PayPal froze a customer's account with $20,000 in it. I suspect there's a run going on at PayPal because every time I try to log on I get a message telling me that its servers are too busy. I want to get my $500+ out now. But I have a bad feeling. According to this Salon article, "PayPal remains outside the strictures of banking laws. Consumer accounts have neither the protection of federal insurance systems like FDIC nor the assurance of regulatory oversight." Link

Facsinating account of the weliveinpublic.com fiasco, by Jupiter/Pseudo founder and (ex?)-millionaire Josh Harris's live-in girlfriend, Tanya Corrin.

"Before the project began, I was hoping I’d be able to do absolutely everything in public, even masturbate. But I never got comfortable with being naked or using the toilet (that was Josh’s specialty), and especially not having sex. Josh wanted to have wild simulated sex, but that felt too manipulative. This was about real life, real feelings. So we did it under the covers late at night, or else we’d cover the cameras. Once we had dirty-talking sex with the camera covered, still unaware that the audio had gone out crystal clear. We were mortified. Viewers went berserk.

Link

Review of a new book, BURIED ALIVE.

"In 1937 Angelo Hays was interred in the village of St. Quentin de Chalais after a motorcycle accident. When insurance inspectors exhumed him a few days later, they discovered that Hays was still alive. A head injury had caused his system to shut down temporarily, making him appear dead. Hays recovered and went on to invent his own security coffin equipped with a chemical toilet and radio transmitter. He became a minor celebrity in France, performing for a TV audience from six feet under."

Link

And Memepool's picked up the soft-drink story! Slashdot effect, here we come! Link

Excellent OpenCola/Disneyland story in today's Globe and Mail. Link

Robots to lay fiber optic cable through sewer pipes. (Thanks Jon!) Link

"A young Chinese tiger keeper has been mauled to death after apparently trying to defecate on one of his big cats." Link

Heh. Speaking of Microsoft, looks like their redirector has been hacked by someone with a relatively subtle sense of humor. Link (Here's a mirror of it -- refer to this once MSFT catches on Link)

"You brutish product of the mineral world!" A collection of insults hurled by Dr. Smith at the robot from Lost In Space. Link

Microsoft operating system chief Jim Allchin is the Joe McCarthy of the software industry: "Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer ... I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. I'm an American, I believe in the American Way. I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat."Link

Supreme court will hear drug bust case based on thermal imaging. "For the first time, the Supreme Court is going to tell us how far government can go in snooping into our private residences and personal lives." I can hardly wait to hear the bullshit sophistry that Scalia will spout when he pulls the string behind his neck. Link

Millennium, shmillennium. 2001 is important because it's Uncle Walt's 100th Birthday. Happy 100th, you crazy frozen head, you! Link (Thanks, Amanda!)

PSI has earned my undying enmity by buying up the greatest li'l ISP in Toronto and turning into a steaming pile of ratshit. Check out this high-freakin-larious email from a senior PSI manager to his salesteam over at FuckedCompany. Link (Thanks, jbrewer!)

More awesome stuff from the site below. This is a reprint from an old Johnson Smith catalog. Link

Ultra fantabulous scan of a 1940s book of jazz fanatic cartoons, by my hero, ex-UPA cartoon director, Gene Deitch. Link

Bad EMF, bad! Get your metal-lined underwear and bedding right here. Link

Disneyland and the Space Needle were terrorism targets. Link

Simson Garfinkel's Technology Review article about Net-connected objects: "I still can't figure out why you would want to put a toaster on the Net. But early this year, Japanese housewares manufacturer Zojirushi plans to begin marketing an Internet-enabled hot pot that can send short messages to cellular telephones using a built-in wireless modem. Zojirushi will pitch the hot pot to the adult children of aging parents. Whenever the pot is used, explains iReady president Ryo Koyama, it automatically transmits a message letting the child know that the parents are okay and enjoying a cup of fresh tea." Link

Nerds like to talk about how copy-protection hardware won't catch on because the PC players don't want it. But here's how it's gonna proliferate: A $10 storage disc that holds 500MB (the last SmartMedia card I bought held 64MB and cost $75) and enforces copy-protection/rights-management. How long until everyone swtiches over to these things? How long before PC players need to integrate with it?

How can this thing only cost ten bucks? Two possibilities come to mind: One, they're being sold below cost; or two, earlier generations of removable media were wildly overpriced. Link

Hey, if anyone out there is looking to drop half a gee on me, here's some kick ass Haunted Mansion shwag for sale on eBay. Link

Dyslexic, trash-talking hacker homepage. Link (Thanks, Oxblood!)

Get your rolls of anti-United Nations toilet paper here. Link

Really cool watercolor paintings of simple Lego sculptures. Link

The latest iteration of the "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" story:

Uploading User: What Happen?
Napster Client: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Downloading User: We Get Signal.
Uploading User: What !
Downloading User: Main screen turn on.
Uploading User: It's You !!
RIAA: How are you gentlemen !!
RIAA: All your base are belong to us.
RIAA: You are on the way to destruction.
Uploading User: What you say !!
RIAA: You have no chance to survive make your time.
RIAA: Ha Ha Ha Ha ....
Napster Client: Uploading User !
Uploading User: Take off every 'Zig' !!
Uploading User: You know what you doing
Uploading User: Move 'Zig'.
Uploading User: For great justice.

Salon has an article about the portrayal of women in the comic books of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. Link

And here's a Salon interview with los bros. Hernandez. Link

And here's Salon's little gallery of Hernandez art. Link

NY Times story on potentially unbreakable crypto: "with Dr. Rabin's system, the message stays secret forever because the code uses a stream of random numbers that are plugged into the key for encoding and decoding. The numbers are never stored in a computer's memory, so they essentially vanish as the message is being encrypted and decrypted. 'If someone walks into my office with a court order or if they put a gun to my head they still could not read my conversations,' Dr. Lipton said." Link