The Bright Lights Film Journal reviews "Survival Research Laboratories: 10 Years of Robotic Mayhem," a documentary chronicling the first ten years of the pioneering machine art/performance group founded by Mark Pauline in 1978. SRL is an ad-hoc collective of brilliant engineers, including former BB guest blogger Karen Marcelo, who stage mind-blowing mechanized spectacles where "humans are present only as audience or operators." Check out the Bright Lights Film Journal article here.

Boing Boing offers our congratulations to dear friends Mark and Amy on the birth this week of Jake Edward Pauline, a feat of biomechanical engineering. Link

Click image for full-size. Browsing through this beautiful gallery of children's book illos from the '20s, I keep thinking about the fact that these were all created during a period just before Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a period of dramatic cultural change. If the people who read these books as children were around my own age group -- twenty or thirtysomething -- when the bombs dropped, maybe a hundred years from now, some young person will stumble on an "Electric Company" episode and think, "Wow, that's what the 9/11 generation was watching in their diapers" -- or whatever it is they'll call this current chunk of history. Some interesting analysis on this site. Snip:

"The children in Kodomo no kuni seem to be enjoying the pleasures of modern city life. There are Western-style houses, trains and cars running along busy streets, airplanes flying in the sky, and subways passing beneath a townscape bristling with skyscrapers. What is different from now is the energy and cheerfulness with which people seemed to be looking forward to the happy future that materialistic prosperity would surely bring."

Maybe those people 100 years ahead will look back on our enthusiasm for technology the same way. Someone in 2104 will take a break from watching Olympic nanorobotic doping scandal coverage on their ocular implants. They'll blink "pause," browse the BoingBoing archives, and think, "How quaint, how naive... If only those poor fin-de-siecle suckers had stopped at Perl."

Try opening two browser windows, side by side -- one with these amazing images, the other with some contemporary manga graphics -- and consider the strands of aesthetic DNA they share. Link to Kodomo no kuni (via MeFi)

stream of consciousness
logo graveyard
bootleg objects
day60
nl design
the apartment
we fail
canon digital creators
bd4d
k10k

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

Some company is selling "pimp" and "ho" costumes for kids. "Our child pimp daddy suit comes with panne jacket & matching pants. Pimp hat is sold seperately." Link (Thanks, Howard!)

Bruce Sterling sent me a copy of No Waste, a free booklet published by Pentagram Design about the ingenious re-use of stuff by Cubans. In a country where new appliances and vehicles are unheard of, resourceful people are turning soda cans into mousetraps, glue bottles into toy cars, plastic jugs into taxi lights, and fumigator engines into motorcycles. These "objects of necessity" are works of wonder. You can get a free copy of the book by emailing Pentagram. (They're out of copies!)

Following up on the mystery surrounding Bugmenot.com's disappearance, Mr. Bugmenot himself delivers the following message to Boingboing readers via encrypted carrier pigeon:

"Our stinkin' host pulled the plug on us without notice (pretty obvious they were pressured somehow). But everything is sweet again- I've been in talk with our new hosts nearlyfreespeech.net -- they are very sympathetic to the cause and won't be pulling the plug on us again. Thanks for your support and concern but they are going to have to pry this site from my cold, dead hands :)

Also; this may be of interest -- evidence that some [registration-required] news sites are starting to use scripts to auto-disable accounts. The numbers in the column on the left represents the number of seconds since the last query."

Data: [ Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3 | Link 4 ]

Within minutes of reading this message, we learn that the site is once again online. Link (Thanks for spotting that, Jean-Luc.)

Update: An anonymous BoingBoing reader writes, "With regard to bugmenot leaving a host that sold racist paraphernalia -- their new web host provides service to a combat18 / redwatch site. combat18 is a british neonazi group. Redwatch is their hitlist, a site containing photos and addresses of people who have opposed them in the past including (bizarrely) internet mogul Danny O'Brien. [If they moved because] they didn't want to be blocked by censorship software... Bugmenot had better hope they're not on the same server this time." [Ed note: a banner ad on Redwatch plugs a hosting service identified as "Nigger Free Hosting," but the site does appear to live at nearlyfreespeech.net.]

Bugmenot responds to the BoingBoing update:

"1. Bugmenot was with our original hosting company. They pulled the plug.
2. Decided to move to dissidenthosting.com, redelegated.
3. Two days passed and I still couldn't access the dissidenthosting account + bad vibe so I redelegated again to nearlyfreespeech.net
4. Dissidenthosting decided to take advantage of the situation by redirecting traffic to a neo-nazi site of their choice while the redelegation took hold to nearlyfreespeech.net
5. Things have just about settled down now at our new host (nearlyfreespeech.net) and everything seems to be working out.
Personally, I don't care if I'm sharing a server with neo-nazis. I might not agree with what they have to say, but the whole thing about freedom of speech is that people are free to speak."

Earlier today, I was over at the NPR studios here in Los Angeles taping a segment for next week's "Day to Day" -- a conversation about MP3 blogs, with show host Noah Adams. He's an amazing newsman -- the former long-time co-host of All Things Considered -- and the author of Far Appalachia (read an excerpt).

We were talking about all of the ultra-obscure sorts of niche-niche-niche music that online services like MP3 blogs help people find, and he shared a story about an independent community media organization in eastern Kentucky devoted to serving the coalfield communities and the Appalachian region. Their radio station, WMMT (which streams online) specializes in bluegrass and oldtime. Evidently, one deejay there was well-known for maintaining an extensive collection of rare oldtime music -- on his iPod. He'd drive three hours to get to the station -- with his iPod -- and play material from it on-air. Kind of funny when you think about the nature of the music (by definition, old), and the nature of the medium (new). Sure beats lugging heavy crates of vinyl all around the mountains, though.

The media organization has a website, and a name: Appalshop (appal = short for appalachian, has nothing to do with Apple Computers). Plenty of interesting stuff there, including some documentary film projects.

And on a related note, Noah did an incredible segment not too long ago on Day to Day. Remember the story about "Dan," the homeless man in San Francisco who became a philanthropist after inheriting $200,000 from his mom? Turns out Noah tracked the guy down and had a series of conversations with him, which you can listen to here. It's nothing short of great radio.

Update: BoingBoing reader Steven Villereal says, "Funny that you posted that -- Anthology Film Archives in New York has a folk film festival, starting tomorrow, which features a lot of Appalshop stuff [as well as probably totally awesome Alan Lomax stuff]. Link."

Mec says, "I was a volunteer dj for WMMT a few years ago. We live in a commercial radio wasteland but WMMT is a bright shining light because they encourage individuality. Where else could you find a program entitled, Ralph Stanley, Time-Traveler? Heh."

And Petra says, "If you'd like a specific example of one of Appalshop's programs, check out Howard Berkes' feature on 'Holler to the Hood,' which brings rappers to Whitesburg to help the local kids learn to rhyme (full disclosure: I was his producer on the piece). Link

Saturday is the second annual inflatable sex doll raft race (aka Bubble Baba Challenge) in Russia. English story from Mosnews: Link. Photos from last year: Link (Thanks, Rob!)

What is the scent of a Hummer? Gasoline? Freshly detonated bombs plopped on an oil-rich country on the other side of the world? You'll find out soon -- the maker of supersized combat-cum-luxury vehicles is licensing the Hummer name to a line of mens' fragrances. Body wash, aftershave, and deodorant. Link (Thanks, Steve)

BoingBoing reader Jeremy says,

I was surprised to learn that a small Guantanamo-style detention center run by the Wackenhut corporation is in place mere blocks from my home. Somewhere around 200 detainees are housed in a non-descript warehouse somewhere in Springfield Gardens, Queens. I find it disturbing and distressing, especially now that they've gone on hunger strike, which is the only reason that I've learned that they are there.

