OBL today is probably a very satisfied, very optimistic man, and if he can skew the last-minute dynamic of the election in Bush's favor, he'll have cause to be all the more satisfied.

And that's the danger, that some crucial percentage of our dimmer, more reactive voters will flash back to 9-11 and the Bush of the bullhorn, the Bush buffeted with the heartbroken grit of Ground Zero, and vote for that -- childishly imagining that such a vote runs counter to the wishes and the needs of OBL, the bearded stickman, the cave-dwelling spider, our new Old Man of the Mountains. Player of the long game.

Update: CJ point out that Gibson's had some second thoughts about this post

"The organization's mandate is to advocate the showmanship of oddities; espouse the belief in natural adaptation and mutation; and encourage the desire to create displays of curiosity."

If you are looking for approval for this so called"art", I am afraid you have come to the wrong place. Displays of wounded,bleeding or mangled animals is not in any form,"art" The members of the NTA are truly professional taxidermists and as such can be called artists,and most, if not all, abhor your desplays[sic].

You can surely be called a Rogue taxidermist.

Bill Haynes
NTA Board of Directors
Ethics Chairman
Vice President

While I didn't take super detailed notes (...) notice how I didn't say "Google is releasing a desktop search for OSX!!!!" That's because he didn't say that. Well he sort of did, but not really, so you can understand my surprise this morning when Mac Rumors, MacDailyNews and Reuters are reporting otherwise. They are quoting him as saying "We intend to do it." What a spin!! That is so out of context it's not even funny.

First of all lets keep in mind here that it's 2004, almost 2005 and pretty much ANYTHING that is released for a PC will be released for a Mac, it's just a matter of time. We all know that, and it's not news.

The remark in quesestion was in response to someone asking about privacy issues of Google Desktop and a footnote to their question was if Google was planning an OS X version. The answer was "yes, and no" He went on to explain that because the way Operating Systems work so differently and how built in the Google Desktop is there's no way to just port it over to a different OS so it has to be redone from scratch so while they do intended to do it, it's not something that they are working on, or something anyone should expect soon.

Tim O'Reilly was the "questioner," and in a discussion forum on ArsTechnica he posts this response.

This is Tim O'Reilly. I'm the one who asked Eric the question at his talk about whether we'd expect a Mac version of Google desktop, and I have to say I didn't read his response at all the way the Reuters reporter did! He was fairly equivocal, saying that it was a hard problem, requiring a whole separate project, not just a port, because of the differences in the operating systems. He made no announcement of actual plans to deliver the product, or even that Google was actively working on it

Link to Xeni's partial transcript of Schmidt's remarks.

Update: Emily Jane sez, "Another thing about the Fragdolls: They're BOOTH BABES. In addition to being sponsored by UBISoft, at the Penny Arcade Expo a few months ago, they were UBISoft's entire booth.

"While they try to adopt 'Just a bunch of girls that like video games' as their image, walking around and hearing 'PLAY VIDEO GAMES AGAINST HOT CHICKS!!!' all day definitly reduced the fun of this girl that likes video games.

"And while I realize that a bunch of chicks playing video games is going to be an event just because they're in the minority, the willingness of these girls to be the circus and make girls playing video games seem even LESS normal, totally contradicts what they claim they are all about."

As it turns out, you're shit-outta-luck even if you managed to snag a copy. That's because Apple just devoted some expensive engineering hours to updating iTunes to version 4.7, with the "improvement" of breaking iPod Download. That's right -- Apple's spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod. Thanks a whole lot, Apple.

Every time I post something like this, I get a deluge of mail that makes the same tired points, so before you bother, here's some pre-rebuttal:

• Apple didn't have any choice. If they don't play nice with the suicidally stupid record industry, the industry will stop supplying music for the iPod.

  So freaking what? Who's the customer here, me or Sony/BMG? And honestly, there may be some powerful bozon emitters in the halls of the RIAA companies, but does anyone really believe that the record industry will just take its ball and go home at this point? "Sorry, we're no longer making music available for the iPod anymore because Apple has refused to break your personal stereo to our specifications." Riiiight.

• Just don't run the update.

  Yeah, that works. Until they roll the iTunes update into an OS update, like they did the last time they broke iTunes and called it an upgrade.

Update #1: Why it's irrelevant that there are other tools for synching your iPod

Update #2: How to un-cripple your copy of iTunes 4.7

At the stroke of midnight, Sharp was delivered to the gates of the "Haunted Mansion" in a black horse-drawn carriage, and was greeted by the Mansion's familiar trio of hitchhiking ghosts. He also received a one-of-a-kind miniature replica of the tombstone and a "Death" certificate of authenticity officially recognizing the addition to the attraction. His gravestone is located in front of a quintet of ghostly musicians who eternally perform in the attraction's memorable graveyard scene.

Update #2: Simon sez, "Thought you might be interested to know that I did some more digging into that Fragdolls link that someone sent in to you, and someone else pointed out was actually some pretty insidious stealth marketing.

* Morning (Link): Bright Side: "Gorillas of the Internet," John Markoff, Gordon Bell, Henry Samueli, Patrick P. Gelsinger, Robert J. Aiken
* Session #2 (Link): Tim O'Reilly, John Perry Barlow, Dan Gillmor, Dave Patterson, Larry Press
* Lunch: (Link) Eric Schmidt and Leonard Kleinrock
* Session #3 (Link) -- The Young Side: The Indigenous Digital Generation. Alan Kay, Clay Shirky, danah boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, Xeni Jardin.
* Session #4 (Link): The Future Side: Pioneers and Visionaries. Bran Ferren, Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence G. Roberts

Link to event home.

The Air Force Research Laboratory has paid for and published a new study on "teleportation physics," referring to the disembodied transport of objects across space.

The author strives to distinguish his subject from the fictional Star Trek "transporter" concept, and notes that "we are still very far away from being able to ... teleport human beings (and even simpler biological entities such as cells, etc.) and bulk inanimate objects...."

But after fifty pages of opaque physics, he concludes with an endorsement of remote viewing, psychokinesis and spoon bending by psychic Uri Geller.

"During a talk that he gave at the U.S. Capitol building, Uri caused a spoon to curve upward with no force applied, and then the spoon continued to bend after he put it back down and continued with his talk," he reports.

We allocate about 70% of our resources to our core business and 30% to "other" because we never know what that other will become. We also ask our employees to spend 20% of their time on exploration, and those tend to be complementary to our core.

Our agenda tends to be driven by a bottoms-up process not so much traditional strategic planning. Google is trying to solve the next problem not the last problem.

[ Question: Was it serendipity that made google what it became? ] I think the word is luck. The principles from which Google was built do exist in other indstries. Ours is a reproducable model, and others may end up reproducing it and solving other problems. We're just seeing the beginning of this.

Good management is not that complicated, it's about leadership. Some managers need to micromanage everything, but that doesn't produce creativity. If you can figure out a way to tell a story, that's how people learn. they have a beginning middle and an end. if you have the right kind of people and the right kind of values, that can work. The great thing about high tech is that labor is very mobile, and if you want to deal with other people, you are forced to deal with them as peers and equals.

