Ken Kesey, R.I.P. Link Discuss

The makers of this special birdfeeder pretty much admit that the main reason anyone would want one is to watch squirrels get frustrated as they unwittingly re-encact the Curse of Tantalus. Link Discuss

RealAudio from NPR's "All Things Considered," about the Radiation and Public Health Project's baby-teeth initiative. Pat sez, "Scientists used a massive number of baby teeth collected in the fifties toprove that above ground nuclear testing was exposing American kids to bigdoses of Strontium-90. Now, have a century later, the owners of the teethare about to be tracked down and their heath studies to see the long termeffects of childhood radiation exposure. And you thought there was no toothfairy!"LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Pat!)

Kevin Kelly is a friend and an author of one of my all-time favorite books, Out of Control. (You can download it for free here.) I was poking around his site, kk.org, and came across this great paper he wrote for Technology in Society called "Nerd Theology." He claims that the most earth shattering event -- in terms of potential for religious upheaval -- would be contact with alien intelligence. Then he goes on to explain that scientists are creating alien intelligence right here on Earth, so it doesn't matter whether we are ever visited by ET or not. Then he looks at the way scientists consider themselves as gods, and rightly so. Unfortunately, the paper is a scanned and put into a PDF file, so you'll have to print it out if you want to read it. But it's worth it. Link Discuss

We know that the military and the recording industry are on opposite sides of the P2P technology fence, but who knew that Uncle Sam was also at odds with the film and software industry? Here's a story about a US Marine onboard an amphibious assualt vehicle who's making great coin bootlegging games, porn, music and movies on burnable CDs and selling 'em to his shipmates.

Keenly aware that the law discourages copyright infringement, he is careful to stress that he copies software and music only for Marines who want a backup of software they have purchased legally. His business is clearly tolerated, conducted in plain sight of sergeants who wander past his shop in the lounge. He says he even has done technical computer work for some officers on board.

At the moment, he is putting together a compilation CD of another Marine's favorite porno clips, plus a few other odds and ends. Pfc. Winter likes to keep his customers happy. He knows they have limited funds, and so, in this case, he went back and told the client that the CD had plenty of space left. He is giving the guy a few days to collect some more material.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Alex!)

We've all heard that "security is a process, not a product," but what does that really mean? This exhaustive study of ATM fraud in the UK highlights the way that the most fabulous cryptosystem in a substandard social/procedural system can be circumvented.

When an aircraft crashes, it is front page news. Teams of investigators rush to the scene, and the subsequent enquiries are conducted by experts from organisations with a wide range of interests - the carrier, the insurer, the manufacturer, the airline pilots' union, and the local aviation authority. Their findings are examined by journalists and politicians, discussed in pilots' messes, and passed on by flying instructors.

In short, the flying community has a strong and institutionalised learning mechanism. This is perhaps the main reason why, despite the inherent hazards of flying in large aircraft, which are maintained and piloted by fallible human beings, at hundreds of miles an hour through congested airspace, in bad weather and at night, the risk of being killed on an air journey is only about one in a million.

In the crypto community, on the other hand, there is no such learning mechanism. The history of the subject ([K1], [W1]) shows the same mistakes being made over and over again; in particular, poor management of codebooks and cipher machine procedures enabled many communication networks to be broken. Kahn relates, for example [K1, p 484], that Norway's rapid fall in the second world war was largely due to the fact that the British Royal Navy's codes had been solved by the German Beobachtungsdienst - using exactly the same techniques that the Royal Navy's own `Room 40' had used against Germany in the previous war.

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Michael!)

I just wanna say that I was massively pissed when I checked into my Cambridge, MA hotel this morning and discovered that they charge SIX BUCKS AN HOUR FOR LOCAL CALLS, and realized that I'd make an entire DSL-bill's worth of local calls every friggin day that I was here, just keeping up with the Internet. So I unpack my iBook2 in my hotel room and lo and behold, there are THREE open 802.11 networks for me to choose from! I've been operating a couple public 802.11 nodes in San Francisco and Toronto for the past year or so, and I'm delighted to see my karma repaid. Thank you, my unknown benefactors!Discuss

