Thursday, December 12, 2002

Your genitals as refrigerator magnets
The Match-Your-Snatch and Clone-Your-Bone kits contain everything you need to make a colorful plastic casting of your (or a loved one's) reproductive organs. Link Discuss (Via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:12 permanent link to this entry

Wardriver bumper-stickers
Wardriver bumper-stickers: $3 gets you a high-quality stretch of weatherproof vinyl that lets you tell the world about your k-rad geek hobby! Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:11 permanent link to this entry

Thurmond's stump-speech video-clip
So, how inexcusable is it for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to have avowed his support for Strom Thurmond's last presedential bid? Here's clip from the Daily Show with an excerpt of one of Thurmond's stump-speeches:

"What I want to tell you...Ladies and Gentlemen...That there's not enough troops in the Army...to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."

Rural India's cellphone-salesmen on bicycles
India's most remote villages are getting cellular phones, thanks to bicycle-riding commissioned sales-agents who tour the back-country selling their wares:

The group behind the initiative is the nonprofit Grameen Sanchar Seva Organization, known as GRASSO. Its goal is to use telecom and IT to strengthen the distribution network of agricultural produce -- rural India's mainstay -- and make it more profitable for villagers whose livelihoods depend on it.

War on Terror makes the case for ACLU membership
The war on terror -- with its fallacious premise that security must come at freedom's expense -- has driven membership in the ACLU. Tuesday night, at the EFF open house party, John Perry Barlow delivered a short speech in which he thanked Fritz Hollings, Michael Eisner, Jamie Kellner, Donald Rumsfeld, "Dreaded Real Admiral" John Poindexter and Dubya for providing such vivid object-lessons that make the case for joining EFF.

"Larger numbers of American people have realized that the ACLU is fundamentally a patriotic organization. executive director Anthony Romero said. There are now 330,000 dues-paying members, 50,000 of whom joined after the attacks.

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

What flight engineers can learn from butterfly wingstrokes
Interesting NYT story about what's revealed in an amazing batch of high-speed digital photos of flying butterflies taken by University of Oxford researchers. Excerpt:

This is the first time that anyone has captured images that show what the wing beats of free-flying insects do to the air they flutter on. (Other visual studies have used tethered insects, moths, for example, glued to a lightweight rod.) The red admiral butterflies, moving without restraint, show an extraordinary agility and complexity in their flight. Not only do they use many different wing strokes, they use them on successive wing beats.

"One insect uses all the known aerodynamic methods that anybody has conjectured," said Dr. Adrian L. R. Thomas, an author with Dr. Robert B. Srygley, now a visiting researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, of a report published today in the journal Nature. "That's a big surprise."

Link (registration required) Discuss (Gracias, vaquera al reves)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 22:20 permanent link to this entry

Random butt-ugly website
Just saw this url posted on an LA web developers' list. It's the kind of gui that makes you say "please, please pass the Dramamine." But there's something comfortably gauche about how bad this site looks, too--it's like listening to your 17-year-old gawky cousin do an earnest but off-key karaoke rendition of the theme from "Grease". That circa-1996-blink-tag-vibe makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. It's got that elusive je ne sais WTF. Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 20:25 permanent link to this entry

Vast online gallery of flight attendant uniforms
Collection of nearly 220 different female flight attendant uniforms from various international airlines. At left: a super-fly 1970s uniform from Allegheny Airlines, back when we called 'em stewardesses.

Work that fine bag of dry-roasted peanuts, Miss Lufthansa!

Link Discuss (Thanks, asobi!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 18:27 permanent link to this entry

Gateway builds 14 teraflop cluster
Gateway is taking 8,000 computers out of excess inventory and turning them into a 14 teraflop (14 trillion floating point operations/second) parallel supercomputer, and renting out time on the system to supercomputing junkies. Link Discuss (Thanks, ronks!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 17:35 permanent link to this entry

$10 from every copy of BBEdit to EFF
BareBones Software, makers of BBEdit -- the greatest text editor ever -- are giving $10 to EFF from every copy of BBEdit sold this month. I wrote my last two novels in BBEdit, I compose blog entries in BBEdit, I use it for html composition, I use it to diff documents as we work on them around the office. Not only do these guys make wicked-swell software, but they also support electronic liberty. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 17:18 permanent link to this entry

Total Information Flowchart
The Total Information Awareness flowchart: more proof that pure evil is pure banality. Link Discuss (via AaronSw)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 17:07 permanent link to this entry

Agoraphone: be the voice of the sculpture
Agoraphone: call (617) 253-6237 and speak through a sculpture in the middle of the MIT campus.

Is there something you have been aching to express or discuss, but for one reason or another have not yet found a way to feel comfortable doing so? Dial AgoraPhone! Upon calling, but before being connected directly through to the public, you will be greeted by a recorded voice giving a few details about AgoraPhone and tips on how to use the features. AgoraPhone preserves anonymity in that it performs no caller ID and records no logs. There is even the option of voice masking so that no one can recognize you. You can try on your voice before anyone else can hear you, to make sure you are happy with it. Whenever you are ready, the connection through to the public space is made by pressing the # key on the phone you are calling from. A full duplex audio link is then opened between you and the people and happenings in the remote public site of the AgoraPhone sculpture.

WiFi vs. 3G: Wireless Smackdown!
Chris writes:

Bell Canada is trialing WiFi hotspots - I've got links to the Bell site, the press release, and to newpaper articles about the launch, then followed by a discussion of why a major 3G cellular carrier is setting up 802.11b hotspots. Isn't this going to reduce the attractiveness of high-speed cellular data services?

Celebrity iPods
Apple's making supastah-branded iPods, like these for Beck, Madonna, and Tony Hawk.

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 16:11 permanent link to this entry

Six Degrees of Elvis
Enter the name of any actor and see how many links he or she is from Elvis. I thought I'd stump it by entering Toshiro Mifune, but he has an Elvis number of 2. I also tried Traci Lords; she has an Elvis number of 2, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sean!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 16:07 permanent link to this entry

Honda debuts an upgraded, walking robot
Honda debuted a new and improved version of its four-foot-tall, walking robot "Asimo" today. The child-sized 'bot can walk, climb stairs, recognize voices, and understand human gestures and movements.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Gatfishing!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 16:03 permanent link to this entry

Retro-tech gallery
Jed describes "The Museum of Retro Technology" as

A lovely little site showcasing pneumatic tube diagrams, the Auxetophone compressed-air audio amplification system, the 1903 Louis Brennan gryoscopic monorail, etc.... Also includes a link to Pneumatic Tube Products Co. which apparently still creates and maintains pneumatic tube systems -- zowie. Plus, they make a Windows-based tube-system controller. The mind boggles.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 15:53 permanent link to this entry

Kola Boof: 'Net persona, writer, Bin Laden's ex-girlfriend--or hoax?
Interesting NYT story about the controversy surrounding Sudan-born writer and web-celeb Kola Boof:

[T]he Kola Boof story demonstrates how flashpoints are reached in cyberspace, the new forum for underground literature and politics, where fact and myth become indistinguishable and publicity campaigns become a kind of performance art. Without the imprimatur of a major publisher or a mainstream review or a public appearance, she has managed to instigate anger and discussion about her work.

Ms. Boof said a fatwa was ordered up on her in London for her stand against organized religion, but particularly against Arab Muslims. Sudanese officials in London, however, said that was not true. One of those officials did denounce her in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a leading Arab-language newspaper in the United Kingdom. A number of well-known African-American activists have taken up her causes, which include her opposition to slavery in the Sudan and her condemnation of stoning and female castration and other harsh measures taken against African women. (...)

Ms. Boof's Web site appeared on the Internet a few months ago, presenting her as a mysterious but alluring figure, whose life provided a potent brew of international politics, diplomatic and sexual -- part Graham Greene, part Jacqueline Susann. Among other things, she claims she briefly was Osama bin Laden's mistress, in the late 1990's.

Link to NYT story (registration required) Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:16 permanent link to this entry

New hub for crap-swappers: Trodo
Leah writes about the December 8 launch of Trodo.com:

Trodo just started up--it's a new bartering hub where users sign up, list three items of their own which they're willing to send away to new owners, and get credits for requesting items of the same kind from other Trodo users. You get more credits when you successfully send an item to someone, or when you list more items of your own. It's like a CD swap writ large.

Dali's paintings for the stage
About this gorgeous online image collection of vintage theatrical backdrops from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ken Coupland writes:

Stage curtains painted by Salvador Dali and others for the famous dance troupe languished in appalling conditions for decades. Since rediscovered, they're recorded here in smallish renditions that are dreamy all the same.

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

Technical difficulties with USA
Great Flash animation that likens the Bush administration's obnoxious and dangerous behavior of late to problems with TV transmission. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 20:05 permanent link to this entry

Wickedly cool looking self-powered heat fan
This fan sits on top of wood burning stoves and operates on temperature difference. Now all I need is a wood burning stove. Link Discuss

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 15:46 permanent link to this entry

Bulk Turing Tests to sniff out bots
CAPTCHA (Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a Carnegie-Melon project to catalog and develop tests that a computer can deliver but only a human can solve, to curtail the activities of bots, malware, and scripts. I'm working on a novel where part of the mcguffin is an effort to use genetic algorithms to turn a dataset derived from a destructive brain-scan into an intelligent model in a massively parallel computer built out of commodity hardware. The many different attempts at generating a modelled brain test out their efficacy by joining chat rooms and otherwise inserting themselves into any machine-mediated human communication (including things like spam, scams, etc) and see how long it takes for them to be accused of being a bot. I think my fictional brain-models would smoke these tests.

Bongo is a program that asks the user to solve a visual pattern recognition problem. In particular, Bongo displays two series of blocks, the left and the right series. The blocks in the left series differ from those in the right, and the user must find the characteristic that sets the two series apart. A possible left and right series are shown here.

(These two series are different because everything in the left is drawn with thick lines, while everything in the right is drawn with thin lines.)

After seeing the two series of blocks, the user is presented with four single blocks and is asked to determine whether each block belongs to the right series or to the left. The user passes the test if he or she correctly detemrines the side to which all the four blocks belong.

If Xmas was a Jewish holiday
Hilchos Xmas: the Talmudic laws of Christmas, if Christmas was a Jewish holiday. Damn, this is funny stuff!

This is the fruitcake of our affliction, which our ancestors baked 400 years ago.

All who are in need, come and celebrate Xmas with us.
All who are hungry, come and partake of this 400-year-old fruitcake, as it is written, "Let them eat cake!"
This year we watch football in the living room, next year may the Super Bowl come to our city!

