My old Clarion classmate Pam Noles has become a comix maven, and is co-organizing an indie funnybooks festival at UCLA called super*MARKET from Nov 7-9. Admission is $2, parking is $7.

Keeping with the do-it-yourself spirit behind super*MARKET, programs will include workshops and seminars designed to help up and coming creators, as well as inform fans curious about how these works of art come to be. Panels will range through topics political and humorous, with a tribute to the underground masters who laid the foundation for today’s independent creators. Quite a few crowd pleasers are thrown into the mix, along with a slate of events for youth. Programming is coordinated by local fan Pam Noles.

Link

The Sidekick turns a year old this month, and for a lot of us early adopters who bought in at full retail on the (dashed) hopes that T-Mobile would make good on Danger's promise to deliver an open platform (like the Symbian phones from Sony-Ericsson, which anyone can write code for, and which, conseuqently, have a really robust software ecosystem percolating under them), that means that this is the month that we can get rid of our Sidekicks and buy something else. For those of us who were so turned off by the outrageous voice-plan offered by T-Mobile on these devices that we kept our old handsets and used these as handheld Internet terminals, there's precious little reason not to: the carriers are subsidising Symbian phones if you buy into a one-year plan, and who needs number-portability when you haven't given anyone the number?

Coincidentally (?), this month, Danger has announced a bunch of really hot (and long overdue) enhancements to the device, including such basic functionality as copy-and-paste. I may hold onto the Sidekick for a couple months longer -- at least until Novmember 28th rolls around and we get fee-crashing number-portability for cellphones.

The new features include:

* Copy and paste (party like it's 1982!)

* Download manager (with ringtones! Party like it's 1998!)

* More AIM features

* "Usability features" Link (Thanks, Mike!)

I'm giving a talk called "Civil liberties, copyright law, and security" on Sunday, Sept. 28th at 11am at the ToorCon Information Security Conference, San Diego, CA, Sept. 27-28, $65 at the door.

ToorCon has established a name for itself within both the professional InfoSec and hacker communities for high-calibre cutting edge talks presented by eminent speakers. This year, with a theme of "Back to Basics," is no exception. Comprehensive presentations on both defence and attack of IT resources, and industry specific presentations on the growing concerns of policies, procedures, and regulatory compliance are highlights of this year's conference.

Link

Note: new link Link

Speaking of future-sarcastic, John Illig makes these cargo pants that are rave culture's finest gift to nerddom, communicating the message, "I have a pocket of dimensions thus-and-so, I wonder if anyone manufactures a device that would fit in it." His fall line is out, and the RAF Fatigues are a really excellent, really future-sarcastic way of secreting your device-array about your person. What's more, they're priced competitively with Gap cargoes (and run about double Old Navy or Army/Navy prices). Link

Greg Brotherton is a sculptor who recycles retro-futuristic vaccuum cleaners and other industrial detritus into breathtakingly cool, highly polished rayguns and robots.

I call this look "future sarcastic," and it's just about my favorite aesthetic. It says: "Well, it's the twenty-first century, where the fuck is my jetpack?" Link

Our new Island Chronicles dispatch is up. Link Feedback

BBC story about a gizmo that cuts out external sensory stimulation so you can make a phone call. Involves getting into a warm pool and sticking your head in a lightproof bubble. Link (via Smart Mobs)

CNET story about a new product that promises the ability to automatically shut off small cameras in futurephones:

Iceberg Systems is beta-testing Safe Haven, which combines hardware transmitters with a small piece of control software loaded into a camera phone handset. When the handset is taken into a room or building containing the Safe Haven hardware, the phone is instructed to deactivate the imaging systems. The systems are reactivated when the handset is out of range.

Analysts have predicted that there will be almost 1 billion camera phones in use within five years, which has led companies such as Samsung and LG Electronics to bar employees from using camera phones in research and manufacturing facilities because of fears over the security of sensitive data.

Patrick Snow, managing director of Iceberg Systems, said he is already in talks with well-known handset manufacturers interested in testing the technology. Although the technology is designed only for disabling the imaging system, it could be adapted for a wide number of uses, such as blocking loud or annoying ring tones in a theater or even disabling text messaging in a school. However, Snow said that for now, his company is focused solely on controlling the imaging side of handsets.

Link to story, Link to vendor site (via unwired list, thanks Mike!)

My piece on casemodding from this month's Wired magazine is online:

MODDER: Rainer Wingender
Manager, BITS-Consulting
Siegenburg, Germany

SPECS: left side: 1.8-GHz AMD XP Thoroughbred 2200, 512 Mbytes RAM, Nvidia GeForce4 graphics card, 110-Gbyte hard disk, DVD-ROM; right side: 450-MHz AMD K6-2, 256 Mbytes RAM, 44xCD, CD-RW, 40-Gbyte hard disk.

COST: $1,000 in cooling plates, exhaust, intakes, and gauges; $2,000 in computer components

TIME: 250 hours over three months

INSPIRATION: "A 1971 Ford Mustang I owned when I was 18. If you've ever driven a V-8, you know the feeling."

CHALLENGE: "Designing good-looking feet. Early tries seemed too small, but when I added the punched bars, it balanced just right visually."

