NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The final brief (PDF) filed by the defendant Joel Tenenbaum in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum seems to put the final nail in the coffin on the RIAA's argument that 'statutory damages' up to $150,000 can be awarded where the record company's lost profit is in the neighborhood of 35 cents. Not only do Tenenbaum's lawyers accurately describe the applicable caselaw and scholarship, something neither the RIAA nor the Department of Justice did in their briefs, but they point out to the Court that the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit — the appeals court controlling this matter — has itself ruled that statutory damages awards are reviewable for due process considerations under the guidelines of State Farm v. Campbell and BMW v. Gore. The brief is consistent with the amicus curiae brief filed in the case last year by the Free Software Foundation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gehrehmee writes "As usual, the International Olympic Committee is coming down on hard on people mentioning things related to the Olympics without permission. This time it's UVEX sporting supplies, which sponsors Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn. Without explaination, their front page was today updated to include a tongue-in-cheek poem about UVEX's interaction with the IOC. Can the IOC really claim an Olypmian's name as their own intellectual property?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Kris Magri, engineering intern

Thanks again to everyone who entered the Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest! As promised, our team at Make: Labs has built the winning gadget: the super-stealth Listening Cup designed by Grand Prize winner Nic. Check it out!

Amid a raft of great entries that were extremely creative, the Listening Cup was deemed the overall winner because it's stealthy and high-tech, but still buildable. It came with detailed hand-drawn plans, even showing what type of electronic parts would be needed. The original idea was a drinking cup with a false bottom and electronics hidden beneath -- a microphone, an amplifier, and a speaker -- so that a person could put the cup to their ear and eavesdrop on conversations from a distance, or listen through walls.

Results
Using electronics available to anyone, we found that the Listening Cup can easily pick up faint nearby sounds and make them louder, though it couldn't listen though walls unless they were paper-thin. Of course, we figure Alex Rider's employer MI6 could afford some awesome miniaturized circuits, like those in expensive hearing aids, that would boost the Listening Cup's performance tremendously.

Overall, the Listening Cup was a pleasure to design and build. It really put us in the shoes of Smithers, the gadget maker for Alex Rider (though we are envious of his lab).

Building the Listening Cup
After judging all the entries on three criteria (creativity of idea, cool factor, and technical realism), tabulating the results, and choosing Listening Cup as the ultimate winner, our troubles were just beginning. Now, how to build one?

We've published quite a few amplifier circuits in MAKE magazine, and built several more that weren't published, so we had a pretty good stash of circuits to try. We went through the magazines and identified 3 potential circuits that might work. On the first day, engineering intern Eric Chu and I reached for the quick-build to test what it would be like to have a amplifier with its microphone inside a cup. We stole the amplifier module from an existing project sitting on our shelf: the "Covert Wireless Listening" device disguised as a book, from MAKE Volume 16, the "Spy Tech" issue. We cut a hole in an ordinary red plastic Dixie cup and shoved the mic in. This became our tester unit for the next few days...

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Copyright rulings in Australia have been a real mixed bag lately, haven't they? There was the wonderful iiNet ruling that said ISPs weren't liable for actions of their users, and the ruling on telephone books saying you can't copyright facts. But then there was the Kookaburra ruling that found infringement in an 80s song of a popular children's folks song. And, to balance things out, now there's another bad ruling, that seems to go against the very principles explained in the iiNet rulings.

Slashdot points us to the news that an Australian court has ruled in favor of Nintendo, against the distributor of mod chips that can be used in Nintendo DS devices. Nintendo has been busy suing such distributors around the globe, though so far without much success. In places like Spain and France, courts were smart enough to realize that just distributing these chips -- which can be used for legal purposes as well as infringing purposes -- should not be considered infringement itself. It's the basic question of secondary liability, and figuring out if a third party should take the blame for actions of end users. In the iiNet case, the court realized that doing so would result in misplaced blame. In this case, the court didn't seem to care.

It's really too bad, because the court is basically saying that users don't have the right to modify a product they legally purchased and own. And, on top of that, a company selling a product that has perfectly legal uses can be held liable for the fact that some users also do unauthorized things with it. That's a troubling precedent by any measure.

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xzvf writes "As someone who went to high school in the '80s, this newsletter from 1980 (PDF) is a blast from the past. An interview with Microsoft talks up its BASIC language product and predicts voice control of computers in five years. Advertisements for Compute magazine, which was about to go monthly, and an article about a computer 'network' in Minnesota that connects some fax machine-looking terminal to a central computer over telephone lines. Lots of Atari, TI and RadioShack news too. It's a reminder from 30 years ago that we are still not using technology effectively in education."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

xzvf writes "As someone who went to high school in the '80s, this newsletter from 1980 (PDF) is a blast from the past. An interview with Microsoft talks up its BASIC language product and predicts voice control of computers in five years. Advertisements for Compute magazine, which was about to go monthly, and an article about a computer 'network' in Minnesota that connects some fax machine-looking terminal to a central computer over telephone lines. Lots of Atari, TI and RadioShack news too. It's a reminder from 30 years ago that we are still not using technology effectively in education."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although this is an old page, it's still a clever idea, and a relatively rare example of a purely practical case mod. Mike Harrison was tired of having to crawl around behind his computer to mess with all the connections, so he turned the case around by mounting all the lights, switches, and drives in what was the back of the case, and using it with that side forward.

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David Byrne with ETHEL and Thomas Dolby at TED2010, Friday, February 12, 2010, in Long Beach, California. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

I enjoyed David Byrne's presentation at TED2010. He spoke about the way artists create their music and other works to look and sound their best in the venue they appear in. After his presentation, I asked him about his research, his upcoming projects, R. Crumb's Illustrated Book of Genesis, and his run-in with the City of New York regarding the bike stands he designed.

Here's the 10-minute audio interview:

I'm sorry that the first part of the interview has some background chatter. The interview took place in the press room, and it was kind of noisy.

The audio file is available in other formats here at Archive.org and I gave it a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Creative Commons license.

kkleiner writes "Cube Stormer is the latest creation from Mike Dobson, aka Robotics Solutions, and not only is it made entirely out of Legos, it can solve any 3x3 Rubik's cube in less than twelve seconds. Often it can finish in less than five! This thing looks bad-ass and is incredible to watch."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at our new Boing Boing Bazaar in the Makers Market, crafter Becky Stern is selling fun, hand-knitted machine-knit by hand police tape scarves for $75. She also makes custom "Emission Spectrum" scarves of any element, starting at $100 for basic spectra like oxygen. Above right is hardware hacker Limor Fried sporting a Silicon spectrum scarf. Sternlab at the Makers Market

Generally speaking, if you're on trial for something, it's probably not a good idea to piss off the judge. Informercial king Kevin Trudeau has been battling the FTC concerning his pitches for a diet book, which the FTC felt were deceiving. The court case itself has had a series of twists and turns, but as the latest case moved forward, Trudeau posted the judge's email address to his website, and announced it on his radio show, and asked people to email the judge in his support. Apparently, quite a few people did so -- and the judge was not amused, sentencing him to 30 days in jail. As Consumerist notes, the types of people who buy the sorts of things Trudeau is selling might not be the most rationally-minded people, and apparently a few took it upon themselves to not just email the judge their support of Trudeau, but to send vaguely threatening messages as well.

Still, there is an open question as to whether or not this is actually illegal. Eric Robinson points out that it's common enough for those on trial to have friends contact a judge, sometimes even via email. Of course, those sorts of setups are usually more limited to a specific group of selected friends, rather than broadcast to the public at large. Either way -- whether legal or not -- it does seem like a generally smart tip to remember: don't piss off a judge in charge of dealing with your case, and urging a hoard of followers to email that judge is pretty certain to piss him off.

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Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to mattm@makezine.comor drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Jacob asks:

I'm new to electronics, and am interested in LEDs. One thing I can't figure out is why some of them are colored, while others are clear. What's the deal with that?

Hey, good question! I'd never actually thought about it before, and now that you mention it, it does seem a bit confusing. My initial guess was that the coloring might be used as a filter to block out other colors, but that doesn't make sense- in general, LEDs put out a very narrow spectrum of light, so they shouldn't need filters (and it would probably be difficult to build a filter with that narrow of a cutoff range). One exception would be more complicated LEDs such as white ones, which normally start with blue light and then use a phosphor to convert it to white light. It seemed possible that at least for those, the color could be part of the phosphor- except that white LEDs are almost always clear! Besides, the phosphor part turns out to be located right on top of the dye.

So, the best I can tell is that the tinting is added to make it easier to tell them apart when they are off. The clear ones are a pain to sort out, because you have to plug them in to figure out what color they might be. Kind of funny, but I guess that's how it goes!

