BB reader Jake sez: "It's interesting to note this vindication of Cory's prediction that intellectual property right law makes certain things too costly for poorer countries to use. The head of Brazil's AIDS program told the BBC today that the only way his group can continue its fight is by breaking the hold on anti-AIDS patents." Link to news story.

If you can't remember, maybe it's time for an update. World AIDS Day -- today -- is as good a day as any to get an HIV test, and the web provides a number of search tools for finding free, anonymous testing near you (as well as AIDS education and safer-sex support). More options than ever are out there.

For instance, where I live here in LA, one organization offers free, quick oral testing (no blood! no needles!) in trailers that drive up to areas near nightclubs and shopping districts. The test strips taste sorta gross (in a pepto-bismol-meets-spackle kind of way), but you're sent off in a few minutes packing free candy, condoms, and the empowerment that knowledge brings. Wherever you are, periodic testing and a commitment to practicing responsible sex are a good thing. Link to HIV testing resource website maintained by the US CDC, Link to resources at stopaids.org, Link to test facility search resources at AIDSHealth.org.

A correspondent from Australian Personal Computer Magazine is live-blogging the Sharman networks trial in Sydney. He describes it as "the world’s-biggest-copyright-case for the Internet’s most-downloaded-program-in-history." Link to Day 2, Link to Day 1. (via pho)

In today's NYT, an interesting feature about China's animation industry -- which, like virtually everything else there, appears to be growing fast. Talent that has until now served mostly as outsourced labor for American TV and film projects won't remain nameless for long, as a string of new features are readied for release.

Seen from outside, there is nary a hint of the Magic Kingdom about this ambitious young animation studio nestled amid magnolias and palms on the campus of Shenzhen University. A glimpse inside one specially secured building, accessible only with a smart ID card that one swipes through a reader to gain entry and move about inside, soon gives up the game. The first clues are the Hollywood posters that hang from nearly every wall: "Star Wars," "Godzilla," "The Lost World," "The Matrix," "End of Days." Down one hallway, heavily air-conditioned computer rooms hum with the kind of processing power one might find in a high-tech laboratory. The giveaway is the army of artist-students slouched over their flat-screen monitors in one dimly lighted production room after another, drawing thousands of pictures for feature-length films.

Early next year, Global Digital Creations Holdings, a fledgling animation studio that has mostly labored in anonymity, is aiming for the big time with the worldwide release of its first 3-D feature film, "Thru the Moebius Strip," a science-fiction adventure about a determined boy's time travel to another galaxy to rescue his stranded father.

Link

Nifty Corgi Toys art gallery. Link (Thanks, Todd!!

Matt Browning sez: "This is a followup for the Haptic entry by Mark yesterday. I wanted to point out a Haptic Arm Wrestling League that just launched in 6 science museums, including the New York Hall of Science in Queens, the Tech Museum in San Jose, and the Imaginarium in Alaska. I developed the software and co-developed the electronics for this, and after 4 months, i still get a big smile watching the kids (and adults) use it for the first time.

Features include:
* live video and audio feeds of your opponent
* left handed person can wrestle a right handed person
* safety (for the kids) balenced with realistic (for the adults) arm movements
* a statistics League - showing the locations with the top winning percentages
* RFID bracelet activation (only for the Tech Museum) that allows museum visitors to go home after the museum visit and enter their ID into the website, providing screenshots of them and their opponent while they were playing." Link

UPDATE: Joe sez: "It's always good to see real life catching up with sci-fi. I can't have been the only person who saw this post and immediately thought of Alan Moore's 80's epic "The Ballad of Halo Jones." Her cabinmate on the spaceship Clara Pandy, where they were working as stewardesses, the 7 foot tall Toy Molto, was forever playing an armwrestling machine and wrecking it. Here is a picture of Toy having just returned from the stores with a new stronger arm for the poor machine. It would be nice to see this groundbreaking graphic novel brought to the attention of modern readers, as it is easily as good as anything produced since (IMHO)."

