Madonna's recent video "Hollywood" is under legal fire as an alleged knock-off of images created by photographer Guy Bourdin some two decades ago. Compare for yourself, on this website that juxtaposes stills from the video with the Bourdin shots they're said to have been copied from.

But the guybourdin.org fan-site also recently announced THE BOURDIN COPY & PASTE AWARDS:

"send us your photos à la manière de Guy Bourdin the best will be shown in this web and win a copy of the book "Guy Bourdin" --amateurs & professionals qualify."

Link, and see more of Bourdin's work archived here. (via Geisha)

Author and blogger Warren Ellis has been posting some delectable, bite-sized morsels of prose on diepunyhumans recently. Snip:

She used to have eyes I could lose myself in, and then she had them replaced with laser pointers. Little red dots jumping up and down on the bedroom wall as I took her from behind. I could live with that until she had the animal voice import. The cheetah purring was okay, but the dingo noises just killed the mood. The combination of the red eyes and the gorilla sounds when she jerked off was horrible. A few weeks later, things were moving down there that shouldn't have. Don't be scared, she said, as stuff pumped like organ stops under her skin. Something extended itself and waved at me.

I threw up between her legs and she didn't talk to me for a week. Which I suppose you can't really blame her for, but still.

I knew it was over when she cut her legs off.

Link, and here's another.

In this year's holiday catalog from upscale retailer Neiman Marcus: his and hers robots, six feet tall, engineered at International Robotics. The pair will set you back a cool $400 grand, though. Heck, for that sum -- *I'll* carry your groceries and respond empathetically! Snip from catalog:

Someone at the door? Click your remote and send His Robot to check it out. His Robot's voice circuitry can deliver your greeting, and His on-board video camera gives you a view of the visitor, who can hop onto His platform and be delivered to you in the den. Need some help getting the groceries into the house? Her Robot is happy to help. Need to leave a message for the spouse or kids? Tell it to Her Robot, and she'll spread the word. In fact, His Robot is designed to respond empathetically to us humans and features programmable technology. Our exclusive package includes much more, like preprogrammed messages and sequences of movements, and training for the humans.

Link (Thanks, siege)

Jason Kottke's got a good post on Google's new AdSense terms-of-service, which not only allow them to terminate you without notice, cause or recourse (withholding any sums owed to you at the time), but also bind you to a number of restrictive confidentiality terms, oncluding one that prohibits you from criticising the service. As Jason points out, this is definitely on the wrong side of the "Don't Be Evil" line.

I really like Google, both the service and the company (hell, I also really like the Googloids whom I'm personally acquainted by). At least once a week, I put on my Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" boxer shorts and get a little grin, and I wore a Google t-shirt to my signing last night.

But that doesn't mean that they should get a free ride. Google wants to be a company that makes money wihtout being evil, and I support that goal! Being not-evil is good, and so's making some dough. But part of being not-evil is that you have to incur liability over and above that which your counsel recommends as the safest path -- just as a shop-owner can't reasonably ask all her customers to submit to a strip-search to contain shoplifting liability, Google shouldn't ask all its users to submit to an unreasonable restriction on their speech in order to contain the spread of negative information about its service.

Google has every right to place whatever limits they wish on people who use their "service", but terminating said service without recourse when money is potentially owed by Google *and then* not allowing any site using Google AdSense (which may eventually include media sites like Salon, NY Times, MetaFilter, Slashdot, and even kottke.org) to comment on the Terms and Conditions that brought about the termination is just plain bad (evil?) and should give serious pause to anyone considering using any Google service.

Link

This week on Retrocrush: a stunning gallery of vintage Hallowe'en costumes. Link (via Fark)

If you define your variables right, you can get C++ to speak AOL chat-room:

If you define your variables right, you can get C++ to speak AOL chat-room:

  Like main WTF
    INEEDAVARCALLED y KTHX
    HUHU
    LOOPORSOMETHING( TEACHERSAIDSTARTWITH(y, 1) KTHX
                  y ENDSAT 10 KTHX
                  y HASTOGOUP, PUTONSCREEN y )
    PUTONSCREEN HATS KTHX
    STFU(y ISBIGGERTHAN 10) OMG UID10T
    YOUAREFIRED
  KTHXBYE



Link

(via NTK)

Link (via NTK)

weezer sumo
hangman
catch a fly
beat the quilters
internet tennis
bubble trouble
monkey moon lander
diner
office space

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

One air guitar, "non-electric model." Link (Thanks, Scott!)

Freenet creator Ian Clarke does interesting things with code on the weekends while the rest of us sleep/eat/watch the game. His latest is a large-scale collaborative document editing app. Ian explains:

3D17 is a website which allows collaborative editing of documents. Consider the scenario - you blog about someone with some wrong-headed ideas, and you want to write a response, but you would also like to enlist the help of your readers. This is where 3D17 comes in, you go to 3d17.org, create a document, like this for instance, and direct your readers to its URL. They can then suggest amendments to it, which other readers can then vote on, and whichever wins will be applied to the document. Hey, presto! Large scale collaborative document editing!

Link

ICANN has finally grown a spine. The President and CEO of ICANN has written an open letter to the General Manager of Verisign's Naming and Directory serivce in which he issues an ultimatum: get rid of the evilly asinine SiteFinder service (which breaks the Internet by redirecting all misspelled domain-requests to an ad-ware site) by Oct 4, or ICANN will "seek promptly to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations." Apparently, this is ICANN-speak for "terminate with extreme prejudice."