There are many uses of the net that are not touched by Google. Peer to peer, and the majority of email traffic. It's very important that people work on internet monitoring, internet scaling, all of the next generation projects -- I don't think any single one is of dominant importance.

We're in a real time world where people who need to collaborate can do so instantly. That has a downside because evil people can collaborate quickly, as well as the good guys, but the overwhelming effect is very positive.

Software businesses, intellectual property businesses have good cashflow if they're run right. A friend who went to business school once told me the only rule you need to know is DNROOC. Do not run out of cash. For us the decision to go public was viewed as a neccesary thing but not something we needed for our operations. People were surprised about the fact that the decision to go public was such a last minute thing, which it was -- we made the decision hours before we filed. We then went through the whole process which was of course widely covered and entertaining in lots of ways. At the end of it, we flew back to our offices and went back to work. Following Monday we had a one hour biefing about what we felt we did right or wrong. We had one of the executives announce the "end of the IPO," and we haven't talked about it since.

The company is about end users changing the world, the good and bad things they're doing out there. It's not about the IPO.

Information on the internet has a very long tail (Ed. Note: referring to Chris Anderson's recent article in Wired.)There are very few things that the entire world is interested in at the same time. The vast majority of people out there are very much engaged in their own daily lives, in a local context very different than yours or mine.

The other thing to remember is that the average person does not want to debug their computer. We prefer instead the idea of a person typing something in and Google -- or someone else -- figuring things out for you. But very few things are organized around that principle of simplicity; we love and appreciate the complexity in technology but people using the internet really don't want that. When you see an ease of use breakthrough, it's such a wonderful thing.

"Looking at the distribution of small-bodied animals around the world today, they tend to occur in rainforests... And certainly that's where small-bodied humans tend to be found. We don't know much about the paleoenvironment on Flores yet, but everything's consistent with it being heavily rainforested back in the Pleistocene and probably heavily rainforested until agricultural humans arrived and started clearing the rainforest. The fauna is consistent with that sort of environment as well. Maybe there just wasn't a lot to eat. The island is only about 14,000 square kilometers, there's not a lot of it there. So I think the most likely scenario is that as part of their adaptation to [having fewer] calories living in a rainforest--and maybe thermoregulation as well--there was this long-term selection for smaller body size."

"If the drug is water-soluble, it will be trapped within a network of tiny inter-connected, water-filled channels in the material. If it’s water-insoluble, it will be trapped within nano-spaces in the polymer matrix, and slowly leach out into the channels. In contact with fluid on the eyeball, these channels open up and release the drug."

However, our President sheepishly admitted it was "a poorly-tailored shirt." Poor guy. We should send him some money for a shirt that doesn't have big rectangular pooch and a rope hanging from it. Link

"I was very surprised," (professor Richard) Kaner said. "My graduate student, Jiaxing Huang, decided to take some pictures of his polyaniline nanofibers one evening when he heard a distinct popping sound and smelled burning plastic. Jiaxing recalled a paper that we had discussed during a group meeting reporting that carbon nanotubes burned up in response to a camera flash. By adjusting the distance of the camera flash to his material, he was able to produce smooth films with no burning, making this new discovery potentially useful."

"The research reveals that the hallucinations can last from a few seconds to several hours and can be of many things, both familiar and unfamiliar to the person viewing them. Hallucinatory content can include inanimate objects, people, animals, plants and bunches of flowers, trees, and complete scenes. Some people see strange things such as monsters, shining angels, or transparent figures floating in a ghostly manner through rooms and hallways."

Why are you doing this?

We believe that there is strong possibility that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan might be a little far away or maybe even a little too busy to be checking out the pseudopatriotic magnet on the back of a 1986 Geo Metro as it drives down I-95 or sits in an Olive Garden parking lot.

Why do you hate America?

We don't hate America, we hate that people think slapping a stupid magnet on the back of their car has meaning. Mostly everyone in this country supports the troops and hopes they will return safely. Maybe you should be telling them directly in person, on the phone or in a letter and not driving around with a big magnetic banner you probably got at Wal*Mart that simply attempts to prove to everybody but the troops that you support the troops more than everybody else.

"John Ashcroft, is that you?" Link

Deirdre McNamer (how appropriate) wrote a story in The New Yorker magazine in October 2002 about a 28-year-old pinko-gray-skinned, blue-eyed, red-blond-haired criminal called Christian Michael Longo who used the alias 'John Thomas Christopher.' His alias was placed on the DNFL used by the Transportation Security Administration. He was arrested in January 2002 but his alias was not removed from the DNFL. On March 23, 2002, 70-year-old brown-skinned, dark-eyed, gray-haired grandmother Johnnie Thomas was informed that she was on the master terrorist list and would have special security measures applied every time she flew. Indeed, the poor lady found that she was repeatedly delayed by a scurry of activity when she presented her tickets at an airline counter, extra X-rays of her checked baggage, supplementary examination of her hand-baggage and extra wanding at the entrance gates. On one occasion she was told that she had graduated to the exalted status labeled, 'Not allowed to fly.' She discovered that there was no method available for having 'her' name removed from the DNFL; indeed, one person from her local FBI office dismissively told her to hire a lawyer (although ironically, he refused to identify himself). An employee of the TSA informed her that 'four other law-abiding John Thomases had called to complain.'

I'm the Chief Technical Officer for a satellite internet and network services provider with offices in Baghdad and Arbil, Iraq. We have over 500 installed sites in Iraq, all of them since the end of the war - I came over 15 months ago. Many of those sites are military, and I may be able to provide some new information for you. Yes, my customers are also blocked from accessing Dubya's site. I can't say I really care - I'm a flaming liberal and he lost my vote when his father was still president. But the act itself is particularly odious.

We resell satellite bandwidth on several different satellite providers, among them Hughes Network Systems, Europe, and Tachyon Networks, Europe. All of those customers are shut out. Most military users here have these choices for internet:

1. NIPRNET, the non-classified network the military uses for communications, including AKO (the military mail system).
2. Filtered, proxied systems provided by Segovia or KBR. Locked down by Websence and filtered against most "offensive" content.
3. No internet.
4. Paying personal money for a private connection.

In general, support units such as the US Army Corps of Engineers have access to military internet options. The USACE builds NIPRNET, after all. But the common infantry units have little or no access except what they can scrounge up from personal funds. We sell a lot of cheap end-user satellite systems to these units. These systems aren't cheap by US / terrestrial standards - a 512x128 kbit shared-bandwidth satellite connection is $275 per month, and it goes up - way up - from there.

Those with access to #1 or #2 probably have access to Dubya's site and anything else that attempts to segregate network access by geography. The rest of us will not.

It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: that popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

I call this long-term trend the Sleeper Effect, after that famous Woody Allen joke from his mock sci-fi film where a team of scientists from 2029 are astounded that 20th-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. (In conversation, I sometimes describe this book as the Atkins diet for pop culture.) Over the course of the book, I look at everything from Grand Theft Auto to "24," from Finding Nemo to "Dallas," from "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos," from "Oprah" to "The Apprentice." There's some material about the internet, too, though less than you might suspect.