Link

BoingBoing reader Chris says, "William Gibson has 'unblogged' himself. He's going back to his day job, and he finds blogging overlaps with novel writing enough that it interferes." Link

Nokia's new phone has a faceplate that can be printed to with an inkjet printer. Link (via Gizmodo)

Via politech: "Every single person in the UK should be compelled to have their DNA on the national database in an effort to prevent crime, a senior police officer has argued." Link

Hilarious list of the ten most awesomely bad videos of all time, according to Vice Magazine. Picks include the Orson Welles commercial for Paul Masson, some Anna Nicole Smith Outtakes (there are outtakes?), and What I Really Want -- described thusly:

[A] way-too-short informative clip (you want it to go on for days) features a typical Marin County self-help group talking about actualizing your dreams. The story goes that, halfway into filming, the leader of this bizarre yuppie cult decided “everything has to be destroyed – RIGHT NOW!” The filmmakers managed to salvage this 15 minutes before the rest was lost forever. HIGHLIGHT: A man rests on his knees and, after being encouraged to say what he feels no matter how much it hurts, bursts into sobs and screams, “I want to touch people. I want people to TOUCH ME!!!!”

Link, (Thanks, ESC)

Greg says:

EyeToy:Play is, according to the ELSPA sales chart, currently the #1 best-selling "game" in the UK. The package includes a small camera you attach to your Playstation 2 via a USB cable, and a disc with a bunch of "mini-games." When you play a game, the camera catches your image, and displays it onscreen. You interact with game objects through the magic of motion capture, using your body to whack them or whatnot. Looks like a very cool toy. No word on if/when it will be available in North America, though.

Link

Brooklyn-based photographer Siege, whose erotic "Dreampod Sessions" for Nerve.com have been blogged here before (Links: Hot, Cold), shot these images of the New York City skyline last night. He's published them online using an interesting photo-sharing service called Fotki I haven't used before. But then, I don't get around the Internet much. Link,

Lisa Rein has uploaded captured video from Al "Fair and Balanced" Franken's appearance on The Daily Show. Link

Lisa Rein has written a very good article for O'Reilly, reviewing the ways in which the RIAA's latest attack on P2P users (and due process!) are legal and how they're legally questionable.

A recent decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals finds that a party using "patently unlawful" subpoenas to obtain access to another party's stored electronic communications could be liable for violations of electronic privacy and computer fraud statutes. This could have serious implications for the RIAA's mass subpoena campaign in that, if such subpoenas were also determined to be "patently unlawful," for whatever reason, the organization could be held liable under electronic privacy and computer fraud statutes for accessing user data under false pretenses. (Read a summary of the decision.)

Does this mean, if the RIAA's subpoenas are determined "invalid," that they are illegally snooping? It's extremely possible. However, the DMCA subpoena law is new and there aren't many decisions on it, so the RIAA could try to hide behind the "newness" of the law to avoid liability for misusing it.

Link

Don't forget: you've got until September 24th to get a proposal in to the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference if you plan on speaking there. Link

The EFF has launched its first-ever a new petition, asking Congress to look into constructive solutions to the file-sharing problem!

Take a Stand Against the Madness; Stop the RIAA!

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is on a rampage, launching legal attacks against average Americans from coast to coast. Rather than working to create a rational, legal means by which its customers can take advantage of file-sharing technology and pay a fair price for the music they love, it has chosen to sue people like Brianna LaHara, a 12 year-old girl living in New York City public housing.

Brianna, and hundreds of other music fans like her, are being forced to pay thousands of dollars they do not have to settle RIAA-member lawsuits -- supporting a business model that is anything but rational. This crusade is generating thousands of subpoenas and hundreds of lawsuits, but not a single penny for the artists that the RIAA claims to protect.

Copyright law shouldn't make criminals out of 60 million Americans, and it's time for a change. Congress is going to hold hearings; we need your help to make sure that the public's voice is heard. Tell Congress that it's time to stop the madness!

We have 3493 signatures so far. Help us get to 10,000!

Link

Geoff Cohen's figured out the logic end-point of this whole flash-mob business:

You've read about flashmobs in the newspaper. Now, tap the power of flashmobs for your enterprise, realizing ROI on your enterprise software investment, and increasing the stickiness of your customers.

Using our proprietary peer-to-peer, adaptive, autonomic, social-network-aware FLASHPOWER software, direct your employees, customers, and stakeholders to arrive at specific locations. We support over four thousand possible locations through our FLASH LOCATIONS PARTNERS program, including Starbucks(tm), Marriott(tm), and Newbury Comics(tm). FLASHPOWER supports twenty-five different activities for your mobs, including muttering, chanting, clapping, hopping on one foot, and furiously scowling while entering data into their PDA*. Upgrade to FLASHPOWER PRO and receive additional PRO locations, including such important sites as Faneuil Hall, Boston, the QuickStop used in Kevin Smith's film "Clerks," and the 1st base bleachers of Coors' Field**.

Link

Jonathan Lethem is a hell of a novelist. Ever since his Gun, With Occassional Music (the inspiration for me inserting a character who's "always self-identified as an ewok" in my most-recent novella), I've been an enormous fan. Now his new book, Fortress of Solitude is out -- and Salon has a great feature review of it.

