Update, 3:50pm PT: One of the two bloggers reports that the TSA has dropped its subpoena against him.

An update on the case of the two travel bloggers who received holiday visits by armed TSA agents (with matching Homeland Security subpoenas!) after publishing a leaked copy of the "Christmas Day incident" security directive.

Chris Elliot has an attorney now, and more time to respond to the subpoena.

Steven Frischling got his laptop back from the Special Agents who demanded it, then imaged his hard drive, but the laptop no longer works (paranoid commenters suggest one explanation could be the installation of keylogger software, but that's just one of many possibilities.)

Annie Jacobsen of TheAviationNation.com has posted an interview with Frischling here. Why, Jacobsen asks in that piece, is Homeland Security going after these guys so hard?

[I found] my answer in a pre-recorded message at the FBI's Detroit Metro Bureau to which press are referred. The message there states that anyone seeking information about "the Christmas Day event at Detroit metro airport" should call the Department of Justice in Washington.

Wait. A Christmas Day "event"? The FBI makes the attack against Northwest Flight 253 sound more like a shopping sale or a rock concert than the terror strike that it was. Trying to kill 298 airline passengers, destroy an airplane, and crash it into the suburbs of Detroit is now called an "event"? Could the jackbooted TSA visit to blogger Steven Frischling's Connecticut home be just another trickle-down result of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano's insistence that terrorist attacks be referred to as "man-caused disasters"?

You see, in the TSA directive which Frischling's posted online, the TSA was caught calling a spade a spade: "INFORMATION: On December 25, 2009, a terrorist attack was attempted against a flight traveling to the United States."

For bloggers reading this story in horror, here's a helpful resource: The EFF's "Surveillance Self-Defense" website. Here's a relevant section:

Q: What should you do if a government agent (or anyone else) shows up with a subpoena?
A: NOTHING.

Update items at NYT, another at Firedoglake which addresses the need for a federal shield law to protect professional bloggers. (Huh? OK, then go read this, too). Snip:

As one federal prosecutor told Wired, "it strikes me that they're more aggressive with this reporter than with the guy who got on this flight."

Previously: TSA subpoenas, threatens two bloggers who published non-classified airline security directive

Related reading: Miles O'Brien: Captain Underpants and the Illusion of Security.

(Thanks, Glenn Reynolds / image: Elliot.org)

Hey, sooner or later everyone falls for some sort of phishing/scamware type of thing, right? It's just especially embarrassing if you're the head of the FCC. The NY Times is reporting that FCC Chair Julius Genachowski had his Facebook account spam all his friends with a message saying "Adam got me started making money with this" which was followed by a link to a now defunct site. Facebook has taken down Genachowski's page, and appears to be effectively blaming him for the problem, putting out a generic notice about how users need to be careful not to click on strange links...

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Danny Sullivan, with another update on the two bloggers visited and subpoenaed by armed Transportation Security Administration agents, after publishing a security directive emailed to them from a Gmail account. "So did Google get a subpoena, too? The company says it can't comment either way, sending me this statement..."

...apropos of bloggers being bullied into parting with their hard drives: check out this nifty doormat, available at Target for 18 bucks and some change.

(Courtesy of Wired: "TSA Special Agent John Enright, left, speaks to Steven Frischling outside the blogger's home in Niantic, Connecticut, after returning Frischling's laptop Wednesday." Photo: Thomas Cain/Wired.com)

(Update post here, Dec. 31, 2009.)

On Friday, December 25, following the incident in which a Nigerian man attempted to blow up a US-bound flight, the TSA issued an urgent, non-classified security directive to thousands of contacts around the world—airlines, airports, and so on. On Saturday, December 26, airlines and airports around the world further circulated that emailed document and began implementing the procedures described. On Sunday December 27, two bloggers published the content of the TSA directive online (some portions had already been showing up on airline websites). And on Tuesday, December 29, Special Agents from the TSA's Office of Inspection showed up at the homes of bloggers Steven Frischling and Christopher Elliott, and interrogated each on where they obtained the document. Both bloggers received civil subpoenas.

Snip from Wired piece by Kim Zetter:

"They came to the door and immediately were asking, 'Who gave you this document?, Why did you publish the document?' and 'I don't think you know how much trouble you're in.' It was very much a hardball tactic," [Frischling] says.

(...) The agents then said they wanted to take an image of his hard drive. Frischling said they had to go to WalMart to buy a hard drive, but when they returned were unable to get it to work. Frischling said the keyboard on his laptop was no longer working after they tried to copy his files. The agents left around 11 p.m. but came back Wednesday morning and, with Frischling's consent, seized his laptop, which they promised to return after copying the hard drive.

Here's Frischling's post. He says he received the document from an anonymous source known to be a TSA employee, who uses a gmail account (will Google be subpoenaed?). "I received it, I read it, I posted it. Why did I post it? Because following the failed terrorist attack on the 25th of December there was a lot of confusion and speculation surrounding changes in airline & airport security procedures."

Here is Elliot's post about his visit from a friendly TSA Special Agent named Flaherty. "[T]he TSA wants me to tell them who gave me the security directive. I told Flaherty I'd call my attorney and get back to him. What would you do?"

Here at Boing Boing, I linked to Frischling's leak post on Monday, December 28. Two days earlier, I'd flown home to the US on an international flight during which I personally experienced the procedures detailed in the directive. I tweeted what I experienced of those procedures before, during, and after my flight on the 26th. Thorough physical patdowns and secondary hand luggage screening pre-board, no leaving your seat or electronics or putting anything on your lap during the final hour of flight, and so on. Attendants on my flight explained that the stepped-up procedures came from a just-issued TSA security directive. As soon as airlines and airports began implementing the directive—and that began before the bloggers posted their copies—the contents of the directive were no secret. So why the strong-arm tactics?

Read more: New York Times story, Wired News story, and Huffington Post.

Related: Just weeks ago, a TSA contract worker posted an improperly redacted sensitive screening manual on a government website.

Bob Self says:

Dr. Sketchy's Los Angeles is alternative figure drawing cabaret for artists who like their naked inspiration to be served up with some theatrical showmanship. To get 2010 off to an epic start, the Los Angeles troupe is producing a Dr. Sketchy's Marathon that will run continuously for 26 hours beginning at 8:00 PM on Saturday, January 2nd and ending at 10:00 PM on Sunday, January 3rd. Over a dozen models will be posing in and out of costume over the course of the event, and a roster of noteworthy contemporary artists will be in attendance (including Michael Hussar, who will be creating an alla prima portrait late Saturday night). As usual for Dr. Sketchy's, there will be prizes and surprises. The event will be hosted at Nucleus in Alhambra. Admission is $26 in advance via Dr Sketchy's LA, or $35 at the door. Attendees will be issued wrist bands that will allow them to come and go as they please.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain about items that would enter the public domain starting on January 1, 2010, if not for copyright extenions: "'Casino Royale, Marilyn Monroe's Playboy cover, The Adventures of Augie March, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Crick & Watson's Nature article decoding the double helix, Disney's Peter Pan, The Crucible'... 'How ironic that Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, with its book burning firemen, was published in 1953 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2010. To quote James Boyle, "Bradbury's firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason; even if we had wanted retrospectively to enrich the tiny number of beneficiaries whose work keeps commercial value beyond 56 years, we could have done so without these effects. The ironies are almost too painful to contemplate.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com. Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

Ah data centers. They may seem like a rather boring concept, but Data Center Knowledge recently put together a rather long list of some of the coolest data center video tours including Google's infamous data center: As well as a "James Bond" data center buried 100 feet beneath Stockholm in a former military bunker, with backup power from submarine engines and which has waterfalls and a glass-enclosed conference room that appears to "float" above the colo floor. I have to admit, suddenly data centers seem a lot cooler. Anyway, those are just the top two. The Data Center Knowledge link has a bunch more.

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We started doing weekly Make: Projects this year, full-blown how-tos, a la the feature projects in every issue of MAKE magazine. Most of these online projects were done by Sean Ragan and we think he did an amazing job. It's cool to look over the list and see all the ground we covered.

