Unspeakable k-rad pewter Simpsons bar accessories. Anyone still owe me a birthday prezzie? Link Discuss

Janis Ian, the singer/songwriter/science fiction writer who posted an excellent rant about the music industry and file-sharing, has posted a roundup of the responses she received:

Emails received: 1268 as of 07-30-02 (does not include message board posts)

Number of times the article has been translated into other languages: 9. (French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Yugoslavian.)

Times AOL shut my account down for spamming, because I was trying to answer 40-50 emails at a time quickly and efficiently: 2

Winner of the Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is award: Me. We began putting up free downloads around a week after the article came out. We will attempt to put up one free download a week for as long as we can - and leave them all up.

Change in merchandise sales after article posting (previous sales averaged over one year): Up 25%

Change in merchandise sales after beginning free downloads: Up 300%

Offers of server space to store downloads: 31

Offers to help me convert to Linux: 16

Offers to help convert our download files from MP3 to Ogg Vorbix: 9

Offers to publish a book expose of the music industry I should write: 5

Offers to publish a book expose of my life I should write: 3

Offers to ghost-write a book expose of my life I shouldn't write: 2

Offers of marriage: 1

Number of emails disagreeing with my position: 9

Number of people who reconsidered their disagreement after further discussion: 5

Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Does anyone know where this stunning photo of a sofa made out of Mac II computers comes from? Check out this amazing sofa made out of old Mac IIs from the Mac Store in St. Louis. (Thanks, Buck!) Link Discuss

I don't think I've ever seen a summation of the Trek zeitgeist as visually neat as this thumbnail gallery of all (?) the women that appeared in the original Star Trek. Link Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

Ben Hammersley's put up a gallery of some of the photos he took in Peshawar and the Afghani border-areas last year while he was on assignment for his paper there. Link Discuss (via Ben Hammersley)

If you've got a fair bit of googlejuice, like Danny "NTK" O'Brien, you will inevitably find yourself getting lots of strange stuff over your email transom. Danny gets occasional random requests from newbies who figure that he might have the answer to their random questions. Then, acting as a kind of freelance Dear Abby, Danny answers them. What a mensch.

Mail like this arrives about once every six months. Last time it was a woman in a Pakistani cybercafe asking about her brother. He'd run away to Britain and she hadn't heard from him since. We tracked him down to a prison in the north of England. I found out the address and phone number for her - again not much, but something.

Link Discuss

Great rant on what's wrong with the much-lauded futuristic UI in "Minority Report:"

Speaking of efficient, I noticed that you guys are still using disks to transfer files from one user station to another. I mean, it's in the same room, you know? You guys could just get a cheap-o wireless card or something, save you the extra step. Especially since sometimes I guess you guys are really in a time crunch, right? Those disks you guys are using are pretty but they are so outdated...

Oh, and speaking of the Temple - you know that pool where the pre-cogs hang out? what's up with the human-sized drain? Does it really need to be that big? I can send you some sketches of grids and stuff you can use that will let water through without, you know, flushing the pre-cogs down too.

Link Discuss (via Megnut)

Bruce Sterling and I have been having an email go-round about spam, the law, and spam-filtering. His latest Viridian note is a transcript of a speech he gave at the O'Reilly Open Source conference, in which he goes over some of the ground that we covered:

I had a long argument about this with Cory Doctorow. He and I were really going at this hammer-and-tongs, over the growing spam and virus crisis. And I thought that there needed to be some kind of political and legal solution. Like building a galvanized steel cage in Cuba and throwing all the spammers and virus writers in there as unlawful combatants who are clear and present deadly enemies of humanity.

AUDIENCE: YAAAY!!! (Applause)

Whereas Cory is a techie, and he wants a techie solution. So he's a fan of stuff like Vipul's Razor, and he doesn't mind if the traffic on the Internet is 96% fraud, malware and evil garbage as long as none of it gets on his feet.

So, I let Cory convince me and I installed Mozilla on my Mac. And its bug-track completely wrecked System 9. So I stopped fighting with Cory Doctorow. Not because he was winning the argument, but because his fucking Open Source solution cost me three days of desperate effort to restore my files! So I took the further trouble to install System X, and I backed up everything of course, but I still don't get it about System X quite frankly, and neither does System X. It never knows what it's running. There are chunks of Microsoft code in there like giant lumps of black putty just *lying* to you about what they are doing on the Internet. It's like trying to wade through drilling mud running this thing. It steers itself by committee.

Udhay Shankar (who runs a great techie list called "Silk" that's mostly based in India) asked me if I wanted to followup on Bruce's talk on the list. It was after midnight, and I ended up with a touch of logorreah and rattled out a response to the list:

The koan that Frankston told me that led me to enlightenment was this: "On the Internet, my right to swing my fist *doesn't* stop just short of your nose, because it can only impact with your nose if you execute the 'punch yourself in the nose' suggestion. It's *your* responsibility to figure out which suggestions you want to execute."

Or words to that effect.

When you see things this way, there is no malware, no spam.

Really. I mean, yes, in the real, present-day world, we don't get to choose which suggestions we execute, but that's because we've got bad software.

But the software is getting better. My second relevatory experience was installing Mozilla 1.0 and finding the "block images from this server" context menuitem. The lid lifted off of my head and my brains did a traditional folk-dance in celebration of the extreme cleverness of the Moz hacker hivemind.

Link Discuss

80 percent of the mail that makes it through Hotmail's spam-filters is spam.

On a typical day, Hotmail subscribers collectively receive more than 1 billion pieces of junk e-mail. Such spam accounts for 80 percent of messages received -- not including mail blocked by Hotmail's first line of filters.

Though Hotmail develops various tools for evading spam, unwanted messages keep slipping through.

"And it's increasing every day," said Parul Shah, a product manager with Microsoft Corp., which runs Hotmail. "Every time Hotmail or another e-mail service provider finds a way to detect spam, the spammer immediately has a way to get around that."

Link Discuss (via /.)