An anonymous tipster points us to the launch of an election-related download project organized by a group called "Internet Veterans for Truth." If you're familiar with P2P-politics, you get the basic idea -- though the projects are not related, and don't follow the same content-gathering process.

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.

Link. Everything's free, natch.

Earlier today I was a guest on the breakfast show of Australia's ABC Radio National, along with professors Leonard Kleinrock and Alex Halavais. The occasion: an event in LA tomorrow commemorating the 35th anniversary of the internet. (Event link). Here's the list of participants.

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.

Link to archived radio show, with streaming sound online (in RealAudio only, sorry).

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!

Becky Hogge has written an excellent piece in today's Guardian about the Creative Commons in honour of the upcoming Creative Commons UK launch.

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.

Link (Thanks, Becky!)

Mark sez, "I run the web archiving programme at the British Library and I've just posted a tender for the development of a smart archiving crawler. The smart crawler is to be free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The project may be of interest to BB readers in the search, document classification and ranking, digital library, or archiving space."

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.

113k Word Link (Thanks, Mark!)

Nintendo sent the email below to the good people at Suicide Girls. Background here and here.

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

Bonnie Powell points us to this incredibly odd story from the folks at Chelsea Green, the publisher of cognitive linguist George Lakoff's latest book Don't Think of an Elephant! (Previous BB posts about Lakoff here and here.)

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 email exchange between Baldwin and the New York Times is funny, and sad. Link

Terrifying (ly cheesy) sound effects from an old LP. Great stuff. Link (via PCL Linkdump)

Reinvigorated after spending $500,000 on a self-congratulatory awards dinner in which it handed out "lifetime achievement" awards, the two-year old Dept. of Homeland Security went after an extremely dangerous toy store owner who was selling a knockoff of a Rubik's Cube. We can all sleep a little more soundly tonight.

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.

Link (Thanks, Ben!)

Michael sez "There may be new impetus to visit Kerinci Seblat National Park in Indonesia. The Orang Pendek may be a living fossil - the same species as Homo Floresiensis, but be very much alive. There are still sightings of such "little people" even today, and none other than Fauna & Flora International, the worldâ€'s oldest conservation charity, is searching for the creature.

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

The only thing I know about these scans of pages from a German kids' books about a Salamander is that they are really beautiful and that they remind me of the work of cartoonist Jim Woodring. Link (via The Cartoonist)

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

Here are a few notes about my favorite story of the year - the discovery of a race of tiny, tool-making people with heads the size of grapefruits.

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.

  There's a lot of good stuff about the tiny people at Nature.com. Link

Derek sez: "Grand Theftendo is a port of Grand Theft Auto III for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is Grand Theft Auto III running on an 8 bit, 256 x 240 resolution, 2 bit colour x 2 bit palette, 1.79 Mhz system, written entirely in 6502 Assembly Language! It includes the entire Portland city!" Link

After two days of silence on the hundreds of tons of missing plastic explosives in Iraq, the President defended himself by stating that the explosives might have been removed before the US invasion. These photos seem to suggest otherwise. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Very scary Halloween costumes for kids based on current political themes.

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!

Link (Thanks, Stephen!)

Video Vote Vigil wants people with video cameras to record instances of voter intimidation.

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.

Link

A Kerry endorsement from one of the most unlikely sources imaginable. The Economist endorsed Bush last time around, and before that Dole. Link. (Thanks, Glenn)

Adriaan Tijsseling, maker of the brilliant Ecto blog editor -- used by all of us who work on BB -- has just shipped a MacOS X app called 1001, which provides a slick desktop interface to Flickr, including your friends' photos, photo-strems matching your favorite tags, and an easy uploader. Link (via Joi)

A Wisconsin man tossed a live electrical wire into the tub while his wife was bathing, "hoping a near-death experience would save their marriage." From an Associated Press report:

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.

Dahlby was convicted yesterday of attempted first-degree murder. Link (Thanks, C-Lo!)

My latest article for TheFeature is about University of Washington University Thomas Furness's Virtual Retinal Display, a system that paints a video image onto your eyeball with a laser beam.

"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."

Link

BB pal Jon Lebkowsky says:

"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.

Link

Yesterday, we blogged about a school principal who allegedly threatened students who attended an on-campus Bush speech in Kerry tee-shirts with expulsion. Many of you wrote to say that you communicated with the principal above and 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

I don't buy it: signing up to do #1, enforcing a ban on political expression, at a political event, in a political season, is a betrayal of an educator's duty. And anything a school administrator bans carries with it the implicit threat of discipline. One student reports being threatened with expulsion, the principal denies it. It may be that the principal didn't make the threat of expulsion, but telling students that it is forbidden to do foo implies that students who undertake foo will be punished somehow. Link

Flickr users are using the "eclipse" tag to collect photos of the lunar eclipse from all over the world. Some are breathtaking. Link (via Waxy)

Dremel, maker of the famed rotary tool that is the favorite of casemodders and hardware hackers, have released a special Hallowe'en rotary tool that is specifically designed for elaborate pumpkin carving. Link (via /.)