The popular blogging-aid software Ecto -- once only offered for Mac -- is now available for Windows users. With today's launch of Ecto for Windows, BoingBoing officially becomes an all-ecto blog! My BoingBoing co-editors all use it to make blogging with Movable Type more friendly and efficient. I'm the only PC-afflicted blogger in the bunch. TypePad, MovableType, Nucleus, and Blogger users: rejoice. Ecto creator Adriaan Tijsseling says:

Joi and me are very happy to announce the release of a beta of a Windows port of ecto, thanks to a unique collaboration with Alex Hung. It is our hope that with this collaboration the ease of use and features of ecto will now be available to the Windows users. The beta trial will last one month, during which we hope to find bugs and improve on the product with the help of user feedback. Any information about this beta will be on the ecto for Windows webpage as Alex will be the main responsible person for this Windows version.

Link

Rupert Scammell tells BoingBoing:

On Gawker tonight, I noticed that DoubleClick now uses banners which look like Google AdWords ads. In a similar manner to their infamous fake Windows error dialog banners, DC seems to be capitalizing upon the now familiar look of Gooogle's advertising to up their click rate. I wrote a quick weblog entry up about it, which features a screenshot of the advertising in action.

Link

Jon Gales tells BoingBoing: "That's not quite true. They are teamed up with Google. They take a bet that they will be able to beat the CPM they pay (which is quite low). Check this Webmaster World forum for more discussion on the topic." (NOTE: forum appears to be for paid members only. --XJ)

Brad Templeton -- the long-time moderator of rec.humor.funny and host of the rhf archives -- has received a cease-and-desist notice from AmEx's lawyers over a 13 year old joke called "American Expressway." Brad, being fully aware of the Constitutionally protected right to parody and how that trumps trademark, has posted a link to the joke, the C&D, and his response, which pokes vicious fun at AmEx's lawyers at the firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe:

hould you ever feel your reputation lost or stolen by free speech and satire, just one call gets LVM to write a threatening cease and desist letter -- usually on the same day -- citing all sorts of important sounding laws but ignoring the realities of parody. Most innocent web sites will cave in, not knowing their rights. LVM will pretend it has never read cases like L.L. Bean, Inc. v. High Society and dozens of others. There's no preset limit on the number of people you can threaten, so you can bully as much as you wish.

After all, Being Giant and Intimidating has its Privileges.

American Express Lawyers: Don't leave your home page without them.

Link

New jargon from Quake legend Alice Taylor: "MoSoSo." Social software for mobile phones. Link

Ten of millions of low carb dieters have created such a demand for beef that cattle rustling is getting popular again. Link (via Carbwire)

Rael Dornfest says he's going to stop filing his email messages into different folders. Instead, he's going to put all the messages he wants to keep into a single folder and use his email programs search and sort functions to retrieve messages he wants to re-read. I'll be interested to see how this works for him. Link

The Boingboing affinity group on tribe.net, created last year by a group of readers, just welcomed its 700th member. Link

Joi Ito writes:

The Japanese "sort of equivalent" of SuicideGirls is Cure, a cosplay site. The biggest difference is that the sexy pictures are not allowed. It's quite an amazing community. There are 5000 layers (comes from Cosplayers) and 30,000 cameko (comes from camera kozo or "Camera Boys"). The layers can be sorted by ranking or by the characters they play. The cameko are otaku who spend their lives taking pictures of the layers and giving beautiful prints of their photos to the layers and sharing them online. The site lets you send these photos to or view them on your mobile phones.

Link

This page contains a scraping of the most recent couple-dozen images included in LiveJournal posts (which often includes some NSFW stuff, wage-slaves be warned). Link (Thanks, Singularity!)

Damien sez, "these incredible guys have created an online archive of the front and back cover art of almost every compact disc album and DVD release ever, freely downloadable as a jpeg. of course, the linear shelf space of any decent DVD movie collection is enormous if actually stored in those over-sized black plastic boxes..." Link (Thanks, Damien!)

