A $140 DES 64-bit/40bit hardware-encrypted FireWire enclosure for IDE drives is shipping in a week. The enclosure uses a USB-based key that holds the cipher. Without the key, the data on the drive is unreadable. It's an interesting approach, since it offloads the gruntwork of encrypting and decrypting onto hardware in the enclosure, and the manufacturer claims no throughput degredation. Of course, this is only secure if you lock up the keys, and don't store them with the drive. I'm kinda hard-pressed to imagine a scenario where my HDD is vulnerable to theft or instrusion and not likely to be stored with the dongle that's required to make it work (i.e., laptop-bag snatches will only be foiled you if you don't carry the key in the bag, and after you've left the key at home once or twice on a cross-continent trip, how likely are you to carry them together? Security is hard) Link Discuss (via /.)

Here's a time-lapse animation of the debris-dispersion as shown on NOAA radar. Link Discuss (via Interesting People)

David Brown has posted his photos of the Astronaut Memorial at Kennedy Space Center. Link Discuss

Shuttle debris has landed in Nacogdoches, TX, punching through roofs. Link Discuss (via Fark)

The Mousecaster is a PS/2 mouse with a built-in digital FM tuner. Using the included software, you can play the demodulated radio signals through your PC, or encode them as MP3 or WAV files on your drive. Link Discuss (via Gizmodo)

Canada's Privacy Commissioner's annual report is a stirring damnation of the opportunists in the Parliament (and, by extension, Congress, Brussels, and elsewhere) who have exploited the 9-11 tragedy to erode privacy without improving safety.

The Government is, quite simply, using September 11 as an excuse for new collections and uses of personal information about all of us Canadians that cannot be justified by the requirements of anti-terrorism and that, indeed, have no place in a free and democratic society.

As of the date this Report went to press, January 17, the Government has shown no willingness to modify these initiatives in response to privacy concerns. Whether the Government's awareness of the imminence of this Report will have brought about any change by the time the Report is tabled, I cannot foresee.

I wish to emphasize at the outset that I have never once raised privacy objections against a single actual anti-terrorist security measure. Indeed, I have stated repeatedly ever since September 11 that I would never seek as Privacy Commissioner to stand in the way of any measures that might be legitimately necessary to enhance security against terrorism, even if they involved some new intrusion or limitation on privacy.

I have objected only to the extension of purported anti-terrorism measures to additional purposes completely unrelated to anti-terrorism, or to intrusions on privacy whose relevance or necessity with regard to anti-terrorism has not been in any way demonstrated. And still the Government is turning a resolutely deaf ear.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kathryn)

This month is the thirtieth anniversary of the invention of mobile telephony and the twentieth anniversary of the first commercial cellphone. The mobile phone's inventor is a Canadian, and Canada offered the first cellular service.

In February, 1983, while dozens of companies were jockeying for licences in Ottawa, the Alberta government quietly launched Canada's first working cellphone service for oil-field explorers. Those brave pioneers who signed up for the Aurora-400 service were given the promised status symbol: A "luggable" phone the size of a briefcase.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

Steve MacLaughlin's blog has a lot of coverage and background on the Columbia disaster. Link Discuss

Salon has published a very sensible, impassioned piece by a record exec (John Snyder, president of Artist House Records) arguing that labels must embrace file-sharing to succeed. There's nothing here that hasn't been said before (labels are chicken-littling, failing to release the variety their audience demands, file-sharing is free promotion, etc), but it's remarkable to hear it coming from a recording-industry executive.

Music companies are more egregious in their abuse of consumers than the movie companies. Consumers don't hate movie companies, but they do hate record companies. The question is, why is this happening and what is going to be done about it? Digital copy protection (known as digital rights management or DRM) will only add fuel to this fire, so expect a very big blaze in 2003. In the end, it will be the music companies that run the risk of being consumed by it. Music companies have the opportunity to adjust to the new realities of digital distribution but instead they cling to their existing business models where they control as much of the distribution channel as possible. It is doubtful that this behavior will be rewarded with increased sales.

Salon Link Discuss

DVD media is susceptible to decay, which rots the disc over time and makes it unplayable. In order to make a backup of your disc (either to VHS or DVD/CDR or DivX file), you have to break the law, because the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent the access-control systems that prevent this. It's also illegal to distribute tools that do this.

During the Betamax wars, when the VCR was ultimately legalized, Hollywood proposed replacing VCRs with something called a "Discovision," whose media was prone to decay and couldn't be written to. The idea was to force purchasers of prerecorded movies to buy the same films over and over again. Apparently, Hollywood got its wish: the DVD player, as crippled by license agreements and the DMCA.

Among those worst affected are video rental stores, which buy millions of DVDs per year.

"Some stores have reported they only get two or three rentals from a DVD before it's unplayable," said Ross Walden, director of the Australian Video Retailers Association.

Distributors "are washing their hands of it", he said. "Once a DVD has been rented out [distributors] will not take them back."

Link Discuss (via /.)

Nick Denton points out that today's scientific-notation date is 03.02.01. Link Discuss

WiFi Alliance's interoperability tests of dual-mode 802.11b/802.11g networks suggests that some equipment drops the entire network's speed to 802.11b rates if any 802.11b traffic is being routed. Link Discuss (via WiFi News)

Dave Winer has been doing a very good job of linking to noteworthy coverage of the Columbia disaster. Link Discuss

WashPo prematurely posted a news story about the successful landing of the Columbia:

With security tighter than usual, space shuttle Columbia streaked toward a Florida touchdown Saturday to end a successful 16-day scientific research mission that included the first Israeli astronaut.

The early morning fog burned off as the sun rose, and Mission Control gave the seven astronauts the go-ahead to come home on time. "I guess you've been wondering, but you are 'go' for the deorbit burn," Mission Control radioed at practically the last minute.