SMART: the stupidnet newsletter
David Isenberg (see below) runs a fantastic newsletter about stupidnet, called SMART. Sign up here. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 14:49 permanent link to this entry

David Isenberg on the stupidnet
David Isenberg just gave an amazing, stirring address on the Stupid Network at Supernova. My notes:

Sure you can do Internet on the phone network -- you can do Internet on smoke signals, too. It's yesterday's news. The best network is a stupid network, which supplies simple connections, but no "services." Instead, "services" are created by smart, network-enabled products, designed for any networked application. Bring them home and plug them in.

[He holds up a slim cable containing 864 fibers that can be run down your street or under it] Two of these fibers could handle the peak load of the entire United States. You can light this up at a gigabit, just for your home -- that's the capacity of a telephone office of a city of 100,000 people. In two or three years, you can have an entire telephone company's worth of bandwidth in your house for $2,000.

The phone companies value artificial scarcity. The most malleable of all laws (Moore's Law, Gilder's Law) is accounting law -- depreciation (as we saw with Enron). Bean counters assume the net will be replaced in five years -- but with the rate of growth in Gilder's Law, it's like replacing the paperboy's bicycle with a rocket-ship. The paper-boy can't deliver papers on a rocket-ship. [me: yay! obsolete paper-boys!]

Engineering effort doesn't scale like Moore or Gilder -- one engineer can only do one engineer's worth of work. If we increase the amount of engineering required for our rocket-ship net, we'll run out of engineers. So keep it simple, stupid. All the smarts in the network should be at the ends, in PCs or devices, not in routers or other network pieces.

Internetworking shifts control and value-creation from the network owner to the end-user. A conventional telephone call touches every node in every network, and every node's owner can add features -- call waiting, etc. The Internet's job is to ignore network-specific differences, like call waiting. Call-waiting is defined at the end-points between both parties on the conversation.

Networks that add cool features break the stupidity principle.

The Internet makes telephony into just another application. Traditionally, you need telephone wires, poles, network and service. You pay for the service, though, not all the hardware. The telephone company does business this way, it's the only way they know.

In a stupid network, telephony is just an application. The telcos know how to string wires and put up poles, but not how to make money on 'em. That's why all the winning apps weren't built by telcos: email, ecommerce, the Web, blogging, etc.

Most of the important future communications applications haven't been discovered yet. This is the green-screen, command-line era of telephony.

Inn the telco world, they charge money for providing this voice application and spend the money to support the network and physical plant.

In the stupid netowrk, the physical layer is designed for anything digital. The network layer is Internet protocol. The applications are anything: data, video, voice, whatever.

MSFT may have a monopoly, but it doesn't have the poles-and-wires monopolistic advantage that the telcos have. The potential for a marketplace in stupidnet applications exists.

So in the stupidnet world, who pays for the physical layer: poles, wires and so on? The wires are usually an expense subsidized by the voice service. When voice is free, who will keep putting poles up?

The telco won't make the transition. They're too addicted to their business. The cable-companies may have a better shot, but they're addicted to video entertainment business. They don't want to put in a net that will let anyone get any video signal they want from anywhere. Municipalities: there are 125 cities in the US that are actively investigating their own fiber nets. Utilities have wire and pipes in our homes. New kinds of companies may do it. Customers and corporations own their own networks.

Stupidnet has its own values: First Amendment, decentralization, not any-color-you-like-so-long-as-its-black.

Remember: Goliath lost! It takes smart people to build the stupidnet! Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 14:46 permanent link to this entry

A&E explores "mankind's fascination with breasts and cleavage"
Cleavage, an A&E special airing tonight, "surveys mankind's fascination with breasts and cleavage, from the goddesses of antiquity to today's silicone-enhanced TV and film stars. Offering their opinions on why two simple mounds of flesh have wielded such power through the ages will be comedian Joan Rivers; Cosmopolitan's Helen Gurley Brown; a plastic surgeon; a female body builder; and others. Narrated by Carmen Electra." What, only two hours long? Link Discuss (via Irregular Orbit)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 14:35 permanent link to this entry

Searching Google for suicide
More from Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, speaking at Supernova: "People who are thinking about committing suicide search Google for 'suicide.' Depending on what they find, they may or may not kill themselves. There are businesses that depend on the kind of results that searchers get from Google, but that's very secondary compared to searches like 'suicide.'" Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:27 permanent link to this entry

Sucky search engines' CEOs didn't use the Web
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, speaking at Supernova: "If you look at the other search companies that didn't do so well, you'll see that in many cases they hired an executive team that consisted of CEOs and so on that didn't use the Web that much." Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:12 permanent link to this entry

Utterly hypnotic Java-toy
SodaPlay is an incredibly fun Java-toy -- sketch out skeletal, jointed constructions, tweak the physics of gravity and friction, and set it in motion. It jiggles and clatters and bounces in a way that I find utterly hypnotic. Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53 permanent link to this entry

Virtual crop circles
Land art created by traveling around with a GPS to make giant drawings. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:35 permanent link to this entry

Honduras bans all violent games and toys
Honduras has blamed the rise of violent youth-gangs called "maras" on violent toys and games. Starting in June, all violent playthings will be banned on the island in the country (thanks, Wayne). The Reg points out that with 53 percent of Hondurans living below the poverty line, it's hard to imagine that the dirt-poor maras are going home from a night's wilding to chill with their PS2s and a lickle bit of the old first-person-shooter ultra-high-rez-violence. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:45 permanent link to this entry

Dan Gillmor's Journalism 3.1b4
Dan Gillmor is standing in for Clay Shirky for the morning keynote at Supernova (Clay's flight from NYC was cancelled -- Frankston wants to know if he was flying United). His talk: Journalism 3.1b4 -- a riff on the Journalism 3.0 talk he gave last year at Emerging Tech (expect an expanded version of this at this year's conference -- don't miss it, and don't forget to send your talk-proposals!).

More bandwidth + more processing power + more storage = New journalism.

First, "Old Media." Then "New Media." Now, "We Media" -- the power of everyone and everything at the edge.

Sept 11 was the turning-point. Dan was in South Africa and got the same coverage the rest of the world did. Most of us couldn't get to nytimes.com, but blogs filled in the gap. The next day we had the traditional 32-point screaming headlines and photos. But we also got, through Farber's Interesting People list, links to satellite photos of the event, first person accounts from Australians explaining how it felt outside of America.

Blogs covered it, and then a personal email from an Afghan American that circulated on the Internet, got posted to blogs, made it onto national news.

9-11 sent people to the Internet. More than 2/3ds used the Internet to learn about the attacks.

New journalism is built on ubiquitous networks, wonderful tools, anyone can publish, but will anyone make money?

Journalism goes from being a lecture to a seminar: we tell you what we have learned, you tell us if you think we're correct, and then we discuss it: we can fact-check your ass (Ken Layne).

Dan's new foundation principle: "My readers know more than I do."

This is true for all working journalists, and not a threat, it's an opportunity.

At PCForum, Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest was on-stage, doing a Q&A. Joe was whining about how hard it is to run a phone company these days. Dan blogged, "Joe's whining." A few moments later, he got an email from someone who wasn't at the conference, someone in Florida, with a link to a page that showed that Joe took $300MM out of the company and has another $4MM to go -- gutting the company as he goes.

Esther Dyson described this as the turning point. The mood turned ugly. The room was full of people reading the blog and everyone stopped being willing to cut Joe any slack.

David Isenberg: Dan once wrote that nothing at a conference ever happens in the main room -- it all goes down in the corridors. Blogs change that.

The office of the Secretary of Defense posts full transcripts of all press interviews with Rumsfeld: they do this because the editing process of the interviews sets the new to a slant that they feel is unfair. Dan: this will change the lives of journos -- when sources can say, "That's not what I said, and here's proof."

The new tools of new journliasm: Digital cameras, SMS, writeable web (blogs, wikis, etc), recorded audio and video.

Blogs are the coolest part of it: variety, gifted pros and amateurs, RSS, meme formation and coalescing ideas, real-time (heh -- typing as fast as I can).

15-year-olds blog from cellphones today -- they're who I ask for tips on the future. Joi Ito blogs with his camera -- so do smart-mobs. (David Sifry: A guy ran a marathon and blogged it from his Sidekick).

The next time there is a major event in Tokyo, there will be 500 images on the web of whatever it was that happened before any professional camera crew arrives on the scene.

But it's not just blogs: Email is still the best source, especially lists like Interesting people. Forums and newsgroups, and non-blog websites. The big question: what can you trust? KayCee Nicole and other hoaxes. Bloggers who debunked the story did profoundly good journalism. Rumors move at the speed of light, corrections follow slowly.

The death of big media won't be an unmitigated disaster: big media is concentrated, unduly influenced by money, and vanilla. But big media also does the investigative stuff and knows where to look for burgeoning stories.

Old media is in danger because there's lots more competition for advertising.

No one knows how new media will turn a buck.

And what happens if Hollywood wins? Disney: "There is no right to fair use." American Association of Publishers: "We have serious problems with librarians." Jamie Kellner, Fox exec: "Skipping commercials is stealing."

The Internet is a read-write medium, but Hollywood wants to make it into TV.

Get active: Lobby, support organizations, vote, support good canditates, take the issues to your friends.

The keyboards are clattering in the room -- expect lots of other takes on this talk to show up on the Supernova Group Blog.

Audience question: Do bloggers who attend events on someone else's dime have an obligation to disclose that fact? Dan: well, that's what journalists do. (Do we need a blogger speaker's bureau?)

Audience question: If bloggers are journalists, are analysts journalists? Dan: Analysts are often tainted by the same conflicts that characterize investment banking researchers. Online writers can't get credentialled for attendance at the Olympics and people who hold up their cam-phones at the event can get booted out -- a TV network owns the right to transmit photos of the Olympics. Analyst, blogger, journalist -- conflicted or not -- they're all deserving of First Amendment protection. [Wild applause!] Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:31 permanent link to this entry

More first-hand reporting from the Elcomsoft trial
Danny "NTK" O'Brien also took himself to the Elcomsoft trial yesterday and reported on the doings and the goings-on:

...if they wanted to draw attention to the flaws in Adobe's ebook, why Dmitry hadn't released his exploit on Bugtraq. This is a fascinating attack, given that it seems to imply that it would be *better* for Elcomsoft to release flaws on Bugtraq. Given that many people believe that releasing such circumvention code on Bugtraq is a breach of the DMCA itself, this seems kind of a weird condemnation. The point wasn't examined in detail by either prosecution or defence. Dmitry said that Elcomsoft didn't want to damage ebook publishers by doing this.

