Yesterday, I blogged about Snap, a reasonably interesting new search engine that unveiled at the Web 2.0 conference. Today, an alert reader pointed out Snap's unbelievably bullshit linking policy -- the idea that any company that is this clueless could end up a critical piece of the Web's infrastructure is so revolting it makes me want to take a bath.

Unless a User has a written agreement in effect with us which states otherwise, User may only provide a hyperlink to the Site on another Web site, if you comply with all of the following: (a) the link must be a text-only link clearly marked "snap.com" or "www.snap.com"; (b) the link must "point" to the URL "http://www.snap.com" and not to other pages within the Site; (c) the link, when activated by a User, must display the Site full-screen and not within a "frame" on the linking Web site; and (d) the appearance, position and other aspects of the link must not be such as to damage or dilute the goodwill associated with our name and trademarks or create the false appearance we are associated with or sponsor the linking Web site. Perfect Market reserves the right to revoke its consent to any link at any time in its sole discretion.

I mean, imagine if the only way you could link to Google was to use nothing but the word "Google" as the linktext and if you could only link to the Google frontpage (and not any of the search-result pages), and you couldn't scrape, frame or otherwise munge Google results -- kee-rist, it'd be a frigging apocalype.

Search engines demand our trust and our goodwill, and they cry out to be an authorative namespace for locations relevant to query terms. For Snap to assert that it can own how you can link to them -- despite the fact that this is nonsensical in both law and practice -- displays such an imponderable depth of contempt and ignorance for the Web's norms that it is truly unforgivable. I've just removed playing with Snap from my list of things to do for the next hundred years or so. Maybe you should, too. Link (Thanks, Jim!)

Update: Snap founder Bill Gross sez, "Cory, thanks for catching that and posting. We're changing the policy, so thanks!"

No word on the rest of the copyright policy, which includes a ban on "creating derivative works" with Snap results.

Donna sez, "People are really upset about the FBI's proposal to extend a phone-tapping law called CALEA to the Internet by requiring that broadband Internet and VoIP providers build in a 'backdoor' for government surveillance. But they'd be even more upset if they understood what this means. EFF's Annalee Newitz explains what will happen if this proposal is adopted:"

If the FCC adopts the proposal, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and nearly all VoIP companies will have to design their systems to be tappable. This isn't nearly as tidy as it sounds. The law distinguishes between two kinds of information that can be gleaned via telephone surveillance: "call identifying information" or CII (numbers dialed and when), and "content" (actual conversations taking place). Telephone network technology allows a law enforcement agent to gather these two kinds of information separately, in isolation from one another. There is no danger that an agent seeking CII will accidentally get to listen to the content of his target's conversations. Or that he will accidentally hear the conversations of everybody on the same block as his target.

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

Jamie McCarthy sez: "Bush's speech was shown on CNN and MSNBC, so Brian Carnell was wrong. If you're looking for good coverage of the coverage, I like this writeup." Link

Biella sez, "This is a collection of anthropological articles on intellectual property, free software, and the Creative Commons. It is, as far as I know, the first time an Anthropology journal has published accounts on free software and the first time they are using a CC license. All the papers are ready to download as a PDF under a CC license." Link (Thanks, Biella!)

The organizers of the Ansari X Prize, including Peter Diamandis, are launching what they describe as "Holy Grail Competitions" in a variety of tech arenas, to be known as The WTN X Prizes.

Competition objectives include seeking to meet the greatest challenges and opportunities facing humanity in the 21st century. The X Prize Foundation (XPF) and the World Technology Network (WTN) will be announcing the launch of a public outreach period to help select and sponsor a series of new technology prizes, the WTN X PRIZES, developed on the heels of the successful ANSARI X PRIZE competition. Intended to spur innovation in a variety of critical scientific and technological arenas and in response to great technological, social, and environmental challenges, areas of focus might cover goals in fields such as energy, medicine, information and communications technology, and nanotechnology. These "holy grail" goals might include cures for major diseases, teleportation, molecular assemblers, cold fusion and a wide variety of others with truly major societal implications. Announcement of the public challenge suggestion process and other competition details and entry criteria will occur at the WTN's 2004 World Technology Summit And Awards.

Link, and link to previous BB post on this week's X Prize win.

My friend Randy works for a large computer equipment company in Colorado. The employees fly to Asia a lot, and some were concerned about catching SARS or Bird Flu. One of Randy's friends put together an Excel spreadsheet to analyze the risk. Click on images for enlargement.

I know people are concerned about the possibility of a "bird flu pandemic".  The news media is not helping to calm these fears. The truth is, from the last news clippings I have, that there have been 22 human fatalities in Vietnam and Thailand. The incidence of this cause of death is twice as high as the probability of dying in an airline accident -- but to keep this in perspective, you are 20 times more likely to be killed by lightning in Colorado than a Vietnam citizen is likely to die of bird flu!!  All human incidents of the disease have been in people who handled sick birds. There is no known mutation of the virus to a state that would allow transmission between people. There have been no instances of humans becoming sick from eating properly cooked poultry.  80 million chickens & ducks have been exterminated in the Asian countries whose poultry has been infected.  My sense is that there is less and less concern as time goes on, and the efforts of the governments to control the outbreak in the bird populations is resulting in a reduction of the problem.

