they're not being protected like everyone else is, then, yeah, I would like that power myself. It has to be placed in the right hands, so it can't be one person, but a board that represents music, its creators and its content owners. I think that'd be more than fair to stand up and say, 'Look, you've ignored us, because there's 50,000 of us and 300 million voters. You've ignored us, and now to show you, we would like to just simply stop for a day,' and see how dry this world gets."

Really? This is the same government that has only increased copyright protections over time and never decreased them (never). This is the same government that has both Republicans and Democrats repeating the RIAA's bogus stats on piracy. This is the same government that allows the RIAA unprecedented access in terms of setting the copyright agenda of the nation. It's hard to see anything that the government has done that "ignores" artists in favor of the rights of the rest of the country. I can't name a single thing.

And I'm curious as to what he means by "they're not being protected like everyone else is." That's also not true. Copyright has been twisted to grant more rights than everyone else, in that it allows copyright holders to control what happens to works after they're sold. In many ways they get extra protection from folks in any other line of work.

Finally, he seems to assume that the only reason people create music is because of these protections -- and yet, as piracy has increased, so has the number of musicians and albums being produced. So, if he wants to create some sort of union that goes on "strike" for a day, I would imagine that there would be a massive influx of indie musicians (I guess they'd be "scabs") more than willing to get their music on the radio instead.

The problem is that for the vast majority of musicians who are not Garth Brooks, the bigger issue is obscurity, not piracy. Having those big name musicians take themselves out of the competition for even a day would thrill plenty of smart musicians, giving them a chance to get attention normally reserved for the Garth Brooks' of the world.

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japan_dan writes "An interesting way to enable Earth-Mars communication when the Sun occults the direct radio line-of-sight: ESA proposes placing a pair of continuous-thrusting relay satellites, using a solar electric propulsion system — one in front and ahead of Mars, the other behind and below — with both following non-Keplerian, so-called 'B-orbits'. This means the direction of thrust is perpendicular to the satellites' direction of flight, allowing them to 'hover' with both Earth and Mars in view. Quoting from the Q&A: 'We found that a pair of relay satellites would only have to switch on their thrusters for about 90 days out of every 2.13-year period, and this solution would only increase the one-way signal travel time by one minute, so it could be effective.'" Here is the paper describing non-Keplerian orbits (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've highlighted how the BSA uses completely bogus stats to push its agenda, but an even bigger issue is how the company uses incredibly underhanded tactics to effectively extort companies into paying massive sums, even if they've legally purchased their software. A few years ago, the Associated Press started calling out some of the BSA's nastier tricks, but it's not like it made a difference. Stories of such tactics continue to pop up. Over at Network World, James Gaskin has devoted an entire column to highlighting underhanded tricks by the BSA, which it uses to bully small companies into paying thousands of dollars:

I'm concerned about how the BSA bullies small companies that lose paperwork, or are victimized by angry employees who destroy the single piece of evidence the BSA considers acceptable. What evidence is that? Want to guess? If you guess wrong, you pay a fine.

Is the original software packaging enough? Pay a fine. The Certificate of Authenticity on the computer? Pay a fine. The original disks holding the software? Pay a fine.

He also highlights how badly the deck is stacked against small companies, and how there are almost no legal rulings on these sorts of things, because the BSA and its biggest members (such as Microsoft, Adobe and Autodesk) know that it's cheaper for companies to settle rather than fight in court. As you read through the article, it just gets more and more ridiculous. Here's just a sampling:

Adobe, another BSA founding member, has started a program to audit companies for font abuse. Yes, fonts. Each font includes a copyright and you need a license. If someone sends you a Word document with a licensed font, and that font gets used by anyone in your company, it becomes a federal case. Literally.

One of the BSA tricks Scott really hates is its unbundling tactic. Say you have a copy of Microsoft Office you can't prove is yours. Perhaps the shipping clerk stole the invoice as he left your company to call the BSA and get a reward (it happens all the time). The BSA comes, and charges you not for one piece of software, Office, but individually for each application within Office, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Each one brings a fine for illegal use.

As Glaskin notes, none of this makes using unauthorized software right (especially these days, when there are so many legitimate alternatives), but the BSA's tactics are much worse. It's difficult to see how these sorts of things are allowed -- but as we've seen, various industry associations seem to get pretty much free reign in bullying whomever they want.