The site features excerpts (and some full-length downloads) from features including Going Upriver, Farenheit 9/11, Uncovered, a bunch of Jon Stewart and Daily Show clips, and Eminem's Mosh video.

Snip from the internetvetsfortruth.org site:

Subject: The Rumors On the Internets Are True!

The INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH have launched a new pre-election campaign, "Never Forget," at internetvetsfortruth.org in an effort to educate the voting public prior to the November 2nd election.

The website features documentary content highlighting the records of both George W. Bush and John Kerry. The Internets Veterans for truth invite you to view this documentary evidence as well as to enjoy the social and political commentary of Jon Stewart, Eminem, and others.

We know the rumors on the Internets are true. We invite you to visit and decide for yourself. And please, pass this on to our fellow Americans. Let's blogroll.

Kleinrock is from the Computing Sciences Department at the UCLA, and is credited with having sent the first email-type message in 1969. I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around how badass that is. I am planning to ask him to autograph my laptop tomorrow. Mr. Halavais is assistant professor at the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo. He studies really interesting stuff! Here's a snip from the show summary:

It's the internet's thirty-fifth birthday today. Like any baby, when it was born in 1969, the Internet looked nothing like the grown-up version of today which networks millions of computers. Back then, it linked just a handful of computers. It was the brainchild of researchers from the University of California who wanted to send data from one computer to several others at the same time.

On this day in 1969, a message we might now call an email was sent from UCLA to nearby Stanford University. The moment the 'send' button was hit, a new era of global communications began.

For those of you in Los Angeles tomorrow who plan to stopy by the event -- here's a tip, if you're hoping to blog-while-confabbing. Bring batteries! They'll have wifi in the house, but no electrical outlets in the room where the conference is taking place. Only 50 or 60 IPs available, too, so connectivity could be tough to access if a lot of bloggers show up. See you there!

On November 1, a group of new copyright licences will be released in the UK, arriving from the US under the umbrella of Creative Commons (CC). The project is the brainchild of Stanford University's law professor Lawrence Lessig, and the licences allow artists to move away from traditional copyright's "all rights reserved" towards a more digital age-friendly "some rights reserved". The different types of licence allow artists to choose which rights they wish to maintain. They could keep the right to exploit works for commercial gain, to veto derivative works or ask to be credited each time their work is reproduced. In turn, those encountering CC licensed works on the internet know immediately how the original artist feels about the use of that work without having to ring lawyers.

The British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are embarking on a programme to archive resources on the World Wide Web in their respective national domains. To achieve this programme, the British Library as lead partner wishes to tender for a contract to multiple suppliers to provide development services and/or software technology for a Smart Archiving Crawler. This will comprise of a framework controlling and interacting with Heritrix, the Internet Archive's open source archiving web crawler, and modules which provide prioritisation capabilities using document thematic analysis and link weighting.

Hello,

We would like to apologize to you and to those who frequent the suicidegirls.com website for inadvertently contacting you about a fan posting on the website.

We know that many of our fans are old enough to make their own choice about what they want to view on the Internet. We value the support of our fans and we respect their decisions. The letter was sent as part of an ongoing Nintendo program to aggressively protect our younger consumers from the hundreds of sexually-explicit sites each year that use Nintendo properties to attract children. We are proud of our efforts in this area. Unfortunately, the site posting identified in our letter was targeted by mistake.

As a gesture of goodwill, we would like to offer you (and RuneLateralus) a free Nintendo video game system and game of your choice. (...)

In addition, we would appreciate it if you could provide us with contact information for RuneLateralus, or have him contact us directly, so that we may apologize to him. We would be glad to send him a game and system of his choice through you as well, since we do not have his contact information.

Sincerely,
Christie Hamilton
Nintendo of America Inc.
Consumer Service Department

Following reports that George Lakoff's political work Don't Think of an Elephant! had made the Booksense and San Francisco Chronicle paperback bestseller lists, Chelsea Green received word that the book had made #30 on the NY Times paperback list. We were ecstatic, but troubled to see that the book was listed with the wrong author (Howard Dean) and wrong publisher (Ballantine). When president and publisher Margo Baldwin called the Times to correct the information, she was told that the book was no longer on the list at all, as it had been reclassified as a How-To/Self-Help book.

The next day, two men arrived at the store and showed Cox their badges. The lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube. She said yes. The Magic Cube, he said, was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

The whole thing took about 10 minutes.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that the Homeland Security agents had it wrong. The Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on rival toy's trademark.

They have set up camera-traps in likely areas of forest or in areas where local people have reported sightings. So far the picture that will make world news has proved elusive and as reported sightings get rarer, the naturalists fear that if orange pendek does indeed exist it may be very close to extinction. Link

UPDATE: Mark Lakata sez: "I saw your post on boing-boing. Those salamander cartoons were free leaflets given out with "Salamander" brand shoes. My mom used to buy them for me when I was young at the local German shoe store (in LA). You would get the cartoons for free. This was in the 70s. Note that there seems to be a big emphasis on the shoes....

Salamander is still in business. I bought a pair of dress shoes last year in Europe.

http://daddytypes.com/archive/2004/10/27/lurchi_needs_a_new_pair_of_shoes.html

http://www.salamander.de/index.cgi?action=frontpage::load_plain&section1=lurchi&template=index

Many kind readers emailed me to tell me that these wee folk are not our "ancestors," as much as I wish that they were. Here's one email I received, from a gentleman named Dustin

I saw your Boing Boing post earlier on the tiny Indonesian hominids, and have a small quibble: the headline says "human ancestor" but these creatures, though apparently related to us, are not ancestors. If they existed 13,000 years ago, they'd have co-existed with modern Homo sapiens for at least 15-20,000 years, and with archaic H. sapiens for the 60-190,000 years before that. If anything, they're more like second cousins or something.

My friend Jenn Shreve forwarded an email from Marc Herman, who is writing a book on Indonesia:

I just read your friend Mark's posting on boing boing about the skeleton of the tiny people of indonesia. As it happens, I met one of the anthropologists in on this discovery several months ago at an airport in Indonesia. She was *bursting* to tell someone about it, so after I promised not to report anything, she went on and on about the discovery. It was an excellent way to kill a layover. But the really cool part, which you really should tell Mark, is that these tiny people were recent enough that they likely coexisted with humans who could tell stories; there are, to this day, myths among people in that part of Indonesia of distant human ancestors who had tiny, somewhat stupid tiny friends who lived in caves. There are also many remnants of tiny elephants on Flores island. It appears increasingly likely that this particular island, which is east of Bali, was isolated from predators, so over thousands of years everything that didn't need to defend itself became smaller and smaller, until it became the land of the tiny things. Normal sized people lived amongst all the tinyness. This is real. This actually happened.

The Littlest Prisoner at Abu Ghraib: So easy, so quick, and so terrifying!

Lyndie England (Candy cigarette optional.)

Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid: Add a burnt-cork beard and an electric match from the tobacconist, and your little terror is ready to fly!

