By Cory Doctorow at 8:43 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Hukilau 2004 is the third annual 3-day tiki festival, to be held at Fort Lauderdale's Mai Kai tiki bar (where I celebrated my 30th birthday!) from September 23-25. Featured entertainment includes tiki carvers, live exotica, custom swizzlesticks and matchbooks, and gigantic, flaming novelty cocktails. Oh, and hula dancers, a tiki merch exhibition, a cruise, fishing, and did I mention novelty cocktails? I wonder if there's any grant money available to attend this...
Link
(
Thanks, Swanky!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:25 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Here's an MP3 of Jonathan "Friendster" Abrams's SXSW keynote on YASNSes.
42.6MB MP3 Link
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via Apophenia)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:14 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Goatse is an infamous Internet gross-out image (google for it if you must, but be warned: this is a sight you can't un-see). It has become iconic in geek cycles, so it's hardly surprising to find its echo in this screenshot from Unreal Tournament 2004. Unsurprising or no, it still evoked a beavisoid huh-huh-huh reaction from this correspondant.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 8:11 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Good essay explaining the origin of airport codes such as YYZ, LHR, ORD, and SFO.
Some special interest groups successfully lobbied the government to obtain their own special letters. The Navy saved all the new 'N' codes. Naval aviators learn to fly at NPA in Pensacola, Florida and then dream of going to "Top Gun" in Miramar, California (NKX). The Federal Communications Committee set aside the 'W' and 'K' codes for radio stations east and west of the Mississippi respectively. 'Q' was designated for international telecommunications. 'Z' was reserved for special uses. The Canadians made off with all the remaining 'Y codes which helps explain YUL for Montreal, YYC for Calgary, etc. One of the special uses for 'Z' is identifying locations in cyberspace. What am I talking about? Well, an example is ZCX the computer address of the FAA's air traffic control headquarters central flow control facility. ZCX is not an airport but a command center just outside Washington D.C., that controls the airline traffic into major terminals.
Link
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via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:09 pm Friday, Mar 19
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LOAF is a novel approach to spam-filtration. The idea is that you send a one-way-hashed version of your entire address book along with every message you send. This allows all your friends to create a privacy-complete list of all the people in their friends' trusted correspondants' lists. When mail comes in, it is flagged as originating with one of your known correspondants, or one of their known correspondants, or a total stranger, helping you prioritize your inbox. The authors of the paper have written a list of known attacks against this system:
Ex-Girlfriend attack
While a LOAF file is hard to reverse-engineer, it's designed to answer the question ``did this person ever send email to X?''. In some cases, that's a question you don't want people to be able to ask. To avoid exposing the fact that you are corresponding with certain people, you have three options:
- Don't use LOAF.
- Create a blacklist of addresses for LOAF to pass over when generating a filter.
- Set a false positive rate high enough to give you plausible deniability: ``Oh, honey, don't be ridiculous. I certainly never wrote to X, that must be a false positive'' will work, but you must be sure to read the caveat about keeping a constant filter size in Dictionary attack below.
Marc Canter attack
The technique is similar to getting a perfect score on the SAT by filling in every oval on the SAT exam sheet - you provide a Bloom filter consisting entirely of ones, and every email address checked against it will match.
Sending an overloaded filter does not help you get accepted by new correspondents, but once you are added to their list, it will make you appear to know everyone. One possible solution to this spoofing problem is to impose a maximum density.
Link
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via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:53 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Aaron Swartz and John Gruber have unveiled their seekrit project, "Markdown," a system for marking up ASCII to make it readily convertable to styled html text, without sacrificing the readability and expressiveness of the core text. There's already support for Blosxom, BBEdit and MT, and it looks pretty straightforward to implement in other environments.
Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)... The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
Link
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via Aaronsw)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:45 pm Friday, Mar 19
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My cow-orker Ren has posted a Creative Commons-licensed flowchart showing the workflow of a Voluntary Collective License -- the blanket license that EFF advocates for solving the P2P wars.
Link
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via Legal Tags)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:42 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Wendy sez, "In response to privacy concerns and RIAA lawsuits, Bway.net offers no-logging, dynamic IP DSL service, billed as AnonDSL. Pretty cool."
Bway.net believes it should be your choice to be as public or as private on the Internet as you want to be. To accomplish this, Bway introduces:
* AnonDSL - the ultimate tool for protecting your identity from tracking by the RIAA, MPAA or anyone else.
* AnonDSL makes your online activities untraceable - except, of course, for email and any other activities that require authentication.
Link
(
Thanks, Wendy!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:40 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Oliver "Conspiracist" North, who conspired with the highest levels of government to defraud Congress about his conspiracy to move guns, terrorists, cocaine and bayonetted nuns around the world for his conspiratorial ends has written an editorial about the tendency of "liberals" to worry too much about conspiracies. And he should know.
Liberals have always loved conspiracy theories because raising the specter of foul play and dirty tricks is an easy and convenient justification for ignoring their own political and policy failures.