[...O]ur review of the .com and .net registry agreements between ICANN and VeriSign leads us to the conclusion that VeriSign’s unilateral and unannounced changes to the operation of the .com and .net Top Level Domains are not consistent with material provisions of both agreements. These inconsistencies include violation of the Code of Conduct and equal access provisions, failure to comply with the obligation to act as a neutral registry service provider, failure to comply with the Registry Registrar Protocol, failure to comply with domain registration provisions, and provision of an unauthorized Registry Service. These inconsistencies with VeriSign's obligations under the .com and .net registry agreements are additional reasons why the changes in question must be suspended pending further evaluation and discussion between ICANN and VeriSign.

Link (Thanks, Hal!)

Lisa Rein has posted a video of her performing her song, Slipping Away. Link

The LifePrint ASL 101 course is a free online introductory course in American Sign Language. Looks pretty thorough. Link (Thanks, John E)

You can emulate a Commodore 64 on a Nokia Series 60 cellphone.

Why on God's green earth would one possibly want a Commodore 64 home computer running on one's cellphone? Aside from the thrill of seeing your old C64 humming away in the palm of your hand and the eyebrow-raising you're sure to see in friends and family, there are the games... oodles of them, available for playing pleasure from C64 UNLIMITED -- and you don't have to spend a quarter.

Sure they're one-off emulations of arcade games running on a one-off emulation of a home computer, but they're suprisingly well-written and very much resemble the real thing--for some definition of "the real thing" amongst all these emulators upon emulators upon emulators. There's Galaxian and Gorf, arcade favourites of the early 80s, Choplifter from my Apple ][, and hundreds more.

Link (via Raelity Bytes)

An anonymour reader sez, "October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation one blogger has started the Blogger Boobie-Thon. Throughout October people can submit pictures of their boobs (yes, manly chests are welcome as well), with the more risque photographs being placed on the 'pay per boobie' page that can only be accessed with a donation of $50 or more. Collaborative porn for charity, anyone?" Link

My colleague Seth Schoen has finished his long-awaited, brilliant white-paper on Trusted Computing. Seth has been briefed as an outside technical analyst by all the companies working of Trusted Computing architecture, and has had his paper vetted by some of the leading security experts in the field. This is the most exhaustive, well-reasoned, balanced analysis of Trusted Computing you can read today. Don't miss it.

Remote attestation is the most significant and the most revolutionary of the four major feature groups described by Microsoft. Broadly, it aims to allow "unauthorized" changes to software to be detected. If an attacker has replaced one of your applications, or a part of your operating system with a maliciously altered version, you should be able to tell. Because the attestation is "remote", others with whom you interact should be able to tell, too. Thus, they can avoid sending sensitive data to a compromised system. If your computer should be broken into, other computers can refrain from sending private information to it, at least until it has been fixed.

While remote attestation is obviously useful, the current TCG approach to attestation is flawed. TCG attestation conspicuously fails to distinguish between applications that protect computer owners against attack and applications that protect a computer against its owner. In effect, the computer's owner is sometimes treated as just another attacker or adversary who must be prevented from breaking in and altering the computer's software.

Link

A group of students at Swarthmore College have formed a "Coalition for the Digital Commons" to combat threats to open culture and information exchange.

This translates into resisting the efforts of the RIAA to sue those who share music files, opposing the DMCA and similar expansion of intellectual property law, spreading the use of Linux and other freeware programs and fighting the plan of Microsoft and the “Trusted Computing Platform Alliance” to put monitoring chips in personal computers.

Linux, a free alternative to the Microsoft Windows operating system, lies at the heart of SCDC’s philosophy. The group’s short-term goals include getting more students to switch to Linux and get some Linux-based computers in public areas, to “show everyone how functional Linux is — that it’s not some impractical pipedream,” Pavlovsky said. A major factor in SCDC’s championing of Linux is the advent of the Microsoft’s new “Trusted Computing” technology, also known as the Palladium chip. This technology, already present in some new IBM ThinkPads and set to be released in the upcoming version of Windows, would require Microsoft to verify if a user has permission to open a file on his or her computer.

Link (via pho, thanks, JP!)

I'll be participating in Poptech in a couple of weeks -- and there are plenty of reasons why you might want to, as well. Among them: Aubrey de Gray is going to talk about the possibility of people living to be 1000 years old. Another guy who creates biological art will talk about injecting tiny sculptures into itty-bitty lifeforms. Then, there's Graham Hawkes, who makes really, really, really deep-sea submersibles. Did I mention "space architect" Constance Adams? The event "explores the impact of technology on our lives, our planet and our future," and takes place October 16-19 in Camden, Maine. Link

Coca-Cola launched what is said to be the world's largest and "smartest" billboard ever this week: 99 feet wide, full of neon, responds to weather changes and interacts with people observing it from the ground. Can you say overkill?

"This is an intelligent sign, with state-of-the-art computer technology, built-in cameras and an on-board heat sensitive weather station," the Coca-Cola Co. said in a statement. The sign can respond to weather and movement. "When it's raining, big drops will appear on the screen and when it's breezy, the Coke sign can ripple as if it's being blown by the wind," a spokeswoman for the company said. It will also be able to recognize if people are waving at it from the ground below and, eventually, will be able to respond to text messages from mobile phones, she said.

Link (thanks, Halvard !)

