This field manual is intended as a training text in basic cryptanalytics and as a reference for cryptanalysts in military occupational specialty (MOS) 98C and related MOSs. The proponent of this publication is Headquarters, United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). Send comments and recommendations on DA Form 2028 (Recommended Changes to Publications and Blank Forms) directly to Commander, United States Army Intelligence School, Fort Devens (USAISD), ATTN: ATSI-ETD-PD, Fort Devens, MA 01433-6301.

Update: Frank sez, "I read with interest the discussion on Military Cryptanalysis. I was in the next to the last US Army class (1976) for Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) 98B which taught us to become military cryptanalysts. Just before I retired from the US Army Reserves in 2002, I was the last trained Army cryptanalyst in service. Our "bibles" of training and reference were written by William F. Friedman (Friedman's contributions thereafter are well known-- prolific author, teacher, and practitioner of cryptology. Perhaps his greatest achievements were introducing mathematical and scientific methods into cryptology and producing training materials used by several generations of pupils. His work affected for the better both signals intelligence and information systems security, and much of what is done today at NSA may be traced to William Friedman's pioneering efforts.)"

Make that two customers -- for life. This is the dirtiest of pool imaginable. Bait-and-switch. I wonder if it's even legal. You'd think that if Intuit had actually made a compelling new product that it could entice its customers to buy an upgrade; seems like they've decided that instead of improving their products, they'll just extort money from customers who were stupid enough to buy from them in the first place. That's a mistake I imagine very few of us will make again once word of this gets out. Link (Thanks, Norvy!)

Update mrquizzical sez, "Following up on the post about Quicken extorting money from customers by expriring Quicken 2002: Intuit is extorting money from financial institutions, big time, by eliminating support for their own QIF format,replacing it with OFX functionality but forcing financial institutions to pay them an exorbitant license fee. I work for a credit union, and we're being held up for $60,000; otherwise our members will lose the ability to import transaction history into Quicken 2005 or later"

Johnson's piece is a thought-provoking look at how productivity software can really change the way that you work -- that you think! Writing in the era of these tools is truly a different undertaking than the writing of old.

Think of all the documents you have on your machine that are longer than a thousand words: business plans, articles, ebooks, pdfs of product manuals, research notes, etc. When you're making an exploratory search through that information, you're not looking for the files that include the keywords you've identified; you're looking for specific sections of text -- sometimes just a paragraph -- that relate to the general theme of the search query. If I do a Google Desktop search for "Richard Dawkins" I'll get dozens of documents back, but then I have to go through and find all the sections inside those documents that are relevant to Dawkins, which saves me almost no time.

So the proper unit for this kind of exploratory, semantic search is not the file, but rather something else, something I don't quite have a word for: a chunk or cluster of text, something close to those little quotes that I've assembled in DevonThink. If I have an eBook of Manual DeLanda's on my hard drive, and I search for "urban ecosystem" I don't want the software to tell me that an entire book is related to my query. I want the software to tell me that these five separate paragraphs from this book are relevant. Until the tools can break out those smaller units on their own, I'll still be assembling my research library by hand in DevonThink.

I can't find any information about him on Google. I don't even know if he's still alive. But I did find this Japanese site that sells products with Emberly's drawings on them. I wonder if these are available in the US? Leave it to the Japanese to recognize this American (?) artist's genius. Link
UPDATE: He lives! Here's his site: Link (Thanks, Robin the librarian!)

Also of note: Gang photography by Robert Yager, whose work we've featured on BB before, will be on display in a Winnebago installation (!) at the artLA event -- which takes place today and Sunday.
Link to artLA details.