Video of last Friday's ABC World News Tonight segment about Firefox (in which I was a participant) is now online.

Link to WMV (~15MB), and Link to Real (~9MB). If anyone's moved to torrentify or convert to other formats, well, be my geek guest.

(Thanks much to JP and Mike O. for TiVoing, and big thanks to Leonard for hosting.)

Update: Brian provides two torrents. Link to WMV torrent, Link to Real torrent. Thanks, Brian!

Fleshbot says:

Shu Lea Cheang's online art project mixes random porn images grabbed from the web while displaying the number of Africans who died of AIDS since you started connecting. Porn is all about fantasy -- but if there was ever a time to remember that certain realities still affect all of us (especially the adult industry), it's today. Get educated, get involved, and do what you can to make observing World AIDS Day every December 1 a thing of the past.

Link (NSFW)

Bad news for the internet, bad news for culture, bad news for the liberty of ideas. In an era of shrinking funds for schools and bricks-and-mortar libraries, a federal judge rules against efforts to open access to knowledge on the 'net.

The case, Kahle v. Ashcroft, pitted two archive groups -- the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, and the Prelinger Archives, which preserves films -- against the U.S. Justice Department. The archivists argued that four copyright laws are collectively keeping people from gaining access to "orphan" works: out-of-print books, old films, and academic articles that have little or no commercial value. The laws that the archivists fault are the Copyright Act of 1976, the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. A central part of the archivists' argument is that laws granting copyright protection to all works, even those for which the creators have not sought protection, have radically altered the "traditional contours of copyright."

Link to SF Chron story. And snip from John Borland's coverage on CNET:

Kahle said Wednesday that the decision would be appealed, and that they had always planned to fight the primary battle in the appellate courts. The court had not directly addressed what he said was the primary thrust of the case--a change in laws to automatically renew copyrights, instead of requiring copyright holders to reregister, he said.

"The key component of the district court ruling is that the judge did not consider the main aspect of this case, which is the changing of the contour of copyright law from opt in to opt out," Kahle said. "That has dramatically changed what's under copyright, and even more ominously, changes the nature of what can be put on the Internet."

Link to CNET story. Link to court's decision in PDF format. Link to a related /. thread.

Big news in Pennsylvania today, after reports of many bureaucratic challenges -- Philadelphia has reached an agreement with Verizon that will allow the city to offer free WiFi as a sort of public utility. Free like liberty, free like beer?

Philadelphia's plans are the most ambitious of any major U.S. city to provide free or cheap high-speed wireless to all residents. Lawyers for the city and Verizon, the city's local telephone company, found common ground Tuesday in discussions with the governor's office, said Luz Cardenas, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street.

Link.

But don't start cheering too soon, counters BoingBoing reader Mike:

While Philly's WiFi plan looks like it will go ahead as planned, that's only because PA Gov. Ed Rendell negotiated with Verizon to get their permission. The bill that Rendell just signed into law is just as bad as ever -- it was written by corporate lobbyists and gives telco monopolies the right to veto municipal plans to provide broadband services. Philadelphians will get their WiFi only because we raised a ruckus about it, but other cities in Pennsylvania are out of luck. This is a bad deal and a bad precedent.

Link to the full text of Mike's critique.

And BB reader Chris Holland says:

Philly citizens are about to unwittingly foot the bill for higher-priced broadband while jeopardizing their Municipal WiFi project, courtesy of telco-lobby-sponsored Pennsylvania House Bill 30. Om Malik is rounding-up analysis from Esme Vos and Harold Feld. The WSJ also offers a similar perspective. Slashdot also picked-up this story from Macworld.

