Ahoy, stalkers, crank yankers, and evil telemarketer scumbags! Beginning this Wednesday, September 1, US-based online company Star38.com will offer paying subscribers a Caller ID falsification service. Make-believe you're the White House! Or 1-800-CALL-ATT! Or, hell, get your '80s on and vamp out in 867-5309! Kevin Poulsen of SecurityFocus tried it out, and evidently the service checked out as providing what it promised. Users complete an online form with phone number, number they want to call, number they want to appear to be calling from; in a couple of seconds, the system rings back to patch them through to their call destination. But, like, in a secret numeric disguise: call recipients see the spoofed number displayed on Caller ID. Link to Register article (via /., which contains some interesting debate from readers over whether or not the system is a truly effective spoofing mechanism)

Phil sez, "Remember Al Fasoldt, the journalist who disparaged Wikipedia? He was challenged by a Techdirt writer to change an item and see if his change was found. While Fasoldt dismissed the idea, Alex Halavais thought it was an interesting idea. He made 13 changes to 13 different Wikipedia pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. He figured he'd give them a couple of weeks and then fix the ones that weren't caught. Every single change was found and changed within hours." Link (Thanks, Phil!)

Snipped from MSNBC.com. Correspondent Ron Reagan was interviewing Joshua Kinberg when he was arrested yesterday (Link to previous BB post for story background):

Released from the "Tombs" after police arrested me (Joshua Kinberg of Bikes Against Bush) I'm now sitting in the MSNBC trailer at Herald Sq., NYC, with Ron Reagan and Joe Trippi after spending 24 hours in the "Tombs" with several hundred Critical Mass cyclists, who were arrested the night before.

Joshua Kinberg: I was arrested while Ron was interviewing me about my invention-- a bicycle that prints text messages on the street in water-soluble chalk. While we were conducting the interview, the police stopped me and asked for my ID. After I produced identification, the police waited for their sergeant to arrive before placing me under arrest without stating the charge. I was doing nothing more than describing my invention to the media and explaining my disagreements with the Bush administration.

When I arrived in the Tombs, I was placed in a cell with around 30 other cyclists. They had spent the previous night in a location they were affectionately calling "Lil' Gitmo," a makeshift detention center on the West Side piers converted from a former bus depot. Lil' Gitmo had cells sectioned off with chain link fence and razor wire, and a floor covered in motor oil, transmission fluid, and other toxic chemicals. The cyclists detained there were forced to sleep on this hazardous floor wearing nothing more than bicycling shorts and t-shirts. Consequently, several developed serious skin rashes the following day. After 36 hours most of the cyclists had been released with a pending court date. Several had been arrested when specifically following police directions to exit the peaceful bike ride. Others had not been part of Critical Mass, but had simply been on the streets with a bicycle at the wrong time.

I was released after 24 hours in detention with a court date set for Friday. Unfortunately, all my equipment-- bicycle, laptop, cell phone, and custom designed electronics-- has been confiscated. Thus, the Bikes Against Bush performance, where I would accept and print messages sent from web users, is likely to be cancelled. A volunteer lawyer from the National Lawyers Guild is confident that my case will be dismissed on grounds of the First Amendment, but we will have to wait until Friday to see. A video of the arrest recorded and edited by Yury Gitman has been posted online (BitTorrent), and the story of my arrest has already been blogged on SlashDot, BoingBoing, Kottke, and JuliaSet.

Link to MSNBC item, with link to video of Reagan's interview with Kinberg (in which he describes "what happened, and what The Tombs was like.")

A slew of riot nrrd updates from BoingBoing readers about protest, art, and tech mixing at the Republican National Convention in NYC this week.

* Bunnyhero says, "The RNC mobile network, or RNCmobnet, is a moblog dedicated to utilizing the power of the collective cell network during the Republican National Convention demonstrations by enabling mobile postings by just about anybody with a properly enabled mobile device."

* Phil Haack points us to the image shown here, and says, "This is the geekiest protest sign ever -- photo taken by a friend in New York." Link to full-size.