Link

Update: Reader Chuck Welch says, "This isn't the first hunger strike at the Wackenhut Detention Center. You can find some information on last year's strike here: Link. The latest hunger strike has some information here: Link. And here's a good article about life at "Hotel Wackenhut": Link."

Update 2 BoingBoing reader David says, "I found more information about the Queens facility (pic, address, contracts, etc.) and some other history (articles) about the company, including a history of cases brought against them. In one of thier other facilities, a guard was charged with raping a young girl on a nightly basis. Link."

Senator Ted Kennedy says he was denied boarding on three shuttle flights in one month, because he's on the federal "no-fly" list of terrorist suspects.

His aides had to call Tom Ridge three times to get taken off the list. Imagine how hard it would be for one of us lesser human beings to get taken off the list.

A Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman's explanation makes me even more nervous about the way things are being run be the feds. She "insisted Kennedy 'is not on the list, not now or ever. His name was similar to someone else's alias.'" [italics mine] Is it supposed to make us feel better that innocent people can be denied boarding for having a similar name to a suspected terrorist's alias? Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Following up on yesterday's post that corporate 'Net filtering service Websense was blocking the recently departed Bugmenot.com as a "Racism and Hate" site, BoingBoing reader Scott Lindsey says:

"I'm pretty sure I know what's up with that. Currently, bugmenot.com resolves to 69.93.251.37, which is probably an ISP server, with multiple sites. Reverse DNS results in ns2.dissidenthosting.com, which redirects http to www.micetrap.net (same IP address). It's a mail-order house for skinhead music and related paraphernalia. Also, according to the mozillazine forum originally linked to, bugmenot will be back up in a few days, now hosted by nearlyfreespeech.net."

Interesting OC Weekly story about censorship allegations surrounding an artist whose work sexualizes the Catholic icon of la Virgen de Guadalupe.

The controversy started on Aug. 1, when Ernesto Cienfuegos, editor of the Chicano nationalist website La Voz de Aztlan, attacked Fullerton Museum Center Director Joe Felz for including "decadent lesbian artist" Alma Lopez in a exhibition titled "The Virgin of Guadalupe: Interpreting Devotion."

Lopez has been the subject of outrage before. Her mixed-media effort Our Lady -- a piece re-imagining the Virgin as a sexy Chicana, roses strapped across her breasts and pelvic area, legs and a firm abdomen exposed for all her children to see -- provoked demonstrations when it debuted at a Santa Fe art gallery in 2001.

Link

Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, reader Damo says,

A related editorial by Robert Jay Lifton entitled "Doctors and Torture" appeared in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the world's preeminent medical journal. In one passage, Lifton describes how military interrogators were given access to detainees' medical records, which were then used as tools in the interrogation process. He also discusses how doctors "brought a medical component to what I call an 'atrocity-producing situation...'"

Link

From the Creative Commons blog, news of what sounds like a very fun event next month in New York:

On Tuesday, September 21, 2004, Wired Magazine will throw a benefit for Creative Commons featuring a concert by David Byrne (with the Tosca Strings) and Gilberto Gil. It will take place at 8PM at The Town Hall in New York City. Proceeds from the concert will go to support the non-profit efforts of Creative Commons.

Tickets are available now from Ticketmaster or, after September 1st, at the Town Hall box office. If you're in NYC and want to help support the work of the Creative Commons, come on out and enjoy a great concert.

Link

Duke University Law School's Center for the Study of Public Domain is running a video contest with some cool prizes, and a nod to Creative Commons. The contest invites artists "to create a 2-minute moving image that explains to the public some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing particularly on either music or documentary film." Entry deadline is November 1, and some tasty, gadgety prizes are offered. Link (Thanks, Yo Vinny)

Dr. Stephen Miles wrote a scathing editorial for UK medical journal The Lancet which says that U.S. military medical personnel were complicit in detainee torture incidents that took place in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to the University of Minnesota bioethicist, "The US military medical system failed to protect detainees' human rights, sometimes collaborated with interrogators or abusive guards, and failed to properly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings." Based on data gleaned from government documents, he details cases of alleged abuse participation by medical personnel, and calls for a formal inquiry.

There are isolated reports that medical personnel directly abused detainees. Two detainees' depositions describe an incident where a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to suture a prisoner's lacertation from being beaten. The medical system failed to accurately report illnesses and injuries. Abu Ghraib authorities did not notify families of deaths, sicknesses, or transfers to medical facilities as required by the Convention. A medic inserted a intravenous catheter into the corpse of a detainee who died under torture in order to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital. In another case, an Iraqi man, taken into custody by US soldiers was found months later by his family in an Iraqi hospital. He was comatose, had three skull fractures, a severe thumb fracture, and burns on the bottoms of his feet. An accompanying US medical report stated that heat stroke had triggered a heart attack that put him in a coma; it did not mention the injuries.

Death certificates of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq were falsified or their release or completion was delayed for months. Medical investigators either failed to investigate unexpected deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan or performed cursory evaluations and physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke, or natural causes without noting the unnatural aetiology of the death. In one example, soldiers tied a beaten detainee to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated that he died of "natural causes . . . during his sleep." After news media coverage, the Pentagon revised the certificate to say that the death was a "homicide" caused by "blunt force injuries and asphyxia."

Link to Miles' editorial in the August 21 edition of The Lancet (registration required; o bugmenot, where foreart thou?). Link to Washington Post story with partial synopsis of the report. Link to Miles' home page at the University of Minnesota Bioethics school, and Link to his latest book, The Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine, which looks like a worthy read.

BoingBoing reader Darren says:

"Jill Greenberg is an accomplished celebrity photographer. Recently, though, she's turned her attention to another biped: monkeys. She discovered her affection for monkey portraits on a commercial, and started renting various species of trained primates and taking their photos as if they were A-list celebrities. The portraits express an amazing range of emotion, and are way more interesting that your average celebrity pic."

Link to Jill's website, with photos of monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates. You may also recall that totally gorgeous cover she shot for Wired Magazine's September, 2003 issue (The New Diamond Age): Link. LA-dwellers: the monkey images and other new works will be on exhibit starting October 23 at Paul Kopeikin Gallery on Wilshire.

"Gmail Notifier" is a downloadable Windows application from Google that alerts Gmail users to the presence of new incoming messages. The app displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets -- without your having to open a web browser. Link (Thanks, ritilan)

Update: BoingBoing reader Oscar Bartos says, "There's an freeware program for Macs that acts like the Gmail notifier, Gmailstatus. Personally I'm fond of Gmailto, which redirects "mailto:" links to Gmail. It's available in PC and Mac flavors: Link, and Link 2. " And BoingBoing reader Nate says, "This site has a Gmail notifier extension for Mozilla/Firefox: Link" And an anonymous reader points us to yet another Gmail helper app -- Gcount.

Update 2: Hey, you know what I could really go for right now? Some Gmail helper apps! BoingBoing reader Mincus says, "Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader has more -- Link. And there are still more at Gmailwiki.com"

BoingBoing reader Mike says:

Aussie band Regurgitator ("the 'gurge") are planning to record their fifth full-length album locked inside a plastic bubble in the middle of Melbourne's Federation Square. The stunt is to be broadcast and webcast from August 31 to September 21. Hopefully it will be a return to form from the band who gave the world such classics as "I Sucked a Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am" and "Blubber Boy".