Link My mirror Discuss (Thanks, Nelson!)

11:46 Eastern Time: Fark reports that "Shuttle debris" is up for sale on eBay (the auction is down, Fark discussion remains). Check here for newly listed items as they (are sure to) emerge. Link Discuss

Tim Kyger, on an Electrolite message board:

One other thought. Two words: Space Station.

There are three humans waiting on board *Alpha* for a ride home. Yes, they've got a lifeboat attached; a Soyuz. But they've been in free fall for about four to five months now (I forget the exact figure). The rentry g-load for a Soyuz is gonna be 8 to 9 gees (versus the peak 1.5 g load during a Shuttle landing -- Story Musgrave stood UP during the entire rentry of his last Shuttle mission). I worry about their ability to get back without a lot of injury.

Link Discuss

The Shuttle debris track as shown on NOAA radar. Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

CNN and everyone else is reporting that the Space Shuttle has apparently broken apart in flames during its landing approach, some 200,000 miles feet above Texas. All seven members of the international crew are presumed dead. The Columbia was a 22-year old craft--NASA's oldest shuttle--and this was evidently supposed to be its last mission. As someone just pointed out on another mailing list, that seems old indeed when you consider that few people drive 22-year-old cars. This was the 113th flight in the program's 22 years and was this craft's 28th flight.Link Discuss

Rip-roaringly bad translations of LOTR: TTT. The site intro sums it up: "This webpage celebrates the wonderful engrish subtitles featured in an asian bootleg DVD of Lord of The Rings - The Two Towers. What you see is exactly what appears on the TV screen. The first half of the movie has the most screengrabs, as there is more action than talking later on, and the subtitle writers eventually started getting the name of the characters right. Have fun!" May I suggest this one in particular. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeff!)

Oh happy day: The 6,000-lego-brick replica of hockey's Stanley Cup has been returned. Question: how do they know it's the real one, and not a replica replica? Link Discuss (Thanks, Rick!)

During last Sunday's Super Bowl, Qualcomm provided Qsec-800 cellular phones to local and federal security agents. These CDMA phones include end-to-end encryption and other security features, and are designed to be secure enough to transmit classified government information. Link to Q-Sec-800 product PDF brochure, link to Wireless Week story, Discuss

"Scientists have been studying pollutants in air, water, and on land for decades. Now they're studying pollution in people, and the results are troubling. This Website reports results from the most comprehensive study ever conducted of multiple chemical contaminants in humans. Blood and urine from nine people were tested for 210 chemicals that occur in consumer products and industrial pollution." Link Discuss (Thanks, Tim!)

Glenfiddich Havana Reserve, a really, really nice scotch whisky that's matured in Cuban rum barrels, has been banned from import into the US because, somehow, that violates the embargo against trade with Cuba.

The company has been trying unsuccessfully to have the six-year-old Helms-Burton trade barrier relaxed through its legal representatives in New York.

The act tightened the four-decade-old economic embargo against Cuba and seeks to punish foreign-owned companies that engage in the "wrongful trafficking in property confiscated by the Castro regime".

Now, William Grant is introducing its precious malt to Canada, which has no such Cuban crisis and a waiting list to keep up with demand.

Link Discuss (via Fark)

blog de jeanpoole's interview with a person who uses latex to expand his mind.

I am consciousness researcher and one of my main research topics is the resonator technology, which is based on the particular capability of inflatable latex objects to intensify and modify the perception of bodily vibrations to synchronize brain waves, which helps to learn and intensify meditation (a similar concept like bio-feedback; more explanations can be found on my site). I have studied much about drugfree psychedelics, including principles of yoga, shamanic trance rites and various other spiritual methodologies for inducing alterated states of mind, but as an asexual monk I never had cared about sex departments of the internet.

Link Discuss

The "Skeleton iBook" is an extreme iBook casemod where you make your own injection-molded trasnparent iBook chassis and move the guts to it. Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary)

A manager at a California INS office got rid of his office's backlog by ordering his subordinates to shred over 90,000 piece of paperwork. As Danny points out, it's possible that a number of the deportainees of the last INS round-em-up whose paperwork was out of order were in fact victims of this lunatic, since they were all local to the office where the documents were shredded.

Among the destroyed papers, federal officials charged, were American and foreign passports, applications for asylum, birth certificates and other documents supporting applications for citizenship, visas and work permits

NYT Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

The Vatican has announced a hunt for a Patron Saint for the Internet. You know, there is no shortage of bushy-bearded Unix-geeks with mad saintly eyes that they could consider, but I guess that you have to be dead first, and fatally wounding the ILECs probably isn't enough of a miracle to qualify for canonization.

Will it be Archangel Gabriel, whom the Bible credits with bringing Mary the news that she'd give birth to Jesus? Or Saint Isadore of Seville, who wrote the world's first encyclopedia? Or perhaps Saint Clare of Assisi, a nun believed to have seen visions on a wall?

So far, about 5,000 visitors are casting their votes daily on www.santiebeati.it, something that delights Monsignor James P. Moroney, an expert on prayer and worship for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jason!)

The military and a consortium of WiFi vendors have agreed on interference thresholds for 802.11 devices that will allow them to peacefully (heh) co-exist with military radar.

"We feel comfortable that the new limits will protect military radar," said Badri Younes, a director of spectrum management at the Department of Defense...

"No one is entirely happy, and that's the essence of compromise," said Intel spokesman Peter Pitsch.

Link Discuss

A judge won't release the ten-years-murdered remains of a small boy to his family without a waiver from the murderer, who is on death row, but whose property the remains somehow appear to be.

Chad was shot in 1991, and buried in a shallow grave behind a house where Horn's family lived. Horn then tormented the Choice family for years, sending ransom notes and placing Chad's skull on the doorstep of the Choices' home on the fourth anniversary of the boy's disappearance.