Here are some bookmarklets (JavaScript widgets you can drag to your favorites bar) for interacting with the Internet Wayback machine. One will take you to the most recent archive copy of any given page -- so when you get a 404, you can see what used to be there -- and the other one will open up the Wayback Machine archive for that page and let you pick any version of the current page for browsing. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

DivX goes legit! DivX is an open-source fileformat for video that can compress braodcast-quality video files to manageable sizes in just the way that MP3 compressed CD-quality audio. Now, a company that is licensed to distribute videos of Broadway musicals is using DivX to supply a new video-on-demand service.LinkDiscuss

Bootleg DVDs of the Harry Potter movie are selling briskly. Link Discuss

Bruce Sterling ruminates on Pokemon in an MP3 interview on Wired News.

But, you know, I'm quite the fan of Pokemon. I'd love to do some writingfor them. ButI think they're probably a harbinger of even more sophisiticated kinds ofthings. [...] These programs, I think, really are preparing them for apost-human future. I mean, you look at Pokemons--they're all obviouslygenetically altered shit. They're straight out of the WTOG (sic) splicingnightmare. They're animals that are cute, cuddly, can sort of talk, and arelike, you know, they glow in the dark, and have extra sets of chickenwings, I mean, they're all biological violations. And cuddly!

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

The New Scientist Reports on the results of a three-year study of eBay buying and selling trends, and discovers that:

• Longer auctions get more bidders and higher sale prices
• Reputable sellers attract higher bids

Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

Artist Danilo Strulato's work from an exhibit entitled "The Hell Inside Me." Link Discuss (Thanks, Enrico!)

"A Cleveland man has been charged with felonious assault for trying to shape his 5-month-old son's head to make it look more like his own." Nuff sed.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Michael!)

 

Gothbabies! The Internet's goths provide their baby pictures. Awwwwwww... You know, my parents always say that their first mistake was teaching me to talk. I wonder if these kids' folks feel the same way about leaving eyeliner lying around.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)

Peer-to-Peer may enrage the music industry, but the military's getting pretty hot to trot when it considers the "decision superiority" potential of P2P networking.

[ Lt. Col. Robert Wardell, special assistant to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] recalled how incompatible computer systems forced an F-14 Tomcat pilot flying over Kosovo to shut down his secure radio system in order to talk freely to officers aboard a B-52 bomber and tell them the location of ground targets.

Several times, he said, the targets were able to move faster than their attackers after the enemy apparently intercepted their radio talk.

More recently, he said the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier whose computers are set up to communicate primarily with Navy planes, found itself facing communication troubles when it suddenly had to carry Army helicopters to Afghanistan.

Soldiers need a communication system that will be more nimble and flexible if they are to counter the threat from international terrorists, Wardell said: "You have a dispersed enemy who basically is operating on a peer-to-peer system, at a very low level. How are we going to attack that? Probably the same way."

LinkDiscuss (Thanks, John!)

The world's most prolific eater of Big Macs:

Gorske has gone through 14.5 cows, 6.25 million sesame seeds, 1,900 whole pickles, 563 pounds of cheese and 100 gallons of special sauce.

LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

An excerpt from Kelly Link's story ""Travels With the Snow Queen."LinkDiscuss

Kelly Link is one of the most startling and wonderful new science fiction writers working in the field today. Her stories are mind-boggling and funny and fine. Today, Salon interviews Kelly about her collection of short stories, Stranger Things Happen.

...I'm fascinated with romance as a genre. If you sit down to write a romance novel, it's like a sonnet; all the rules are in place. It has to have this kind of ending. Depending on the type of romance, it has to have this kind of sex, but not before a certain point. Part of that story was that I was trying to figure out the structure of a romance story. And I was very interested in London subway names at the time, so that got in there, too. This was one of those stories where a lot of ideas got stuck together.

Link Discuss

eBay is planning a live auction of the world's rarest and most valuable Trek schwag, much of it donated by the original cast and crew. The bidding for a production model of the Enterprise starts at $15,000.LinkDiscuss

My pal Fixer just moved from LA to Ireland, the land of his ancestors. He's a big goddamned geek -- basically, all my friends are big goddamned geek, like attracts like -- and is discovering and reporting on the geek zeitgeist in the land of Eire in a new blog.LinkDiscuss

South By Southwest (SXSW), the killer culture/music/tech conference in Austin, has updated its site, and lo and behold, I'm doing the keynote with Bruce "Zeitgeist" Sterling. Woo! I think I musta attended 40 conferences last year, and SXSW is in the top two. What a great show. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jon!)