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Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft on Thursday confirmed that the blue screen of death issues that affected a slew of users after the latest batch of Patch Tuesday updates is the result of an existing infection by the Alureon rootkit. There was widespread speculation after the patch release that simply installing the MS10-015 update was causing the BSOD condition on some Windows 32-bit machines. However, Microsoft said at the time this was not the case and started an investigation into the problem. In an advisory released Thursday, the company said that it now was confident that the restart problem is being caused by the Alureon rootkit." That seems a harsh way to find out that your Windows machine has been rooted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BJ writes "The Linux Action Show, the Linux-podcast to end all Linux-podcasts, is returning with their 11th season after over 7 months off the air. Kicking it all off with a live streaming event this Saturday at 5pm. Topics are set to include: Maemo/Moblin merging into Meego, Open Source Nividia drivers with 3D, KDE 4.4 and much, much more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And here we go again. Apparently there was recently a "flash mob" snowball fight in Philadephia that got a bit out of control, resulting in a "rampage" through a Macy's department store. Nobody was hurt, but 16 people were arrested. So how are Philly officials dealing with it? They're threatening to sue Twitter and Facebook. Seriously. Two city council members say that those companies deserve some of the blame and a lawsuit is an option:

"While [the kids] certainly owe this city an apology and deserve to be punished under the fullest extent of the law, we believe that social media outlets should also bear some of the blame." The letter, written by council members Frank DiCicco and James F. Kenney, explains that this is the second such time a band of mischievous teens has formed via social media and went on to destroy property. "We believe that the lack of monitoring of these sites allows for mass, organized riots to occur."

Hopefully someone explains to these two council members that both sites are certainly protected from liability under Section 230 of the CDA. But, more importantly, beyond just invoking those safe harbors, can someone explain to them how silly it is to blame a communication tool for how it's used? Do they want to sue the phone company when criminals use phones to plan their crimes? Do they threaten to sue the car companies when a car is used in a crime? Furthermore, if their complaint is that these sites failed to "monitor" what people were planning, then isn't the city council actually even more to blame? The content of Twitter is available to the public, and these days much of Facebook is as well (and info on such a flashmob would almost certainly be public). Then shouldn't Philadelphia officials be aware of what's being planned in their own city? Based on the reasoning of DiCicco and Kenney, perhaps they should be suing themselves for failing to monitor what kids in their city were planning on some very public forums.

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As we join fair John and Erin for leg 2 of their exciting journey, you will recall that they are in search of an online retailer to sell their delightful and most-puzzling Mystery Boxes. -- Gareth

Magnolia Atomworks, part 2: Kit design and production

By John Edgar Park and Erin Kelly-Park

While I was busy making lists of possible cool company names and checking to see if the URLs were available, I also began to consider who the Mystery Box customer would be: Geeky? Puzzled? Mysterious? Based on our twenty minutes of "market research," we decided to contact Maker Shed and ThinkGeek, two great stores with what we perceived was the right demographic: customers who were likely to see blog posts, videos, and other buzz that we generated, on sites like Lifehacker, Boing Boing, Wired, and MAKE.

Obviously, we had a bit of an in with Maker Shed, but for ThinkGeek, I literally picked a likely contact name from their website and cold emailed them. We were thrilled when both stores placed orders for the 2009 holiday season! This was great news, but there was no way we could handle cutting hundreds of boxes in time. Outsourcing can be a bit scary. You're trusting someone else to manufacture your product and get it there on time. We were fortunate to find a perfect fit: a contract-cutter who was knowledgeable, super-helpful, and fast.

Making prototypes is one thing, full-scale manufacturing is quite another. We quickly realized that the original design would need to be revised. First of all, those Wikipedia images I used for the original box probably weren't cleared for commercial use. Secondly, due to a wood-sourcing difficulty, I needed to re-draft my design for a different dimension of lumber. Finally, the original design wasn't too easy to put together, requiring some hand-tuning of various parts that hold the box together. The kit version needed to go together right out of the box.

To solve the design problem, we hired a graphic designer friend of mine, Will Weyer, to do custom graphics. Not only were his designs gorgeous, but they etched much faster than the originals. Machine time is money. I re-drafted the slot heights for the new lumber thickness, and came up with a new design for press-fit notches that would allow the boxes to snap together easily.

Since the kit contains small parts that the children of litigious people might decide to choke on, we decided to start a limited liability corporation, or LLC. This keeps your personal and business assets separate from each other. It can also simplify taxes (or make them heinously complex; since we haven't had to do taxes yet, we're still waiting to find which it is!). I was planning to file for the LLC myself, but ran out of time (read: lost interest in researching and filling out forms), so I hired My Corporation to do it.

And so this meant that we had to finally settle on a name. "Magnolia Atomworks" was now official.

Tune in for the thrilling next chapter: Part 3: To market, to market

More:

• Maker Business: Magnolia Atomworks
• Exploring the business of making
• Maker Business: Venturing out...

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sopssa writes "2K Games announced today that they will be releasing Civilization V in the fall. For the first time in the series, the square tiles will be changed to hexes, which 2K Games says provides 'deeper strategy' and 'more realistic gameplay.' Civilization V will also include a new graphics engine, new combat system including ranged bombardment, multiplayer and good support for the modding community. 'Each new version of Civilization presents exciting challenges for our team. Thankfully, ideas on how to bring new and fun experiences to Civ players never seem to stop flowing. From fully animated leaders and realistic landscapes, new combat tactics, expanded diplomacy and shared mods, we're excited for players to see the new vision our team at Firaxis has brought to the series,' Sid Meier said. In addition to Civilization V, the Facebook-based Civilization Network will also be released during 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the Wall Street Journal via Good: Campbell's Soup redesigns a label using "neuromarketing" techniques.

Campbell's New Neuromarketing

The latest fine art edition from Pressure Printing is by painter and comix artist James Jean, who in 2008 also designed a stunning series of fabric prints for Prada (and incredible promotional animation too). The print above, titled "Dive," is Jean's second piece with Pressure Printing. A limited edition of 15, the print is $2,000. From the Pressure Printing blog:

James employed a technique he's got a unique mastery of here, working up a one-color "key" drawing by hand and then going back and adding tone and color in Photoshop. This technique just happens to lend itself perfectly to printmaking. After much color proofing and not a few sets of test plates, we decided upon printing the key drawing in a dark burgundy, with the tonal additions printed in a warm cyan.

The print is large, with an image size of 29" x 16", and a paper size of 36" x 23". It has been printed via an intaglio process, with the two plates cut to slightly different sizes giving the print its unique double-plate-embossed border.

"Dive" by James Jean

Today, the UK's Ministry of Defence and National Archives released a huge chunk of UFO files. The collection of 6,000 pages chronicles UFO reports and investigations from 1994 to 2000. This is the fifth collection the UK's UFO files released online. They're available for free for the next month here. According to a National Archive press release, here are some of the highlights from these documents:

• A UFO sighted by Boston and Skegness Police captured on film and then spotted by a ship's crew in the North Sea. Simultaneously, an unidentified blip was picked up on radar over Boston. A detailed investigation followed, which identified some of the lights as the planet Venus rising and the blip on the radar as 'a permanent echo' made by a tall church spire.

• A Birmingham man arrived home at 4am to find a large, illuminated blue triangle hovering over his garden. The craft 'shot off' leaving behind a 'silky-white' substance on tree tops in his garden, which he saved in a jam-jar. The file that contains the report of the incident does not reveal what happened to the substance.  

• Copies of original statements taken from the UK's 'Roswell', Rendlesham Forest, and calls for an inquiry into 600 alleged sightings in Bonnybridge, Scotland, known as the 'Bonnybridge Triangle'.

• A West Lothian electrician spotted a 'Toblerone-shaped' UFO hovering over a field. A sketch of the craft is included in the report.

"Close Encounters of the Second Kind: the latest release of UFO files" (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)

Damn, those Gama-Go "creatives" are punny! Their new Pot Holder is just $8.
Gama-Go's pot leaf Pot Holder

The 18th of February has been designated as Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, an offshoot of National Engineers Week.

A few days ago we asked Dr. AnnMarie Thomas, a professor of engineering at the University of St. Thomas, to share her thoughts on the occasion. If you haven't read her guest editorial, please do check it out. However, the gist was that it's our responsibility to let girls -- and everyone else! -- know that engineering and other technical vocations are options.

The IAGTED page lists activities going on nationwide. But there are things we can do as individuals to encourage girls to pursue technical careers. As AnnMarie wrote in her editorial,

I challenge all of you makers out there to introduce a girl to engineering- pick up a soldering iron, go on a factory tour, visit a windmill, or share the beauty of Bernoulli's equation. And feel free to include her little brother, father or mother!

So, readers, what are you going to do? Leave a comment.

[Image: Argonne National Laboratory]

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Sean Bonner says,

/b/ [NSFW link!] decided that chatroulete wasn't interesting enough on it's on, and decided to start showing photos instead of livewebcams and then getting screan grabs of reaction shots.This site is now totally amusing in a way 17 year old russian kids could never have imagined.