Link Discuss (via Fark)

Great Japanese photo-gallery that documents the dissection of one of the new 12" Powerbooks. I've got one of these on the way, but I don't think I'll be (deliberately) taking it to bits any time soon. Link Discuss (via MacSlash)

Brobeck, a massive technology/finance corporate law-firm, has collapsed.

Three years ago, Brobeck recorded the highest profits in the city for a firm its size, each partner taking in $850,000, according to the Recorder, a San Francisco legal publication. Its total revenue topped $300 million. And Brobeck handled hundreds of merger deals and IPOs, such as Juno Online Services, the free Internet service provider, and DoubleClick, the online ad company.

Link Discuss (Thanks, ronks!)

Paul sez: "Caught up in the post-State-of-the-Union excitement over fuel cells, but don't have $1.2 billion to spend? Fuelcellstore.com has "accessories & gifts" like demonstration fuel cells, fuel cell powered desktop fans, and -- most exciting -- a remote-control fuel cell car." Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

The Space Shuttle is getting fresh data connectivity courtesy of Linux boxen and TCP/IP:

Nasa is keen to use standard terrestrial techniques to route data to and from satellites and spacecraft to cut costs and make off-planet resources easier to manage.

The space agency currently uses a mish-mash of ageing hardware and software to keep in touch with spacecraft and to ship data back and forth.

By converting to tried and tested technologies used to keep the net running, Nasa believes it can cut the numbers of staff needed to ensure spacecraft stay in touch.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

The animals of Pablo "drug kingpin" Escobar's private zoo have gone feral, and ten hippopotami now roam the grounds of his estate north of Bogata.

A dozen refugee children play in the grounds all day, and the hippos watch them from the lake. Only the tops of the hippos' massive, reddish-brown heads and their constantly twitching ears show above the water. If the children come too close to the shore, the hippos snort and bluster and open their jaws menacingly, or make a rolling dive, to scare them away...

The refugees, unfamiliar with the ways of the giant African herbivores, have tried repeatedly to fence them in with barbed wire to thwart their raids on the salt lick and keep them from upsetting the cows. But to a hippo, a barbed-wire fence is an annoyance, not an obstacle.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

A prof in Texas is refusing to write letters of recommendation for further study in biomedical science unless his students aver a belief in evolution and disclaim a belief in Creationism. His students claim it's "religious bigotry."

The Web page advises students seeking a recommendation to be prepared to answer the question: "How do you think the human species originated?"

"If you cannot truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation for admittance to further education in the biomedical sciences," Dini writes...

He argues that physicians who "ignore or neglect" the Darwinian aspects of medicine or the evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions...

A scientist who denies the "fact" of human evolution, Dini writes, is in effect committing "malpractice regarding the method of science."

"Good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs," he writes.

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

The Erie Times News ran an interesting article about why the days of the classic carny freakshow are numbered. The article is set in the World of Wonders, one of the last "odditoriums" still on the carnival circuit.

"Thank God as a young boy I saw someone sticking a nail up their nose, or I would have a terrible life,'' said Apocalypse as he pulled a cigarette out of a metal Band-Aid tin. "You want to see a freak show? A guy sitting in a cubicle, staring into a computer all day, typing until he gets carpal tunnel syndrome, with a 'thank God it's Friday' coffee mug sitting on his desk. There's your freak show.''

Link Discuss

Gillete announced a plan to embed radio-frequency identification tags in razors to foil shoplifters.

From Small Times: "A pilot is already under way at a Tesco store in Cambridge, England, which is testing whether a Gillette 'smart shelf' can use RFID to foil shoplifters (Gillette has found that if someone takes more than two or three packages of razors, they're probably stealing)."

People are freaked out that if more products become tagged, someone could drive by your house and gather a list of what you buy. The (current) reality though is that the RFID scanner has to be within three feet of a tag to read it. Personally, I'm more interested in the cool nano/micro-fluidic technique Gillete's RFID vendor, Alien Technology, developed to make these things on the cheap. Link Discuss

Mena and Ben "Moveable Type" Trott recently took a biz-trip to Tokyo and got to spend an afternoon at Tokyo Disneyland/Disney Sea. Mena's posted a gallery of fantastic shots from the Parks. I am turgid with jealousy. I yearn to visit Japan, to see the Akihabara, to wander the alleys of Tokyo Disneyland, to buy a square watermelon from a vending machine. Link Discuss (Thanks, Mena!)

Here's an article I wrote for the LA Weekly about a guy named Denny Moynahan who is converting an abandoned building in Los Angeles into a Tiki-themed apartment complex. The Weekly didn't run any pictures, but I've got some here. Link Discuss

Here's a little quiz for you. Can you pick which of the 15 noses belong to Michael Jackson? (I got 13 out of 15.) Link Discuss

Interesting article about the way Microsoft's SPOT (smart peronsal object technology) watch will work.

Microsoft ... settled on a data rate of 12 kilobits per second. In a given day... more than 125 megabytes can be transferred in the radio broadcasts. Microsoft ... secretly cut deals with FM radio stations around the country to lease the sub-carrier spectrum... enough coverage to hit about 80 percent of the country, and all major metropolitan areas. Microsoft found a way to personalize the watches: giving each a unique identification number. Then, as the watch is receiving the DirectBand signals, it looks only for data associated with the ID number. Hence, your watch only stores data on the sports teams you like and discards the rest. And because the watch knows which radio station it is receiving the information from, it can use that knowledge to reset itself. For instance, if you travel to Dallas, the watch will pick up signals from the Dallas radio station and reset itself for the appropriate time zone.

