trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency, Canadian Blood Services, has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed "science-based" organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the Nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hopefully this is just a big mistake, but Slashdot points us to a bunch of Google Docs users complaining that Google is blocking them from sharing their documents claiming "inappropriate content," even in cases where the content is clearly fine, such as college class notes and homework assignments. Even assuming this is just some sort of bug, the bigger issue seems to be Google's lack of response, despite the issue cropping up weeks ago. This charge has been raised about Google in the past, and it's only going to become more important. As more and more people rely on Google for services, the company is going to need to improve its handling of customer service issues and communication.

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This sounds like so much fun, I'm tempted to drive up to NYC for the day to attend. As part of MoMA'a amazing Bauhaus exhibitions, events, and workshops, Douglas Repetto (Dorkbot founder, artist, and teacher at Columbia) will be doing a workshop, called "Walking Tables and Wrestling Foals: A Hands-on Workshop and Musical Performance." Here's the description from MoMA:

In conjunction with the exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity (November 8, 2009-January 25, 2010), Bauhaus Lab is a new interactive space that reimagines the historic Bauhaus classrooms in which students and teachers of many forms of art experimented with innovative pedagogical approaches. Led by artists, educators, and art historians, an ongoing series of hands-on art-making workshops offers participants of all ages the opportunity to engage in techniques and processes integral to the Bauhaus, such as drawing, collage, graphic design, color theory, and mechanical construction.

Join Machine Project for a day of woodworking, mechanical mayhem, and cute baby horses. Participants collaborate with artist Douglas Repetto in manufacturing a herd of "foals"--simple walking tables--small tables that actually "walk" across the floor--handmade from scrap wood and basic mechanical parts. The foal-building workshop is a humorous take on issues central to the Bauhaus movement, including the relationships between form and function and between craft and mass production. At the end of the afternoon the foals are let loose in MoMA's Education and Research Building. Musicians from the experimental chamber ensemble WetInk provide musical accompaniment with improvisations informed by the movements and intersections of the foals. Poet Joshua Beckman reads traditional ceremonial foal poems of his own devising. Foal pandemonium or peaceful frolic? There's only one way to find out! Workshop participants and audience members may adopt a foal. Take-home foal-building plans are available.

The workshop is this Friday, Dec 4th, from 2:00-6:00 p.m. The performance is 7:00-8:00 p.m.

Walking Tables and Wrestling Foals: A Hands-on Workshop and Musical Performance

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Hemant Mehta does a fascinating interview with Ray Comfort, not about Creationism, but about Comfort's personal philosophy and the way he has gone about promoting Creationism and Christianity in general. Comfort, you'll recall, is the guy who tried to prove the existence of a benevolent interventionist God by appealing to the human-convenient shape of a banana--a plant that's been heavily modified by humans through controlled selection in agriculture. Kudos to Mehta for giving us a glimpse inside this particular head.

Hemant: The banana. Do you stand by the argument in your video? Do you regret saying what you did? Do you like when people associate that video with you? Was it a joke? Are you aware that the banana in your video is genetically modified while a "natural" banana would be virtually unrecognizable? (There are several other questions regarding the Banana, but these are the overall themes).

Ray: I deeply regret doing the banana routine on television without a live audience. I have been doing it for live audiences for more than 20 years, and it's never failed to get a lot of laughs. Regarding genetic modification. There isn't any evidence that the banana has changed its shape in the last 2,000 years. The anonymous creator of the well-publicized YouTube clip used a picture of a modern banana that was shaped like a potato, to make me look like a fool (and he did a pretty good job). To see evidence that the banana hasn't changed shape, go to the bottom of http://www.livingwaters.com/origin/presskit and click on the PDF of "The Banana Controversy." Humbling though it has been, the subject has worked in my favor. Being "The Banana Man" has left me with a very low bar to reach. People are quite amazed when I'm able to string a complete sentence together.

It's worth noting that, given Mehta's audience, this is pretty atheist-centric. However, I'm well aware that belief in the Christian God/Jesus (or any other deity) doesn't preclude acceptance of evolution and doesn't equate with scientific illiteracy. Mehta seems to be aware of that as well. Comfort, on the other hand, appears to be a little confused on the subject.

The Friendly Atheist: Interview With Ray Comfort

Image courtesy Flickr user ian_ransley, via CC

CWmike writes "Microsoft's Windows ran to stay in place last month as Window 7's market share gains made up for the largest-ever declines in Windows XP and Vista, data released today by Web metrics firm Net Applications showed. By these numbers, Windows 7's gains were primarily at the expense of Windows XP. For each copy of Vista replaced by Windows 7 during November, more than six copies of XP were swapped out. Meanwhile, Apple's Mac OS X lost share during November... betcha Ballmer is having an extra giddy time with that news. Linux came up a winner last month, returning to the 1% share mark for the first time since July. Linux's all-time high in Net Applications' rankings was May 2009, when it nearly reached 1.2%."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In my previous post, I described how I was able to program an iCop eBox to transmit date using an XBee wireless link. The program was written in Visual C++ and executed serial port commands to send data to a host computer. I had previously set up the XBees to communicate at 115,200 baud, but the Visual C++ serial port configuration defaults to 9600 for the baud rate. I was able to find sample code for It and it was relatively straightforward to add code to my program whichchanged the baud rate to the desired value.

Then things got a little strange. I noticed that every time I ran my program, it would hang after the serial transmission. I also found that the program would crash if I tried to send more than 16 characters. There's a long list of possible causes for such crashes, and I started to debug them one by one. The important part of this story is the outcome. Honestly, debugging can be unpleasant. I like a good challenge and have always enjoyed solving puzzles, but that's not how I wanted to be spending my time with these SPARK projects. So back to the outcome of the story. After taking many small steps backwards in the debugging process, I finally managed to make a huge leap forward, out of programming darkness. I now have a Visual Basic program running on my iCop eBox, and it's sending and receiving data from another computer using XBee transceivers.

Why is this so great? That's a fair question. Read on at the SPARK site for the answer!

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SETI@Home, one of the earlier and (still) largest distributed computing projects was launched more than 10 years ago, and it's still pretty common for lots of folks (geeks and non-geeks alike) to run the screensavers and work through the mounds of SETI data. That's why it's a bit surprising to find a News.com writeup by Chris Matyszczyk, about a guy fired for running the software written up as if SETI@Home were some sort of wacky new project by UFO enthusiasts. Basically, it sounds like the guy installed the SETI@Home software on a bunch of computers at the school, and that upset school officials. This isn't the first time we've seen this sort of thing. Five years ago, we wrote about a similar firing of an employee by the state of Ohio.

Still, if you look at the details of this particular firing the situation seems a lot different than the News.com report suggests (or than even the article from AZCentral suggests). There's actually a criminal investigation going on, but the bigger issue (even though it's downplayed in the article) is the fact that the school district claims the guy stole 18 computers from the district and had them in his home (turned up by a warrant). That seems a lot more understandable as an offense leading to termination. Separately, it appears he did not complete his job duties -- such as installing firewall software that never showed up (oddly, the article never actually defines the guy's job title, but it sounds like some sort of IT job). The whole SETI@Home stuff just seems exaggerated. This includes the claim, made in the article, that the guy's actions cost the school district between $1.2 million and $1.6 million. While some of this may be tied to the missing computers, the article implies that much of it is from running SETI@Home, which the school claims was a burden on the computer systems. While he probably shouldn't have been running the software on those machines without permission, that alone is hardly that big of a deal. It seems like most people at the school district and the writers of the articles linked above don't understand how SETI@Home works, which seems to create an awful lot of confusion.

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I'm sick and tired of washing my contact lenses everyday, and my dog Malcolm recently broke my glasses with his teeth. That's why I'm thinking about getting Lasik.

Excimer laser technology was first used and developed by IBM to make etchings on computer chips in the 70s. The first excimer eye surgery was conducted in 1988, and the basic underlying technology has remained pretty much the same since then. There are a few things that are new now. The first is how our vision is mapped. The amount of correction needed for Lasik used to be measured the same way one would evaluate for eyeglasses — e.g. by showing the patient Cs facing different directions, giving them different lens options and having them say which eye sees sharper. Around 2002, surgeons started using wavefront-guided corrections, which means the laser relies on multiple detailed topographic maps that show all the quirks in each person's optical system.

The second thing that's different is the way the corneal flap is created. The flap-creating portion of Lasik used to be done using a mechanical keratome, basically a high-speed metal blade that would create a flap while the cornea is under a suction cup. "It's very similar to the guillotine effect you see when you go to a deli and they're slicing meat," says Dr. Manche, a Lasik surgeon at the Stanford Eye Laser Center. Now, most places use a femtosecond laser — a super accurate, super fast flap-making device. In addition to being a lot less invasive, the femtosecond laser creates flaps with a more uniform thickness — the mechanical flap tends to create a thinner center and a thicker peripheral, creating more structural instability in the eye.

Basically, Manche says, when you see tiered pricing at a laser eye surgery center, you should ask yourself these questions: What kind of laser do they use? Are they using wavefront-guided or traditional correction measurements? Is the flap being created by a laser or a blade? Is the surgery being performed by the head surgeon or an apprentice? Depending on these answers, you could end up with prices all along the spectrum, from a couple thousand bucks to $6000 (which is what Manche charges).

"It's lke heart surgery or brain surgery," says Dr. Roy Rubinfeld, a Lasik doctor at Washington Eye Physicians & Surgeons in DC . "Better surgeons will have better equipment, and will understand who is a better candidate and who isn't." Also keep in mind the importance of aftercare, something that many who opt for discount Lasik centers might lose out on.

To date, over 17 million Lasik procedures have been performed worldwide, and according to the FDA, 95-99% of them are complication-free. Of course, this also means that a good number of people who have had Lasik end up seeing halos or having compromised night vision — some have even started their own web sites to share Lasik horror stories and cautionary tales.

