The Associated Press found what appear to be new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse by US military personnel -- by Googling for them, then paying 29 cents a copy for reprints through on-line photo sharing service smugmug.com. The images appear to date from May 2003, which may make them the earliest evidence of such alleged abuse. Snip:

[The AP] reporter found more than 40 of the pictures among hundreds in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site by a woman who said her husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty. It is unclear who took the pictures, which the Navy said it was investigating after the AP furnished copies to get comment for this story.

These and other photos found by the AP appear to show the immediate aftermath of raids on civilian homes. One man is lying on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat. In many photos, faces have been blacked out. What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo and others show debris and upturned furniture.

(...) The images were found through the online search engine Google. The same search today leads to the Smugmug.com Web page, which now prompts the user for a password. Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived version of the page. "I think it's fair to assume that it would be very hard for most consumers to know all the ways the search engines can discover Web pages," said Smugmug spokesman Chris MacAskill. Before the site was password protected, the AP purchased reprints for 29 cents each.

Link to AP news story, and link to the smugmug.com photosharing site (the images referenced are no longer publicly accessible through that photo-sharing website). The AP report says:

Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived version of the page.

Any 1337 BoingBoing readers who sleuth the url for Google's cache of the smugmug gallery in question are invited to let us know.

Update: More images said to be from the smugmug gallery in question are published here: Link (Thanks, pemdasi) And the Spanish newspaper El Mundo has also published a selection of those photos. Link (Thanks, nv1962)

Note that we have made our traffic stats available in the left column. Link

Warren Baelen sez: "I was [at the Computer History Museum] the other night for a memorial to Ken Iverson who recently passed away. He was the designer/inventor of several languages including APL and J. Ken was a great mathematician and computer pioneer and they had a nice tribute to him. But before the memorial I got to take the walking tour.

What I thought BB readers may want to know about is this "viewable storage" tour. It features some computers that you would expect to see at a computer history museum, including an Apple I signed by Wozniak, a piece of the Eniac, but it also has some other really cool things such as a complete Johniac, an IBM 7030 "Strech", a few Cray machines. One computer that stood out in my mind was an IBM radar analysis computer -- features included: *light pen/gun, *circular radar console, *built-in phone (rotary of course), *cigarette lighter and ashtray.

Yes, a cigarette lighter and ashtray -- because watching radar of Russian bombers must have been really boring. I enclosed a picture of the computer with ashtray (which appears on the left hand side -- rotary phone on right). Apparently this machine was obsolete when it was deployed because the USSR switched to using ICBMs and this machine was built for tracking bombers in the Artic circle -- however it wasn't declassified until the 1980s because the Russians didn't know what its capabilities were. As my father put it, 'sometimes a blinking light is just a blinking light.'"

Guess we'll have to find something new to blog about:

[T]he Internet [Ed. note -- Read: BoingBoing] has been abuzz about an alleged hack into Target's Web operations, where its online store site appeared to offer items for sale that one wouldn't normally expect to find at the mainstream retailer. When customers typed "marijuana" into the search feature of Target's Web site, books and CDs about marijuana appeared that Target wouldn't want to sell. Worse--at least for Target--books, CDs and DVDs related to sex and drugs appeared when other words were entered.

"When a guest logs on to Target.com and searches for a particular word, that search includes Amazon.com's millions of books, music and (movie) titles," Target said in its statement. "Target.com is currently working with Amazon.com to suppress certain titles from the Amazon.com catalog from appearing on the Target.com web site."

Link to News.com story, and link to related BoingBoing posts about Target selling anal massage, more anal massage, blowjobs, crack, MDMA, and marijuana. That was quite some inventory! (thanks Steve)

My friend Todd Lappin recently returned from a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto, and he has uploaded his excellent photographs on Flickr. Link

This robot stereo and loudspeaker system is beautiful. Link

Tom sez: "Who needs an electronic nose to sniff out buried landmines? The Belgians prefer African giant pouched rats. And no, the rats do not get blown to bits."

The idea of using rats for the detection of landmines came up through a search for a cheap and efficient mine detector tool, which would be able to detect both metal and plastic landmines.

"Added bonus: the rats can detect tuberculosis from sputum samples!!" Link

Pop your way to a state of bliss with Virtual Bubble Wrap. Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

UPDATE: Here's a Palm OS version.

Lisa Rein has transcribed the the complete Countdown With Keith Olbermann interviews last week with Jesse Jackson and Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell about the controversy surrounding the vote count. Video available too. Link (to Blackwell) Link (to Jackson)

Camille Utterback's Shaken artwork is a tiny video screen embedded inside a snow globe. From the artist's statement:

"In the Shaken object, the physical gesture of shaking the device initiates the objects response of being 'shaken'. This object consists of a snow globe with an embedded LCD screen and tilt sensor. The more the user shakes the object, the more momentum is added to a video of a woman shaking out of control. Future versions of this piece will incorporate video clips which evoke a first person depiction of being shaken or disorientated."

Link (via Near, Near Future)

Maverick German anatomist Gunther von Hagens is the inventor of "plastination," a process by which the body and fat in a corpse is replaced with a polymer. His surreal work is currently on display in Los Angeles. Now, von Hagens is preparing to plastinate a giant squid in his Heidelberg laboratory. From a New Scientist article:

To research the project, von Hagens visited (Auckland, New Zealand squid expert Steve) O’Shea in October to study some much smaller species such as arrow squid. “We dissected a number of ‘sacrificial’ squid,” says O’Shea. This week, O’Shea sent a mature female giant squid, measuring about 10 metres including tentacles, and a mature male, just under 7 metres, to Heidelberg.

Link