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SpaceGhost sends in a story from San Antonio, TX: "Police have arrested a 16-year-old girl on charges of harassment under a new Texas law that took effect September 1, 2009. H.B. 2003 says a person commits a third degree felony if the person posts one or more messages on a social networking site with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person. Police say the harassment went on for a few months and involved a dispute over a boy. ... Some people expect legal challenges to the constitutionality of the new Internet law.' The law is evidently a response to the Lori Drew case.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First a prediction -- some people are going to say I'm writing this because I want to be on Techmeme. They are entitled to say that, but they are wrong. I am neutral about it. If a story of mine belongs on Techmeme, it should be there, if not, it shouldn't. And it isn't up to me to decide, it's up to the people who run Techmeme.

Also, please read this whole post before commenting, not just one paragraph or phrase, because it's complicated.

I've always believed that Techmeme was a combination of a bot and human judgement. This was confirmed a few months back when Gabe, the guy who runs the site, hired a human editor.

I've disabled their bot by including a line in my robots.txt file that tells them not to crawl the site. But there is no such thing for the human beings, you can't make it so that a person can't read your site. So I always thought that if one of the humans at Techmeme thought something I wrote was interesting, they would publish a link to it. As far as I know this has never happened. (And I watch pretty carefully.)

Sometimes I take the block out of the robots.txt file to see what will happen. In those cases my pieces often turn up on Techmeme, almost never as a major item, rather as part of the "chorus" -- commenting on one of the major articles. I'm often in the chorus with the story everyone is reacting to, including the guy who got top billing. I don't know how this happens, but it's a large part of why I block their bot. I really dislike the chorus. It's what makes the blogosphere like a mail list. You end up with a lot of people chiming in with nothing to add, who just want the flow from being there.

Anyway, what made me think of it is that today Charles Arthur at the Guardian has a nice piece which is centered on my review of Twitter's lists. It's getting a good run on Techmeme. If Techmeme were doing their job well, they'd flip it around and present it as him commenting on the original piece. I'm saying this in case Gabe and Company think the bit in the robots.txt is a prohibition on their human editors. It is not. Read up on robots.txt if you don't believe me. It's all about robots.

Man, what don't monomes do? Robert Böhnke puts the popular open source controller to work as a Twitter display.

Related:
Monome's 64 (video) fingers

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An anonymous reader writes On October 14, the FCC issued a call for public comments on a study (PDF) done by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society about whether the US should require the telephone and cable companies to open their networks to competitors so that independent ISPs could begin offering broadband, much in the way it was done back in the days of dialup access. The study found that open-access in virtually every other country 'is playing a central role in current planning exercises throughout the highest performing countries,' noting: 'While Congress adopted various open access provisions in the almost unanimously-approved Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC decided to abandon this mode of regulation for broadband in a series of decisions in 2001 and 2002. Open access has been largely treated as a closed issue in US policy debates ever since. We find that in countries where an engaged regulator enforced open access obligations, competitors that entered using these open access facilities provided an important catalyst for the development of robust competition which, in most cases, contributed to strong broadband performance across a range of metrics.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ride safely at night with this easy to make Mini Bike Light.
Thanks go to Trevor Shannon for the original article in MAKE, Volume 14.
To download The Mini Bike Light video click here and subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the complete Mini Bike Light article in MAKE, Volume 14
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.
Here is the modified schematic using the LM3909 chip

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Jared from InventGeek begins a series of photo gear projects with his recipe for a 40" pop-up reflector -

So photography is not only a hobby of mine, but also more or less absolute necessity for what I do here on invent geek. That being said I have always been appalled at the high prices for photography equipment and accessories and I find myself thinking that I could make this a lot cheaper than that! Well its time I put my money where my mouth is I guess and finally start equipping my studio with the types of equipment I both want and need to create more consistent and higher quality imagery for our projects. So I have started a new series of projects in preparation to the launch of a new sister site in our how to network for photography, studio and lighting equipment and accoutrement that I am putting together. So we will be doing many projects across the board and wanted to start with something easy and yet worthwhile.

As he notes in the step-by-step - the spring steel fish tape required for the project, can unravel quite energetically when released from its coil - so be sure to protect eyes, skin, and other valuable objects should you give this one a go.