As for the next big thing? Some speculate it might be something called instrastromal ablation, which would use femtosecond lasers — the ones that make the flaps in Lasik — to make cuts inside the cornea. Since there's no flap creation process, there would be no possibility of flap complications, and it may be cheaper because it only uses one machine. Instrastromal ablation was used successfully on test subjects with presbyopia in recent tests outside of the US, but it could be years before we see it stateside. "There are three companies pursuing this now, but it's way down the pipeline," says Dr. Marguerite McDonald. She's the president of the International Society of Refractive Surgery, and she's also the person who performed the first excimer laser surgery in 1988. Other things, like eye implants and inlays, have already been done in small numbers and could become more popular in the near future.

McDonald also points out that Lasik is not getting cheaper anytime soon: "It is always going to be expensive because the technology that goes into the surgery is expensive. And there has to be a way to pay for the R&D of each breakthrough."

Armed with all this knowledge, I'm still not sure whether I'm going to get Lasik or not. I would definitely do it if it was a little bit cheaper, but I don't want to go for the discounted surgeon who might skimp on things like cleanliness or attention to detail. (I Googled the place that sent me the $500 off coupon, and found out that the head surgeon there had been sued several years ago for reusing blades.)

And what about just sticking with my Acuvues? "Contacts work briliantly," Manche says. "If you can wear them and they work well, that's a great option." A great option, Rubinfeld points out, that costs more over a decade than single Lasik operation.

MojoKid sends in a piece that takes a step back from Google's much-analyzed OS to look at what it is trying to accomplish. "Last week, Google open-sourced its Chromium OS project, more than a year before the operating system is scheduled for release. In doing so, Google hopes a variety of developers and companies will become involved in the project, and has pledged to release regular updates as well as a comprehensive log of bug reports and fixes. This article takes a look at Google's design vision for Chromium, the unique benefits it offers, and a bit of why Google is throwing its hat into this particular ring in the first place. Chromium, after all, is a Linux-based OS entering the smartbook/netbook market at a time when the product segment is already being well served by a variety of Linux distros, XP, and Windows 7. In the midst of all these options, do we need another operating system? We just might."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Packing light but packing warm is going to be essential for my next journey, a month in Nepal in January 2010. Here are a few things I am hoping to take with me. Dell Mini10V Hackintosh: I want to be able to jot my thoughts down or look for a wi-fi connection in Kathmandu. As difficult as it was dealing with Dell customer service, I am happy to be taking my Mini10V with me so I don't have to lug my MacBook with all its data around. By the way, the Hackintosh is working great — I was having problems with the trackpad and the sleep function, but after some Googling and some Blam magic, it works wonderfully.

A portable water filter: Exposure to unclean water is the number one cause of traveler's diarrhea. There are a lot of ways to purify water, but one of the most handy, reusable ones that I've found is the pocket-sized Steripen's JourneyLCD handheld water purifier. It decontaminates a liter of water in about a minute and a half using ultraviolet light, which alters the structure of viral and bacterial DNA and stops them from reproducing.

A warm puffy jacket for rain, city, and snow: Sierra Designs Flex Down jacket is big and puffy with 750-weight goose down — the kind they use in good winter sleeping bags — but looks decent enough to wear out on a night on the town. It also has pockets within pockets, so you can stick your hands in your pockets and not lose your keys. It's a small detail that I know I will be grateful for when I'm on the road.

Mountain Hardwear's Napali backpack: I reviewed this pack for Boing Boing Gadgets a while ago, and absolutely love it. At 3lb 7oz, it's lightweight, has a mesh backpanel to prevent sweatiness, and has lots of extra pockets for compartmentalizing gear. My favorite part of the design is the dry sack-style roll top, which prevents water and dust from entering the bag, but also makes the whole thing a lot more compact to carry when there's less inside.

A super compact midlayer: I get cold really easily, but I also hate carrying a lot of bulk. The Patagonia Nano Puff jacket weighs just nine ounces but is remarkably warm — I have one that I wear over everything in San Francisco, and it's almost too hot. It stuffs itself into its own chest pocket and has a carabiner clip so you can hook it onto your luggage.

Waterproof hiking shoes: The North Face's Hedgehog GTX XCR uses Boa lacing and Vibram rubbersoles, two of my favorite technologies for high performance athletic shoes (climbing!). Keen has this awesome hiking boot called Summit County that has an outsole that hardens under cold weather and added insulation at the toes to prevent frostbite.

Therm-a-rest's Ventra Down comforter: Parf of Therm-A-Rest's sleep system, the 650-fill down Ventra Down comforter has the warmth equivalent of a 40-degree sleeping bag without the mummified feeling. It weighs about 2lbs and packs tightly into a little stuff sack — the system also comes with a self-inflating mattress pad and a fitted sheet so you can essentially pull out a bed where everyone else might be strapped into a sleeping bag.

Warm but lightweight base layers: My current favorite is Spyder's new X-static series, which is made of multi-layered textiles that are bonded with silver — a highly conductive metal that transfers heat evenly across the body. Also, it makes you look like Spiderman.

From ConceptArt.org user Jiangzu (who says "I am so addicted to sculpting that I forget to eat half the time") this awesome Sculpey-and-wire rendition of one of Lovecraft's master baddies from At the Mountains of Madness. This thread includes more shots and details of this and other creature builds. [via Propnomicon]

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Beschizza's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced reality is indistinguishable from Photoshop."

Above is the mindbending work of camouflage artist Liu Bolin. More images over at Hi-Fructose!

Delicious typography. A super-soft, “Tri-Blend” t-shirt in espresso brown from American Apparel, printed with everyone’s favorite logogram (set in Knockout’s Ultra Sumo weight). Peanut butter? Mustard? Fluff? Jelly? Either way, we think the ampersand is a ligature for eat and not et.

The Ampersandwich Tee is available now over at the shop. For fine typography aficionados such as yourself.

This seems too insane to be true, but the EFF points us to a report, based on a Freedom of Information Act request, that claims Sprint provided law enforcement with GPS location data a staggering 8 million times in the last year. Sprint apparently set up some sort of portal that made such requests easier, and it sounds like law enforcement took advantage of that in a major way. The report also notes that this information should have been disclosed to Congress, under a 1999 law, but the Justice Department has ignored the law for the past five years. The rest of the report also looks at some other concerning factors, such as the fact that the government seems to regularly get all sorts of info from service providers, with little oversight. On top of that, it explains why so many service providers agree to it: they charge the government for such info, and it's quite lucrative. As such, they actually have the incentive to encourage the government to ask for more information and to deliver it to them as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, you have to wonder how so many requests are being made with such little oversight -- and how often this means the process is abused to spy on individuals with no legal basis. Update: Sprint is now trying to explain this by saying that the numbers represent number of "pings" and that can include thousands of pings per a single investigation. In a single investigation, once law enforcement has a court order, it can check someone's location every 3 minutes for up to 60 days -- and that's what made the number so inflated.

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From the Journal of Emergency Medicine: "De Novo Cerebral Arteriovenous Malformation: Pink Floyd's Song "Brick in the Wall" as a Warning Sign." (via NCBI ROFL)

eldavojohn writes "A formal complaint was filed in California (caged PDF) last week by John Lindstein naming David Miscavige and the Church of Scientology International as defendants. Lindstein claims that for sixteen years (from age 8) he was forced to work as a slave at Gold Base, a secret CoS site run by Golden Era Productions with 'razor wire, security guard patrols, surveillance posts, and three roll calls each day.' The pay was $50 a week. The allegations include 'Violations of wage and hour laws as well as unfair/illegal business practices actionable under California B&P 17200 Et. Seq.' and a complaint under the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, which abolished slavery. Members of the group Anonymous praised the summons."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Not sure what to do about those unsightly cables that are strung about your abode? Well, instead of hiding them, why not feature them prominently on the wall? That's what Maisie Maud Broadhead decided to do with her cable drawings project. Just be sure you really want to keep your appliance in place, because nailing the cord to the wall in a hundred places is going to make it difficult to move. [via curbly]

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Tonight, the National Geographic Channel visits a rural Brazilian town where "the 80 households in a one-square-mile area have reportedly some 38 pairs of twins. Blond, blue-eyed twins." Nat Geo then attempts to trace rumors connecting that creepy phenomenon to Nazi medical monster Joseph Mengele, who was on the lam in Brazil in the 1950s. I'm not sure I've seen a Nat Geo special that inspired this strong of a, "No, really, you're making this up, right?" response. I'm curious whether they turn up anything definitive, or whether this just ends up being a lot of speculation. Sadly, I don't have cable, so I probably won't find out. If anybody watches it, let me know what you think.

National Geographic Channel: Nazi Mystery: Twins From Brazil

dasButcher notes that the Supreme Court will hear arguments next week brought by a Nevada accounting firm that asserts the oversight board for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is unconstitutional. If the plaintiffs are successful, it could force Congress to rewrite or abandon the law used by many companies to validate tech investments for security and compliance. "Many auditing firms have used [Sarbanes-Oxley Section] 404 as a lever for imposing stringent security technology requirements on publicly traded companies regulated by SOX and their business partners. SOX security compliance has proven effective for vendors and solution providers, as it forces regulated enterprises to spend billions of dollars on technology that, many times, doesn’t prevent security incidents but does make them compliant with the law."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the UK music act Georgia Wonder, who was thrilled to be listed as one of the "most pirated" musical acts out there -- recognizing the power of good promotion. Since then, we've watched with interest how the group has continued to really interact with fans and use new tools and new marketing ideas to get heard and build a following. Rose M. Welch alerts us to the band's latest smart move. As they wanted to record a new album, they realized (as plenty of others have) that it's expensive to record an album -- buying studio time, equipment and instruments. So they did something different. They teamed up with a local music equipment shop, called Nevada Music and worked out a deal:

Both during store hours and after the store closes each night, they'll be recording their next album dubbed "Made In Nevada" using all the gear the store has on sale.

This benefits everyone. The band gets access to all the equipment and instruments they need, plus they get added attention for doing something cool and new. The store also gets a nice benefit in additional attention and marketing for itself and its products. What's cool about this is that it's yet another different way of going about things. One of the most frustrating responses we hear whenever we show examples of cool things that musicians are doing -- is people saying "but everyone can't do this." But that's the whole point. Musicians can keep coming up with cool different things to do. Frankly, the idea that they can't come up with cool ideas is insulting. These are some of the most creative people around, and given the ability to express that creativity, it's amazing what they come up with.