"Like a match struck in a darkened room," his novel begins: "Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July." These are the Solver sisters, Thea and Ana, shining "like a new-struck flame" in the eyes of Dylan Ebdus, the currently five-year-old hero/narrator/recollected protagonist of Lethem's mighty "Fortress." The sisters are blond and beautiful, strangers, like Dylan, in a rundown New York neighborhood made up principally of browns and blacks. It's 1972 and the Solvers are "the new thing, spotlit to start the show ... The girls murmured rhymes," Dylan thinks, or "were murmured rhymes" -- it's hard to tell "in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell."

Gowanus is a part of Brooklyn, of course, not Krypton or Kandor, and Lethem is the new poet of Brooklyn -- the new Whitman, even, whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among this country's foremost novelists. Five years in the making, "The Fortress of Solitude" is Lethem's "spiritual autobiography," proudly claimed as such and following magically on the heels of 1999's award-winning "Motherless Brooklyn," the novel that introduced a detective with Tourette's syndrome to the United States and marked Lethem's departure from the hybrid but definitely marginal genres in which he'd previously worked -- mysteries, westerns and sci-fi's, sometimes all three at once. To say that Lethem bends the rules, pushes the envelope and extends the possibilities of fiction is to state only part of the case. He's defiant, delicious, in his refusal to be pinned.

Link

In 1938, Homes and Gardens ran a long, loving piece on Adolf Hitler's Mountain Home. Words of Waldman has the scans. Link (via Joi)

In the October Wired, Joshua Davis tells the gripping operating room tale of Laleh and Ladan Bijani, the 29-year-old Iranian conjoined twins who underwent surgery this summer to get separated and died as a result. Link

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite books in our house was this gigantic collection of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge. I used to scan my eyes accross each page really fast, left to right, trying to form movies in my head out of the sequential rows of stop-action stills. The horse ones were my supernumberonefavorite; the naked baseball guy was also neat. So, anyway, there's a new biography out about Muybridge by Rebecca Solnit called River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking Press, 2003). It explores his relationship with California, examining his experiments in film and their importance in shaping the future of this state as the seat of entertainment and technology.

If you're in LA, or passing through -- Michael Dawson Gallery is launching an exhibit of Muybridge's photos that runs through November 8. They're also hosting an evening with Solnit on Tuesday, October 14.

"Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was born and died in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England, but spent much of his working life as a professional photographer in America. He arrived in San Francisco from his native England in 1855. After working for a time as a bookseller, Muybridge began his career as a photographer, calling himself 'Helios' - the name of the ancient sun-god (...) By the late 1870's Muybridge was deeply involved in his study of human and animal movement and developed innovative techniques for producing sequential photographs. Employed by Leland Stanford to answer the question of whether all four legs of a trotting horse were ever aloft simultaneously, Muybridge became THE pioneer photographer of the moving image. His extensive studies and inventions were acknowledged by E. J. Marey, the Lumiere brothers, Thomas Edison and other innovators of the motion picture."

Link to more info on the show, Link to online gallery of some of the images in the show, Link to more info on the book.

A company called GPS Networkcar promises "complete solutions for monitoring the performance, location, and security of your car." Location-based wireless technology connects to your car's computer and beams data about your car's performance to your "personal vehicle website," and your service provider. This kind of stuff seems to be becoming a more common built-in feature on late-model vehicles, particularly luxury brands (for instance, some of the cool telematics stuff that Mercedes-Benz began offering in 2003). But if your car didn't ship off the lot with such features, GPS Networkcar's service "communicate[s] with your vehicle's onboard computer, interpret[s] the data and transmit[s] important information back to you and your service provider." Here's how it works. Update: The all-seeing Paul Boutin wrote about this recently in Slate, and check out this related article by Paul on automobile "black boxes." (via unwired, Thanks Frank!)

Link to scanned ballot (804x638 px jpeg), (Thanks, Gabe!)

Click here for the entire frame, with both image and text. A BoingBoing exclusive: Renowned Toronto-based artist Graham Roumieu shares his latest from the Bigfoot series, and you're the first to see it.

Roumieu's graphic books In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot, and A Really Super Book About Squirrels are available through Amazon.

From Scott Rosenberg, in Salon:

My kids are big Richard Scarry fans, and one of their favorite books is a little paperback titled "Pie Rats Ahoy!" (Yes, these successors to Captain Hook are tiny rats who steal a pie from the seafaring hero.)

I thought of that punning title as I read the latest batch of headlines from the file-swapping wars. The RIAA and its member labels have now taken the final step (one I predicted nearly four years ago, as I recalled here) of declaring all-out war on the music fans who are their own best customers -- and who have in recent years taken to file trading en masse because of the music industry's price gouging and its pathetic reluctance to adapt to new technology.

Link, (Thanks, ESC)

Straight Outta Gawker:

Lushy clothes-shedding celebutante Tara Reid is undoubtedly pole-dancing with joy today. In the first good thing to happen to New York City in months, nudie bars and porno theaters are -- for now -- totally legal. Yesterday, Manhattan's Supreme Court ruled against the City's adult business ban, calling it, weirdly enough, unconstitutional. Michael Bloomberg, capitalist kingpin, will now spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of the broke-ass City's money trying to close down the small businesses. This is when Cindy Adams pokes her head out of the stripper bar and shrieks, "Only in New York, kids, only in New York!"

Link to NY Daily News item,

QTVR panoramas of Ground Zero, shot ten days after September 11, 2001 by photographer Jim Galvin.