Please vote for your faves, and tell us in comments if you did any of the projects and how that worked out. And feel free to suggest ideas for next year.

You can always see all of the projects under the Projects tab above, or by clicking here.

What was your favorite online Make: Project 2009?(opinion)

More:
Favorite MAKE video series for 2009
Best projects of 2009, MAKE magazine

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A federal judge today dropped all charges against five security guards with Blackwater Worldwide (now "Xe") security guards said to have been responsible for killing unarmed Baghdad civilians in a 2007 shooting incident.

A musical theater adaptation of one of my favorite fiction books, William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 noir carny novel Nightmare Alley, will premiere in April at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. As my brother Bob wrote when he emailed me this news, "I can't wait to hear the geek sing."

richrumble writes "The OISF has released the beta version of the Suricata IDS/IPS engine: The Suricata Engine is an Open Source Next Generation Intrusion Detection and Prevention Engine. This engine is not intended to just replace or emulate the existing tools in the industry, but will bring new ideas and technologies to the field. This new Engine supports Mult-Threading, Automatic Protocol Detection (IP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, TLS, FTP and SMB! ), Gzip Decompression, Fast IP Matching and coming soon hardware acceleration on CUDA and OpenCL GPU cards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I learned of Chocolate Ammo today through an ad in a relative's copy of the NRA magazine American Rifleman. Talk about target marketing. (sorry!) From the Chocolate Weapons site:

...Several years ago we started a company called [sic] which manufactured and sold high end chocolate fountains to caterers, hotels, casinos, reception centers and other high end event centers. In addition to selling the chocolate fountains we also sold chocolate...and literally TONS and TONS of it. With our connection in the chocolate industry we had virtually a limitless supply of chocolate, and just as many chocolatiers and chocolate factories who could basically make anything and everything we ever wanted to.  

While I was growing up we spent a lot of time in the mountains fishing, camping, and hunting. On a recent getaway vaction/hunting trip, we were all piled in the car..dirty, grimy - hadn't bathed in days - and we were discussing our existing business, and ways we could help it grow. Someone blurted out  

'We should make chocolate bullets!'

Chocolate Weapons

The excellent MusicAlly blog has a neat look back at a piece written in March of 2001 covering the digital strategies of the major record labels. Some of it is quite amusing in retrospect -- such as how Warner Music's plans were entirely focused on how its newly merged parent, AOL Time Warner, would offer it all sorts of digital opportunities (how'd that work out)?

The company's internet strategy begins and ends with AOL. The thinking here is that AOL, with 24 million subscribers, has a natural customer base for Time Warner's extensive music catalogue, as well as serious Internet expertise in house. Although MBI World Music Report lists Warner Music Group's global market share as equal to BMG's at 11.9 percent (tied for fourth), AOL was working to secure licensing rights from the other music titans.

Combined with Time Warner's cable-modem Road Runner service, AOL also has control of fat pipes in the US. The reason many people didn't use Napster is because it is slow and expensive. With control of broadband, subscription is that much more compelling.

Of course "compelling" in theory is different from "compelling" in execution, and AOL, Time Warner and Warner Music never bothered to come up with anything close to compelling (for years we were amused by the fact that the company even refused to let AOL work together with Road Runner, despite them being the same company!).

As you read through the rest, you just keep seeing names of long-dead sites and projects -- none of which came up with anything compelling. You see plans for "new proprietary digital formats" that rely on RealPlayer (yeah, there's a winner) and other short-sighted concepts. But what you see is really the same old story, and effectively still the same thing we're seeing today. Everyone was focused on recreating the same old retail world, pretending that the digital world is just a replica of the physical world. It's all focused on direct sales of recordings, rather than anything larger. And, of course, all of these plans ran into trouble when backwards-looking execs freaked out about being too open or too free, and so all of the plans were locked down, inconvenient, expensive and useless (if they ever came out at all).

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Miles Davis covers Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." Yes, really.

I found this curious note on the sidewalk in my neighborhood. What do you think it means? And why is the phrase written twice? Was the author practicing? Click the image to see it larger.

harrymcc writes "Polaroid, Netscape, CompuServe, Westinghouse, Heathkit — these were once among the most respected names in the technology business. They're still around, but what's happened to them is just plain sad. I took a look at the tragic fates of a dozen mighty brands that have, in one way or another, fallen on hard times."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We were just discussing the DRM tax on a Kindle, which is the "price" of having to rebuy any ebooks you want to keep later on if you decide to switch to another platform. Some of the commenters on that post scoffed at the idea, and insisted that "in the future" this wouldn't be an issue, because most likely there would be ways to take your ebooks with you to other readers. Of course, that's little comfort to people today. Reader Mark sends in this story of how Sony initially refused to fix a Sony eBook Reader that only broke because of an update that Sony pushed the woman to install (oddly, they required her to send them the reader. So, effectively, Sony contacts her, tells her to send in her working eBook Reader, then they send it back and it's broken. And they refuse to fix it because it's out of warranty. Nice.

But here's the kicker. After all of this, she went out and bought another Sony ebook reader. She noted that she would have gladly purchased a competing product "but would have lost access to the library she's spent hundreds of dollars building up." And there it is. The DRM tax at work creating serious lock-in and consumer problems. At least in this case, due to the publicity from Consumerist, Sony agreed to reimburse the woman, but you shouldn't have to get a major publication to tell your story first to get that kind of resolution.

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New Year's Eve 'blue moon' to ring in 2010!

Once in a blue moon there is one on New Year's Eve. Revelers ringing in 2010 will be treated to a so-called blue moon. According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. But don't expect it to be blue — the name has nothing to do with the color of our closest celestial neighbor. A full moon occurred on Dec. 2. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year's countdown. "If you're in Times Square, you'll see the full moon right above you. It's going to be that brilliant," said Jack Horkheimer, director emeritus of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of a weekly astronomy TV show.

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nottheusualsuspect excerpts from this speculation-laden report at Brighthand that "Motorola is reportedly working on a device that will have one of the largest displays of any smartphone. Code-named the Shadow, it will sport a 4.3-inch WVGA+ touchscreen, Google's Android OS, and a range of other high-end features. When it comes to screen size, the Shadow will be equaled only by the Windows Mobile-based HTC HD2. The closest Android-powered model will be the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which will sport a 4.0-inch display. Most other models, like the Motorola Droid and Google Nexus One, have 3.7-inch screens. The display on this upcoming Motorola smartphone will allegedly have a resolution of 850 by 484 pixels."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cathal Garvey in Cork, Ireland, developed this 3D printable centrifuge attachment for a rotary tool, dubbing it the "Dremelfuge." What an awesome alternative to an expensive piece of lab equipment, congrats on paving the way for DIY science! If you don't have access to a 3D printer to print your own, he's made it available for purchase on Shapeways, where it's still cheaper than a traditional centrifuge. [via @bre]

More:

Lab-on-a-Chip with Shrinky Dink and toaster oven

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It's no secret that we live in a world of moral panics -- where new technologies are feared by those who don't understand them, often leading to regulations that block their potential. For years now, a number of politicians have sought laws to ban social networks in schools, assuming that they are either bad or simply inappropriate for schools. While those laws have yet to pass, many schools already do ban access to social networks and other sites. I've never quite understood how this makes sense. Rather than training students to use those sites properly, now they're seen as forbidden -- which only makes them more attractive to students, while making it even clearer that students won't be prepared to handle those sites properly. On top of that, as more powerful mobile phones become popular, students will easily bypass the school's own network and access those sites on their own -- and there will be nothing the schools can do about it.

So it's nice to see a sensible opinion piece in Slate arguing that rather than ban or block social online services like Facebook and YouTube, schools should be embracing them and looking for ways to incorporate them into the learning process. There are a variety of strong arguments for why this makes sense, but two that stick out:

1. Students already like using these sites quite a bit. Using those sites to make other things more relevant and interesting seems like a good way to reach kids in a manner that they understand, and which doesn't feel quite as much like "education," but more like something fun that they want to do.
2. Using these kinds of free tools may be cheaper, easier and much more effective than a number of the super expensive e-learning tools out there, which would require a steep learning curve anyway. But incorporating lesson plans and info and assignments into the tools that students already use would be both cheaper and more likely to actually be used.