On November 2nd please join the army of volunteers who will keep an eye on our democracy. Volunteer here to submit video of disturbances outside polling locations. Enter your contact info and we will send you an email with more information. PLEASE NOTE: We are not asking people to videotape INSIDE polling locations. We want volunteers to monitor the intimidation where it happens -- on the streets outside the polling locations.

William Dahlby said in court he was only trying to scare his wife the evening of May 9. He told jurors the wire was hooked to a "ground fault interrupter" designed to cut the electricity when the cord encountered water. His wife was not hurt.

"The small screens and narrow fields of view of mobile devices don't work well with the human vision system," Furness says. "When we first started talking about VRD, the idea was to create a system that requires very little power but can be connected to a PDA or cell phone to deliver a wide field of view with high brightness. For mobile computing applications where you want to overlay digital information on top of what you see, you need the luminance to compete with the outside world."

"Working with Texans for Truth and Mercury Campaigns, we're putting together a web site to gather videos and images of any disturbances and irregularities that might occur at polling places on election day. We launched yesterday with a QuickTime video of George Bush shooting the finger (though some just linked to the video). We aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented... We're hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we'll have video and photo records which we'll place online as close to realtime as possible.

1. The Bush people rented the gymnasium, and the school was just enforcing their requirement that students not wear Kerry-supporting materials
2. The principal didn't threaten expulsion

Don't like a dry shave? Nobody does. Buy yourself some generic sex lube. It's only a couple of bucks at Walmart or Target or, really, any drugstore. A little dab and a disposable razor and you can get a nice shave. Rub a thimbleful of water over your face and wipe off to finish. It may sound funny, and of course your razor is ruined unless you rinse it out right away, but this works very well. It's one of my favorite tricks.

A dab of sex gel will help you comb out your hair in the morning, too, and it disappears completely into the hair, as if it were never there.

For washing up, make my homemade, adult version of baby wipes in a bottle. First, find some hand and body lotion that has a scent you'd like to wear, buy some baby oil, and get some relatively scent free shower gel or shampoo. Pour a couple of teaspoons of each into a small water bottle, say half a liter. Maybe skimp a little on the baby oil and be a little generous with the shampoo. Fill the bottle halfway with warm water, cap it and shake to mix. Now take a napkin from your favorite fast food place, saturate it with the mixture, and give yourself a good wipe down. It takes the smell off, trust me. Add a bit of witch hazel to the mix if you like an astringent quality.

Students at the University of Pittsburgh are taking a class on "writing and reading practices in digital environments." This week, they are looking at a MMO called Second Life, and started a discussion on the ethics of researching players - do you tell them you are researching, or does that compromise the research. (A good terra-nova thread).

The 'net works in funny ways, and sure enough, a student told a SL user about the blog. Now the users of Second Life are in an uproar about the ethics of the students researching them without asking first. (Not to mention that the fairly intellectual Second Life community wasn't happy about the insinuations that they are all crazed stalkers.)

There is a long thread in the Second Life forums but registration is required.

On the one hand it was that, as a science fiction writer, we're supposed to be looking towards the future, and it's pretty clear to me that the future involves electronic text. It's very hard to imagine that we'll read fewer electronic words or more paper words as the years tick by and so I wanted to be involved in that practice; I wanted to be one of the people who was a pioneer in that practice, because I'm a science fiction writer and it's what I should be doing.

By the same token, I was pretty sure whatever the future of electronic text looked like it wouldn't be distorted in a way that was intended to maximize the degree to which it resembles traditional, non-electronic text – which is what DRM technology does. The objective of DRM technology is to make bits act like atoms. To embrace that as the future of electronic text is to say that the Luther Bible will finally give us a proper Protestant Reformation once they can make the Gutenberg press run on fetal calfskin instead of paper, because everyone knows that a real Bible is on fetal calfskin. Once they can be sure that the Luther Bibles are only printed in Latin and read by priests, then we'll have a proper Protestant Reformation underway, and not until then.

Votergate 1: "This is an action documentary, following a young team on their nationwide investigation of the current problems with our voting systems and elections procedures. Fast-paced and engaging, this documentary reveals the shocking story of how touchscreen voting systems are highly susceptible to hacking and how these systems are being implemented across the country without the proper checks and balances to insure accuracy and accountability"

Votergate 2: "This film is an investigative documentary uncovering the truth about new computer voting systems, which allow a few powerful corporations to record our votes in secret. But the film is not just a warning. It strongly concludes that elections are harder to defraud when voters turn out in big numbers. This documentary is designed specifically to help viewers navigate past the fear and spin already being thrown at this critical issue." Link to the first movie, Link to the second movie

"(PR client) is a market intelligence and media analysis services firm. (PR client) is working with F1000 companies who are using our services to Manage and Monitor Digital Influencers (such as blogs, message boards, user groups, complaint sites, etc.) as an intelligence and threat awareness tool. (Person's name), CEO could talk to you about 'What F1000 Companies are doing to take action against bloggers' and 'How companies are taking steps to protect their corporate reputations from bloggers/digital influencers.'"

Here's the provocative notion: "there must be any number of ways to visualise that data or explore it or rip it apart or whatever. So here's the dump: Every full post made to plasticbag.org over the last five years."

Boing Boing's fifth is coming up in January -- we'll have about 17,000 posts by then. Maybe we'll do this too! 7.4MB Textfile Link

Hi Xeni, I called the S.F. and the Seattle offices of the law firm representing Nintendo here, Perkins Coie. They not only seem to not know about this, they can't even look at it because their firewalls won't allow them to get to porn sites. (Ed note: BWAAHAHAHAHAH!)

I've emailed someone in their offices the posts so I expect this'll get cleared up inside a day or two.

Sinclair is ran by David Smith, who in the mid-1970s was a partner in a company called Cine Processors, according the Los Angeles Times, which cites public records and a former partner in the company as sources. David E. Williams, Smith’s partner in the business, told the Times that Cine Processors’ sole business was the development of 8mm pornographic films.

We've built an appropriation-friendly library in San Francisco and are now welcoming visitors.

The Prelinger Library is an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, print ephemera and government documents, located in downown San Francisco, California, USA.

Though libraries live on (and are among the least-corrupted democratic institutions), the freedom to browse serendipitously is becoming rarer. Now that many libraries have economized on space and converted print collections to microfilm and digital formats, it's become harder to wander and let the shelves themselves suggest new directions and ideas. Key research libraries are often closed to unaffiliated users, and many libraries keep the bulk of their collections in closed stacks, inhibiting the rewarding pleasures of browsing. Despite its virtues, query-based online cataloging often prevents unanticipated yet productive results from turning up on the user's screen. And finally, much of the material in our collection is difficult to find in most libraries readily accessible to the general public.

Most important of all, people wishing to copy library holdings for research and transformative use often face difficulties in making legitimate copies. Since the act of quoting and recontextualizing existing words and images is indistinguishable from making new ones, we think it's important for libraries to build appropriation-friendly access into their charters, and we're trying to take a big first step in this direction.