Link Merc News Discuss

After listening to Rush Limbaugh call war protestors "anti-American," "anti-capitalist," and "communists," Vietnam war veteran Micheal Stinson started an email campaign to boycott Rush's show. So far Radio Shack, Amtrak, and Bose have stopped sponsoring the program. Personally, I don't care what happens to Rush's program. If his show gets killed (which I doubt it will) some other blowhard will take his place. Link Discuss

Derek sez, "The third-annual Fray Cafe has been scheduled for Sunday March 9, right after the SXSW Web Awards ceremony. If you were turned away last year when the venue filled up, rest assured that the venue is much larger this year -- The Mercury Lounge! Start practicing those stories." Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

Charlie "Hugo Nominee" Stross and I are having a two-week-long discussion on the WELL's public Inkwell.vue conference, in honor of the publication of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Even if you don't have a WELL account, you can join in by emailing questions to Charlie.

Social incentives are the most powerful forces in our world -- the reason you can't wear your underwear on your head is because of disapprobation. The most disruptive thing about the Internet is its ability to locate you in homogenous communities that embrace the same values as you, so that there's no dialectic in socail pressure: IOW, you can spend all your time in alt.underwear.on.my.head and never get the funny looks that would cause you to reconsider your fashion choices. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (except when it is, i.e., alt.big.nazi.idiots), but it is a powerfully disruptive thing.

Sidebar: in our second collaboration, "Flowers from Alice," we deal with uploaded "people' who can instantiate many copies of themselves in parallel. One of the interesting things about this is that it suggests that attention isn't necessarily a scarce resource -- if you need to do two things at once, you just make another copy to do it...

Link Discuss

This morning's Kuro5hin has a great article on the ins and outs of dumpster diving. I've always been fascinated by diving (and I've done a little myself -- see this Wired article I wrote). I recently got sent a copy of Dumpster Diving: The Advanced Course, How to Turn Other People's Trash into Money, Publicity, and Power, a Paladin Press book written as a follow-on to the classic "The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving." The hardcore divers I know are all a little on the intense side, filled with folk wisdom and radical philosophy about trash and politics, and the author of DD:TAC is no exception. The book is a kind of extended rant, alternating between fish-tales about the big, big dumpster scores, stories of inadvertent discovery of secret information that blows the lid off of political conspiracies, and love found and lost in the trash. The Paladin Press titles vary pretty widely in writing-quality, but this is definitely on the high-end of the scale, and the information is invaluable. As the landfills overflow and the moments of our lives grow ever more ephemeral, there is no experience more life-changing that dumpster-diving. I think everyone should spend a couple nights in the trash, at least once in their lives. Link Discuss

San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum is hosting an exhibit of controversy in comic strips, including both the offending strips and the hate-mail they generated.

A TIME LINE OF COMIC STRIP CONTROVERSY

1900s: The Yellow Kid and the Katzenjammer Kids are cited for bad influence on youth.

1910s: In Polly and Her Pals, the "new woman" dares to show ankle.

1930s: Little Orphan Annie creator Harold Gray ridicules labor and FDR's New Deal. Dick Tracy becomes the first action strip to depict violence in America's backyard.

1940s: In Li'l Abner, Al Capp kicks against the establishment.

1950s: Pogo creator Walt Kelly lampoons Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.

1960s: On Stage introduces a black character; several papers cancel the strip.

1970s: "How come there's no blacks in this honky outfit?" asks Lt. Flap in Beetle Bailey. Garry Trudeau brings hashish and Watergate to the funnies in Doonesbury.

Link Discuss

An Australian ski-resort is recycling black-water (sewage) into artificial snow:

Waste from resort is converted into usable water in two ways, both at a recycling plant for initial treatment, and then separately through a three-step purifying process of UV light filtration, ozonation and ultra-filtration. The final ultra-filtration step removes all suspended solids from the liquid including all biological matter, alive or dead. The resulting water is even free of viruses, bacteria and spores from cryptosporidium or giardia. The treated wastewater is then used in conjunction with meltwater and creekwater from surrounding areas to create snow.

Link Discuss (via /.)

IBM, which operates data-archiving vaults in Canada, has lost a hard-drive containing the records for 180,000 customers of an insurance company. The records contain everything an enterprising identity thief needs, including Social Insurance Numbers, names, addresses, mothers' maiden names, beneficiaries and pre-authorized checking information. Link Discuss

25 "This Phone is Tapped" USAPATRIOT stickers for $5.50, suitable for prominent placement on the phones in your life. Link Discuss (via JWZ's LiveJournal)

Google is a private company and is notoriously closed-mouth about its revenue sources. We know that some of the money comes from partnership deals, and that some of it comes from Google "appliances" for searching private networks, but it's rare to actually get information on what actual customers pay for the service and why Google's pitch is attractive. The city of San Diego recently dropped $23,000 on a Googlebox that has completely changed the way that city employees and residents interact with each other. The interesting thing for me is that the competition here proposed a much more expensive "solution" that involved creating an explicit taxonomy and then manually tagging all the city's docs within it. In other words, the competition's pitch is, "First, tell us everything you have, then we'll tell you what you've got." No wonder Google's kicking ass in the market.

Bill Cull, the city's E-government program manager, says that because city officials were so familiar with Google, it was hard to ignore the vendor's pitch. It also didn't hurt that it was being offered a special price as a public entity. The city opted for a single Google server with a license to search an index of up to 150,000 documents. The result has been a welcome improvement for the city's 8,000 computer-equipped employees and its nearly 250,000 unique monthly site visitors: Cull says employees are using stuff they didn't know existed, and citizens are sending E-mail about the search success they're having.

Link Discuss (via EvHead)

Purdue researchers have isolated the protein that controls the body's clock -- by fuxoring with it, they hypothesise that they can induce "days" that are longer or shorter than 24h in humans and other organisms.

To confirm that the protein was responsible not just for regulating growth but for all activities set by the biological clock, Pin-Ju Chueh, then a microbiology graduate student in Dorothy Morre's lab, isolated the gene which produced the protein within cells. The team then cloned the protein and altered it in ways that produced different period lengths.