I don't know which car I'd rather have: a Dymaxion Omnitransport or a Honda Unibox (shown here). Link Discuss

I'm currently sitting in on a talk at the O'Reilly P2P conference on the EFF's Open Audio license, an "open source" license for music that the EFF produced to allow musicians an alternative to either giving away their art holus-bolus or locking it up with a draconian traditional license. This is a prototype of an overarching, viral, free license that I think we'll see in the near future, something that covers film, music, prose and so on. I hereby declare that this license will be known as the "Enthusiastic License" -- the license of choice for the Enthusiastic Movement.

[..T]his license is designed to serve as a tool of freedom for artists who wish to reach one another and new fans with their original works. It allows musicians to collaborate in creating a pool of "open audio" that can be freely modified, exchanged, and utilized in new ways. Artists can use this license to promote themselves and take advantage of the new possibilities for empowerment and independence that technology provides. It also allows the public to experience new music, and connect directly with artists, as well as enable "super distribution" where the public is encouraged to copy and distribute a work, adding value to the artist's reputation while experiencing a world of new music never before available.

LinkDiscuss

Firsthand account of the first eBay University seminar outside of the US, held in Toronto's Metro Convention Centre:

By lunch, everybody is talking eBay. Moez Ladha, 26, who runs a cellphone accessory business and uses eBay to boost sales, is having a conversation with Heidi Goertz, 34, who sells porcelain dolls. They've found common ground talking about the difficulties of competing with U.S.-based sellers.

I interrupt to ask Ladha what his user rating is. The number is often a source of pride among eBayers; it's a performance gauge that refers to the amount of praise a user has received from successful transactions. He tells me his rating is 256, though he assures me that it should really be something like 1,400.

"Nobody ever leaves positive feedback any more," pipes up Goertz in sympathy.

LinkDiscuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

David Byrne has this weird little book out -- it looks like a red Gideon bible, with the title -- "The New Sins" -- stamped in gold leaf on the cover. Inside, it looks like a weird, vaguely Satanic bible, with strange chapters and verses interspersed with lush and faintly surreal images. This British review of the book sums it up neatly.

Byrne is often witty - "Our loved ones demand honesty, but what they really want is better fiction" - and sometimes wise - "One would do well to be suspicious of all things sweet and cuddly" (and, we might add, of those cuddliness-mongers who promise to make the world safe for our children). In its goofy way, this book works like such earlier instances of Christian satire as Erasmus's Praise of Folly, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, or Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It frees up religious apprehensions from their tendency to petrify over time into ethical codes or mere patterns of social conformity, more or less strictly enforced by more or less plausible leaders in whose hands lie merit awards, penalty points and, should the need arise, depleted uranium.

LinkDiscuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

I love the logic in this spam I got:

Internet scams, con games, illegal pyramid schemes.

There are so many business opportunities available on the internet,

How do you know which one to pick?

Simple, Let us pick one for you!

Discuss

Lawrence Lessig's new book, "The Future of Ideas," reviewed on Salon today. I saw Lessig speak a couple weeks ago at the Internet Wayback Machine launch, and he's delivering the evening keynote tonight at the O'Reilly P2P conference. He's a way, way smart guy, and he is full of interesting, one-of-a-kind insights into the nature of civil liberties, law and policy online.

In "The Future of Ideas" Lessig argues that future prosperity is impossible without the freedom to innovate -- but that freedom is under attack by vested interests. Lessig's effort to bind innovation to prosperity is as big an idea, perhaps, as Adam Smith's rebuke to the mercantilists in "The Wealth of Nations." Although free-market capitalists look to Smith as their intellectual fountainhead, Smith was not battling the yet-to-be-born Karl Marx in the latter part of the 18th century. He took aim at those who believed that a nation's prosperity could be measured by the gold it acquired. Prosperity, Smith reasoned, was an ongoing process.

Lessig offers a similar insight about the information economy at the turn of the 21st century. Prosperity requires progress and progress requires innovation. But while some intellectual property theorists and the shareholders of Disney may favor the extension of intellectual property rights into the infinite future, the long-term impact of an economic system that piles high property rights, while burying the intellectual commons that makes progress possible, could be that all new forms of production grind to a halt.