Of course, some will decry that these sites are automatically bad for kids -- or that it makes no sense to waste time on such issues. But the fact is kids are going to use these sites no matter what. Ignoring that doesn't change that. Banning the sites doesn't change that. It just makes the activity more underground without any oversight or reasonable lessons. But incorporating the technology into the educational efforts could actually get a lot more attention. Yes, some of the examples in the Slate article seem pretty lame (and would be seen as such by the kids), but if done right, it really could add a lot more value to students' educations.

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joelsherrill writes "RTEMS is a free real-time operating system for embedded systems. The project is celebrating the 21st birthday of RTEMS today. RTEMS supports the single process with filesystem POSIX profile on over a dozen processor architectures. To just be entering young adulthood, RTEMS has had a busy life. It has been a Google Summer of Code project twice (Thanks Google!). It has been to Venus on the Venus Express, circles Mars on the Electra radio, powers Herschel and Planck, is on its way to the asteroid belt aboard DAWN, and has been a key part of physics discoveries at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Nikoley of Free the Animal (a blog about paleolithic diet and exercise) writes that he has been showering without soap or shampoo for the past six months. Here are some of his observations:

Took about two weeks to normalize. That is, I felt my hair was greasy and skin oily up to then.

My skin & hair have never been softer. Never.

If anything, my hair is less "greasy" than ever, yet shampoo hasn't touched it in over six months.

Private parts. Have to address this, of course. This is the biggest benefit of all. Surprised? You'll just have to try it, because I'm not going to elaborate. That's why they call them "private parts." OK, a clue: maybe it's the constant cleansing that's the cause of the sweaty-stinky problem in the first place? If for nothing else, I'm soap free for life on this point alone. I feel as though I've been scammed -- and liberated. I can't explain further. You'll just have to try.

The commenters on his blog share similar soap-free experiences.

Paleo I Don’t Care: I Like No Soap; No Shampoo

Do you think the bird would peck at the can even if it didn't have a bird on it?

(Via I have seen the whole of the Internet)

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that TSA special agents have served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott demanding that they reveal who leaked a TSA directive outlining new screening measures that went into effect the same day as the Detroit airliner incident. Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents for about three hours and was forced to hand over his laptop computer after the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn't cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo outlining new security measures that would be apparent to the traveling public. 'It literally showed up in my box,' Frischling told The Associated Press. 'I do not know who it came from.' Frischling says he provided the agents a signed statement to that effect. The leaked directive included measures such as screening at boarding gates, patting down the upper legs and torso, physically inspecting all travelers' belongings, looking carefully at syringes with powders and liquids, requiring that passengers remain in their seats one hour before landing, and disabling all onboard communications systems, including what is provided by the airline. In a December 29 posting on his blog, Elliott said he had told the TSA agents at his house that he would call his lawyer and get back to them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Usually when you see copyright infringement claims, it's for copying something that someone else held a copyright on, but THREsq points us to a case where Canadian songwriter, Gordon Peterson, is suing singer Eddie Vedder for supposedly changing lyrics in a version Vedder did of Peterson's song "Hard Sun." Assuming that the song was properly licensed (which is also in dispute, but that seems to be a separate issue), it's difficult to see what sort of copyright infringement claim there would then be for modifying the song. After all, the modifications wouldn't be covered by Peterson's copyright at all. But, alas, this is what you get with today's "ownership culture," where people just assume more ownership rights over something than they actually have under the law.

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Emanuel Derman speculates what would happen if the Federal Reserve and the TSA switched roles.

If a bank failed at 9 a.m. one morning and shut its doors, the TSA would announce that all banks henceforth begin their business day at 10 a.m.

And, if a terrorist managed to get on board a plane between Stockholm and Washington, the Fed would increase the number of flights between the cities.

(Via Marginal Revolution)

plover writes 'I work as a developer for a Very Large American Corporation. We are not an IT company, but have a large IT organization that does a lot of internal development. In my area, we do Windows development, which includes writing and maintaining code for various services and executables. A few years ago the Info Security group removed local administrator rights from most accounts and machines, but our area was granted exceptions for developers. My question is: do other developers in other large companies have local admin rights to their development environment? If not, how do you handle tasks like debugging, testing installations, or installing updated development tools that aren't a part of the standard corporate workstation?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist Christopher Locke makes these cool "fossilized" versions of obsolete techno-artifacts. Shown above is Asportatio acroamatis or the common cassette tape. Christopher explains his technopaleontology:

Most of these examples were discovered in the United States, although the various species are represented all over the world. It is sad, but most of these units lived very short lives. Most people attribute the shortened lifespan to aggressive predators or accelerated evolution, but this is not necessarily true. It has been shown recently that the true demise of most of these specimens came from runaway consumerism and wastefulness at the high end of the food chain.

[Thanks, Mauricio!]

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nottheusualsuspect writes "AT&T, in response to a Notice of Inquiry released by the FCC to explore how to transition to a purely IP-based communications network, has declared that it's time to cut the cord. AT&T told the FCC that the death of landlines is a matter of when, not if, and asked that a firm deadline be set for pulling the plug. In the article, broadband internet and cellular access are considered to be available to everyone, though many Americans are still without decent internet access."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years back, someone sued Apple, claiming that the iPod caused hearing loss, saying that the devices have an "inherently defective design" and that they need more warnings that you can acquire hearing loss if high volumes are used. The lawsuit eventually turned into a class action, which a district court dismissed. Now an appeals court has agreed, saying that the plaintiffs showed no evidence that an iPod "poses an unreasonable risk of noise-induced hearing loss." Basically, the argument amounted to "you know, Apple could make iPods that are less likely to lead to hearing loss." But that's not legally actionable, and it's good that the courts were quick to point that out.

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To seduce someone is to: 1. Find out what they want. 2. Give it to them. 3. The way they want it.

All three elements are necessary.

I put this together as a response to a well-meaning commenter on my Person of the Decade piece yesterday, who observed that I was an "old" person who had done all the work being honored while in his 40s (and 50s!). I didn't ask for details, but I assume they meant that such accomplishments are usually the province of younger people.

This didn't feel right to me.

So I started thinking.

Not to brag, but I was also very accomplished in my 20s and 30s, and in my teens I was precocious. But as an adult, which I am now, I am capable of seduction. And you couldn't launch something like RSS or podcasting, without the ability to seduce people. Because they won't move unless they get what they want, the way they want it. It never occurs to young males to seduce, because to get what they want they just have to look young and virile. Which they are very good at! If an older male wants to get some action he has to seduce. Therefore evolution taught at least some of us to do this. And that's the skill you need to make something like podcasting work.

So don't be surprised if old (I hate that word) people make great contributions in the arts and technology. There are certain things, those that require seduction, that we do much better than younger folk.

Example: Why it's smart to publish Realtime RSS now.

Matt over at Liquidware posted an evolution of simple introductory sketches for those fresh to the world of Arduino. A good starting point for those who find themselves with a new board, the examples require no additional hardware and demonstrate/combine digital output, serial communication, and their relevant functions.

In the Maker Shed:
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Hugh Pickens writes "Neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger have an interesting article in Discover Magazine about the Boskops, an extinct hominid that had big eyes, child-like faces, and forebrains roughly 50% larger than modern man indicating they may have had an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to 'alien abductors' in movies. Naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote: 'Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain.' The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor, yet the existence of the Boskops argues otherwise — that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens — that is, ourselves. 'With 30 percent larger brains than ours now, we can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149,' write Lynch and Granger. But why did they go extinct? 'Maybe all that thoughtfulness was of no particular survival value in 10,000 BC. Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society, the Boskops were unable to exploit the vast potential locked up in their expanded cortex,' write Lynch and Granger. 'They were born just a few millennia too soon.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "The USPTO has granted IBM a patent covering the Resolution of Abbreviated Text in an Electronic Communications System, lawyer-speak for translating "IMHO" to "In My Humble Opinion" and vice versa. From the patent: "One particularly useful application of the invention is to interpret the meaning of shorthand terms...For example, one database may define the shorthand term 'LOL' to mean 'laughing out loud.'" So much for Big Blue's professed aim of stopping "bad behavior" by companies who seek patents for unoriginal work!"