Link

I'm supposed to be on holidays from blogging this week, but this is too important not to blog RIGHT NOW.

EFF has won its Grokster case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- this is the case that establishes that if you make truly decentralized P2P software -- like Gnutella -- you can't be held liable for any copyright infringement that takes place on their networks. This is the "Betamax principle," from the famous Supreme Court case that established that Sony wasn't responsible for any infringement that its customers undertook with their VCRs.

The Studios' argument was that people who make P2P software should be obliged to build it in such a way as to make it easy to police -- i.e. not on Gnutella-like lines -- an idea so sickeningly dumb that it's a tremendous relief that the court refused to buy it.

Now is a good time to download the 16MB MP3 audio of EFF IP Attorney Fred von Lohmann's oral argument in the appeal -- he was nothing less than brilliant (and it didn't hurt that one of the shmendricks representing the rights-holders kept forgetting the judge's name). This is some of the best courtroom drama you'll ever hear, and when you're done, download the PDF of the decision below and rejoice in our freedom.

I don't often shill for donations to EFF here on Boing Boing, but if there is one day this year that you make a tax-deductible donation to the organization that just won the right to write any software you damn well please, even if it's not amenable to being wiretapped by the record labels, today is it.

It's a good day.

"The Copyright Owners urge a re-examination of the law in the light of what they believe to be proper public policy, expanding exponentially the reach of the doctrines of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. Not only would such a renovation conflict with binding precedent, it would be unwise. Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the Copyright Owners’ immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context.

"Further, as we have observed, we live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation. AT&T Corp. v. City of Portland, 216 F.3d 871, 876 (9th Cir. 1999). The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well established distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player.Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.

"Indeed, the Supreme Court has admonished us to leave such matters to Congress. In Sony-Betamax, the Court spoke quite clearly about the role of Congress in applying copyright law to new technologies. As the Supreme Court stated in that case, “The direction of Art. I is that Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. When, as here, the Constitution is permissive, the sign of how far Congress has chosen to go can come only from Congress.” 464 U.S. at 456 (quoting Deepsouth Packing Co. v. Laitram Corp., 406 U.S. 518, 530 (1972))."

128k PDF Link

To appease to the handful of BoingBoing readers who protested yesterday's overabundance of marginally worksafe gadget/girl fetish photo posts, I offer -- here it comes, folks -- a Japanese collector's huge, obsessively-organized gallery of backpacker cooking stoves. Guaranteed 100% babe-free. But it's a big internet; chances are that someone, somewhere is super-turned-on by this. Link (Thanks, jared).

Tighten up your tinfoil beanie thong and lock up the kryptonite -- The 6th Annual Bay Area UFO Expo happens August 28-29 in Santa Clara, California.

Hot new reports on UFOs, ETs, Abductions, Encounters, Crop Circles, Earth Mysteries, Conspiracies and more! We wish to welcome all new-comers and for those who have been with us before, we want to thank you for your continued support. Joining us again this year with hot new data about Mars and the mysterious Coral Castle is Richard C. Hoagland who, in addition to his lecture, will give two amazing workshops. Jordan Maxwell, our guest of honor for the weekend, will share his knowledge on the ET presence dating back to the ancient world and it's implications for today's world.

Link (Thanks, Captain Todd Lappin!)

A Java program intended to kick the proverbial ass of MyTunes. Its developers say, "If you like it -- give us beer money, we're broke college students." Released under GPL; sourcode and executable app are available for download here.

BoingBoing reader Ateo says:

Dungeons & Dragons turns 30 this year and tonight is the start of GenCon too. NPR did a story, and Gamespy is doing tons of articles on the history of the game this week as well.

Link to the official D&D site

Copyfight spokesmodel Donna Wentworth says:

RealNetworks put a link to Fred von Lohmann criticizing Apple's FairPlay on its "Freedom of Music Choice" campaign website homepage. But something tells me it may decide to veto Fred's response - a scathing critique of Real's miserable record for promoting customer choice via interoperability.

Link

As mentioned here last night, Bugmenot is now, well, not. A recent post on the MozillaZine forums by someone understood to be the admin for Bugmenot.com says:

"Our host pulled the plug. I reckon they were pressured. If anyone has got some secure, preferably offshore hosting in mind then please let us know so we can get the service back up as soon as possible."

Link (Thanks, Michael)

Update: Several BoingBoing readers wrote in to say something like this, from reader Bryan Swain: "I don't have the inside scoop on what happened to BugMeNot, but thought you might find this interesting. I've used the site in the past from work with no trouble, but as of today, it is blocked (our company uses WebSense filtering). I get a message saying that the site is blocked by the "Racism and Hate" category... figure that one out! The WebSense site has a section where you can see what sites fall into what categories and suggest changes, but, ironically enough, you have to register to use those areas. No thanks."

BB mourns the loss of soundtrack composer Elmer Bernstein, the artist behind the classic scores for The Magnificent Seven, The Man With The Golden Arm, The Great Escape, and even modern-day comedies like Airplane! and Stripes. Bernstein studied under Aaron Copland before relocating to Tinseltown in 1950. That same decade, his career was almost ruined during the Hollywood Red Hunt when a congressional subcommittee demanded that Bernstein, a well-known liberal, name names of film industry commies. Blacklisted from the big studios, he composed for B movies including Cat Women of the Moon and Robot Monster. Finally, Cecil B. De Mille gave Bernstein a shot at the score of The Ten Commandments when the original composer became ill. Bernstein earned his first Oscar nomination for that work.

"Film music, properly done, should give the film a kind of emotional rail on which to ride," Bernstein said in 2001. "Without even realizing that you're listening to music that's doing something to your emotions, you will have an emotional experience."

Link

Approved by the FDA yesterday, the SonoPrep blasts the skin with painless ultrasonic energy to make it more permeable. The SonoPrep technology, developed by MIT researchers, uses low-frequency, ultrasonic energy to push open tiny channels in the skin for fluids to be extracted and delivered.

"A painless 15-second treatment by the new device, followed by an application of lidocaine cream, will anesthetize the skin in five minutes. By itself, lidocaine takes one hour to work...Because the method is simple and painless, and speeds up the action of lidocaine—a topical anesthetic commonly used in pediatrics and on critically ill adults and children who must endure repeated needle sticks—it could become standard procedure in doctor’s offices and hospitals. Another use would be before painful procedures such as angiography, balloon angioplasty, and the insertion of venous catheters."

The scientists predict that in the next five years, the same ultrasonic technique could be used to take the prickly pain out of routine vaccinations. Link

When construction workers in Oslo dug a drainage ditch around a church in the "Old City" district, they uncovered a slew of skeletons little more than a foot below the surface. According to an Aftenposten Norway article, the skeletons likely belong to the former tenants of a Dominican monastery located in the area from 1240 until 1537.

"Before the Reformation the most blessed resting spots were awarded hierarchically and could be bought. The best plots lay under the holy water that drained off the church roof and dripped onto the ground below... The skeletons also bear witness to medieval times as an age of violence. Many of the bones reveal notches that must have resulted from brutal force."