...the probability of dying from SARS in Taiwan was roughly the same as the probability of being hit by lightning in Colorado. 

UPDATE: Aalia sez:

I enjoyed your post earlier on the low risk of catching bird flu. However I hate to nitpick but I'd just been reading a few articles on the subject and couldn't resist pointing out that there is a probable human to human case of transmission in Thailand, under investigation by WHO.

This was reported in ProMed Digest today:

"Thailand went on high alert last week [final week of Sep 2004], after it reported that an earlier avian influenza victim died after probably contracting the virus from her daughter. She was the 1st person in this outbreak believed to have contracted the disease from another human, rather than from poultry." Source cited in ProMEDmail

The Promedmail's moderator notes :

"[A preliminary account of this case was included in ProMED-mail post "Avian influenza - Eastern Asia (120): Thailand 20041003.2731. If confirmed by the World Health Organization, this case will raise the total number of cases recorded in Thailand to 16 (with 10 deaths). Taken together with the 27 cases in Viet Nam, the total number of avian influenza A (H5N1) virus cases in East Asia becomes 43 (with 30 deaths). - Mod.CP]"

So there may be one case...

As there's already clear evidence that the virus can cross species to cats, dogs and humans, its not really that shocking that it there will be the occasional likely instance of human to human infection occurring. I calculate the raw probability of infection at approximately 1 in 4 million on the current reported infection rates reported in Thailand. Pretty remote chances indeed.

http://www.promedmail.org - best place I know of to keep track of this stuff. If you need to follow it up just put bird flu and Thailand in their search engine and you'll get more info on the Thai cases than you probably ever wanted.

UPDATE: Quinn sez: "i've put up a long post about what makes the bird flu more dangerous than it seems at ambiguous, inspired by your post. fundamentally, i agree with the point that there's no reason to *not* take business trips to asia, but i wanted to highlight why the bird flu matters, despite how little direct danger it presents at the moment, especially in light of the recent flu vaccine news."

Casey Sorrow sez: I am a regular devotee of Boing Boing and noticed you have the occasional monkey headline (as does my website). You may be interested in this article in which China has dedicated a monument for monkeys that have died in SARS research. Link

Kieron Gillen, a UK games journo, has penned a stirring manifesto for games writers calling on them to reinvent the form the way that rock-and-roll writers reinvented moribund music writing with a new gonzo style a few decades back.

However, once I thought the initial burst of energy was well spent and a fair chunk of the better writers absorbed into the gaming press in one form or another, State produced something that managed to embody everything I'd want the New Games Journalism to be. It's by a gentleman who works under the name of Always Black, and is entitled "Bow, Nigger".

It's a memorable piece of writing in at least a dozen ways, but is firstly notable for reading like games journalism without being anything like a piece of any games writing you've ever read. It's going to lead to a lot of copyist features, the huge majority will vary between average and utterly rubbish. Which is fine. Innovation tends to do that. How many uninspired Hunter S. Thompson riffs have we had to sit and shudder through? What, hopefully, we'll also get are the pieces that Hunter's verve and vision inspired without being simple plagiarism.

"Bow, Nigger" lies outside the main thrust of "serious" games journalism: that is, the analytic tradition. A bad games journalist would write in imprecise generalities, talking about something's "gameplay" and urging you to "try before you buy" or similar page-filling rubbish. A good one would look at the game, take it apart, try and understand how it works and inform the reader of their findings.

Link (Thanks, Jim!)

HYPER-RUNT is an exhibition of works by an excellent group of experimental tech artists, including Ken Goldberg and Shawn Brixey, and Mark Napier (left). The show is co-curated by my old friend Ebon Fisher, an influential digital artist himself who staged pioneering "Media Rituals" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn during the cyberdelic early 1990s. From the HYPER-RUNT curators' statement:

"HYPER-RUNTs raise uneasy questions pertaining to the nature of art in the realm of artificial life forms, media viruses, robot psychology, and inter-species cultures. They flirt with the possibility of a "post-human" future in which the paradigm of art and civilization gives way to a hyper-biology of emergent processes. A HYPER-RUNT might be seen as an ornery cultural lifeform, an élan vital, unexpectedly rearing its head in the turmoil brewing between artist, audience, technology, and ecosystem."

The exhibit runs from October 8 to 14 at the National Products Building with an opening reception this Friday. Link

Marc Laidlaw sez: "I can't believe this came to pass.  An excellent Shatner album." The first track that plays on the site, "Common People," is great. Link  

Bruce Schneier's blogged a great essay about the history of DES, the Data Encryption Standard, which was, for a time, the only public, standard cipher lawful for use by the American public. Most interesting is this part, in which he details how the National Security Agency deliberately weakened DES to make it less secure.