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Like Checkbox News, the Social Camera and the Twitter Camera, this product is just around the corner. Someday soon we'll all have watches that do Bluetooth.

Here's the pitch.

Earlier this decade Microsoft started an effort they called the Smart Watch. It pretty much failed. Some people wore watches with keypads, presumably so they could do calculations or write memos. You'd have to have fingers about 1/100th the size of human fingers for that to work. I'm sure there were lots of other early attempts to digitize watches, but in the end, watches are good for telling time and not much more.

The reason -- to be ergonomic a watch has to be small. But to have a decent user interface a watch has to be big. Too big.

That's why the functionality that could have conceivably gone on our wrists is now in our pockets -- on smart phones, Blackberry, iPhone, Droid.

In-our-pocket is the wrong place for quick text messages. They should be on our wrist!

Enter Bluetooth.

I don't know the economics but I imagine a digital watch could be made to look beautiful and also to have a mode where it couples with our phone and acts as a receiver for text messages. That way every time someone DMs you on Twitter it could show up on your wrist, with a little vibration only you feel.

I considered calling this the Twitter Watch, but enough with Twitter. They get too much free publicity.

Discuss!

PS: I know there are Bluetooth Watches, but they got it wrong. The display should be the whole watch face, not a sliver of tiny text beneath an analog watch face. And it's nice they can show you the caller ID, but I don't get nearly as many phone calls as text messages. A watch could display 140 characters, if you temporarily displace the time display (until you click the face to dismiss). The ones that try to be an MP3 player or cell phone are just as ridiculous and doomed to fail as the smart watches of the 90s.

david.emery was one of a few folks who noted that Patrick Stewart can now be referred to as Sir Captain as he will be knighted by the Queen. This should bring balance to any future X-Men movies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Teemu shares a quick & easy method for improving signal reception with a 3G modem using nothing but a USB extension cord + cookware. Makes sense considering similar methods employed for use with wifi adapters - mayhaps something a bit more parabolic may be in order?[via Slashdot]

Related:


HOW TO - Uni-Directional WIFI Range Extender

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Hugh Pickens writes "EFF reports that Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and students at the National Reading Summit on How to Destroy the Book and said that 'anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself.' Doctorow says that for centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books and that when you own a book 'it’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children' and that 'the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm always amazed at the claims by some of our usual band of critics in the comments that "remixing isn't creative." They never seem to explain how something like what Kutiman has done could ever be considered not creative. Nor do they explain how taking a clip of a note and using it to make a new song is really different from using a keyboard (which plays "pre-recorded" notes) and playing a song. And we've certainly seem plenty of content creators encourage remixing of their work, and now more and more musicians have been purposely releasing stems and asking fans to make their own mixes. But how about with a book?

A few months back, we wrote about how author Robin Sloan was offering a tiered support model, similar to what many musicians have done, so he could write a novella. He used Kickstarter, and it turned out to be a huge success, with him earning much more than he originally targeted as his goal. The novella has been published, and apparently it's getting quite a response. But Sloan has realized that you don't stop there.

He's taking things a step further, and has reserved $1,000 as a "remix fund," to encourage people to take the book that he just wrote (which is available for download in a variety of formats under a Creative Commons license) and do some sort of remix project on it. He's asking his supporters to pitch remix ideas (including how much it would cost to do), and then those who helped pay for the creation of the original story will vote on the ideas -- and the top ones will get funded (until the $1,000 runs out):

I wrote and published Annabel Scheme with the help of about 600 patrons. It's gotten a warm recep?tion from read?ers, but I'm greedy! I want more: I want other people to trans?form it and make it their own. If you're a writer, an artist, a musician, a mathematician, a pastry chef--or a fan of one of the above--where could you or they take this story? I want to find out.

It's yet another cool way of connecting with fans, and going explicitly against what copyright allows. It's explicitly encouraging people to copy his work and even offering money to them if they do a good job. I imagine this will confuse those who will say "but... wait, he should be getting paid any time anyone wants to do something with his characters." But what Sloan appears to recognize is that building up a larger audience for his works will certainly pay off a lot more in the long run than trying to squeeze people in the short run.

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Though it's likely a viral vid from a hardware manufacturer, the "superhuman tape measure skills" seen above do seem plausible - and fun!

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Kabosu is a citrus fruit that tastes kind of like a cross between a lemon, lime, and yuzu. It gets harder to find the further you get from Oita Prefecture, on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, because 98% of all kabosu production takes place there. Legend has it that the tree first arrived in Oita when an Edo period doctor from Kyoto brought a branch to the region and planted it.

Like most other citrus fruits, kabosu is a great source of Vitamin C. People in Oita believe that the vinegars from kabosu are critical for liver health and to stabilize blood pressure. My father is from there, so I grew up eating fish dipped in kabosu-infused soy sauce thinking this was completely ordinary. Because it has a distinct salty flavor, it's confident enough to go solo as a seasoning. Try it sometime!

By the way, if you have any ideas for Taste Test items — unusual fruits or vegetables, fun recipes for in-season produce, or a special condiment — send me an email: mango [at] tokyomango [dot] com.

Image via cabosu.com

Every installment of Taste Test will explore recipes, the science, and some history behind a specific food item.

Reader BakaYaro points us to this article about OPTi, the company that recently won a $21.7 million patent ruling against Apple, where the company's CEO insists it's not a patent troll because it's only suing over patents that it got itself. It seems that Bernie Marren is trying to redefine what a "patent troll" is to mean just someone who buys patents and sues. But the real story shows that OPTi is yet another example of patents harming, not helping, innovation. The company used to produce products, but other companies eventually caught up, and OPTi couldn't compete. Now, in a true capitalistic society, the companies that can't compete, go out of business. And that's a good thing. Failure is important for free markets to work. But, thanks to the very un-capitalistic concept of government granted monopolies, known as patents, tech companies never need to fail and go out of business. They can just sue over patent infringement. So, OPTi went from a 235-person company producing products and adding value to the market, to a 3-person company that just sues and extracts money from the companies who actually provide value on the market. So OPTi went from providing value to sucking value out of the market. It might not be a troll, but it's difficult to see how it's good for the economy or for innovation.

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coondoggie writes "NASA said its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft successfully popped the cover off its infrared telescope and began “celestial treasure hunt” mission of sending back what will be millions of images of space. The WISE lens cap served as a safety system keeping the ultra-sensitive lens and telescope system safe until the spacecraft positioned itself correctly in orbit. The cap also served as the top to a Thermos-like bottle that chilled the instrument. WISE’s infrared telescope and detectors are kept chilled inside a Thermos-like tank of solid hydrogen, called a cryostat."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Designing Automata kit will teach you about simple mechanics using cams, cranks, and slider mechanisms. The kit includes instructions for making several different automata, and since no glue is used, it can be used over and over again. Made from chemical-free rubber wood that is from sustainable resources.

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I love ginkgo nuts. They have a nutty, ever-so-slightly bittersweet flavor and a punchy-soft texture reminiscent of jelly beans that is, in my experience, quite unmatched by other nuts. They're also beautiful to look at — tiny egg-shaped beads that are a pale yellow when raw and take on a translucent, golden-green glow when cooked.

When I was in elementary school in Tokyo, my friends and I used to walk past a really stinky ginkgo biloba tree. The stink is one of the reasons why the trees aren't seen near busy streets in the US, even though it's the oldest tree specie in the world.

When you buy ginkgo nuts, they usually come shelled, with a light brown casing. The easiest way to prepare them is to fill a frying pan with oil, just enough to cover the nuts, and cook for about three minutes until they're shiny and translucent, and the brown casing starts to fall off. Make sure you pat away excess oil with a paper towel before serving, and sprinkle some good coarse salt on them.