No, this ain't The Onion. But it is ridiculous. Suicidegirls founder Sean says:

I got this email this morning from the law firm that represent Nintendo. They are claiming that the member RuneLateralus listing Zelda and Metorid as his favortie video games in his profile is an infringement on Nintendo's intellectual property. I enjoy an ice cold coca cola on a hot day. Do you think Coca Cola is going to sue me for posting that?

Remember, kids, lawyers are evil and all they want to do is figure a way to bill you more of their time. Nintendo is actually paying these people to threaten me over RuneLateralus favorite video games listing on his profile. What a bunch of morons.

UPDATE: Link to update post

Reader Daen de Leon points to the Netcraft report here: Link

Reader Supi in Finland says, "Guess Bush really hates us foreigners. Finnish news article here. In brief: GWB's publicist turned media to ask questions from Bush's internet campaign manager Michael Turk, who never bothered to reply. You can of course access the site via a proxy, but that's little bit too complicated for most of the people. Well, at least we are left with this "mirror" of Bushs site -- georgewbush.org (brought to you by whitehouse.org -staff). And johnkerry.com works just fine from Europe."

Reader Marco Montemagno in Italy says, "On this page I uploaded a screenshot [of what happens when I try to access the Bush website."] Link

Reader Michael Maas asks, "Can US soldiers in Iraq access GeorgeWBush.com?" [Ed note: I'd assume so, if they use military networks rather than regionally-managed ones -- but I'd welcome an authoritative answer.] See update below.

Canadian reader Anne Galloway says, "Just to let you know there is no problem accessing Bush's site from Canada." And Tarik in Barbados says, "You know can access Bush's site from Barbados no problem, including that awful Kerry flash game." Reader Tom Biro adds, "I work for a company based in Germany, but I am working (and have lived - forever) in New Jersey - since our whole network proxies out of Germany, I'm unable to visit this website. I imagine I'm not the only person actually here in the States having this problem. The number of expats this affects is probably pretty huge. "

Swiss reader Guido says, "The ISP behind georgewbush.com seems utterly incompetent. The following two links work just fine from Switzerland: https://georgewbush.com/, and http://65.172.163.222/. The 'normal' homepage, however, doesn't work." Thanks, Guido. It must be hard work, keeping up with all those internets!

Dave Cross says, "To counter the barring of georgewbush.com someone has set up a http://georgewbush.co.uk -- which is just a redirect to michaelmoore.com."

UPDATE: Can US servicemen and women, reporters, and contractors in Iraq access georgewbush.com? Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Iraq, and he tells BoingBoing: "I just tried. Access denied." Some US readers with enlisted friends and relatives stationed overseas echo that. Reader John J. says, "My sister's stationed in Germany; she tried it and got that 'access denied' response." But an enlisted reader requesting anonymity says, "I am a Lt Col serving in Northern Iraq - all of us serving here are on .mil domains - we have no problem getting to the site."

Reader Jim in Germany says, "It is probably done by this tool: Akamai EdgeScape. This is how it works -- Link. And this link shows you the way how visit it anyway ;) -- Link. My article in my blog (in German, sorry) Link." And Jason in the UK says, "This is the link to the origin server that Akamai uses to pull in content to the network. This link is still accessible to me in the UK."

Joi Ito has more: Link. No official word on why from the Bush camp, but internet monitoring firm Netcraft said "the pattern of traffic to the website suggests that the block was not due to an attack by vandals or hackers."

"50 artists were given Votomatic voting booths from the 2000 Florida election. Naturally they fucked with them. Tonight they will be auctioned off in New York City.

"Participating designers and artists include David Byrne, Christo, Frank Gehry, Milton Glaser, Hugh Hardy, Maira Kalman, Richard Meier, David Rockwell, Stefan Sagmeister, Ed Schlossberg, Robert A.M. Stern, Brian Tolle, Yeohlee Teng, and Diane von Furstenberg."

Link to details on Benefit Reception and Silent Auction - Wed, Oct 27.

Shown here: SIT ON THIS, designed by Tucker Viemeister, Kai Williams, Philip Refior, and Silas Warren of Springtime USA. Materials: Pink corduroy, foam rubber, and iron-on patches. “The abstract form of the Florida voting booth reminded us of a chair. We shortened the legs, made a corduroy slipcover, and BINGO! It’s almost a proverbial La-Z-Boy. To wake up the complacent citizen, we wrote on the seat: Do Not Rest Until Your Vote Is Counted.”

"Hipstercards features dozens of designs contributed by digital artists and graphic designers. The cards are free, easy to send and wildly creative in how they incorporate the 'Vote' message. The beauty of these eCards is that they can quickly travel from person to person -- so they can cycle beyond your initial circle of friends and reach people who may not be as committed to voting and are in critical states."

Link

Earlier this week BoingBoing linked to my blog post about Bluetooth being disabled on the new Treo 650 for laptop dialup. I got a note this morning from Sprint PR saying that they do plan to support laptop dialup over Bluetooth on the Treo 650. The phone will ship without it, but they will release a software patch to enable support -- no firm release date given.

And Wired News Editor Kourosh Karimkhany says, "BTW, the first site to run that ad (actually, to inspire AT&T to create those ads) was Hotwired. As it happens, today the ol' timers are getting together for the 10th anniversary of Hotwired."

I publicly apologized last year for recommending the Sidekick to people. Danger lied to the press and its customers about the platform, then went on record saying that it intended to sell its customers out to media companies.

Now it's screwing over Mac users who want to have a means of migrating their own data off their devices. If you do business with Danger after all this, you need your head examined. Link

Here's the contact information for the school officials, who have betrayed the trust we put in them as educators to teach democratic fundamentals, like open debate, dissent, and freedom of expression.

Richland Center High School
23200 Hornet High Rd
Richland Center, WI 53581
Phone: (608) 647-6131

Here’s the principal:
John Cler
608-647-6131 x1590

Here’s the local superintendant of schools:
Rachel Schultz
608-647-6106

Here’s the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
1-800-441-4563

Here’s the state superintendent:
Elizabeth Burmaster
state.superintendent@dpi.state.wi.us

Update: Many of you wrote to say that you communicated with the the principal listed above that that he says:

1. The Bush people rented the gymnasium, and the school was just enforcing their requirement that students not wear Kerry-supporting materials
2. The principal didn't threaten expulsion

Since the FreeS/WAN list is archived on the Web, Rolex Watch U.S.A., Inc. (remember Rolex? It's an article about Rolex) found the post in searches for the counterfeiters of Rolex watches. It's obvious to anyone over the age of 13 (and probably lots of people under that age) that the spam appearing in the FreeS/WAN archive is something that happened to the FreeS/WAN list, not something that the FreeS/WAN list intentionally propagated. It was an accident, and an unfortunate one at that. But obvious though this is, a group of highly paid attorneys hired by Rolex couldn't figure this out and sent a cease-and-desist letter (undoubtedly accompanied by twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one) to John Gilmore telling him that, as the person who registered the freeswan.org domain, he could be liable for damages up to $1,000,000 for posting content that violated the Rolex trademark, promoted counterfeiting, and diluted Rolex's intellectual property rights. Now that's adding injury to insult! First spam makes it through to a list you run, and then you're threatened by lawyers because of it.