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<img alt="MiniBikeLight.jpg" src="http://blog.makezine.com/MiniBikeLight.jpg" width="494" height="699"
Ride safely at night with this easy to make Mini Bike Light.
Thanks go to Trevor Shannon for the original article in MAKE, Volume 14.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.
Here is the modified schematic using the LM3909 chip.

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Because the federal government apparently hasn't helped the RIAA enough in the past century -- despite repeatedly changing copyright laws to favor the industry again and again and again (and again) -- the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the Performance Rights Act, which effectively serves to tax radio stations for promoting music. It's quite obvious to anyone who actually understands radio economics that this makes no sense. After all, the history of radio has always been about payola -- having the labels pay the radio stations to play certain works. That's because the record labels know quite well that airtime leads to more money in terms of promoting an artist and building a business model around music, concert and merchandise sales. To the labels, airplay has always been the equivalent of advertising. That's why they pay for it.

But now they want the radio stations to pay them to advertise the labels' music? Isn't that getting the equation backwards?

This is nothing more than a federal bailout of the RIAA, who still refuses to embrace new business models. Instead, they have to squeeze others and get the government to force them to hand over money. A real business model doesn't involve changing the law. It involves giving others a reason to buy. Apparently, that's too difficult for the RIAA.

As for the claims that a performance license will somehow help musicians, that's bogus as well. First, ask the RIAA's SoundExchange about all the money it keeps for itself and about all the musicians it "can't find." Besides, all this will do is harm up-and-coming musicians. Because radio stations will now need to pay more for playing music, they'll play less music, and if they're playing less music, they'll focus just on the big name acts. Smaller up-and-coming artists should be furious with the RIAA for giving radio stations less incentive to play their works. Remember, this is the opposite of payola. While payola got new records on the air, this will make sure fewer get on the air. But it will sure put a bunch more money in the pockets of the major record labels. So there's that.

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itwbennett writes "In a recent article, Dr. Markus Jakobsson, a Principal Scientist at PARC offers some tips on effectively running human-subject research studies on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. '...[B]enefits [include] very low experiment costs, quick turn-around rates, and relatively simple approvals from human subjects boards. But you have to be careful to avoid bias and error.' says Dr. Jakobsson. For example, in many situations subjects may be biased just from knowing that they are participating in a study, or by knowing the goals of a study. To avoid this bias, you need to 'convey a different task to your subject than what you are observing — essentially deceive them — to see how they react when faced with the situation of interest. Consider a study of user reactions to phishing sites. You may, for example, say that you are studying the common reaction to online e-commerce sites, and ask them to rate how helpful various sites are, with a free-text input field where they can add other observations. You first show them three or four legitimate websites, asking them to rate and describe them; then you show them a phishing site and do the same. Will they tell you that this is a site run by fraudsters? If they do, they noticed signs of fraud without you prompting them.'" The author also gives tips on avoiding cheaters, and determining how much to pay and when.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes "Despite being the much better development platform for today's smartphones, open Web standards still face an uphill battle on mobile devices, Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes, noting that here, as on the desktop, the main hurdle is scalability. But whereas successful Web development for the desktop is a matter of scaling up, mobile Web development calls for applications that can effectively scale down as well — an imperative that is fast making the state of the mobile Web 'even sadder,' McAllister writes. 'The more that modern Web applications take advantage of the new client-side technologies available in desktop browsers, the more the divide between the desktop Web and the mobile Web widens.' As a result, developers are forced to fall back on basic Web technologies — a tactic that too often translates simply into writing separate UIs for mobile users. 'The result? Mobile Web applications are in pretty much the same boat as they were when the first WAP-enabled handsets appeared: two separate development tracks, one for the desktop and one for mobile.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Built for the 2007 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge the "Spirit of Berlin" is already a complex marvel of modern technology. Add to the already tech laden minivan an iPhone remote and you've got yourself one heck of an RC. [via PopSci]

The team developed its iDriver app to manage the highly modified "Spirit of Berlin" autonomous vehicle using WiFi and the smartphone's controls. The unit's accelerometer controls steering, accomplished at hand by turning the device, while screen buttons control braking and acceleration. The system also sends a live video stream of the road ahead to the iPhone screen.