Neuromarketing: scan consumers' brains to gather marketing data
Super-scary approach to marketing from an Atlanta company: scan people's brains with MRIs to see how the subconscious mind responds to products and ads.

In a hospital in Atlanta, researchers are trying to do that mapping. They're paying people to lie inside MRI machines and look at pictures of products while the machine snaps images of their brains. The Brighthouse Institute for Thought Sciences claims it's closing the gap between business and science — with the goal of getting us to behave the way corporations want us to.

"What it really does is give unprecedented insight into the consumer mind. And it will actually result in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave," company executive Adam Koval told Marketplace.

(Semi)-Live notes from the Elcomsoft trial
Lisa Rein, a technology activist, is attending the Elcomsoft hearings in San Jose this week and blogging it in the evenings. This is the most recent case shaking out from the arrest of Dmitry Skylarov, a Russian researcher, for violating the DMCA by explaining how broken Adobe's ebook security was. Dmitry went to jail for 30 days, and the Russian State Department has advised its scientists to steer clear of US shore lest they, too, be arrested for delivering technical presentations. Dmitry eventually had his charges dropped, in exchange for recording testimony that is being used to prosecute his employer, Elcomsoft, whose software could be used to extract cleartext from encrypted ebook files. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:48 permanent link to this entry

Mad Max: Beyond Retirement Home
Mel Gibson will do another Mad Max movie, called "Fury Road." In this movie, senior citizens in a post-apocalyptic leather-clad retirement home are not threatened by elderly punks riding motorized wheelchairs and must not fight for their supply of precious lineament. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21 permanent link to this entry

Monday, December 09, 2002

Scam alert: do "out-of-office" e-mail autoreplies help burglars?
A report issued by UK-based Infrastructure Forum ("TIF") says spam-savvy thieves are using info from 'out of office' email autoresponders and cross-referencing it with publicly available personal data to target empty homes.

Criminals are buying huge lists of email addresses over the internet and sending mass-mailings in the hope of receiving 'out of office' auto-responses from workers away on holiday.

By cross-reference such replies with publicly available information from online directories such as 192.com or bt.com, the burglars can often discover the name, address and telephone number of the person on holiday. Tif is advising users to warn their staff to be careful of the information they put in their 'out of office' messages.

"You wouldn't go on holiday with a note pinned to your door saying who you were, how long you were away for and when you were coming back, so why would you put this in an email?" said David Roberts, chief executive at Tif.

What sex is that nose?
Guess the nose: Maragaret sez, "You are shown 16 different noses and try to guess the gender of each. It's surprisingly difficult." Link Discuss (Thanks, Margaret!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 23:16 permanent link to this entry

Sterling's decade-ahead-of-its-time librarian talk
Bruce Sterling's 1992 speech to the Library Information Technology Association is eerily prescient -- the "Information Economy" is bankrupt, and it's taking the public domain down with it.

Ladies and gentlemen, there's a problem with showing Mr Franklin the door. The problem is that Mr Franklin was right in 1731 and Mr Franklin is still right! Information is not something you can successfully peddle like Coca-Cola. If it were a genuine commodity, then information would cost nothing when you had a glut of it. God knows we've got enough data! We're drowning in data. Nevertheless we're only gonna make more. Money just does not map the world of information at all well. How much is the Bible worth? You can get a Bible in any hotel room. They're worthless as commodities, but not valueless to humankind. Money and value are not identical.

What's information really about? It seems to me there's something direly wrong with the ``Information Economy.'' It's not about data, it's about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the Library of Congress around in your hip pocket. So? You're never gonna read the Library of Congress. You'll die long before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What's important --- increasingly important --- is the process by which you figure out what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true economics of information. Not who owns the books, who prints the books, who has the holdings. The crux here is access, not holdings. And not even access itself, but the signposts that tell you what to access --- what to pay attention to. In the Information Economy everything is plentiful --- except attention.

Goodall goes ape for Sasquatch!
World-renowned primate expert Dr. Jane Goodall said in a recent NPR Science Friday interview that she believes in "undiscovered" primates like Bigfoot. Now that's a pretty damn good celebrity endorsement! Link Discuss
posted by David Pescovitz at 19:46 permanent link to this entry

Beneath Marc's Feet
Marc Schiller's (almost) daily snapshots of interesting things beneath his feet. He told me he can't stop looking down now. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 15:22 permanent link to this entry

Turkey's [Star|Porn] Trek
Turkey's local version of Star Trek is weird, quasi-pornographic, and cheezy. Is this for real?

The Turkish Enterprise's dress code has got to cause problems. The female personnel are forced to wear miniskirts that end four inches above the bottom of their asses, and when they turn around to work on the spray-painted cardboard computers, they have no secrets. I'm sure this leads to situations where the navigator loses his concentration and says, "Miss Uhura, we are crotching a course for the panties sector, coordinates your whole ass hanging out. Repeat: panties, panties, panties."

Kirk decides to go down to a nearby planet and assembles an away team of Scotty, Mr. Spak, Dr. Makkoy and an unnamed guy in a green shirt who they hope will act as a human speed bump if any creatures on the planet rush them. The teleportation effects are, like all Turkish special effects, a strange combination of retarded and rad. The four men stand as still as possible while the camera goes out of focus. Ten seconds later, the film gets scratched in their general area and they run out of frame while the guy holding the camera hits pause and unpause. This gives more of the impression that something's wrong with your VCR than of people being transported through space. Miniskirt technology is a much higher priority among their people than visual effects.

P2P obsoletes businesses that sell people to each other
Karl Jacob from CloudMark is speaking now at Supernova. He suggests that many Internet based-businesses (like Classmates.com) essentially sell people to each other: here is some data that I input, here is some data that you input, and the software acts as a trusted-third-party/matchmaker to hook us up. Peer-to-peer networking makes these businesses superfluous: why do I need you to sell me other people, when they can connect with me directly, using distributed search? (Of course, conferences are businesses that sell people to each other, too) Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44 permanent link to this entry

Trash-obsessed six-year-old: youngest craphound ever!
The LA Times covers the six birthday of a trash-obsessed six-year-old that was held at a city dump.

His favorite pastimes include trailing trucks on their collection routes (in the company of his parents or sitter) and peering into trash cans. He said he wants to go to college so he can learn to drive a trash truck.

"Some people have said, 'Why don't you steer him in a different direction?' " his mother said. "My answer is this is his passion. Whatever his interest is, I support it."

Daily Show on Kissinger QuickTime
In case you missed it, here is Jon Stewart and friends on the Daily Show running down Henry Kissinger's unique qualifications to investigate the September 11th attack. I can't find a transcript at the moment, but the gist of the remarks are this: who better to investigate war crimes than a war criminal? Who better to investigate intelligence failures than someone who hid a campaign of secret bombings? And so on. Funny, sad, scary. Link (57MB QuickTime) Discuss (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29 permanent link to this entry

Open standards and quality of service: pick one
IBM's Rod Smith is speaking at the Supernova conference. In his intro, he cites a lot of customer demand for both open standards and quality-of-service guarantees. Aren't these antithetical? If I'm running open standards, then the software at my end of the network can be set to abide by or ignore any signals send by the software at your end (as opposed to a proprietary system where both ends are welded-shut-boxes that always and deterministically do whatever the software author thought was best). That means that even though your software requests a priority level of x and a guaranteed pipe of y, you have no way of knowing whether my software is actually delivering x and y. All you can send me is a suggestion -- not a guarantee. Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:29 permanent link to this entry

Camera-in-a-pill
A digestible comestible camera inside a pill is being touted in Japan as the new endoscopy alternative:

Computer-simulated footage created for the promotion of the capsule was presented at an international medical symposium in Tokyo recently. In the film, the white capsule illuminated the dark stomach wall and moved along the digestive canal while rotating.

The scenes in the footage resembled those taken by miniature submersible vessels that sometimes appear in science fiction films...

About 40 percent of the capsule's interior is still empty. This space will allow researchers to store medication or surgical tools to achieve a more efficient delivery of drugs or to carry out surgical operations inside the body.

Unleash the F*&$^#% Fury!
From Roadrunner Records' Blabbermouth blog:

"Yngwie Malmstein threatened to kill a fellow passenger on a flight to Tokyo, Japan after the woman poured a glassful of water on the guitarist. The passenger, who had no prior contact with Yngwie, allegedly overheard Malmsteen making derogatory comments about homosexuals and decided to show her disapproval by emptying the contents of her glass on the hefty axeman. A member of Yngwie's touring entourage, who was traveling with Malmsteen at the time, had a tape recorder running and managed to catch Yngwie's reaction on tape immediately after the guitarist was 'assaulted' by the offended passenger."

MPAA FCC comments: too many howlers and fibs to count
The Motion Picture Association of America has released its comments on the Broadcast Flag proposal before the FCC. This has too many howlers to count (though I imagine many groups will be countering 'em in their reply comments), but here are two choice ones, in which the MPAA says that sharing 19.4Mb/s video files will require no special software and only need you to save them to your hard-drive and the idea that a requirement that all DTV technologies be resistant to end-user modification would not stop open source developers from shipping compliant code.

Once received in the home, digital broadcast television content can easily be redistributed via retransmission over networks like the Internet by such means as rebroadcasting, hosting files on a web server, or peer-to-peer file trafficking. Such unauthorized redistribution can be accomplished without downloading any special software, without the need for circumventing any copy protections, without such tools as analog-to-digital converters, or indeed without any complex technical skills whatsoever. For example, all a person has to do is to select "Record" while watching TV on his or her computer using a TV tuner card, and then save the file to a publicly accessible folder on his or her hard drive, where it can be illegally redistributed to anonymous users via peer-to-peer file trafficking...

Similarly, the Broadcast Flag solution will not, in itself, interfere in any way with continued innovation in the development of open source software. While building a secure open source protection technology will no doubt be a challenge, it is a challenge faced by open source programmers in developing any secure application, not just Authorized Digital Output Protection Technologies or Authorized Recording Methods...