Fashion Fixes
Jeans too low?
Shirt Too Short, Sheer or Low Cut? Pants Too Low?
Skirt too short? Pants too low or tight?
Can't Find Jeans That Cover Your Stomach?

More on hums, which some have dubbed the Taos Hum, 'a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide.'

So what is the Taos Hum? Spurred on by complaints that the 'Bristol Hum' (which has driven at least one person to suicide) was caused by faulty gas pipeline equipment, British Gas undertook an investigation, canvassing 33 hum sufferers. Of these, 80% were found to have hearing problems, but 20% were genuinely hearing something. Further investigation found that the noise was actually originating from a number of distant sources, including distant machinery, and were 'being amplified by the geometry of particular rooms' in the sufferers' houses.

Related, the concrete sound mirrors on the South Coast, designed to listen in for fleets of approaching enemy bombers in the days before radar.

This morning, Ronn Owens interviewed Michael Powell on KGO radio in the bay area. About 15 minutes after starting the interview, Howard Stern called in. Fur flew.

Update: BB reader cowicide says, "I noticed your new mp3 download is pretty huge for most people. This might help people out who aren't on broadband: Small (680KB) file, edited to just air Howard's part of the show. Link." Thanks, cowicide!

Update 2: Link to CNN story, and Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine blog says, Here's a transcript of the Howard Stern v. Michael Powell confrontation: Link." .

Meeker: ...And if there are hundreds or thousands of thought leaders and motivated, interested parties on the Internet with the ability to publish news or insights into any number of local or global issues, then it is safe to say that these blogs often become both the first source of news, a vital proving ground for authors and a source of potential community for other interested parties. For example, you’re probably going to get far more Boston Red Sox specific-content from a blog about the Red Sox made by a die-hard fan than you will from a random sports page, especially if you’re after opinions and community.

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal -- Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it -- and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

UPDATE: Anonymous sez: If you look closely, you'll notice that their editorial staff was split and so they each did a seperate endorsement. Among the staff, they pretty much endorsed everyone from Bush to Badnarik to (shockingly enough) Nader. To say they endorsed Kerry is accurate, but also very misleading. One editor endorsed Kerry, the rest endorsed others.

"The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology." --JG Ballard

When Mark first launched the BoingBoing weblog, it began as a sort of publicly-viewable personal scrapbook of "wonderful things." More than four years later, with four more participants added to the mix, that is what this project remains.

It may seem odd for a scrapbook to endorse a presidential candidate. But Mark, Cory, Pesco, John and I -- the people who keep this scrapbook alive -- share the conviction that John Kerry is the candidate best suited to lead America for the next four years. And we want you to know why.

In recent days, a growing number of news organizations have posted eloquent endorsements for Kerry. Some of them are particularly suprising, because they come from such unlikely sources. We encourage you to read them, and consider their content.

For us, the choice for Kerry involves simple things. Justice, liberty, privacy, transparency. Freedom of speech, thought, and technological expression. A woman's right to choose. Equal access to health care, education, and economic opportunity for all. The rule of law, at home and abroad. Peace. The enduring value of the American Constitution.

These are wonderful things. The Bush administration has proven both inability and unwillingness to protect them. In 2004, Kerry is the one.

We urge all eligible BoingBoing readers to exercise their right to vote in this election. Democracy is a wonderful thing. It won't survive without your participation.

Anyway, this is so much bullshit, it makes your head spin. And as of today, the appeals court agrees: Lexmark can't use the DMCA to prop up its business-model of charging you a 1000 percent markup on its inkjet carts. Neener, neener, neener. Link

"My son Luke was diagnosed at age three with Type 1 (diabetes). At about age six Luke began losing his glucose meter way too often. But he knew exactly where his GAMEBOY was, even if it was under the sofa. So I thought - Why not combine the two devices into one."

Giving the Jungle Cruise skippers their guns back is what seems to have delighted visitors the most, however.

"At least once a week somebody would get off the boat and say, `Hey, what happened to the guns?'" said Ribble's daughter, Sherri, one of the ride's operators.

Now, she says, people burst into applause when she opens fire.

No you can share his passion. The Monochromniks have put up a hot-or-not style site for posting your photos of dreadful digestive aids. The next time you find yourself looking at an eatery painting that looks like it came free with the cheap chrome frame, snap a shot, upload it it and share. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

The owner of Rookery Farm in Suffolk told The Times that she had detected an unexplained presence in the farmhouse on several occasions since moving there in 1992. Julie Hunn, 47, a legal secretary, who lives at the farmhouse with her husband, Andrew, said: “Sometimes you’ll just get a feeling that there’s somebody there or you’ll see a shadow. It’s happened two or three times since we moved here.”

"We wanted to examine the truthfulness of reports claiming declining P2P traffic and help the community make reliable assumptions concerning P2P traffic estimates and trends," wrote Thomas Karagiannis, a doctoral candidate in computer science at UC-Riverside, in an e-mail. "The assertion of declining P2P traffic was in direct contrast to the constant increase of P2P activity over the last year and counterintuitive to the fact that P2P applications are still the top most downloaded applications (on) the internet."

We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports - because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere. It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps - because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.

Cubans and others on the island can still hold dollars in unlimited quantities and can change them into pesos before the new policy takes effect. But they will have to pay a 10 percent charge to exchange dollars afterward. There will be no such charge on changing other foreign currencies, such as Euros, into convertible pesos.

$18 - Celeron 700MHz 66MHz 128K FCPGA CPU OEM (socket 370)
$25 - ASUS MEW-AM Mainboard Socket 370 supporting Intel Celeron 300~533+ Onboard sound/video
$40 - 1 512mb Stick of PC100 Ram $58 if 2 256mb sticks are required.
$3 - Encore - 10/100 VIA Chipset NIC
$24 - COMP-USA ATX Case w 250W Power Supply.
$2 - Generic heatsink

Total = $112

Electronic voting machines will be used in 10 California counties during the next election. However, every California voter has the right to request a paper ballot, which can be used in a recount and verified for accuracy by each voter. Some election officials are trying to keep this choice a secret, so we want to make sure that you know about the availability of paper ballots. If you live in Alameda, Merced, Napa, Orange, Plumas, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Shasta, Tehama, please pass this to your friends and neighbors.

Pitcairn, with an area of just five square kilometres, has no safe harbour and is too rocky for an airstrip. It has no paved roads, no sewage treatment system and no landline telephones.

Visitors must fly to an outlying French Polynesian island and then travel by boat for 36 hours to get there, ending their journey in a longboat, riding the surf that crashes on to the island.

Islanders fear that the Pitcairn community, with a population of only 47, will not survive if the six are jailed.

Many of the men operate the island's only boats, which are lifelines to the outside world, ferrying in essential supplies.

Update: Zach sez, After following the Pitcairn Island link I noticed that smh.com.au now requries users to register. For those wishing to view the article and future articles from this site they can use the following details:

username: boingboing
password: boingboing

DRM is invisible only when users only want to use data in ways foreseen by the publishers.