• Raffi "Tivo Hacks" Krikorian and NYU's Tom Igoe doing a double-header tutorial on hardware hacking called Net Objects
• Damian Stolarz explaining how to Hack Sci-Fi Features Into Your Car in a half-day session covering "the basic workings of the automotive electric, audio, and diagnostic systems" and "radio head-ends, touch screen input devices, remote controls, and in car x86-based hardware and software all in the context of a working automobile"
• My cow-orkers Wendy "Chilling Effect" Seltzer and Jason "Patent Busting" Schulz on Endangered Devices and How We Can Save Them -- a tour of all the cool crap you can buy today, which might be illegal tomorrow
• My pervy cow-orker Annalee "Techsploitation" Newitz's talk on How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change which covers "how sex laws have enlarged the demand for technologies that provide anonymous, instant, mobile gratification while also stoking content-providers' desires for soft/hardware that can control access and quickly identify users by age and geographical location."
• The wildest researchers at BBC Radio: Tom "Plasticbag" Coates, Matt "Brain Hacks" Webb, Matt "No Nickname" Biddulph and Paul "Also No Nickname" Hammond talking on Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software in which they explain some deeply cool, deeply weird shit they're doing with the BBC's radio service
• Matt "Metafilter" Haughey on Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild in which the Creative Commons's secret search sauce will be unveiled and dissected
• Tom "The British Don't Really Have Nicknames" Loosemore explains TheyWorkForYou.com, the best political advocacy site I've ever seen, in Forgiveness, Not Permission: Retro-fitting the Semantic Web onto British Democracy
• Natalie "Feral Robots" Jermijenko -- my choice for real-world cyberpunk heroine -- takes us beyond her genius feral robot dogs with Social Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?) Robots: "Feral robots are roving packs of adapted open source robots that are released to investigate contaminated urban sites. Feral robots begin as domestic commercially available robotic dog toys."
• Danny "NTK" O'Brien and Merlin "5ives" Mann will jointly present their Life Hacks Live work -- a book-length version of Danny's amazing hacker life-skills Life Hacks project, with "a whistle-stop tour through an amazing year in this exploding field: tracking apps that merge the geek's command-line power with GUI ease-of-use; the expansion of RSS and wiki techniques into frontline organizing apps; the spread of search and script automation onto the desktop; how plain text files are the new rock and roll."
• Finally, Lee "Jhai" Felsenstein, who pretty much invented the PC, will present on Tech That Helps the World, talking on the bicycle-charged ruggedized meshing WiFi networks he's sending to Laos. I mean, seriously: LAOS.

It was discovered by MaxPatrol team that it is possible to defeat Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP SP2 Heap protection and Data Execution Prevention mechanism. As a result it is possible to implement:

* Arbitrary memory region write access (smaller or equal to 1016 bytes) Arbitrary code execution

* DEP bypass.

Exeemlite client is out. It removes the adware, but is a version behind the latest eXeem release. The latest release is out of private beta, but on the surface of it, the current version of exelite is not. Not to fear. Just close the popup asking for a serial, and off you go (ie. requiring the serial feature has been neutered, along with the adware.)

Note that you can manually unistall the adware from the latest oficial release, but when you restart eXeem, it _helpfuly_ reinstalls the adware (cydoor I think...)

Original:

Some have attempted to paint copyright piracy as a victimless crime, arguing that "if I make a copy of a computer program, you still get to keep your copy, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case.

Reducing piracy offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the piracy rate, the larger the IT sector and the greater the benefits.

Some have attempted to paint printing as a victimless crime, arguing that "if I print a book, you can buy it from me, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case. "Reducing printing offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the printing rate, the larger the scribes and bards sector, and the greater the benefits."

Some have attempted to paint conjugal sexual intimacy as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you and I have intimate relations, we both derive pleasure and a sense of togetherness, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case. "Reducing sex among committed partners offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the intimacy rate among committed partners, the larger the prostitution sector, and the greater the benefits."

Some have attempted to paint ham radio as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you operate an amateur radio station, you and I can communicate across long distances, and we are both better off." This is hardly the case. "Reducing the prevalence of amateur radio operators offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of amateur radio communication, the larger the long distance telephone services sector, and the greater the benefits."

Some have attempted to paint tooth-brushing as a victimless crime, arguing that "if you brush your teeth regularly, you improve your dental hygiene, and we are all better off." This is hardly the case. "Reducing tooth-brushing offers direct benefits. The equation is a basic one: the lower the rate of tooth-brushing, the larger the dental prosthetic, dental filling, and dental surgical equipment sectors, and the greater the benefits."