Link to Galvin's seven panoramas, Link to other 9/11-related QTVRs,

Item! The blogosphere is all aflutter.

(1) Elizabeth Spiers, "snark queen" editor of Nick Denton's New York-based Gawker blog is said to be on (insert Dr. Evil air-quotes) vacation (/air quotes). Jeff Jarvis says:

She has been hanging around New York magazine, getting a co-byline on the Intelligencer this week (imagine if you could hear her voice there -- it'd be better than a return to the good old days of the column that really started smart local gossip). She has also been called by various magazines, even Conde Nast magazines (yes, even that one), to freelance. What makes this notable is that Elizabeth is the first media star really made by weblogs. Others have become stars in their own rights (Glenn, Andrew, et al) but Liz is the first to be making the jump from niche to mass media; she is our Judd sister. Nick Denton discovered her voice on a weblog and together they made Gawker a hit and now she's getting ready to move on up to the East Side. Choire Sicha has been filling in.

Greg Lindsay from WWD dishes more speculation, Gawker weighs in here, and there's a statement on Elizabeth's personal blog here. You still with me? Good.

(2) Jason McCabe Calacanis wants to put the bling in blogs. The serial entrepreneur who created tech publications including Silicon Alley Reporter and Venture Reporter (disclaimer: I'm the former VP of the publishing company he founded, behind both magazines) has been quietly planning to launch his Next Big Thing later this month. His still-in-stealth venture has something to do with B2B weblogs for profit, and creating viable economic micropublishing models for bloggers. If it takes off as planned, someone close to the venture says, he'll have spawned 500 of these sites in three years' time.

(3) Calacanis initiated what amounts to a bidding war for Spiers today, offering her 50% of a new publication product she would edit, a new laptop, paying for her Soho house membership and funding. Can Nick Denton -- or any of Spiers' rumored print suitors-- top that?

Update: Nick Denton responds.

Former BoingBoing guest blogger Jenn Shreve was interviewed today on NPR: Day to Day. Jenn talked about her Slate essay "A Fitting Memorial," an insightful piece on memorial t-shirts that commemorate the tragic deaths of loved ones. Scroll down to find the audio link to "Slate's The Gist: T-Shirts and Mourning." Link

Roger Wood's latest clock is brilliant, beautiful. I really miss living down the hall from him. Link

BoingBoing pal Gil Kaufman breaks the news on MTV.com that after more than a decade, the legendary Pixies are reuniting in April for a world tour. Gil says: "The Eagles declared 'Hell Freezes Over' when they reunited a few years ago, and indie rock fans are about to feel the same way." Link

My co-worker Fred von Lohmann has an op-ed in today's LA Times about the ways in which the RIAA's amnesty is a scam:

Rather than trying to sue Americans into submission, imagine a real solution for the problem. What if the labels legitimized music swapping by offering a real amnesty for all file-sharing, past, present and future, in exchange for say, $5 a month from each person who steps forward?

The average American household spends less than $100 on prerecorded music annually. Assuming that many people will continue buying at least some CDs (a recent survey by Forrester Research found that half of all file-sharers continue to buy as many or more CDs as they did before catching the downloading bug), $60 per year for file sharing seems reasonable.

And such a plan would surely be more popular than the use-restricted and limited-inventory "authorized" alternatives. After all, the explosive growth of file-sharing is the strongest demand signal the record business has ever seen. The industry should embrace the opportunity instead of continuing to thrash around like dinosaurs sinking in hot tar.

Link

Want to exercise your first-sale rights in the music you buy from Apple? It's not easy, but it is possible. All you need to do is buy a disposable credit-card, jump through a lot of hoops, and eventually, you can make it happen.

I run to CVS and buy my first prepaid MasterCard, paying for it with my real credit card. The price of pseudo-anonymity is steep though, $9.95 for the card with a minimum initial balance for $20, turning my $1.05 iTunes investment into a pricey $31 expenditure. I should be able to get the $20 back out of the card assuming Keith doesn't buy 20 iTunes the moment he gets my email. [Update 2003-09-10 8:23 AM - I was able to spend $19 of the $20 on a gift to the EFF, not sure what happened to that other $1]...

I've deauthorized my computer, sent Keith the information and file. He can play the Double Dutch Bus as well as the other songs that he purchased from the iTunes Music Store. His computer is now authorized on his old account and the new account that he received from me.

Link

A California resident represented by Ira Rothken, a brilliant Class Action attorney, is suing the RIAA for its fraudulent shamnesty offer:

It is "designed to induce members of the general public...to incriminate themselves and provide the RIAA and others with actionable admissions of wrongdoing under penalty of perjury while (receiving)...no legally binding release of claims...in return," according to the complaint.

"This lawsuit seeks a remedy to stop the RIAA from engaging in unlawful, misleading and fraudulent business practices," the suit reads.

Link Ho

London's worst blackout in 10 years was caused by the improper installation of a one amp fuse.

National Grid's chief executive, Roger Urwin, described the incident as a "one off" caused by a single faulty installation that remained undetected until August 28, when it provoked London's worst power failure in 10 years...

The automatic protection equipment, a shoebox-sized device that acts like a normal domestic fuse, was activated because it was the wrong amp size. Two years ago, engineers had mistakenly installed a one-amp version instead of a five-amp version. When the power surged, the fuse - because it was oversensitive - shut down the system when a correct fuse would not have done.