LinkDiscuss

Streaming "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" audiobook on Salon today. LinkDiscuss

Turkish prison inmates and their families have been on a fatal hunger-strike for a year, protesting changes to the prison-system that have increased the frequency and severity of beatings by guards. The protestors threatened to immolate themselves if the police attempted to take them into custody or force them to eat, and several of them did, yesterday, during a raid. Now, Turkish Human Rights organizations are speculating that the acts of immolation may not have been voluntary.LinkDiscuss

Linux hackers have built a Linux filesystem that can handle up to 144,000,000,000 megabytes -- 144 petabytes. This is way, way more than any other desktop OS.LinkDiscuss

Tourist Guy's identity has been revealed. He's a Brazilian who has visited NYC once, but won't go back ever again... LinkDiscuss (Thanks, DanielJ!)

"Pope John Paul, who writes most of his speeches by hand and does not own a computer, will dedicate his message for World Communications Day to the Internet, the Vatican said Tuesday." Link Discuss

Fred "Baron" von Lohmann is a lawyer at the EFF and a former IP hotshot attorney at white-shoe lawfirm Morrison Foerster. He untangles the California Appeals Court ruling on DeCSS, and explains what it really, actually means.

So, you can republish DeCSS without worrying about a "stop the presses" injunction based on trade secrets law. You still might be sued for damages (assuming the secret hasn't been lost), or for violating the DMCA.

LinkDiscuss

Wesley "Hack the Planet" Felter is blogging from the O'Reilly P2P conference (Link), as is Meg "Nut" Hourihan (Link, Rael "Meerkat" Dornfest (Link). Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!)

Dance Dance Ressurection is a blasphemous -- and funny! -- parody of Dance Dance Revolution, a strange, kinetic and addictive videogame.LinkDiscuss (via None More Negative)

Tiki King has posted a new batch of his ukulele tunes for you to listen to. Link Discuss

Photos from the O'Reilly P2P conferences, including a couple of me. Have I mentioned how much goddamned fun this conference is? This conference is a lot of goddamned fun.LinkDiscuss P2PCon Pix

"Barney Macintyre, age 6 and three-quarters [on the Harry Potter movie]: 'This is great, the best film I've ever seen, way better than any of the Disney cartoons.' Kids review Harry Potter. Link Discuss

Drug subculture and gaming subculture intersect at stoner LAN Parties.

Quake II On Drugs: The Guided Tour. An enterprising German duo played Quake II under the influence of every drug known to man or woman and posted the results of each experiment. The Web site rates drugs on fun factor and effects on fragging capacity. Cocaine scores 3 out of 4 for fun, and 4 out of 4 for ability distortion: "Who doesn't know the superior feeling to come with invulnerability, quad damage, and a BFG [Big Fucking Gun]? On cocaine one feels always this way, even if one has only a blaster [i.e., Small Fucking Gun]."

Link Discuss

After the Potter movie comes out, we will forever lose our innocence.

But once the movie hits, there'll be no going back. Reading a book is an intensely private interaction between reader and writer, and even a chart-topping book like each of the Harry Potter installments has had to win over its converts one reader at a time. But going to the movies, especially a costly, much-anticipated would-be blockbuster, is about as public an act as you can commit. And so, even before the movie's release, our personal, intimate imaginings of quidditch, potions and chocolate frogs have been diluted by Harry on the Coke can, Hagrid in FAO Schwartz and wizards by the dozens on our Halloween doorsteps.

Link Discuss

Rumors of Apple's new G5, 1600mHz, 400mHz bus computers, now in use at some software developers' shops.

The machines we have here are much faster than Pentium 4s in every single task," notes our Adobe insider.

Link Discuss

Visitors to this year's ComDex won't be able to lug their laptops and bags and other nerdiphenalia onto the trade floor, on the off-chance that their gear is a ticking bomb.

In addition, the organizers advise visitors to "please leave bags, briefcases, backpacks, laptops, etc. at home or in your hotel room." People carrying purses and fanny packs must enter through a separate security check.