Magic not Magick
Clifford Pickover's "ESP Experiment" is a wonderful implementation of the "pick a card, any card" online mind-reading trick. How do YOU think it works? (OK, everyone knows how it works. But it's STILL fun.) Link Discuss
posted by David Pescovitz at 09:44 permanent link to this entry

One PC boots 37 OSes
Gareth sez: "Crazy Rickie, He's Insane! 1918-year-old Eagle Scout Richard Robbins has built a PC with 37 working operating systems. Includes BeOS, OS/2 Warp IV and a million flavors of Linux, not to mention Windows 1.0." Link Discuss (Thanks, Gareth!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39 permanent link to this entry

"The Man Behind 'Bigfoot' Dies" (Long live Bigfoot!)
The family of Ray Wallace says that he launched the Bigfoot phenomenon in 1958 with a pair of carved wood 16-inch fake feet. Mark Chorvinsky, editor of Strange Magazine, says that this admission raises serious doubts about the existence of Sasquatch. I disagree. The only way I'll change my mind about the reality of Bigfoot is if someone provides physical proof of its nonexistence. Link Discuss (Thanks, Doug!)
posted by David Pescovitz at 09:38 permanent link to this entry

Stretch laptop battery life by cutting brightness
A survival tip for attendees at conferences like Supernova, where I'm at for a couple days: we've got lots of wireless bits here, but we don't have any power-outlets at the tables. You can stretch out your battery life by a significant margin by cutting the brightness on your screen down to about 50% -- provided that the indoor light is good enough. Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:30 permanent link to this entry

MacArthur Foundation endows public-domain fund
The MacArthur Foundation has endowed a fund to support research in support of the protection of the public domain.

The foundation's initiative on Intellectual Property and the Long-Term Protection of the Public Domain focuses on questions of intellectual property rights in the digital era, in particular those that seek to balance the legitimate concerns of the creators of intellectual property with the public's right to access that knowledge.

SpamSieve reviewed
Paul Bissex gives a ringing review to the Bayesian spam-fighter for OS X, SpamSieve:

That's the hot thing in spam fighting now -- Bayesian filtering. I'll leave the details to smarter people, but it is essentially a statistical method in which individual tokens (words) are mapped to probabilities. For example, a quick look at my spam log of 700+ recent spams shows that my last name shows up in 4 spams and 254 "good" messages, making it a strong (but not absolute) indicator of non-spam. Conversely, the term "hcode" shows up in 304 spam messages and no legitimate messages, making it a very good indicator of spam. What's "hcode"? I have no idea -- something that shows up in spammers' HTML a lot, I'd guess. It's obviously incredibly predictive, yet I never would have created a rule to look for it.

That's the beauty of this approach. Instead of trying to cleverly create individual rules that identify spam, you simply feed your Bayesian engine a pile of spam, and a pile of good mail, and it learns the difference. (It does weighting like SpamAssassin, but instead of weighting rules, it individually weights every unique word.) Read Paul Graham's highly influential "A Plan for Spam" essay for more on this. Really, read it. It's excellent.

Virus-throttling: routers can keep malefactors *in* as well as out
Virus-throttling is a technique whereby routers analyze hosts inside their network and attempt to spot machines that are making outbound connections in a fashion consistent with virus activity. These hosts are then throttled with respect to how many other hosts they can contact over time, Early lab results from HP are promising, with a marked slowdown in the spread of malware, but I have to wonder how smart the router is -- are promiscuous IMmers and file-sharers, nstat-using security testers and swarm-downloading users going to end up throttled, too? Also, I wonder to what extent this is an attempt to prop up companies like Cisco, whose proprietary software lets them sell their product at a signficant markup, a margin that's threatened by a variety of open-source routing tech startups who run on commodity hardware. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:58 permanent link to this entry

Sunday, December 08, 2002

Blogging a marathon -- from the marathon
A guy running a marathon with his HipTop PDA/camera/browser is "moblogging" (mobile blogging) the run -- typing and snapping pix as he goes.

24 miles, close. My feet hurt :-) oh you thought this wouild be easy david.... Gatorade here we come

Sewer-bot standards-body
A new standards-setting committee has formed to create best-practices for sewer-bots, semi-autonomous robot subterranean conduit-zippers that pull high-speed data lines around.

The operation and maintenance of sewage conveyance systems need active preventive maintenance and sound pipeline engineering input. If proper standard of care is not practiced, it is only a matter of time until major problems will manifest. At that point the sewer lease fee paid by a fiber installer to city hall will amount to nothing compared to the cost the public will have to bear to return the sewers back to normal. Historical lessons learned more than 100 years ago in the Paris sewer tunnels when engineers attempted to place more than one utility in the same space must be studied thoroughly so as not to repeat the same mistakes.

Coffee-making PC casemod
Presenting the Caffeine Machine, "a fully functioning coffee maker integrated into a computer case. You pour the water into the funnel at the top, it goes down the tube into a book-shaped water tank where it sits until you hit the power switch, at which point the heating coil boils the water, sending it back up another tube and into the coffee grounds basket." The site has a walk-through if you have a yen to make your own. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gareth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 15:42 permanent link to this entry

LOTR's armorer and obsessive attention to detail
Rhys sez: "The Journal of Metallurgy interviews Peter Lyon, sword- and weapon-maker for The Lord of the Rings films. Possibly the only academic journal in which you'll find a discussion of the material properties of Ringwraith weaponry."

So for four years, in an on-site foundry, Lyon focused his skills on Middle-earth weaponry. From artists' drawings he crafted swords that were designed to reflect their own histories. Those that had seen many battles were forged, then aged by applying acid and other chemicals to create a pitted, corroded effect (Figures 2a and 2b). The damaged surfaces were cleaned to give the appearance of an old blade that was still cared for. Swords used by elves were elegant and curved to represent their more evolved culture (Figure 3). Orcs who were barbaric fighting creatures, carried crude, chunky weapons...

Such details -- the metalsmiths hand-forged more than 10,000 buckles for the Orcs alone -- pass by so quickly they are nearly impossible for the average viewer to notice.

"Unfortunately, so much of it isn't actually seen in the film, and so people would argue, why do it then? Why on earth would you go to that trouble?" Taylor said. "Because the real world has a level of subliminal detail that supports a cultural inheritance through graphic design that gives you the feeling that what you are looking at in the present is predated by a huge cultural influence that goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years. . .Therefore, every single actor, every single character, had a different buckling system, a different belting system, a different level of cultural integrity built into the variety of detailing on the armoring, to emulate the feeling of this process."

Email that won't travel more than 500 miles
Great sysadmin war-story about a university mail-system that would not transmit mail to hosts more than 500 miles away.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails. This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed. Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence (580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears.

ACLU versus Ashcroft: rewriting the Constitution
The ACLU is running a spectacular TV ad campaign criticizing Ashcroft's systematic undermining of the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. I was zooming through the commercial in a "Changing Rooms" episode at 32X on my TiVo and the ad leapt out at me. This is a great, tight message explaining what's wrong with John Ashcroft's America. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:50 permanent link to this entry

Law and Order: Battlestar Galactica Unit
Battlestar Galactica is to be reinvented in cinema verite, 24/Law and Order/artsy auteur style. GalacticaGeeks are hopping mad.

This shift in tone and look cannot be overemphasized. It is our intention to deliver a show that does not look like any other science fiction series ever produced. A casual viewer should for a moment feel like he or she has accidentally surfed onto a "60 Minutes" documentary piece about life aboard an aircraft carrier until someone starts talking about Cylons and battlestars...

Another way to challenge the audience visually will be our extensive use of the multi-split screen format. By combining multiple angles during dogfights, for example, we will be able to present an entirely new take on what has become a tired and familiar sequence that has not changed materially since George Lucas established it in the mid 1970s...

Story. We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other clichés of the genre. Our show is first and foremost a drama. It is about people. Real people that the audience can identify with and become engaged in. It is not a show about hardware or bizarre alien cultures. It is a show about us. It is an allegory for our own society, our own people and it should be immediately recognizable to any member of the audience.

Saturday, December 07, 2002

Own a real Tron Gladiator's Tunic
Up for auction on Disney's eBay zone: an original prop "gladiator tunic" from the movie Tron (also for sale, original, 1950s Mousketeer jackets! (1, 2) Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 20:58 permanent link to this entry

SUVs are not healthy for children and other living things
SUV's aren't only hard on the environment, they're also dangerous to their owners, to other drivers, and to their owners' kids. Not to mention the whole, "I'm changing the climate -- ask me how!" factor.

Part of the reason for the high kill rate is that cars offer very little protection against an SUV hitting them from the side--not because of the weight, but because of the design. When a car is hit from the side by another car, the victim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But if the aggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises to 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the ground. Rather than hitting the reinforced doors of a car with its bumper, an SUV will slam into more vulnerable areas and strike a car driver in the head or chest, where injuries are more life-threatening. But before you get an SUV just for defensive purposes, think again. Any safety gains that might accrue are cancelled out by the high risk of rollover deaths, which usually don't involve other cars.

Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that's illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his two-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he'd hit the curb.

Will compulsory licenses save P2P?
Fascinating paper by copyright scholar Neal Netanel on compulsory licenses and P2P. The idea is that P2P nets are themselves valuable, but imperiled by copyright law, whose purpose is to make work available to the public, but which often fails in this regard. In order to compensate artists and promote use of file-sharing, Netanel proposes that ISPs pay a small fee per connection that is passed on to an ASCAP-like collecting society. The collecting society uses part of the money to search the web, to seek out Nielsen-family-like volunteers and to monitor sharing networks, and uses the data gleaned to disperse the rest to artists. Under this scheme, artists get paid, P2P nets flourish, ISPs have a much more valuable commodity to sell, and there's a strong impetus to develop ever-better file-sharing nets.

It sounds like a kinda far-out idea, but it's not all that different from the compulsory license that saved radio over 50 years ago, when broadcasters were expected to seek out licenses for each and every song they played, something too expensive to realistically undertake. The advent of compulsories -- which were not without their own problems, to be sure -- saved radio by requiring that broadcasters pay into a kitty which would be paid out to the artists whose music was discovered through statistically valid random sampling of the airwaves. Link (788k PDF) Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31 permanent link to this entry

EFF comments on the Broadcast Flag
EFF filed its comments on the hateful Broadcast Flag -- a proposal to turn over a veto over new general-purpose digital media technology to Hollywood studios, the same companies that tried to outlaw the VCR -- yesterday. The FCC got over 2,000 comments on the issue, most strongly opposing it. There's a reply-comment period that opens today and closes mid-January; hope you folks will all think about contributing between now and then (watch this space for more).

The value of any new technology is in large part derived from unanticipated, innovative uses, uses that spring up as the widest possible variety of technologists and end-users tinker, modify, and experiment to discover remarkable ways of extracting new value unimagined even by the technology's inventors. The explosive growth of technologies such as the Internet, the cellular phone and the automobile is characterized by a Cambrian explosion of innovation in each case. From the drive-in theater to telephone dating to Internet-based auctions, innovation has been a principal driver of consumer adoption of a new technology.