Link

* Smart Dust Millirobots take a walk

* Computer-recognition of human motion could lead to videogames where the players control human actors

* A collaborative virtual workspace is tricked out with haptic feedback

All in my latest issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. Please stop by! Link

Emmett Plant is running a collection-plate to pay back the 12-year-old honor student who lives in a New York housing project who was intimidated into turning $2000 over to the RIAA to keep them from suing her for file-sharing. Link

The Hungarian immigrant known as the "father of the H-bomb" died at his home on the Stanford University campus in California Tuesday. Link, Discuss

Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy said yesterday he is leaving the company. Link, Discuss

BigChampagne, a P2P metrics company that generates Billboard-charts for file-sharing nets, is the subject of a Wired article in which they reveal that their customers are the same labels whose industry association is suing everyone from 12 year old girls to university profs for using those nets.

According to on-the-record statements by many major labels, the scene I witnessed in Fleischer's office couldn't possibly have happened. But Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, says his firm is working with Maverick, Atlantic, Warner Bros., Interscope, DreamWorks, Elektra, and Disney's Hollywood label. The labels are reticent to admit their relationship with BigChampagne for public relations reasons, but there's a legal rationale, too. The record industry's lawsuits against file-sharing companies hang on their assertion that the programs have no use other than to help infringe copyrights. If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance. "We would definitely consider gleaning marketing wisdom from these networks a non-infringing use," says Fred von Lohmann, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based cyber liberties group that's helping to defend Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa.

Link Discuss

BoingBoing pal ESC exclaims, "Did you know the British have a different numbering system than we do for numbers over a million? They have shit called Milliards, and Billiards! WTF?" Link, Discuss

I don't know anything about Hideshi Hino, but I sure like the look of his toys. Link Discuss (via Geisha Asobi)

In the 1970s, Chile's Allende socialist government contracted with a British garage-inventor to erect an egalatarian nationwide data-network.

For the next two years, as subordinates searched for these amid the food shortages, and the local press compared him to Orson Welles and Socrates, Beer worked in Chile in frenetic bursts, returning every few months to England, where a British team was also labouring over Cybersyn. What this collaboration produced was startling: a new communications system reaching the whole spindly length of Chile, from the deserts of the north to the icy grasslands of the south, carrying daily information about the output of individual factories, about the flow of important raw materials, about rates of absenteeism and other economic problems.

Until now, obtaining and processing such valuable information - even in richer, more stable countries - had taken governments at least six months. But Project Cybersyn found ways round the technical obstacles. In a forgotten warehouse, 500 telex machines were discovered which had been bought by the previous Chilean government but left unused because nobody knew what to do with them. These were distributed to factories, and linked to two control rooms in Santiago. There a small staff gathered the economic statistics as they arrived, officially at five o'clock every afternoon, and boiled them down using a single precious computer into a briefing that was dropped off daily at La Moneda, the presidential palace.

Link Discuss (via Electrolite)

Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis has sold his first novel. Kick ass!

This comic tour of the dark underbelly of American culture features a down-and-out private detective who is hired by heroin-addled G-men to find the lost (secret) Constitution to the United States. Publication is slated for Winter/Spring 05.

Link Discuss

Pete Rojas writes on Gizmodo:

"Someone in South Korea actually went to the trouble of mounting a Compaq TC1000 Tablet PC to the dashboard of their car so they could use it for GPS navigation and as a video and music player. We love it."

Link Discuss

On this keyboard -- which is currently being auctioned on eBay -- every key has been replaced with an "X." I rather like it, but must confess a particularly personal bias to that character. Link, Discuss (via Geisha)

A new end-of-summer gallery of previously unreleased shots is now up on Paris-based photographer Ernesto Timor's site. Some nudity. Link, Discuss

Participants in Second Life -- a large, user-built, 3D online society -- created a virtual "Burning Man" that existed concurrently with the real-world event:

All the freeform creativity and dreamy partying -- just without the sunburns, or long lines at the portapotty. In an online tribute to the legendary Burning Man arts festival held every Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock desert, Second Life opened up two new simulators (about 32 acres of virtual land), and let the residents go wild.

[R]esidents immediately converged on Burning Life, held in the Mauve and Chartreuse simulators, throwing up fantastic sculptures and structures. Pyramids of giant monkeys! The statue of a torch-bearing goddess! An electronica-themed nightclub for raving into the wee hours! Elf-bearing dirigibles, pagan art shrines, kinetic horse sculptures, solar system mobiles, and of course, the bonfire incineration of the Burning Life effigy itself. Everything seemed possible, and usually was -- right up until September 2nd, that is, when the simulator territories were returned to normal use.

Link, Discuss (thanks, Charlie O'Donovan!)

Online step-by-step photo gallery documenting "surgery done on Realdolls." For those of you unfamiliar with these high-end sex toys, they are costly (about $6-7K) and unusually lifelike love dolls. Each page on this surgery site contains a brief explanation of the procedure, history of how each -- er -- mishap occured, and how each faux female was fixed. Includes helpful tips on why superglue is bad for Realdolls, intimate snapshots of "butt repair," and hyperpunctuated reminders to "enjoy the gruesome and PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOUR DOLLS!!!!!" Wiley points out that the site lacks "information on anything really interesting, like adding exta heads or limbs." I suppose it's not worksafe, but the only naked women here are 100% silicone, so, whatever. Link, Discuss (via News of the Dead)

Within the year, the new Transporation Securiry Administration will begin to do background checks on every airline passenger. You'll be issued a color-code: green, yellow, or red.