Attendees will be able to collect literature and freebees in "plastic bags" distributed by vendors, but they will not be able to leave the show floor and return with the bags. A bag check will be available at the convention center.

LinkDiscuss

Pick my jaw up off the ground: EMI has agreed to put a bunch of their media online on Gnutella, without any copy-protection. LinkDiscuss

The Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C., captures the spirit, genius and sadness of my favorite patent clerk. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Schuyler!)

Vint "Internet Pioneer" Cerf co-authored this IETF RFC, which is working to establish a standard for stringing up an Interplanetary Internet. The preamble alone is worth the read, stirring and thought-provoking stuff.

Remember always that launch mass costs money. Think not, then, that you may require all the universe to adopt at once the newest technologies. Be backward compatible.

Never confuse patience with inaction. By waiting for acknowledgement to one message before sending the next, you squander tracking pass time that will never come to you again in this life. Send as much as you can, as early as you can, and meanwhile confidently await responses for as long as they may take to find their way to you.

Therefore be at peace with physics, and expect not to manage the network in closed control loops -- neither in the limiting of congestion nor in the negotiation of connection parameters nor even in on-demand access to transmission bands. Each node must make its own operating choices in its own understanding, for all the others are too far away to ask. Truly the solar system is a large place and each one of us is on his or her own. Deal with it.

LinkDiscuss

Stefan sez: "I'm losing it . . . why didn't I think of this? Via Paul Riddel's newsletter: Two (count 'em, two) different pages describing how to make faux otherworldly biological specimens inna jar: Bottled Deep One, Bottled Thing in a Jar. Discuss

What a cool hack! The Game Boy camera only shoots black-and-white photos. In order to make color photos from the black-and-white output, the photographer on this site uses color gels to capture three images (a red, a green and a blue) of each shot, then digitally superimposes them to make a color image. Link Discuss

Drug smugglers are getting back to business: After a couple months of going (even more) underground, America's drug smugglers have overcome their fear of ensnarement in the anti-terrorist net and are back at it.LinkDiscuss

The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror.

Throughout the Islamic Middle East, men and women are taught to be vehemently opposed to pleasure, especially of the sexual variety. Men are raised not only forbidden to touch women, but to even look at them. Sex before marriage is not just a sin -- but a criminal offence. It is punishable by a severe beating at best, and an execution at worst....It is excruciating to imagine the sexual confusion, humiliation, and repression that evolve in the mindsets of males in this culture. But it is no surprise that many of these males find their only avenue for gratification in the act of humiliating the foreign "enemy," whose masculinity must be violated at all costs – as theirs once was.

Link Discuss

This alarming census describes the volume and kind of weapons seized at airport security checkpoints over the past decade or so. 60 handguns were seized at Logan, 600 at DFW, and 762 at LAX. LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)

Ah, the hazards of a "What would you do to win a _______?" contest: Desperate gamer eats worms to win a Nintendo GameCube.LinkDiscuss

The nastygram redefined: Dutch cops spam stolen phones with intimidating SMS messages, rendering them useless. The article doesn't make it clear why they just don't ask the cellphone provider to disconnect the phones.LinkDiscuss

Recently declassified CIA documents. If you thought the exploding cigarbomb they aimed at Fidel was goofy, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

In a project known as "Acoustic Kitty" the Directorate of Science and Technology sought to train a surgically altered cat, wired with transmitting and control devices, to become a mobile, eavesdropping platform. In its first test, the cat was run over by a taxi.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

Aww... isn't it cute. A wee digital camera. Link Discuss

Lengthy paeon to the Simpsons in the NYT.

Measuring the creative entropy that afflicts TV series has become a popular form of do-it-yourself cultural analysis. Recently, the phrase ''jumping the shark'' has entered the lexicon, referring to that point in its run when a series, having exhausted its premise, resorts to desperate novelty to keep itself alive. At the Web site that popularized the concept -- named after a late episode of ''Happy Days'' in which the aging Fonzie undertakes a death-defying water-skiing stunt -- the various ways in which a show can go bad are cataloged by example: ''New Kid in Town,'' ''Special Guest Star,'' ''Singing,'' ''Birth,'' ''Death.'' The part of the site dedicated to shows that never jumped the shark is headed by a picture of the Simpson family squeezed together on their indestructible living-room couch.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)