Innovation flourishes in the absence of stricture. Hot-rodders and overclockers both rely on open hardware to tweak their equipment for maximum performance, and even an average driver would balk at the notion of purchasing an automobile whose hood was welded shut. A broadcast flag mandate, particularly if it includes tamper-resistance requirements, effectively welds shut the hood of every DTV device. It insists that only authorized parties may peek at the works of any given DTV device, and requires that interoperability be subject to the prior consent of vendors who may have reason to discriminate against new market entrants. In this regime, which BPDG co-chair Andy Setos of Fox Studios described as an "orderly marketplace," competition is replaced by gentlemen's agreements between self-interested parties who seek (in the case of the entertainment companies) to control private use of DTV programming and (in the case of the technology companies whose protection technologies are chosen) to shut out their competitors.

In the absence of a broadcast flag mandate, all an innovator needs to know to build a novel DTV device is what she can find in publiclyavailable materials. She need not beg permission of a favored vendor for some exotic copy-control system nor submit to a private license agreement governing the scope of her use of that system. She need not add superfluous tamper-resistance measures that seek to prevent end-users from modifying her invention or lock out service-centers from performing minor repairs.

The broadcast flag proposal turns all this on its head. An innovator in a broadcast flag mandate world needs to build her technology to interact not with a simple MPEG file, but with a proprietary system whose only documentation and tools exist at the sufferance of a private licensor. She is bound not only by the strictures of the art and science, but by any conditions that the licensors with whom she must treat choose to burden her with. She can not rely on free/open source software -- which encourages end-user modification -- for critical components.

Friday, December 06, 2002

Human-powered house-move on bicycle
Great photo-documentary of a "human-powered" house-move, accomplished in the icy winter on trailer-bikes. Link Discuss (Thanks, Joe!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 23:32 permanent link to this entry

Taking pictures of hotels is terrorism
2600 Magazine reports that an amateur photographer in Denver was busted for taking too many pictures of the cop-zoo surrounding the hotel when Dick Cheney was staying. The cops busted him, seized his camera, called him names and accused him of being a terrorist. Then they refused to turn over his camera or an arrest report when he was released. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 23:29 permanent link to this entry

DVD hacker on trial in Norway on Monday
Jon Johansen, the Norweigan teenager who helped crack the crypto on DVDs so that he could watch out-of-region disks on his PC, is facing charges on Monday in Norway. I asked a lawyer-friend about this today: if Norgeigan law doesn't have the "anti-circumvention" stuff that the American DMCA has, what has Jon been charged with? It turns out that the MPAA insisted that Jon be prosecuted and that the best the Norweigan prosecutors could come up with is a statute forbidding intruding on a computer, so they charged him with hacking his own PC. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 23:26 permanent link to this entry

Japanese Pi researchers get a trillion-digit record
Japanese researchers have set the record for calculated digits of Pi, turning in over one trillion post-decimal numbers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 23:23 permanent link to this entry

Celebrity illustrated Beowulf
High-freakin-larious abidged retelling of Beowulf in the style of Mexican fotonovelas, with speech-ballooned photos of celebs, politicos and other public figures. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:28 permanent link to this entry

Beautiful wind-walkers
Richard sez: "Theo Jansen has developed staggeringly beautiful machines that walk when powered by gusts of wind. Created to be 'art that evolves', he's now working on a way to store the energy to provide power when there is no wind. He likens this to muscles." Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:26 permanent link to this entry

Nanotechnology at Alcor conference
I wrote an article for Small Times magazine about a couple of nanotechnology-related talks given at the fifth annual Alcor Extreme Life Extension conference in Newport Beach. Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:30 permanent link to this entry

Active camouflage -- tricks of the light

Stunning footage of optical camouflage technology at the university of Tokyo, where retroreflectors are used to capture the visual behind an object and LCDs paint it on the front. I'm not clear if this is actual footage of the tech in motion, or just video FX -- either way, it's croggling. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12 permanent link to this entry

New Canadian sf antho open for business
Attention Canadian science fiction authors! Bakka Books is doing a second commemorative anthology to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto next fall. Edited by Claude Lalumiere, who used to run Nebula books in Montreal, "Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction" is open to original submissions from Canadians and residents of Canada. Link Discuss (Thanks, Nalo!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:57 permanent link to this entry

Spam-king drowning in snailmail spam
A spammer whose gleeful interview -- where he revelled in the money pouring in from spamming -- was Slashdotted is now drowning in catalogs and other junkmail. Slashdotters have submitted his name to every direct marketer on earch.

"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told me. "These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me..."

"Several tons of snail mail spam every day might just annoy him as much as his spam annoys me," wrote one of the anti-spammers.

Ashcrofties threaten to shut down open wireless
Consultants working for the Department of Homeland Security have announced that the Feds view open WiFi as a means of abetting terrorists, and say that they will compel the open wireless operators will have to close off their nets.

Homeland Security is putting people in place who will be in a position to say, 'If you're going to get broken into ... we're going to start regulating.'

Thursday, December 05, 2002

20-50,000 WiFi hotspots coming
Anil sez: "the former Project Rainbow has yielded Cometa, a joint effort by Intel, IBM Global Services, and AT&T to get 20k to 50k WiFi hotspots launched across the country, putting one within 5 minutes of everyone in a major metropolitan market. The best part? The CEO's name is 'Larry Brilliant.' I kid you not." Link Discuss (Thanks, Anil!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 23:06 permanent link to this entry

Chat with me, Wil McCarthy and Geoff Landis next Tuesday
I'll be doing a live chat on December 10th at 6:30PM Pacific/9:30PM Eastern on SciFi.com, with science fiction writers Geoff Landis and Wil McCarthy. The topic is ON THE CUTTING EDGE: two rocket scientists and a computer expert discuss what it's like to work on write on SF's cutting edge. We're up right after Marina Sitris, "Deanna Troi" from Star Trek: TNG. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 22:59 permanent link to this entry

A talking Bush for Xmas
What better way to say, "Irradiate your prezzies before unwrapping" than giving an Xmas package containing a talking Shrub doll that says things like "Freedom will be defended" and "I come from Texas?" Hmmm: talking Bush... Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 22:53 permanent link to this entry

Low-carb diets eliminate zits
Evidence is mounting to suggest that bread -- not chocolate -- causes pimples.

That is the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Highly processed breads and cereals are easily digested. The resulting flood of sugars makes the body produce high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).

This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones. These encourage pores in the skin to ooze large amounts of sebum, the greasy goop that acne-promoting bacteria love. IGF-1 also encourages skin cells called keratinocytes to multiply, a hallmark of acne, the team say in a paper that will appear in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.

Bakka Anthology cover art and invite
Check out the exceedingly swell cover-art for the Bakka Anthology, a book of short stories by writers -- including me -- who worked at Bakka Books in Toronto over the past 30 years. Reminder: the launch party is December 19th in Toronto at 7PM, and there are only 400 copies signed by all the authors (I signed all goddamned 400 of them last week!). Link Discuss

posted by Cory Doctorow at 21:08 permanent link to this entry

Square dancing with old fashioned tractors
Jim sez: "Check this out! Squaredancing with old-timey tractors! I used to drive one that looked just like these! I still want one really bad. To drive around Palo Alto and all. It would be so much cooler than all the Ferarris and Lamborghinis."

The video clip is great! Link Discuss
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 15:10 permanent link to this entry

Suicide or Art?
Woman kills self at an "off-beat Berlin arts center," visitors think it is performance art. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gareth!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 15:03 permanent link to this entry

Barlow's reasons for joining the EFF
John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the EFF, list several reasons why it's a good idea to join the EFF:

Thomas Pynchon on bad acid couldn't dream up the paranoid nightmares now pouring out of Washington.

Today we learn that the CIA has been given authority to kill any American citizen who is *suspected* of terrorism. Say again? You mean they *all* have a license to kill? And not just the other, but us. Summarily. Without trial. Yikes.

Then there is John Poindexter's new Information Awareness Office - about which I have much more to say in my next screed - which is being extended authorization to combine and data-mine every database, commercial or public, in a massive search for evil-doers and behavioral patterns that match up with evil-doing. Records of your buying habits, your medical problems, the books you take out of the library, your driving skills, your telephone calls are all available to the Government without a warrant or a suspect.

The Pentagon is working on a new version of Internet protocols called eDNA that would render digital anonymity impossible. (I'll write more about this in my next spam as well.)

The Homeland Security Administration is being given a 150 billion dollars, 170,000 employees and few legal constraints to become a massive internal surveillance force with vastly streamlined access to your electronic records.

Meanwhile, the Content Industry is working on redesigning the architecture of both the Internet and your computer so that they - and anyone else who might be interested - will be able to see what's on your computer and control what can pass between it and any other digital devices.

Fair use, the ability to share information with your friends, indeed - the very right to know - is being criminalized. With these legally ordained control methods, it becomes trivially easy to stop the flow of dissent since it might contain copyrighted material.

The bats of Facism have left the cave. Against this cloud of leather-winged horrors, there are few organized forces of opposition.

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation is there. Indeed, we're practically all that's there.

In a country where the corporations just bought the most expensive and incumbent Congress in history, few are standing up for the rights of the individual.

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation is still defending your tattered liberties.

I suspect you feel scared, hopeless, and impotent against this anti-patriotic betrayal of American principles. You can't register your opposition. They ignore your demonstrations. You could send them a letter, but the White House no longer opens mail because it might contain anthrax. E-mails are utterly irrelevant to the them.

Much of what is being decreed is profoundly unconstitutional. But nothing is unconstitutional until someone has proven it so in court. Someone has to be willing to plead the case for liberty. This is what EFF does. And we need to do it before the Judiciary has been completely subverted by Bush/Ashcroft appointees. In 18 months it may be too late.

This is why I believe it is very important right now that you join the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I would say that even if I hadn't help start the thing. There just isn't anything else like us out there. Without our technically sophisticated interventions, the Internet will become the most penetrating and through surveillance tool ever conceived. Click right here -> www.eff.org <- right now and join.

Video Humanism: Multimedia masks that "amplify as well as conceal"
Great NYT article about the compelling work of multimedia artist Gillian Wearing, whose tough-to-watch video work called Trauma is now on display at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Screenshot from the video at left. Excerpt:

"In one of the video's eight short scenes, a middle-aged woman sits before the camera, her face obscured by a shiny plastic mask of a sad-faced child and a blatantly synthetic wig. It is a laughable disguise, but her words are not funny. In a pained, quiet voice, the woman recounts being molested by her grandfather as a young girl every Sunday for several years, an ordeal that ceased only with his death.