Fees for each celebrity are negotiated on a case-by-case basis, but costs range from £300 - £5,000 for a dinner, depending on the celebrity (assuming that a dinner sitting will last one and a half hours). The fee does not include travel expenses incurred by the guest (which need to be reimbursed separately).

"Since it's my network, and this is something I think is amazing and compelling, we are going to broadcast the feed continuously on HDNet during daylight and twilight hours in Baghdad. No talking heads. No interruptions for commentary. Just the sights and sounds of Baghdad, uninterrupted and unedited. What you see, and in High Definition you see and hear a lot, is what you get."

Link to Mark Cuban's blog post.

On January 29, 2005, the Norman Lear Center will hold a landmark event on fashion and the ownership of creativity. Ready to Share will explore the fashion industry's enthusiastic embrace of sampling, appropriation and borrowed inspiration, core components of every creative process. Presented by the Lear Center's Creativity, Commerce & Culture project, and sponsored by The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising/FIDM, this groundbreaking conference will feature scholarly debate, fashion shows, multimedia presentations, the clash of perspectives and the cross-fertilization of ideas.

Correction Eric sez, "Please note that the photos of ice in Geneva on boingboing are due to water spray from the lake, not because of an "ice storm". If you look at more of the photos you will see that everything covered with ice is right next to the lake shore. If you look closely at some of the photos there are houses in the background that are free of ice."

TheFeature: But the ability for people to easily make and distribute copies of music and movies is new. Entertainment content providers want to protect themselves with DRM.

Doctorow: Well, locomotives didn't require horseshoes. You know, the blacksmiths might not have liked the fact that locomotives didn't require horseshoes. But if you started a business to outfit locomotives with special horseshoes in order to keep the blacksmiths happy, you probably wouldn't have lasted very long. Likewise, if you're starting a business to outfit phones with special locks that make it hard to copy things in order to make the music industry happy, then you're probably not long for this world.

Link to archived audio for this story with expanded online coverage. Link to NPR Day to Day home. Previously on BoingBoing: Aliens of the Deep premiere.

"One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain."

"Over the last one hundred and fifty years, California has developed one of the most innovative spiritual cultures on the planet. Many of our contemporary concerns with deep ecology, human transformation, body-positive spirituality, and the technoscience of mind are rooted in the state's maverick "culture of consciousness." California has been home to spiritual mavericks like Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley, to popular visionaries like Starhawk and Carlos Castaneda, to spiritual poets like Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder, and to visionary organizations like Esalen and the Ojai Institute. Why did all this happen here?

This seminar will explore and try to explain this rich legacy using poems, film clips, music, photographs, and slides drawn from Erik Davis's own exploration of California's hidden temples and sacred spots. The program will examine the idea that California's alternative spirituality forms a distinct religious tradition on its own—a kind of West Coast Hinduism, full of diverse and often contradictory sects, philosophies, and spiritual technologies, but sharing a a common cultural landscape."

...A chorus of thousands of nano-whistles produced a wail loud enough to hear. This is the first demonstration of whistling in superfluid helium-4. According to Packard and Hoskinson, the purity of the tone may lead to the development of rotation sensors that are sufficiently sensitive to be used for Earth science, seismology and inertial navigation...

"For 40 years, people have been trying to see something like this, but it has always been with single apertures," Hoskinson said. "Maybe it's true that you don't get coherent oscillations with a single aperture, but somehow, with an array of apertures, the noise is suppressed and you hear a coherent whistle."

First is this BBC story about a "devout Baptist couple" who purchased what they thought was a DVD of Doris Day's Pillow Talk at a supermarket and were SHOCKED to discover it was an Italian sex romp.

"My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn't believe what we were seeing.

"The film became progressively more graphic, there was no plot to it, it was just sex."

Alan and his wife Anne, 60, a retired teacher, complained to Safeway the next day and all copies of The Pajama Game were removed from the store.

And then there's this Macleans story about a couple in Canada who happened to see their neighbor masturbating in his house. The couple was so SHOCKED, they ran from window to window to get a better view.