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Wooster Collective ("a celebration of street art") has an article about "The Pink Lady of Malibu," which appeared over a tunnel in Malibu Canyon Road in 1966.

One Saturday morning, on October 29, 1966, a massive 60-foot-tall painting of a nude pink lady holding flowers suddenly appeared as you headed into the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road.

As word of the massive pink lady spread, and the traffic on the highway grew to a halt, city officials decided "The Pink Lady" had to be removed. Firefighters were called to hosing her off the rocks. It didn't work. Buckets of paint thinner were thrown on the rocks. It only made her pink skin pinker.

As county officials worked on figuring out a way to remove The Pink Lady, a 31-year-old paralegal from Northridge, a woman named Lynne Seemayer, suddenly showed up on the road and admitted that she was the artist who did the piece.

Seemayer said that she was annoyed by the graffiti that was all over the canyon wall ("Valley Go Home" was a memorable slogan) and so, over a 10 month period, she started to secretly climb up under the moonlight and suspended herself by ropes to remove the graffiti.

At 8 P. M. on October 28 Seemayer painted the Pink Lady using ordinary house paint. By dawn it was done.

Snopes has more about the story.

The Story Of "The Pink Lady of Malibu" (Via Little Hokum Rag)

Apparently, extremely altruistic people and sociopaths have surprisingly similar character traits. This according to an analysis at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies IEET) of new research (PDF paper) by University of Iowa psychologists. Here are the traits summarized by Andrea Kuszewski in her "Rogue Neuron" column at IEET:

Sociopath:
• low impulse control
• high novelty-seeking (desire to experience new things, take more risks, break convention)
• no remorse for their actions (lack of conscience)
• inability to see beyond their own needs (lack of empathy)
• willing to break rules
• always acts in the interest of himself

X-altruist:
• low impulse control
• high novelty-seeking
• little remorse for their actions (would “do it again in a heartbeat”)
• inability to see past the needs of others (very high empathy)
• willing to break rules
• acts in the best interest of others, or for the “common good” (because it is the right thing to do)

Addicted To Being Good? The Psychopathology of Heroism (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)

Adventures with Chocolate: 80 sensational recipe is chocolate genius Paul A. Young's first foray into cook-books, and, like his wonderful shops in London, it's playful, inspiring, delicious and surprising.

Young's gifted touch with truffles, brownies and drinking chocolate have made his Islington store a fixture in our orbit around London. My wife's pregnancy was eased with his sea-salt caramels; we celebrated the birth with kalamansi truffles. The baby practically melted when she first tried a crumb of his cherry brownie. I am visited by Paul's chocolate in my dreams. I have been conditioned to start salivating when I reach the end of Camden Passage, and by the time I reach the shop, I need a bib to catch the dribble.

And here are all of Paul's secrets, laid bare in a superbly designed and printed book whose pornographically chocolated pages make you want to surreptitiously taste them (I tasted them. Tasted like clay-coated heavy paper stock). Paul's recipes are easy to follow and are equal parts inspirational (he makes it clear enough that even ham-fisted me believes that I can make them) and aspirational (in reality, it's a lot more likely that I'll just pop in on the Camden Passage shop and buy another box). And his essay on how he became a chocolatier, as well as his essays on buying and preparing chocolate, are sensational.

And truth be told, there are some recipes here I'd like to try for a special occasion: the savory chocolate recipes, if only because Paul doesn't actually sell these in the shop and I want to find out what a honey-cured bacon, Stilton and chocolate sandwich tastes like, or sip some cocoa-bean infused vodka, or try a salted black-olive bar with 600g of Ghanian tempered 68% dark chocolate.

I've just heard that the entire first run of Adventures with Chocolate has already sold out, but the second printing is due in less than a week, and should arrive in time for Christmas.

Sea-salted chocolate and pecan tart

Venezuelan chocolate pancakes with chocolate maple syrup

Adventures with Chocolate: 80 sensational recipe

Tim Biskup designed a wallet made by Poketo, which will be offered at his upcoming show, "Art-Snob Eat Shit" at All Tomorrow's Parties' "Nightmare Before Christmas," December 4-6, 2009 at Butlin's Holiday Centre, Minehead, UK.

Tim Biskup not only designed the poster, tee shirts and other graphics for the upcoming My Bloody Valentine-curated "Nightmare Before Christmas" event for All Tomorrow's Parties, but will also be showing an exhibition of his own work at the on-site gallery, "Art-Snob Eat Shit". To add icing to the cake, Tim Biskup will be releasing an exclusive Poketo wallet, only available at the show, in addition to two new Poketo wallets available at Poketo.com.

Curated by My Bloody Valentine, "Nightmare Before Christmas" takes place during All Tomorrows Parties in the UK. The festival showcases world-renowned artists, and musicians ranging in style from post-rock, avant-garde, and underground hip-hop, with a more intimate feel than a mainstream music festival.  More information available at www.atpfestival.com.

Nightmare Before Christmas curated by My Bloody Valentine

Rachel sez, "I just made these rings today, and think you might like them! They are handmade from sterling silver with black onyx "food points." As the saying goes, 'om nom nom!'

Yes, Rachel, I do like 'em! I like 'em a lot!

Pacman Ring Series- Sterling Silver and Black Onyx (Thanks, Rachel!)

The design blog Core77 has some great ideas in their 2009 holiday gift guide.

Solvate Customer Service Haggling, $25/hour

Consider the gift of time, in $25 increments, from Solvate Customer Service Haggling. This startup VC-backed company takes on numerous phone-related haggling challenges, with impressive case study results. 90 minutes saved in planning a last minute business trip. 30 minutes reducing DMV headaches. 45 minutes haggling down a four-figure iPhone abroad data charge. This holiday season, give the gift of delegation.

Core77's holiday gift guide

I made this short video to demonstrate the assembly of the laser-cut Mystery Box. While there is an instruction sheet packed in with the kit, this seemed like a nice way to show the particulars.

In the Maker Shed:

Mystery Box Kit - The Mystery Box is a clever puzzle box made by our very own John Park, host of Make: television.

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Radley Balko wonders what will happen to the court-document stealing deputy of Maricopa County: "I can't think of another case where a judge has ordered someone jailed for contempt and the police department has refused to carry out the order. I'm not sure what would happen next. A duel? Arm wrestling?"

An anonymous reader sends along Chris Soghoian's blog entry revealing that Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' GPS location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. The data point comes from a closed industry conference that Soghoian attended, at which Paul Taylor, Electronic Surveillance Manager at Sprint Nextel, said: "[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that's just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don't know how we'll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in." Soghoian's post details the laws around disclosure of wiretap and other interception data — one of which the Department of Justice has been violating since 2004 — and calls for more disclosure of the levels of all forms of surveillance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christiane Keller created an incredibly rich environment where people can interact with information as if it were present in space:

dataMorphose is an interactive installation which projects data into real space and visualizes it three-dimensionally. Information is represented by spanned and moving sails directly in the room. Thus abstract and virtual data becomes real and tangible. As the user takes new positions and perspectives, he can experience a completely novel and sensual perception of data. Three spatial displays visualize statistical data, web activities and the current time. The coding and procurement of data is visualized by the tension of the canvas, the pace of movement, the position of the canvas and the change of their shape.

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The mayor of Ozark, Arkansas, has fired the policeman who tased a 10-year-old girl. He apparently had to exploit the same technicality previously used to suspend him: failure to use the built-in camera. [KATV]

Jay Rosen is doing a brilliant job highlighting the rather silly trend among folks who think they're "debunking" the economics of free to build up complete strawmen often identified as "the information wants to be free crowd." However, as Rosen notes, none of those critics ever links to anyone in particular or defines who they're arguing against or what it is they actually said. There's a good reason for that, of course. Usually those folks are arguing against a myth. They don't want to argue against the actual economics or what folks who understand where free fits into the wider economic landscape are actually saying. They want to throw up a punching bag (usually something along the lines of "everything must be free!") which they can knock down without anyone punching back. But that's not because they're right, but because they're arguing against a myth. No one claims everything (even information) must be free. Most (and in this group I include folks like Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson, Stewart Brand and others) are simply pointing to the basic economic forces on information. If you don't understand what those forces are, then you will be overwhelmed by them. But simply claiming that any one in that group is saying that everything must be free is flat out wrong.

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BBC: "A Twitter feed set up by a Dutch teenager as a hobby has been taken over by Microsoft news channel MSNBC.com."

The report emphasizes the rate that the feed is growing, by 3000 to 4000 followers per day. What it doesn't say is that the feed is on Twitter's Suggested Users List, and that growth is normal for feeds on the list, even ones that aren't run by prodigious teens.

Editorial comment: Might as well say that a Dutch teenager amazes his parents by traveling from Europe to America in a matter of hours. Without saying that he booked a flight on KLM. :-)

We live in a time of pseudo news.

Another observation. It would be interesting to know how much Microsoft paid for his feed. That would, right there, establish the monetary value of SUL placement.

2010 will mark the 40th anniversary of one of the Internet's oldest memes: That Video Where They Blow Up a Beached Whale. To mark this momentous occasion, Asylum recently interviewed Paul Linnman, the TV reporter who recorded the footage that went on to become the the fifth-most-viewed viral video of all time.

"We're hearing this noise around us and we realize it is pieces of whale blubber hitting the ground around us (from) 1,000 yards away. A piece of blubber the size of a fingernail could kill you if it hit you in the right part of the head, so we ran away from the blast scene, down the dune and toward the parking lot. Then we heard a second explosion ahead of us, and we just kept going until we saw what it was: A car had been hit by this coffee-table-size piece of blubber and had its windows flattened all the way down to the seats."

The footage and Linnman's report made the evening news and eventually found its way into the national media, something that only earned him $90 extra bucks and $110 for Brazil "because he had a better union than I did apparently."

