A few days ago, we ran word of a report alleging that Windows 7 consumed more memory than it should, based on a report from Devil Mountain Software; a followup post linked to Ars Technica's robust deconstruction of that claim. Now the story gets weird: Fred Flowers writes The original story quoted the company's CTO, Craig Barth on the issue. Now, InfoWorld editor in chief Eric Knorr has still more to add. From Knorr's blog at InfoWorld.com: 'On Friday, Feb. 19, we discovered that one of our contributors, Randall C. Kennedy, had been misrepresenting himself to other media organizations as Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software (aka exo.performance.network), in interviews for a number of stories regarding Windows and other Microsoft software topics. ... There is no Craig Barth.' Knorr's post goes on to say that Kennedy has been fired from his blogging gig at InfoWorld over this 'serious breach of trust,' and that his blog will be removed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

roju writes "Cory Doctorow is reporting on a leaked copy of the 'internet enforcement' portion of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. He describes it as reading like a 'DMCA-plus' with provisions for third-party liability, digital locks, and 'a duty to technology firms to shut down infringement where they have "actual knowledge" that such is taking place.' For example, this could mean legal responsibility shifting to Apple for customers copying mp3s onto their iPods." Adds an anonymous reader, "Michael Geist points out that the leaks demonstrate that ACTA would create a Global DMCA and move toward a three-strikes-and-you're-out system. While the US has claimed that ACTA won't establish a mandatory three strikes system, it specifically uses three-strikes as its model."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Linux Terminal Server Project has for years been simplifying the task of time-sharing a Linux system by means of X terminals (including repurposed low-end PCs). Now, stgraber writes "After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, the LTSP team is proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. As the LTSP team wanted this release to be some kind of a reference point in LTSP's history, LDM (LTSP Display Manager) 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 were released on the same day. Packages for LTSP 5.2, LDM 2.1 and LTSPfs 0.6 are already in Ubuntu Lucid and a backport for Karmic is available. For other distributions, packages should be available very soon. And the upstream code is as always, available on Launchpad."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PMA 2010: Sony bosses are ‘pushing’ the company to produce a 3D digital camera, according to Masashi ‘Tiger’ Imamura President of Sony’s Personal Imaging and Sound Business group.

theodp writes "After the morning commute from his Las Vegas apartment, Air Force captain Sam Nelson sits in a padded chair inside a low, tan building in Nevada, controlling a heavily armed drone aircraft soaring over Afghanistan, prepared to kill another human being 7,500 miles away if necessary. Welcome to the surreal world of drone pilots, who have a front-row seat on war from half a world away. 'On the drive out here, you get yourself ready to enter the compartment of your life that is flying combat,' explained retired Col. Chris Chambliss. 'And on the drive home, you get ready for that part of your life that's going to be the soccer game.' No wonder why the Air Force is interested in the Xbox LIVE crowd and the Army's opened a new arcade recruitment center!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Someone has uploaded a PDF to a Google Group that is claimed to be the proposal for Internet copyright enforcement that the USA has put forward for ACTA, the secret copyright treaty whose seventh round of negotiations just concluded in Guadalajara, Mexico. This reads like it probably is genuine treaty language, and if it is the real US proposal, it is the first time that this material has ever been visible to the public. According to my source, the US proposal is the current version of the treaty as of the conclusion of the Mexico round.

I've read it through a few times and it reads a lot like DMCA-plus. It contains, for example, a duty to technology firms to shut down infringement where they have "actual knowledge" that such is taking place. This argument was put forward in the Grokster case, and as Fred von Lohmann argued then, this is a potentially deadly burden to place on technology companies: in the offline world Xerox has "actual knowledge" that its technology is routinely used to infringe copyright at Kinko's outlets around the world -- should that create a duty to stop providing sales and service to Kinko's?

This also includes takedown procedures for trademark infringement, as well as the existing procedures against copyright infringement. Since trademark infringement is a lot harder for a service provider to adjudicate (and since things that might be trademark infringement take place every time you do something as innocuous as taking a photo of a street-scene that contains hundreds or thousands of trademarks), this sounds like a potential disaster to me.

This calls on all parties to ensure that "third party liability" (the idea that ISPs, web-hosts, application developers, mobile carriers, universities, apartment buildings, and other "third parties" to infringement are sometimes liable for their users' copyright infringements) is on the books in their countries. It doesn't spell out what that liability should be, beyond "knowingly and materially aiding" an infringement -- see the Kinko's point above for why this is potentially deadly.