It's a textbook case of function creep. The TSA is not only targeting terrorists. but criminals of all kinds.

[U]p to 8 percent of passengers who board the nation's 26,000 daily flights will be coded "yellow" and will undergo additional screening at the checkpoint, according to people familiar with the program. An estimated 1 to 2 percent will be labeled "red" and will be prohibited from boarding. These passengers also will face police questioning and may be arrested.

...The system "will provide protections for the flying public," said TSA spokesman Brian Turmail. "Not only should we keep passengers from sitting next to a terrorist, we should keep them from sitting next to wanted ax murderers."

Thank goodness. This ought to put a stop to all those gruesome ax murders that are committed aboard commercial airliners. Link Discuss

Regarding my Infrasound post below, Marc Laidlaw points us to this article about the discovery of sound waves from a supermassive black hole more than 250 million light years from Earth. According to a NASA article, "the 'note' is the deepest ever detected from any object in our Universe." Marc asks "Could it be that the supermassive black hole at the galactic core is responsible for the sense of cosmic dread that permeates our galaxy?" Link

Disney is going to start offering DVDs that deteriorate within 48 hours after removing them from an oxygen-resistant envelope. Link Discuss

While at WorldCon last week, I had opportunity to go to dinner on two consecutive nights with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- friends and mentors and editors of mine who are both thoroughly engaged in the business end of the field and the fannish, amateur (as in "one who loves") end of the field. On the first night, Teresa mentioned that her collection of essays (mostly collected from fanzines, APAs and the like), "Making Book," was going into its third printing. I realized that I had seen this book on innumerable bookcases at friends' writerly apartments around the world, a kind of recognition symbol of membership in a fraternity of publishing and fannish insiderdom, but that I'd never read it myself. So I rushed out and bought one of the few remaining second edition printings still available for sale, had Teresa sign it, and started to read it in bits and bites.

This is a terrific book. I mean, I had no idea. It is a convulsively funny, shrewd and sharp collection of anaecdotes well-told, observations well-observed and jokes hilariously cracked, all the while tracing secret histories of fandom, the ins and outs of being diagnosed narcoleptic at a time when such diagnoses were considered sprious and radical by the medical establishment, and of the gypsy life of a con-running, APA-publishing foremother of the blogging masses whose "personal publishing revolution" has its origins in the dim days of mimeographs and dittos.

Oh, and don't miss the "On Copyediting" piece, which began as an internal publishing memo and is a sterling example of the species of bureaucratic documentation that can become a lasting work of art.

I've been thinking about which bit I wanted to quote here, and today on the BART I nearly fell out of my seat laughing at this passage:

Unfinished letter (New York, c. 1984): Take the "A" Train

We're in New York now, living a few blocks from the 190th street "A" train stop. I want someone to do a new musical arrangement of "Take the 'A' Train." It would be played at half the normal speed, and partway through the band suddenly stops and just sits there for fifteen minutes while the conductor cups his hands around a microphone and makes muffled announcements in Mandarin Chinese and the audience groans in unison. Then the band would play a few more bars and stop again, while the conductor announces that everyone sitting to the right of the center aisle must go find a seat on the left side and vice versa. Any member of the audience not complying will be forcibly seized and carried out, to be later deposited in Far Rockaway. And all that jazz.

BTW, Teresa's blog is every bit as sharp as her book, but harder to read on the subway. Link Discuss

The cheapest way to get from Boston to Texas? Air freight.

After hours of traveling, McKinley, 25, of New York City, pried open the crate with a crowbar Saturday morning. He popped up outside his parents' doorstep in the south Dallas suburb of DeSoto, shook the hand of a shocked deliveryman and walked away.

The deliveryman called DeSoto police, who arrested him on outstanding Texas warrants. The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration are investigating.

Link Discuss

WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, is theoretically about agreements on all kinds of copyright regimes, including open source and patent-free tegimes. However, the WIPO administration has refused to consider questions of how to promote open culture, open source, and open science, largely because the US Patent and Trademark Office has been throwing its weight around, saying that open IP regimes have no place at WIPO. Write to the USPTO and tell them what you think of this! EFF's got the details at the action center:

The cost of software, availability of medicine and production of valuable scientific knowledge are, in large part, determined by the policies of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Today, WIPO focuses on restrictive intellectual property regimes, but it doesn't have to be that way tomorrow. WIPO is holding a budget meeting in Geneva from September 8-10, where it will decide whether or not to schedule increased discussions of open and collaborative development models (OCDM). OCDM includes open source software like Linux and collaborative scientific endeavors like the Human Genome Project - valuable initiatives that benefit the public. WIPO expressed support for such a discussion, but backed off when the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) warned it away. Tell the USPTO to reconsider its misguided stance and support public information goods throughout the world! Note: International residents are welcome to take this action.

Link Discuss

Declan McCullough sent out a message to his Politech list subscribers recently, saying that he planned to go through the online list archives and obfuscate the email addresses published thereon to frustrate spammers' harvest-bots.