Image here, cropped for your safety, is a Chatroulette screengrab in which a /b/tard has displayed goatse.cx [NSW link!] to two victims. Not so much a screengrab as a SCREAMGRAB.

The US Mint has revealed a new design for the 2010 penny. Lincoln in still on the front, but this is the new back. And here I was just having a conversation last night about why we still have the penny at all.

From gunpowder to alternative energy: 7 things to do with poop.

Next week a few of us from MAKE will attend the Greener Gadgets conference in New York City.

For three years, the Greener Gadgets Conference has explored sustainable design alternatives for the electronics we use in our homes and workplace every day.

The 2010 event, held February 25 in New York City, will feature two design keynoters, Yves Behar, founder of the San Francisco design studio, fuseproject, and Robert Fabricant, vice president of creative for frog design inc.

Behar’s design studio was responsible for the design of the world’s first $100 “XO” laptop for One Laptop Per Child, a project aimed at bringing education and technology to the world’s poorest children. Fabricant leads frog’s Design for Impact initiatives, which has harnessed the power of mobile technology to combat the world’s worst HIV and AIDS epidemic in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Other speakers include visionaries from Green Life Smart Life, Autodesk, LaboGroup, MIT Media Lab, U.S. Green Building Council, Home Automatic Inc., Dwell magazine, Treehugger and more.

The conference closes out with the incredibly popular Greener Gadgets Design Competition, highlighting a new class of sustainable product concepts, from those that create their own energy to those that minimize the need for any electricity at all. Online registration is available until February 19. Readers can use the registration code "BLOG10" for a $50 discount.

More:

• Greener Gadgets 2009: THE WINNERS!
• Natalie Jeremijenko @ Greener Gadgets
• Chris Jordan @ Greener Gadgets
• Tweet-a-watt - our entry for the Core77 & Greener Gadgets design competition
• The green gadget gift guide at MAKE - Environmentally friendly for the holidays!
• OLPC @ Greener Gadgets

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Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that education commissioners in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont have pledged to sign up 10 to 20 schools each for a pilot project that would allow 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college. The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore. 'We've looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you'll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.' says Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Kentucky's commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, says high school graduation requirements have long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate. 'We've been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready,' says Holliday. However some school officials are concerned about the social and emotional implications of 16-year-olds going off to college. 'That's far too young to be thrown into an environment with college students who are about 18 to 23 years old. ... Most of them are just not mature enough to handle that,' says Mary Anderson, headmaster of Pinkerton Academy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's Bill Gates' Zero Carbon presentation from TED2010. It was one of my favorite talks at the event.

From my report last week on Gates' talk:

"A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal." He and Nathan "Mosquito Zapper" Myrhvold are backing a nuclear approach. It's called Terrapower, and it's different from a standard nuclear reactor. Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today's reactors as fuel. "In terms of fuel this really solves the problem." He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky -- the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.

TED Talk: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero

A whole bunch of you are sending in this absolutely horrifying story of a school district outside of Philadelphia that apparently gave its students laptops that included hidden software that allowed district officials to secretly turn on the laptops' webcams and monitor student activities, no matter where they were. This all came to light when a student was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" with the evidence being a photo of the kid from his laptop webcam. The district is now being sued for this. It's rather stunning that anyone thought this was a good idea. Secretly spying on children in their homes when they have a very real expectation of privacy is downright horrifying. It's not hard to see how this could be abused in very dangerous ways.

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Algae blooms on rural lakes—some of which are toxic to humans and wildlife&mash;increase along with fertilizer and manure pond runoff from farms. Minnesotan Mary Taffe took this ironically beautiful image of algae on Big Stone Lake. You can see more of her photos in a Treehugger gallery.

Clayton Boyer makes incredible wooden clocks and clockworks, and sells the plans to build them -- you'll either need some leet woodworking skills, a CAD rig, a laser-cutter, or a lot of willingness to learn.

Clayton Boyer Clock Designs (Thanks, Brian!)

Dresden Codak's "Artificial Flight and Other Myths (a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds)" is a superb, spot-on critique of artificial intelligence skeptics (like, ahem, me), comparing the our arguments against the emergence of "real AI" to the arguments a bird might make against "real" artificial flight. I love being made to re-examine my own convictions while laughing my ass off:

We can start with a loose definition of flight. While no two bird scientists or philosophers can agree on the specifics, there is still a common, intuitive understanding of what true flight is: powered, feathered locomotion through the air through the use of flapping wings. While other flight-like phenomena exist in nature (via bats and insects), no bird with even a reasonable education would consider these creatures true fliers, as they lack one or more key elements. And, while some birds are unfortunately born handicapped (penguins, ostriches, etc.), they still possess the (albeit undeveloped) gene for flight, and it is indeed flight that defines the modern bird.

This is flight in the natural world, the product of millions of years of evolution, and not a phenomenon easily replicated. Current A.F. is limited to unpowered gliding; a technical marvel, but nowhere near the sophistication of a bird. Gliding simplifies our lives, and no bird (including myself) would discourage advancing this field, but it is a far cry from synthesizing the millions of cells within the wing alone to achieve Strong A.F. Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird.

Artificial Flight and Other Myths (a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds) (via Futurismic)

(Image: Anna's Hummingbird in Flight, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Noël Zia Lee's photostream)

jargon82 writes "A Pennsylvania high school is using laptops they issued to students to spy on them in homes and outside of school. According to a class action filling the webcams and microphones in these laptops could be remotely activated by school officials, and have been used in this role. One student was accused of 'improper behavior in his home' and the school provided a photo taken via his laptop as proof."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama met with US President Barack Obama today. China is not stoked. But the exiled Tibetan leader is. Departing the White House, he described himself as "very happy" with the meeting, saying Obama was "supportive." AP quotes him as having "urged a greater leadership role for women in the public life of nations." Back in the homeland, Tibetans in HHDL's native province of Amdo celebrated the meeting with fireworks and the burning of incense (sangson in the Tibetan language):

"We do this whenever something big, and good happens," said Losan, swathed in the vermillion robes of a Buddhist holy man, standing on a hillside above a monastery where monks were lighting fireworks in the early hours of Thursday.

"He's really going to meet Obama?" interrupted a monk standing next to him, sounding somewhat incredulous.

"I heard it on Voice Of America," Losan told him confidently.

The sound of conch shells being blown echoed around the valley as a group of monks burned an offering of flour and a ceremonial Tibetan scarf on a fire.

"I'm very excited about who the Dalai Lama is going to meet," said one Tibetan woman, who declined to be identified citing the sensitive nature of the topic. "But I worry about what measures the government could take against us in retaliation."

[Image at top: "In Memory of Tibet," a Creative-Commons-licensed photo from the Flickr photostream of "Breathtaking Photos."]

Beyond domino toppling lies the next big thing in kinetic art: xyloexplosive devices. I met kinetic artist Tim Fort when he put on a workshop at the wonderful Leonardo's Basement in Minneapolis and taught me the basics of stick bomb building.

Fort apparently holds the world's record for building the largest such device, shown in this recently recorded video clip.

Fairfax loves a bargain. She loves one so much she is willing to eat food that others have thrown away. She buys plain coffee at cafes and adds milk, which is much cheaper than buying a latte. She holds dinner parties where people bring stuff they no longer want and swap it. She finds lots of good books to read in "trash receptacles surrounding college dormitories at the end of the year." She takes photos of her finds, scores, and tips at her blog, called Frugan Living.

Excerpts:

• After catering an event, a friend of mine was saddened to see tray after tray of untouched food tossed out, so she brought me approximately 79 pounds of pesto pasta.  I froze it in baggies, and have enjoyed a plate of it weekly for going on three months.

• I recently secured $50 selling two charcoal BBQs that I found on the street and ended up having no room for.  Two posts, two emails, two 3 minute exchanges.  Now I have pocket cash and less clutter, an Irish lady has the means to cook on her camping trip, and the Broke-ology set at Lincoln Center Theater has a prop.  Three winners!

•A couple months ago I collected many books from the dumpsters at Columbia and NYU.  The other day I finally got around to posting a couple on Amazon, not really expecting them to sell given a presumed summertime lull in textbook sales.  Lo and and behold, I am now $140 wealthier!  And two more people can gain knowledge (or not, based on how pristine these books were) from the pages of those trees. Aren't trees and trash generous!!

Frugan Living

In the early 20th century, the popularity of the pocket camera in America led to a wave of DIY postcards. The snapshots depicted anything that the sender wanted to share with remote friends or colleagues, from family snapshots to amateur photojournalism. According to former BB guestblogger Mark Dery, real-photo postcards "are transmissions from the postmortem Internet," and they definitely have the feel of a visual Tweet shared with one's social network. In the Las Vegas Weekly, Dery reviews a recent book on the topic, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930, by Luc Sante, author of the seminal account of New York City's underbelly in the early 1900s, Low Life. Dery's review of the book makes me want to start collecting Real-Photo Postcards. Me and everyone else, I'm sure. From Dery's essay, titled "Ghost Cards":

In one of those harmonic convergences of popular desire, profit motive, and governmental intervention that punctuate media history, the emergence of the real-photo postcard as the cell-phone snapshot of small-town America was the result of Kodak’s rollout, in 1903, of its cheap, easy-to-use No. 3A Folding Pocket model; the U.S. Postal Service’s introduction, in 1905, of the penny rate for postcards; and the growing penetration of Rural Free Delivery into heartland America.