"We found that we could produce clocks with cycles of between 22 and 42 minutes," James Morre said. "The 'day' which the cell experienced was precisely 60 times the period length of the protein's cycle. We even found that feeding cells heavy water gave them a 27-minute cycle of growth and rest, so that old piece of information served to confirm our theory."

Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix)

If you live in Los Angeles, you are invited to a panel discussion about weblogs, moderated by Xeni. I'll be on the panel, along with Evan Williams, the creator of Blogger, Susannah Breslin of the Reverse Cowgirl Blog, Doc Searls of Linux Journal, Tony Pierce of Busblog, and Heather Havrelisky of Rabbit Blog. For time and location, read this press release: Link Discuss

This Java app recreates the Powers of Ten movie on an even grander scale, beginning with the galaxy and zooming down to an invidual quark, with stops on the way at the Milky Way, Earth, Florida, an oak tree, a leaf, DNA, and an individual carbon atom Link Discuss (Thanks, Dav!)

Rumor has it that Jim Carrey will play Count Olaf in the film adaptation of the Lemony Snicket books that's being shot next summer. Link Discuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

Good SmartMobs story on Affero, a reputation system for hackers, and the ways in which it parallels Whuffie:

One of the critical uncertainties about the future of smart mobs is whether or not workable, transportable, trustworthy reputation systems will evolve and spread. The potential for collective action in any population cannot be realized until the trust level rises above a threshold, and reputation can multiply the number of ways people trust each other. So far, eBay's and Slashdot's reputation system , or the more geeky trust metric used by Advogato have been the exemplars of reputation management systems.

Affero is a new wrinkle, one that holds some promise. Specifically created to "facilitate funding for Free Software and Open Source projects and to facilitate more effective dialogue among groups", Affero works for Usenet or listservs or message boards." You register and get a URL you can put in your .sig or on a web page. People who like your posts or feel you have contributed your time and expertise to helping them with a technical problem can click on your URL and give you reputation points or contribute money (via credit card and soon via PayPal) to your chosen cause, or to the community's default cause, or all three. Organizations like the Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation are popular beneficiaries.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Howard!)

Schuyler sez:

The FreeNetworks Conference (FN-CON) 2003 is focused on giving the public an in-depth look into the the fast growing worldwide movement of Community Wireless Networking (CWN).

FN-CON aims to gather the experts and implementors in community wireless networking groups from across the globe, innovators from the wired community and municipal networks, and the technologists designing the hardware for future phases of this amazing movement.

The conference will combine overviews of the technologies and motivations, status reports from the frontline, and in-depth coverage of implementation details that provide the conference attendee with the knowledge to bootstrap a CWN in their own locale.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Schuyler!)

World's Most Dangerous Places author Robert Young Pelton describes his ten day ordeal as a captive of a right-wing paramilitary group in the Panamanian jungle.

Do you feel lucky that you came out of it alive?

It's not really luck. You're in a certain mindset when you're kidnapped. You want to win the respect of your captors, so they drop their guard. You want to make sure that you're always aware of what's going on. And you want to make sure that, should the moment arrive, you can escape. Because you are being held by people who chop up people with machetes. These are not boy scouts.

Link NatGeo Discuss

For the last few months, I've been using a folding contraption called the Laptop Desk with my iBook. I fold it in half to elevate my iBook when I use it at my desk, and unfold it and set it in my lap when I use my iBook on the couch for long periods of time (so I don't cook my thighs). I really like it, but I don't think I'd want to pack it in my luggage (even though it would easily fit in my iBook case) because I don't need the additional 1 pound, 6 ounces. But for home use, it's excellent. Link Discuss

George "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" Saunders's latest sf story in the New Yorker is about kids who are raised as captive focus groups, with ads screened directly inside their heads.

Because I for one wanted to do right, I did not want to sneak through that gap, I wanted to wed someone when old enough (I will soon tell who) and relocate to the appropriate facility in terms of demographics, namely Young Marrieds, such as Scranton, PA, or Mobile, AL, and then along comes Josh doing Ruthie with imperity, and no one is punished, and soon the miracle of birth results and all our Coördinators, even Mr. Delacourt, are bringing Baby Amber stuffed animals? At which point every cell or chromosome or whatever it was in my gonads that had been holding their breaths was suddenly like, Dude, slide through that gap no matter how bad it hurts, squat outside Carolyn's Privacy Tarp whispering, Carolyn, it's me, please un-Velcro your Privacy opening!

Then came the final straw that broke the back of my saying no to my gonads, which was I dreamed I was that black dude on MTV's "Hot and Spicy Christmas" (around like Location Indicator 34412, if you want to check it out) and Carolyn was the oiled-up white chick, and we were trying to earn the Island Vacation by miming through the ten Hot 'n' Nasty Positions before the end of "We Three Kings," only then, sadly, during Her on Top, Thumb in Mouth, her Elf Cap fell off, and as the Loser Buzzer sounded she bent low to me, saying, Oh, Jon, I wish we did not have to do this for fake in front of hundreds of kids on Spring Break doing the wave but instead could do it for real with just each other in private.

And then she kissed me with a kiss I can only describe as melting.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Aaron!)

After five years of writing for Online Journalism Review, Gideon "Spike" Brower is calling it quits. His last column includes a bunch of his favorite Internet stuff. So long, Spike! Link Discuss (Thanks, Spike!)

"File Rouge," Japan's answer to Napster, has had a devastating judgement against it, and damages to the Japanese recording industry associations could exceed 400 million Yen ($3,382,924.81). Original Japanese link Babelfish translated link Discuss (Thanks, Yuichi!)

Kiwi scientists warn of "eThrombosis" -- veinous thromboses brought on by sitting on your ass in front of a computer all the damned time.