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

In this long text published by CIO Magazine, Ray Kurzweil writes about the dangers introduced by new technologies. More specifically, he gives his views about genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics (collectively known as GNR). In his conclusion, he says that "we need to understand that these technologies are advancing on hundreds of fronts, rendering relinquishment completely ineffectual as a strategy. As uncomfortable as it may be, we have no choice but to prepare the defenses." As a matter of coincidence, Fortune interviewed Bill Joy a day after he left Sun Microsystems. And of course, he talked about the article he wrote for Wired in April 2000, "Why the future doesn't need us," in which he said that rapid advances in GNR could endanger our lives. This summary contains essential quotes from both articles, but read them in their entirety if you have some time.

Link

Lore Sjoberg, the Internet-comedy genius responsible for the Brunching Shuttlecocks, has collected his Lore-Brand Comics comic-strips on the Web. Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

According to US social security records, there were five kids born in 2000 whose parents named them Timberland, forty-nine Canons, eleven Bentleys, five Jaguars, and a Xerox. The kicker? Twenty-four children were named Unique. Link (Thanks, Gil!)

The Poor Clare nuns, who take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, have launched a website, opening their reclusive world to the public for the first time. Saint Clare is also the patron saint of television. Go figure.

They usually only communicate with visitors, and even family members, by talking through iron bars at their closed monastery in Galway, western Ireland.

Link

GPRS (a cellular data service) has been compromised -- apparently for quite some time, though the disclosure only comes today. The hack that everyone's worried about is one that allows hackers to bill arbitrary services to any GRPS handset:

There are lots of potential issues, but the one which has forced the phone networks to acknowledge that there is a problem, is a scam where a company obtains IP addresses that the GPRS operators own, in the "cellular pool" and start pinging those addresses.

When one of them responds, the scam operator knows that a user has been assigned the address. And, unbelievably, there was nothing to stop them simply providing services direct to that IP address - and taking the money out of the GPRS billing system to pay for it.

Link (via Interesting People)

In the fine tradition of I can eat glass, it will not harm me, and other Internet Rosetta Stone projects, here is a page on which you will find many translations of "Oh my god! There's an axe in my head."

Greek: hristo mou! eho ena maheri sto kefali mou!
Tagalog: Ay Dios ko! May palakol sa ulo ko!
Danish: Oh min gud! Der er en oekse i mit hoved.
Afrikaans: O God! Daar's 'n byl in my kop!
Polish: O Moj Boze! Mam siekiere w glowie!
Maori: Ave Te Ariki! He toki ki roto taku mahuna!
Italian: Dio mio! C'e' un' ascia nella mia testa!

Link (via Making Light)

The Illustrated Catalog of Acme Products is a collection of frame-grabs from Warner Bros cartoons from 1935 to 1964, displaying the wide range of fine products on offer from the Acme company through the years. Link (via Making Light)

Tighty whitie home decor. At just 26 bucks (and free shipping when you order online), what better example of trailer park chic? Click thumbnail for full-size image. Link (thanks, claytonjames)

Here's a great open thread in which Mac users are discussing how they use iTunes. I'm pretty chuffed about the idea of a "Never Played" smart playlist.

I personally use dynamic playlists almost exclusively. I have the prerequisite Top 25 playlist (highest rated, random 25), the Recently Played (played in the last week) for finding something i recently heard and want to hear again, the Never Played (playcount: 0) to make sure i hear everything, and the Newest (Added after *date*), which i set up before the trip so i could listen to the newest stuff and add it to the iPod easily.

Every other playlist, with the exception of one, is a dynamic playlist with a Genre label and automatically includes anything with the specified genre. I maintain my genres fanatically and every mp3 i have fits into one of my genre playlists. The lone non-dynamic playlist i have is called Tag-Fixing and when i get new music on my machine i drag it into that playlist so i can check the tags. When i have edited the tags to my satisfaction, iTunes notices and pulls them into the appropriate Genre playlist and whatever other playlist they belong in as well. I then delete them from the Tag-Fixing playlist.

Link (via Kottke)

Kids in Europe who surf the 'Net for everything from tunes to term paper templates have become the fastest-growing portion of the Internet population, according to a new Nielsen/Netratings study released yesterday.

Some 13 million children under the age of 18 in eight countries surveyed surf the web for school work, games and music, a rise of some 27 percent over last year. Four million were under age 12... the findings from the survey covering Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands suggest that a plea from educators and politicians to add the Internet to school curricula and make high-speed Internet services cheaper as well as more accessible is paying off.

Link (via pho)

A flaw critics have warned of in the RIAA's series of lawsuits against consumers -- the possibility that "innocent" file-sharers could appear "guilty" -- is the subject of a newly released anonymous paper. "Entrapment: Incriminating Peer to Peer Network Users," was posted this week on a free Australian webhost service. Excerpt from the document:

If a user of peer to peer (P2P) networks is allegedly caught searching for, downloading, sharing or uploading contraband files such as copyright-protected music .mp3 files, they might mistakenly believe that their only option is to plea bargain with authorities. However the P2P user, who the authorities are all too quick to brand as an offender, may actually be an innocent victim. It is possible for an attacker to exploit both the underlying design of P2P networks as well as implementation flaws in P2P applications in order to implicate another P2P user in behaviour deemed unacceptable by the authorities.