To Sante, these postcards constitute a “ghost telegraph,” as he told a radio interviewer. In Folk Photography, he writes, “The real-photo card was typically a product of the small town, particularly the small town isolated on the plains, whose newspaper did not have the capacity to reproduce half-tones, and whose lonely citizens felt an urgent need to communicate with absent friends, distant in those days even if they lived only three stops down the railroad line.” Like the blues, field hollers, chain-gang songs and other folkways of Old Weird America, real-photo postcards served as a social network, a kind of Basement Tapes of the backwoods unconscious, reporting local news, memorializing personal tragedies, scrapbooking sentimental moments.

"Ghost cards: Thanks to Folk Photography, at long last, we’ve got mail" (Las Vegas Weekly)

Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (Amazon)

We've seen our fair share of bad legal rulings come out of France over the years (remember when they declared Yahoo a war criminal? And, of course, we're all familiar with France's ridiculous three strikes "Hadopi" law, that will kick people off the internet based on accusations (not convictions), and which apparently doesn't apply to the government itself, which has been caught infringing on the intellectual property of others multiple times. But, apparently, that was all just the warmup for a law that will turn France into the China of the west when it comes to Internet censorship and ISP secondary liability.

Kevin Donovan points us to a report noting that a bill cruising through the French Parliament would massively increase state-backed internet censorship and surveillance with a bill called Loppsi 2. Beyond requiring ISPs to completely block access to a list of sites the government doesn't like, it would also:

"[make] it the responsibility of each Internet service provider to ensure that users don't have access to unsuitable content."

That's the kind of secondary liability for ISPs that is used in China to create the "Great Firewall" of censorship, and it's the same sort of thing that is currently being pushed in ACTA negotiations by certain parties as well.

But, that's not all. Loppsi 2 also would allow for massive government surveillance via trojan horse applications that would let the government spy on computer usage:

Police and security forces would be able to use clandestinely installed software, known in the jargon as a "Trojan horse," to spy on private computers. Remote access to private computers would be made possible under the supervision of a judge.

So why is France doing this? From the article linked above, the speculation is that it's a really base political ploy by president Nicolas Sarkozy, worried about his and his party's poll ratings, and looking to be seen as a "tough on crime" and "for the children" kind of candidate:

In the face of a rampant economic crisis, growing unemployment, a devastatingly large budget deficit and various political scandals, Sarkozy is pulling out a presidential trump card. He is hoping that fear of criminals will convince voters to come to the polling booths.

In that respect, there is no more suitable issue than child pornography on the Internet and the hunt for pedophile criminals whose only desire is to seduce innocents via their home computers. According to that argument, it is necessary to impose controls on the digital world and introduce state surveillance, so that a pro-active Big Brother can fight the cyber world's sexual deviants who are, in all likelihood, lurking on Facebook or Twitter.

Please tell me French citizens are smart enough not to fall for something like that. In other places, proposing such strict censorship and surveillance legislation has been known to backfire, and already it does look like Sarkozy's political opponents are screaming in protest over this. Taking away people's rights over a bogus "but think of the children" scare, seems like the kind of old school political tactics that hopefully will start to backfire more often than succeed as people realize that they're being lied to.

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watanabe writes "I just moved from a house with Cat5e wiring to a house with ... a whole bunch of coax cables. Like, my living room has five coax cables coming out of a hole in the wall. All of them go back up to my attic. The house is big, (and I like it, thank you), but I have realized that our digital usage pattern (media server + squeezeboxes + remote time machine backups to a linux box) will not work without wiring. I am currently bridging some old Linksys WRT54Gs to the right places, but of course, that slows everything down. This got me thinking: 100mb ethernet is four wires, yes? And I have four wires for every two coax cables. What about a two coax-head -> ethernet jack setup? Has anyone done this before? Searching online only gives me $100+ coaxethernet transceiver type boxes. At that price, a HomePNY system would make more sense. I'm willing to solder if I have to, but I first wanted to get advice and holes shot in my plan, if there are any."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using the open hardware Stimmmopped, you can tune your stringed instrument using you eye rather than your ear. It works by illuminating a string with two lights, which are flashing at the frequency that the string should be vibrating at. If the tuning is off, the string will vibrate slightly faster or slower, so the illuminated part of the string will appear to be moving (due to the stroboscopic effect). Once the string is in perfect alignment, the lights will appear fixed in position. It's certainly not a new idea, however this version looks like it was designed quite well. Cool project!

I'm also guessing that you could have some fun with it as a musical note generator, if you use some photocells to pick up the frequency of the flashing lights... [via embedds]

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Gina from kick-ass comics publisher FirstSecond sez,

First Second Books is pleased to announce a new online serial project: Zahra's Paradise, a graphic novel about the social and political situation in today's Iran, will be serialized on line beginning 12:00 a.m., February 19, 2010 and be published in book form in 2011. In the beginning, the serialization will reflect events in Iran's recent past, but in the months to come, as current events unfold in Iran, they will be woven into the story.

Written by Amir, a human rights activist, and illustrated by Khalil, Zahra's Paradise tells the story of an Iranian blogger's search for his brother, Mehdi, a nineteen year old protester who has disappeared in Tehran after the June 2009 unrest. As the blogger and his mother, Zahra Alavi, begin their search for Mehdi, we are drawn into the underbelly of the Islamic Republicâ€"an elaborate labyrinth in which countless dissidents have vanished over the past decades. Although the characters are fictional composites of actual people in Iran, the context and events are real. The project is a roman à clef of history as it happens.

Zahra's Paradise (Thanks, Gina!)

(Disclosure: I'm happy to say that FirstSecond will publish a graphic novel based on one of my short stories)

Indonesian prison cells for wealthy people convicted of bribery and other corruption crimes are a palatial resorts (and you have to bribe the guards to get in to see the prisoners!). The Indonesian government is trying to fix things, but corrupt officials stand in the way.

The money cycles through the prison system, he explains. Prisoners and their visitors pay bribes to block leaders, who then give a cut to officials. Block leaders often hold auctions where new detainees can bid for certain cells. Those without money are packed into 10- by 13-foot cells with up to five other inmates, while others receive upgrades depending on how much they are willing to pay.

Service varies by prison, according to descriptions from former inmates and people who have investigated prison operations. Wealthy inmates can hire people to deliver food and clean their cells. In Cipinang and Selemba high-security prisons, inmates can buy air conditioning and laptop computers.

Prison for wealthy Indonesians puts Club Fed to shame

In "Thrill Makers of Coney Island" from this July, 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix, we learn many amazing facts about the high-tech people-hurling technologies being developed for the burgeoning Coney Island amusement park:

Another mechanical ride which brings the owners a rich harvest each season is the Steeplechase. In this sweepstake there are four wooden horses which race around a course which is supposed to represent hill and dale and the riders imagine themselves as embittered jockeys. Two persons ride each saddle.

At the starting point the horses are released down a mild decline and again they are driven by gravity until they reach a gentle slope of a track. Here they are pulled up for about 25 yards by a system of chains and gears, not unlike the method used in the roller coaster, and then when they reach the top of this first hill, they glide off and downhill on their own again.

The horses are placed on two trolley wheels and it is these wheels which whirl them around the whole course after their first descent. Gravity and the wheels do the rest on the 1/2-mile ride.

There are 65 races run off an hour on this mechanical track. Over 5,000 ride these horses daily. Not more than $5.00 worth of electricity is consumed each day.

On the other hand, Coney Island has become so vast that there is a large electrical plant there and one of the biggest gas works in the country. It is estimated that the pleasure colony's electric bill each day is $10,000 and that its gas bill is more than $5,000. Next to the labor item, these are the two outstanding costs of upkeep which disturb the proprietor at Coney Island, who is perhaps the only individual in the universe who can mix pleasure and business and make it pay.

Thrill Makers of Coney Island (Jun, 1931) `

Lots of Buzz buzz is still running through the internets yet, so here's a bit more of it, just in case you aren't burnt out yet. Google has added a one-button disable option to totally remove the system from Gmail. I'm sure someone there sure wishes that had been on by default. This is partially in response to a class action complaint and follows earlier cleanup efforts as well as an apology for auto-follow. Since there is no Facebook interaction, I still wonder what traction they will get. But maybe this means the end of Twitter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Accidental blindness has never been so funny! You can download a high-res version from the always-entertaining Mike's Electric Stuff. [via Boing, which is to say Boing]

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One of the key problems we have with any sort of collection agency/performance rights organization/collective licensing scheme is that they introduce an unnecessary bureaucracy into the equation and, as a result, money gets redirected from the actual creators to the bureaucracy itself. It's a giant economic inefficiency that harms content creators. Case in point: Michael Geist points us to the news that the Australian copyright collection group, The Copyright Agency Limited, spent more on its own staff than it gave out directly to content creators. In 2009, it paid its staff $9.4 million, and it disbursed... $9.1 million directly to content creators.