Asylum.com: Exploding Whale Video Reporter Looks Back Four Decades Later

itwbennett writes "A new data center being built in Helsinki, scheduled to go live at the end of January, will generate energy and deliver hot water for the city. The data center is located in an old bomb shelter and is connected to the Helsinki public energy company's district heating system, which works by pumping boiling water through a system of pipes to households in Helsinki. The recycled heat from the data center could add about 1 percent to the total energy generated by the energy company's system in the summer." The article doesn't say what the overall efficiency of the heat recovery is. Researchers at MIT are working on a new energy-conversion technology based on quantum dots that they say has already demonstrated 40% of the Carnot efficiency limit — 4 times what is achieved by current commercial thermoelectric devices. The researchers believe they can reach 90% of the Carnot limit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today marks the launch of the new CRAFT site! Natalie rounds up the best features in her announcement post:
Here it is -- our new web site! We hope you enjoy visiting us here each day to catch up with our blog as well as our previous magazine sections Handmade, Curio, Bazaar, Travel Crafty, 101and Quick Craft that are now online and ready to provide you with more crafty goodness!
The new Calendar section, (pictured above) features all the upcoming craft events and fairs coming to a city near you. Our Projects area, let's you easily browse through all of our recent DIY projects and on every page you'll be able to go to specific crafting categories, archives, and search for what you want! You'll also be able to go to our Craft Podcast: Videos and Patterns area directly from the top navigation.
Our Crafter section has a brand new profile on Anna Maria Horner. Find out about her inspiration, her new Little Folks Fabric line, and how she juggles work and her six kids!
Week of Giveaways! Sign up for the CRAFT: Newsletter and be entered in our giveaways each day this week! Today we'll be giving away a Yudu from Provo Craft! All entries close at 8am PST, December 2nd. Stay tuned tomorrow morning and the rest of the week to see what other cool goodies we are giving away! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

Rupert Murdoch stopped by at an FTC workshop on the future of journalism to say that the federal government should "stay out" of regulating the journalism business. Except, in the same speech he said exactly the opposite. What he meant was that he didn't want the government to get in the business of funding journalism. Yet, in the very same speech he does say that the government shouldn't allow Google to link to his news stories, calling it "theft" yet again. Again, he doesn't explain why he hasn't blocked Google if it's actually "theft." Not surprisingly, compounding these contradictions, he fails to mention (or perhaps recognize?) that the sites he owns do plenty of aggregating themselves. I've been told, however, that Arianna Huffington is making that point, though I wonder if Rupert stuck around to hear it. Update: Huffington has published her speech, which does a very nice job making the point.

Other points made by Murdoch include the bizarre claim that "advertising is dead" as a model to support journalism. You would think that someone who has lived through a bunch of ad market cycles wouldn't extrapolate from just a short period, but that appears to be what Murdoch is doing. About the only other explanation for all of this is that he's simply trying to confuse and throw off both the competition and the federal government -- but at some point someone should directly call him on his various contradictions and confusion.

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Interested in sensing things without using sight? So are the researchers at the University of Sheffield and Bristol Robotics Laboratory, who have developed the Scratchbot robot that can navigate by waving around a set of 18 whiskers.

To design their sensors, they began by reverse-engineering a rat's whiskers using high-speed video cameras. After studying how the rat used the whiskers, they developed a mechanical system that was able to perform in a similar manner. The larger whiskers were then outfitted with a magnet and hall effect sensors, which allowed their motion to be observed. Then, instead of developing a traditional software-based motion control system, the researchers developed a neurologically-inspired system that uses an FPGA to simulate how the rat's brain actually reacts to whisker movement. The result is a robot capable of sensing the world around it using only touch.

As a sight-based organism, I find it humbling that there are so many other ways of navigating the world that do not involve light. In this case, the whiskers on many creatures are sensitive enough to detect subtle textures and patterns in the world around them, and this works well as a replacement for vision in navigation. Cool stuff! [via neatorama]

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RasputinAXP writes "Verizon has changed their FiOS AUP effective yesterday, and added an interesting new clause to their specific examples that we're all familiar with: 'it is a violation of the Agreement and this AUP to ... post off-topic information on message boards, chat rooms or social networking sites.' At this point, every FiOS-based Slashdot user is breaking the new AUP."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RasputinAXP writes "Verizon has changed their FiOS AUP effective yesterday, and added an interesting new clause to their specific examples that we're all familiar with: "it is a violation of the Agreement and this AUP to ... post off-topic information on message boards, chat rooms or social networking sites.' At this point, every FiOS-based Slashdot user is breaking the new AUP."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface.

In my explorations of a hypothetical decentralized Twitter, at first I thought the clients would be where decentralization would happen. But, lately I've come to realize that it probably won't happen there because as the market has evolved they've become too dependent on Twitter Corp, and are unlikely to do anything that might threaten a friendly relationship with the company.

I saw this first-hand in the Mac software market in the early 90s. Even when it would have been in the interests of developers to work with each other, each of them tried to do special deals with Apple. Of course no one really got those deals, so we all went down. But it's human nature to think you're special and if you play nice with the platform vendor, they'll play nice with you. And the platform vendor may totally mean to be nice, but they can't help acting in their own self-interest and that almost always is at the expense of the developers.

So if the commercial developers can't or won't break free of the platform vendor, let's create an open source client that can be repurposed in as many different ways as we, as individuals want. Some of us may want to do deals with Twitter Corp, and that's fine -- but others may wish to embark on paths that are independent of Twitter. They wouldn't try to guess what would make the platform vendor happy, and instead follow the grain of the Internet, or go where the users want to go, or some users, or to scratch their own itch. Some may want to be part of the Cathedral and others part of the Bazaar. :-)

I'm not even 100 percent sure what I'm asking for, but I'll know it when I see it. Probably a JavaScript framework that comes with a Twitter timeline object. So displaying a timeline is automatic as are the user interactions. So any kind of client, one written in any language -- Python, Perl, Java, JavaScript, PHP, C, etc -- could store data in it. It wouldn't know anything about the Twitter API. It would be up to the applications to put data in the structure.

It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does. Same prefs, same commands, same user experience. Think Apache for the Twitter user interface. It would, of course, be programmable through a user scripting language.

Having this one component would let a thousand flowers bloom in exactly the place where we need them to bloom. The key thing is to find out what would happen if we could take a path that was not designed to please the platform vendor. Note I carefully did not say "to piss off the platform vendor." I really do mean to chart courses that are independent of the vendor.

What would be even cooler is if one of the client vendors decided to release their code under the GPL. Or, even better would be if Twitter Corp did it. That would be hugely disruptive and would likely lead to some very serious innovation. :-)

A new study conducted in Florida has given scientists reason to believe that hammerhead sharks may have vision comparable to that of humans. The researchers measured electrical activity in the eyes of half a dozen sharks from three different hammerhead species. They then put electrodes under the sharks' corneas and recorded electrical activity while shining lights in horizontal and vertical arcs around each eye. Compared to normal-headed sharks, the hammerheads had three times the visual overlap — that's what creates stereo vision and depth perception in animals with eyes that face forward. This, of course, helps them be faster and more efficient at hunting prey. But there's a catch: because their eyes are so far apart, hammerheads have these giant blind spots right in the middle of their head. As study leader Michelle McComb put it in an interview with National Geographic:

There's actually been anecdotal claims by divers that they see little fish schooling right in front of the hammerheads' heads. It's like the fish are swimming by and saying, Ha, ha, ha, you can't see me!

Hammerhead sharks have "human" vision [National Geographic] Image via Eric Charlton's Flickr

duguk writes "Microsoft has confirmed that it is investigating a problem described as the 'black screen of death,' which affects Windows 7 — and reports suggest it affects Vista and XP, too. The firm said it was looking into reports that suggest its latest security update, released on Tuesday 25 November, caused the problem. The error means that users of Windows 7 and earlier operating systems see a totally black screen after logging on to the system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unigamer points out Andy Gadget's Instructable for building an ultra-portable melody/beat box - super cute!

This tiny box will give you hours of fun composing your own tunes. You can vary the tune tempo and switch between a pentatonic and blues scale as well as producing a variety of percussion sounds.
Load up a different program and it will compose its own percussion rhythms(Tic Tac Beat Box) or play with half a dozen different musical scales (Tic Tac Scales). Another cool feature is no power switch - It will hibernate when it's not being used.

The project runs off of a PicAxe-08M - grab the code + schematic here.

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Well, here we go again. For years we've questioned the wisdom of using real world laws to deal with issues within virtual worlds. You begin to open up quite the Pandora's Box of problems. If it's okay to charge someone for theft of virtual goods in a virtual world, what do you do if "theft" is a part of the game? And then does killing another character in a virtual world become "murder"? These issues are coming up again as Slashdot points out that a guy in the UK has been arrested for "robbery" of a player in the online world RuneScape. In this case, the arrested guy used a phishing scheme to get access to the username and password, making it similar to a story from two years ago involving "stolen goods" in Habbo Hotel that involved a similar "hacking" of an account.

But, again, it seems questionable to call this a robbery. Why not just charge the guy with violation of whatever laws there are against phishing or fraud, rather than robbery. These sorts of "robberies" can and probably should be dealt with directly in the virtual worlds themselves, where game administrators should be able to just "make things whole." Instead of calling it a robbery, why not focus on the actual crime of phishing, rather than the questionable "crime" of "robbery" of another's character.

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I'm very happy to welcome my friend Paul Spinrad back as a guest blogger. If you missed him the first time around, do yourself a favor and check out his previous posts on Boing Boing.

Paul is one of the most original thinkers I know, and a warm, friendly person. He's a freelance writer/editor with catholic interests, and is the Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He was also an early contributor to bOING bOING when it was an online zine. He lives in San Francisco. Please give him a warm welcome!

Former beauty queen Solange Magnano died from plastic surgery complications on Sunday. She was Miss Argentina in 1994, and is the mother of 7-year old twins. 1 in 30 Argentines have had plastic surgery, according to CNN.