3M has shipped tranparent "Scotch" duct-tape. Kevin Kelly's been playing with it and he says it holds up as good as the silvery stuff, but strong uptake would obviate my favorite Star Wars joke: "Duct tape is like The Force: It has a dark side and a light side and it holds the Universe together." Still, we could sub in "Duct tape is like the good government: It is perfectly transparent and it holds the nation together." Link (via Cool Tools)

This is probably phony, but it seems like something that might actually be used: The ID SNIPER rifle implants "a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis." Link (Thanks, Thorzdad!)

Steve Lawson sez: The ID Sniper Rifle is indeed a fake. The NPR show "The Next Big Thing" did a segment on it--the guy made a mock poster, business cards, etc. and took it to a weapons convention where he got serious interest from the Chinese. See http://www.nextbigthing.org/ and scroll down to the story "High Tech High Art"

Here's Matt Haughey's 66MB Zip of Jon Stewart being interviewed on Al Franken's Air America show last night. 66MB Zip Link (via Whole Lotta Nothing)

From Gizmodo: beautiful trompe l'oeil paintjobs on streetside transformer boxes. Link

Bruce Schneier has written an amazing editorial on the security risks inherent in instituting a national ID card.

Not that there would ever be such thing as a single ID card. Currently about 20 percent of all identity documents are lost per year. An entirely separate security system would have to be developed for people who lost their card, a system that itself is capable of abuse.

Additionally, any ID system involves people... people who regularly make mistakes. We all have stories of bartenders falling for obviously fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government buildings. It's not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures. Biometrics such as thumbprints show some promise here, but bring with them their own set of exploitable failure modes.

But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.

Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

James Grimmelman has written up a witty and marvellous con-report from Yale's Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment, wherein a bunch of Internet law-enforcement theorists and practicioners chewed the fat with civ-lib types:

Phil's Commandment Five -- "Criminal sanctions should where necessary deter costly anti-social conduct." -- sounds an awful lot like Bentham's "The general object which all laws have, or ought to have, in common, is . . . to exclude mischief." Similarly, Phil's Commandment Three -- "When traditional crime presents a greater harm to society because it is committed online, that crime should entail a heavier punishment, where possible through neutral means such as measuring the actual damage done" -- has a close resemblance to Bentham's "When two offences come in competition, the punishment for the greater offence must be sufficient to induce a man to prefer the less."

Now, this is all well and good, but Dan Solove then undermines these simple utilitarian calculations, in exactly the way that two centuries of law and economics have undermined Bentham's calm confidence. It turns out that optimal deterrence is indeterminate: it doesn't spit out clear answers all the time, because you can often make good deterrence arguments for lower punishments. This is what Solove is getting at when he says that constructing identity theft as "theft" undermines the importance of building secure architecture. Dan sees creating vulnerability itself as a harm that needs to be redressed: perhaps the people at "fault" are as much the people using social security numbers as database primary keys, as much as the crackers who steal those numbers.

Link

Via Declan McCullagh's politech list:

You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail.

New Hampshire is "two-party consent state" -- one of those jurisdictions that requires all parties to a conversation to consent before the conversation can be intercepted or recorded. The decision is the first of its kind to apply that standard to online chats, and the ruling is clearly supported by the text of the law. But it marks a blow to an investigative technique that has been routinely used by law enforcement, employers, ISPs and others.

Link to Security Focus story

Fascinating piece in today's NYT about digital media sharing among enlisted personnel in Iraq. Would entertainment industry groups -- or at some point, our government -- prosecute these soldiers for piracy?

At the Kirkush Military Training Base in the eastern Iraqi desert less than 15 miles from the frontier with Iran, an hour's wait for a helicopter was spent listening to Marilyn Manson, Eminem and Shania Twain before the Black Hawk fired up its turbines and somebody back in the barracks, as if on cue and with a dark sense of irony, cranked up Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." The songs came from a European satellite music channel and a communal computer where 12.8 gigabites of tunes had been downloaded for sharing on MP3's. The rule was simple: Take some music, add some music. "Any time anybody on the team gets a new CD, they load it in, so we stay pretty current," said Sgt. Thomas R. Mena.

As the new CD from Tool blasted in the barracks, Sergeant Mena scrolled through the computerized music library, which ranged from Abba and AC/DC, through Limp Biskit and Metallica and on to Van Halen and ZZ Top. Emigres from West Africa who joined the Army for citizenship and career training arrived with the latest Nigerian pop CD's. Chinese-Americans hauled along hot Hong Kong video imports.