My aunt prepared the ginkgo nuts in this picture for dinner last night. My brother and I both love them, so we immediately started popping them in our mouths. Then my mom and aunt both told us that we shouldn't eat more than 10 at once. My mom said it was bad for digestion; my aunt said it would give us nosebleeds and make us stupid. I wasn't sure if this was just folklore if there's some scientific truth to it, but my brother and I both counted back, stopped at 10, and saved the rest for later.*

As a supplement, ginkgo biloba extract is thought to improve blood flow and memory. Ginkgo contains antioxidants, which gets rid of free radicals in the body that can contribute to heart disease and cancer.

*Later, I found that my mom and aunt's warnings were in sync with side effect warnings that accompany ginkgo biloba extract. I'm sure the chances are low, but as with everything else in life, moderation is the key to staying healthy.

Every installment of Taste Test will explore recipes, the science, and some history behind a specific food item.

An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting: "At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Honestly, at what point do entertainment execs finally figure out that by purposely not making content available in the format people want it in, they're only encouraging them to get that content through unauthorized means? We already knew that the big movie studios were annoyed with Netflix and trying to get Netflix to delay movie rentals until at least a month after the DVD comes out. Now we have an explanation why. As JJ was the first (of a few) to send in, the studios apparently are quite annoyed that, in order to jumpstart its movie streaming offering, Netflix routed around the movie studios, and signed a deal with Starz that allowed it to stream the same movies without a direct deal with the studios. It's not clear how or why Starz had the right to also stream movies through Netflix, but I'm guessing it was a loophole in Starz' deals with the studios -- a loophole that's now closed. So, Netflix is saying it needs to convince Hollywood it's not the enemy, but Hollywood isn't quite buying it yet.

This really shouldn't be a huge surprise. After all, this is Hollywood, where reports that actually show that the movie industry will grow quite a bit in the next decade are also used to claim that rental services like Redbox and Netflix are killing off jobs. It's also the world where Hollywood execs still think that the answer to their problems (problems like its best box office year ever) is to just add more release windows. It's as if they still think that keeping content away from people makes them more likely to buy.

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Corpuscavernosa writes "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets — one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

unknown_gamer writes "BRINK turns out to be a lot more than just a regular shooter. The research behind the game — yes, there was research — turns out to actually be valid. Richard Ham and Edward Stern talk to Snezana about the actual scientific methods behind BRINK, the motivations behind the game, and about the game itself." A video up at Destructoid sums up the game briefly, and two others show an extended gameplay sequence. A preview from back in September at Rock, Paper, Shotgun explains BRINK in more detail. The game is due out Fall 2010. The developer, Splash Damage, seems willing to do a Linux port if the publisher, Bethesda, gives them the green light.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In domain name arbitration disputes, it often seems like the big name almost always wins -- but apparently not always. Canadian search engine Groovle (which actually uses Google as its underlying technology) has won a domain name dispute with Google, as the panelists reviewing the dispute said that Groovle wasn't simple enough to confuse people, and people probably thought of the word "groovy" or "groove" more than Google when they saw Groovle. This really is a bit surprising, since it's pretty rare for the small players to win these sorts of disputes.

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In domain name arbitration disputes, it often seems like the big name almost always wins -- but apparently not always. Canadian search engine Groovle (which actually uses Google as its underlying technology) has won a domain name dispute with Google, as the panelists reviewing the dispute said that Groovle wasn't simple enough to confuse people, and people probably thought of the word "groovy" or "groove" more than Google when they saw Groovle. This really is a bit surprising, since it's pretty rare for the small players to win these sorts of disputes.

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Nokia has been struggling a bit this year, but this "hack it" to get your phone unboxing is pretty interesting. Once you "root" the box it opens up and a little puff of smoke appears, along with your phone (if you're a phone / gadget reviewer). It's interesting to see what's been happening on the artist/maker side of phone hacking, a couple years ago the Nokias were all used for projects - and then the iPhone came out and almost immediately the very same folks were jailbreaking and then making their own apps. There's still not a lot of hardware interaction, but the iPhone seems to be the phone of choice for hackin' around oddly enough.

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CyberDong writes "Roscosmos, Russia's Federal Space Agency, will start working on a project to save planet Earth from a possible collision with Asteroid Apophis, which may happen in 2036. NASA specialists believe that the collision is extremely unlikely. Russian specialists will choose the strategy and then invite the world's leading space agencies to join the project."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBC News: "An Argentine judge has ordered the heirs to a powerful media empire to take DNA tests to establish if they are victims of a forced adoption scheme... Last month, the Congress backed a proposal from the group, allowing the forced extraction of DNA from adults who may be the children of political prisoners - even when they do not want to know." And more here.

This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com. Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

You don't often get to see the details of a massive data center. The companies that run them tend to keep things pretty quiet, as they view the datacenter as a competitive advantage. Thus, what happens in Google's datacenters remains mostly a mystery. And yet, it seems that the folks at Weta Digital, famous for providing the computing horsepower behind major Hollywood blockbusters like Lord of the Rings and now Avatar are apparently willing to open up a bit and provide some details about its setup. What struck me as interesting wasn't so much the hardware specifics, but how they had to switch from the industry standard cooling system of raised floors and air-cooling, because the machines were too close together to get the necessary bandwidth. So, instead, they went with water-cooled racks. Water-cooled data centers have been increasingly common over the past few years (and were typical with many old mainframes), but they're still a technology that not all data center operators are comfortable with, and which many still think create more problems than they solve. So it's always interesting to see another one in action.

At the same time, as neat as it is to read about Weta Digital's massive computing power (which apparently represents one of the 200 largest "super computers") in the world, I'm still left wondering if the trend -- even for amazing movie effects -- isn't moving away from such massive data centers. We're seeing more and more what can be done on the cheap. And, no, it doesn't come close to matching the stunning effects found in the blockbuster movies that Weta works on, but it does have all the symptoms of a classic innovator's dilemma scenario, where the new stuff isn't "as good" as the old stuff, but is improving at a faster rate, and quickly reaching a point where it's "good enough" at significantly lower price points.

Given the regular discussions around here concerning movie budgets, where do people think the technology is headed for movie special effects? Will it always be run in giant datacenters, or is there a place for making high quality (even blockbuster-type) films on cheaper hardware?

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You aren't going to believe this.

Slate's culture podcast chose three people as Person of the Decade and they were: George W. Bush, Paris Hilton and Dave Winer.

It's the weirdest thing.

They said my name and no one said Who dat?

I don't think it was a joke.

And it was for a good thing, podcasting -- and they're right about how nice it is to have all those great podcasts to listen to.

I didn't make a dime off podcasting, but in a more important way I did get rich from it. There's an incredible wealth of great stuff to listen to. It really took off, and it's something I'm really proud of.

Here's the full MP3. The segment starts around minute 27.

And here's the 3.5 minute excerpt where they talk about the Person of the Decade.

Mike Rotondo created an instrument using an Arduino, Max/MSP and some sensors for a Physical Interaction Design workshop at Stanford's CCRMA. As he puts it: "When the guitar is too sexy and the piano makes too much sense, it's time to stick a bunch of sensors to your body with electrical tape and plug it all into your computer!"

How it works:

There's a small electret microphone attached to my foot, and two bend sensors on my arm: one in my elbow, and one on my finger. The signals from each of these are routed through an Arduino microcontroller into a Max/MSP patch.

The microphone output is routed through a percussion follower, and impulses (like stomps) trigger the instrument's tone generation. The sound of the instrument is created by a a plucked string model and some ADSR'd harmonized sine waves. If the impulse picked up by the mic is heavy in high frequencies, the sound is captured and "granulated" around a bit at a random interval.