Now, to be fair, the article buries the fact that CAL also gave $76 million to publishers "on the assumption that a proportion of this money will be returned to authors," but it also notes that it has no checks to see if that money is ever distributed. In other words, CAL doesn't actually do anything concerning that $76 million other than pass it on to other bureaucracies (not content creators) -- who might just be keeping it, rather than disbursing it. As the report notes, CAL collected $114 million last year, and can only say, for certain, that $9.1 million got distributed to actual content creators. Now that's efficient! Certainly, some of that $76 million may have reached content creators, but no one knows for sure.

So, again, we're left wondering why such a setup makes sense at all? All that's happening is that money that could go directly from fans/consumers to content creators gets filtered through inefficient bureaucracies that take huge cuts. That harms content creators.

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An anonymous reader writes "Players of Lego's new MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) are tasked with a mission: help save imagination from the dark forces of evil. The bad force can be kept at bay only by users' 'imagination and creativity,' said Ryan Seabury, the creative director for the game and founder of Louisville, Colorado-based NetDevil, which is developing the game for Lego. Players cannot be killed, but they can be reduced to a pile of unassembled bricks. The idea is to play the game and collect bricks, which will allow users to build more interesting models. Lego Universe, will launch in the second half of this year and will be a subscription-based service (price not disclosed)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last May I had the opportunity to talk a while with Wired Magazine's Thomas Goetz about the idea of how people can take control their over own health care using the tools and data available on the Internet. His new book on the subject, entitled The Decision Tree, is a step above most health improvement books in terms of the scholarship/readability (i.e. it's based on good science and it's easy for me to understand.)

The big idea is this: A person's health doesn't happen all at once; it's a consequence of years of choices - some large and some small, some good and some bad. His book looks at the choices that advances in genomics, self-monitoring, new screening techniques, and collaborative health tools are giving the average patient. The trouble is, there's so much information available that it's really, really hard to interpret it all. What to do? According to Goetz, the answer is to make a decision tree.

Decision trees or flowcharts that make all of these decisions more visible and more obviously something we are actually choosing. Unfortunately, most current decision trees look like the one to the right: technical and hard to understand

But where we are apparently headed is in the direction of interactive ones like this one at Preventative Math.net. It really makes the tradeoffs clear: If I do this (e.g. take a baby aspirin daily) I can expect to add X days to my life. For me, the daily aspirin adds a probable 293 day to life span - why wouldn't I do that?

The test and interface is simple. In fact, I wish there were a lot more factors to play with (e.g. how many days of life, if any, would a daily glass of red wine add, etc?) I eagerly await the day that an organization that I trust puts up a decision tree website like that with a lot more factors (daily alcohol intake, quantity of fruit eaten per day, basement radon test, etc.)

Vann Hall says:

Yesterday's Boing Boing entry on panoramic photos of power-plant control rooms reminded me of a Library of Congress site, "The Empire That Was Russia," showcasing the color(!) photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, taken in the years immediately preceding WWI.

Prokudin-Gorskii used a camera of his own design that took three photographs in rapid succession on a 9x3" glass plate; the images were shot through a red, green, and blue filter, respectively. After developing, a full-color image could be projected from the plate using a custom, three-part projection system.

In 1948, the LoC bought the existing plates from Prokudin-Gorskii's heirs -- seemingly including nearly 1,900 color images, along with an unknown number of black-and-white photos. They've since been digitized and made available on the LoC web site. Most are available in three variations -- composite color image, single-frame black-and-white image, and entire (three-frame) negative -- and, amazingly, each variant is available as a medium- or high-resolution JPEG ('high-resolution' in this case reflecting typical usage at the time the scan was made: namely 1024 x 826 or thereabouts) or an uncompressed archival TIFF (e.g. 3200 x 2700 pixel for composite image). In addition, selected images are also presented in a "corrected" format that takes into account problems with plate shrinkage and misregistration.

The subject matter varies widely, as Prokudin-Gorskii's intent had been systematically to document the Russian Empire...

The Empire That Was Russia (Thanks, Vann!)

Joe Saavedra writes:

The concept is a wearable version of Conway’s Game of Life, that is controlled by the current state of your life. Essentially, a wearable extension of your heart, externalized in the form of Conway’s Life. A custom circuit includes an infrared EKG monitor that resets the Game each time a heartbeat is detected. Heartbeat data is analyzed by a hackduino which resets an ATMega48 chip, part of Adafruit’s kit controlling Life, which is embedded in the chest of a hoodie. Conductive thread is used to connect the 16 LED matrix to the circuit board which is kept in a pocket towards the bottom of the hoodie.

More:

• Collin's Lab: Infrared heart sensor
• Soft circuit hoodie warms, illuminates lucky dog
• TV-B-Gone hoodie
• Touch Sensitive LilyPad Arduino Hoodie

In the Maker Shed:

Game of Life Board

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Alan sez, "A great, but slightly disturbing, look at how pervasive green-screening has become in simply every scene in television these days. Pretty much everything you think is outdoors is faked, at least to some degree. I particularly like the faked ferry fire..."

Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009 (Thanks, Alan!)

It's no secret that we think Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures is a dangerous, innovation harming monstrosity. The company used a bait and switch scheme to get a bunch of big tech companies to fund it, not realizing that they were then going to be targets of his shakedown system. Basically, IV buys up (or in some cases, applies for) tons of patents, and then demands huge cash outlays from those same companies (often hundreds of millions of dollars) for a combined promise not to sue over those patents and (here's the sneaky bit) a bit of a pyramid scheme, where those in early supposedly get a cut of later deals. Of course, to just talk to IV requires strict NDAs, so the details of these deals are kept under wraps and only leaked out anonymously. But the hundreds of millions of dollars going towards this sort of trolling behavior, rather than any actual innovation in the marketplace can be seen on various financial filings (you can't hide hundreds of millions of dollars in payments that easily).

Now, for years, Myhrvold tried to avoid the term "patent troll," by claiming that IV had never actually sued anyone. Two years ago, though, it seemed clear that the company was on the verge of breaking out the lawsuits. However, the company still hasn't been directly linked to a lawsuit. Late last year, though, some eagle-eyed reporters noticed that IV patents were showing up in lawsuits, but those lawsuits were from different companies. Reading between the lines, it became clear that IV had decided to protect its brand name by getting other companies or creating those companies itself, giving the patent to those other companies that no one had ever heard of, and having them sue. This is a very common practice among patent hoarders. They set up shell companies for their lawsuits, that often make it difficult to track back who actually owns what patents. It's all a shell game to extort more money.

The NY Times is now running yet another profile (they do this every two years or so) of Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures that covers the usual bogus claims by Myhrvold about how he's creating "invention capital," with very little skepticism. However, it does reveal one interesting tidbit that we had missed. Last year, a research firm released a report highlighting that Intellectual Ventures has up to 1,110 shell companies, with which it can hide its activities. No wonder IV can pretend it doesn't sue anyone. It can simply hide behind its shell companies.

It's hard to find anything in Myhrvold's activities that actually contribute to any innovation, but you can see billions of dollars being siphoned away from actual innovation -- the kind that brings real products to market -- and see it being fed into what appears to be a giant shakedown scheme that is trying to pull as much money out of the system as possible before Congress wakes up and realizes it needs to fix an incredibly broken patent system.

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k33l0r writes "Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and other projects, announced that it has received a $2 million donation from Google. This is the first time that Google has supported Wikipedia, and it has many wondering why. Anyone remember Knol, Google's answer to Wikipedia?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Geist sez, "Howard Knopf has an absolute must-read post that lists 21 reasons why Canadian copyright law is already stronger than the U.S. Knopf's list includes the existence of the private copying levy, neighbouring rights, movie theatre payments for exhibiting films, moral rights, the fact that broadcasters pay more copyright royalties and educators pay more copyright royalties, and that fair dealing is more restrictive than fair use. There are many more - read the whole thing."

For non-Canadians: an oft-heard reason for urgent reform to make Canadian copyright more restrictive is that the US government (and the US copyright lobby) say that Canadian copyright law is lax compared to the US version. Canada has even been put on copyright watchlists, along with countries like China and Russia.

1. Canada has about 36 copyright collectives, many of which have received substantial direct and indirect government subsidies. The U.S. has only about half a dozen, with no government support.