In the worst case scenario, an attacker can anonymously trick an innocent P2P user into downloading a contraband file from another user on the P2P network. If authorities participate in P2P networks in order to identify offenders, the innocent P2P user may have downloaded a contraband file from an authority. This article will describe how a P2P user allegedly caught committing an offence relating to copyright violation, such as sharing/uploading/downloading/searching for contraband files, might not have been knowingly involved, or might not have been involved at all.

Link to New Scientist article, Link to "Entrapment" paper (Adobe PDF)

O'Reilly's Hacks book are total mind-candy. I've got MacOS X Hacks on my desk, eBay and Google Hacks on the coffee table and now I've found one for the toilet tank: Wireless Hacks, by Rob Flickenger, the WiFi hacker who wrote Building Community Wireless Networks, outed Linksys for using Linux in its APs without delivering code, lost a kidney after falling off a roof while installing a WiFi antenna, and is in lots of other ways the wireless hacker's wireless hacker. Can't wait to get ahold of this. Link (via WiFiNetNews)

So. What are you wearing?

Mmm-hmmm. Nice.

Me? This.

Link. Bonus: read Schwarzenegger's 1977 Oui interview in entirety here.
.

Russian Finance magazine was forced to tear down their ad posters in Moscow depicting the euro, er, pleasuring the US dollar from behind. "I thought the currencies were dancing on our poster," said the magazine's publisher. Link (Thanks, Vann!)

Ain't-It-Cool News reports that there's a Tenacious D movie in the offing, and the script is complete. Link

Apple is hiring a WiFi hot-spot evangelist in the UK -- looks like they're going into the free WiFi business.

The primary purpose of this role is to raise the profile in the marketplace of AirPort, Apple's Wireless networking solution. Achieving this by co-ordinating the opening of WiFi Hot Spots in high profile places, which Apple will support.

Link (via ThinkSecret)

Following similar moves by regulators in Wisconsin and Minnesota, companies that provide 'net telephony services to consumers in California will soon be required to obtain the same operator licences as regular old phone companies. VoIP developers argue this is not only an inaccurate application of the law -- they're not telecom providers, they're data carriers -- but that it will also throw a regulatory wet towel on an industry that's still in its infancy:

VoIP providers argue that a state's rules govern only telephone calls made over traditional telephone networks. VoIP calls use the Internet and should be excluded, the providers argue. But that distinction is becoming irrelevant, said John Leutza, director of the California Public Utilities Commission's telecommunications division. "They sure look like a phone company in nearly every regard," he said during an interview on Tuesday. "This will be California's policy going forward." Because of its size and national stature, California's decision to bring VoIP providers into the regulatory fold could have enormous sway on the dozens of other state's now investigating a similar step.

Link

Can't afford an iPod? Cheap consumer-electronics chic: print, glue onto cardboard, cut out and assemble. 100K JPEG Link (via Mijnkopthee)

A reminder: I'll be launching my new short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I'm going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you! Link

Newsmonster -- a wicked-cool, Mozilla-based RSS reader -- is funded and looking to hire an engineer. The rarity value of this, a cool tech gig in San Francisco in 2003, is really astonishing.

We're looking for someone with experience in

# JavaScript, Java, C, C++ (min 5 years)

# XML including SAX, DOM, XPATH, XSLT, XUL, RSS, and RDF

# Understanding of "modern" RPC technologies (REST/SOAP/XMLRPC)

Link

eBay Hacks -- the latest of the O'Reilly Hacks series -- is out. It runs down 99 tips and tricks for eBay, ranging from simple buying and selling techniques to advanced programming with the eBay API. I wrote the intro for this book, and I'm really pleased with how it came out:

eBay makes us all into participants in the market again. It's no coincidence that eBay's first great wave of participation came from the collectibles trade. The collectibles market occurs at the intersection of luck (discovering a piece at a yard-sale or thrift shop), knowledge (recognizing its value), market-sense (locating a buyer for the goods) and salesmanship (describing the piece's properties attractively). It requires little startup capital and lots of smarts, something that each of us possess in some measure.

Somewhere, in the world's attics and basements, are all the treasures of history. Someone is using the Canopic jar containing Queen Nefertiti's preserved spleen as an ashtray. Someone is using George Washington's false teeth as a paperweight. Somewhere, a mouse is nibbling at a frayed carton containing the lost gold of El Dorado. A Yahoo! for junk would never break even: you simply couldn't source enough crack junque ninjas to infiltrate and catalog the world's storehouses of *tchotchkes*, white elephants and curios.

And just as Napster found the cheapest way to get all the music online, eBay has found the most cost-effective means of cataloging the world's attics and basements. It's attic-Napster, and it's spread the cost and effort around. When you spy a nice casino ashtray on the 25-cent shelf at Thrift Town and snap its pic and put it up on eBay, and when the renowned collector of glass ashtrays, ColBatGuano, bids it up to $400, you have taken part in a market transaction that has simultaneously catalogued a nice bit of bric-a-brac and moved it to a collection where it will be lovingly cared for -- and you've left a record of where it is and what it was worth when last we saw it. Buried in eBay's backup tapes is a Blue Book with the last known value of nearly every object we have ever created as a species, from Trinitite (green, faintly radioactive glass fused at the detonation of the first nuclear explosion at Los Alamos, $2.59 a gram at last check) to commodity 40-gigabyte laptop hard-drives ($30 at press-time and falling fast).