Nashville Guy writes "According to Australia's The Age, 'A New Zealand man living in Queensland and believed to be behind the world's largest spam operation, has been ordered to pay more than $16 million for running the illegal enterprise. Lance Atkinson, 26, originally from Christchurch, was living in Pelican Waters on the Sunshine Coast when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had his assets frozen last year. ... The FTC found Atkinson and American Jody Smith were at the centre of the world's largest internet spam operation, dubbed 'AffKing,' having recruited spammers from around the world.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every now and then we all need a break from making things. So sit back, relax, and enjoy "Our Place in the Cosmos" by Symphony of Science. [via MilkandCookies]

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sinsi alerts us to a bizarre lawsuit in Australia where shooting victim Michael Trkulja is suing Google, claiming the search engine has some liability for his getting shot. The reasoning? Apparently searches on his name would take you to pages suggesting that Trkulja was involved in organized crime operations. It doesn't appear that he has any other info linking his shooting to this particular webpage or to the fact that the shooter may have done a Google search. It also does not appear (at least from the article here) that the guy is blaming the website in question -- just Google for leading people to it. Not sure what sorts of laws there are in Australia concerning such liability, but it's hard to think of a scenario under which this lawsuit should make sense under any legal system.

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Brian Klug noticed a dumpster in his parking lot painted incorrectly. He fixed it in 'shop.

eldavojohn writes "If you think JavaScript is a crime against humanity, you might want to skip this article, because Ars is reporting on efforts to take JavaScript to the next level. With the new ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the article points out a lot of positive things that have happened in the world of JavaScript. The article does a good job of citing some of the major problems with JavaScript and how a reborn library called CommonJS (formerly ServerJS) is addressing each of those problems. No one can deny JavaScript's usefulness on the front end of the web, but if you're a developer do you support the efforts to move it beyond that?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Have your elements and eat them, too! This is the only safe way to consume those delicious heavy metals, the cupcake Periodic Table! [via Rachel's Twitter]

MAKE's bi-annual MASSIVE Periodic Table Roundup:

Periodic table

Periodic Table Sweater

Periodic Table of Videos

Crocheted Periodic Table

Make: Holiday Gift Guide 2009: Science and Chemistry

Periodic Table shower curtain

Periodic Table Mini-Sweaters

In the Maker Shed:

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments

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odysseus31173 writes "A little over a year ago, I began developing for the iPhone and needed a working mac (not a Hackintosh), so I decided to purchase a MacBook logic board to save on cost. I modded a Linksys case to accept the logic board (along with all of the other hardware) and made it function again. The Mac currently runs Leopard and has a working iSight and mic along with fully functional WiFi and bluetooth. The RAM is the standard 1 gig, but the hard drive has been upgraded to 160 gigs. The iSight/mic holes in the front panel are hard to see and this could be used as a nanny cam of sorts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

All of us here at Make: Online have banded together to produce this guide. Each of us has submitted at least one review of a favorite tool, which hopefully, will help to inspire many of you who are still looking for gifts for the makers on your list. The tools are arranged in order, from the least to the most expensive, so you can scroll as low as your budget allows! Happy Holidays from all of us at MAKE!

Tri-Wing Screwdriver ($4 from Play-Asia)

If using this to get into my Wii remote and Wii Nunchuck controller (I used one for the Make: Television Roller Coaster Flight Recorder project) wasn't already reason enough to love this little security driver, how about this: I used it again today to open and fix a corroded contact in a battery-operated Thomas the Tank Engine train! They're also good for getting into GBA cartridges, the Nintendo DS, Zune HD, and a few other products. -- John Park

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Swiss+Tech UKCSB-1 Utili-Key 6-in-1 Key Ring Tool ($8 from Amazon)

With the Utili-Key on my keychain, I'm perfectly content dealing with most situations where I'd usually opt for a pocketknife. It's so small, you'll forget you have it with you. I've often forgot about mine until I've already passed through airport security. And at under $10, it's easy to replace. The key unfolds to a very serviceable combination flat and serrated blade. It also comes with a bottle opener and various screwdrivers, including a Phillips head. -- Adam Flaherty

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Olfa Heavy Duty Cutter/Ratchet Wheel ($8 from Amazon)

I got turned on to this utility knife when it came in my starter art school kit, and I haven't let it out of my sight since. The blade adjusts easily with the satisfying clicks of the ratcheting wheel. The blade sheath holds the sharp snap-off blade securely, providing optimal control over your slicing action through model-making foam board and heat shrink tubing alike. In writing this review, I examined the condition of my Olfa knife after seven years of continual use. Its handle bears only light surface scratches.The letters of my Sharpie-scrawled name now fade from the dense yellow plastic, once deflecting tool-thieving studiomates. I'll very readily share any of my tools with friends, but I think twice before lending this knife. -- Becky Stern

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Scotch Transparent High Performance Duct Tape ($8 from Amazon)

Oh gentle duct tape, boon to the tinkerers, the dabblers, the fixers of things since days of yore. But forget the classic silver or black, this duct tape rocks it colorless! And when it comes to wrapping gifts, cast aside the boring old Scotch tape, for now, you can wrap gifts with the real deal. Let songs of joy ring out throughout Nerdonia! -- John Baichtal

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Microplane Cutting Tools ($9 and up from Microplane)

Known as "the woodworking tools that crossed over to the kitchen," Microplane has a wide offering of sturdy kitchen and workshop cutting tools, each made up of tiny, incredibly sharp planes. I have their classic grater, which works magic on everything from nutmeg to lemon zest to parmesan, transforming that hard lump into the fluffiest cheese shavings you've ever seen. They now, of course, offer zesters, spice graters, a rotary Parmesan grater, and even a sea salt shaver -- I get giddy just looking at all the options! Whichever you get, it will surely have a myriad of uses. -- Arwen O'Reilly Griffith

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Zibra Open It! Package Tool ($12 from Zibra)

Only twice in my adult life has design innovation brought me close to tears -- the extra legroom and a footrest I encountered on a TransPacific flight was the first. And using the Open It! tool to get through the clamshell packaging of a calculator, then opening a new CD with the same tool (and the same ease), was the second. Seriously.

Opening packages, whether its a new gadget for yourself, or something you've got to set up in your role as Santa's helper, is a bear. Am I right? The plastic is tough and sharp! Those little wire tie-wraps are twisted into a mess and are always in those hard-to-reach places. Until now. Two women (naturally!) have come up with the Open It! tool, and suddenly, my holiday season is looking better already. The Open It! is actually five tools in one. These smart women even thought to include a little screwdriver to get into the battery bay of your toy/gadget/begging-to-be-hacked object. The clippers cut through nasty plastic with ease, and the bend in the clippers makes it easy to get to those wire wraps. There's a retractable blade that easily takes care of DVDs and CDs, and if these features haven't convinced you yet, there's even a bottle opener. Cheers! -- Shawn Connally

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DuraScoop Original Cat Litter Scoop ($14 from Amazon)

Our two huge cats share a litter box, and we switched from pine (lightweight) to clay (heavy) litter when we realized that it spread around less (we have two young ones and our apartment is a perpetual mess, but that's another story). Our local pet store carries several litter scoops, and I've tried and broken all of them. Plastic just can't handle the strain; it was a constant source of frustration. So, I searched online and found the DuraScoop, which is sturdy metal, scoops a lot, and doesn't bend and flick back. This product has made my life easier. -- Paul Spinrad

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Antex C/3U Miniature Soldering Iron - 15 Watt ($29 from Minute Man Electronics)

I'm amazed I haven't found someone else who's heard of these before. They're great for intricate work, heat up in about 30 seconds, and they're as nimble as a ballpoint pen (resist urge to do 700? spin/flip-tricks). The slip-on tip installation left me doubting the iron's durability, but after a few months of use, everything still stays put nicely. And hey, it's yellow! -- Collin Cunningham

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SK 73676 21 Piece Stubby Ratcheting Screwdriver Set ($30 from Amazon)

SK, formerly known as SuperKrome, makes a heck of a tool. They mainly focus on immortal socket sets, but they also make a mean ratcheting screwdriver. This small-profile driver (known as a stubby) ratchets like a Swiss clock, fits all standard attachments, and comes with a bunch of bits, as well as extenders to help you get at hard-to-reach screws. -- John Baichtal

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686 Original Tool Belt ($40 from REI)

I really like tools I don't have to carry. If I have to lug something around, it had better be useful. Lately, I have just enough patience for my wallet, keys, and phone. Needless to say, I was rather stoked when I came across this belt from 686. 100% full grain waterproof leather, double prong buckle with bottle opener, #2 Phillips and flat head, 8MM, 10MM, 11MM wrench loop, and a brushed nickel finish. -- Adam Flaherty

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X-Mini iHome Capsule Speaker ($25/mono, $50/stereo from ThinkGeek)

When my son gave me one of these capsule speakers last year, I thought it was cute, but didn't expect that it'd become an indispensable part of my mobile gear. He gave it to me because it had become an indispensable part of his mobile life, and he wanted to pass the tech goodness on. Now I do the same. I use the X-Mini in hotel rooms with my iPhone, when I want to hear music "in the air," in bed, with my BlackBook when I'm watching TV, and other situations where I don't care to have earbuds in. Here's the best situ, which just happened to me recently: you're hanging out with a few people, at a little impromptu party, and somebody says: "I wish we had music." You whip this little black ball out of your pocket, expand it, plug it into your phone or MP3 player, and fire up the tunes. Party joy ensues. ThinkGeek claims the sound is "shockingly huge." That's a bit of an overstatement. It certainly is impressive for the size of the unit, but it's not going to win any fidelity or power awards. They now have a MAX Stereo version with two capsule speakers. "Oh son... guess what the old man wants THIS year?" -- Gareth Branwyn

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A few folks have sent in the news that Australian mobile operator Optus appears to be completely blocking access to paid apps for owners of Android phones. Apparently people have been complaining about this for a while, and Optus has been mostly silent on the matter, only stating:

"Optus is currently working with Google to provide an Android application store to our customers, and we are optimistic it will be available soon."

Except, of course, it shouldn't require any permission from Optus at all -- which is leading to reasoned speculation that Optus is blocking access to paid apps in the Android app store because Optus wants a cut of the revenue. This is typical of mobile carriers who keep wanting to believe that they're the tollbooth everyone needs to pay. Instead, the more likely result is just to drive mobile phone users to other carriers.