Link
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via Electrolite)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:54 pm Friday, Mar 19
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I haven't seen a copy of
Atomic Ranch yet myself, but my friend Marc has and he says it's great. The magazine is for ranch home and tract house owners who like mid-century modern style. We're about to move into a ranch home in the San Fernando Valley, so I'm excited to get this.
Link (On a semi-related note: we're getting a miniature donkey, and I'm wondering if any Boing Boing readers own one and can tell me about them. Email me.)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:48 pm Friday, Mar 19
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IEatBrainz is a MusicBrainz plugin for OS X. You feed it tracks in your iTunes library with missing metadata -- artist, title, album, etc -- analyses the audio to generate a fingerprint of the song, then compares that fingerprint to a database of millions of songs, figures out what the unlabelled track is, and fills in the metadata. That's some sweet, sweet functionality.
Link
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via Ben Hammersley)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:45 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Nick Gillespie, editor or
Reason, sez: "thanks for the
plug re: bagge (however negative). take a look at peter's longer-form comics for us and i think you'll agree they are pretty damn swell. including:
Swingers of the World, Unite! A report from an alternative lifestyles conference (April 2004)
Everyone's a Winner! One state's--and one man's--love/hate relationship with legalized gambling (October 2003)
Observations from a Reluctant Anti-Warrior (March 2003)
and
(A secular humanist looks at the world of) Christian Rock (February 2002)
By Xeni Jardin at 1:13 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Child porn posession charges against Paul "Peewee Herman" Reubens have been dropped. Must have been the
t-shirts.
Link (
thanks, Jonno!)
By Xeni Jardin at 12:57 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Fascinating, disturbing two-part series by Julia Scheeres in Wired News about online anti-pedo vigilantes.
Part One,
Part Two.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:37 pm Friday, Mar 19
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Here's a neat site to make fun buttons like these.
Link (via horkulated)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:59 am Friday, Mar 19
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Spencer sez: "Recently, a friend of mine from Australia was attempting to sell some ugg boots (note that's with a lowercase u) on eBay and received a note from them that she couldn't use the word "ugg" anywhere in their title or description because the trademark owner had threatened them. Knowing that "ugg" is a generic Australian term for sheepskin boots and has been used for years (to the point that it's in the dictionary), she was more than a little annoyed. We were inspired to do some research and discovered that the American company Deckers has been attempting to wrest control of the word "ugg" using legal threats for some time now."
Link
Grant Barrett, Assistant Editor, Lexical Reference and Project Editor, Historical Dictionary of American Slang for Oxford University Press sez: "The Macquarie Dictionary ('Australia's National Dictionary') indicates that the Australian ug/ugh/ugg boots derive from a trademark. The OED concurs and defines them as 'a proprietary name for a type of soft, sheepskin boot' indicating that it is used in Australian and New Zealand. The original spelling appears to have been 'Ugh.'"
Zara Baxter sez: "The Macquarie dictionary only lists UGG boot as a proprietary name because Deckers threatened to sue them - see here. There's a big stink in Australia about it at the moment. Lots of media coverage. FWIW my (slightly older) macquarie lists it as a generic term.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:45 am Friday, Mar 19
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Heath Row of
Fast Company sez: "We just went live with a wide-ranging package about blogs -- and their use in business. The package includes commentary from David Weinberger, guidelines from Robert Scoble, a look behind the scenes at VH-1's blog-driven show Best Week Ever, and a report on the state of Social Network Software -- as used in business."
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 11:42 am Friday, Mar 19
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BoingBoing pal
Roland says:
Lucy is not an ordinary robot, driven by software. She's a pure product of artificial intelligence (AI). And after a three-year long training, she's now able to make a difference between an apple and a banana, which is quite handy for an orang-utan, even if she doesn't eat them. Her five microcontroller chips wouldn't like this... In "A Grand plan for brainy robots," BBC News Online tells us that Lucy is the brainchild of Steve Grand, an honorary research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Psychology. And why did he choose an orang-utan design? "I made Lucy as an orang-utan because, can you imagine how scary it would be if she looked like a human baby?," said Grand. More details and references are available in this overview which also includes the cover of Grand's last book, 'Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:22 am Friday, Mar 19
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The Knee Defender is a set of plastic clips that fit on the airplane seat in front of you, keeping the person sitting in that chair from reclining his or her seat. Some airlines have banned the device. but it looks like you could probably improvise with a folded-up inflight magazine.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 10:20 am Friday, Mar 19
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On Matthew Gilbert's PhotoMatt site, pictures of "Pink Girls" hanging around outside the Gap in Harajuku, Tokyo.
Link
(
Thanks, Alice!)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:03 am Friday, Mar 19
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NTK this week savages the UK media for gullibly swallowing the story of the NannieBots, chatbots that entrap paedophiles:
The BBC, The Register, New Scientist and all fell over
themselves this week to promote "NannieBots", a set of
"self-replicating" bots to fight chatroom "grooming". These
bots, relays their master Jim Wightman, guard kids'
chatrooms from predators, and "behave like humans, sound
like humans... but with one massive difference - they never
sleep". The idea of handing over your kids' safety to Eliza
the Psychiatrist may not be that reassuring. But don't worry
- these bots use "neural networks" to become "the most
advanced artificial intelligence in the world"! Looking
through the transcript of a NannieBot/Human interaction in
New Scientist, maybe he's right. Certainly this "IT
consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands" has
either managed the greatest step forward in Artificial
Intelligence since Marvin Minsky scraped a pass in the
Turing Test - or this was a very carefully rigged demo. In
the transcript given, NannieBot seems to be able to make
logical deductions, parse colloquial English, correctly
choose the correct moment to scan a database of UK national
holidays, comment on the relative qualities of the Robocop
series, and divine the nature of pancakes and pancake day.