Link (via Fark)

Today, Chris Pirillo announces the launch of "a much-better eBay-to-RSS generator. Our exit strategy is to have one big code auction in a few years." Link

Bugmenot appears to have been taken offline by its creators. The site served as a clearinghouse for shared passwords to registration-required websites. Subscription-based website owners despised it, hassle-hating 'net users loved it. No word on what happened (bugmenot peeps: talk to me, honey), but I'd bet dollars to downloads that lawyers were involved. (via MeFi)

In this warped variant of stealth disco, you strike the cigarette-dangling-from-mouth, finger-points-at-exposed-prisoner-genitalia pose made famous by Pfc. Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib torture photos. As a website devoted to Stealth Lynndie-ing explains, "The image has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women up and down the country who don't give much of a shit about anything."

I'm not sure what's more disturbing about this online photo gallery -- (a) the fact that people are sick enough do this, photograph this, publish it on the web, and think it's funny; (b) the fact that I'm blogging about it, or (c) the fact that Lynndie England bears a striking resemblance to the fellow in the photo at left. Photo gallery featuring dozens of anonymous people "striking a Lynndie": Link (Thanks, Doug)

Update: BoingBoing reader Dave says, "This picture taken by Kefin Smith during the production of the movie Dogma proves that the first true 'Stealth Lynndie' occurred years before the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Specifically, it occurred in the movie Dogma: here's the 'Buddy Christ' giving what appears to be a Stealth Lynndie to the camera. Link"
(Ed. note: Technically, He needs a lit cigarette in order for this to be considered an actual Stealth Lynndie -- but in light of the fact that the Lord prefers to smite instead of smoke, we will consider this an immaculate exception. Did we mention that as of 7:10pm PT, www.stealthlynndie.com remains available?)

Following in John Battelle's footsteps (ripping off the title of his Searchblog?), Yahoo just launched "Search Blog," about -- surprise -- the business of search. Link to A look inside the world of search from the people of Yahoo!. (Thanks, jean-luc)

Images from a new gallery show at sixspace featuring underground art superstar Coop, whose work I was first exposed to in the form of a devil-babe tattoo on the back of an ex-boyfriend.

Parts with Appeal is Coop's first gallery exhibit in about five years. For the show, he constructed one contiguous acrylic canvas 78 feet long which contains four separate panels each comprised of a series of 6' x 6' paintings. The snapshots look fantastic, and I can't wait to see the work in person.

Link to images and more info on the sixspace show in LA, and link to more info and merch from the mighty Coop.

Boingboing buddy Eli the Bearded says:

Freedom to Tinker is reporting that two groups have signifcantly damaged the current leaders in cryptographic hashes. A French team has found collisions in a weakened form of the SHA-1 hash, which can probably be extended to the full SHA-1; and a Chinese team has found an out and out clash in MD5.

What does this mean? Well the hashes are digital abstracts from some input value (eg file) that are used to verify that the input value is unmodified. Due to the size of the hashes it has always been known that clashes would occur, but it was hoped that finding one would be impossible due to the large size of the hash space and the complexity of the generation process. Now that hope is shattered.

These hashes are used to verify integrity of downloaded programs, integrity of https site certificates, in pgp/gpg keys, etc. In other words lots of modern crytography is going to feel the waves from this.

Link

See what happens when all of my co-editors go on vacation? There goes the bloggerhood. Here, I present to you obsessively-organized and allegedly arousing fetish galleries of girls wearing spacesuits.Link. From the same geek wacko perverts people who brought you two equally tittilating galleries of scuba fetish photos and deep-sea diving fetish photos, here. (Thanks, oscar)

More sexualized gadgetry. For some very special people, photos of chicks wearing headphones are personally exciting. This online photo gallery features obsessively-organized pictures of mostly clothed girls wearing headphones and construction headsets.Link (Thanks, danski)

The Indian state of Kerala has launched a wireless broadband service that will provide rural residents with 'Net connectivity that would otherwise be impossible via landline or cellular services.

The community Internet kiosks, named Akshaya, have been set up by the Kerala State IT Mission Department. More than 550 of the kiosks have been opened in the Mallapuram district, spread over 3,500 square kilometers. The local government plans to introduce kiosks in other districts later this year. The centers will offer services such as Internet access, Net-based phoning and videoconferencing to state offices as well as private businesses. Five Wi-Fi hotspots have also been established around government offices and a tourist resort.

"This is the world's biggest rural wireless network," H.S. Bedi, managing director of Tulip IT Services, said at the launch. "The decision to provide a completely wireless solution was dictated by the Mallapuram's rugged terrain. Other options could have been leased lines or cable or fiber--all of which would have involved digging and would have been more difficult as well as more expensive to roll out."

Link to ZDnet story.

I can't tell whether this "Toaster Fetish" kitchen appliance porn gallery is parody or straightahead smut. Either way, someone out there in this big wide world is probably wanking off to it. Atkinserotica is so five minutes ago. Clearly, the hot-buttered temptation of Porn Bread has arrived. Who can resist her sultry, carb-hither gaze? Link to Fleshbot post, NSFW.

Famed DJ and friend of BoingBoing Michael Donaldson, aka QBurns Abstract Message, had just returned from tour in Eastern Europe last week when the hurricane hit his home in Florida. Electricity is still out in many places, so he's hiding out in his recording studio with a dial-up connection and a hamster-powered laptop to e-mail us this report. Image: snapshot of a frightened cat coming out of hiding a couple days after the storm.

The winds here in Orlando were at about 90 MPH when it hit. The was a lot of destruction, but somehow my house and property ended up completely unscathed. The worst part lasted 45 minutes. I just sat in the dark with my cat and a bottle of wine watching the whole thing out the window. It was really crazy. Saw the trees flapping around and then I kept seeing flashes of blue and green in the sky ... I thought this was some strange lightning but found out later it was actually electrical transformers exploding across the neighborhood. Wow.

I've been through at least 3 hurricanes in my life and have never seen anything like this either. The city is like a warzone with debris and fallen trees and power lines everywhere. It was starting to get cleaned up as I left home yesterday, so hopefully when I return all will be back to normal. I can't even imagine what it looks like down south in the Ft. Meyers area, which received the full force of the storm. It actually weakened a bit before it hit central Florida.

My business partner has a 30 foot tree laying in his backyard. Another friend has a tree about that big in his swimming pool (no idea how he'll get that out). Yet another friend lives in a neighborhood that is in a 'dead end' road. A huge tree has fallen in the path of their only exit, and they can only leave by foot. I guess I got off easy. None of us have any power, though.

The storm was followed by eerie silence and the even eerier sight of my neighborhood residents walking the lightless streets, Night Of The Living Dead-style, surveying the damage. A friend of mine owned a bar that miraculously had power so after a few phone calls we convened there 90 minutes after the hurricane's end. About 60 people showed and I started playing records and doing vodka shots. This had the makings of a really nice party as a ton of frustration and stress was being expelled by all. We were stopped at about 1 AM by a number of cops who claimed the city was in a state of emergency and there was a curfew in effect all over the city. We either left the party or we were to be arrested. Thus we were ordered to tipsily navigate the darkened, traffic light-less, wreckage covered streets to our hot, powerless, and, in some cases, devastated homes. You think the 'man' would give us a break.