The pair watched Clark for up to 15 minutes from the privacy of their darkened bedroom...they took care to avoid being seen by Clark, peering out from underneath their partially lowered blinds. Later, the woman's husband fetched a pair of binoculars and a telescope. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to videotape Clark in action, says the judgment.

Then they called the police, who arrested the hapless masturbator. Link

Canadian rock art interested us because of a traditional Algonkian Indian belief that manitous – spirits – lived inside rocks and cliff-faces, and that shamans in trance could enter the rock surfaces and meet with them in order to exchange tobacco offerings for supernatural power, usually referred to as “rock medicine”. (If the shaman failed to carry out this operation correctly, though, it was said he could become trapped in the cliff or rock he had spiritually entered and never return to his body outside. In our terms, he would die or go mad.) We wanted to test the hypothesis that such rock art marked venerated, magical places where the spirits could be heard; perhaps places where echoes were unusually strong. Had the Indians, like the ancient Greeks, believed echoes to be the sound of spirits calling, mimicking human-made noises to do so.

Apparently, the decomposing manure generated so much heat that it spontaneously combusted. And no one knows how to extinguish the fire. They don't want to quench it with water because the manure will run off into nearby rivers. Link (Thanks, Betsy!)

In response to many suggestions, especially from bloggers, Eric has set up a fund for people to donate to help with relief for people who may have medical costs or, sadly, burial costs from yesterday's crash. The paypal link is at the top of the page. The following entry is a long account of what touring the site was like, including some pictures. It's on his campaign blog right now, but we'll put it on the city servers early tomorrow.

I toured the site -- it was horrifying. I have had the misfortune of being in war zones, I have seen cities like Sarajevo after the Balkans war, post-war Eritrea, Cambodia during the end of the years of the Khmer Rouge resistance, and in "liberated" areas of Burma. But seeing a tragedy like this, the immediacy of it, overwhelmed me. Tom said he had never seen anything so bad in his entire life.

The smell of fuel, which I first sensed on Los Feliz Boulevard at the 5 freeway, a good 2/3rds of a mile away, was omnipresent, and as I walked past the diesel, I realized that it had mixed with the pouring rain and blood and was a deep, bright, red. The trains were twisted in every direction, an overpass (which killed one of the passengers when a derailed car hit it) was crumpled, cars were overturned and steel twisted everywhere. I went through some of the cars and saw the personal effects--sunglasses here, a commuter's bicycle there, bloodstains everywhere.

The authorities had spraypainted the sides of the cars with the number of fatalities in each car to piece together what had happened. The fire department told me that they feared some people might still be under the train cars and were awaiting the heavy equipment to see for sure. Initial checks with x-ray equipment and dogs indicated no further survivors, but crews continued working.

Its functions depends on its position: orientating it on the side it's a radio, upright it becomes an alarm timer and placed horizontally it's a clock. As you come nearer to Quattro, it detects your presence and reveals illuminated touch-sensitive controls relevant to its current function....the radio alarm works in tandem with a teddy bear: squeezing the bear triggers various actions including a remote "snooze" operation.

Image: a bonus bubblewrap item from artist Jason Chase: Batter Whipped and Bubble Wrapped, 2003, 43" X 29", Oil on Canvas.

And my blog-mate Cory Doctorow points out that the master of all bubblewrap game sites is Joey "accordion guy" DeVilla, aka Joey "bubblewrap guy" deVilla. Link. He was hand-rolling it in Shockwave back in 1995, people. Old-school.
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

In the new work, researchers Robert Deaner, Amit Khera and Michael Platt, all of Duke University Medical Center, tested this hypothesis by measuring how much fruit juice monkeys would accept or forgo to see photographs of familiar monkeys, permitting the researchers to compare monkeys' valuation of different types of social information. Male monkeys "paid" in juice to view female hindquarters or high-ranking monkeys' faces, but required "overpayment" to view low-ranking monkeys' faces.

Separately, a suicidal man who parked his SUV on railroad tracks in Orange County was arrested early Thursday, said Irvine police Cmdr. Dave Freedland, declining to say if it was a copycat situation. The man drove off when police spotted him and, after a chase, a dispatcher talked him out of suicide during a cell phone call.