Link

Bruce Sterling's produced a list of ten dreadful technologies whose day has gone, technologies that deserve to die:

Most loathsome of all is the fiendish spam hard-burned into DVDs, which forces one to suffer through the commercials gratefully evaded by videotape fast-forwards. The Content Scrambling System copy protection scheme doesn’t work, and the payoff for pirating DVDs is massive, because unlike tapes, digital data don’t degrade with reproduction. So DVDs have the downside of piracy and organized crime, without the upside of free, simple distribution. Someday they will stand starkly revealed for what they really are: collateral damage to consumers in the entertainment industry’s miserable, endless war of attrition with digital media.

Link (via Kottke)

Rumor: A BoingBoing pal says that Chris Douridas, host of AOL and KCRW's syndicated radio show "New Ground," has just been tapped as music programmer for iTunes.

Wired News story about a graphic artist whose domain and professional reputation were effectively hijacked by a spammer -- and what he did to fight back:

One week later, the spammer struck again, using Markley's domain. Five days after the second attack, the spammer struck yet again. Thousands of bounce reports and hate e-mails arrived in Markley's inbox. And Earthlink reps told Markley they could do nothing to help him. So "blood boiling, furious and literally foaming at the mouth," Markley set out to track the spammer down. (...)

Markley checked the headers on the original spam returned with some of the bounces. Then he learned how to access domain-registry information and how to use a trace-route program. Over the next two weeks, he painstakingly worked his way through a half-dozen hijacked servers and a dozen spoofed e-mail addresses and bogus identities to find "his" spammer. "Last Thursday, at around 7 p.m., I finally knew without a doubt that my nemesis was Eddy Marin, who has a reputation as the world's most prolific spammer," said Markley.

Link

If you're in LA: new work by BoingBoing pal and Bay Area artist Isabel Samaras will be included in a show called "The HAUNTED DOLLHOUSE," which opens tonight and runs though Nov 8th at Copro Nason Gallery in Culver City.

Shown here: "Wednesday The Destroyer," Oil on wood.

Link

Gareth Branwyn, blogger, author, and scribe of Wired Magazine's Jargon Watch column, has a new book out: The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. It's part of the popular Absolute Beginner's Guide series by Que publishing, and leads newbies into the fascinating world of robots and do-it-yourself bot building. Gareth explains:

"The book contains projects that detail how to build three cool robots out of a coat hanger, a trashed computer mouse, and those AOL CDs that seem to breed on your desktop. I'm not kidding. Junkbots R Us.

Ilustrations throughout the book where done by bOING bOING's amazing Mark Frauenfelder, with photos by Street Tech's very own Jay Townsend. The site will include information not available in the book, bug fixes on the projects, reader hardware hacks, robot news, and downloadable "Heroes of the Robolution" trading cards illustrated by Mark."

Link

Because they're proof that the Internet is still, on whole, uncensorable:

They die over and over on continuous loop, the journalist's throat slashed again and again, the bank robber blown up by the bomb locked to his body time after time. The graphic video and still images of dead and dying people that mainstream news organizations choose not to display inevitably find their way to the Internet, where they can't be killed. Some can be legally challenged, but even if a site is shut down, the image rarely goes away.

And there's a vigorous argument over whether instant access to such images is good or bad: Are they examples of stomach-turning excess or honest depictions of a disturbing world? There's little disagreement, however, over the Internet's role in eroding the mainstream media's reign as gatekeeper -- the media's decisions to withhold images from their viewers no longer mean viewers won't see those images

Link (via politech)

Brilliant and minstretching manifesto on the end of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, the dawn of Homo Technicus, and the ethical implications of bioengineering. Author Alan H. Goldstein is director of the Biomedical Materials Engineering Science Program at Alfred University in New York. Snip:

"The current popular fixation on clones, or science fiction's obsession with cyborgs, does not provide useful paradigms for the new forms of sentience that will ultimately emerge from nanotechnology. Both clones and cyborgs are too anthropomorphic. Ultimately, the future will not be about mixing humanity and technology but about sentient chemistry. Just as the revolution in quantum physics laid the foundation for the creation of weapons capable of vaporizing the planet, so the nanotechnology revolution is laying the foundation for the end of evolution and of life in any form we can imagine."

"A recognition of the ethical implications of bioengineering should have followed logically from the ethical questions raised by genetic engineering. But somewhere in our human hearts we apparently need to believe that, even in a cyborg, there will be a border where biology starts and technology ends -- a plug, a slot, an interface. That, unfortunately, is a fantasy. Silicon and carbon are perfectly happy to bond on the molecular level. DNA has no mandate from any deity that gives it an eternal role as the information storage system of sentience. Homo technicus will be different at the atomic level. We are not only going through the looking glass; we are merging with it."

Link (thanks, Stephen Hill)

Via Declan's politech list, news that the FBI is demanding that several reporters retail any notes or communication records pertaining to Adrian Lamo, the "Homeless Hacker" who turned himself in to Federal Authorities earlier this month. Lamo has been charged in NYC federal court with computer fraud and unlawful access.

The letters, first revealed in a report by Wired News, state that pending authorization, the FBI will issue subpoenas for the reporters' records regarding conversations with Lamo. (...)

FBI Agent Christine Howard states in the criminal complaint against Lamo that she gained information about Lamo's New York Times break-in from articles published by Securityfocus.com, Newsbytes (a Washington Post web site), the Associated Press, MSNBC.com, ComputerWorld.com and the San Francisco Weekly. Several reporters from these and other organizations have received requests from the FBI to retain all records relating to their contact with Lamo. Howard, part of the Cybercrime Task Force in the New York field office, told Wired News that "all reporters who spoke with Lamo" should expect similar letters.