Stompolin

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resistant writes "As the evocative title from Wired magazine implies, Kevin Dunbar of the University of Toronto has taken an in-depth and fascinating look at scientific error, the scientists who cope with it, and sometimes transcend it to find new lines of inquiry. From the article: 'Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I actually had decently high hopes for Vevo, the partnership between Universal Music and YouTube to create a website for official music videos (currently from three of the four major record labels). I mean, I always figured that eventually the labels would screw stuff up, but I thought it actually had a shot at maybe being useful. The fact that Universal put Rio Caraeff in charge seemed like a good sign as well, since Caraeff seemed like the sort of music industry exec who understood the new marketplace for music, and wasn't encumbered with the "old ways" of doing things. But rather than a useful site, Vevo has basically been a cookie cutter version of what you would do if the record labels created their own YouTube. That is, it took none of the good parts of YouTube. Hell, it didn't even take the ability to handle a lot of traffic. For the first few days after it launched, Vevo just didn't work at all.

Its latest screwup was that it didn't include its preroll ads in the YouTube API, meaning that others who used the API could access and repurpose Vevo content without the ads, and even show the content outside the US (which Vevo currently does not allow). It didn't take long for one enterprising startup, Muziic, to do exactly that. Muziic has received some attention for basically using the YouTube API to create an iTunes-like experience out of YouTube videos (it also gets attention for being founded by a 16-year old). Muziic sent out an announcement this week about how it was using the YouTube API to add Vevo content, meaning you could access Vevo videos without the preroll ads and outside the US.

Vevo's first response? To send a cease and desist. At the very least, it wasn't a legal nastygram, but a more friendly cease & desist sent by Caraeff himself. But "cease" what? Muziic was using the API as designed, and even though Caraeff admits that Vevo is quickly scrambling to change the API, he still says Muziic needs to cease from using the Vevo logo or referencing the company's name. But Muziic used the name in an accurate and descriptive manner. It accurately noted that it was now offering Vevo content -- without ads and outside the US -- all legally via the use of the API provided by YouTube/Vevo itself.

Muziic's co-founder responded to Caraeff's email over at Hypebot, saying that he "was as shocked as anyone when I realized there were not yet any "pre-roll" advertisements for Vevo content in the API," but since it was how the company set up the API, it seems perfectly reasonable to use it that way. He also notes that he had reached out to Vevo prior to this to try to work out an arrangement with the company and got no response.

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modeca writes "Using only commonly available kitchen equipment this guy demonstrates the amazing powers of an ordinary metal pan to boost the 3G reception of his USB modem. It really seems to work, check the right hand side of the graph in the video." It's not that crazy: cheap antenna boosting (for USB WiFi dongles, Bluetooth, and more) has been elevated to a fine art in New Zealand.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via EFF comes this rather interesting calculation of the DRM tax of owning an Amazon Kindle. It's not a definitive number, as it would differ for different people based on what kinds of books they buy, how often and how many of those books they'd like to keep. But it's a good little thought experiment for those looking to buy a Kindle. The key recognition, of course, is that with a Kindle ebook you're renting, not buying the books:

There is one other problem with DRM protected books. When the reading device reaches its end of life, you have to assume all the content you purchased will be lost. If, for instance, I went with a Kindle, all of the content I purchase can be used only on devices supported by Amazon.

When, several years later, it comes time to replace that Kindle I may get a new Kindle -- but I can't assume that. Maybe somebody else will have a better device at that time. Or, maybe Amazon went bankrupt or evil or stupid and I need to switch to another vendor. There are any number of reasons I might like to switch my e-reader. If I do, I have to assume I won't be able to use any of the content I purchased for the Kindle.

Thanks to DRM, when my e-reader reaches its end of life, I will have to pay to acquire replacement books for the material that's locked out of the new e-reader. I call the amount of that purchase the "DRM tax" -- an added cost imposed by DRM restrictions.

He's quite fair in calculating his own personal DRM tax, noting that he probably wouldn't want to rebuy all the books, but just a portion of them. He also knows that ebooks are cheaper. But, in the end, he realizes that this DRM tax makes the total cost of ownership of a Kindle much higher for him than just buying the physical books -- even if it's more of a pain to have to sometimes lug them around. In his case, he would use it mainly for technical books, which is a different situation than, say, recreational novel reading, where "ownership" may be less important. Still, he feels that the DRM issue is a problem and a serious hidden cost:

Maybe someday Amazon (and publishers) will realize how much harm they are doing with DRM. If the DRM tax was removed, not only would more people get e-readers, but also, thanks to the low friction of e-book purchasing, they'd buy more e-content.

This is actually a key point. Just the fact that he had to run through this calculation to determine if a Kindle made sense is a serious amount of friction. If Amazon made this calculation easy (i.e., no DRM tax) that would lead to more sales.

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From Wired's Autopia blog:

China is home to a widespread DIY culture fed by necessity (the mother of all invention) and innovation. These garage builders and innovators are, like their products, often called shanzhai. Literally translated, it means "mountain strongholds," but it has come to mean nonprofessional or clandestine manufacturers turning out products from the basic to the highly sophisticated. These shanzhai often take familiar products, concepts and marketing memes and remake them with peculiar but innovative twists.

Aviation is by no means an exception, and it has its share of shanzhai builders. But there is more to it than that. China's emerging aviator class is spreading its wings with a plethora of approaches, from the ramshackle to the sophisticated to the potentially revolutionary. They're using everything imaginable, from old motorcycle engines to electric motors to even their own legs, like Mao Yiqing and his human-powered airplane shown above. You could easily plot these adventurous innovators on a graph, with the X axis showing their skill and the Y axis their financial means.

The Sky's the Limit for China's DIY Aviators

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theodp writes "Among the last batch of patents granted in 2009 was one for IBM's Resolution of Abbreviated Text in an Electronic Communications System. The invention of four IBMers addresses the hitherto unsolvable problem of translating abbreviations to their full meaning — e.g., 'IMHO' means 'In My Humble Opinion' — and vice versa. From the patent: 'One particularly useful application of the invention is to interpret the meaning of shorthand terms ... For example, one database may define the shorthand term "LOL" to mean "laughing out loud."' USPTO records indicate the patent filing was made more than a year after Big Blue called on the industry to stop what it called 'bad behavior' by companies who seek patents for unoriginal work. Yet another example of what USPTO Chief David Kappos called IBM's apparent schizophrenia on patent policy back when he managed Big Blue's IP portfolio."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I hit the same wall I always hit when looking for a place to store the users' content.

It's not much of a problem when you're running the server for them, but when the server is running on their desktop, as it is in River2, where do you put the publicly accessible content? I could operate a storage system for them, but what happens if the service doesn't take off and never becomes a business? At some point I have to punt, and that leaves users with data that goes missing. Thinking long-term I don't want to set another one of these up.

The right answer is to help them get their own storage working. And Amazon has made that relatively easy, so I spent the time to make it really work.

The users' feeds are stored in Amazon S3. For this I need three pieces of data. The "Access Key ID" (which is the equiv of a username), "Secret Access Key" (password) and a default bucket. That's explained on the Frontier News site.

Frontier News: New preferences for Amazon S3.

I created my own feed using the new tool, you can see it's on Amazon. I wouldn't subscribe to it, while it should keep updating, I'm going to merge it with my lifeliner feed.

Back in July, I blogged about YB2Normal's inexpensive PVC gimbal for a home-made steadicam rig. Since that time, William has been steadily refining his design. Version five, pictured above, features a redesigned gimbal incorporating an off-the-shelf auto part. [via Hack A Day]

From the pages of MAKE:

Johnny Lee showed us how to build a $14 Video Camera Stabilizer way back in MAKE 01.