This is the first reported case of an association between prolonged immobility at a computer and a life-threatening embolism, says the researchers, who suggest the condition should be called "eThrombosis". However, some scientists are likely to question the link.

Link Discuss

K-rad video clips of a model rocket flight transmitted live to a ground station via 2.4GHz microwave. Site offers videos in QT, WMV formats. Link Discuss (Thanks, Adam!)

At-Home Imagineering is Martha-Stewart-grade crafts and cooking project that results in tchotchkes and nosh inspired by the rides and menus of Disnelyland. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bill!)

Dr. Martin Bohner, a math prof at University of Missouri-Rolla, has published new advances in Calculus that are being characterized as a "unified theory of calculus."

Bohner's paper had the highest percentage increase in citations in ISI Essential Science Indicators in the field of mathematics from the second to third bimonthly periods of 2002.

"This paper is part of a fairly new and exciting effort to unify continuous and discrete calculus," says Bohner. "Dynamic equations on time scales have been introduced in order to unify the theories of differential equations and of difference equations and in order to extend those theories to other kinds of so-called 'dynamic equations.'"

Link Discuss

German kids have a new zip-gun: the potato-bazooka. Made by duct-taping one end of a pipe, and then loading it with hairspray and a potato, the gun is fired by touching off the harispray and blowing the potato forward at great speed:

With a range of 200 metres they could split a man’s head at 15 metres and penetrate a wooden wall at 90 metres.

The guns are not governed by the usual strict firearms regulations in Germany, but prosecutors in the republic’s 16 states are passing emergency rulings to try to outlaw them.

Times Online Link Discuss (via /.)

Mental Green is a neat idea -- raise money through donations to buy up ad-space and then put nothing on it, forming a kind of greenspace without any mental bombardment. Unfortunately, the site to promote it is so gratuitously overdesigned (splashscreen, nonsensical frames, pull-down menu navigation, popup windows... you get the picture) that it's nearly impossible to figure out what they're up to.

Update: Turns out that this site is run by a marketing company. As Pesco sez, "Altruistic irony or a great PR stunt. You be the judge." Link Discuss (Thanks, Dean!)

Peter Baldes's net-art site has a bunch of great little art-vids, but none so cool as this Strip Mall Convergence QuickTime, which is violently cognitively dissonant. In a good way. Link Discuss

I did an Internet radio interview about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, with a program called "The Dragon Page." It airs Thursday -- check it out! Link Discuss (Thanks, Evo!)

Fantastic anaecdote about a music professor/Formula One car (thanks, QrazyQat) racer whose perfect pitch let him detect cheaters by listening to their engines:

I also used to tell my competitors what gear ratios they were running by comparing their cars' pitch with mine when we were adjacent on the track, identifying the musical interval between the two pitches (minor 2nd, Major 3rd, etc.), and then using temperament ratios to figure out the difference in RPM. It got a little busy out there sometimes with all the braking, cornering, multiplication and division.

I had the usual suspects memorized. Piece of cake - a major second is 9/8, major 3rd is 5/4, P4 = 4/3, P5 = 3/2 etc. For minor intervals I'd just interpolate from the nearest major/perfect.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeremy!)

The Finnish recording industry is demanding that kindergartens pay 20 Euros per month in royalties for songs sung by the children. Link Discuss

"A teenager was catapulted at least 25 feet in the air during an auto accident but grabbed onto overhead utility wires like an action hero and dangled for about 20 minutes before a rescue crew brought him down by ladder." (With video). Link Discuss

If you have a guitar and an oscilloscope capable of saving waveforms as digital files (that are emailable), and want to earn a quick $50, email me: mark@well.com. (It's for a short article I'm writing.) Discuss

From Kevin Werbach's blog:

Link Hoewing of Verizon had an op-ed in the Boston Globe last weekend about broadband. This line stopped me: "Step back, and you can see the United States is recasting the Internet as a genuine multimedia platform...." It was meant as a positive statement of what could happen if the FCC further deregulates the Bells. Instead, it epitomizes what so many companies don't understand about the Net. They have never stopped yearning for the walled gardens of video dialtone or proprietary videotext services. If the broadband Net is turned into "multimedia", it will die the same death as all previous iterations of that vision.

Link Discuss

"Category Management" is the sexy trend for today's mega-retailers. It involves asking one vendor to take over a section of your store and decide what you'll stock there, so that the vendor not only chooses which of its products you'll stock, but which of its comptetitors' products you'll stock.

Welcome to the world of "category management," a bizarre and controversial place in which the nation's biggest retailers ask one supplier in a category to figure out how best to stock their shelves. You'd expect HarperCollins to tell Borders which of its own books are hot, of course. But that's not what's going on here. Borders has essentially tapped Harper to advise it on what cookbooks to carry from all other publishers as well.

Strange as it may sound, category management is now standard practice at nearly every U.S. supermarket, convenience store, mass merchant, and drug chain. And its use is growing because it works -- at least from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. According to a recent survey by retail consultancy Cannondale Associates, retailers attribute 14 percent sales growth to category management; manufacturers report an 8 percent jump. Both say such collaboration is the key to maximum efficiency.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Tom!)

Chris Anderson, Wired's editor, is writing dispatches from Davos for Slate. They're great!

When it comes to thinking about how to regulate the science, the best test may be the "yuck factor." This is, as you might imagine, a pretty squishy concept, something along the lines of using gut reaction as a proxy for a long and unproductive philosophical debate.... Dr. Baltimore bravely soldiered on, noting that yuck changes with age and generations; teenagers aren't freaked out by the things their parents are. Indeed, yuck is as much learned as innate: An audience member cheerily volunteered that a 1-year-old will drink apple juice -- which is urine-colored -- out of a bedpan without complaint. Good point: Perhaps this is not the stuff laws should be made of.