DRM makes it harder for consumers to invent their own ways of using technology. A user wishing to listen to digital content on a new type of device needs to go to the media companies first, and ask, "Mommy, may I?"

Subject: How do I get rid of all those videos.
10/24/2004 8:35:08 PM - by Ashlee Simpson
Ok you people know the internet, I'm going to get rid of all these videos posted on other websites, how do i delete them?

Now, in all fairness -- we have not verified that this post was in fact penned by the real Miss Simpson. Honorary factchecker and wet blanket Jeff "Koganuts" Koga says,

Per a Stereogum comment (Link), The "Ashlee Simpson" who posted the comment you quoted from (notice no photo) (Link) differs from the real Ashlee Simpson (photo, link at the top of the forums pages) (Link). Still, both Ashlee's stats and date of registration are the same, so who knows why she's registered twice? Maybe she forgot her password? :-)

Hey, just thought I would give you a heads up and let you know that the posts from the author whose profile page does NOT have the picture is not the real Simpson. I say this because if you examine the source of this page, you will see this HTML code:

<td align="right" valign="top" class="txtLabel">Status: </td> <td align="left" valign="top" class="txtBox">Host</td>

On the "fake" profile page you will find this code:

<tr> <td align="right" valign="top" class="txtLabel">Status: </td> <td align="left" valign="top" class="txtBox">Registered User</td> </tr>

...with some javascript below it to spoof the Status field.

Originally I didn't notice that in this piece (by Schuyler Graham) the name of the glue is "Love All." There is nothing that can bring the earth together more than a liberal application of seventeen kascrillion tons of glue. It's hard to lift up a gun, or anything really. Don't dilute! Ok!

1: Raise the Dead. Get out your video editing tools and download a slice of George A. Romero's classic 1968 horror flick Night of the Living Dead. Romero's original, idiosyncratic, super-low-budget vision of a broken world filled with animated, cannibalistic corpses has filled the imaginations of moviegoers for decades. Indeed, it's the film that gave birth to an entire genre: the apocalyptic zombie horror movie. [More]

And because it's in the public domain, anyone can borrow pieces of it to make a music video, comic short, or other art. Which is what we want you to do. To really get your creative juices flowing, hook yourself up with another piece of re-mixable art: the 2003 student film "Amid the Dead." [More]

It's available for download here for the first time, under a Creative Commons license that gives you permission to play mad scientist.

Step 2: Go Mad – Invent! Take a piece of Romero, mix it up with some Amid the Dead, and add your own special twist. Use your imagination to build your own new piece of art.

Step 3: Give it a ReBirth Certificate. Tag your new creation with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. It not only lets people feel safe to use your work without having to phone you and a team of lawyers, but it prevents someone else getting their own team of lawyers and turning your work into a big commercial franchise that everyone else has to pay to use.

Earlier this month, the FCC opened the door for more consumer trials and wider deployment of the technology, which delivers internet connectivity through the electrical system in your home or office. What you may already know is that BPL could soon rival other consumer options like DSL and cable internet, delivering speeds of 2-3 Mbps through ordinary power jacks. More choices means more competition, and that likely means lower prices.

What you may not know is that beyond cheaper, ubiquitous internet -- BPL could potentially revolutionize the way electrical power is priced, managed, and delivered.

Link to archived audio for today's program, Link to NPR Day to Day home. Link to recent FCC newsletter edition which contains details on the October 14 announcement. Here's a link to some of the ARRL's concerns about the fact that BPL can cause interference with amateur ("ham") radio frequencies under certain circumstances. The FCC acknowledged this issue as it gave BPL the go-ahead on October 14.

“I didn’t want to feel I couldn’t get out my Satanic Bible and relax in bed. I didn’t want to bite my tongue any more when dealing with idiots,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

The much-anticipated new Treo 650 was unveiled by PalmOne today, and BoingBoing reader Marc Hedlund says,

[It has] a bunch of new features, including Bluetooth. Unfortunately the rocket scientists at Sprint decided to turn off Bluetooth for dialup from your laptop (though other networks allow it). Why? Well, they want you to buy *another* $250 product from them (their "connection card") so they can charge you as though you own two cell phones. The phone looks great -- too bad Sprint decided its customers are idiots.

UPDATE: Sprint has since announced that it will not levy the $250 fee. Details here. Cool!

# "I figure since I can't use it at camp x-ray anymore"
# "Hey, let's snort coke off this donkey's balls."
# "And then you just simply put the voter in what I call the "freedom machine.'"

Link to details for this image, link to more Aesthetic Apparatus posters, link to group's home page. (thanks, Siege, and Matt Jacobs!)

Thought I'd let you know that my jazz trio, Whispering Johnson, recently released some new recordings of original tunes (the Birthday Numbers) and we've made not only the audio but also the sheet music available under CC Sampling Plus licensing.

As far as I know it's the first time sheet music has been released with this kind of license. We think they're really good compositions, and we hope others will take them, play 'em, write lyrics for 'em, reharmonize 'em....whatever. It's the old jazz tradition, formalized for our times (which unfortunately seem increasingly hostile to the kinds of informal sharing and extension that have always fostered creativity).

And while we're at it -- the Wired Magazine CD with CC-licensed tracks is out on newsstands now. Link

"It's a great phone, but I'm scared to do anything with it." For a man toting the fastest PowerBook ever made, and completely in touch with the electronic world, this surprises me. "I'm largely scared of doing any of the advanced things on my phone mainly due to the cost. And by the cost I mean the ridiculous per megabyte data pricing everyone in Europe seems to have. In the States I had a simple data phone, nothing fancy. But with it I had a $50 a month unlimited data plan. A true unlimited plan, not an unlimited plan until you reach 10mb of Wap Data. Because it was flat rate, it meant that I could take risks and chances with services. I would play with the phone and see just what is possible, because I knew I would never get stuck with on of those bills where you go 'Shit! How did I spend £100 looking up the football scores?!?' So that's scared me off."

I recently purchased a Sapphire 9800XT 256MB AGP 3D card off Ebay, modded with a Zaltec VGA heatpiper cooler. So, the graphics card is awesome; I get to finally play Deus Ex 2 (pretty fun). The problem, however, is now my GARAGE DOOR OPENER won't work whenever I'm playing the game! I've tried this out several times, and it seems as though there is interference whenever I'm playing a computer game.

Hamadi assembles dozens of identity-theft cases in short narrative form, like little cautionary tales, and then strings them together with some interconnecting material to show you who commits identity theft, who falls victim to it, how identity thieves work, and what steps are most likely to mitigate the threats. Also, and importantly, he describes which steps won't make an appreciable difference in identity theft -- like biometric ID systems -- and how companies' imperiousness (demanding you identify yourself at every turn and taking copies of your ID) negligence (throwing those copies out unshredded) and foolishness (demanding easily forged documents like gas bills as proof of ID) make us all more vulnerable.