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We've been discussing how collections societies around the globe have been making a mad dash to get governments to tax more things or to simply massively expand existing collection taxes on music. One stunning example we gave was how the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia (PPCA) was pushing to increase fees by ridiculous amounts (in one example from $125/year to $19,344). Apparently, part of the setup is that clubs and restaurants have to pay a much higher per patron fee, and the number of patrons is based not on the actual number of patrons -- but on capacity. PPCA and others like them continue to insist that all of the value in a restaurant or club comes from the music, and thus those places should pay these extortionate rates, even if actual human beings don't come to fill up the place (so much for the music actually bringing in the crowds). But it looks like at least some clubs in Australia are pushing back. Sambo points us to the news that many are trying to build support for a protest effort where these clubs will only play independent music and avoid all music licensed to the PPCA. Of course, in the US, we've seen ASCAP and BMI tell clubs that do similar things that it doesn't matter -- since they might accidentally play their music. Still, it looks like these kinds of moves, that often would bankrupt these clubs and restaurants, are having an unintended consequence of helping to promote non-PPCA music. So, if you're a musician and you want to get heard in Australia, try licensing your songs under a Creative Commons license or something and highlight that anyone can play the music without having to pay a ridiculous PPCA tax.

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Canon has released the Easy Photo-Print App, which enables wireless photo printing via Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch to a compatible Canon PIXMA printer. The app allows users to print photos up to 8.5" x 11" on six different types of paper and make 20 copies at a time. The Easy-Photo-Print App is available for free from the Apple App Store.

The Science of Scams is a new project from Channel 4 and mentalist/magician Derren Brown that aims to debunk the paranormal industry's lucrative claims about ghosts, fortune-telling, telekinesis and other assorted woo woo. Brown and C4 produced seven videos purporting to show the kind of "paranormal" activity held up as evidence of the supernatural and released them on YouTube for several weeks, allowing people to make what they will of them. Now, they're revealing the hoax videos once per week, with accompanying videos that explain how the scam works. The show is presented by Kat the Scientist, who did postgrad research in Biological Anthropology and Pharmacology at Oxford.

I love this to pieces and I've been waiting to tell you about it for months -- you see, it was commissioned by my brilliant and talented wife Alice Taylor for Channel 4, as part of C4's educational/public service remit. And that, friends, is why my marriage kicks ass.

Science of Scams

Japanese software developer Ichikawa Soft Laboratory has announced a 'release candidate' version of its Silkypix Developer Studio Pro raw converter that supports Sigma's SD14, DP1 and DP2 digital cameras. The new version also extends raw suppport to most cameras including the Nikon D300S and Canon EOS 5D Mark II, and offers features such lens aberration controllers, noise reduction, color accuracy and batch processing. The Sigma RC will be available as a free download until November 30, 2009. The release candidate label indicates the update is tested, but not yet the finalized version.

Kheldon writes "The MMO Gamer recently sat down with Lorien Gremore, lead producer on SOE's upcoming spy-shooter MMO, The Agency. They discussed various aspects of its development, such as the 'stickiness' of session-based games, striking a balance between FPS and MMO players, and whether or not The Agency even falls under the definition of a traditional MMO at all. 'You might be in Prague, and experiencing play with a lot of different other players; you might have come in at your field office and gone out into the city, encountering many other players doing missions that you are also doing,' Gremore said. She added that the game's areas are large enough to have 'lots of different people in them, collecting intel, engaging in public combat, all of those types of things. These areas are big enough that there’s shops, there’s secret spaces, photos to be taken of suspicious objects, things like that. They’re all out there in the world. We’re really trying to create a balance, where you’re encountering a lot of social situations, chances to get into groups with other people, just by merit of the fact that you guys are doing the same sorts of things in the same sorts of places.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cams, Cranks, and Computers: New Machines, New Music is an art installations and performance that was held at NewTown. The ensemble above is San Francisco's Crank Ensemble, led by Larnie Fox. Lots of DIY instruments!

NewTown is a dedicated consortium of accomplished professional artists and artist/administrators - musicians, dancers, film and video makers and visual artists - all of whom donate their time to ensure new creative opportunities for their colleagues throughout Southern California.