Link

Boeing's new 376HP model satellite -- "e-BIRD" -- was successfully launched earlier this week. The satellite was launched by an Ariane 5 rocket out of French Guiana on September 27, and is said to be the first ever specifically engineered for two-way broadband communications.

With a configuration of multiple spotbeams, each providing high-power regional coverage, e-BIRD can contribute to national and pan-European broadband programmes such as the European Union's e-Europe initiative that aims for all schools, universities and businesses to have access to the Internet by 2005. It is estimated that a quarter of the population and between 10 to 40 per cent of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union and candidate countries do not have access to broadband today.

link (via pho, thanks JP!)

'Net research firm Nielsen/NetRatings says fileswapping volume has decreased on popular peer-to-peer networks since the most recent bout of RIAA-vs-consumer lawsuits.

Since the last week of June, traffic to the largest network, Kazaa, fell 41 percent to 3.9 million visitors during the week ending Sept. 21. Similar drops in usage were recorded for BearShare and IMesh networks. "The RIAA is clearly sending a strong message to American Web users and the message appears to be working," said Greg Bloom, senior Internet analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings (NTRT: news, chart, profile). "With hundreds of individuals facing real lawsuits, the threat to music file sharers is serious." Usage of popular file-sharing applications is at an all-time low, he added.

Link

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day":

California's Anti-Spam Law: NPR's Alex Chadwick talks with technology writer Xeni Jardin about California's new anti-spam law, scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2004, and how effective the law might be.

Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.

Two interesting pieces on this morning's WiFi Networking News:

Intel's free networking day benefitted free networks: in hindsight, it seems obvious that the biggest beneficiary for publicity for free wireless will be free wireless networks. Still, the stats are compelling:

...the Starbucks in downtown Portland had 40 unique logins while Portland's free Personal Telco hot spot downtown had 176 unique logins.

Hotspot suppliers are offering competing packages for cafes that want to offer free wireless, including one that claims to "stop spam" (??). It's not clear to me, though, why a cafe that wants to give away free WiFi needs a "managed" solution (which requires that you depend on a tech-support queue for problems) that costs $300 when the "unmanaged" solution (a regular access-point, which can be "fixed" by turning it off and on) costs $40.

The moral of the story: Free WiFi is really, really free. Or at least cheap. The brisk market in WiFi gear, combined with the commodity nature of packets, makes it hard to engineer the kinds of market-failures in WiFi that represent gigantic marginal profit opportunities.

Super Slurper, the super-absorbent compound found in disposable diapers, is being repurposed for use in drying out books that have been flood-damaged:

"Around 250,000 books are damaged each year in the United States by water from flooding or burst pipes," Yeager said...

"With Super Slurper it takes roughly 10 minutes to dry each book. It's a quantum leap in the amount of time," Yeager said.

Link

One of Moby's fans is being sued by the RIAA, and it's got Moby steamed:

personally i just can't see any good in coming from punishing people for being music fans and making the effort to hear new music.

i'm almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the riaa would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive.

Link (via Kottke)

Presently topping my list of scary/surreal commercial applications for GPS technology:

Next summer, Coca-Cola plans to use satellites to find U.S. buyers who happen to purchase special cans of Coke products. They will be winners in a giveaway that will feature Hummer H2 sport-utility vehicles. The giant vehicles will be presented in person, using satellites to locate the recipients."

Link (Thanks, tregoweth!)

A new project known as the "Peer-to-Peer Legal Defense Fund" was launched today by a group calling themselvers Downhill Battle. Co-founder Nicholas Reville explains:

We think the major label lawsuits are just intimidation followed by extortion: the record companies scare people with a suit for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then offer a settlement for 4 or 5 thousand. The cost of fighting is so high that even if you think you're innocent, it's cheaper to settle. (...)

The Defense Fund actually runs on a peer-to-peer model: rather than collecting the donations centrally and then later distributing them, we use PayPal accounts so that donations go directly to people that have been sued and have signed up on our system. Our open-source software tracks donations and presents the person with the least donations so far to receive the next contribution-- money gets spread out evenly over time, without a middleman. We think it's a cool system and a good political response.

We hope it will give some people the ability to fight and will help alleviate some of the financial damage to the families that have to settle, people are seriously talking about taking out second mortgages or not being able to afford college tuition. From a political standpoint, if we can take away the damage, then the lawsuit scare strategy doesn't work as well.

Link to web site, Link to related NYT story, (via pho list)

James Cramer's rant on Disney's new VOD venture, Operation MovieBeam:

No more devices. Sorry, I don't want still one more device attached to my television set. And I certainly don't want to pay for it. Yet, there goes Disney (DIS:NYSE) , offering Operation MovieBeam, under which you can add a device to your television that costs you money every day so you won't have to pay late fees at Blockbuster. Huh? Who thinks about this stuff? Who creates it? And at what point do companies stop dreaming about the wonders of video on demand? (...)

My prediction: There's a $100 million write-off headed Disney's way. This venture reminds me so much of those Disney ventures I was involved during the dot-com period. Everything they touched turned to stone. They had no feel for the marketplace or for what consumers wanted. It's just amazing how bad they are.

Link

My friend Roger Wood's latest assemblage sculpture clock makes me homesick for a time that never was. Link

Remember Verisign? The incompetent crooks who have abused their monopoly over .COM and .NET, betraying the trust of every Internet user, continuing on a long history of abusing their customers and the Internet?

