The Japanese Broadcast Flag has gone into effect. Like its American cousin, this is a technology mandate that restricts how you can use the shows that show up on your own television, on the grounds that you might be some kinda eyepatch-wearing-pirate. 'Course, the broadcast flag doesn't really stop you from capturing analog signals and putting their programming online; no, this is a measure that is 100% ineffective at stopping "piracy" and 100% effective at stopping new tech like VCRs from being invented without the permission of the movie studios.

Because programs that have been copied once cannot be duplicated or edited digitally, editing the programs via a personal computer has become impossible.

In addition, the broadcasters' move has made it necessary for viewers to insert a special user identification card, known as a B-CAS card, into their digital TV sets to watch programs.

These duplication controls are being applied to digital TV programs aired by both digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasters.

In the week after the measure was implemented, NHK and the grouping of private broadcasters received more than 15,000 inquiries and complaints about the scheme.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: put clothes on famous nudes. It's positively aschroftian. Link

Today I thought about the fact that I can legally download the latest hit song for less than US$1 but a sample of the same tune used as a ringtone costs twice as much or more. Who's to blame? The record industry, of course.

According to this Reuters article, mono and poly ringtones bring the original artists and music publishers a 10 percent royalty while the record labels don't get squat. But "sample" ringtones are clipped from studio recordings, requiring a license from the record label. And they're happy to sell those rights to the tune of 25 to 55 percent of the total retail price of each ringtone. As a result, the resellers are jacking up their prices.

I think this will only drive more people to make their own "sample" ringtones and trade them. As a matter of fact, record labels themselves stand to benefit from giving away "sample" ringtones. Talk about infectious grooves! Link

From Amateur Gourmet -- the guy who brought you "Janet Jackson breast cupcakes" oh so many memes ago -- comes a recipe inspired by the U.S. National Security Advisor: Condoleezza Rice Pudding with Berries of Mass Destruction. Snipped from the comment boards: "I'm thinking this needs to be accompanied by a high-fiber dish to be known as Colon Pow!" Link

If you haven't already: read Susan Sontag's piece on the images from Abu Ghraib, published in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life -- even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges.

An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face, although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

Link

I was interviewed for this Fox News story about text-messaging and romance. Bottom line in my book of digital dating manners for well-bred nerds: hot-n-heavy haiku, fone-flirting, and pickup lines by text are all hot. Breaking up by SMS is not -- but it's also not entirely uncommon, particularly among late teens and twentysomethings.

Link to "Language of Love for the High-Tech Set."

Howard Lovy's NanoBot blog brings us some particularly surreal text by Rabbi Yehuda Berg (er, Madonna's rabbi):

"...... The genius of nanotechnology is the reduction of space. Smaller is infinitely more powerful...It seems that scientists on the cutting edge of nanotechnology are reaching the same conclusions about space as did the kabbalists thousands of years ago." Link

New York artist Richie Fahey creates hand-colored black-and-white photographs inspired by pulp paperback covers from the 1930s-1960s. Right now on eBay, there are Giclee limited edition Fahey prints of a girl gone to town to burn it down. Link to Fahey's site. Link to eBay item. (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)

Gary sez: Thought you'd appreciate this: a Lileks-esque saga about Petey, Gerald McBoingboing-esque spokeskid for Pel-Freez Rabbit Meat. Truly. The saga goes on and on. Fans start drawing Petey, hare-larity ensues. Link

Today on the National Public Radio program "Day to Day," I talk with host Alex Chadwick about discredited news reports that US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld issued an edict banning phonecams in Iraq -- as well as the confirmed release of a new Pentagon directive (PDF) outlining new restrictions on consumer wireless tech at DoD installations worldwide. While there may not be a Pentagon-issued ban on phonecams or connected digital cameras per se, there do appear to be new efforts under way to address the proliferation of those technologies in the military theater and throughout the DoD's "information grid." Alex says,

The images of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the photos of returning soldiers' coffins -- we see them because of this technology. And it's caught defense officials off-guard.

Link to Day to Day "Xeni Tech: Phonecams and the Front Lines" (online audio available after 12PM PT, station search here)

Time magazine has a short slideshow of kit-built and pre-fab houses. (Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house shown here.) Link

(When I was in New Zealand, I looked at a great prefab house on Waiheke Island.)

I wrote a piece for TheFeature.com about i2 Internet's new device , the InternetTalker MG-3, which allows mobile phones to make VoIP calls.

Here’s how the MG-3 works: first, you have to sign up for VoIP service with a company that resells i2 Telecom’s hardware and network access. You’ll get the MG-3, a little plastic box stuffed with microchips, which you plug into your broadband connection and existing phone line. Then, when you want to make a long distance call with your mobile, you just call your home number. The MG-3 will recognize the mobile’s number using Caller ID, and connect you to i2 Telecom’s VoIP network. You get a second dial tone, and you can make your overseas call. Want to talk to somebody in China? You’ll get charged 5 cents a minute. Cingular has been having a great time charging you $3.49 a minute for making the same call.

Link

New Scientist reports on the graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University we've linked to previously who built a robot that can make simple origami constructions. The work is aimed at developing robotic systems that can manipulate various materials encountered in daily life. From researcher Devin Balkcom's site:

"Why origami?  Origami is a fresh challenge for the field of robotic manipulation.  Paper is flexible; robots are best at manipulating rigid things.  Even if we model origami as an articulated rigid body (by building our origami out of really stiff cardboard with hinges along creases), it still has a complicated mechanical structure."  Link

Joey DeVilla has a blog entry on a Boston blogger whose house burned down this weekend: there's a PayPal donation box to help the poor guy out.