We look forward to the NannieBot sweeping the board at this
year's Loebner Prize. Either that, or journalists to stop
suspending their disbelief whenever someone starts waving
a paedophile on a string.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 8:57 am Friday, Mar 19
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Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla attended my reading last night at the Merril Collection; he's posted great notes on the event:
I arrived about ten minutes into Cory's session, during a reading of what I later found out was Human Readable. Every seat in the Merril room was full; many were occupied by what The Onion might term "high-profile Area Nerds". Sci-fi authors Mike Skeet and Karl Schroeder took their places near the back of the audience, while closer to the front were Ian Goldberg (who has forgotten more about computer security than I will ever learn) and his wife Kat. As the reading went on, a guy sitting down in front of me drew an impressionistic sketch into a handmade blank book. Everyone's attention was focused on Cory, who sat at a desk beside a large bottle of water, looking trim (Atkins and a busy schedule will do that) in a two-tone Blogger T-shirt. You never forget your first blogging tool.
Link
(
Thanks to Luke Tymowski for the photo!)
By Xeni Jardin at 8:41 am Friday, Mar 19
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It doesn't matter
who is
really behind
Belle de Jour -- we're all pseudonymous pretend prostitute webloggers, aren't we? For every meme, there is a Cafe Press shop, where you can buy t-shirts, mugs, and thongs.
Link (
Thanks, Hoff)
By Xeni Jardin at 8:27 am Friday, Mar 19
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Last night in LA, I went to a big fucking party thrown by the fucking
LA Press Club to show some fucking support for Sandra Fucking Tsing Loh, snarky host of "The Loh Life." The radio humorist was abruptly sacked from
KCRW after her fucking engineer failed to bleep a certain fucking four letter word from a fucked-out taped comedic monologue. Fuck!
Her commentaries had previously included deliberately-bleeped words for comic effect, but the production goof came at a time of intense concern by broadcasters over new FCC scrutiny. Nipplegate, Howard Stern, now Loh. Station manager Ruth Seymour later apologized and offered to re-hire, but Loh declined. The whole story's here (and you can still hear Loh on NPR's Marketplace, here). LA Times update here.
There's good reason for concern, as evidenced by a recent decision by congress -- which passed 391-22-- to substantially increase fines, penalties and license reviews for 'indecent' or 'profane' material. BoingBoing pal Ernest Miller says:
"For years the FCC has been regulating 'indecent' speech. Recently, of course, this has become a big deal, what with Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction and Bono saying 'This is really, really f-ing great!' at the Golden Globes. Now, however, the FCC has really taking a big step forward in regulating speech. For the first time they have declared speech not only 'indecent' but 'profane' as well. If the FCC's argument about profane speech is upheld, any 'grossly offensive' speech, whether or not related to sex or excretion, could be banned from the airwaves."
Link to Corante post on the FCC's new moves to regulate profanity in broadcasting.
Update: Stern fined, Bono's remark ruled profane, in FCC decision: Link
By Xeni Jardin at 8:09 am Friday, Mar 19
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Names of actual bands, past or present, including: A Cat Born In An Oven Isn't a Cake | Accidental Goat Sodomy | Anal Beard Barbers | The Archbishop's Enema Fetish | The Ass Baboons of Venus | Bertha Does Moosejaw | Biff Hitler and the Violent Mood Swings | Chewbacca Plaid Cock | Crappy the Clown and the Punch Drunk Monkies | Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death.
Link (
via warren).
By Cory Doctorow at 7:45 am Friday, Mar 19
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The Chillow is a non-electric heat-sink you put under your pillow to keep it cool at night.
The Chillow was designed to match your body’s cooling needs. At night after an active day, when your metabolism is high and you’re hot, the Chillow is cool and refreshing. But in the the early a.m. hours, when your metabolism is low due to inactivity, and air temperature is at it’s coolest, the Chillow is lightly cool to lightly tepid, which is exactly the temperature you will enjoy. After you get out of bed, the Chillow loses any accumulated heat and recharges so it’s ready to go again at naptime, or at bedtime. There is no maintenance required, save sweeping the air out once per month, which takes approx. 20 seconds.
Link
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via Gizmodo)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:36 am Friday, Mar 19
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id has licensed Doom 3 to a board-game company, which is planning a meatspace, miniature first-person-shooter.
The game itself is set to be largely modeled after id's upcoming entry in the franchise, Doom 3, and will feature sculpted plastic miniatures of the game's characters, board pieces for players to create their own custom maps, specialized oversized dice, and a number of different weapon types.
Link
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via Futurismic)
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