They've been tapped to secure the US's Internet voting technology. They were given the contract by Arthur Andersen consuluting, now using the post-felony-fraud alias Accenture Accenture (Accenture split from Arthur Andersen before the Enron scandal, thanks, Jamais!). This beggars the imagination. I'm going to be sick.

VeriSign announced Monday that it will provide key components of a system designed to let Americans abroad cast absentee votes over the Internet.

The contract was granted by consulting firm Accenture, which is working with the U.S. Department of Defense on a voting system known as the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. When completed, the system will allow absentee military personnel and overseas Americans from eight participating states to cast their votes in the 2004 general election.

Link

The Dean campaign has drafted a gang of Internet advisors -- not all of whom are Dean supporters -- to help guide its use of and feedback to the Internet. The advisors include Hal Abelson, Laura Breeden, Lawrence Lessig, Bob Lucky, Dewayne Hendricks, Joi Ito, David Reed, Richard Rowe and David Weinberger. Link

Bill Scannell -- the whistle-blower who caught Jet Blue violating its own policies by handing over its customers' records to defense-contractors for a TIA-like aviation spy-program -- has caught one of the CAPPS II vendors with its hand in the cookie-jar. The TSA has appointed David S. Stempler, head of the "Air Travelers Association," to serve as the "passenger advocate" in the CAPPS II process. CAPPS II, the suspicion-generating system intended to automatically determine which passengers are likely to be guilty of crimes and hence liable to search and grounding, is supported by Cendant Corporation, a defense contractor that stands to profit if CAPPS II is enacted.

And it looks like Cendant Corportation and the "Air Travelers Association" are run by the same people.

Some "passenger advocate." No wonder he says that CAPPS II is a fine idea and "(w)hatever's going to be done will have to be done in secret".

# Stempler's 'Air Travelers Association' website reads like an infomercial for Cendant's Travelers Advantage program.

# Both Stempler's website and the site of Cendant Travelers Advantage are owned and managed by the Trilegiant Corporation, a Cendant subsidiary.

Update: more background on Cendant from George Scriban your post on Cendant's shell game with the "Air Travellers Association" caught my eye. one thing you might want to clarify -- Cendant's not a defence contractor in the Lockheed sense of the term. they're a holding company for a number of businesses in the travel and hospitality industries (like the Gallileo GDS, CheapTickets.com, Days Inn, Howard Johnsons, Budget car rentals) with interests in real estate (Century 21) and consumer fiance (Jackson Hewitt). of course, they also have "loyalty" programs that remarket to frequent users of their products, and a wealth of data on their customers. Link

Pulver.com -- makers of fine Voice-Over-IP memes, software and now hardware -- have shipped a Voice-Over-IP-over-WiFi phone, called the WiSIP. Right now, it can only be used to make calls on the Free World Dialup network, but a version that works with Vonage's service is in the offing, which will play with the legacy phone-network. Link (via Gizmodo)

The PETA people are sure to get their panties in a bunch over this one: fur coats from Elmo pelts, and wall-mounted game trophies of the googly-eyed one's decapitated head. Elmo say, "owie." But don't throw blood at your monitor -- it's only the work of artist Kelly Heaton, who purchased 64 previously-owned Tickle Me Elmo dolls on eBay.

Link to photo series, Link to eBay art auction (Thanks, Tim)

Yes, you read that headline right. "The little girl showing how to make a bong was the most in-your-face example of drug culture among primary school students I've heard of,'' one teacher said. Link (Thanks, Richard!)

Walt Disney and the Quest for Community is a (pricey, $50) academic text on Walt's Utopian dream of building a city called EPCOT -- Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow -- on the grounds of his planned Florida theme park. EPCOT would have asked its worker-citizens to sign away their Consitutional rights in favor of a code-of-conduct specified by Walt and embodied in the Park's designs, and included plans to be electrically self-sufficient through the construction of a nuclear power-plant.

Written by a professor of Urban Planning, the book seems to have been written from the perspective of utopianism in urban design, with Walt as a kind of Bizarro-world Jane Jacobs. This is a subject that's always fascinated me -- the idea of a top-to-bottom Disney-mediated utopian community. There was a generation of Americna entrepreneurs who dreamed of these things -- Ford reportedly built planned communities in Brazil called "Fordlandia" where he subjected his rubber-plantation workers to his utopian vision (which included the banning of the local booze in favor of Tom Collinses, which were inherently Utopian in Ford's eyes).

"Mannheim does a remarkable job in detailing the Disney's revolutionary urban planning contributions that shape most of the modern world."
Edward J. Blakely, Dean, Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University, New York, USA

"The book is the first to reveal Walt Disney's deep personal concern for the urban "crisis" of the time..."
Gerald Gast, Associate Professor, Portland Urban Architecture Program, The University of Oregon

Link

Following recent moves by ESPN and Fox Sports to add their names to restaurant chains, media behemoth Clear Channel Communications is licensing Minnesota's largest sports radio station to launch "KFAN the Restaurant." I'll have one order of monopoly meatloaf, some free speech fries, a Commons cupcake, and a side of public airwaves, julienned.

Opening in Roseville, Minn., near St. Paul, by early December, the restaurant will be the first of what may become many tied to Clear Channel properties throughout the United States, including New York City. The Minnesota restaurant is meant to piggyback on the power and reach of Clear Channel properties. In addition to 60 plasma-screen televisions, banquet space and private "skyboxes," it will offer patrons sports and music programming from Clear Channel's seven area radio stations.