About 5 or 10 minutes later I started smelling smoke and heard my dad looking in the attic outside my room. It was now he started screaming, "The house is REALLY on fire. Get anything you can and get out!" He said this as he walked down the stairs and when he came back in after putting something outside.

I was a bit panicked and shaken but I grabbed my backpack and threw my computers in it and put on some pants. I should have probably put on the pants with my wallet in them, but for some reason I didn't. And I should have probably got a jacket as well seeing as it is so cold now.

Link

Mark Lemley, a UC Berkeley law prof, has just published a paper on copyright called "Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property," that's a good, fast read. Lemley says that in copyright's early days, the justificaiton for the auhtor's monopoly was to give authors the incentive to crete new works, but that today, we have the "ex ante" arguments that copyright also gives authors the incentive to exploit their creations -- to make more of them once they are created -- and to "steward" them by ensuring that only good, quality derivative works enter the market.

Without saying much about the idea that copyright can be a good incentive to create, Lemley tears these other arguments for copyright to shreds, in a highly entertaining fashion:

The argument that a single company is better positioned than the market to make efficient use of an idea should strike us as jarringly counterintuitive in a market economy. Our normal supposition is that the invisible hand of the market will work by permitting different companies to compete with each other. It is competition, not the skill or incentives of any given firm, that drives the market to efficiency. Nothing about the fact that a work was once subject to copyright or patent protection should change our intuition here. It is hard to imagine Senators, lobbyists, and scholars arguing with a straight face that the government should grant one company the perpetual right to control the sale of all paper clips in the country, on the theory that otherwise no one will have an incentive to make and distribute paper clips.24 We know from long experience that companies will make and distribute paper clips if they can sell them for more than it costs to supply them. The market for paper clips functions just fine without this type of government intervention. We can also predict with some confidence that if we did grant one company the exclusive right to make paper clips, the likely result would be an increase in the price and a decrease in the supply of paper clips. Yet supporters of the CTEA confidently predict exactly the opposite in the case of copyrighted works from the 1920s.

164k PDF Link (via Freedom to Tinker)

The game Achnea has introduced a virtual narcotic called gleam:

Achaea characters who take gleam get hooked quickly -- suffering typical addiction symptoms: violent vomiting, shivering, irrational sobbing, begging for the drug and even overdoses resulting in death. Some of the game's players are angry about gleam's introduction into their world.

Link

John Gilmore sez, "If Kerry had the sense to pick Nader as his VP, they'd unify the anti-Bush ranks and eliminate the chance of a significant protest vote. Nader polls at 4%, which would put Kerry over the top. Independent voters have noticed the remarkably similar platforms of Bush and Kerry re the Iraq war (they're for it), Guantanamo (they're for indefinite imprisonment without judicial review), the Patriot Act (they're for it), and many other issues like the drug war (they're for it). If independents could vote at least one honest person into one party's administration, known for blowing the whistle when needed, they would be a lot more inclined to do so."

The Washington Post did a poll and said ... It found Bush in a dead heat with Democratic candidate Massachusetts Senator John Kerry in the presidential race.

Forty-six percent of registered voters said they would vote for Bush if the election were held today; 46 percent said they would support Kerry and 4 percent said they would back independent Ralph Nader, the poll said.

Link (Thanks, John!)

A member of the Kansas City Dance Dance Revolution club -- which was profiled in this rather dark tale of a guy who steals to support his DDR habit -- responds:

I am the site admin of DDRKC.com. The author of this article approached us a few months ago claiming to want to write a positive publicity piece about the Kansas City local area Dance Dance Revolution scene. They interviewed a number of us, who all spoke about the comraderie and positive aspects of having a virtual community based around DDR. If you read the article, you will note that NONE of this information was used. Instead, they decided to focus on the personal exploits of a single person who was doing stupid and illegal activities. What that has to do with DDR, I have no idea. It's like creating an expose on how bloggers are evil and engaged in illegal activities just because one of them decided to go shoplift something. It completely misrepresents for only DDR as a whole, but DDRKC and the local players as well. Here is a link to the community reaction to the article.

Link

This HalfLife-inspired casemod is jaw-droppingly cool. Link (via /.)

Fascinating Salon piece about the moral debate among Christian teens over whether P2P file-sharing for gospel music is a sin.

"Being faithful to your friends, giving them something for free, is more important than any kind of moral allegiance to a record company. Whether a teenager is a committed Christian, of a different faith or just has no religious affiliation, some of the patterns of how they make decisions transcend religious input," Kinnaman says. He believes that to change those kids' attitudes, you'd have to somehow influence those networks of friends, not just tell the kids that what they're doing is wrong.

Another complication: For some Christian kids Barna studied, sharing the religious hits that express their faith is their way of spreading the word. "They wanted it to be part of their ministry. They wanted to share some of the positive messages from their music with non-believers. It's an evangelistic impulse." He compared it to the old saw about the stolen Bible: "If someone came and stole my Bible, I'd be happy that they stole it, because they needed it."

Link

This week on Engadget's HOWTO section: how to hack your own ringtones for the P900:

I bought a CD and use it in my alarm clock (a lot of alarm clocks have that as a feature)- Should I pay $3 for that? Perhaps, seems weird to me. Sometimes when the phone rings I whistle a popular tune from a CD I bought, do I need to pay for that? America is a great place, we have fair use- it’s why we’re great innovators and heck- making stuff for our phones for our own personal use goes beyond fair use. In this week’s how to we show you how to make your own ring tones, for just your phone, for just personal use, from the CD you just bought.

Link (Thanks, pt!)