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Famous politico-pranksters The Yes Men have a long history of putting forth convincing parody websites that get those they parody to rush around to get the websites offline. Back in 2007, there was the fake ExxonMobil site that got pulled. Earlier this year it was the fake Chamber of Commerce site that the real Chamber issued a DMCA takedown over. The latest prank is based up in Canada, with the Yes Men setting up some parody sites of Canadian government organizations, promising massive greenhouse emissions reductions. This greatly upset the Canadian government who ordered the websites' service provider to pull them down. However, as Michael Geist points out, in the rush to pull down the sites, the ISP also took down 4,500 other websites. Seems like quite a bit of unnecessary collateral damage. Of course, this is exactly what the Yes Men want. For every takedown, they get another burst of publicity.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Professor Johannes Skaar's Quantum Hacking group at NTNU have found a new way to break quantum encryption. Even though quantum encryption is theoretically perfect, real hardware isn't, and they exploit these flaws. Their technique relies on a particular way of blinding the single photon detectors so that they're able to perform an intercept-resend attack and get a copy of the secret key without giving away the fact that someone is listening. This attack is not merely theoretical, either. They have built an eavesdropping device and successfully attacked their own quantum encryption hardware. More details can be found in their conference presentation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Youtube user Brusspup made these animated optical illusions by carefully combining slices of different drawings, then sliding an image of vertical lines over the top. That part is straightforward. The illusion comes in when your brain interprets the small white slits that it sees into larger shapes. He also has a nice tutorial on the technique:

I can understand doing this by hand to learn how this works, but it seems like the perfect kind of task to automate with a computer program. Anyone up to the challenge? [via laughing squid]

More:

• Cylinder mirror optical illusions
• Real-life optical illusions
• Reflections on an Illusion

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dinoyum writes "Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's promise of a winter without snow in the capital city has fallen short. While cloud seeding is not a new concept for Russia, often used on major holidays, geoengineering snow has never been done to that magnitude. Carrying off the $6 million procedure required jets to spray silver iodide into coming clouds, ensuring that all precipitation fell before it reached the capital. However a combination of disrupted radar, wind control, and faulty weathermen have been blamed by Luzhkov for his failed attempt at playing with mother nature. For now, Russia can go back to enjoying snow."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the more famous examples of abuses of the YouTube video takedown process was the case of Lenz vs. Universal Music, which involved Universal Music issuing a YouTube DMCA takedown to a woman who posted a very short clip of her baby dancing to a Prince song that was playing in the background. It was a clear case of fair use, and while after the woman filed a counternotice Universal chose not to sue, the EFF filed a lawsuit against Universal Music, saying that the DMCA notice was fraudulent, since it was such an obvious case of fair use. While Universal Music argued that since fair use is just a "defense" and not a "right" it need not consider fair use in sending a takedown, the court disagreed.

You would think, then, that any takedown notices on similar short videos of kids dancing to music would avoid a similar scenario. Copycense points us to the news that a guy has received a notice from Google of potential infringement for his short clip of his kid dancing along to what appears to be a version (not the original) of the Kool & The Gang song "Celebration." As in the Lenz case, this video is a kid dancing to somewhere around 30 seconds of a song: The notice claims that the video contains content for which the copyright is held by record label Razor & Tie. The guy who got the takedown seems a bit confused, in that he appears to be blaming McDonald's for the mess, when it appears McDonald's had nothing at all to do with the takedown. In fact, the record label Razor & Tie may not have anything to do with it either... as I'll explain below. The song used in the video was from a CD that came with a McDonald's Happy Meal. Looking around, it appears that in April, McDonald's announced a promotion with record label Kidz Bop to issue music CDs. Razor & Tie is the parent company of Kidz Bop. The problem here is clearly not McDonald's. All it did was include the CD in Happy Meals. It's got nothing to do with the takedown, and the guy's anger at McDonald's is misplaced (though, you could make the argument -- and it's a stretch -- that McDonald's should tell its partners to avoid these sorts of ridiculous copyright claims that scare people away from buying Happy Meals).

The next assumption, then, would be that Razor & Tie is guilty of sending the takedown, but I don't think that's true. If Razor & Tie had sent a DMCA takedown, the video would be down. When Google receives a DMCA takedown, it almost always (or perhaps always) pulls down the content immediately in order to retain its DMCA safe harbors. The user would then need to file a counternotice to start the process of potentially getting the video back up. The fact that the video is up and the notice the guy received simply tells him to review the videos suggests that no DMCA takedown was sent.

Instead, the blame almost certainly lies with Google's content recognition engine/filters that the record labels pushed them to use to try to catch copyright infringement ahead of time. Now, Razor & Tie is somewhat complicit here, in that it appears to have uploaded its catalog to train Google's filters (if I remember correctly -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- Google needs the copyright holder to submit copies for its filter to work). So, Google had this particular song on file, and noticed the similarity. Google's filter algorithms don't appear to consider fair use (or, perhaps more likely, they do a bad job of it in many cases) and the guy then is sent the automated notification, even though it makes everyone -- McDonald's, Razor & Tie and Google -- look bad, though the blame from the recipient appears to be in almost reverse order of culpability.

Unfortunately, the guy who received the notice also appears to be confused concerning his own rights. He says he is going to take down the video, though he clearly has a strong fair use case in asking for the video to be left alone. It seems likely that Google would allow the video to stay up, and I highly doubt that Razor & Tie would do anything else (it would be ridiculous to try to claim that this was not fair use).

Either way, this highlights a variety of interesting things. First, despite all the publicity of the Lenz case, these types of "takedowns" (even if it's not a DMCA takedown) still happen. Second, people on the receiving end of these notices assume that there is no recourse that would allow the video to stay up. People get official sounding notices and they assume they need to jump. Third, Google's content match filter isn't particularly good on fair use issues. Fourth, when these sorts of bogus notices are sent, it reflects very poorly on a variety of companies. In this case, McDonald's is getting most of the blame, despite being almost entirely blameless (well, it did decide to put out these silly music CDs, but that's a separate issue). Even Razor & Tie may be getting misplaced blame (though it may depend on the "rules" it set for Google's filter). Amusingly, it may be Google that deserves the most blame, and it appears to be getting the least.

Still, no matter what the situation, it's simply ridiculous that a guy filming 30 seconds of his kid dancing should have to worry about any of this.

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Here's MAKE's Collin Cunningham explaining Ohm's Law: Voltage = Current X Resistance.

My tweeting-in-the-river project has yielded a stream.

Witness...

In this screen shot I am composing a tweet to be published. Self-explanatory.

Then a few moments later, it appears, as if by magic, in its own river.

I am speechless.

kkleiner writes "The Shadow Dextrous Hand is a robotic arm that allows for fine motor control and precise movements. It's accurate enough to pick up an egg, screw in a light bulb, or thread a needle. Even cooler, researchers can control it with a 'Cyber glove,' allowing for 24 distinct human movements that mimic the user's own hand. A British based company, Shadow, has been displaying the hand for several years now, and recently demonstrated its latest model at IREX 2009. The hand, toted as the world's most advanced, is available for sale to researchers (pricing has not been made public)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "I am currently looking to move from text editing with vim to a full fledged IDE with gdb integration, integrated command line, etc. Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin, so I am looking for a linux based GUI IDE. I do not want to give up the efficient text editing capabilities of VIM though. How do I have my cake and eat it too?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Peter Kirwan has an interesting article in Wired UK on the emergence of software that automates the collection, evaluation, and even reporting of news events. Thomson Reuters, the world's largest news agency, has started moving down this path, courtesy of an intriguing product with the nondescript name NewsScope, a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven trading. The latest iteration of NewsScope 'scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information' from US corporate press releases, eliminating the 'manual processes' that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment. At Northwestern University, a group of computer science and journalism students have developed a program called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball games. Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated 'narrative arcs' to describe the action in a format recognizable as a news story. 'No doubt Kurt Cagle, editor of XMLToday.org, was engaging in a bit of provocation when he recently suggested that an intelligent agent might win a Pulitzer Prize by 2030,' writes Kirwin. 'Of course, it won't be the software that takes home the prize: it'll be the programmers who wrote the code in the first place, something that Joseph Pultizer could never have anticipated.'"

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1934 photo of a baby in a wooden and wire cage hanging out of a window a few stories up. It looks secure.

Make: Online's space correspondent, Rachel Hobson, points us to this article in Florida Today:

After months of searching for a new home for a full-scale model of the space shuttle's crew compartment, Chuck Ryan is beginning to accept the replica he spent almost 15 years building may soon be destroyed.

He is now trying to find takers for 1,000 toggle switches, 50 gallons of paint, 40 gallons of fiberglass resin, plywood, tools and other never-used materials.