Photo galleries from the Orlando Sentinel: images part one, images part two. And here's a gallery of personal snaps from Maria, one of the "hurricane party" attendees (owner of the frightened cat above): Link. Bonus: a brand new Q-Burns Abstract Message DJ mix available for online listening and/or download -- Link

Update: an anonymous BB reader sends in this wmv file -- a composite of time-lapse stills of Hurricane Charley hitting Florida over the span of about seven hours. Link. And via Poynter, an interesting essay on the power of TV infographics in the eye of a storm: "Radar Love." Link

Recently on BoingBoing, I blogged about Hollywood space oddity Dessarae Bradford, spotted at the Erotic LA convention hawking a self-published book titled I FU*KED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S -- a first-person autobiographical account of an alleged starfucking incident. Flashback to the liner notes:

"In Sept. 2002, I fu**ed Alec Baldwin in his a** in a hot, sweaty, nasty sex romp. Read the story that will change lives. Be the first one on your block to have the nitty gritty about that night, that will be only told in my book. Grab the scoop before my story gets into the hands of the media, and they attemp to censor it. I had Alec Baldwin on all four's for me, and S/M was involved. Read the real story. Tell everyone you know about this site. Free Baldwin brothers, and family photos come with this book, and a free I FU**ED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A** bumper sticker too."

Ladies, gentlemen, and happy mutants, I'm now shocked -- shocked I say -- to share this e-mail from BoingBoing reader Karl Lautman:

"Yeah, well I got F**cked in the A**, too. I thought the book would make a great gift for a few people I know, though only for the title, so I ordered 3 copies @ $20 per. What arrived were 3 copies of My S/M Romp with Alec Baldwin, a title I find completely forgettable, and even these were crappy, spiral-bound, Kinko's affairs. I was very disappointed and e-mailed the author as much; haven't heard back, of course."

Sorry, Karl. To any other BoingBoing readers who may have been pondering this literary investment -- caveat online emptor, dude.

Looks like they've found those weapons of mass destruction. WSJ article about Iraqi heavy metal outfit Acrassicauda, and what life is like trying to obliterate audiences with satanic soundwaves after the fall of Saddam.

The members of Acrassicauda honed their English by singing along to black-market Megadeth and Metallica CDs. They developed their stage moves by copying what they saw on pirated videotapes of American rock concerts. Now they're learning a different lesson: the difficulties of reviving culture and entertainment in a society ripped apart by war.

The four members of Acrassicauda, which means Black Scorpion in Latin, hope they can prove just as resilient. The young men -- Mr. Talal, bassist Faris al-Lateef, drummer Marwan Mohammad Riyak and guitarist Tony Aziz -- met as high-school students and formed the band, along with another member, in 2000. Scions of prominent families, they were drawn together by their love of Western heavy-metal bands like Slayer and Judas Priest, which appealed to their feelings of isolation and disillusionment.

"It's about feeling powerless and lonely and wanting to scream out because no one else is paying attention to what you're feeling," says Mr. Lateef, 23, who has spiky hair, a goatee and tinted sunglasses that he wears indoors. "The songs were sung by Americans but they could easily have been written by us as Iraqis."

Link, more here via Channel One News (Thanks, Ollie)

Update: BoingBoing reader Eric Eberhardt says, "There's a (slightly) more sensationalistic article about these guys in last February's Vice -- Link." Photo above by Gideon Yago, from the Vice article.

Glad you asked. Link to an online photo gallery with street snapshots from Harajuku station in Tokyo. (Thanks, Todd!)

BoingBoing reader Lawrence says:

In Japan the QRCode is becoming wildly popular, for everyone with a celphone has a camera that can read these 2D barcodes and inst-o-magically input pre-formatted emails, contacts, URLs and even random text. I've put together a script, suitable for Mozilla sidebar or Opera panel fun, that generates QRCodes for any purpose, including Vodafone + DoCoMo (I-mode) formatted shortcuts. Create and share - they're like modern hieroglyphics!

Link

BoingBoing reader and South Pole resident F. Scott Robert points us to some short story entries on his Antarctic weblog:

* Presumably crazed from winter darkness, the station manager at South Pole punishes crewmember for Photoshop know-how: Link
* Winter Jello-wrestling at McMurdo Station: Link
* The Antarctic Scurvy Awareness Program, in which I offer rewards to Antarcticans for contracting scurvy: Link

Link

So wrong: Something Awful re-captions selections from Watchmen. Link (thanks, Zed)

It looks like Earthlink has hired performance artists to staff its live online help department. Look at the fine job "Val P" did in pretending to be a gobbledegook-spewing support worker. Matt, who only wants Earthlink to send him a modem, says he has read it twice and still can't make sense of it.

Val P: I am sorry, but the tracking number is not generated yet.

Matt: WHAT? Matt: This was supposed to have been shipped over a week ago

Val P: The tracking number available is 1Z6R1W530240197995.

Matt: and it says that it was shipped or billed on July 27

Matt: 2nd day air

Matt: it's Aug 9

Val P: Yes, you are correct.

Matt: well why hasn't it been shipped, this is getting ridiculous

Val P: But the tracking number for the new modem is not generated. As the shipping method is in 2 day, it should be generated in 2 days.

Matt: so it still hasn't been shipped?

Val P: I am sorry, it is not yet shipped.

Matt: why?????????

Val P: The request has been sent to the appropriate department to send you the kit. I request you to wait for 2 days.

Matt: this is getting ridiculous, it has now been almost a month since I had service and at least 2 if not 3 weeks since the new modem was requested and supposed to have been shipped out

Val P: I am sorry for the inconvenience caused to you in this regard.

Matt: are you able to look up the trouble ticket number on this complaint? i do not have it handy and would like to discuss this over the phone with someone

Val P: Kindly hold on, while I check it.

Val P: Thank you for being on hold.

Val P: I see that a new request has been sent to the appropriate department on 08/05/04 to send you the new kit. I suggest you to wait for 2 to 3 days until you receive the kit.

Matt: an additional 2-3 days? from today?

Val P: No, it is from the date the request has been sent.

Matt: today is the 9th

Matt: 8/5 plus 2-3 days would be the 7th or 8th

Val P: Yes, you are correct.

Matt: so why isn't there a modem here, or at the very least a tracking number?

Val P: I request you to wait for 2 days please as the request is already sent.

Matt: so not from the 5th but from today

Val P: Yes please.

Val P: Let me know if you have any further issues to help you with.

Link to Flash game by Liquid Generation (via Defamer)

In his latest Good Experience newsletter, Mark Hurst describes his not-so-good experience with Verizon's customer service department:

Rep 1: "Uhh, Mr. Hurst, looks like there's a wiring issue. I'll connect you with the DSL Office." (put on hold)

Rep 2: "No, it's not a wiring issue. The problem is that there's someone else's name on your account, and we have to reset your entire account to clear it. I'll connect you with someone who'll do that for you." (put on hold)

Rep 3: "I have no idea what they're talking about. 'Reset your entire account' - what did they mean by that? I'm going to put you on hold..."

At some point during the interminable hold, the call was dropped (either by Verizon or my AT&T-powered cell phone) and I called back, starting over again. I explained my issue to the new rep (#4), and asked to speak to a manager. She agreed, and sent me to... a brand new service rep (#5), not a manager, who delivered the punch line: "I'm sorry, we have no record of your phone number."

