Earlier today, I posted comments from a BoingBoing reader about the fact that MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging tool, censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or url. If you can't speak freely on a blog, what's the point of having one? This demanded a full investigation.

Using my existing MSN Passport account, I attempted to create a number of blogs, one after the other. The results of which titles passed and which were banned may surprise you -- or at least generate a few Beavis-and-Butthead snorkles. Each of the linked test-titles in this BoingBoing post points to to an actual, unmodified screenshot of the corresponding test blog I created (or was denied the ability to create) using MSN Search.

(1) BoingBoing's readers said the title "Corporate Whore" was censored. My attempt at "Corporate Whore Chronicles" met the same result, but "Corporate Prostitute Chronicles" worked fine. Hooray for synonyms with more syllables!

(2) I figured anything in the original list of seven dirty words banned by the FCC would be off-limits: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Most of that proved to be true, as did other potent cusswords which would likely cause license problems for a television or radio station. But a test blog titled "Tits for Tats" passed without incident. Off to a good start, with no unneccesarily broad language policing. Chalk one up for MSN Spaces!

(3) More good news. "World of Poop" is just fine. And the rather racy "Butt Sex is Awesome" made it through, as did the overtly naughty "Dick, Balls, Boobies, Goddammit." The test blog titled "My Craptacular Life" was free to do its bloggy thing, unhindered by prudish vocabulary cops. Even "Internet Explorer is Crappy" was welcomed with open arms. Now that's free speech!

(4) Uh-oh. My attempt to create an MSN Spaces blog called "Pornography and The Law" is met with rude red text advising me to can the profanity. So, if I were a law student who wanted to start a blog about the history of obscenity law in the United States, I'd be shit out of luck.

(5) Very bad news for fans of Russian literature. The blog title "Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov" is deemed inappropriate, as are any titles I try to create with the 1955 book's name.

(6) You may recall our previously-approved blog title, "Butt Sex is Awesome." That name was fine, but MSN Spaces puts the kibosh on "Anal Health for People who Think Buttsex is Awesome" ("anal" was the problem word here; "buttsex," "butt-sex," and "butt sex" all passed MS-muster.)

(7) "Smoking Crack: A How-To Guide For Teens." This wholesome little morsel, suggested by my NPR "Day to Day" producer Steve Proffitt, also made the grade.

The conclusion? A mixed bag of results that manages to do what most attempts to automate censorship do -- make fools of the censors.

Richard sez: "I noticed that recently you've blogged several vintage-things sites -- the commie cartoon, the sci-fi book covers, that old diary, etc. All very cool, and I think you should add one more site to the list --€“ "emails" from the last century!

"Someone found a huge box of old postcards (1898-1922) in an antique shop. Not all that unusual, but what made them interesting was that they were all sent between members of the same (huge) family. Their finder is now scanning them in, transcribing them, and sticking them online.

"It's the best of all possible things: you get to pry into the personal lives of strangers, see cool, old pictures (like a wall covered in skulls and London before the tourists arrived), as well as getting a rare glimpse into the past. As far as I can tell, these people used their postcards like we used email -– the post was so good the cards (and their reply) could arrive the same day." Link

I received this Cingular brochure in the mail today. The girl on the cover seems to be amused that a tiny hand is growing out of her shoulder. (click image for enlargement.)

BoingBoing reader and accidental sex-spam-sleuth Alias observes:

"Because GMail (and other popular email clients these days) blocks images by default, porn spammers have now begun to use 1980s style ASCII art in order to get their message across.

This textfile contains one simple example, with the words HOT GIRLS in big letters - it cunningly gets past spam filters by not containing any actual words in the body text. As its content is only apparent to humans, it will be tricky to catch by any filters - as long as the whitespace remains intact, the actual text can just be any random garbage. In theory, every spam email could be totally unique.

I confidently expect to see a renaissance in erotic ASCII art in the coming months, until someone figures out how to filter out this type of spam..."