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Earlier this week, we noted that a court had rejected, yet again, the Obama administration's attempt to stall in handing over info on who lobbied to get telco immunity. At the time, we asked what excuse the administration would use to delay again -- given that the release of documents was due today, Friday. Well, it appears they haven't come up with any excuse... they've just tried asking the court yet again -- as if the first three "no" answers weren't enough.

Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder what's going on here. As I said when the initial court order came out, I don't know what could possibly be surprising in the documents. It seems quite likely that the telcos lobbied hard for immunity. That would not be a surprise or particularly revealing. So who is the government trying to cover up for here?

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The British ISP TalkTalk has produced a compelling case against the government's plans to disconnect whole households from the Internet if the copyright industry accuses them -- without proving anything in court -- of three acts of infringement. TalkTalk picked a random street in North London and showed that 23 of the households in that road were using WEP security to stop strangers from accessing their networks. WEP has been thoroughly broken for years, but many older games consoles, phones and other devices are only capable of using WEP to connect to WiFi networks. TalkTalk argues that householders who have done everything they can to secure their networks from people who want to use them for cover during illegal file-sharing are still vulnerable to being disconnected by record- and film-company execs.

Households that are subjected to this form of collective punishment -- "someone around here broke the law, so you'll all suffer" -- lose access to the net, and with it, connectivity related to their employment, education, family connections, health, and government. All on the unsubstantiated say-so of the same entertainment companies that have previously accused a laser-printer of illegally downloading an Indiana Jones movie, not to mention the small legion of dead people; ancient, non-computer-owning grannies; and other innocents who've been legally threatened by the music industry for alleged copyright infringement.

A rep from the record industry insists that he has bought some magic beans "robust" evidence-gathering software that will never, ever cut someone off from the Internet on false pretences, so we don't need judges or evidence or trials or any of that messy business. But, of course, if someone is hacking your WiFi without your knowledge, he's prepared to cut you off from the Internet, because "the responsibility for ensuring that an internet account shared throughout a household is not being used for illegal filesharing clearly lies with the account holder."

ISP in file-sharing wi-fi hack

Earlier this year, Sweden put its anti-piracy IPRED law into effect, and earlier this summer we noted that the ISP ePhone was refusing to give up a user's IP address, and appealing a court ruling ordering it to do so. The details of the specific case suggested a unique circumstance, involving a server that supposedly contained infringing material -- but which was never made public. It was always behind a password and thus, Ephone argued, there was no infringement. While the lower court disagreed, the appeals court has overturned the lower ruling, saying that probable cause for infringement had not been shown. Given some of the recent rulings in the Swedish court system on copyright issues, it's nice to see a court not just accept the entertainment industry's claims on some of these things...

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Love this air-conditioner cover ("Tape & painted cardboard on window AC unit cover, Bushwick, Brooklyn NY") snapped by Flickr user Dbilly.

Televox (via Neatorama)

The Discovery store has these amazing wild animal hoodies (cobra, raptor, whale, shark) whose sleeves turn into huge fanged mouths when you cross your arms. I wish they didn't just have a boy modelling these -- they are definitely unisex.

Raptor Hoodie Shirt (via Geisha Asobi)

Update: The shirts come from Mouthman, and they're modelled by boys and girls on the site! Thanks to the anonymous commenter who alerted us to this!

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Yahoo Tech outlining a system currently being researched: "Card counting is perfectly legal — all a counter does is attempt to keep track of whether the cards remaining in a deck are favorable to his winning a hand (mainly if there are lots of tens and aces remaining in the deck) — but it's deeply frowned upon by Vegas casinos. Those caught counting cards are regularly expelled from casinos on the spot and are often permanently banned from returning. But given the slim house odds on Blackjack, it's often said that a good card counter can actually tip the odds in his favor by carefully controlling the way he bets his hands. And Vegas really doesn't care for that. The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual 'count' of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in the action. If a player is betting big when the count is indeed favorable, and keeping his chips to himself when it's not, he's fingered by the computer... and, in the real world, he'd probably receive a visit from a burly dude in a bad suit, too. The system reportedly works even if the gambler intentionally attempts to mislead it with high bets at unfavorable times." It's not developed in Vegas, though, according to the brief description (the other projects are also interesting) from the University of Dundee's release, but rather in conjunction with the Dundee Casino.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flickr user Megpi made this beautiful "impressionist cake." ZOMG.

impressionist cake (via Craft)

Deanna of Collector's Quest wrote about 19th Century vampire killing kits.