Link

A weblog all about the yummy Vietnamese soup known as pho. Meat, spices, noodles, fresh herbs, and magical broth. When it's really good, it's like an angel up in heaven just peed into your bowl. This foodstuff is so versatile and bitchin', you can even get your Atkins on by just asking your waiter to hold the noodles. Genius, I know! A Vietnamese-American software developer pal once tried to teach me how to say the word properly -- most Americans butcher the word into something that sounds like foe. He told me, "Just say 'fuck' without the 'ck,' but try sort of curl your voice up in pitch and tone a bit at the end." I never got the phonics right, but I still dig the pho. Link (Thanks, Joshua)

Update: BoingBoing reader John Horner says, "Whoever told you how to pronounce pho was making it all too difficult. The comma stuck in the side of the O makes it an ur sound and the question mark above it means it's pronounced as a question: fur?. Imagine yourself as an animal rights activist presented with a fur coat. My wife is Vietnamese, if that helps, and Vietnamese is a bit of a mess orthographically because it was translated from Chinese ideograms into French by a Portuguese guy."

A quick reminder of two things:

1. I'm on holidays this week

2. I never blog stuff that's emailed to me. If you're interested in seeing something on Boing Boing, use the Submit a Site form.

Thanks!

Cory

It was inevitable:

Beijing Haidian People's Court yesterday held a session in a case that involves Mr. Wu Mingming, a furniture manufacturer, who had bilked two students' parents of about RMB180000 by pretending he was a secretary of an Education Minister in China. One of the students submitted a photo taken with a mobile phone as evidence. The photo is a small one, but it shows one of the parents handing money to the defendant, Mr. Wu. The parent said he took the photo because Mr. Wu refused to give him an invoice, and he was afraid he would be cheated.

So far, no judgment has been made in the case. This is the first documented time that mobile phone photos have been submitted as evidence in a court in Beijing.

Link (Thanks, James Tyre!)

Warren Ellis is blogging from the set of GLOBAL FREQUENCY. This graphic novel of Warren's is becoming a WB TV series; shooting is under way in Canada and the end result is slated to air in March, 2005. From time to time, he lifts his head out of that trough of cold Red Bull long enough to futurephone a blog entry about how bizarre the whole experience is. The result? A magnificently good online read. His permalinks are b0rked right now, and this may have something to do with the fact he's posting from his Treo -- so just go to the main page, find August 11's post, and work your way forward in time from there. Link

BoingBoing reader Paul McEvoy saw this series of photos I shot for an NPR radio segment about urban dance competitions -- and points us to his own gallery of "pictures of breakdancers on the street in Boston and Cambridge." Nice shots, Paul! Link

Schwinn has re-issued its original Sting-Ray street bike. The 2004 models are available with the classic banana seat frame or in a new chopped Harley-esque low-rider design. Too bad they don't offer a sissy bar option, probably a safety decision to avoid encouraging Evil Knievel-style wheelies. Link (Thanks, C-Lo!)

The government of Mexico is RFID-tagging police in order to combat record high levels of kidnapping and disappearances. About 170 officers are said to have been subcutaneously tagged in their arms with microchips about the size of a rice grain of rice. The chip grants them access to a crime database and becomes a tracking tool in case they're kidnapped.

The first-of-its-kind step shows the lengths to which the Mexican government will go to try to bring safety to the streets. Crime - and how to fight it - has long been a challenge here. Kidnapping is spreading, reaching beyond traditional wealthy targets to the middle class. And in a country where only a quarter of all crimes are reported because of fear that bribed cops will expose informants, securing access to sensitive documents has become a priority.

The chip comes from VeriChip, a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions of Palm Beach, Fla. The device is nonremovable (though it can be deactivated) and is slipped under the skin in seconds via a syringe-like device. The chip costs $200, plus $50 a year, in addition to the scanner and software. The technology has existed for years and was originally developed to let pet owners identify stray animals.

The chip sits dormant under the skin and is only "awakened" by a scanner using radio- frequency identification, or RFID. The scanner emits a signal that powers the chip, allowing it to send its identification number. Then, depending on the configuration of the database that is hooked up to the scanner, a door is opened or a database unlocked, the way an ID card allows employees into the office.

Link to news article, and Link to Verichip home (via politech)

Ever since I interviewed artist Jim Woodring back in 1995 for the bOING bOING Happy Mutant Handbook, I've been enamored with his surreal comix inspired by his childhood hallucinations and "psychological malfunctions." Now, Taruto Fuyama has animated Woodring's Frank character in a beautiful piece that somehow manages to perfectly express the dreamy tone and emotion of the comic. (Someone else's attempt here.) Fuyama won a Prize of Excellence for the work in the Japan Media Arts Festival. The animation is online in Real format. From the "Reason for the Award":

"...the greatest appeal of this work is that it had successfully expressed unique "newness" by combining 3D-CG and classical cartoon-like design. Alien creatures created by pasting comic frames to 3D-CG in a Gothic manner generate uncomfortable feelings, and these uncomfortable feelings that color the entire work feature this work's contemporary sensitivity."

Link

My latest TheFeature article is about ways to make tiny batteries last for years.

At Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., researchers are trying to make a nuclear-powered battery with a very long life span. They've built prototype batteries that use a speck of nickel-63 (a radioactive isotope) to vibrate a tiny cantilever. The cantilever could be made from a piece of piezoelectric material, which could supply power to the sensor. Nickel-63 has a half-life of around 100 years, so it could provide power for several decades. Nukes make people nervous, but there's not enough radioactive material in the prototype to cause a mini-meltdown -- it's comparable to the amount found in a smoke detector. Still, researchers acknowledge that they have a perception problem to overcome.

Link

Alex sez: [Here's] a site consisting of scans from "wacky, bizarre, surreal and otherwise strange examples of technical documentation". Submissions are welcome. Link

These enterprising geeks have translated Lewis Carroll's classic poem Jabberwocky (the first poem I ever memorised!) into ActionScript. Link (via /.)

I went to Home Depot over the weekend to buy two dollar's worth of hardware (pins for door hinges) and walked out with over $100 worth of stuff, of course. My prime pruchase was something called a KleerDrain instant drain opener, which combines the fun of explosives with the satisfaction of unclogging a sink.

I was a little wary of spending $30 on this gadget, which looks like a cross-between a plunger and a pogo stick. But Home Depot had one of those videos running next to the set-up, which showed clogged sink after clogged sink giving up its precious bolus of greasy hair to the explosive force of a CO2 cartridge unleashing its entire payload at once. Watching the guy on the demo using the device, with its rifle-like kickback and puff of condensed carbon dioxide gas, mesmerized me. The next thing I knew, I was racing home with my new KleerDrain.

I could hardly wait to use it on a slow-draining sink in the bathroom. I duct taped the overflow drain on the sink, and inserted a CO2 cartridge into the Kleer Drain. I screwed on the rubber cone and then pressed it into the drain opening.

WHAM! A shower of gray grime flew out of somewhere and splashed against the walls, mirror and ceiling. I wiped the junk off my face and turned on the faucet. The water whooshed down the drain, ending with a nice sucking sound, like it was wishing there were more water it could dispose of.

I think I'm in love. Time to stock up on more CO2 cartridges. Link

UPDATE Chris sez: Just a quick note regarding your drain cleaning story. I own a device called a Profi Pipe Cleaner. It is basically the same thing, but you pump it up and pull the trigger to release the blast, rather than having to buy CO2 cartridges. It has much the same effect, as did watching the demo on QVC.

Alan of halfpie.net slammed Ticketek's website ( a New Zealand company) and a Ticketek employee, posing as a semi-literate Ticketek customer, posted a note on Alan's blog, defending Ticketek. Alan exposed "Simone," who then quietly slithered away.

I have to disagree with u all i stumbled onto this website by mistake and i cant belive all the rubbish im reading ticketek is a great web site and service who have continued to give me great service over the years there is always somethinh for people like you to moan about so get a life!!!
- posted by Simone at August 10, 2004 03:28 PM

=====

Well of course you would say that, Simone - seeing as you work at Ticketek.