* Reader Jeff McHugh loved that "‹/BUSH›" sign so much, he created a shop on cafepress where you can purchase bumper stickers, mugs, and the like. Link

* Eli says, "A group of us are using wearable computers, wifi, and souped up camcorders are doing an interactive web and tv broadcast tonight of the RNC. We have one crew inside MSG near the bloggers and three crews in the streets. We'll be broadcasting live from 7-7:30 PM EST on MNN in NYC and over the web at Konscious.tv. Participants can watch live streams and chat over the web with camerapeople live while they're shooting. More info here."

* Blogstar Anil Dash tells BoingBoing, "The Village Voice has got a number of new blogs they've been launching, but the most interesting one to me was the diary of a (clothed) cocktail waitress at a strip club -- Link. There's only one post up so far, but if she keeps updating, it promises to be the most compelling record of the convention that I've seen."

* And Jon says, "Found "Axis of Eve" via we-make-money-not-art.com be sure to check out this page for some hilarious underwear slogans!"

Axis of Eve, a women's rights group, is planning a 10-minute mass panty flash on Appointment on Wednesday, September 1 to protest the policies of the Bush administration. Over 100 women will flash panties emblazoned with anti-Bush slogans like "give Bush the finger," "cream Bush", "drill Bush, not oil", "Ballot Box," "My Cherry For Kerry," etc."

Fleshbot has more on that one: Link
Previous BB posts about RNC-NYC and protest tech: Barlow's dance protests. DIY coverage. Sterling's prediction. Nationwide scream 09/02. Robocops. Rooftop protest messages. Brooklyn Orgiastic Politics Collective. Bikes Against Bush arrest. First Amendment read-ins. C-SPAN protest video feeds. TXTmob. A TV network-er's photoblog. Protest videos.

Anandamide is a cannabis-like substance produced by the brain. Researchers at the University of Cologne and UC Irvine who observed that schizophrenics have higher adandamide levels than healthy individuals. The odd thing though is that within the group of people suffering from schizophrenia, the individuals with the most severe symptoms had the lowest anandamide levels. The new theory is that rather than causing psychosis, anandamide helps control it and that those with the worst symptoms might be producing too little of the substance in response.

At some point in their lives, between 5 and 30 per cent of healthy people have had symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations, which can be triggered by something as simple as sleep deprivation. "All of us are potentially psychotic," says David Castle of the University of Melbourne. So for the body to have a system that prevents these experiences getting out of hand makes sense, he says.

Link
Update: As our friend at root.cellar points out, ananda, the root word of Anandamide, is Sanskrit for "bliss." Appropriate! Link

I've always though that the people who hung out at Andy Warhol's 1960s Factory were probably more interesting than Andy himself. Warholstars is an amazingly comprehensive and searchable guide to the Factory scenesters, including bios, "whatever happened to" information, and current news of Warhol-related happenings. Link (via MetaFilter)

This curious tortoise skeleton, an antique veterinary teaching aid, is on eBay right now. The shell is hinged so that you can see the entire skeleton. I assume it's a model, but it's still quite amazing. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)

BareBones is a company that makes BBEdit, the most valuable piece of software on my Macintosh. BBEdit is a tool for writing and manipulating text, like vi, emacs, WordPad, and other editors. But while WordPad and TextEdit are underpowered and poorly thought-through and while vi and emacs are briliant but complex and hard to learn, BBEdit strikes the perfect balance between ease-of-use and power. All of my novels and every story I've written in the past eight years has been written in BBEdit. Every Boing Boing post I've posted (including this one) was written in BBEdit. I've had excellent support from them all along, and every so often, they ship a new version that inevitably fixes whatever minor annoyances I had with the previous version and introduces a few features that I hadn't thought of but which end up being indispensible to my workflow.

Today, BareBones shipped BBEdit 8.0, a $49 upgrade for BBEdit 7.x users, and I've just paid for it and downloaded it, on the strength of new features like Text Factories, a GUI front-end to regular-expression-based search and replace, so that you can do the kind of thing a perl hacker does in one inscrutable line with a series of easy-to-understand drop-down menus; the Documents Drawer, which fixes the slightly clumsy handling of multiple windows in the current BBEdit; and the newly integrated MacOS spell-checker, which fixes the sorely lagging BBEdit spell-checker.