These are expensive kits, made for the wealthy; not some cheap and cheesy plastic novelty items. Such luxury concedes a seriousness -- a deadly seriousness. These items were made to address deep, dark, primal fears. And then, like our fears often are, they were not thrown away but stored in equally dark and out of the way places... Antique wooden killing kits in the attics of old houses, just waiting for the day when the creatures creep from the attics of our minds.

Fascinated, I spoke with Dwight Stevens, of Stevens Auction Company, on the phone yesterday about the antique piece of vampire history.

"I don't believe in vampires -- I've never met one. But somebody believed in them, something drove people to believe... From New Orleans to Vicksburg, these old boxes remain." Stevens has sold four vampire killing kits in his 27 years as an auctioneer, most recently selling one a year ago, in Natchez, Mississippi, for $1485.

Antique Vampire Killing Kits

Tor has updated the tile game that accompanies the ongoing serial of my forthcoming novel Makers, which comes out at the end of the month (and boy am I excited! Publishers Weekly called it "Brilliant" and a "Tour de force" and Library Journal called it "Enthusiastically recommended").

Each installment in the serial has been accompanied by a CC-licensed image from Idiots' Books, and the images tile, lining up with one another on all four sides. Tor is tossing these images into a Flash-toy that allows you to arrange and rotate these to your heart's content.

The serial is up to 44 parts now, and the first 36 illos have been combined into a new, expanded, 6X6 version of the tile game (we'll do the 7x7 soon, then the 8x8 and finish up with a 9x9 incorporating all 81!).

Makers Tile Game 6x6

Index of Makers installments

The mission of the Read-Along Adventures site is to assemble the audio and scanned pages from every Read-Along book ever created -- these were the short picture books that came with a 45RPM record that narrated them, with cues to turn the page as necessary. Where possible, the curator has recreated the Read-Alongs as Flash apps. There's even audio for the Haunted Mansion record. How lovely!

Read-Along Adventures (Thanks, TimK!)

Wired Science rounds up the winners of the past 35 years' worth of Nikon prizes for excellence in microscopic photography. These are just stunning. Shown here: 2001: Fresh water rotifer feeding among debris (200x), Darkfield. / Harold TaylorKensworth, UK.

35 Years of the World's Best Microscope Photography (Thanks, @timoreilly!)

Toyota marketing created some kind of ill-conceived alternate reality game whose premise was that you were being stalked by an unhinged criminal who sent you threatening emails saying that he was coming to your house, backstopped by things like MySpace profiles and even angry bills from hotels he trashed on the way, having given your name as the payment contact. A woman didn't realize that these were a marketing prank and thought she was being stalked, got scared, lived her life in fear, and then sued.

Toyota's defense? The woman had taken some online survey in which the fine print gave them permission to send her "marketing and other communications."

Duick's attorney said the marketing company went so far as to send Duick a bill for damages the fictitious man supposedly made to a hotel room...

The alleged harassment lasted five days, according to the suit, and frightened Duick so much she contacted neighbors, friends and family, and the occupant of her former home about the man she feared was coming to visit. Her attorney declined to comment as to whether or not she called the police. She even made her longtime boyfriend sleep with a club and mace next to the bed for protection...

It turns out the prank was actually part of a marketing effort executed by the Los Angeles division of global marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which created the campaign to promote the Toyota Matrix, a new model launched in 2008...

Tepper, Duick's attorney, said he discussed the campaign with Toyota's attorneys earlier this year, and they said the "opting in" Harp referred to was done when Duick's friend e-mailed her a "personality test" that contained a link to an "indecipherable" written statement that Toyota used as a form of consent from Duick.

Tepper, said that during those legal negotiations, Toyota's lawyers claimed Duick signed the written legal agreement, which they said amounts to "informed written consent."

Woman Sues Toyota Over 'Terrifying' Prank (via /.)