Everytime a comment is made on this site the IP address of the commenter is logged. Yours is 210.54.93.30, which by an uncanny co-incidence belongs to auck.ticketek.co.nz. Funnily enough it looks like you came to this site through "accidentally" entering "I hate Ticketek" into Google, the same search that has been used by you and your Australian counterparts to find this page several times in the past month.

Your ignorance in these matters is amusing and sad and unfortunately appears par for the course with your company. Your rather ill-advised comment further reinforces the lack of respect I have Ticketek and further demonstrates why your website - and your business - should be avoided as much as possible.

Have a nice day.
- posted by Alan at August 10, 2004 05:07 PM

Link (Thanks, Brett!)

Peter Bagge's excellent 4-page comic strip rant on the state of contemporary art, in Reason. Link

Thanks to the 3360 people who took our Boing Boing reader survey! We will use this information for good, not evil. Here are the results. Link

A BoingBoing exclusive: the full text of Bruce Sterling's brilliant keynote speech delivered last week at the 2004 edition of SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. Snip:

Steve Jobs is a pioneer of personal computing and the head of Pixar. Apple is the biggest vendor here. It's hard to get any more SIGGRAPH than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has neuroendocrinal pancreatic cancer. That's because, like everybody else in the world, like you and like me, Steve Jobs is carrying a load of carcinogens in his flesh. Silicon Valley, as an industrial clean-up site, is rather well known for its mutagens.

The disturbing substances that are in the body of this captain of your industry, they should not be in there. They are wasted resources, they are systemic inefficiencies, they are externalities. We need ways to keep these substances organized and contained, and, eventually, designed out of the production system entirely. Steve is sick for physical reasons, for metabolic reasons. We may not know the exact chains of cause and effect, but there is one; he's not sick because some dark angel blew on his dice wrong. He has effluent, byproducts of industry, inside his body.

It's painful. But we need to understand that our bloodstreams are our dumping grounds. So are our lungs and our livers. If we could visualize that, if we knew and could prove what had gone wrong inside of ourselves, if we could put a digital medical imaging screen on our bellies, our lungs and our livers, and make those invisible problems visible, then everything would become different. If that knowledge was attached to every object in our possession, the objects that were killing us would vanish quickly.

That wouldn't be easy to do. But in the year 2004 it is no longer unimaginable. It could be done. It's possible to live in a cleaner way. We live in debris and detritus because of our ignorance. That ignorance is no longer technically necessary. Those who know, know. Instead, our problem is becoming obscurantism, which is a deliberate hiding of the facts by vested interests who know they are injuring us. Such acts of evil must be combated. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Link to complete text. Photo at left from a series of snapshots I took of Mr. Sterling earlier this year in LA. (Thanks, Bruce!)

I can't begin to say how much I despise the Explorer 8000 digital video recorder made by Scientific-Atlanta. That's the system Time-Warner gave us when my wife signed us up for cable service a few weeks ago. I was out of town on the day they were scheduled to install it, so I told my wife to make sure the DVR was real TiVo, because I'd played with a TiVo belonging to my friend, and thought it was just about perfect. The service tech came and told her it was real TiVo. When I got back and saw that the ugly box didn't have a happy bipedal TV set logo on it, I was disappointed, but willing to give it a try. The first thing I noticed was the crappy user interface. Unlike TiVo, there's no audible signal when you press a button. And because it takes a couple of seconds after pressing a button for anything to happen on the screen, I often press the button twice, thinking the first press didn't go through. What happens when you press a button twice is that you see the result on the screen for a split second before it disappears, because the second press cancels the first press. That means I have to press the button a third time, and wait another mini-eternity for something to happen. So many other things suck about the user interface that I can't list them all. But the main UI problems include lack of keyword scheduling, way-too-slow fast-forwarding, no alpha character entry, and the inability to see how many hours of programming are available on the hard drive.

This last flaw hit home when the machine suddenly stopped recording shows. I tried everything I could to get it to work, including rebooting the system and calling Time Warner Cable customer service. They told me that they'd have to replace the unit, which would take five days.

Five days later a service technician came with a new box. I asked him if this problem was common, because Google returns a lot of pages from people who think the Explorer 8000 is a piece of junk. He said the system is fine as long as you didn't store too many shows on it. If you fill up the hard drive, the system freezes up, and there's no way a user can undo it. But how do you know when the disk is close to being full if there's no gage to tell you? The service tech's answer: "don't keep very many shows on the hard drive." That pretty much defeats the purpose of a DVR, doesn't it?

He also warned me not to put anything on top of it, as it was notorious for overheating and seizing up. I told him I was considering TiVo, but he insisted the Explorer 8000 was better than TiVo. How so, I asked? "We will give you a new one if it breaks," he said.

Our second Explorer 8000 is also a piece of junk. Like the first one, it regularly fails to record requested shows. But this one goes even further in its attempt to aggravate me by freezing up while playing back a show, and pixelating and jittering like a lost episode of Max Headroom.

Yesterday I was at Best Buy, and I noticed that 40-hour TiVos were on sale for $50 after rebate. I bought one and set it up. What a difference! If TiVo were a beverage, it'd be a tall glass of Jamaican ginger beer with chipped ice and a lime wedge, while the Explorer 800 would be a paper cup of warm fake lemonade stirred with the finger of a nose-picking six-year-old.

I can't wait to get the Explorer 8000 out of my house. Why did Time Warner make a deal with this company?

George Lazenby wrote a must-read Live Journal entry about the famous neurologist/author Oliver Sacks and his iridium fetish. Sacks had several buttons of super-dense iridium that he wanted to melt into a single ingot. Iridium has a very high melting temperature (2,446 C), so Lazenby and Sacks went to a company that has an electron beam furnace. The "batsh*t insane Russsians" who worked there melted the iridium buttons while LazenbyTheodore Gray* shot video, which you can see at hisLazenby's site.

A few months ago, Oliver bought a kilo of these buttons, and kept them in, what was for a while, the heaviest 6 fl. oz. jar of current jam in the universe. While I was up there, he gave me one of these buttons, which I promptly nearly killed myself with. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So Oliver has these buttons in this current jam jar. The next logical step is to make the buttons one with each other, to get as close as possible to theoretical density. How to achieve this? Max's arc furnace can only fuse 5 gram buttons (poorly) into irregular buttons of about 50 grams. No, this project calls for industry, with its pumping pistons, its smoking smokestacks and desolated landscapes. Enter ********** [company name deleted]. Exeunt pumping pistons, smoking smokestacks and desolated landscapes. This, is in fact, the setting for the most advanced high purity metal processing plant in the United States.

UPDATE George sez: Thanks for posting the story to BB, there's just one thing, I didn't shoot video or take any pictures, that was all the work of Theodore Gray. Link

Bill sez: "On the 16th of August 2004, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals begins work on the Gilmore vs. Ashcroft case. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel freely in their own country -- and the exposure of 'secret law' for what it is: an abomination.

"The man who is fighting the good fight is named John Gilmore. John made his fortune as a programmer and entrepreneur in the software industry. Whereas most people in his position would have moved to a tropical island and lived a life of luxury, John chose to use his wealth to protect and defend the US Constitution.