And, of course, this contains the DMCA's injunction against breaking digital locks (that is, circumventing DRM), even though this provision has been in international treaties since 1996 and has done nothing to reduce infringement, has never shown itself to be effective in shoring up the power of these technologies to prevent copies, and has introduced enormous anti-competitive effects into the market.

Also buried in a footnote is a provision for forcing ISPs to terminate customers who've been accused -- but not convicted -- of copyright infringement (along with their families and anyone else who happens to share their net connection).

There's plenty more here -- and we don't know what the rest of the treaty reads like, or what the competing drafts said -- and I'm sure that more astute legal scholars than I will be along shortly with their commentary.

Update: Here's an IDG report on the leak, with more analysis.

Article 2.17: Enforcement procedures in the digital environment (PDF)

My mirror (PDF)

(Thanks, Paolo!)

This laser-sintered 3D-printed shoe, by Naim Josefi and Souzan Youssouf, was displayed at Stockholm's Fashion Week. If only it was made out of the kind of milk-based bioplastic that smells like rice pudding, well, shiny shiny shiny pumps of dairy!

The Melonia Shoe: A world's first? Wearable 3D printed footwear (via Make)

tekgoblin writes "The Lower Merion School District of Pennsylvania was recently accused of privacy invasion. Now the school has released an official response to the allegations. According to the school, the security feature was installed in the laptops as an anti-theft device and was not intended to invade privacy. The software that was installed would take a photo of the person using the laptop after it was stolen to give to the authorities. Now this may be what it was intended for, but it seems that someone didn't get the memo." The district's claim that it "has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever" doesn't square with the allegations which set off this whole storm. And if there was nothing wrong with it, why does the school say it won't start using the snooping feature again without "express written notification to all students and families"?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fashion design students Naim Josefi and Souzan Youssouf created the shoes using a technique called selective laser sintering, and displayed them at the Stockholm Fashion Show. [via core77]

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An anonymous reader writes "Twitter users are being warned not to click on messages saying "'ol, this is funny,' as they can lead to their account details being stolen. A widespread attack has hit Twitter this weekend, tricking users into logging into a fake Twitter page — and thus handing their account details over to hackers. Messages include Lol. this is me?? / lol , this is funny. / ha ha, u look funny on here / Lol. this you?? followed by a link in the form of http://example/ [dot] com/?rid=http://twitter.verify.bzpharma [dot] net/login, where 'example.com' can vary. Clicking on the link redirects users to the second-half of the link, where the fake login page is hosted. In a video and blog entry, computer security firm Sophos is warning users that it is not just Twitter direct messages (DMs) that carry the poisoned links, but they are appearing on public profiles due to services such as GroupTweet which republish direct messages. Sophos also reports that the site being used for the Twitter phishing has also been constructed to steal information from users of the Bebo social network. Affected users are advised to change their passwords immediately."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Esther Schindler writes "It's easy for techies to enumerate the reasons that Internet Explorer 6 should die. Although the percentage of users who use IE6 has dropped to about 12%, many web developers are forced to make sure their websites work with the ancient browser (which presents additional problems, such as keeping their companies from upgrading to newer versions of Windows). But rather than indulge in an emotional rant, in 'Why You Can't Pry IE6 Out Of Their Cold Dead Hands,' I set about to find out why the companies that remain standardized on IE6 haven't upgraded (never mind to what). In short: user and business-owner ignorance and/or disinterest in new technology; being stuck with a critical business app that relies on IE6; finding a budget to update internal IE6 apps that will work the same as they used to; and keeping users away from newer Web 2.0 sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PMA 2010: Sony has decided to keep no secrets and has outlined its forthcoming plans for 2010, including an APS-C competitor for micro Four Thirds. The company has mockup images of a compact, slimline camera, plus three lenses including a currently-fashionable pancake prime. Alpha SLR enthusiasts will be heartened by a promised successor to the highly-regarded A700 that will shoot AVCHD video, shown alongside an as-yet unidentified, smaller video-capable body. Finally the high end is catered for by an upcoming Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 24mm F2 wideangle lens, and a 500mm F4 G telephoto in what appears to be the same silver finish as graces the 80-400mm F4-5.6.

The Israeli air force unveils a fleet of unmanned aerial drones it says can fly as far as Iran. Officials say the Heron TP drones are about the size of passenger jets, with an 86-foot wingspan, and can fly 20 consecutive hours.