2. Canada has a full-time Copyright Board which has normally had four full time members plus a sitting or retired Judge as Chairman and currently about a dozen full time professional and administrative staff. The Board has enormous policy and, effectively, law making powers. No other country of which I am aware comes close to having such a large, permanent, powerful and full time copyright tribunal.

3. Broadcasters pay more for copyright royalties than their counterparts in the USA, much of it for rights that don't even exist in the USA - for example the "ephemeral right."The U.S. provides an outright exemption in 17 USC §112 for the "ephemeral right." Now, about $50-million a year more over and above is being demanded by a collective dominated by the American dominated record labels for this right in addition to amounts now collected by composers, authors and publishers.(Canada's Copyright Board heard a major case where this will be decided on commercial radio in December of 2008 and January of 2009. However, it will probably be at least 18 months to two years after the hearing before a decision is announced, based upon the timing of some recent major decisions from the Board.

4. The Canadian Copyright Board values each right under the Copyright Act brought before it separately, with little regard to the layering and multiplicity of tariffs that result, in effect, for the same transaction. Whether this is an error in approach by the Board, and/or in policy, and/or in legislative drafting or at all is subject to fair debate. But the fact is that U.S. law goes to great length to avoid such a result, as recent court decisions have confirmed...

The Annual "301" Show - USTR Calls for Comment - 21 Reasons Why Canadian Copyright Law is Already Stronger Than USA's (Thanks, Michael!)

nk497 writes "Developers looking to prove a point about the information people are sharing on social networking sites have unveiled a new tool called Please Rob Me. It hunts out tweets from people who are also using location-based services telling the world that they're out of town, and then directs the world to go rob their house. The creators of the site said: 'Don't get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information is less awesome.' How long until the first actual robbery takes place?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "French lawmakers have voted to approve a draft law to filter Internet traffic that Slashdot previously discussed. The government says the measure is intended to catch child pornographers. The Senate, where the government has a majority, will soon give the bill a second reading. If the Senate makes no amendments to the text, that will also be its final reading, as the government has declared the bill "urgent," a procedural move that reduces the usual cycle of four readings to two."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "French lawmakers have voted to approve a draft law to filter Internet traffic that Slashdot previously discussed. The government says the measure is intended to catch child pornographers. The Senate, where the government has a majority, will soon give the bill a second reading. If the Senate makes no amendments to the text, that will also be its final reading, as the government has declared the bill "urgent," a procedural move that reduces the usual cycle of four readings to two."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "French lawmakers have voted to approve a draft law to filter Internet traffic that Slashdot previously discussed. The government says the measure is intended to catch child pornographers. The Senate, where the government has a majority, will soon give the bill a second reading. If the Senate makes no amendments to the text, that will also be its final reading, as the government has declared the bill "urgent," a procedural move that reduces the usual cycle of four readings to two."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "French lawmakers have voted to approve a draft law to filter Internet traffic that Slashdot previously discussed. The government says the measure is intended to catch child pornographers. The Senate, where the government has a majority, will soon give the bill a second reading. If the Senate makes no amendments to the text, that will also be its final reading, as the government has declared the bill "urgent," a procedural move that reduces the usual cycle of four readings to two."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, at a panel in Silicon Valley on the future of journalism, one of the topics of discussion was whether or not tablet computing would be the "savior" of news, with most of the focus being on a recent video put together by Sports Illustrated of what a specialized tablet version of the magazine might look like. More recently, Wired Magazine demonstrated a working prototype of a tabletized version of the magazine. Both of these demos are certainly impressive -- but I'll say the same thing that I said about the SI demo on that panel discussion: why is the focus on the hardware? Nothing in either demo really requires a tablet. If this format is so compelling, why aren't these publications already offering it for use on regular computers? Certainly, the ability to use touchscreen controls is nice, but you could easily replicate the basics with a mouse. If the overall format is so compelling, then what does it have to do with a tablet/iPad, specifically? Now, perhaps Wired does intend for this to be useful on other platforms, as its version is just an Adobe AIR app, and so it could function just fine on a desktop/laptop, but again, the video seems to keep focusing on the tablet as if that's necessary. Yes, perhaps the form factor of a tablet computer makes this experience more enjoyable, but I think it's important in judging whether or not these apps actually make sense to separate the hardware from the software, to see if either makes sense without the other, or if they really are joined at the hip.

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Last month, at a panel in Silicon Valley on the future of journalism, one of the topics of discussion was whether or not tablet computing would be the "savior" of news, with most of the focus being on a recent video put together by Sports Illustrated of what a specialized tablet version of the magazine might look like. More recently, Wired Magazine demonstrated a working prototype of a tabletized version of the magazine. Both of these demos are certainly impressive -- but I'll say the same thing that I said about the SI demo on that panel discussion: why is the focus on the hardware? Nothing in either demo really requires a tablet. If this format is so compelling, why aren't these publications already offering it for use on regular computers? Certainly, the ability to use touchscreen controls is nice, but you could easily replicate the basics with a mouse. If the overall format is so compelling, then what does it have to do with a tablet/iPad, specifically? Now, perhaps Wired does intend for this to be useful on other platforms, as its version is just an Adobe AIR app, and so it could function just fine on a desktop/laptop, but again, the video seems to keep focusing on the tablet as if that's necessary. Yes, perhaps the form factor of a tablet computer makes this experience more enjoyable, but I think it's important in judging whether or not these apps actually make sense to separate the hardware from the software, to see if either makes sense without the other, or if they really are joined at the hip.

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Last month, at a panel in Silicon Valley on the future of journalism, one of the topics of discussion was whether or not tablet computing would be the "savior" of news, with most of the focus being on a recent video put together by Sports Illustrated of what a specialized tablet version of the magazine might look like. More recently, Wired Magazine demonstrated a working prototype of a tabletized version of the magazine. Both of these demos are certainly impressive -- but I'll say the same thing that I said about the SI demo on that panel discussion: why is the focus on the hardware? Nothing in either demo really requires a tablet. If this format is so compelling, why aren't these publications already offering it for use on regular computers? Certainly, the ability to use touchscreen controls is nice, but you could easily replicate the basics with a mouse. If the overall format is so compelling, then what does it have to do with a tablet/iPad, specifically? Now, perhaps Wired does intend for this to be useful on other platforms, as its version is just an Adobe AIR app, and so it could function just fine on a desktop/laptop, but again, the video seems to keep focusing on the tablet as if that's necessary. Yes, perhaps the form factor of a tablet computer makes this experience more enjoyable, but I think it's important in judging whether or not these apps actually make sense to separate the hardware from the software, to see if either makes sense without the other, or if they really are joined at the hip.

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Last month, at a panel in Silicon Valley on the future of journalism, one of the topics of discussion was whether or not tablet computing would be the "savior" of news, with most of the focus being on a recent video put together by Sports Illustrated of what a specialized tablet version of the magazine might look like. More recently, Wired Magazine demonstrated a working prototype of a tabletized version of the magazine. Both of these demos are certainly impressive -- but I'll say the same thing that I said about the SI demo on that panel discussion: why is the focus on the hardware? Nothing in either demo really requires a tablet. If this format is so compelling, why aren't these publications already offering it for use on regular computers? Certainly, the ability to use touchscreen controls is nice, but you could easily replicate the basics with a mouse. If the overall format is so compelling, then what does it have to do with a tablet/iPad, specifically? Now, perhaps Wired does intend for this to be useful on other platforms, as its version is just an Adobe AIR app, and so it could function just fine on a desktop/laptop, but again, the video seems to keep focusing on the tablet as if that's necessary. Yes, perhaps the form factor of a tablet computer makes this experience more enjoyable, but I think it's important in judging whether or not these apps actually make sense to separate the hardware from the software, to see if either makes sense without the other, or if they really are joined at the hip.