Link Discuss

A man who received a liver transplant from someone with a terrible nut-allergy became allergic to nuts.

The 60-year-old man, who had no history of nut allergy, suffered an anaphylactic reaction to a cashew nut just 25 days after he received the liver transplant. The 15-year-old boy did have the allergy and had died after eating a peanut.

Link Discuss

"Tom the Dancing Bug" just did a particularly funny take on the recent Supreme court decision, here. Discuss

Incredibly icky -- but reasonably priced -- cane-toad-leather fashion accessories. Legs and faces optional. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

The Spanish paper el Pais published a story yesterday on the discovery by a Spanish art historian of the use of modern art in political torture during the Spanish Civil war. Bauhaus artists Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, and surrealist filmmakers Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, were said have inspired the creation of a series of secret cells and "psychotechnic" torture centers.

Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial. The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress.

Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving. A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisoner sliding to the floor when he or she sat down, Mr Milicua said. Some cells were painted with tar so that they would warm up in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat.

Guardian UK Link, Discuss (Thanks, Simon !)

Is nothing sacred? A 6,000-brick replica of the Stanley Cup was reportedly swiped during a sports equipment convention in Las Vegas last week. The stolen hockey trophy copy is only one of two that exist, and was created to promote Lego's new NHL hockey kits. Worldnetdaily Link, Discuss (Thanks, Michael!)

Frank Chu is a San Francisco street-loony who shleps an inarticulate sign up and down the downtown streets, proclaiming his disgust with various politicians and their crimes against various "Zagnatronic Galaxies." He's a total fixture, so much so that you occassionally see people dressed as Frank (neat suit, shades, slight limp, sign) on Hallowe'en, and Quizno's subs used to sponsor an ad on the back of his sign ("The best sub in 12 Zagnatronic Galaxies!"). Here's a short feature about Frank. Link (25MB QuickTime) Discuss (via MeFi)

"The most look-a-like MADMAX movie badge" -- and it's only US$227, plus shipping from Japan! Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

A British funeral-entrepreneur has built a vintage-bike-sidecar-hearse. He's patenting it, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!)

Justin Chapaweske, who developed SwarmCast (a "swarming" parallel download tech) for OpenCola, has started a new company that's building on his work, called Onion Networks. Onion's tech turns the Slashdot effect into a cooperative effort, where everyone downloading a popular file becomes a host of part of the file, so that the more popular a file is, the easier it is to get.

To show off Onion's stuff, he's started the Open Content network, which allows the whole world to put its popular, high-demand files into the mesh to make 'em easier to download. Link Discuss

Larry Lessig is throwing a conference on Open Spectrum on March 1-2 at Stanford Law School:

In an effort to encourage innovation, critics of the current model have proposed radical - and radically different -- reforms. Some say spectrum should be treated like 'property', giving purchasers the same rights afforded any property owner, including the right to exclude others from using it, and the right to transfer ownership. In contrast, proponents of a 'commons' model argue that spectrum is like a stream that belongs to all of us, and that current technological innovations allow sharing of the resource--a practical, not moral, argument...

At "Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons?" leading figures in this debate will explain their views on today's wireless technology and market conditions, and discuss the complex implications of the competing models. Then they'll debate their positions before a blue ribbon panel of judges: FCC Chairman Michael Powell, renowned economist Harold Demsetz, and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lauren!)

The secret life of "Lorem Ipsum," the nonsense Latin that designers dummy into their pages:

Contrary to popular belief, Lipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...", can be read out of a line from section 1.10.32, reproduced above.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Doug!)

Jason Kottke's posted an amazing primer on rolling your own stereoscopic images with a digital camera and some image-editing software. Possum, my high-school roommate was obsessed with stereoscopes and three-d (part of a lifelong project to write stereoscopic software to help people understand how to visualize n-dimensional space in three dimensions), and would build his own by drawing two nearly identical images and sticking them on the ends of paper-towel rolls, then putting the rolls up to his eyes and unfocusing his vision until the image converged. It all went great until one day, he decided to try to train his eyes to move independently by slowly moving the tubes apart, while keeping the image converged. Luckily, he stopped before he did any permanent damage.

Stereo photography turns out to be fairly easy to do if you're not concerned with exact results, even if you only have one camera. Choose an appropriate scene and photograph it from two different positions a small distance apart, making sure to keep the camera as horizontal as possible. That distance depends on distance between the camera and the scene, but for most pictures, an inch or two of separation between camera positions is sufficient. For the Lisa Simpson image, the figurines were about two feet away and I moved the camera only about an inch between shots. Make sure you keep track of which is the left most photo and right most photo. That'll be important when preparing the images for viewing.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Rob!)

Last weekend's Slammer worm turned machines running unpatched Microsfot SQL server that were net-accessible into zombies that unleashed torrents of bogus packets on random hosts, busying-out big chunks of netspace for hours. The techy response was predictable: "What kinda idjit runs a MSFT server product without applying all the patches? And worse, what kinda idjit makes that machine available from the public Internet?"

Microsoft, it turns out. MSFT's own network was riddled with infected servers, which made it especially hard for affected sysadmins to get themselves a copy of the patch.

"This shows that the notion of patching doesn't work," said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer for network protection firm Counterpane Internet Security. "Publicly, they are saying it's not our fault, because you should have patched. But Microsoft's own actions show that you can't reasonably expect people to be able to keep up with patches."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Bruce!)

Phone companies are fighting over the allocations of phone-numbers to VoIP companies like Vonage, arguing that "designer phone numbers" and growing services will exhaust all ten-digit numbers PDQ. The telcos claim that they just want to play nice, but it sure sounds like they're trying to find an excuse to stop technology that lets us secede from the hated phone companies.

At the Jan. 22 NANC meeting, proponents of VoIP phone number regulation said they want agencies including the FCC to examine the Internet-phone industry's use of "designer numbers," among other things. Because of the nature of the Web, computer phone providers can offer customers a choice of different area codes, regardless of where they live.