Reader Xopl replies,

"Well, ASCII text spam messages are actually pretty easy to filter. You just render the text, and then use technology similar to an OCR to see if it spells anything. Now, if they start doing actual ascii-porn images... that's difficult. But frankly, I'm not sure I'd mind."

Link to spam-specimen (*.txt)

This reminds me of one of my favorite books in childhood.

Having failed to quell months of escalating unrest in three southern provinces by force, Thailand's unorthodox prime minister is hoping plane loads of origami peace bombs will defuse the tension.

Thaksin Shinawatra has urged all 63 million Thais to make at least one paper bird in the next fortnight so they can be dropped on the three restive provinces on December 5 as a sign of goodwill to mark King Bhumibol Adulyadej's birthday...

Link (thanks Alex Rosen)

Tim sez: "I saw your post today about the haptic arm wrestling stations. I work at The Tech in San Jose and thought I'd send along a couple photos of our stations, including one showing the videoconferencing and progress meters. We just opened our NetPl@net gallery and this is one of the

most popular exhibits in the gallery. We've had to make several repairs since the opening since kids absolutely love beating the hell out of it, so we're looking into ways to better reinforce its mechanical parts."

BoingBoing reader Tom Biro writes:

If you're not familiar with what went down in the last week with regard to Jason Kottke's blog, then here's a quick refresher. Kottke had pointed out details he was given about Ken Jennings' eventual demise on the television game show "Jeopardy," and much speculation took place on blogs and in the public eye that he would lose sometime this year. Then, a few days ago, Kottke posted audio and a description of what happened in the "final" show for Jennings. A few days later, he was contacted by Sony and asked to first remove the audio and then the printed description. Various print outlets, including the Washington Post were apparently not told to do the same. (Or are at least not saying/doing so)

Thursday morning, Kottke wrote this post, where he stated that "Things may be a little quieter around here in the short term as I deal with some stuff going on in the real world....I can't say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org."

The concern here is that a blogger could, even if s/he were *correctly/legally* doing something, be sued and lose the case, purely for financial reasons. Is this right?

No. It most certainly isn't. Link to Kottke's post. IFILM has a copy of the video here, and here's a torrent Link (thanks alfie). For the KenJen-obsessed, here's more fodder. Jeff Jarvis proposes a "Bloggers Legal Defense Society" -- Link.

Updated. Today, Microsoft launches their free hosted blogging platform, spaces.msn.com. What effect the service will have on Blogger, TypePad, Userland, and the like is, predictably, a subject of great debate. The service is free, and seems aimed squarely at home users. BoingBoing reader alfie checks the W3 validator site and says, "MSN Spaces seems to be completely ignoring markup standards. Well done chaps." Link. Reader Christopher Carfi hosts a discussion about the launch on his blog, here.

Reader Paul Pellerito says, "MSN Spaces User asciident notes that at the bottom of every MSN Space is (c)2004 Microsoft Corporation. And according to their terms of use:

For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission."

"Makes me wanna yell STOP! Soylent green is people!"

Wired News story, Forbes coverage, and here is the Microsoft press release.

Peter Orosz says:

MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging service, censors stuff! We're all gonna die! This is a screencap taken by a friend of mine who apparently tried to register at MSN Spaces. His blog's description reads "A Corporate Whore", which the service promptly bounced. Yikes!

Link

On this wonderful little blog, a young man in Bordeaux, France sketches his way through life in a series of moleskine journals. He scans the results, and posts them online for all to see. Simple things like this bring me endless delight in the power of the web. It's a microscope. It's a telescope. Its lens captures a field of infinitely varying depth. Link to Beleg's moleskine online, Link to his main blaugue, and link to the Wandering Moleskine Project.

In today's Wired News, a gadget shopping guide I pulled together, in which everything was selected for mobility. Battery-powered holiday travel delay coping mechanisms.

For geeks, the most telling signs of seasonal reality have nothing to do with a crisp chill in the smog, the scent of tofurkey roasting in the microwave or that scraping sound a super-sized fir makes when you're cramming it through the front door of your nano-apartment.No. The sure sign it's time to move out of holiday denial and into holiday acceptance is the sight of all those fresh gadgets jamming shelves at the mall.