John Gilmore's written a stirring and principled response.

Why have you fallen into the all-too-common fallacy of thinking that if email addresses aren't published anywhere, that will help "solve" the problem of unwanted communications? I had an idiot come after me several times, demanding that my archive of the USENIX Face Saver images remove his email address, because he was trying to obliterate every reference to it on the web. I refused, of course. Have we reached a Brave New World in which we all start rewriting online history to suit today's prejudices? That sounds like what you propose for the Politech archives.

For the record, please keep my email address INTACT in the Politech archives. I don't want my communications to be "obfuscated" in the historical record.

Unwanted communications would exist even if every "spammer" was flayed and burned at the stake. You should know -- reporters get more unwanted press releases than anybody.

Link Discuss

Wham-O, the brain-donors who manufacture the Slip-N-Slide water-fun-toy are suing the producers of "Dickie Roberts," a dumb torture-comedy movie in which Dana Carvey David Spade (thanks, JeremyT) flings himself on an un-wetted Slip-N-Slide and friction-burns his nipples.

Wham-O is asking a judge to order the film out of theaters as long as it contains the Slip 'N Slide scene, or for a disclaimer to be added urging viewers not to try the maneuver made by Spade.

Link Discuss

Blogger and tech journalist Paul Boutin points us to this article, for which he pinged lawyers at the EFF and RIAA today to nitpick details and outline potential problems with the RIAA's Clean Slate amnesty program. "I'm sure people will disagree with my personal opinions," says Paul, "but the legal points are worth reading."

To those determined to make an end-run around the music biz's lack of attractive online offerings (Apple's iTunes Music Store is still the best of a weak lot), the lawsuits just mean it's time to abandon KaZaA by moving their game of keep-away to the next playground. KaZaA rose to prominence only after Napster was shut down. Now that RIAA lawyers have proved they can subpoena the names of KaZaA users from their ISPs, expect a mass migration to anonymous, encrypted P2P networks designed specifically to fix the known vulnerabilities in KaZaA. Earth Station 5 is the most outrageous example. It uses a mesh of proxy servers, encrypted data, and other identity-hiding tricks to keep copyright owners from tracking who's downloading what. To top it all off, the company—which recently issued a press release declaring itself "at war" with the entertainment industry—is headquartered in Palestine.

But what about Americans worried about the prospect of a bank-breaking lawsuit? Should you take the RIAA up on its amnesty offer? Maybe not. The "Clean Slate" program promises that the RIAA won't pursue legal action against P2P pirates who send in a notarized affidavit declaring that they've wiped all copyright-infringing materials from their disk drives and who vow not to file-share again. But lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco say there are multiple reasons to sit tight for now, rather than rush to sign and deliver what amounts to an admission of guilt.

Link, Discuss

Larry Lessig's a father! The gold master shipped yesterday, codenamed "Willem Dakota Neuefeind Lessig." Link Discuss

Bev points us to this incomplete but interesting list of websites about art projects that involve cellular phones or mobile internet devices. Some of the projects are new, some are old, but the link-list is good for countless hours of amused browsing. Link, Discuss

CD scratchin' and mixin'. The soon-to-be-released Technics Direct Drive Digital Turntable makes me weak in the knees:

"From some photos of a Technics display in Japan pictured below, you can see in great detail the new decks soon to be released. The photos suggest that the turntables themselves spin, and are to work fundamentally along the same lines as the Technics 1200 series Turntables, but feature a huge number of digital functions, additions and improvements. The turntable also uses Panasonic’s SD Card technology so you can instantly switch between CDs and digital memory stick, which can hold up to 512MB. This essentially enables a DJ to rock up to a gig and deliver his set directly off SD Cards.

We are of course reserving judgment until we get to play with some, but the outlook appears promising. Technics decks are currently featured in nearly all clubs and bars around the world, and set the global standard for professional DJ equipment. It will be fascinating to see if these new CD mixers can live up to the high expectations and eclipse the Pioneer CDJ1000’s, which have grabbed much attention of late, for a decent share in the market."

Link to photos from Resident Advisor, Discuss (thanks, Geoff Goodfellow)

Cool story about mysterious art-graffiti tiles embedded in American streets. No, it's not a new phenomenon, but this Kansas City Star story offers a fun new take.

"The message wasn't painted. It was some kind of tile, a bit larger than a license plate, that had actually been imbedded in the street. Each letter looked to have been hand carved and inlaid in a plastic or epoxy base. I tried to push my thumbnail into the tile. It was rock hard. Harder than the asphalt itself(...) Since then I've walked right over the thing dozens of times and each time made a mental note to further investigate its origins. And each time promptly mislaid the mental note.

A couple months ago, however, on my way back from Jake's, I made an actual paper note and kept it clutched in my hand all the way back to my cube here at The Star where I "googled" the wording on the strange tile. Bingo. Up popped more than 30 Internet addresses referring to other such tiles found in other cities. Turns out there have been more than 130 documented sightings of these "Toynbee tiles"-- as they're nicknamed on the Net -- in at least 20 cities around the United States (and two in South America!). In New York almost 50 tiles have been counted, in Philadelphia nearly 30. Twenty have been spotted in Baltimore, including four at one intersection. And there have been at least 16 documented sightings in Washington, D.C., -- one a block from the White House.