My take-away from this is that there are some steps that we can individually take to improve our security against identity theft -- buy a good shredder for your credit-card receipts, don't recite your account numbers aloud into your mobile phone on a crowded bus, make up something other than your mother's maiden name to use when asked to give it as a security password -- that the main identity theft risk needs to be addressed by calling companies and agencies that compromise our identities to account. When the hotel you've checked into takes a photocopy of your driver's license, you can storm out in a huff, but that's not a sustainable way of behaving, especially when they all start doing it. Link

Even more interestingly, the study found that 17% of young people have sent pictures or stories to a website and "online creativity can be encouraged through the very experience of using the internet." That is, the more time kids spend online, the more likely they are to produce their own content. And interaction breeds interaction. Does that mean we can safely assume that as internet usage increases its media timeshare, more and more people will become creative producers as well as consumers?

And does online game play in particular have any connection to this increased propensity to create? Nathan Combs recently suggested in his Socially Charged Software post that multiplayer games have a "MODder dimension", where "content is more than just accumulated and integrated, it is the product of collaboration and a shared value system of production: from inspiration through validation." (See Habbo Hotel's fan sites, for example.)

Turns out that a couple of days ago, HBO started encrypting all of its programs with CGMS-A. They allow you to "copy" a program that you record from their signal once. The trouble is that they consider that one-time copy to be recording the program onto your hard drive, not taking it from the hard drive to a DVD. THAT SUCKS OUT LOUD and I am extremely angry, as you can imagine. The files are HUGE and, even though I have a 200 gb hard drive, I can't keep them there forever. MediaCenter records tv shows with a dvr.ms extension.

Then, months later, it stopped working. He could no longer record his favorite shows. Why? Well, because the cablecaster decided to remove a right from him. And because Gateway, the company who sold him the equipment, decided to collaborate with the cablecaster in screwing him out of that right.

When this guy goes back to the store, what should he do to protect his next investment? Say he buys an HP device next, having concluded that Gateway won't look out for his interests. He takes it home and finds that it works fine for his purposes (maybe HP has a "better" deal with HBO that will let him burn more-restricted DVDs from his HP media-centre), then, a couple months later, the cablecaster switches on another flag and suddenly his video won't work.

Where's the market-force here? Should he stop being an HBO customer? A cable customer? A customer for only those PCs that he builds himself and installs a copy of GNU/Linux on?

What purchase-decision can he make or avoid in order to signal to the market that this kind of restrictiveness is unduly harsh and he won't pay for it any longer? Link (via Hack the Planet)

Knitty is a web-published knitting magazine that normally comes out quarterly. They've done a special issue for breast cancer awareness that's just come out, and they've published it under a Creative Commons license. (see the last page of the special issue for details). This is the very first time I've seen knitting patterns published under a CC license, and I think it's splendid!

Person 1: Knock knock.
Person 2: Who's there?
Person 1: Control freak.
Person 1: Now you say "control freak who?"

Q: Why can't engineers tell jokes timing?

How many kids with ADD does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
LET'S RIDE BIKES!

A duck goes into a bar and asks the bartender, "Got any grapes?" The bartender says, "No. This is a bar and we don't sell grapes." The duck leaves.

The next day, the duck goes back to the bar and asks, "Got any grapes?" The bartender says, "I told you yeaterday. This is a bar and we don't sell grapes."

The following day, the duck returns and asks,"Got any grapes?" The bartender loses it. He grabs the duck by the neck, and yells, "I already told you twice! This is a bar! I don't have any grapes! If you ask me again, I'll nail your beak to the floor!"

The next day, the duck goes in the bar and asks, "Got any nails?" The bartender sighs and says, "No, we don't have any nails." The duck says, "Good. Got any grapes?"

So many systems -- from Yahoo's login screen to most ISP-provided POP mail to iChat/AIM to all those reg-required news-sites -- default to you sending your password in the clear or even require you to do it, it's a crine shame.

Especially given how many passwords we need to generate these days and the concomittant inevitability of recycling passwords, which means that your throwaway NYT-LAT-WashPo password, which you send in the clear every time you login to one of those sites, may suddenly become associated with your credit-card number when you buy access to an article out of the NYT archive. Now you're sending a password that unlocks limited spending authority on your credit-card in the clear, potentially several times a day. Gee, thanks, NYT.

# Encrypt all information at all times, except when it's displayed on the screen. In particular, never send plaintext email or other information across the Internet: anything that leaves your machine should be encrypted.

# Digitally sign all information to prevent tampering and develop a simple way to inform users whether something is from a trusted source. This might, say, replace current stupid security warnings that people don't understand because they expose the guts of the technology. ("The security certificate has expired or is not yet valid." Aha. And what does that mean to a normal person?)

# Turn on all security settings by default since most people don't mess with defaults. Then, make it easy to modify settings so that users can get trusted things done without having to open a wide hole for everybody.

# Automate all updates. Most virus software downloads new virus definitions in the background, which is a good first step. The automated patching introduced with Windows XP's SP2 is also an improvement.

# Polish security features' usability to a level far beyond anything we've seen so far. Security is inherently complicated, and it's something users don't care about (until it's too late). The user interface requires the ultimate in simplicity. Heavy user testing and detailed field research are a must.

Update: In fact, if you look at the source code for login.yahoo.com (for the "standard" security) you'll see that the form uses:<form method=post action="https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?cm3nqsgq0mv6j" autocomplete=off name=login_form onsubmit="return hash(this,'http://login.yahoo.com/config/login')"> What that does is if you have javascript enabled, it creates an MD5 hash of your password (plus an included challenge) and sends that along with your userid. If you don't have javascript, it defaults to sending everything via https. Effectively your password is never broadcast in the clear, only your userid, which is public information anyway.

Disney also is working on something called Virtual Magic Kingdom, an online version of California's Disneyland built on the same technology as multiplayer online games.

Rasulo didn't say when the cyberpark would open, but he promised it would be "almost as magical as visiting one of our parks in person."

Update: A Disney insider writes, "Virtual Kingdom is a proposed MMORPG that Disney might launch. I've seen the storyboards and heard the pitch. Think Kingdom Hearts as an MMORPG, not Disneyland, visiting the various 'worlds' of Disney. Possible innovations include visiting physical locations (theme parks) and watching TV or listening to radio for special codes that unlock perks inside the game. Yes, they know Persistent World games are hard. Yes, they know grief players and powergamers will have to be controlled. No, it's nowhere close to being released or even in alpha code."

Link to quicktime movie of some people throwing a live cat around in zero gravity on a "vomit comet."

The file is linked from an Air Force website for an online education class called " COCKPIT PHYSICS: Physics Instruction for the Twenty-First Century." The website doesn't appear to be a joke, nor does the cat-tossing QuickTime clip, presumably intended to illustrate the science that governs cruelty to fluffy, innocent housepets in reduced gravity environments.

While you're visiting the Air Force website, don't miss this equally invaluable physics lesson (Link):

#1 If you are outside in a lightning storm, you may notice that your hair starts to stand on end. Why do you think this happens? Some good advice is to stay indoors during a lightning storm. If your hair is standing up, then you are in extreme danger.

UPDATE: The Air Force website where this was first spotted has removed the cat-toss video. New download location details in this update post: Link