While some continue to insist that there's nothing good or legal that comes from file sharing sites, many content creators who have embraced those sites have found them to be wonderful tools for distribution and promotion. Now, it looks like a bunch of them are teaming up to do even more. Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Miro, Vuze and Frostwire have all agreed to work with a new project called Vodo, which will help promote indie films. Filmmakers can offer their films through Vodo and get promoted on the various file sharing sites -- and the system is designed to let people easily donate. While I'm not a huge fan of a pure "donation" business model, it should be interesting to see how Vodo evolves over time. Certainly, it could be a valuable tool to indie filmmakers who recognize that obscurity is a much bigger threat to their efforts than piracy.

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DASH hexapedal cockroach-inspired robot survives large falls, dashes off... could be a fun remake...

The Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, aptly abbreviated DASH, really moves. It's a high-speed six-legged runner that can be built in an hour using basically cardboard and polymer sheets for its frame. Created by Paul Birkmeyer and Prof. Ronald Fearing at the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley, DASH is extremely lightweight (16 grams) and uses a single DC motor to power the legs and a small servomotor to slightly deform the robot's body, making it turn left or right.

From MAKE magazine:

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and lots more, in MAKE, Volume 19! Subscribe here. Buy the issue in the Maker Shed.

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There have been lots of different writeups on Michael Dell's recent Churchill Club talk, with most focusing on his trashing of netbooks or talking up Windows 7. But at the end of that article there was something even more interesting, which Derek pointed out to us:

Clark asked Dell about the fact that, through virtualization, many companies end up buying fewer servers, and less hardware in general. "The first thing you have to remember is that any time a new technology comes along that's good for customers, you get in the way of it at your own peril," Dell said.

Indeed. This is a point that so few companies seem to recognize. Instead of focusing on what the customers actually want, they freak out about how it may cause them to sell less of what they currently offer. This is the key in avoiding the innovator's dilemma and marketing myopia. You have to focus on what benefits the customer actually gets -- and if you try and get in the way of that, they'll just go somewhere else instead. But it's so rare to hear execs actually recognize that point -- so, kudos to Michael Dell for acknowledging it.

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hype7 writes "An Australian student at Deakin University had a fascinating idea for a final project — to send a balloon up 100,000ft (~30,000 metres) into the stratosphere with a digital camera attached. The university was supportive, and the project took shape. Although there were some serious hitches along the way, the project was successful, and he managed to retrieve the balloon — with the pictures. What's really amazing is that the total cost was so low; the most expensive part was buying the helium gas for approximately AUD$250 (~USD$200)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This video by YouTuber electricunicycle, while dark, shows off a pretty sweet haunt prop he made by attaching a frame, fabric, and lighting to an electric wheelchair base he adapted for radio control.

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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This is a really cool idea, an open source project dedicated to the idea of tracking, documenting, and mapping where all of the components for our everyday goods come from. It's supply chain transparency. [Thanks, Laura Cochrane!]

SourceMap - Visualizing Supply Chains

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MAKE reader Ken Wallich built a couple of versions (one shown above) of Larry Cotton's Rok-Bak chair project from MAKE Volume 19 and shared them with us. The Rok-Bak is an amazingly comfortable chair that easy to make and is built from a single sheet of plywood. Here's what Ken had to say about the project:

This was a great novice project. Simple tools, simple build. In fact, painting the chair is more time consuming than building it! Wanted some deck chairs we could just leave out over the winter, and these were perfect, and economical to boot. Plus, they're really easy to break down and store if we want to. Pics from my build: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallich/sets/72157622502418914

Below are images of the other variation Ken built, a nice action shot from Ken, and the version with cushions from the pages of MAKE Volume 19.

From MAKE magazine:

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and lots more, in MAKE, Volume 19! Subscribe here. Buy the issue in the Maker Shed.

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While a bunch of politicians in the UK had been under the influence of entertainment industry lobbyists in believing that kicking accused (not convicted) file sharers off the internet would somehow magically bring back a working business model, at least there are some who recognize what a futile and backwards effort this would be. MP Tom Watson has put forth an "Early Day Motion" against such proposals:

That this House notes with concern the Government's proposals on file sharing which would allow rights holders to request internet service providers to disconnect for a period of time, or throttle, the internet connection of people who may be accused of copyright infringement via peer to peer networks; believes that disconnecting alleged offenders will be futile given that it is relatively easy for determined file-sharers to mask their identity or their activity to avoid detection; acknowledges that illicit file-sharing only costs rights-holders money when people download infringing content in preference to buying it; further notes that identifying offenders using the Internet Protocol address of a specific machine may punish those who share a web connection; and calls on the Government to ensure that any citizen accused of illicit file-sharing is given the right to legal redress in a court of law before sanctions are imposed.