"I'm still holding out a little bit of hope that someone wants the shuttle," said Ryan, who would like to donate the 33-foot long, 10-ton model and see it used as a monument or for a space camp.

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With the failed attempted terrorist attack last week, there has been a tremendous amount of confusion and changing stories concerning airline security. What was especially odd was that there were so many conflicting reports about what the TSA was requiring that it really made the very concept of flying a total pain. There were some reports saying that no carry on baggage was allowed and other reports saying no electronics were allowed. Then there were the reports that you could carry on one bag, but wouldn't be able to leave your seat in the last hour of the flight or have anything (anything at all) on your lap during that hour. Every flight seemed to be different and the TSA was silent for a few days, before finally issuing a vague "guidance" press release that didn't really answer any questions. Basically, the TSA said that it was changing rules constantly. One supposes that the idea was to completely vary the rules so that no "terrorist" could prepare for them and get around them, and I actually can see some merit in that, conceptually. But from a travelers' perspective, it's ridiculous. You simply can't plan ahead with any sense of reason.

And since the TSA was so quiet and/or vague, there were a ton of people searching for information. Even the NY Times was relying on info found on airline websites rather than the TSA itself. So it was of little surprise that there would be plenty of demand for anyone to share any info that they knew -- not for any nefarious purpose, but just so regular travelers could properly prepare for their trip.

Among those who found and posted such information was blogger/reporter and travel expert Christopher Elliott, who regularly blogs about travel issues. He posted the details of a TSA order requiring pat-downs of all passengers on international inbound flights. The order that he posted had been sent to US Airways employees, and seemed like a reasonable bit of information that people would probably like to know about, so it's no surprise that Elliott blogged about it. But last night, Elliott received a surprising knock on the door from a Federal Agent with a subpoena demanding he hand over the details of where he received the info on the pat down procedure (thanks to Rob Hyndman who pointed me to an account of this incident).

Now, the argument in favor of this action is that these sorts of security procedures are probably supposed to be kept quiet (again, the idea would be to throw off any terrorist), but if you actually think about this, it doesn't make any sense. First, it wouldn't take long at all for reports of universal pre-boarding pat downs to be spread around. After all, thousands of people get on planes to fly to the US every day. In fact, among the many stories I heard, the universal pat down story was among them. So it's not like it's actually a secret. It's quite clear from what's being done. Second, if the TSA's security plan is based on keeping information like this "secret" (even if it's made obvious by their actions), then we're in even more trouble than I thought. It's security through pretend obscurity. It's ostrich-level security theater. It's security theater where the idea is that if the TSA pretends no one knows what's actually happening, then it can assume that no one knows what the procedures really are for airport security.

Instead, the whole thing (once again) demonstrates how silly the TSA security procedures are. And, oh yeah, rather than sending federal agents to issue subpoenas to folks like Elliott to figure out how he got the security procedures, shouldn't Homeland Security be spending more time tracking terrorists and coming up with plans that actually make us safer? What good is it engaging in a witch hunt over who passed on the obvious info that people get patted down before they board a US-bound flight?

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According to the YouTube description for this video, a guy threw his bicycle at a pair of purse-snatching thieves who were speeding away on a scooter, causing them to crash and become quite upset.

wkurzius writes "The new Google phone, the Nexus One, is rumored to cost $530 unlocked and will work on any GSM network. A subsidized version is also available for $180 and will get you a T-Mobile Even More Individual 500 Plan for 2-years with a $350 termination fee. Access to the phone is supposed to be invite only at first, with January 5th being the supposed release date."

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ReflectionOf.Me posted a graph that shows how much HP printer ink costs compared to human blood, vodka, crude oil and other precious liquids.

Ever wonder how you can get rectangular lumber from round trees? I figured that it involved a lot of sawing, but didn't realize how much handling was required. The video above is of the Jackson Lumber Harvester 3 Saw Vertical Edger. [via core77]

More:

• The power of steam
• Sturgeon's Mill field trip

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Ever wonder how you can get rectangular lumber from round trees? I figured that it involved a lot of sawing, but didn't realize how much handling was required. The video above is of the Jackson Lumber Harvester 3 Saw Vertical Edger. [via core77]

More:

• The power of steam
• Sturgeon's Mill field trip

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Copyright maximalists who hate the DMCA's safe harbors often claim that service providers can easily tell what content is infringing and which is not. This is, in fact, a key part of the argument made by Viacom in its lawsuit against Google over YouTube. It claims that YouTube must know that the clips are infringing and should be taken down. There's just one problem: even Viacom doesn't seem to know which clips are infringing and which are not. It turns out that, among the many YouTube clips included in the lawsuit, approximately 100 were uploaded on purpose by Viacom. Yes, you read that right:

Viacom sued Google over clips it claimed were infringing, that Viacom purposely uploaded to YouTube.

That alone should show how ridiculous Viacom's claims are in this lawsuit. There is simply no way for Google to know if clips are uploaded legitimately or not. Oddly, however, the court has now allowed Viacom to withdraw those clips, but lawyers like Eric Goldman are questioning how this isn't a Rule 11 violation for frivolous or improper litigation. But, more importantly, it demonstrates that even Viacom has no idea which clips are infringing and which are authorized. Given that, how can it possibly say that it's reasonable for Google to know?

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My nephew Ari Pescovitz, a metal sculptor and architecture grad student, spent the fall living in New York City for an internship. He became intrigued by the structures used to prevent people from sitting on standpipes. (Maybe that's why they're called standpipes, and not sitpipes! *rimshot*) "It amused me how hostile and creative New Yorkers were in not wanting people to slow down and rest," Ari says. So he began to photograph the standpipes as bits of urban engineering. Ari did find an exception to the anti-sitting technology though: a stand-pipe outfitted with a tiny seat. Above it was a sign: "Please be seated -- rest, dream, this is New York." The seat was sponsored by a realty firm.

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

By Eric Chu, engineering intern

There aren't many low-budget ways to customize one's yo-yo. The most common ones are either painting or dyeing, but they're limited: paint chips off with time, and dyeing is only for plastic yo-yos.

Being a yo-yo fanatic, I regularly visit the blog yoyoskills.com for yo-yo news. There I recently read a post about spin-activated LED side caps that fit into the side of yo-yos. They're low-cost ($6) and look very cool; a perfect customizing add-on for a yo-yo. Unfortunately, they only come in one size, thus only fitting a few yo-yos.

I thought it'd be a fun project to make my own set (and it was!). I used a One Drop Project yo-yo.

How It Works
Using the centrifugal force generated by the spinning of the yo-yo, the spring, acting as the switch, is pulled outward. It makes contact with the positive leads of the LEDs, thus completing the circuit, turning the LEDs on.

It looks great in action, day or night. Check out the video:

I'll be writing up the project as a DIY article soon. Look for it in MAKE Volume 22 this spring.

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Xcott Craver writes "The next Underhanded C Contest has begun, with a deadline of March 1st. The object of the contest is to write short, readable, clear and innocent C code that somehow commits an evil act. This year's challenge: write a luggage routing program that mysteriously misroutes a customer's bag if a check-in clerk places just the right kind of text in a comment field. The prize is a gift certificate to ThinkGeek.com."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting tutorial over on Propnomicon, by Richard Bird, who built this vintage diving helmet replica prop for a recent LARP adventure for London's The Dark Door group.

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President Obama is taking steps to modify rules around the secrecy of government documents, and the length of time for which documents may remain secret. Secrecy experts like Steven Aftergood are cautiously optimistic, but not yet convinced this is good news.

"Just / want / allah / help / good / people." Link, requires Java and no adblockers.

Via Wired Danger Room on Twitter, from @i2pi and via @drewconway

Bruce Schneier: a voice of reason, as usual.

Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many people think. It's rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism, and executing a terrorist plot is much harder than television makes it appear.

The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. But even these are less effective at keeping us safe than our social and political policies, both at home and abroad. However, our elected leaders don't think this way: They are far more likely to implement security theater against movie-plot threats.

Is aviation security mostly for show? (CNN guest editorial)

Comedian and television host Chris Hardwick has a few choice words for the TSA.