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Wow, not sure how I missed this one - the Bliptronic 5000, a relatively low-cost (aka hackable) melody grid sequencer from ThinkGeek. The 50-dollar device sports 8 casio-esque voices, tempo control, and can be linked up with additional units to play longer sequences. CDM posted an interview with product dev Ty Liotta revealing a very awesome early prototype version -

The switches were intended to be a cost-saving measure, but the engineers figured out that it was actually a little bit cheaper to use LEDs and the plastic buttons. The sounds come from a standard Casio-type FM synth chip, which is controlled by the onboard sequencer/logic chip. The Bliptronic can be chained together with other units to form longer sequences via the sync jack on the side, which operates via voltage pulses.

More of the story over at Create Digital Music

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theodp writes "Over at CNET, James Urquhart sings the praises of cloud computing, encouraging folks to 'really listen to what is being said, understand how the cloud is being used, and seriously evaluate how this disruptive model will change your projects, your organization, and even your career.' Fair enough. Over at the Google Docs Help Forum, some perplexed cloud computing users spent the month of November unsuccessfully trying to figure out why they've been zinged for inappropriate content. Among the items deemed inappropriate and unshareable include notes on Henry David Thoreau ("the published version of this item cannot be shared until a Google review finds that the content is appropriate"), homework assignments, high school yearbook plans, wishlists, documents containing botanical names for plants, a list of websites for an ecommerce class, and a list of companies that rent motorcycles in Canada. When it comes to support in the cloud, it kind of looks like you might get what you pay for."

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.

As many of our readers already know, we've been producing several topical conversations on a variety of subjects via the Insight Community, and we'd like to introduce our newly sponsored site, IT Innovation, brought to you by Sun Microsystems and Intel. (You may have missed the subtle new 'IT Innovation' link added to the top of our page.) First and foremost, the goal of this effort for us here at Techdirt is to create interesting and useful content for our readers in the realm of server hardware and datacenter management.

We'll be covering trends in datacenters and skills for IT managers -- and asking the Insight Community for its input on generating relevant insights for future conversations. And as with any natural conversation, we're not 100% sure where the topics will lead because the ideas will develop and evolve as we discuss them. But we'll start with current trends, as well as far off predictions, advice and tips for IT managers, business tools, and try to delve deeper into the subjects that resonate with the community participants. If you're already a member of the Insight Community, you can contribute your thoughts on the datacenter upgrade process. If you're not already a member, you can join now.

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Barence writes "Microsoft Research has found a novel way of beating the deplorably slow speeds of mobile broadband, by combining several phones together to make one high-speed hotspot. Dubbed Cool-Tether, the system harnesses the mobile data connection of multiple mobile handsets to build an on-the-fly Wi-Fi hotspot. 'To address the challenges of energy efficiency, Cool-Tether carefully optimises the energy drain of the WAN (GPRS/EDGE/3G) and Wi-Fi radios on smartphones,' Microsoft's research paper claims. 'We prototype Cool-Tether on smartphones and, experimentally, demonstrate savings in energy consumption between 38%-71% compared to prior energy-agnostic solutions.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The amazing "Big Daddy" costume build from Volpin Props that we covered back in September is up for auction on eBay. The listing closes just after 9:00 AM PST on December 3rd which, incidentally, is my birthday (hint hint hint). The image shown above is actually a photograph of the costume (admittedly one that's been run through a PhotoShop filter or two) taken at the Georgia Aquarium. You can view the entire photo-set here. [Thanks, Phil!]

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We've recently seen efforts to ramp up the system of "pre-settlement" letters as a way to "profit" off of file sharing. The scheme works by having a company that either holds the copyrights to certain works or has merely licensed them for this purpose put those files online and then see who is downloading them. That's the simplest version (though, of questionable legality since if the copyright holder itself is putting the content online, you can raise questions about whether or not the sharing is really unauthorized). Some others in the space don't actually put their content online themselves, but try to find IP addresses of those who are sharing the content, and then sending those users "pre-settlement" letters, in the hopes that many people just pay up, rather than fighting the letters (or, more likely, ignoring them).

Of course, one of the big problems with such a system is that those sending such letters have very little incentive (if any) to actually verify that unauthorized file sharing has happened. They want to cast as wide a net as possible and send out as many letters as possible to as many people as possible. It's a pure numbers game. And, for that reason, plenty of false positives are identified. Now, plenty of people reasonably point out that IP addresses are not indicative of individuals, and there are problems with relying solely on IP addresses -- but those problems become even bigger when you're dealing with folks who don't understand how BitTorrent actually works. That activity leads to claims of copyright infringement by networked laser printers.

Over at Freedom to Tinker, computer science professor Mike Freedman discusses how the popular CoralCDN has been getting hundreds of pre-settlement letters because one of these companies doesn't seem to do even the slightest verification of whether or not an IP address is actually involved in sharing content, and misinterprets the data it has received (despite the self-supported claim that "The information in this notification is accurate"). Of course, since the "punishment" for such things is slight to non-existent, the company in question (in this case, "Video Protection Alliance") has no incentive to improve its process. But it presents a real cost to Freedman, who helps run CoralCDN:

Our personal experience with DMCA takedown notices is that network operators are suitably afraid of litigation. Many will pull network access from machines as soon as a complaint is received, without any further verification or demonstrative network logs. In fact, many operators also sought "proof" that we weren't running BitTorrent or engaging in file sharing before they were willing to restore access. We'll leave the discussion about how we might prove such a negative to another day, but one can point to the chilling effect that such notices have had, when users are immediately considered guilty and must prove their innocence.

At some point, shouldn't we start to consider serious sanctions against those issuing not just bogus DMCA takedown notices, but then also using such notices to demand "pre-settlement" payments from individuals who may not realize their legal rights and may just pay up?

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eldavojohn writes "Congressman Peter King (R-NY) is calling for a probe into Wikileaks with regard to the recent publication of half a million 9/11 pager messages. He has announced that he plans to have his Washington staff begin a preliminary investigation because Wikileaks' action 'raises security issues.' A word of caution: Congressman King has been known to make inflammatory and unpopular statements."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though it's understandably not a high priority for most electronics manufacturers, the aesthetic quality of a circuit board can be pretty important to those of us hacker/maker/experimenter types who often end up using electronics sans enclosure. Seeed Studio pushes the envelope a bit with their multi-solder-mask Rainbowduino -

Nobody knows what it will be like, we chose to try from color blocks. The RGB three colors are casted upon corresponding pins of our new Rainbowduino, adjoin to each other. The result is beyond expectation, the patterns are precisely made.  Complex patterns should be OK, re-alignment does not seems to be a problem. Multi color is feasible, but opaque solid. (don’t expect to have some blending effect)

I'd love to see this sort of thing become a common (and affordable) option with PCB fab houses - seems unlikely at this point, but who can say where open-source hardware will take us next?

In the Maker Shed:


Seeeduino v1.1

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Gnat sez, "YouTube video of national treasure/musician Tim O'Brien, singing his song about the phantom phone call syndrome. In the words of the song:

You feel it vibrate, you reach for the cell
But no one's there, that's how you tell

Tim O'Brien: Phantom Phone (Thanks, Gnat!)

Sugru is a soft modelling clay that dries in 30 minutes at room-temp to a waterproof, heat/cold-resistant, dishwasher safe, flexible semi-solid. It's self-adhesive and bonds with many metals, glass, ceramic, plastics, etc. It can be used to make or fix or remake things from shoes to spectacles to plumbing-pipe. I've just ordered some for home and office -- it comes in four colors and looks like it'd be hella useful, and at £7, I'm certainly willing to give it a try!

Sugru (via Core 77)

Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes." Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every so often we see a similar article to the one penned recently by Ashlee Vance in the NY Times, bemoaning the lack of "open source business model" success stories. Now, Vance is a top notch reporter and does great work for the NY Times (as he did for The Register before), but these kinds of articles seem to miss the point. They go looking for "open source" company success stories, and find that most open source software companies don't end up doing very well, and the few that do okay end up selling out to other companies (MySQL, XenSource, SpringSource) and conclude that, outside of perhaps RedHat, "open source" isn't a very good business. But that misses the point. Open source software, by itself, shouldn't be much of a business. Just as music isn't much of a business by itself, but it can be a huge component of a larger business, open source software is part of what helps many other businesses.

So, while Vance dismisses the fact that companies like Google and IBM rely tremendously on using open source software to be the foundation of their multi-billion dollar businesses, it's time to recognize that those are open source business models. Just as we talk about how the new music ecosystem involves using music to make other things much more valuable, the "open source business model" is using open source software to make other things much more valuable. The companies that haven't gotten very far trying to sell open source software are in that spot because they don't understand open source business models themselves, and seem to think that the focus should remain on selling software, rather than using the software to make other things more valuable. While Vance dismisses companies like Google and IBM using open source software as "pawns," it's time to recognize that that is the most reasonable way to build a business on open source work. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. It's helping build tremendous businesses that have a huge impact on the world economy.

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Arguendo writes "Martin Goetz, who obtained the first software patent in 1968, has penned a thoughtful defense of software patents for Patently-O. Goetz argues that there is no principled difference between software and hardware patents and that truly patentable software innovations require just as much ingenuity and advancement as any other kind of patentable subject matter. The Supreme Court is of course currently considering whether to change the scope of patentable subject matter in the Bilski case, which we've discussed before." Does it weaken Goetz's argument that his description of the software lifecycle harks back to the waterfall days and bears little resemblance to current development practice in open source and/or Internet contexts?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, there were early reports that ISP Virgin Media in the UK would become a copyright cop for the entertainment industry and start kicking file sharers offline if they were accused of infringement. While Virgin later denied this, the company did send letters threatening to kick users offline anyway. And, now, reports are coming out that Virgin Media is starting to use controversial deep packet inspection technology to spy on users to see if they're sharing any copyrighted works. As the article notes: "It's the equivalent of the Royal Mail opening every parcel to see if there's a CD inside, and making a note if there isn't a receipt in there too."