Electronic healing starts when you admit you are powerless over your problem -- deciding which gizmos to buy, either for your loved ones or yourself. To kick-start your journey of techno-recovery, consider these goodies, all of which can fit handily into a single carry-on bag (we've even picked that out for you).

Link

This one really nails it. Frank Rich on the new red-state-panderin' mood washing over mainstream media at the moment. Some interesting thoughts on the role of blogs.

[N]etwork news still counts. The idea, largely but not exclusively fomented by the right, that TV news might somehow soon be supplanted by blogging as a mass medium may remain a populist fantasy until Americans are able to receive blogs by iPod. (At which point they become talk radio.) The dense text in the best blogs often requires as much of a reader's time and concentration as high-end print journalism, itself facing declining circulation. Since blogging doesn't generate big (if any) profits, there's no budget for its "citizen reporters" to reliably blanket catastrophic and far-flung breaking news. (There are no bloggers among the 36 journalists thus far killed in the Iraq war.) Bloggers can fact-check documents (as in the Rather case), opine, organize, talk back, leak early exit polls and publish multimedia outings of the seemingly endless supply of closeted gay Republican officials. But if bloggers are actually doing front-line reporting rather than commenting upon the news in a danger zone like Falluja, chances are that they are underwritten by a day job on the payroll of a major news organization.

Kevin Sites, the freelance TV cameraman who caught a marine shooting an apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque, is one such blogger. Mr. Sites is an embedded journalist currently in the employ of NBC News. To NBC's credit, it ran Mr. Sites's mid-November report, on a newscast in which Mr. Williams was then subbing for Mr. Brokaw, and handled it in exemplary fashion. Mr. Sites avoided any snap judgment pending the Marines' own investigation of the shooting, cautioning that a war zone is "rife with uncertainty and confusion." But loud voices in red America, especially on blogs, wanted him silenced anyway. On right-wing sites like freerepublic.com Mr. Sites was branded an "anti-war activist" (which he is not), a traitor and an "enemy combatant." Mr. Sites's own blog, touted by Mr. Williams on the air, was full of messages from the relatives of marines profusely thanking the cameraman for bringing them news of their sons in Iraq. That communal message board has since been shut down because of the death threats by other Americans against Mr. Sites.

Link (Thank you, J. Muller)

Following up on earlier BoingBoing posts (one, two) about controversial military recruitment tactics: a 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling this week will allow colleges and universities to ban military recruiters from their campuses.

The government has been using a ten year old federal law called the Solomon Amendment which "requires law schools to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives.

Link to military.com story, Link to Washington Post coverage. Link to PDF of decision, including the 30 page dissenting opinion. (Thanks, PJ)

BoingBoing reader Mark Miller says,

"For anyone who has actually received such a pre-recorded call from the US Army, and is not on the Do Not Call List, such action is already illegal in it of itself, I discovered. Here's a link to the federal code that prohibits this activity. Personally, I plan to take civil action against the US Army. I encourage anyone else who has received such a call to do the same.

Link

BoingBoing reader Brian Hagner, a student at University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, responds:

Mr. Miller claims the section of the US Code that is linked prohibits the automated phone calls by the US Army to be illegal. I believe if he had thoroughly read the exemptions listed under section (2) (B) of the linked section of the code, he would see that the Commission holds broad discretionary powers to exclude such automated calls from being held illegal under the code. It is well with in reason for the Commission to find a) that the US Army calls are not specifically of a commercial nature, or b) if they are deemed to be commercial calls, they do not infringe on the privacy rights of the recipients, and do not include unsolicited advertisement. While it seems obvious that these calls are advertisements, its entirely likely that they are ruled not to be advertisements, but rather fall into another category due to the nature of the US Army and the inherent necessity of recruiting people to our nation’s defense.

I enjoy reading the postings on BoingBoing, but just thought it unwise to encourage people to file suit against the US Army based on an incomplete reading of the US Code.

I enjoy reading the postings on BoingBoing, but just thought it unwise to encourage people to file suit against the US Army based on an incomplete reading of the US Code.