In exchange, Clear Channel will receive 5 percent of the restaurant's sales, sales that are forecast to reach $10 million in the first year, said Ken Plunkett, the chief executive at Grand Management in St. Paul, which is opening the restaurant. Clear Channel has agreed to return half of that 5 percent in the form of advertising time.

Link

Alexander "al3x" Payne, Chris Adams and Christian Woodward took great collaborative notes at ToorCon using SubEthaEdit, a Rendezvous-enabled text-editor for OS X.

a. Introduction to Root-Fu
 - What is a hacker?
  + Deep knowledge: finding/writing exploits, breaking in, fixing, alluding capture
  + Classical hacking: physical security, dumpster diving, social engineering, phreaking
 - What is a hacker contest?
  + The problem: how do you test a hacker's mettle in 2-3 days?
  + Limiting script kiddy BS
  + Finding/developing sploits
   = Coming in with predefined sploits doesn't make a good contest; DIY sploit dev
  + Teamwork
   = Range of skills required to own modern, complex systems
  + Integration of classical hacking
   = Physical, espionage, information gathering
  + Challenge of scoring
  + Fast-paced game

Day One Link, Day Two Link (via Al3x)

I'm at the ToorCon infosec after-party at DachB0den labs, and they've just screened a stunning Matrix fan-film called The Fanimatrix, which had a roomful of hackers enraptured.

"The Fanimatrix" is a fan-made, zero-budget short film set within the Matrix universe, specifically shortly before the discovery of "The One" (i.e. the first "Matrix" feature film). It tells the story of two rebels - Dante and Medusa - and of their fateful mission onto the virtual reality prison world that is The Matrix.

The film was shot on the Sony Mini-Digital Video format and edited on a PC editing suite utilizing Adobe Premiere, After FX and AlamDV Special FX. The entire production was completed over nine nights, ranging from six to over fifteen hour shoots, not including rehearsal and blocking-tape-shooting sessions. Most of the props, sets and lighting equipment was borrowed and locations were either hired or shot guerilla style. Although the film was a "zero budget" production, the final cost of the movie (combining personal expenses of cast and crew such as investment into costumes, transport costs, food etc) has reached upto approximately $1000 NZ (or $400-$600 US). The movie was shot entirely within Auckland City, New Zealand (our home).

Link

Neal Pollack -- blogger, author, chutzpah-filled media prankster, and Suicide Girl -- tops even the zaniest of his previous stunts by embarking on a nationwide book/rock tour to pimp his latest literary and musical releases:

Now I'm going on the road, thanks largely to the generous donations I received from readers of this website, and I won't disappoint. Yes, I'm out to sell and promote my groundbreaking rock novel, Never Mind The Pollacks, currently the 66,410th most popular book in the country, and the accompanying soundtrack from my band, The Neal Pollack Invasion. Reviews of both can be found here. So, yes, I'm selling, because I'm the Willy Loman of literature. Attention must be paid. But I have other purposes as well.

Link. Tour starts today. Don't miss that soundtrack, which includes the timeless ballad "I Wipe My Ass on Your Novel."

lo-fi mixtape
audio vhs
disco
techno
rave slave
records
cassettes
cover versions
critic
emogame

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

New York Times story about technologies for studying human consciousness -- and the impact of new research on both medical ethics and practical policy. Recently, one group of neurology researchers proposed a new definition, "the minimally conscious state." With it, they point to the possibility that many coma victims who've been diagnosed as vegetative might in fact have mental activity that was previously undetectable.

As the tape of his sister's voice played, several distinct clusters of neurons in Rios's brain had fired in a manner virtually identical to that of a healthy subject. Some clusters that became active were those known to help process spoken language, others to recall memories. Was Rios recognizing his sister's voice, remembering her? ''You couldn't tell the difference between these parts of his brain and the brain of one of my graduate students,'' says Hirsch, an expert in brain imaging at Columbia University. Even the visual centers of Rios's brain had come alive, despite the fact that his eyes were covered. It was as if his sister's words awakened his mind's eye.

Link

The recently-formed Peer-to-Peer filesharing trade association "P2P United", together with CxOs of larger P2P software developers, are expected to announce tomorrow the adoption of a "File-Sharing Industry Code of Conduct" at a gathering in Washington, DC. They're also expected to demand Congressional action to work out differences between the file-sharing public and the recording/film industries, and to halt the RIAA lawsuits. Link

Lisa Rein has posted two more of her original songs to her site: Hiding and It's Alright. Both very good, both under a Creative Commons license. Link

In his current Sunday column, Dan Gillmor's written a very good piece on the good guys and bad guys of the Internet, and the ways in which the Internet constitutes a microcosm of the forces of constructivism and vandalism:

But pure malevolence fills some souls, and the Internet is their toxic playground. One creep found a security flaw in the software powering the site and exploited it. This person posted programming code inside a comment form -- some HTML that took users to an unaffiliated Web page containing one of the most disgusting photographs I've ever seen.

The site came down temporarily but quickly, thanks to users who alerted us. The offending post has been removed, thanks to a sharp-eyed programmer who let us know what had happened. The hole is being permanently repaired, thanks to the free software's developer, who hadn't foreseen this misuse.

We'd surely seen the downside of the Net. But in the response of people who helped us find, analyze and fix the problem, we'd also seen the profound upside.

Link