I'd even take issue with the claim that it costs rights holders money when people download instead of buy -- as there's ample evidence that such things can lead to additional purchases down the road. But, still, this is a good start, and great to see some politicians not falling for the industry's claims.

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Here's a neat idea: using the standard microphone and speakers that are built into most recent laptops, researchers from Northwestern and University of Michigan have developed a sonar system to detect when a user is near the computer. Why is this interesting? Well, the idea is that it can be used to turn your computer screen off as soon as you walk away, rather than waiting the typical 10 or 20 minutes for the screensaver to kick on. It's a pretty neat idea, especially since it doesn't require any extra components, however I wonder how much power the sonar system itself will draw.

[via slashdot]

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One of the key points we've raised in the past about the futility of newspapers putting up paywalls is that doing so would only open up a huge opportunity for other, smarter journalism organizations to take their market share by remaining free. And, indeed, more and more organizations are starting to point out that's exactly what they would do. Reader Jamie writes in to let us know about a speech by the managing director of ABC in Australia (not the Disney owned ABC in America), Mark Scott, taking on the "old media" thinking around such things as paywalls:

Scott's most virulent words were saved for News Corporation (owner of The Australian) chairman Rupert Murdoch and CEO Europe and Asia, James Murdoch.

He called Rupert Murdoch's recent call for content providers to charge online distributors for content as "a classic play of old empire, of empire in decline. Believing that because you once controlled the world you can continue to do so."

"When you have been so powerful and dominant for so long, it is hard to believe that empire is slipping away," he said.

Scott argued traditional media companies had been out-thought by technology companies in strategy.

And... oh yeah, if Murdoch goes paywall, Scott promises to do the opposite:

He reiterated the ABC would continue to provide free online news content and said the ABC must remain audience-focused

Not just that, but he seems to be recognizing that the way people interact with news has changed, and they want to be much more involved:

... he noted the only media organisations to survive will be those that: know and accept that all the rules have changed; are endlessly inquisitive about the new; empower their audiences to contribute, to create and share media....

Nice to see some news business execs who seem to recognize what's happening.

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angry tapir writes "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced last month that he would seek to develop formal rules prohibiting Internet service providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content and applications. However, 44 companies — including Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia — have sent a letter to the FCC saying new regulations could hinder the development of the Internet. A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like a bunch of other people I had the new Twitter lists feature turned on today. Immediately I needed a list to explore and had a bunch of ready-made ideas. I had already done aggregated feeds of the top 100 most followed people on Twitter, the employees of the Twitter company and the NY Times, the Twin Cities and most recently Berkeley Twitterers.

The last one I replicated as a Twitter list.

If you don't yet have the feature turned on, you'll get a blank page on the last link. Here's a screen shot of what it looks like.

Basically you get a flow of all the people I've chosen to put on the Berkeley list.

Depending on what the API looks like we'll probably see all kinds of tools for combining and cloning lists.

It's a new authority system. The number of lists you appear on is a kind of page-rank. So let's hope Twitter does two things: 1. Provides an open API to crawl this data set. 2. Doesn't pollute it by artificially inflating the rank of friendly press and their industry friends. Stay out of the editorial space and let a healthy ecosystem develop. It's another chance to not screw it up.

Some people have said it's somehow related to the Suggested User List but I don't see it at all. This feature is for advanced users, the SUL is for total newbies. Unless Twitter somehow data mines our lists, something they could have done right at the start, it won't have any impact on the newbies' user experience.

Update: As you would expect, Scoble is going crrrazy with this feature!

My friend Joe Bowers bought a Chumby Guts kit. Step one: get it up and running. Step two: give the poor, naked thing some clothes. Joe designed a case for it and asked me to laser cut it for him. It reminds me of an old television set. This is an early prototype; we plan to refine the design, add some etched graphics, and more. Maybe some rabbit ear antennae?

Clever trick alert: Joe put the Chumby on a scanner and traced the rounded-cornered bezel in CorelDraw to get an exact fit. It pops in there beautifully!

In the Maker Shed:

Chumby Guts

Joe's blog

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