Reader Douglas Barnes (also a law student, but at the University of Texas School of Law) counters:

At the risk of turning BoingBoing into a legal debating club, I have to point out that Brian Hagner has misread the statute. He also neglected to check the implementing regulations to determine whether the hypothetical exemptions he suggests were implemented (for the reasons below, they weren't, but it's always good to check anyhow).

The ban on automated calls to cell phones is in 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(1)(A). At 227(b)(2)(B), it allows regulatory exemptions to 227(b)(1)(B). You'll notice they put a helpful forward pointer in 227(b)(1)(B) "or is exempted by rule or order by the Commission under paragraph (2)(B)."

There is another exemption, 227(b)(2)(C), which allows a regulatory exemption for calls "calls to a telephone number assigned to a cellular telephone service that are not charged to the called party . . ." More interestingly, there are sovereign immunity and related issues to work through, which I will spare the readers of BoingBoing.

And Mr. Hagner replies:

Douglas Barnes is absolutely correct in that the calls to cell phones are prohibited. I did not realize that the discussion was about calls to cell phones because the previous posts did not specify. After looking further, I realize that Mr. Barnes’s blog mentioned cell phones, but that was not specified any where else. I assumed we were talking about automated calls to phones in general.

BoingBoing reader Darren writes,

I saw your post on Worlds AIDS Day. Coincidentally, I just posted on a great CBC radio documentary about the church's role in HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It's called 'Milk and Honey, Vaseline and Prayer'. Collectively, the Christian churchs' approach to managing HIV/AIDS is shameful. The Anglicans are the only church to offer condoms to parishioners, and even they seemed to do it reticently. The documentary's title refers to the most common approach to the disease.

Link to documentary and Link to Darren's blog post.

BoingBoing reader Lee Kin Mun says, "Hi, I was amused to read about the umbilical cord story you posted, and just want to point out that while gross to most Western audiences, it is a very common practice in Asian communities. We Chinese do it too (yes, even in metropolitan Singapore), like my blog friend Huileng. My wife has the umbilical cord stump of my secondborn son (but not our firstborn daughter, we forgot) too. Personally, I think keeping the umbilical cord stump is way less gross than the eating of placentas (which I am told, tastes like liver).

Link to a post on Huileng's blog about umbilical cord cultural norms.

This scientific paper was published two years ago, but I missed it. It may be an oldie, but it's a goodie. Computer scientist Markus Kuhn demonstrated a way to read CRT computer monitors at a distance using a photosensor, even if you're not facing the screen.

An image is created on the CRT surface by varying the electron beam intensity for each pixel. The room in which the CRT is located is partially illuminated by the pixels. As a result, the light in the room becomes a measure for the electron beam current. In particular, there is a little invisible ultrafast flash each time the electron beam refreshes a bright pixel that is surrounded by dark pixels on its left and right.

So if you measure the brightness of a wall in this room with a very fast photosensor, and feed the result in another monitor that receives the exact same synchronization signals for steering its electron beam, you get to see an image like this (after using a mathematical signal processing technique--ed.)

Link (Thanks, Ken!)

Cereality is a sit-down restaurant that serves up custom blends of brand-name breakfast cereals and toppings. The second Cereality location just opened on the University of Pennsylvania campus. From an Associated Press report:

Between bites of hot oatmeal with cranberries and almonds, Penn junior Alpha Mengistu, 20, said Cereality offered more than a quick carb- and sugar-load."> Between bites of hot oatmeal with cranberries and almonds, Penn junior Alpha Mengistu, 20, said Cereality offered more than a quick carb- and sugar-load.

"I think this would be a good place for a date," she said. "You could learn a lot about a person by what cereal they choose."

Link

In my latest issue of Lab Notes, research from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:

* Listening for extraterrestrials

* A class on Lego Mindstorms robots

* Composites for satellite engineering

Link

The Center for Disease Control offers two free sets of disease trading cards to download in PDF form. Each card has photos and information about diseases that the CDC studies, from Anthrax to the West Nile Virus. Link (via MetaFilter)