The mask alters the revelation in a fascinating way, both buffering and intensifying its dreadfulness, creating the conflicting desire to hang on every word while also pulling back to decipher the visual power and artifice of the scene. The mask is delicately tactful, yet deadening. It respects the speaker's need for privacy, yet it executes a weird, surreal transformation, turning the speaker into a kind of freak... Yet the masks' crude but effective magic can trigger hope and giddy delight, feelings that often signal the presence of good art.

In these days of reality television and confessional talk shows, when Family Feud is played for real, Ms. Wearing has managed to do something new with the ever-volatile combination of people and cameras. Making a few easily discernible technical adjustments or adding accessories, she separates voices from faces, souls from bodies, inner thoughts from outward appearances in a process of masquerade, ventriloquism and displacement, drawing the viewer into a complex emotional web. At her best she slips rather raw chunks of real life into pristine envelopes clearly marked 'art' while keeping both hands on the table."

Link to museum web site, Link to NYT article (registration required) Discuss (Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:45 permanent link to this entry

Sky Dayton's 802.11 Planet keynote
Danny's posted liveblogging notes from Sky "Boingo" Dayton's keynote at 802.11 Planet yesterday:

Survey says: 97% of travelling businessmen would alter their plans to gravitate to high-speed access (high-speed access is more important to them than wireless access)...

Dayton compares it to early days of ISPs ("Nobody knew who was their customer and who was their competition"). Back then, everybody tried to do everything - owning the wires, the network, and the brands. Eventually each company concentrated in one area - end users are AOL, MSN, networks are UUNET etc, wires are the telcos. (Hmmm. Has this happened in broadband yet?)

Radiotherapy patients strip-searched "for safety"
Recent radiotherapy patients who ride the New York subway systems are tripping the Geiger counters, resulting in humiliating anti-dirty-bomb strip searches.

They said they called New York's terrorism task force for advice and were told that doctors should give patients letters describing the isotope used, its dose and date of treatment. Such letters should also include doctors' phone numbers to allow police to verify the information, the physicians said they were told...

Patients may choose to avoid public transportation to escape the problem, the doctors said.

Canadian Supremes: no patents on mousies
The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that the "Harvard Mouse" -- a mouse bred at Harvard for susceptibility to cancer for use in lab trials -- cannot be patented. Link Discuss (Thanks, Craig!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46 permanent link to this entry

Stupid copyright claims? Just ask
Ed Felten's got a new solution to the copyright problem: just ask. Ask and ask and ask.

When companies make silly overreaching claims about the extent of their copyrights, don't just ignore them. Call them and ask for exceptions. Call WalMart and ask permission to tell your friends about their prices. (WalMart told FatWallet's ISP that that's infringement.) Call Turner Broadcasting and ask permission to fast-forward through the commercials in their shows. (Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner told Cableworld that commercial skipping is illegal.) Call Adobe and ask permission to read their e-book of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to your kid. (One of Adobe's licenses prohibited this.)

Congress makes it even harder to reach out and touch 'em
Congresscritters are sick of hearing from their constituents, so they're shutting down or obscuring their email addresses and replacing them with forms that route the mail to god-knows-where. Of course, physical mail and Congress don't get along -- that's thraxpanik for you -- and their fax machines are usually out of paper. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:37 permanent link to this entry

Crazy LP covers
Wonderful gallery of obscure and humorous LP covers, with some MP3 samples. Link Discuss (Thanks, Rupert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34 permanent link to this entry

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

But would suicide bombers wear pasties and hump-me-pumps?
The Reverse Cowgirl writes:

It appears that, as we speak, 8,000 male members of the U.S. Navy are descending upon the girlie bars of Hong Kong in search of strippers named Suzie Wong. and, in doing so, they may be inadvertently setting themselves up for a possible terrorist attack by members of the no-no notorious Big Al's al Qaeda striptease terrorist posse.

my god, are not even titty bars sacred anymore? to what has this world come? a Hong Kongian deputy commissioner of police says they've beefed up local patrols, but, more importantly... his name is Dick Lee.

Mouse Genome will be published Thursday
Stefan sez:

The genome for the mouse is being published on several websites on Thursday. Here's you chance to get in on the ground floor of creating Red, White & Green Xmas mice, plump savory eatin'-mice, and freakish radiotelepathic hive-mice with gestalt minds and a overpowering urge to dominate mankind.

Groovy underwater VR panoramas
Gorgeous underwater QTVR pano's. Navigate in a full circle, or vertically.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jens!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 16:23 permanent link to this entry

Refrigerator chills food with cool (but *loud*) sounds
Scientists at a Pennsylvania State University lab are developing ways to use sound waves to chill food. Research is sponsored by Ben and Jerry's ice cream!

They have produced a sonic fridge that converts very loud sounds to directly cool a fridge containing ice cream. The researchers hope that their work will end reliance on gases that can contribute to global warming [and] have exploited the fact that sound waves travel by compressing and expanding the gas that they are generated in. (...)

Humans feel pain when they hear sounds of 120 decibels, a level typically reached next to the speakers at a rock concert. The sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert. Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion.

Will Smith to star in big-screen adaptation of Asimov's "I, Robot"
Hollywood trades are reporting that Will Smith may star in a film adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi book series "I, Robot." Alex Proyas ("Dark City") is slated to direct the Twentieth Century Fox project.

Production is scheduled to begin in the spring, with John Davis, Lawrence Mark and Topher Dow producing. Adapted by Jeff Vintar, "Robot" revolves around a society in which robots function alongside human beings in a servile capacity and are both harmless and helpful. The story line centers on a technophobic police officer (Smith) who is called in to investigate a murder that he believes was committed by a robot and uncovers a giant conspiracy.

Jury Service goes live today
Last spring, Charlie Stross and I co-wrote a story called "Jury Service," an extremely gonzo post-Singularity story whose writing was more fun than any other story I've ever written. Charlie and I pitched the manuscript back and forth to one another in 500-1000 word chunks, each time trying to top the other. We have very little "meta" communication -- just sent the story around and rewrote what we had, then added our own bits. I can remember chuckling so loudly while considering what I would do with Charlie's latest challenge in an airport lounge that the security guard came by to ask if everything was all right.

Stross is amazingly fun to write with. We've put together another story since and will be writing some short shorts as soon as both of us can take a break from our novels for a couple weeks.

"Jury Service" will be published in four pieces -- it's 21,000 words in all! -- on scifi.com, weekly through the month of December. The first chunk went live this morning. I think that this is one of the most entertaining pieces I've ever worked on, kind of Rucker-meets-Stephenson-meets-William S. Burroughs. Hope you like it.

Two days later, Huw's waiting with his bicycle and a large backpack on a soccer field in a valley outside Monmouth. It has rained overnight, and the field is muddy. A couple of large crows sit on the rusting goal-post, regarding him curiously. There are one or two other people slouching around the departure area dispiritedly. Airports just haven't been the same since the end of the jet age.

Huw tries to scratch the side of his nose, irritably. Fucking Sandra, he thinks again as he pokes at the opaque spidergoat silk of his biohazard burka. He'd gone round to remonstrate with her after work the other day, only to find that her house had turned into a size two thousand Timberland hiking boot and the homeowner herself had decided to winter in Fukuyama this year. A net search would probably find her but he wasn't prepared to expose himself to any more viruses this week. One was quite enough—especially after he discovered that the matching trefoil brand on his shoulder glowed in the dark.

A low rumble rattles the goal post and disturbs the crows as a cloud-shadow slides across the pitch. Huw looks up, and up, and up—his eyes can't quite take in what he's seeing. That's got to be more than a kilometer long! he realizes. The engine note rises as the huge catamaran airship jinks and wobbles sideways towards the far end of the pitch and engages its station-keeping motors, then begins to unreel an elevator car the size of a shipping container.

"Attention, passengers now waiting for flight FL-052 to North Africa and stations in the Middle East, please prepare for boarding. This means you." Huw nearly jumps out of his skin as one of the customs crows lands heavily on his shoulder. "You listening, mate?"

"Yes, yes, I'm listening." Huw shrugs and tries to keep one eye on the big bird. "Over there, huh?"

"Boarding will commence through lift bzzt gurgle four in five minutes. Even-numbered passengers first." The crow flaps heavily towards the huge, rusting shipping container as it lands in the muddy field with a clang. "All aboard!" it squawks raucously.

Merchants of Cool supplemental
PBS's companion site for its Frontline: Merchants of Cool program is brilliant. It's full of interviews, supplemental footage, documentation about media conglomeration, and more resources that flesh ou the story of the trendmakers who find our best ideas, repackage them, and sell them back to us. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gatfishing!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:22 permanent link to this entry

Ben's RSS book available for pre-order
Pre-order Ben Hammersley's "Content Syndication with RSS," an O'Reilly book that introduces, demystifies and explains RSS for Web developers who want to use XML to syndicate the material on their sites. Ben is such an amazingly swell blogger, and a wonderful author and journalist -- this one's going on my Xmas list. Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:14 permanent link to this entry

Kismac: WEP cracking for OS X
Finally, an OSX/Airport-compatible app that cracks WEP, the craptacular "security" in 802.11b wireless communication. Download and install, grab some packets and watch as the WEP password is sucked out of the bitstream. Link Discuss (via /.)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:09 permanent link to this entry

How to wash dishes
Danny is busily building out his algorithm describing, from beginning to end, the process for washing dishes. I imagine that this is an exercise to clarify his own thinking, but it could sure come in handy if he were to ever, i.e., invent an anthropomorphic robot that was, i.e., water-proof.

The Current Item and the Queued Item are both washed. This involves completing a series of acts. The item has not been cleaned unless all of these acts have been completed. Some acts may be performed on a Queued Item, some acts may be performed on the Current Item, some may be performed on both. Acts vary according to the item. Acts should follow the order in which they are listed.