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Tim O'Keefe, Michael McIntyre, and Brock Roland of San Francisco State University's School of Engineering created MARV, here. That's "MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," of course. Which is a nested acronym, really. Crank it all the way out and it's "Musical Instrument Digital Interface Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," or MIDIARV, which is not nearly so catchy. Each key has two solenoids--a striker and a damper. Cool stuff. I wonder if you couldn't make one solenoid do both striking and damping? [via Hack a Day]

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Tim O'Keefe, Michael McIntyre, and Brock Roland of San Francisco State University's School of Engineering created MARV, here. That's "MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," of course. Which is a nested acronym, really. Crank it all the way out and it's "Musical Instrument Digital Interface Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," or MIDIARV, which is not nearly so catchy. Each key has two solenoids--a striker and a damper. Cool stuff. I wonder if you couldn't make one solenoid do both striking and damping? [via Hack a Day]

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Tim O'Keefe, Michael McIntyre, and Brock Roland of San Francisco State University's School of Engineering created MARV, here. That's "MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," of course. Which is a nested acronym, really. Crank it all the way out and it's "Musical Instrument Digital Interface Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," or MIDIARV, which is not nearly so catchy. Each key has two solenoids--a striker and a damper. Cool stuff. I wonder if you couldn't make one solenoid do both striking and damping? [via Hack a Day]

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Tim O'Keefe, Michael McIntyre, and Brock Roland of San Francisco State University's School of Engineering created MARV, here. That's "MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," of course. Which is a nested acronym, really. Crank it all the way out and it's "Musical Instrument Digital Interface Actuated Robotic Vibraphone," or MIDIARV, which is not nearly so catchy. Each key has two solenoids--a striker and a damper. Cool stuff. I wonder if you couldn't make one solenoid do both striking and damping? [via Hack a Day]

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holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on an analysis by Harvard researchers that suggests Google rakes in half a billion dollars annually from advertising that appears on typosquatting domains. They estimate that 60 per cent of typosquatting pages use Google ads, but the advertising giant declined to discuss whether it should be working with such pages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on an analysis by Harvard researchers that suggests Google rakes in half a billion dollars annually from advertising that appears on typosquatting domains. They estimate that 60 per cent of typosquatting pages use Google ads, but the advertising giant declined to discuss whether it should be working with such pages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on an analysis by Harvard researchers that suggests Google rakes in half a billion dollars annually from advertising that appears on typosquatting domains. They estimate that 60 per cent of typosquatting pages use Google ads, but the advertising giant declined to discuss whether it should be working with such pages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on an analysis by Harvard researchers that suggests Google rakes in half a billion dollars annually from advertising that appears on typosquatting domains. They estimate that 60 per cent of typosquatting pages use Google ads, but the advertising giant declined to discuss whether it should be working with such pages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest item of interest presented by Casper Electronics could easily take centerstage at the next hardware hacking social. Casper's Benjolin Light Synth provides an intense show of color as accompaniment for its broad and unpredictable sonic palette -

This piece is built around the 2 Benjolin circuits, which is a complex, analog sound generator designed by engineer/artist/super star Rob Hordijk. I've made a bunch of modifications and added a 3 channel light globe. The globe has three high intensity LED lights in it, RED, GREEN and BLUE. I'm able to grab different signals from the circuit (not JUST the audio signal) and send them to the lights, so each color is fading and strobing in a different pattern. The result is complex color mixing madness.

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CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks. The 86% mark for Windows 7 is more than twice the average number of Windows XP machines that run at the memory 'saturation' point, and this comes despite more RAM being available on most Windows 7 machines. 'This is alarming,' Barth said of Windows 7 machines' resource consumption. 'For the OS to be pushing the hardware limits this quickly is amazing. Windows 7 is not the lean, mean version of Vista that you may think it is.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a fascinating post on "foil impressioning" -- a simple lockpicking technique that uses the lock itself to fashion a working key out of soft aluminium tape. You just stick a key loaded with this stuff into a lock and wiggle it around in a special way and the lock opens itself.

Just brand new on the market is a kit that uses a clever technique to also open dimple locks that have a serious profile (and are not one solid square piece of metal). The kit was brought to my attention when visiting Israel with Jord Knaap and Han Fey last week. A local locksmith called Raf (well known from the UK bumpkey forum) invited us to his shop and proudly showed me this tool and technique. The way the tool works is that you first take some aluminum foil and make a 'U shaped' form (using the special tool to do so) and make small incisions on pre-determined positions. Next thing you do is put the foil over a special blank that already has the profile of your target lock. The clever thing about this tool is that the 'U shaped foil tube' is wrapped around some sort of needle, and the foil can not be pushed in when entering the lock! Once the key is inserted, the needle is taken out from the back of the tool, and the pins are now resting on the foil. Because of the cuts in the foil, each pin will stand on it's own 'island' of foil, and when it is pushed in will not disturb the neighboring pin! I have played around with it a little, and the design is really very clever and works fast and reliable!

Advanced foil impressioning (Thanks, Bruce!)

Reflecting on the VentureBeat report on big media companies' massively multiplayer online games for kids at the NYC Toy Fair, veteran game designer and entrepreneur Raph Koster points out that "kids worlds and media-driven worlds are probably more important than most all the AAA MMOs released 2007 to today. Whether that's a good thing... exercise for the reader."

Where's kids MMOs are at

This is just bizarre. As NBC continues its screwed up process of broadcasting the Olympics by delaying the actual telecast of important events until prime time, apparently a bunch of folks are pissed off that real news sources are reporting on what's actually happened. They're targeting the wrong thing, of course. If they're upset that the news is being reported before it's being shown on TV, the real problem is NBC's decision not to show stuff live on TV or to webcast it for those who would prefer to see it live. But people are taking out their anger on newspapers who are giving live reports of what's actually happening:

"Could you please ask the editor of the front Web page to not name the winners within the headlines/sub-headlines?" asked Ken Waters of Phoenix.  Matt Gooch of Harrisonburg, Va. said he was disappointed when The Times reported the results of the men's downhill before NBC showed the event.  "This is not Taliban news, nor TARP news, or even Paula Jones type news," Gooch said.  "There is no meaning to this except the anticipation and suspense that sports viewers feel watching the event live.  Please help me understand why your organization needs to spoil the experience."

Other news organizations are hearing similar complaints.  Liz Spayd, managing editor of The Washington Post, told a reader who asked for a spoiler alert yesterday that, "It's an issue we're trying to evaluate right now."  She said that it's a tricky question "for a news site whose greatest value is to break news. We don't want to be the game spoilers, but when big news happens -- an unexpected gold for the U.S., for example, we want it prominently visible on the site."

Thankfully, the NY Times "has no intention of changing its approach," recognizing that it's a news organization, rather than a business to prop up NBC's ridiculous broadcast scheduling choices.

This does highlight a larger issue that I've been noticing lately. In our more "real-time" society, especially with things like Facebook and Twitter, the idea that you can hide from "spoilers" is increasingly arcane. Now, for most broadcasters (other than NBC, apparently) this should represent good news: as it will drive more people to watch content live, rather than trying to save it for later, since they'll want to avoid spoilers ahead of time. In this case, though, NBC has apparently decided that it knows better than to enable such things.

Of course, plenty of people are smart enough to realize just how badly NBC is managing this, falsely believing that people will just sit and wait until NBC decides to show what it wants, rather than letting people actuallyfollow what's happening. News reports are popping up highlighting how many people are pissed off at NBC for the ridiculous decision to hide live events in a real-time world. With the end result being that NBC's brand is being dragged through the mud for not understanding how to broadcast a sporting event in a real-time world:

"In the age of DVRs, Hulu, and mobile phone scoreboards, the pointlessness of NBC's broadcast strategy -- Olympics and otherwise -- has never been more obvious. People don't eat dinner during Nightly News then settle in for three hours of prime-time network programming anymore. They want things when they want them, not when NBC wants them."

NBC's bizarre reasoning for this is that it wants to put all the "highlight" moments during prime time when it can sell the most advertising. But, apparently no one there thought that perhaps they could show the actual events live and then use prime time for a nice summary of what happened that day at the Olympics. In that way, they might actually get more viewers. If you ever wanted the epitome of a company still living in the last century, it appears to be NBC Universal.

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Pentax has posted a firmware update for its K-7 mid-level DSLR. Version 1.03 provides lens correction compatibility for additional FA lenses, improves movie recording stability with specific SDHC cards and offers minor usability improvements. The firmware is available for immediate download from Pentax's website.

These stylish and attractive small batch iPhone cases from EXOvault are machined from solid pieces of billet aluminum. They add a retro-futuristic charm to something already heavy on the futuristic.[Thanks, Revolverkiller!]

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The Copyright Agency Limited, an Australian copyright collecting society (an organization that collects money on behalf of authors for use of their copyrighted works) is spending more than half the money they collect than they give to authors on their own salaries and expenses. The Chief Executive is paying himself AU$350,000 a year out of the money that he is meant to serve as trustee for. They've also paid for staff junkets to China and Barbados out of the sums. All told, the staff are spending AU$9.4 million a year, and giving the creators whom they are meant to serve AU$9.1 million per year.

Among the highest paid at CAL was its chief executive Jim Alexander, who earned more than $350,000 last year, while another senior staff member earned between $250,000 and $299,000, another between $200,000 and 249,000, and five others between $150,000 and $199,000. A further 21 staff earned between $100,000 and $149,000.

In addition, the agency spent more than $300,000 on travel for its top executives, including a trip for its three senior executives to an International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations conference in Barbados, and a trip for four employees and board members to the Beijing Writers Festival...

In response to questions put to the agency by The Australian, CAL defended the proportion of its budget spent on salaries. "While licensing revenue grows, the complexity of CAL's business continues to require investment in systems and process improvements to achieve operational efficiencies and, in particular, to integrate with new international standards," Mr Alexander said. "Appointing and retaining key managerial staff to lead CAL through these system change projects is integral to its efficiency."

Copyright staff get more than they give to authors and artists (Thanks, Dr Matthew Rimmer!)