[S]uch indeed are repeat occurrences that do follow the "Werther" or "copycat effect" pattern. More copycats from the LA incident are to be expected in a three-day, one-week, and one-month anniversary cycle.

Update: Fleshbot has a few full-size sneak preview pics from the complete Nerve.com gallery. Link

We arrived in the middle of a concert. Gil was asked to speak. As he went to the mic, the tent fell silent. Hundreds were packed into a tiny space. Gil began to describe the work of the Lula government to support free software, and free culture, when a debate broke out. I don't speak Portuguese, but a Brazilian who spoke English translated for Barlow and me. The kid was arguing with Gil about free radio. Two minutes into the exchange, about 8 masked protesters climbed onto chairs on one side of the tent, and held posters demanding free radio. A huge argument exploded, with the Minister (Gil) engaging many people directly, and others stepping in to add other perspectives. After about 20 minutes, the argument stopped. The band played again, and then Gil was asked to perform. For about another twenty minutes, this most extraordinary performer sang the music he's been writing since the 1960s, while the whole audience (save Barlow and I) sang along. When the concert was over, Barlow, Gil and I were led out of the tent. It was practically impossible to move, as hundreds begged Gil for autographs, or posed for pictures. At each step, someone had an argument. At each step, Gil stopped to engage. Even after Gil was in the car, some kid rapped on the window, yelling yet another abusive argument. Gil, with the patience of a saint, opened the window, and argued some more.

Giles
There's mention some two hundred years ago in Ireland of, of Angelus, the one with the angelic face.

Buffy
They got that right.

Xander
(clears his throat) I'm not saying anything, I have nothing to say.

Giles
Does this, uh, Angel have, um, a tattoo behind his right shoulder?

Buffy
Yeah, it's a, it's a bird or something.

Xander
Now I'm sayin' something. You saw him naked?

Q: Is Social Security in crisis?
A: Yes it is! And if we don’t do something right now it is going to EXPLODE!
Q: Oh no!
A: In forty years.
Q: Then what happens?
A: Then Social Security runs out of money! That means either your benefits are reduced, or all Social Security everywhere explodes in a giant fireball and we will have to run away from the fireball and jump away from it in slow motion to escape!
Q: Tell me more about this crisis in gritty detail!
A: The fireball is huge and loud and expensive and there is grinding guitar music on the soundtrack informing everyone that we are bad, bad dudes! The radiation turns all old people into very poor mutants who must scavenge and eat each other for food. Eventually the robots come: they are unstoppable. What has science done!

FP: In a protected file, the "mp4a" atom -- part of a standard AAC file -- is replaced by a non-standard, proprietary "drms" atom. This contains the same basic information about a song as the "mp4a" atom, plus the identity of the purchaser and some of the cryptographic information needed to decrypt the music. The actual decryption key needed to decrypt the music is not stored here, however,but merely an indicator as to which key -- among many possible keys -- assigned to a particular user should be used.

Once you have found the needed key, you apply that key, using AES decryption, to the data in the "mdat" atom, which, in an unprotected file, contains all of the raw AAC audio sample data.

Apart from this, there are various atoms added beyond what you'd find in an unprotected AAC file, such as an "apID" atom, which marks music files with the iTunes Music Store ID of the purchaser.

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

3. You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you’re going away for a while, don’t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they’ll still be there when you get back.

4. Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

What's the problem? We love a guy who stands behind his product. James Joseph Minder, chairman of gunmaker Smith & Wesson, is forced to resign when newspaper reporters discover that, before becoming a corporate exec, he'd spent 15 years behind bars for a string of armed robberies and an attempted prison escape.

Do as I say, not as I...hey, get a load of those! After joining the Bank of Ireland as CEO, Michael Soden issues a dictate: No porn surfing on the job. His next dictate: The IT department is to be outsourced to Hewlett-Packard. Shortly after the outsourcing deal goes through, IT staffers, now employed by HP, discover porn on Soden's computer. Soden resigns, leaving the bank and HP scrapping over who should pay his severance, estimated at $5 million.

Though state law outlines how people can be declared brain dead, no statute says who is authorized to declare a person dead, said Dr. John Butts, chief medical examiner for North Carolina.