Cutlery
1. Dipped and shaken under basin water - Queued, Current
2. Areas of uncleanliness observed - Queued, Current
3. Unclean areas scrubbed clean - Current
4. Re-dipped - Current
5. Rinsed under cold tap - Current

Pots, Pans, Cups, Mugs
1. Dipped and shaken under basin water - Queued, Current 2. Areas of uncleanliness observed - Queued, Current
3. Handle (if any) of item scoured - Current
4. Outside bottom of item scoured - Current
5. Outside sides of item scoured - Current
6. Inside bottom and sides of item scoured - Current
7. Remaining unclean areas scrubbed clean - Current
8. Re-dipped - Current
9. Rinsed under cold tap - Current

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

Disney bans PalmOS, Danger and other PDAs
The Disney corporation's IT department has banned all PDAs except RIM Blackberries (ugh) and Compaq iPaqs (I'm assuming that installing *nix on your iPaq is out). Link Discuss
posted by Cory Doctorow at 21:15 permanent link to this entry

JK Rowling auctions off 93 words from next Harry Potter book
Thomas sez: "J.K. Rowling is auctioning off a card containing 93 random words from the fifth Harry Potter novel (with the proceeds benefitting children's literacy). A fan site has made itself into a non-profit corporation for the occasion, hoping that, if all its readers make a small donation, then perhaps they can collectively win the card and post the 93 words to their site, while simultaneously supporting a charitable cause." Link Discuss (Thanks, Thomas!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 21:05 permanent link to this entry

Taxi drivers must pay royalties for radio songs
Finland's Supreme Court has held that taxi drivers must pay royalties for music played in their cars while they're chauffeuring passengers -- even radio songs. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 21:04 permanent link to this entry

How and why you should help reform the DMCA
Seth "crypto-activist" Finkelstein has written a great piece on the current process to reform the hateful Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which EFF published today. Called "How To Win (DMCA) Exemptions and Influence Policy," Seth's essay leays out the hows and whys of advocating for changes to the DMCA:

For example, consider censorware blacklists. The "use case" is research, investigation, and so, regarding what censorware in fact has on the blacklists. But the "class of works" is "compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by filtering software applications".

So don't talk about fair-use as a principle in itself. Rather, focus on practical problems affecting a specific "class of works", as in perhaps "public domain works released on CSS-protected DVD disks".

This is not a situation where quantity (whether votes or money) is the key aspect. Rather, it's a case where a detailed, well-constructed, presentation can have an effect. And this is why an ordinary person can make a difference here. Better, if done properly, the requirements can even play into a technical person's strengths in formulating an argument which needs to meet certain specifications. It's just critical to keep in mind that this concerns empirical effects, not ideological axioms.

Baby rat-heads grafted onto adult-rat thighs
We live in an age of wonders:

Infant rats are being decapitated and their heads grafted onto the thighs of adults by researchers in Japan.

If kept cool while the blood flow is stopped, a transplanted brain can develop as normal for at least three weeks, and the mouth of the head will move, as if it is trying to drink milk, the team reports.

Pentagon 0wnz public schools
More Homeland Security Act madness: The Pentagon now requires public high schools to turn over the names of their students for recruiting-purposes. Schools that fail to comply are de-funded. Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 20:54 permanent link to this entry

The 12 Days of Boingboing: Day One - bOINGbOING blingbling
Now that Buy Nothing Day is over, it's time to melt some plastic. When you cash that fat check you're getting from the investment deal with Mobutu Sese Seko's widow, don't spend it all on one website. Instead, consider the following geek luxuries for your holiday shopping list. (pricerange key: $ = starts at around a hundred bucks, $$$$ = at least one G.)

(1) Catrina Gregory jewelry: hot metal for men and women. Silver, gold, and platinum. My fave: double happiness knuckle ring, at left. ($-$$$$) UPDATE: bOINGbOING readers who order on or before Friday, Dec. 5th receive an exclusive 25% off! To get the discount, you must contact Catrina directly via e-mail, cg [at] catrinagregory.com. Cool!

(2) Christian Dior iPod case: Excessive and essential. Hedi Slimane designed this sleek leather case for the world's coolest portable digital music device. Buy online at colette.fr or dior.com. ($$)

(3) Zero-Halliburton laptop cases: Drop 'em from a plane, loaded, and your notebook would probably survive. Durable, functional, sexy. ($$$)

(4) Casio Elixim Digital Camera: Adorably anorexic digital camera. Very pocket-sized. ($$)

(5) Paintings by Miltos Manetas: Still-lifes of laptops, joysticks, or neurotic heaps of cables and routers. Manetas is a visionary. His large-scale works on canvas will change the way you feel about technology and your relationship to it. This one hangs in my room. This is another favorite, and so is the one depicting two Playstations PlayStation and N64 controllers as Madonna and Child (shown at left).($$$$)

Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 15:14 permanent link to this entry

Roll over, Rover: toy version of Mars Rover 'bot in development
Robotics Institute scientists at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are creating a child-friendly, toy version of the Mars Rover.

The researchers hope to release a consumer-ready product within two years, and hope to keep the price below $500 per bot:

"If we can make a robot that is inexpensive enough that people can actually afford it, and we can put it in the real world, kids will have available a new tool for creativity,"[said Illah Nourbakhsh, assistant professor of robotics at CMU]."We want a robot that is expressive enough and interesting enough to play with."

The FatWallet Strikes Back
cypherpunk writes:

This article describes FatWallet's response to the use of the DMCA to force the site to take down a posting giving advance information about "Black Friday" (day after Thanksgiving) sale pricing. Under the DMCA, frivolous or false assertions of copyright infringement can be punished by having to pay the legal fees used to contest the claims. FatWallet is proceeding under the terms of the DMCA to sue the companies which made it take down the price information.

New Homeland Security bill is a downer for model rocket fans
Stefan sez:

A last-minute amendment to the Homeland Security bill is going to make it tough to buy and transport the larger model rocket motors.

The new restrictions are intended to keep Ammonium Percholorate, a powerful oxidizer, out of the hands of terrorists. But the AP in "composite" rocket motors is bound up in a rubbery mixture that's a pain to ignite, much less make go boom."

Turning the tables on TIA and crooked Poindexter
John Gilmore is calling for an early demonstration of how bad convicted felon Poindexter's Total Information Awareness campaign will be. This demonstration will consist of the compiling of as much personal, lawfully obtained info as we can about John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, +1 301 424 6613.

It would be good to have an early public demonstration of just how bad life could become for such targeted citizens. While ratfink's system is probably not working yet, and a large part of it is classified, much of it can be manually simulated for demonstration purposes. Public records can be manually searched and then posted to the net by people who happen to be looking there for something else. Many Internet public records search sites also exist; try searching for "People finder". (Matt Smith at matt.smith@sfweekly.com has offered to "publish anything that readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally".) Photographs and videos of the target, their house, car, family, and associates, can be made and circulated to demonstrate facial recognition techniques.

Employees at various businesses and organizations such as airlines, credit card authorizers, rental-car agencies, shops, gyms, schools, tollbooths, garbage services, banks, taxis, honest civil servants and police officers, and restaurants could demonstrate denial of service to such targeted people. A simple "We won't serve YOUR KIND OF PEOPLE" would do, as was practiced on black people for many decades. More subtle forms of denial of service are possible, such as "You've been 'randomly' selected as a security risk, I'll have to insist that [some degrading thing happen to you]". Or merely, "I can't seem to get this credit card to work, sir, and those twenties certainly look counterfeit to me."

Those with access to DMV and criminal records databases, credit card records, telephone bills, tax records, birth and death and marriage records, medical records, and similar personally identifiable databases could combine their information publicly to assist in the demonstration. This is how TIA is intended to work -- the government would get privileged access to all these databases, access that the rest of us do not normally have. But some of us have access to various of these databases today, and can demonstrate how the TIA system might work.

Automated Alanis
The Brunching Shuttlecocks scores again with an automated, madlibs-based Alanis Morissette lyrics generator:

I Think family members are gonna drive us all crazy
And laptops make me feel like a child
I Think gadgets will eventually be the downfall of civilization
But what can you do? I said what can you do?

Like a black rain, beating down on me
Like a Shelley line, which won't let go of my brain
Like Winona's ass, it is in my head
Blame it on myself
Blame it on myself
Blame it on myself

Cube-farm origin of species
Scan of a 1970s article describing the construction of one of the earliest IBM computer-centric, purpose-built campus. Amazing to read the breathless, radical descriptions of what is recognizable, even at 30 years' distance, as a humble cube-farm.

There were apparent contradictions in some of the expressed requirements and preferences:

* a desire for individual offices, and also a need to accomodate open planning

* a desire for individually customized work spaces, an also a need for aggregate work areas and flexibility for future change;

* a requirement for closely grouped work areas near central services, also a desire for a sense of small scale and identity;

* a need to provide major centralized services fro 2000 people, and also a strong desire for an informal, noninstitutional setting.

New biodiesel cops sniff out frites-stinking vehicles
Britons are evading fuel taxes by running their diesel vehicles on biodiesel: cooking oil. HM's taxman has responded by commissioning a squad of "chipper" detectors who cruise the roads, sniffing for diesels that smell like fry-traps. Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:57 permanent link to this entry

Bakka's writers celebrate its 30th anniversary
Toronto's Bakka Books is one of the oldest science fiction bookstores in the world, open since 1972. More than just a traditional center for sf readers, Bakka has also been home to many writers who worked behind the counter over the years. To celebrate Bakka's 30th anniversary, all we writers who worked there have written original short stories for the BAKKANTHOLOGY, a limited-edition anthology signed by all of its contributors. The launch party is on December 19th, and you can buy your copy at the store or by mail-order.

Contents:

Forward by Spider Robinson
Introduction by Mark Askwith
Bakka history by Kristen Pederson Chew
Afterword by John Rose

And BRAND-NEW STORIES by:

Robert J. Sawyer
Tanya Huff
Fiona Patton
Michelle Sagara West
Tara Tallan
Cory Doctorow
Nalo Hopkinson
Chris Szego
Ed Greenwood

Have yourself a nerdy little xmas
Scientific American has assembled a list of more than 30 low-cost, nerd-friendly Xmas gifts.

Aged Well
Fossils, skulls, and large insects are among the offerings at Maxilla and Mandible online. When we looked, for instance, the 350 million-year-old fossil trilobite was a steal at $56. Also available was a modern wildebeast skull with graceful black horns ($360), and an impressive specimen of a giant scorpion ($100). Prices and offerings vary...

Titanic Coal
Need to fill stockings for bad children, large and small? Well, for a mere $21.95 you can give them a piece of coal from the engine room of the most famous shipwreck, the sinking of the Titanic. Each lump comes with a certificate of authenticity...

Test-tube Spice Rack
For the chemist-cum-cook, this set of glass test tubes in a matching silver rack makes it easy to brew up just about anything in the kitchen. Cork stoppers keep spices fresh.

Monday, December 02, 2002

World's first tattooing robot
An Austrian electrician has created a robot that tattoos humans. But would you trust your butt to a tattooing 'bot? The inventor says:

"It was a hard job because the only person I could test it on was myself which was painful but a good incentive to get it right as soon as possible.... He's an artist of course so he always decides what design the person is going to get, they can't choose. But I haven't had any complaints yet."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Beau!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 14:25 permanent link to this entry

Robert Redford Op/Ed: Patriotism = stepping away from the oil pump
Interesting Op/Ed in today's LA Times by actor, director, and longtime solar power advocate Robert Redford.