While this is just a test, and the information is being aggregated in a supposedly anonymous way just to judge the extent of the problem, there are a bunch of issues with such claims. First, there is no such thing as an anonomyzed dataset. Second, there are some pretty serious privacy questions raised by this. In the US, the use of Deep Packet Inspection for looking at what users do has been frowned upon, but in the UK it's been deemed not so bad by the legal system (however, the wider EU doesn't agree with the UK on this position). No matter how you look at it, it does seem quite extreme for your ISP to carefully look at everything you do online. In the end, of course, this will only serve to drive up the demand for encryption technology.

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Just posted! A beginners guide to HD video in digital cameras. One of our many side projects here at dpreview.com is an expansion of our 'Learn' section, and this is the first in a series of technology and technique articles we're hoping to make a regular feature on the site during 2010. This one is designed to give absolute beginners a quick overview of the video modes on digital stills cameras (and more specifically on the HD shooting capabilities of the latest SLRs and hybrid cameras). Check it out after the link or visit the Learn section using the menu on the left.

The Therething is an open source MIDI controller based on an Arduino. OK, so it's not a true analog Theremin, but it sounds pretty good, and it's enclosure is awesome! Check out the link for more information, including the source code and more videos.

Ultrasonic sensors are used to return a distance value, from the sensor to the player's hand. This value is converted by an Arduino or other microcontroller into a MIDI key value and is output at the correct baud rate (31,250 bps) onto a serial pin. Since MIDI needs a signal to turn off a key pitch as well as a signal to turn it on, it is recommended that when the note changes, two MIDI signals are sent - one to turn off the previous note and one to activate the required note. It may be possible to program some sort of delay/sustain effect in here, so that the off signal is delayed. This would mean that note changes are not too abrupt as there could be a slight overlap between notes.

In the Maker Shed:


Give the gift of Arduino this holiday season!

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Steve sez, "A traditional red phone box has been recycled into one of the UK's smallest lending libraries - stocking 100 books, CDs, and DVDs. The phone booth was bought from British Telecom for £1, and it looks like something right out of a Doctor Who episode." [ed: technically, the Tardis is a police call box, which is green blue, not red] [/comicbookguy]

Users simply stock it with a book they have read, swapping it for one they have not...

"This facility has turned a piece of street furniture into a community service in constant use."

A resident dreamed up the idea when the village lost its phone box and mobile library in quick succession.

Phone box has new life as library (Thanks, Steve!)

(Image: Phone box and bus stop, Cheriton, Hampshire, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Mike Cattell's photostream)

Blake Fall-Conroy's "Minimum Wage Machine" is a penny-dispensing Rube Goldberg machine that "allows anybody to work for minimum wage."

Custom electronics, change sorter, wood, plexiglas, motor, misc. hardware, pennies (approx. 15 x 19 x 72 inches)

The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine's mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box.

Minimum Wage Machine (Work in Progress) (via Make)

Here's Scot Nery's list of eight reasons why normal people should learn to juggle. My old roommate, Possum Man, was a hell of a juggler, and though he took it up as physiotherapy for an arm injury, it quickly built to an avocation. Flaming torch and machete juggling was always a favorite at our parties.

#2 Got The Hunchies?
The average person spends 312 hours per day at a computer. Your back and neck get outta whack, your wrists start hurting and your legs fall asleep. You can combat this crappy feeling by doing light exercise - juggling is perfect. To hone the art of juggling, you need to think about standing up straight, relaxing, and using your hands correctly.

#3 I can't de-stress you with my eyes
It's nice to learn something new, do something active and get away from what seems important in your life. You can lose your tension through tons of hobbies, but juggling is a great combination of physical activity, brain stimulation, joy of success, and visual stimulation. Here's another scientific study...

8 Reasons Normal People Should Juggle

(Photo: WJD2008 - 7 JUGGLING BEANBAGS, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from madaboutasia's photostream) (via Kottke)

Here's Japanese mixologist Kazuo Uyeda demonstrating his "hard shake" technique. Whatever he's mixing looks delicious.

ginza hard shake (via Kottke)

Author Ellen Kushner writes in on behalf of the lovely Interstitial Arts Foundation, saying

To celebrate the release of Interfictions 2, their (our?) second original anthology of interstitial writing (edited by Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak), the Interstitial Arts Foundation (promoting "art made in the interstices between genres and categories...disciplines, mediums, and cultures") invited artists & crafters to create original pieces based on stories in the book. (We did this months in advance, so all the artists got sneak peeks at the unpublished stories they chose.)

The results include a bookmark sewn with little bits that "make alien things seem oddly familar" like Theodora Goss's story "The Child-Empress of Mars," a glass bottle containing fragments of Shira Lipkin's story "Valentines" recorded in multiple mediums, and a cocktail hat embellished with semi-precious stones, refrigerator magnets, sequins, and an origami frog, all caught in a net along with words, inspired by Camilla Bruce's "Berry Moon."

Bidding runs through December 8th, and stuff will be shipped in time for the holidays. All funds raised will go toward further interstitial art projects, including anthologies, exhibitions, and salons. The IAF is dedicated to supporting and inspiring art that crosses, falls between, or breaks apart borders -- such as the pieces in this year's auction! We were amazed at just how interstitial the actual works turned out to be - and many of the artists have thanked us for giving them space to experiment and stretch their usual boundaries.

Interstitial Arts Foundation Auctions (Thanks, Ellen!)

Jeff sez,

Last week, Microsoft told Seattle's KUOW: 'We pay all our tax obligations everywhere we are, properly.' Today, Microsoft Tax Dodge, a new website focused on the company's royalty tax dodge, challenged CEO Steve Ballmer today to live up to his spoken commitment to transparent business practices: 'At this point, I think it's reasonable to ask Microsoft to back up that claim with a public explanation of the company's licensing operations. In that spirit, will you tell the public how it is that Microsoft has avoided paying Washington State's B&O Royalty Tax for the past 12 years?' Washington State currently faces a projected $2.6 billion deficit. In addition to the ethical and public relations issues that crumbling bridges and overcrowded schools (Seattle recently considered making D a passing grade) present to the state's most profitable company, the compa ny also faces deeper scrutiny of the legality of its tax practice.

An Open Letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: Quit Dodging Washington Taxes (Thanks, Jeff!)

(Image: WEB DEVELOPERS!, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Nick, Programmerman's photostream)

Lucas123 writes "Researchers at Harvard Medical School pored over survey data from more than 4,000 'wired' hospitals and determined that computerization of those facilities not only didn't save them a dime, but the technology didn't improve administrative efficiency either. The study also showed most of the IT systems were aimed at improving efficiency for hospital management — not doctors, nurses, and medical technicians. 'For 45 years or so, people have been claiming computers are going to save vast amounts of money and that the payoff was just around the corner. So the first thing we need to do is stop claiming things there's no evidence for. It's based on vaporware and [hasn't been] shown to exist or shown to be true,' said Dr. David Himmelstein, the study's lead author."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few weeks ago, some publishing industry veterans announced plans to start a new daily newspaper in Detroit, a city that has seen its daily newspapers significantly scale back the production of the paper product. This resulted in some reasonable confusion over how the plan could possibly make sense. There was little indication of a plan to do anything different to try to offer a better product. Instead, it looked like just an attempt to jump in with a product not particularly different than the ones that had already stumbled in the same market -- but without the brand recognition or built up loyalty. So, it should come as little surprise that the new paper appears to have folded after just a single week of operation, though the publishers insist it's just a temporary "bump" due to (merely) a lack of advertising, distribution or timely printing operations. Seems like there are some kinks to work out.

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An anonymous reader writes "Nintendo is investigating potential copyright infringement by Nokia during some video demos of their N900 phone, which can be seen emulating Nintendo games. Nintendo spokesman Robert Saunders says: 'We take rigorous steps to protect our IP and our legal team will examine this to determine if any infringement has taken place.' In the video, Nokia says, 'Most publishers allow individual title usage, provided that the user is in possession of the original title.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slowly, but surely, we're seeing some regional newspapers try out a paywall. We've already seen Newsday, on Long Island, put up a paywall, but it's more about reducing churn than actually getting people to pay (and early reports are that not many are paying). Now, as a bunch of readers sent in, Johnston Press, in the UK has announced a paywall as well, asking £5 for three months of access (which certainly beats Newsday's ridiculous $5/week plan. I'm glad that some newspapers are actually trying this out, as it was getting a bit tiresome hearing them all threaten to do so without any actual action. Now we can actually see what happens. Of course, my opinion on the matter has been clear. I think it will be a lot more difficult to get people to pay than these publishers believe, and it will be a lot more expensive to manage than they believe. Also, the writers for the papers behind paywalls might not like the fact that no one knows who they are any more. At the same time, it will only serve to open up the competitive market for others to come in at a better price point (i.e., "free") and scoop up a significant percentage of the advertisers who are seeking to reach a larger audience.

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necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting on a new report from Osram, a German lighting manufacturer, which has calculated the total lifecycle energy costs of three lightbulb technologies and found that both LEDs and CFLs use approximately 20% the energy of incandescents over their lifetimes. While it is well known that the newer lighting technologies use a fraction of the energy of incandescents to produce the same amount of light, it has been unproven whether higher manufacturing energy costs kept the new lighting from offering a net gain. The study found that the manufacturing and distribution energy costs of all lightbulb technologies are only about 2% of their total lifetime energy cost — a tiny fraction of the energy used to produce light." The study uses the assumption that LEDs last 2.5 times longer than CFLs, and 25 times longer than incandescents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"An extraordinary moment in the political blogosphere," noted @Greatdismal on Twitter, and I agree. "Feels like some rare astronomical event, something we hear about but don't bother hoping to see," he added -- "somebody changing their mind." Why I Parted Ways With The Right, at Little Green Footballs (yeah, you read that correctly).

This design for a gun-shaped camera is unlikely to be mass-produced. It looks easy enough to make one with a 3D printer, though.

Breaking glass with sound...

Rubbing the rim of a wine glass with a wet finger will cause it to resonate at its resonant frequency. The glass is placed in front of a speaker playing a sine wave, created by the function generator, of this same frequency. When the amplitude is turned up, we can see by shining a strobe light at the glass that this resonant frequency causes it to oscillate. When the glass becomes too stressed, it will shatter, which we see very clearly on high speed video.