BBEdit upgrades are like Christmas for me. More than any tool on my computer, I live in my text-editor. These upgrades are major quality-of-life enhancers for the likes of me. Link

A New York Times editorial today praising the recent appeals court decision on P2P services Grokster and Morpheus:

[T]he broader issue is the distribution of information. Software like Grokster creates a network of independent Internet users who can access one another's computer files without going through a central server. (Napster maintained a central server, which made it legally liable in very different ways.) Grokster can certainly be used to swap music illegally. But it can also be used to exchange electronic copies of books already in the public domain, transcripts of Congressional hearings or any number of other legitimate types of information. Much like a VCR that does not distinguish between a pirated tape and one legally acquired, the technology does not care what is shared. It is impossible to strike down software like Grokster for its use in illegal file-sharing without also destroying its capacity for legal and socially beneficial activities.

Link

BoingBoing reader Dave Pentecost says,

Two clips on my site related to the RNC protests. First, caricature as protest: the Billionaires for Bush. Among their rallying cries - Lower the Minimum Wage! No Justice, No Problem! In this clip they urge watching more Fox TV, chant "This is what plutocracy looks like!" and thank the other 99% for their tax dollars. The other clip is a protestor's eye view of the day. A short montage of protest signs, and a wide shot of the march on Seventh Avenue, full of peaceful folks as far as you can see.

Link.
Previous BB posts about RNC-NYC and protest tech: Barlow's dance protests. DIY coverage. Sterling's prediction. Nationwide scream 09/02. Robocops. Rooftop protest messages. Brooklyn Orgiastic Politics Collective. Bikes Against Bush arrest. First Amendment read-ins. C-SPAN protest video feeds. TXTmob. A TV network-er's photoblog.

BoingBoing reader Chris says,

The TXTmob service came into force at the DNC protests, and has really taken off so far this week at the RNC protests, helping organize and coordinate events in real time. Here's a sample of some of the messages that were sent yesterday (there's a full archive on the site, but it requires registration:

15:51:05 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Over 1000 protesters have gathered in Central Park, seems calm at this time.
16:00:30 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Police are not allowing bicycles to ride on the streets in the Times Square area.
16:11:56 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Update: police have closed 6 Ave and all streets west of 6ave from 34 St to 59 St to bicycles
16:14:56 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Kiss-in in progress! 5Ave @ 41 on the steps of the library
16:23:38 Sun, Aug 29 morgan The crowd on the Great lawn of Central Park is growing, police seem calm
16:37:07 Sun, Aug 29 morgan The Kiss-in is marching toward Times Square, and the mouse-bloc actions in that area are begining

Link, and more info on smartmobs blog

Yesterday, Parisian blogger Alex Boucherot of Fluctuat.net and I were discussing how some flash mobs have a (hopefully unintentional) fascist undertone, depending of course on who organizes the particular gathering, their motivation, and even the phrasing of the announcement. After we hung out, Alex stumbled on Christopher Bruno's recent net artwork where historical figures are "reincarnated as... artists." The entire series is excellent, but A. Hitler's FashMobs is particularly relevant to our discussion. From the Fashmobs "artist" statement:

"I created a website where people can leave their mobile phone number. The idea is that when the number of people is large enough, a SMS instruction is sent to all of them simultaneously by the server. When they receive it, people have to perform the instructions. The instructions are simple ones, like raising an arm, but the effect is amplified by the fact that many people do it in the same place, at the same time, as in a symphonic orchestra."

Link

I've been travelling nonstop for a couple years now, shooting pix of various amusing, pretty or outre things as I go. I find myself with hundreds of photos that I took basically because I thought it'd be funny to show them to friends, but I never do.

This morning, I used Flickr's Uploadr tool for OSX to upload about 160 of them, tagging them with some metadata as I went. It was a pretty neat experience, reliving all those moments. I'm gonna try to keep my public Flickr library up to date on this stuff from now on. Link