Link (site registration required (Thanks, JP)

A few days ago, Jonno pointed me to a Bollywood-flavored remake of Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough," which he found on a sekrit MP3 blog that shall remain nameless. This track is phat. This track is funky. This track makes me want to do a little dance in my ergonomic chair. A little google-digging reveals the song is by a group called the Bollywood Freaks, and came out on a limited edition red vinyl 7" in the UK. I want to send them money for the funk they provide. I want more of their music. If anyone has info, cough it up.

But for now -- look! Someone dumped a copy of said funky track on a server somewhere. Download the MP3 while it lasts. Link

UPDATE: Stephen VanDyke says, "The name of the artist is James Hy-man, you can find all of the tracks at Boomselection (Link, alternate link). You may also be interested in Get Your Bootleg On (GYBO), which is where a lot of the bootleggers post new mixes."

And Charles Vestal says, "The mix posted on boomselection is a DJ set James Hyman did. While it's wikked awesome, very little of it is actual work he's done, save beatmatching the tracks and adding his name from promos over the intro track. I believe he has done some great mashups in the past, like the Slim Shady / Rockafella Skank mashup from so long ago.

Also, have you seen neverfollow.com? Audi's giving away a TT Coupe for someone who does a mashup of a track off Bowie's new album, Reality and any other Bowie track. Go Home Productions already did this, at the request of Bowie for the new single (featured in a new Audi commercial), mixing the new rocker Never Get Old and Rebel Rebel from Diamond Dogs. So much newness with a little bit of old, and Bowie's still ahead of the curve, embracing mash-up culture when the rest of the industry is scared of it. Dig out your sampler and get to work!"

Ripped from the headlines of Gawker:

Last week, Dustin Diamond -- once known as Screech on the TV show Saved by the Bell -- apparently failed in an "internet court" arbitration to procure dustindiamond.com. (Yes, I know: I'm still having a hard time believing this isn't an elaborate joke.)

At legal issue in ownership of the domain name: just how famous is Screech these days? In the response to complaint, Max Goldberg, the operator of dustindiamond.com, says:

"Mr. Diamond's attorneys have sadly overstated the extent of their client's renown and the value of his 'brand.' This becomes embarrassingly clear when they attempt to support their claim by pointing to their client's video, Dustin Diamond Teaches Chess. Their Exhibit H shows an advertisement for the video on a nonexistent web site [EXHIBIT G]. Their Exhibit I shows a listing (not an advertisement, as they claim) for the video on eBay from February 3, 2004, shortly before the complaint was filed. It is very possible that the eBay offer was posted by Mr. Diamond or his representatives. Apparently Mr. Diamond's legal team can find no evidence that Dustin Diamond Teaches Chess is anything but a self-published vanity project, one that does not support the claim that the name 'Dustin Diamond' has acquired secondary meaning."

Harsh, dude. This is a clear wake-up call for C-list actors and reality stars everywhere: sock that money away, because your future is fucked.

Screech v. Goldberg [Dustin Diamond Sucks] | Response to Complaint [Dustin Diamond Sucks] | Dustin Diamond dot com

If you're in LA this Saturday evening, check out this new show opening at sixspace -- new works by LA artists Megan Whitmarsh and Rachell Sumpter. If you're not in LA, dig the preview online. I'm particularly fond of the images form Whitmarsh (detail at left) -- gallery co-founder Caryn Coleman tells me they're the result of a dream the artist had that Kermit the Frog was in her house, hanging out and doing origami. The pieces depict -- well -- Kermit the Frog hanging out in someone's house, doing origami. Snip from press release:

"Whitmarsh will present her exquisite embroidery on fabric pieces that combine this traditional medium with depictions of elements in pop-culture such as yetis and battling elf girls. While the size of her work ranges from small to large, her characters remain tiny and detailed, forcing the viewer to literally peer into her worlds. Sumpter, part of the new school of illustration, will be exhibiting paintings on paper using gouache, ink and watercolor. Her work has been described as '...delicate ink lines, and subtle attention to detail complement and subvert the lightness of her drawings' and her 'icon-like imagery resembles... children's books found in antique stores, but with a modernist composition and adult subject matter'."
Link to press release, show images up later this week.