PMA 2010: The show is about to start but first there's a press conference on the Sony stand. We're blogging live from the site to bring you all the latest news about their intentions. Click through and refresh the page for the latest updates.

An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Roughly Drafted: "I'm a full-time Flash developer and I'd love to get paid to make Flash sites for the iPad. I want that to make sense — but it doesn't. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen — and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about: current Flash sites could never be made to work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware. That's not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It's because of the hover or mouseover problem. ... All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This excellent video features Stanford's Derrick Davis and Tom McFadden rapping about glycolysis and pyruvates. [via Tierneylab]

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theodp writes "After establishing that nothing can excuse Joe Stack's murderous intentional plane crash into an IRS office, a NY Times Op-Ed explains the reference in Stack's suicide note to an obscure federal tax law — Section 1706 of the 1986 tax act — which the software engineer claimed declared him a 'criminal and non-citizen slave' and ruined his career. Interestingly, a decade-old NY Times article on Section 1706 pretty much agreed: 'The immediate effect of these [Section 1706] audits is to force individual programmers ... to abandon their dreams of getting rich off their high-technology skills.' Section 1706, the NYT Op-Ed concludes, 'is an example of how Congress enacted a discriminatory law that hurt thousands of technology consultants, their staffing firms and customers. And despite strong bipartisan efforts and unbiased studies supporting that law's repeal, it remains on the books.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes "Sony recently announced it would halt sales of its 11" OLED TV in Japan, where the panel first debuted. For now, the XEL-1 will remain on sale in the US and other markets, but Sony's decision to kill the unit in its home market and reduce the rate at which it's investing in future OLED TV development has been perceived in some corners as a judgment on the long-term feasibility of OLED technology. In the wake of Sony's announcement, far too many pundits have rushed to declare OLED panels dead, dying, moribund, or otherwise abandoned. However, it seems more likely at this juncture that we'll see development focus shift from large panel sizes to smaller ones, particularly since the smartphone/handheld OLED market is growing briskly and larger screens are inherently more prone to defects. Sadly, this means that your chance of traipsing home with a truly cutting-edge display before 2014 or so could be pretty minimal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Niris writes "I'm currently taking a course called Advanced Java Programming, which is using the text book Absolute Java, 4th edition, by Walter Savitch. As I work at night as a security guard in the middle of nowhere, I've had enough time to read through the entire course part of the book, finish all eleven chapter quizzes, and do all of the assignments within a month, so all that's left is a group assignment that won't be ready until late April. I'm trying to figure out what else to read that's Java related aside from the usual 'This is how to create a tree. This is recursion. This is how to implement an interface and make an anonymous object,' and wanted to see what Slashdotters have to suggest. So far I'm looking at reading Beginning Algorithms, by Simon Harris and James Ross."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that Chatroulette, the social Web site created by a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, drops you into an unnerving world where you are connected through webcams to a random, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe. The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click 'start' you're suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they're staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click 'next,' instantly calling up someone else. Entering Chatroulette is akin to speed-dating tens of thousands of perfect strangers — some clothed, some not. You see them, they see you. You talk to them, they talk to you. 'It's very strange, and not just because you are parachuting into someone else's life (and they yours), a kind of invited crasher,' writes Nick Bilton. 'It is also the eerie thrill of true randomness — who, or what, will show up next?' The Web has long allowed anonymous conversations among strangers. Text-based chat rooms are rife with deceit — people pretending they are someone else. Video makes this harder — even if you're wearing a mask. 'From my experience on the site, echoed by those I've spoken to, it seems as if 90 percent of users are genuinely looking for novel and unexpected conversation,' add Bilton. 'The rest — well, let's just say they have debauchery in mind.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The President is checking out a ShopBot, in our lifetime we'll have a FabLab in the Whitehouse... not a matter of if, just when :)

Unfortunately this photo set from New York magazine's Daily Intel is called "A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things" - most/all of the photos are of the president looking at manufacturing, equipment, factories, laboratories, and workshops - the author of the article describes this mundane. To me, it seems like the author is poking fun at how boring this must all be, but I think having the leader of the free world tour factories, laboratories, and workshops is worth celebrating. I don't think the President is "faking interesting" as the author writes. These are great Americans, great companies, making great things, you can see in the photos how proud they are of what they are doing - we're all trying to support more manufacturing, get kids interested in science and engineering - it's not mundane - it's the most exciting thing our country has going for us, we need more of this :) So, here's my plan - I'm going to try and contact Dan Amira (the author of the article) - and see if he'll come out to Maker Faire NYC or to Maker Faire, CA - there's probably going to be over 100,000 people at our Faires all together. Makers from all walks of life, showing what they made, you won't find anything mundane Dan. You might see some of the same people from that slideshow, some of the same equipment (like the ShopBot) but Maker Faire is everything *but* mundane, hopefully we can get the President to stop in too. Dan, if you see this - I have some Maker Faire tickets for you, email me!