"The Bush administration's energy policy to date -- a military garrison in the Middle East and drilling for more oil in the Arctic and other fragile habitats -- is costly, dangerous and self- defeating... The benefits of switching to a mostly pollution-free economy would be considerable, and the costs of failing to do so would be steep. Prolonging our dependence on fossil fuels would guarantee homeland insecurity. If you are worried about getting oil from an unstable Persian Gulf, consider the alternatives: Indonesia, Nigeria, Uzbekistan.

If we want energy security, then we have to reduce our appetite for fossil fuels. There's no other way. Other issues may crowd the headlines, but this is our fundamental challenge ...American rooftops can be the Persian Gulf of solar energy... wind and solar power generate less than 2 percent of U.S. power. We can do better."

Maps designed by mobs
For the last couple of months, volunteers living in Amsterdam have been wearing GPS units which track their movements around town. The data was used to create a road map of the city. Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:00 permanent link to this entry

Ashcroft urges federal lawbreaking
John Ashcroft, sworn to uphold all of the laws of the land, is urging government employees to violate the Freedom of Information Act.

Last October, the Justice Department cited the Sept. 11 attacks in a memo to federal FOIA officers that stated, "When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions."

That memo superseded Attorney General Janet Reno's memo of 1993 that told FOIA officers to presume government documents are public. Citing the D.C. Circuit opinion Hemenway v. Hughes, Reno urged care to make sure that the government "is not unduly limiting the records found responsive to those requests."

Sunday, December 01, 2002

New "anti-terror" visa laws in US = canceled concerts
New federal laws intended to close borders to would-be terrorists are making life tougher than it already is for international performing artists and promoters:

Organizers of cultural events in the Bay Area and across the nation say they're being forced to cancel and change scheduled acts, squeezing the groups financially and depriving audiences of seeing acclaimed singers, filmmakers and other luminaries from foreign countries.

Last weekend, the Afro-Cuban All Stars, one of Cuba's most famous musical acts, was scheduled to perform in Berkeley in front of sold-out audiences. But the new visa policy prevented them from entering the United States.

Other recent cancellations include the Cuban-Haitian group Desandan, which was supposed to play at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley; Cuba's Los Van Van, which had been scheduled to perform at this month's San Francisco Jazz Festival; Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, who couldn't attend the Latin Grammy Awards in September; and the Whirling Dervishes of Syria, who had to miss their scheduled performance at the L.A. World Festival of Sacred Music in September.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Ned!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 22:46 permanent link to this entry

Dahling, you look mahvelous... in chromakey

Bev sez:

"Viktor & Rolf's Fall collection uses chromakey blue to portray immateriality.

The video image of the clothing on the big video screen that accompanied the catwalk showed mapped imagery in place of the chromakey blue areas on the clothing."

[ What's chromakey? In television production, it's a way of digitally electronically (thanks, Dan!) inserting an image produced by one camera into an image produced by another.

A solid color background--chromakey blue or green, for instance--is placed behind the subject to be shot and inserted through an effects generator. --XJ]

Link to photos Discuss

posted by Xeni Jardin at 22:37 permanent link to this entry

Unwired Afghanistan
A nationwide mobile network is under development, and the country's first 'Net cafe is online and operational:

[New Zealand telecom company Argent Networks] will develop a billing system for the GSM mobile network set up in June by the Afghan Wireless Communications Company, a joint venture between US company Telephone Systems International and the Afghan Ministry of Communications.

Back from Kabul after closing the deal with AWCC, Argent chief executive Chris Jones said demand for mobile phones had skyrocketed as Afghans adjusted to a life free of oppressive Taleban rule.

"There's chaos at the Ministry of Communications, with people queuing for phones and recharge cards. There's a concentration of expats, but Afghan demand is big in comparison." he said.

Afghanistan's telecoms infrastructure has been shattered by years of war, so communications are having to be built from the ground up. Wireless technology is the cheapest and easiest means of connecting the country to the outside world.

Jones said mobile phones in Afghanistan connected to cell sites which in turn linked to one of two satellites being used by AWCC. Under the deal, Argent will extend its billing platform for wireless internet services which are planned for Kabul and other main centres.

The first internet cafe has gone live at the Intercontinental Hotel. The former Islamic administration run by the Taleban banned the internet, but exiled Afghans have been active in maintaining online communities. Afghanistan has no postal service to send monthly telephone bills, so the new wave of mobile users buy pre-paid calling cards to get connected.

Link Discuss
posted by Xeni Jardin at 22:20 permanent link to this entry

World AIDS day today
Remember to Link and Think today.

Link and Think is an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing communities. The project involves hundreds of webloggers, journalers, diarists and other personal website publishers, each linking to resources about HIV/AIDS or publishing personal stories about how the AIDS pandemic has affected them.

New secret legal system emerging in the US
Those who sacrifice liberty in the service of security deserve neither.

The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say...

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

Exploding buildings!
Implosion World hosts a 12-minute short film featuring great buildings and bridges getting blowed up real good. Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:19 permanent link to this entry

1k of data in a molecule
University of Oklahoma Chemical Physicists have stored a one kilobit bitmap on a single molecule.

The researchers fired an electromagnetic pulse containing 1024 different radio frequencies close to 400 megahertz at the molecule. Each frequency either had amplitude, representing a "1", or did not, representing or a "0". This imprinted the information on the molecule.

Bitter business card toons
Tiny, bitter cartoons drawn on the backs of bizcards. Hugh sez:

I'm becoming famous for sitting in bars and drawing this weird cartoon stuff on the back of business cards. I've got a cult following now. It's strange. I dunno. The stuff gets published. All I was looking for was something to do besides sitting in bars. Living in NY- if ypu're not sitting in your tiny wee apartment, then you're sitting in an office, bar, restaurant or park bench. Woo-Hoo! Some choices.

Text ads:
Get A Real Robot
The ER1 Personal Robot System: only $499.99!
Visit www.evolution.com

Turn your MP3 collection into a streaming web site with Andromeda.

Pre-order my first novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," at a 30% discount and send this blogger to summer-camp! -Cory
(12 Reasons to Pre-Order)

I wrote and illustrated a science experiment book called "The Mad Professor." Every page is in full color and loaded with illustrations, and it's printed on easy-to-clean laminated paper, so you can make your Goon Goo, hovercrafts, portal paper, spool-bots, and other experiments without fear of staining the book. If you buy a copy and send me a self-addressed stamped envelope, I will send you a handsome sticker with an original drawing and my signature that you can stick on the front page of the book. (My address is 11288 Ventura Blvd #818, Studio City CA 91604) -Mark
Discuss

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The Guestbar! A tiny, guest-edited blog! Clay Shirky is a hell of a P2Pundit, an educator, and a great provocateur. He's promised to fill the guestblog with groovy old rants from the dawn of the Web. He sez: "I write about the Internet. I'm currently working on figuring out new forms of social software." VoIP: Its Now I have been experimenting with Voice over IP, and to my surprise, its just about ready for to prime time. I have been testing Vonage's VoIP service, and it comes close to the critical mix of simple, useful, and cheap. The key difference between Vonage and previous "You computer is your phone!" models is that now your phone can be your phone, thanks to Cisco's Analog Telephone Adapter, a box that takes a phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back and does pretty much exactly what you would expect a box that takes phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back would do. The voice quality is good (though doing big file uploads in the background can make things get choppy, which takes some getting used to if you are in the habit of making calls while during long up/downloads.) Getting voice mail on the web is cool, being able to get a 415 number while living in 203 is cool, etc, but price is the killer app: $40/mo for an unlimited number of unlimited length calls in the US. Flat rate telephony at last. The phone companies don't realize how close consumers are to treating voice as just another application on a data network. posted by Clay Shirky at 2:13 PM Making Education Better When the internet turned out to be better at reducing costs than increasing profits, a lot of bad ideas went away, but a lot of good ideas went away as well, or at least went dormant. One of these was making education better. Here is a great interview with Roger Shank on the subject. Its worth remembering that even in the midst of the IPO silliness, there were people asking questions like "What exactly should the offerings of a university be? What should a course be? Should there be courses at all? How can we make education better?" We should still be asking those questions. posted by Clay Shirky at 10:45 AM The Tyranny of Structurelessness On the Old-School-Meets-Social-Software tip, Jo Freeman's marvellous essay from 1970, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is a good antidote to the fear of structure in group endeavors. It was a critique of the design of groups in the women's movement, but is beautifully and broadly applicable to many arenas (including, near to my heart, the design of software meant to support group interaction.) Says Freeman: "Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed..." This is just the tasting spoon sample, there's good stuff throughout. posted by Clay Shirky at 7:23 PM 25 Theses of Pr0n Architecture Yoz Grahame and Matt Jones were building a 'get - search - replace' web interface, and as a proof of concept came up with the ideal critique for that dorky "25 Theses about Info Architecture" thing. Thesis #12: One goal of porn architecture is to shape porn into an environment that allows users to create, manage and share its very substance in a framework that provides semantic relevance. posted by Clay Shirky at 7:49 AM Social Rhetoric Terrifically interesting post by Matt Webb about the possibility of developing a social rhetoric that would aid us in developing software for groups. posted by Clay Shirky at 7:26 AM Morning constitutional Most successful online communities have a constitution of some sort, essentially a group-ratified agreement about 'how we do it around here'. Like Britain, however, most such constitutions are not written down. For research into what works in social software, I am collecting a list of formal constitutional documents. In keeping with the great tradition of chaos in online social systems, everything here documents some crisis or period of prolonged difficulty. These documents are concrete wisdom about social software. LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction, by the Wizards of LambdaMOO -- The wizards depart, and then return quite crankily How Did the Moderation System Develop? from the slashdot FAQ. -- Gaming the system as the principle concern of system design Our Replies to Our Critics from the Wikipedia FAQ -- Leverage for a core group to keep things on an even keel posted by Clay Shirky at 5:39 AM Its beginning to look a lot like Christmas... Several years ago, my friends Marina Zurkow and Marisa Bowe had an idea for tiny images they likened to an Advent calendar. Marina took a bunch of matchbook art and animated them in weirdly simple ways for Marisa's late, great word.com. Word is long gone, but the images are around, and I still find them weirdly hypnotic. Click the spinning wheel to get three new images. (There's more of Marina's work at O-Matic.) posted by Clay Shirky at 5:33 PM Guestbar Archives

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