When IBM submitted DES as a standard, no one outside the National Security Agency had any expertise to analyze it. The NSA made two changes to DES: It tweaked the algorithm, and it cut the key size by more than half.

The strength of an algorithm is based on two things: how good the mathematics is, and how long the key is. A sure way of breaking an algorithm is to try every possible key. Modern algorithms have a key so long that this is impossible; even if you built a computer out of all the silicon atoms on the planet and ran it for millions of years, you couldn't do it. So cryptographers look for shortcuts. If the mathematics are weak, maybe there's a way to find the key faster: "breaking" the algorithm.

The NSA's changes caused outcry among the few who paid attention, both regarding the "invisible hand" of the NSA--the tweaks were not made public, and no rationale was given for the final design--and the short key length.

Link

This is the best thing I've seen on the Web in quite a while. It's a painting of a weird world and you can zoom in and out of it with the up- and down-arrow keys. Link (Thanks, Marc Laidlaw!)

UPDATE: Ian sez: This is FEEDBACK in response to Mark Frauenfelder's kudos of

Re: Zoomquilt is a fantastic zoomable painting

It is also quite impossible [in Firefox OSX] to break out of, ie. stop the endless rendering, once you get it going. Nothing short of force quotting the app, thus forcibly closing all the windows with their accumulated content, will do. I thought it may have been embedded in the Shockwave Director file, but on closer inspection of the calling page, this malfunction appears to have been DELIBERATELY disabled in display parameters block... Either way, this is clearly not a good thing.

value="swSaveEnabled='false'
swVolume='false'
swRestart='false'
swPausePlay='false'
swFastForward='false'
swContextMenu='false' ">

French university students have some fun with inexpensive stop motion. Link (Thanks, Kevin Kelly!)

Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive and one of the great heroes of the copyfight) just delivered an amazing presentation at the Web 2.0 conference, called Universal Access to All Human Knowledge. It lays out Brewster's plan to see to it that all the information ever created in the world is stored and made available forever. Here are my running notes:

Universal access to all knowledge is possible, and it's not a non-profit goal. Index the whole damn thing -- it's a business for AMZN (let's sell all the books, let's sell everything), Altavista, (let's index all the web), etc.

26MM books in the Library of Congress -- more than 50% out of copyright, most out of print, a tiny sliver in print. A digitized ASCII book is about 1MB, so this is about 26TB, which costs about $60K and takes up one bookshelf.

Google announced that it will digitize in-print material and out-of-copyright works (like AMZN's thing).

It costs $10/book to scan -- they're digitizing all the books in the Library of Alexandria, and they're going this in China, too.

A group in Toronto is doing a robot-scanner that will bring the cost in the industrial world -- where labor is more expensive -- to scan books for $10. At $10 per, that $260 Million to scan all the books.

Link

Update: The Weblogs, Inc Web 2.0 blog has got Brewster's talk in MP3 as well as plenty o' pix.

During last night's vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney advised viewers interested in his version of the facts about Halliburton to visit factcheck.com. Evidently, he meant to direct them to factcheck dot ORG, a site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, but mis-spoke. Factcheck dot COM redirects you to GeorgeSoros.com which contains arguments on "why we must not re-elect President George Bush." Whups.

For their part, the factcheck dot ORG folks say:

Cheney got our domain name wrong -- calling us "FactCheck.com" -- and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton. In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.

Link to factcheck dot COM. BoingBoing reader Clay says Soros and Co. have no idea who directed the vicepresidential linklove their way. "My friend designed the Soros blog and says [redirecting factcheck.com to the Soros site] was a happy and unrequested favor. Whois turns up not enough of a clue..."

Update: BoingBoing reader Dave Hayden points us to an AP story which says:

Cheney cited FactCheck.com, a for-profit advertising site based in the Cayman Islands. The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits -- ” about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.

"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators shortly after the debate ended.

They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would receive in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money.

Link to story.

BoingBoing reader Mark Kraft says,

Last night, Dick Cheney said, "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight." Turns out that this isn't true. Soon after the debate, the media was given a photograph of one such meeting: Link. Well, after doing a bit of searching, I found another such meeting! In fact, I found video, took screenshots, and so on...

Link. Daily Kos has more: Link, as does the Kerry campaign blog: Link (Thanks, Jeff Winkler)

My latest article for TheFeature is about the future of wireless sensors that can be implanted into your body, enabling your cell phone to act as a doctor in your pocket.

The human body is like a car. Take care of it, and it might even last a lifetime. If it has problems you may have to bring it to the mechanic, your doctor. Once you're there, though, the knocks and pings always seem to disappear, leaving you with a lot of explaining to do. Ideally, for treatment's sake anyway, your physician would follow you around and do an instant examination at the moment a symptom rears its ugly head. That's the idea behind UbiMon, a wireless sensor network of medical-monitoring devices that will eventually be implanted right into the body.

Link