All the tiles say virtually the same thing. And they all look virtually the same, except some are made with colored letters and others only black letters. The Internet accounts and stories from other newspapers indicate that the first tiles were discovered in the late 80s. Nobody has ever claimed to have witnessed any of the tiles being imbedded. And nobody has ever publicly claimed responsibility for making the tiles."

Link to Kansas City Star story, Discuss (Thanks, ESC)

Optical illusions for endless hours of zoned-out, timewasting pleasure. Included in this online gallery of tasty visual teases, "Rotating Snakes." Click thumbnail at left for full-size image and full, freaky visual impact. The static, "coiled" shapes appear to writhe on-screen. Link, Discuss (Thanks, KK!)

This quote is stuck up on the wall here at EFF. It makes me think every time I read it. Figured it should be online somewhere.

Copyright law strikes a precarious balance.

To encourage authors to create and disseminate original expression, it accords them a bundle of proprietary rights in their works.

But to promote public education and creative exchange, it invites audiences and subsequent authors to use existing works in every conceivable manner that falls outside the province of the copyright owner's exclusive rights.

Copyright law's perennial dilemma is to determine where exclusive rights should end and unrestrained public access should begin.

Neil Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society, 106 Yale L.J. 283, 285 (1996).

Discuss

My first short story collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," is out! It should start appearing on store shelves this week. As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I've made a bunch of the stories in the collection available online for free, under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

I'm trying some different stuff this time around. For starters, I'm only making one format available: ASCII text, wrapped to 80 columns. If you want another format, you're invited to do the conversion yourself and post a link to a downloadable version on the page for the story in question.

Short stories are naturals for electronic distribution. For starters, they're short. Durr. More important is that they're ephemeral. Short fiction is the cutting edge of the field, but the stories themselves usually vanish along with the current ish of the magazines in which they appear. That's depressing as hell, but it's also infopocalypic. I learned a lot of my form by reading and dissecting stories, and by writing them, iterating through different experiments quickly. Those stories are gone -- might as well be gone forever.

Electronic editions mean that the stories will be in print forever -- or for as long as there's an Internet. I'm really glad to have the collection on the stands and the stories on the Web. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. (Oh, and don't miss Bruce Sterling's intro, it's killer). Link Discuss

I've always been intrigued by infrasound, extreme bass frequencies that you may not be able to consciously hear but can have a profound impact on your state-of-mind (and body). Of course, the military has also been interested in exploiting this phenomenon as a non-lethal weapon. Acoustic scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in England recently conducted the first controlled infrasound experiment--on 750 people at a concert. According to this Reuters report, "The audience did not know which pieces (of music) included infrasound but 22 percent reported more unusual experiences when it was present in the music. Their unusual experiences included feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting chills down the spine or nervous feelings of revulsion or fear."

"Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost -- our findings support these ideas," said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England.

It'd be fun to write an article on the history and future of infrasound. Link Discuss

Here's the latest Island Chronicles dispatch. Link

Extremely cool online gallery of '50s and '60 commercial art and photography. Link, Discuss (via J-Walk).

In the '70s, Morton gave out a brochure with a recipe for "salt dough" -- like Play-Doh for grownups. The brochure is full of pictures of creepy salt dough crafts you can make for your home. Link Discuss (via Irregular Orbit)

(Forwarded anonymously) This email message was sent to Conde Nast employees today:

This morning an object that might possibly be an animal part was found in the 18th Floor janitorial area of the freight corridor. At this time our security personnel is cooperating with an investigation that involves representatives from both the EMS and the NYPD. As part of their routine investigation, it may be necessary to inspect other janitorial areas and/or employee bathrooms within 4 Times Square. We appreciate your cooperation.

Discuss (Thanks, Anonymous!)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center is calling on us to get involved in a Federal initiative to limit the power of States to control how organizations firehose our personal information at each other. Write your congresscritter!

This Fall, Congress is likely to amend the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and in doing so, may override or "preempt" state laws on affiliate sharing of personal information. Affiliate sharing is the practice of transferring personal information amongst companies with the same corporate ownership. Information transferred can include name and contact information, Social Security Number, purchase information, account numbers and balances, and even the information individuals write on checks. Affiliate sharing is invasive because individuals have no access to the data and cannot obtain an accounting of disclosures; it is used to generate unwanted marketing and telemarketing; and because it puts personal information at risk of being misused.

Affiliate sharing presents a large and growing risk to individuals' privacy. It is likely to be the most important financial services privacy issue in the next decade, especially as companies increase profiling, cross-selling, and telemarketing activities using affiliate-shared information. Companies, such as Citibank, that have 1,900 affiliates, or Bank of America, with over 1,000 entities in its corporate family, can transmit personal information for these purposes to an unlimited degree under federal law. If Congress continues this standard, it will permanently prevent states from passing laws to establish reasonable restrictions on affiliate sharing and on some areas of identity theft. Furthermore, a federal standard is highly anti-democratic, and comes at a time when California legislators have just enacted a new law for affiliate sharing regulation that enjoys significant public support.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!)

Forgotten NY is a collection of annotated photos of the bones of the cities that New York once was, from faded murals to alleys to nowhere to ONE WAY signs from the paleolithic. Link Discuss (via Electrolite)