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Ross-Shire Geek writes "Atlas V lifted off on Feb 11 from Kennedy. As it goes supersonic through a sundog (aka parhelion) you can see (video link) wonderful visible ripples of the shock wave in the sky."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PMA 2010: Casio has announced the Exilim EX-S7 and EX-Z35 digital compacts. Both offer 12MP sensors, 3x (35-106mm equiv.) zoom lenses and feature direct web upload options. The EX-S7 comes with 720p HD video recording and has a slightly larger LCD size of 2.7” compared to the EX-Z35’s 2.5". They also feature a Dynamic Photo option that enables users to add graphics and create e-greetings in camera.

The New York Times reports that stone tools discovered on the Greek island of Crete, and reported last month at an academic conference, are strong evidence for rethinking the maritime capabilities of early humans. The researchers who found the tools (hand-axes, cleavers, and scrapers) estimate them to be at least 130,000 years old; if they're right, humans have been traveling long distances at sea (Crete is 200 miles from the northern African coastline) for at least several tens of thousands of years longer than earlier believed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fans of Robert Anton Wilson, the Principia Discordia, and the Church of the Subgenius will appreciate this delightful logo. To understand (or rather experience the illusion that you understand) the meaning of "fnord," I direct you first to the references I listed above, the contents of which are inextricably linked to the original bOING bOING print 'zine, and also the Fnord wikipedia page, where I found the image above.

I dig these geek chic molecular necklaces featured in our Boing Boing Bazaar at the Makers Market! Above is caffeine (left) and dopamine (right). Also available: serotonin, DMT, and others! Makers Market: Made With Molecules

I know Mark will be embarrassed that I posted this, but I just can't resist. Seen here is the fantastic cover for Mark's new book, Made By Hand: Searching For Meaning In A Throwaway World, due out May 27. (And yes, he made those cigar box guitars himself.) Congrats, buddy! We're so proud of you!

Dotnaught writes "Photoshop co-creator Russell Brown asked Ansca Mobile to re-create Photoshop 1.0, originally introduced in 1990, for the iPhone. The resulting app, created in three days using the Corona SDK, was distributed to 50 attendees of an event celebrating Photoshop's 20th anniversary. Programmer Evan Kirchhoff in a blog post explains that Ansca took the project on to prove its claims about how Corona makes iPhone development faster."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So I don't want to go too far down the "funny warning signs" rabbit hole (you could get a whole blog out of that, I think), but a commenter on last Tuesday's "Big Scary Laser" post linked to this design, of hers, to be mounted on robot power tools. I get a huge kick out of the giant menacing robot with the buzz-saw hand. [Thanks, Jennifer Elaan!]

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I don't think I've ever seen as unique a Lego creation as this "eco punk" mobile town, created by Dave DeGobbi. (Click for a bigger pic!)

Crawler town roams the barren wastes of a post steam-punk world after cataclysmic climate change do to excessive coal use. Several such cities exist but Crawler town is the most popular due to the Aero 500 hydrogen fuel cell Air races that are held. Many people travel the wastes to Crawler town for vacation and to enjoy rare luxuries like Pizza, fresh vegetables and Beer. Travelling the wastes in search of minerals and aquifers ( vital for survival) the mobility of the city keeps it away from the vicious sand storms of the wastes.

Also check out Dave's Goliath airship creation. [via the ever-awesome Brothers Brick]

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An anonymous reader writes with word of ongoing work at Scripps Research Institute: "Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules."

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Fra Fondi, of Hobby Media, writes:

To celebrate the anime "Sora no Otoshimono," which depicted hundreds of girl's panties flying like birds, the Japanese company Questioners has produced a series of rubber-band powered Panty Ornithopters. On march 6th these flying pants will be liberated in the skyes of Akihabara during the model rocketry event "Sorafes" (translated "Sky Festival").

Among the organizers of the event there is an amateur group of aspiring web-livecasters called NKH and Nicotech, an open Internet community of Sunday engineers

I am utterly speechless (and anybody who knows me will understand the rarity of such an occurrence).

Flying Panty Ornithopters!

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