"On the 4th of July 2002, John Gilmore, American citizen, decided to take a trip from one part of the United States of America to another. At the airport, he was told he had to produce his ID if he wanted to travel. He asked to see the law demanding he show his 'papers' and was told after a time that the law was secret and no, he wouldn't be allowed to read it.

"He hasn't flown in his own country since."

Another program which depends on showing ID is the Watch List and No-Fly List.  Airlines are issued these lists by the federal government and are required to request ID from their passengers in order to check them against the lists.  This has resulted in countless citizens with names similar to bad people being harrassed, arrested, or prevented from travelling by air—including every person named 'David Nelson'.

Link

An iPod cradle in the form of a friendly robot. Link (Thanks, Scott!)

Update: BoingBoing reader Spencer Cross fact-checks our asses: "That's not just a friendly robot, it's actually in the shape of a Kubrick. Kubricks are highly collectible, Playskool-like action figures manufactured by a Japanese company named Medicom. They're usually licensed characters from cult film and comics. Toy collectors are crazy for them."

Please don't try this at home. You may have spotted Japanese web oddity Micky Yanai's -- um -- work on Rotten.com. Now, Fleshbot has more on "the most creative porn actor who invented 'Helicopter Fuck!'," as one fan-site enthusiastically proclaims. Male pattern baldness mullet. Bad '80s novelty sunglasses. Spandex. Sequined American flag codpiece. If that doesn't add up to buzzkill, I don't know what does. Link to Fleshbot item, which includes pointers to "Helicopter Fertish" (sic) galleries. NSFW, duh.

BB reader Nate sends us another subtle advertisement for a sex lubricant. Unlike the KY Jelly ad I posted yesterday, this Manix print advertisement for the French market is real and an award winner. Link (via essays and effluvia)

Over at the NanoBot, Howard Lovy writes about General Electric's new "Fantastic Voyage" television commercial:

"General Electric is working on real-life nanotechnology, but somebody in its ad department knows that lectures on the company's R&D in nanocomposites and nanostructured optoelectronics will leave viewers running for the fridge or the remote. Instead, it chose to try for the imagination, using cultural icons and humor."

Link

If BoingBoing had a society page, I suppose this would be it. An online photo gallery from the wedding of Robolympics founder David Calkins with Simone Davalos of the Long Now Foundation includes this surreal geek snapshot. Ceremonies took place earlier this month at Children's Fairyland, a park in Oakland, and a bevy of Stormtroopers were in the hizzouse. May the happy couple live long and prosper. Link to full-size image, and links to more more more photos.

Writer-director M Night Shyamalan (Sixth Sense, Signs) may face legal action over accusations that his latest project, The Village, was plagiarized from a children's book. The source in question: "Running Out of Time" by Margaret Peterson Haddix, published by Simon and Schuster in 1995. While the matter of plagiarism is open to debate, evidently the movie's suck factor is not. Last week, one blogger/culture crit pal was so distressed at the stinker he'd paid two digits to see in a Manhattan theater that he text-messaged me halfway through -- "OMG THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE EVER." He was not alone in this assessment. Link (via MeFi, which includes a handy list of other films accused of plagiarism in recent years)

1 minute audio vacations
entrances to hell
trips to blackholes
voyage to hollow earth
7 deadly sins nyc tour
rock 'n' roll holiday
ruins of detroit
postcards from the road
roadside america
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

A thought-provoking piece from Newsweek's Brian Braiker on the trend toward increased web surveillance:

[T]wo recent legal developments have raised further fears among Web privacy advocates in the United States. In one case, the Federal Communications Commission voted 5-0 last week to prohibit businesses from offering broadband or Internet phone service unless they provide Uncle Sam with backdoors for wiretapping access. And in a separate decision last month, a federal appeals court decided that e-mail and other electronic communications are not protected under a strict reading of wiretap laws. Taken together, these decisions may make it both legally and technologically easier to wiretap Internet communications, some legal experts told NEWSWEEK. "All the trends are toward easier to tap," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The FCC's plans to require Internet-based phone and broadband services to be engineered for easy wiretapping is a response to a request from the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies. The proposal would bring Internet-based phone providers in line with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires "telecommunications" carriers to make their networks wiretap-friendly. The FCC says the government must still go through all of the necessary legal steps to obtain the authority to wiretap; CALEA simply makes it technologically easier to do. "This will not have an effect on whether there is appropriate lawful authority -- that remains the same," says FCC spokesman Julius Knapp. "All this really is addressing is whether the carrier is required to have the capability to provide the information that's covered by a court order."

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BB pal Vann Hall points us to this brilliant KY Jelly advertisement that, unfortunately, is not officially sanctioned by Johnson & Johnson. It should be though! Link (via Adrants)

Oooooh, the [alleged] irony. Seth Finkelstein says:

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has announced an "anti-piracy" site, with a kids' mascot ferret, and a contest to call it a name.

The BSA weasel creature reminded me of something I'd seen before. Something shady, disreputable, criminal. Finally, I remembered! The BSA weasel looks like he's a member of a criminal gang in Walt Disney Comics, the "Beagle Boys".

Update: More unintended irony? BoingBoing reader Bitey says, "The scientific name for ferret, Mustela putorius furo, translates as 'little fur thief.' This references the animals love of stealing toys, socks, food and anything they can move themselves, and dragging them away to stash in their lair."

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Update 2: BoingBoing pal Gareth Branwyn says, "This ain't the first time that BSA's spokesbots have shared DNA with other people's intellectual property. See Bruce Sterling's WiredBlog posting about the uncanny similarities between Kata Sutra, Mark Frauenfelder's cartoon character that appreared in BoingBoing and Beyond Cyberpunk in the early '90s, and BSA's "Meg A. Byte:" If you saw the Beyond Cyberpunk comic book that Mark and I did, the similarities would be even more apparent. We're not accusing them of STEALING or anything, but still..."

India's government began distributing free condoms in the '60s to stem population growth, and they're made available today for HIV/AIDS prevention. But according to a recently-released report, only a quarter of the 1.5 billion condoms manufactured each year in India are "properly utilised":

According to two university reports, rural villagers have used them as disposable water containers to wash, after relieving themselves in the fields. India's military have covered gun and tank barrels with condoms as protection against dust.

Of the 891 million condoms meant to be handed out free, a considerable proportion were acquired by road-building contractors who mixed them with concrete and tar and used the mixture to construct roads, rendering road surfaces smooth and resistant to cracks. Builders spread a bed of condoms beneath cement plastering on roofs, ingeniously preventing water seepage during the monsoon rains.

Weavers in Varanasi used around 200,000 condoms a day to lubricate their looms and to polish the gold and silver thread used to embroider the saris they produced. Sari maker Yusuf Bhai said they purchased the condoms from agents, who reportedly acquired them from agencies involved in family planning and AIDS prevention schemes.

Above, a Thai model "improperly utilizes" condoms in the form of a couture cap. Link to registration-threatening news article (Thanks, Darren)

Office Depot is doing a promotional event with HP in which the store will offer free electronics recycling through Labor Day for residents of the continental US. Drop off your old TVs, monitors, CPUs, printers, PDAs, etc., for no charge, and Office Depot will deliver the e-junk to HP for recycling. Link (Thanks, Matt)

Update: BoingBoing reader Jeff says, "People near Portland, Oregon have a better choice: FreeGeek is a not-for-profit promoting reuse and responsible recycling by refurbishing computers and giving them away, and recycling responsibly the ancient and the broken. OfficeDepot is just recycling, and it's unclear what percentage won't go into a landfill because it's not cost-effective to sell as material."