A few things to note: The scrolling effect seen in the strobe light footage is caused by interference between the strobe light frequency and the video camera frame rate. Also, the real oscillations of the glass are much faster than they appear in the strobe footage. Setting the frequency of the strobe light can make them appear much slower so that we can see the oscillations in real time without the help of high speed video.

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A few folks have sent over some version of the story that the Kindle is outselling every other product on Amazon. Of course, that's somewhat meaningless, as the folks at Gizmodo smartly point out. Because you can only get the Kindle via Amazon, and that makes the number completely different than other products:

When Amazon tells you that the Kindle is the highest-selling product on Amazon, you're supposed to think of it as you'd think of anything else: as a strong, reliable metric in gauging how well a product is doing in general. The thing is, there is no "in general" for the Kindle. There is only Amazon. Anyone who wants a Kindle and doesn't normally shop at Amazon has to make an exception. Anyone who wants a Kindle and doesn't normally shop online has to make an exception. The Kindle didn't outsell the iPod Touch--not even close.

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Good news! Climate change means better wine, with a higher alcohol content. From the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Chapter 1, "The consequences of warming are already detectable in wine quality, as shown by Duchêne and Schneider (2005), with a gradual increase in the potential alcohol levels at harvest for Riesling in Alsace of nearly 2% volume in the last 30 years. On a worldwide scale, for 25 of the 30 analysed regions, increasing trends of vintage ratings (average rise of 13.3 points on a 100-point scale for every 1°C warmer during the growing season), with lower vintage-to-vintage variation, has been established (Jones, 2005)."

buchner.johannes writes "I was fed up with the general consensus that Linux is oh-so-secure and has no malware. After a week of work, I finished a package of malware for Unix/Linux. Its whole purpose is to help white-hat hackers point out that a Linux system can be turned into a botnet client, by simply downloading BOINC and attaching it to a user account, to help scientific projects. The malware does not exploit any security holes, only loose security configurations and mindless execution of unverified downloads: I tested it to be injected by a PHP script (even circumventing safe mode), so that the Web server runs it; I even got a proxy server that injects it into shell scripts and makefiles in tarballs on the fly, and adds onto Windows executables for execution in Wine. If executed by the user, the malware can persist itself in cron, bashrc and other files. The aim of the exercise was to provide a payload so security people can 'pwn' systems to show security holes, without doing harm (such as deleting files or disrupting normal operation). But now I am unsure of whether it is ethically ok to release this toolkit, which, by ripping out the BOINC payload and putting in something really evil, could be turned into proper Linux malware. On the one hand, the way it persists itself in autostart is really nasty, and that is not really a security hole that can be fixed. On the other hand, such a script can be written by anyone else too, and it would be useful to show people why you need SELinux on a server, and why verifying the source of downloads (checksums through trusted channels) is necessary. Technically, it is a nice piece, but should I release it? I don't want to turn the Linux desktop into Windows, hence I'm slightly leaning towards not releasing it. What does your ethics say about releasing such grayware?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An angry loser (right) came to Syracuse University to make a fool of herself by spreading pathetic hatred and was treated to a happy mutant style stunt by this smiling student, named Chris Pesto (left).

I decided that because this woman thought it was okay to make me feel uncomfortable in my home, I would retaliate and make her feel just as uncomfortable, if not more.

This woman was wearing a ankle-length corduroy skirt, which, as we all know, is a fashion nono. So, in order to make her feel uncomfortable, I stood next to her and held a sign that said Corduroy skirts are a sin! I don't think I have ever drawn so much attention in my life. SO many people asked to take a picture with me, I got laughs, high fives and there were the few that even cursed off the woman standing behind me.

As I drew interest to what was going on with myself and the woman with the hateful sign, I started to draw a crowd that stood with me in support. Before I knew it I had 100+ people holding signs for gay rights asking people to honk their horns to support. I was interviewed by a news station, and more than 5 student organization papers, and the post standard of syracuse.

I never expected anybody to come stand by me and support and I appreciate it so much that everyone came! It meant so much and it proved to those ignorant people that we aren't afraid, and we will put up a fight.

I'm proud that Syracuse has such a homosexual friendly community.

Corduroy Skirts are a Sin

There have been a bunch of stories lately about how pictures that people put up on Facebook are coming back to haunt them in unexpected ways. First, we have the case of Adam Bauer, a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student who had been careful about who he friended, but chose to accept a friend request from an unknown user, because "she was a good-looking girl." Turns out that the "good-looking girl" was actually the La Crosse police, who ticketed him for underage drinking because of a photo on Facebook of Bauer holding a drink. This reminds me of a case we wrote about six years ago, involving a woman who posted some naked photos of herself at some locations around Lincoln, Nebraska -- leading the police to charge her with violating local no-nudity laws.

The other story that a bunch of folks have submitted was the case of a woman who who lost her disability insurance benefits because of photos on Facebook. She was on sick-leave due to a diagnosis of depression. Yet, somehow the insurance company got access to her Facebook photos that showed her out having fun -- at a birthday party, on vacation and the beach and at a Chippendale's show. Now it's entirely possible that there was insurance fraud going on. Or, it's also possible that someone who had been diagnosed with depression was trying to put her life back together. It's a bit difficult to think that an insurance agent looking at photos online is better at diagnosing the situation than a trained doctor.

In both of these cases, the issue is that photos might not tell the whole story. Making major decisions based just on some photos uploaded to social networks seems fraught with potential problems. I could certainly see using them as part of a larger investigation, but it doesn't seem like that was the case in either situation. But, in the meantime, it's a reminder that your privacy is increasingly disappearing -- and you may be surprised about decisions that others make about you based on what you assumed was perfectly innocent activities.

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Ever feel like you are just cranking away and not getting anywhere in life? Well, at least with Blake Fall-Conroy's Minimum Wage Machine, you are guaranteed to get paid as long as you crank. The idea is that you generate power by turning a handle, which in turn powers a change machine that pays you in pennies, one every 5.035 seconds. It's a work in progress, but Blake was kind enough to share these photos and some information about how it works with us:

The minimum wage machine pays the user minimum wage in real-time in pennies-- the smallest unit of currency in the US. Being in NY, with minimum wage at $7.15 an hour, this equates to 1 penny every 5.035 seconds. The machine has a crank attached to an antique change sorting machine (circa 1913, ebay) and by belt to a small DC motor (salvaged from a printer). The crank turns the motor's shaft which, in turn, acts as a small generator. The voltage produced goes through a 5V regulator and powers a Basic Stamp. It also powers a stepper motor (same printer) moving a small wheel at the mouth of the change sorter and a small motor inside the change reservoir of the machine.

As the user turns the crank, they spin a platter in the change sorter which begins lining up the pennies at the mouth of the sorter, blocked by the stepper motor's wheel. They also start spinning the generator, which powers on the BASIC stamp. The basic tamp begins its countdown of 5.035 seconds. When it gets to zero, it activates the stepper, which turns the wheel, releasing one penny from the mouth of the sorter, which falls down a shoot into the collection bin of the minimum wage machine. The whole process repeats. Every third cycle, the BASIC stamp also activates the small motor in the change reservoir which churns up the pennies with a small arm at the opening of the change sorter to make sure the pennies fall from the reservoir onto the spinning sorter platter. If the user stops turning the crank (or turn it too slowly), power to the BASIC stamp stops, and the stepper does not turn, halting the release of pennies.

So, being powered by the crank, by the user's own energy, the machine only pays if the user performs work.

In the future, I see possibility in a lot of these machines hooked into a grid, with people performing basic human labor for money. Perhaps a new form of renewable energy generation? A new kind of supercomputer with thousands of people performing basic calculations at minimum wage "stations" across the world? Who knows?

I like the use of old and new materials in the machine construction, and especially the LEGO parts stuck in there. Nice work!

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"He really messed up. He could have done nine months out of a year sentence, and not even in lock up for killing someone. Now he is going to do the remainder of that time in county jail." Ventura County Sheriff's spokesman Ross Bonfiglio on the matter of Roger Avary's jailhouse tweets, previously blogged on BB first here and later here.

"Edie's Big Adventure," spotted on Dangerous Minds. Says Edie the hamster's "person," Victoria Belanger, who shot these photos:

I'm a photographer for the [New York City] DA's office and there is a women there who makes these models (trains, apts, buildings, etc) for court cases, as a visual aid for the jury. The train is perfectly hamster sized so I brought my super tame hamster into work yesterday for a little photo shoot. They came out better than expected. I'm really excited about them.

(newyorkshitty.com, alternate link for partial gallery is here)

While more and more courts seem to be understanding that eBay shouldn't be responsible for what users are selling on its site, it appears that French courts are a bit confused. Last year, a French court fined eBay $63 million because counterfeit LVMH products were being sold on the site. Of course, eBay has no way of knowing what's legit and what's not, but the French court didn't seem to care. A similar case, also involving LVMH, but concerning Google ads, was also ruled in LVMH's favor, but it was appealed to the European Court of Justice, and a judge there has already indicated that it makes little sense to blame the company. But that isn't stopping the French courts. eBay has now been fined yet again, because of a French ban on selling even legally purchased brands of LVMH perfumes if you're not an authorized distributor. eBay is appealing the ruling, saying that banning the resale of legally purchased goods doesn't make sense and harms consumers. However, a much bigger question is why eBay should be liable at all. It's not eBay doing the selling, but users on the site.

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superglaze and several other readers noted a piece up on ZDNet.co.uk reporting that last summer a pub in the UK was fined £8,000 after a customer downloaded copyrighted material on its Wi-Fi connection. According to the article, whose source was the Wi-Fi hotspot provider, it was a civil action and the pub was not identified because its owner had not given permission to release the details. Techdirt is skeptical as to whether or not the reported fine happened, given the sketchiness surrounding the details. If true, the ruling seems baffling to UK legal experts, according to ZDNet: "Internet law professor Lilian Edwards, of Sheffield Law School, told ZDNet that companies that operate a public Wi-Fi hotspot should 'not be responsible in theory' for users' illegal downloads under 'existing substantive copyright law.'" In a follow-up article, Prof. Edwards cautions that such hotspot operators should "watch out for the pile of copyright infringement warnings coming your way."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.