"The idea is not to choke this thing off, but to explore the issues and reach some agreements so we can go forward," said Randy Sanders, BellSouth's director of regulatory and external affairs.

Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet)

Tissue engineers are growing fake meat in vats from cell-cultures. Chicken Little, anyone?

However, you only need to establish a good blood supply if you want to grow thick slabs of muscle. Vladimir Mironov, director of the Shared Tissue Engineering Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston has other ideas. His team thinks the meat of the future will be a processed food closer to a sausage or hamburger.

In a detailed project proposal to NASA, he sets out how to grow cells on protein spheres suspended in growth medium. These could then be harvested and made into nuggets or patties.

His starting cells will be myoblasts, which normally live at the edges of muscle fibres and help repair the muscles if they are damaged. They are better suited than embryonic stem cells, Mironov says, because they are already part of the way down the road to forming the desired cell type, rather than being totally undifferentiated.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

Utah space enthusiasts want to find out what salt-flats look like after a meteor strike (so they can figure out which geographical elements are meteoric). To that end, they propose to drop bowling balls onto the flats from high-altitude aircraft.

Members began searching for aircraft and a cooperative bowling alley until the government's Bureau of Land Management heard of the plan. Officials were not amused. The prospect of high speed bowling balls plunging into the weather stations, geology researchers or racing car enthusiasts that populate the salt flat was simply not acceptable, they announced. So the plan has been put on ice until the society can convince them that it is safe. Members of the society are now preparing a reportso that officials can determine if the proposal can go ahead.

Link Discuss (via Making Light)

Yummy. Denmark-based QTVR evangelist Hans Nyberg sends us a link to this sumptuous full-screen vista, shot deep inside a rarely-seen cave in Slovenia. He writes: "This weeks panorama is one you have to see. It's an exclusive visit into a world that feels like something you'd find in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth -- only this is the real world. You're entering a giant cave that has been experienced in person by less than 30 people, including the photographer Bostjan Burger. The colors and the view are unbelievable!"

Slovenia's slogan should be "Land o' Caves." There are more than 7,000 of them in this country, and many are captured in this online QTVR gallery of Burger's work, which contains more panoramas of Slovenian churches, waterfalls, and urban scenes. Truly jaw-dropping stuff. Link Discuss

iCommune, the iTunes sharing/streaming plugin that Apple nastygrammed out of existence a couple weeks ago is back, though it's not clear if the author is doing this in defiance of Apple or not. The new version has Rendezvous sharing, too! Link Discuss

WhatIsMyIPCom: exactly what it sounds like -- a page that gives you your current IP address. Mighty helpful if you've stumbled into an open network and you want to find out if there's a mail server available on the network. Link Discuss (via EvHead)

Gibson is shipping an Ethernet-capable electric guitar that uses cheap Cat 5 cable instead of big-dick analog cables.

"The protocol itself is kind of complex," said Vallier. "We use the packets themselves to clock each end of the signal because we can't have jitter. We can't have someone hearing a crack."

The current incarnation of the hardware is based on a custom media-access controller developed by Vallier and running on an Analog Devices Sharc DSP working with an FPGA designed by Schmidt and standard 100-Mbit/s Ethernet PHY chips. A separate analog board, designed by Gibson's Mike Dibble, uses multichannel preamps and four-channel A/D converters with integrated op amps.

Link Discuss (via /.!)

Business 2.0 Valentine's ish has a business-oriented roundup of condoms.

The latest condoms provide technical innovation and lots of opportunities for product differentiation. Though the venerable Trojan still commands almost 70 percent of the U.S. market, worldwide the $750 million prophylactic business is extremely competitive. Brand preferences say a lot about a nation's tastes -- but we'll leave that last bit of interpretation entirely to you.

Link Discuss

A crap economy is always a good excuse for people to grind their personal axes. In Japan, robotics engineers are arguing that the economy won't recover unless they're allowed to override the proscription against letting robots walk the public streets.

"At the moment you can't have robots on the sidewalk or in the street because of traffic and radio-signal regulations," Wataru Aso, governor of Fukuoka, said yesterday. "We are asking the government to deregulate to allow these kind of experiments."

Hirofumi Iida, head of Fukuoka's new business department, said that testing robots on the street would help perfect robotics more quickly and allow people to familiarise themselves with their presence.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Remain Sedate!)

Workers at Canberra's deep-space antenna (part of NASA's Deep Space Network) kept their apparatus from getting torched by the brushfires that are ravaging Australia.

Brush fires surrounded the network's Canberra complex on Saturday. Workers used hoses to dowse spot fires on the site Saturday and were still extinguishing flare-ups Monday.

"A group of staff performed magnificently, successfully ensuring that no fires took hold at the site," said Peter Churchill, director of the Canberra antenna complex. "They also assisted the local fire service in their efforts to protect homes and farm infrastructure in the Tidbinbilla Valley."

Link Discuss

Samsung has shipped a hard-drive-based camcorder that shoots MPEG4 video. The device does just about everything you'd expect -- shoot stills, play MP3, and work as an outboard hard-drive, but involves two very puzzling design decisions:

1. It only has a 1.5GB drive. My walkman has a 20 GB drive! With only a one-hour capacity, the camera is all but useless unless you've got a PC with a big drive handy, so that you can shove video off of the camera and into the box as it fills up. However, this is a giant PITA, 'cause:

2. It only has a USB2 output. Firewire 800 is backwards compatible with FireWiree 400, runs faster than stink, and FW interfaces are already standard among video-heads.

What the hell was Samsung thinking? Link Discuss (via /.)

This site has an amazing history of past and present efforts to build a monowheel vehicle. I spit upon your puny Segway. What's that word again? Monowheel! Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)