Sony has released the DSC-H55 compact superzoom, featuring an image stabilized 10x (25-250mm equiv.) zoom lens. A simplified version of the recently released HX5, it features a 14MP CCD sensor rather than a back-illuminated CMOS sensor, standard 720p HD video recording and leaves out the HX5's GPS and compass. It incorporates a 3 inch LCD and features such as Sweep Panorama and SD card compatibilty.

schliz writes "The Federal Court has ordered an Australian distributor to pay Nintendo over half a million dollars for selling the R4 mod chip, which allows users to circumvent technology protection measures in Nintendo's DS consoles. The distributor, RSJ IT Solutions, has been ordered to cease selling the chip through its gadgetgear.com.au site and any other sites it controls, as well as paying Nintendo $520,000 in damages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Rules of Thumb (which doesn't seem to have permalinks?): "Between two barbers in a shop, choose the one with the worst haircut. They cut each other's hair. Submitted by: George Cameron, Wilmington, NC, USA"

I definitely agreed with others that Google's failure to realize the potential privacy problems of automating followers based on who you talk to the most -- and then making that info public -- was a privacy mistake, but is it worth a class action lawsuit? To lawyers, of course it is. These days, if you do anything that people don't like, you can pretty much expect a class action lawsuit that really serves only one purpose: to enrich the lawyers bringing the class action lawsuit. So, it comes as no surprise that a class action lawsuit have been filed against Google for the Buzz privacy mishap. But, really, is this necessary? The company quickly admitted it had made a mistake and changed things. At this point, what good does a class action lawsuit do? It's not like the company hid something bad and tried to avoid taking responsibility for it. Class action lawsuits can have real value, but in this case, it's a pure money grab.

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According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don't know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I'm getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.

Schools are in an absolute panic about kids divulging too much online, worried about pedos and marketers and embarrassing photos that will haunt you when you run for office or apply for a job in 10 years. They tell kids to treat their personal details as though they were precious.

But when schools take that personal information, indiscriminately invading privacy (and, of course, punishing students who use proxies and other privacy tools to avoid official surveillance), they send a much more powerful message: your privacy is worthless and you shouldn't try to protect it.

Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (PDF) (Thanks, Roland!)

(Image: IMG_6395, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from bionicteaching's photostream)

Adobe will celebrate 20 years of its flagship Photoshop image editing software on February 19, 2010. Since the launch of version 1.0 in 1990, the software has been developed and features added to take into account the changing needs of different industries (not least the arrival of the Internet), helping it to become the de facto industry standard. To mark its anniversary, the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) in the US will host an event, presided over by the company's senior management and the co-creators of the software, Thomas and John Knoll.

My latest Internet Evolution column, "Copyright Undercover: ACTA & the Web," talks about the absurd tea-leaf-reading exercise that we have to engage in to figure out what's actually happening with negotiations for a far-reaching, secret copyright treaty that could change the face of the web, privacy, creativity, competition, and commerce.

As the seventh round of secret negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) concluded last month in Guadalajara, Mexico, the radio silence on the negotiations was near-total. Like the Kremlinologists of the Soviet Union, we're left trying to interpret the clues that leaked out from beneath the closed door.

Here's what we know: The idea that major copyright treaties should be negotiated in secret is losing traction around the world. Legislators from all the ACTA negotiating countries are demanding that this process be opened up to the press, activist groups, and the public.

In response, trade reps are making the bizarre claim that none of the treaty language will result in major changes to their countries' laws, only the other countries will have to change. (Since all these countries have irreconcilably different copyright systems, someone is lying. My money is on all of them.)

Finally, we have some idea of how ACTA's masters view public participation: During the bland "public meeting" held before the negotiations got underway, an activist was thrown out for tweeting an account of the assurances being mouthed by those on the podium. As she was led away, she was booed by the lobbyists who are able to participate in the treaty from which mere citizens are excluded.

This issue is an embarrassment for all concerned, a naked bit of crony-capitalism that has so much more at stake than mere copyright. It needs to stop. Read on for how it came to this, and what you can do to stop it.

Copyright Undercover: ACTA & the Web

Holy moly did I ever want one of these pole-and-pennant jobs for my bike when I was about seven. You know what? Looking at this ad, I still want one. It has the desiderata current.

7Up Bicycle Pole n' Pennant Offer

Artist Adam Voorhes has created a series of exploded images of everyday objects, including an Etch-a-Sketch, a handgun, a frog, and a rotary phone (my favorite, pictured here. Man, that thing is a tank).

Exploded (via Neatorama)

My day was made much more pleasant by this Wonderland tourist board poster, created by Mr Bluebird on DeviantArt. Bravo!

Wonderland by *Mr-Bluebird (via Super Punch)

Here's a new Star Wars Stormtrooper toy that has been executed as a loving recreation of the classic Japanese Super Shogun toys, complete with rocket punch fist:

The Star Wars Stormtrooper Super Shogun stands a whopping 24 inches tall, and includes all of the features that you expect from an authentic Jumbo: free rotating wheels on the bottom of his feet, and a spring-loaded Rocket Punch firing fist!

Utilizing the same techniques implemented by Japanese toy manufacturers in the 1970s, the Super Shogun is constructed from durable, blow-molded polyethylene with a painted vinyl helmet. The figure is articulated at the neck and shoulders, and includes a removable, highly-detailed BlasTech E-11 laser blaster. The blaster even features a posable stock that unfolds from below the barrel. Collectors of both Japanese and Star Wars memorabilia are sure to be impressed with the care taken to fuse the disparate concepts into a new unique entity.

Super Shogun StormTrooper (Thanks, Francesco!)

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has revealed that it RickRolled users that were killing its TechEd conference WiFi network last year by torrenting large files. Network administrators at the event quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local web server containing some RickRoll scripts. According to the admin: 'It killed me that I didn't see anyone getting done by this first hand, but there were hundreds of impressions in the server logs containing the the Rick Roll scripts so I did get a fair amount of satisfaction at least. It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too — worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past.' Fun and games aside, it looks like the leechers will force quotas and traffic shaping for the first time in the event's history."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Called a "scalable actuated shape display", this project by Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf, and Hiroshi Ishii of MIT's Tangible Media Group seems especially suited for displaying terrain.

Relief is an actuated tabletop display, which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. It allows users to experience and form digital models like geographical terrain in an intuitive manner. The tabletop surface is actuated by an array of 120 motorized pins, which are controlled with a platform built upon open-source hardware and software tools. Each pin can be addressed individually and senses user input like pulling and pushing.

[via the Eyebeam ReBlog]

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In response to my "Lost Knowledge" column on sign painting (aka signwriting), one of our readers, peterman921, himself a signwriter from Southern, Oregon, sent us links to some YouTube videos of the craft. The one above is by Alicia Jennings, aka monkeysign123 on YouTube, a big rig 'striper and signwriter from the Great Northwest. This video of her painting on glass, viewed from the opposite side, so perfectly captures my childhood experience of seeing a signwriter at work while getting my hair cut, as recounted in my piece.

Monkeysign123's YouTube Channel

More:

• Lost Knowledge: Sign painting

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A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm in San Diego through Monday, attending the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. This pic comes direct from the lab tours I went on Wednesday afternoon. Starting Thursday, I'll be updating you with highlights from this annual gathering of the world's largest general scientific society. Or, at least, the highlights I get to see. One of the wonderful/frustrating things about AAAS is that there always seems to be at least three lectures I'd love to hear running simultaneously. Together, we'll learn some cool stuff this week—and still only scratch the surface.

We've had numerous posts lately about jurisdiction questions raised online, and PRK alerts us to a case in the UK where two men were convicted for publishing racist information online. The jurisdictional question came in because the content itself was hosted on servers in California. The court said that UK law still applied because the actual action of creating the content was done by the two men in the UK, and it was then just uploaded to the server elsewhere. While there are serious concerns over "libel tourism" type cases in the UK, in this case I can understand the reasoning behind the ruling. The actions themselves took place in the UK, so it does make sense to try the men there.

Of course, there are some other issues related to the case, including the court saying it didn't matter whether or not anyone in the UK had actually seen the content -- which seems a bit odd. While the content ran afoul of some sort of hate speech laws in the UK, it does seem reasonable to ask whether or not the content itself was ever actually seen by anyone, but the court found otherwise:

"The point that there cannot be publication without a publishee is in our judgment fundamentally misconceived," he said. "It is based on an irrelevant comparison with the law of libel. Libel is a tort or civil wrong where it is necessary for the claimant to prove that the words complained of were published of him and were defamatory of him ... the offences of displaying, distributing or publishing racially inflammatory written material do not require proof that anybody actually read or heard the material."

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mu22le writes "Enlightenment, the daring window manager that disappeared from our collective radar years ago is back to bring Ubuntu to ARM. The bet that E developers made years ago to neglect 3d, compositing, and realize a fast and versatile 2.5d engine may have finally payed off. The new market for ARM based devices everybody that is so hot right now could be a niche the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries can fill comfortably."

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