Soundtrack to the Chestnut Revolution: a song called Razom Nas Bahato. "Together we are many / We cannot be defeated." Link to blog entry with lyric translation, and Link to MP3 file. (Thanks, JP)

Mike Horvat, an Oregon resident who really, really, really digs science fiction -- has placed his lifetime collection of fanzines up for auction on eBay. The list of 250,000 individual issues range from 1964 to 1978, and include complete runs of Trumpet, Psychotic, Algol and Locus, according to his description.

"After forty years of amassing my collection of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fanzines I have to get rid of it. I don't have much to say about it, because if you don't all ready know what I am talking about, you won't want to buy it."

Link to auction (via trufen)

Reader Francis Hwang says,

I've just opened an eBay auction for an unauthorized iPod "U2 vs. Negativland" Special Edition. Commemorating the infamous early-90s case in which U2's record label crushed indie noisemakers Negativland, this iPod is a U2 iPod that comes pre-loaded with lots of Negativland tunes, and some fancy box modifications, too. Also, profits go to Downhill Battle, so we can start fighting back!

Link

If only it were the result of a Fark photoshop contest. Link (Thanks, dave davies)

A handwritten journal attributed to a woman who lived in Boston in 1878 is for sale on eBay. It's filled with talk of star quilts, boiling sheets, chamber pots, bed tick, collar boxes, ginger cakes, feather pillows, corsets, stabbings and head wounds. Our ancestors called these things "DIE-ah-rees." Link (Thanks, Robert)

New Scientist has an interesting story about the struggles of bloggers in China and the "Great Firewall" of government censorship there.

The potential of blogs to act as news sources is relished by some Chinese bloggers. One site, Chinanewsman.net, founded by journalist and programmer Li Zhaohui, is a haven for news that is banned from the official media. Within its first five months of operation, Chinanewsman was closed repeatedly, forcing Li to switch internet service provider six times.

But it survived, and now hosts around 5000 blogs kept by journalists. Some of the information is available only to registered users who join by invitation. This mechanism has protected the site, probably because the censors are, in general, more tolerant of these semi-private spaces.

Link

Cybersociology author Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri, a director at the Institute for the Future, have teamed up to host a course at Stanford University that will undoubtedly be incredibly engaging. The course, Toward A Literacy of Cooperation, is open to public enrollment and kicks off January 5. Howard and Andrea have lined up a dynamite list of guest speakers including Paul Hartzog, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Ross Mayfield of SocialText. From the course description:

"Darwin had a blind spot. It wasn't that he didn't see the role of cooperation in evolution. He just didn't see how important it is. So for two centuries -- a time during which the world passed from an agrarian landscape into a global post-industrial culture of unprecedented scale and complexity --science, society, public policy and commerce have attended almost exclusively to the role of competition. The stories people tell themselves about what is possible, the mythical narratives that organizations and societies depend upon, have been variations of "survival of the fittest." The role of cooperation has been largely unmapped.

Now is the time to finally build this map, not because we're feeling altruistic, but because scientists are beginning to see how cooperation actually works in biology, sociology, mathematics, psychology, economics, computer science and political science. And in the last two decades, we've seen a variety of new challenges to business models that stress competition over customers, resources, and ideas. Companies in emerging high-tech industries learned that working with competitors could build markets and help avoid costly standards wars. The open source movement showed that world-class software could be built without corporate oversight or market incentives. Google and Amazon built fortunes by drawing on, even improving, the Internet by facilitating and building on the collective actions of millions of web publishers and reviewers. Thousands of volunteers have created over one million pages of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia – in over 100 languages. Collective knowledge-gathering, sharing economies, social software, prediction markets – numerous experiments in technology-assisted cooperation are taking place.

In this lecture series we want to begin to put these pieces of the puzzle together to build a practical map of cooperative strategy, starting with the basic social dilemma that has forever defined the tension between self-interest and social institutions. Social dilemmas arise when you or I act rationally... in our own self-interest...but our individual rational acts add up to a situation in which everyone is worse off. That is, our choices add up to less, not more."

Link