"As a practical matter, people are regularly proclaimed dead by medical personnel who are not physicians," Butts said.

A small group of Japanese artists took note of this subculture and were instantly entranced. Rather than viewing it as a passing fad, these artists immersed themselves in the “Hot Rod” lifestyle - customizing cars, learning to pinstripe, traveling to car shows, and creating street art using the subculture’s outlaw symbolism such as skulls, cars, monsters, and tattoo images. A thriving subculture now exists in Japan devoted to the scene,?which has?incorporated elements of Japanese pop culture, while remaining loyal to the American hot rod tradition.

This show features the work of several of these Japanese artists, and ranges from Rockin’ Jellybean’s exquisitely rendered rock vixens, to Sugisack’s photo realistic paintings of street rods, to Mr. G’s meticulous pin striping, to Makoto’s exceptional blend of traditional Japanese iconography with old school Americana. This show is curated by Nash Yoshii of “Burnout” magazine and Detroit Junk in Tokyo.

"Since the beginning of 2001, I draw in small notebooks 11 cm X 15 cm (approximately), always with a ball point pen, always on same paper, always in black. I contrained myself never to tear a page off, what is done... is done. I put the date at the beginning and the end of each notebook. Each day (or almost) I spend one hour or two drawing in these notebooks. At this day, I made approximately 450 pages distributed in 12 notebooks."

Mahadevan likened the Venus flytrap's hinged leaves to a plastic lid that is bowed in one direction and then suddenly pops the other way. While waiting for prey, the plant's leaves are bowed outward, opening the hinged trap. When an insect touches the hairy triggers located inside of the trap, the plant moves water in the leaves, changing their curvature and suddenly snapping them closed.

"It is a relatively simple mechanism, but the plant is actively controlling it," Mahadevan said.

But they do more screeners -- people to host screening parties, even small-scale ones. Nicholas from Downhill Battle sez, "we want to emphasize that people can just have them in their living room if they want and don't need to post the address publicly (just a contact email is fine)."

On February 8th, during Black History Month, screenings of Eyes on the Prize, Part I: Awakenings 1954-1956 will be taking place across the country. Together, we'll bring this film back to a mass audience, but in a self-organized, grassroots way. If you don't see a screening in your city, please do everything you can to help organize one in your home or at a community center, library, or other space. If you can only host a screening on a different day, you can post that also, but we're hoping to connect people with the February 8th date as much as possible.

Once upon a time, Alan's mother gave birth to three sons in three months. Birthing sons was hardly extraordinary -- before these three came along, she'd already had four others. But the interval, well, that was unusual.

As the eldest, Alan was the first to recognize the early signs of her pregnancy. The laundry loads of diapers and play clothes he fed into her belly unbalanced more often, and her spin cycle became almost lackadaisical, so the garments had to hang on the line for days before they stiffened and dried completely. Alan liked to sit with his back against his mother's hard enamel side while she rocked and gurgled and churned. It comforted him.

The details of her conception were always mysterious to Alan. He'd been walking down into town to attend day school for five years, and he'd learned all about the birds and the bees, and he thought that maybe his father -- the mountain -- impregnated his mother by means of some strange pollen carried on the gusts of winds from his deep and gloomy caves. There was a gnome, too, who made sure that the long hose that led from Alan's mother's back to the spring pool in his father's belly remained clear and unfouled, and sometimes Alan wondered if the gnome dove for his father's seed and fed it up his mother's intake. Alan's life was full of mysteries, and he'd long since learned to keep his mouth shut about his home life when he was at school.

He attended all three births, along with the smaller kids -- Bill and Donald (Charlie, the island, was still small enough to float in the middle of their father's heart-pool) -- waiting on tenterhooks for his mother's painful off-balance spin cycle to spend itself before reverently opening the round glass door and removing the infant within.

Also, some local bloggers are now talking about the possibility of doing fundraising for crash victims via blogs.

Link to LA Times story

Lawrence Guyot, former leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, plans to organize a screening in Washington, D.C. He said that Downhill Battle's reaction is "precisely what is needed."

"If people had stuck to the law, black people wouldn't have the right to use restaurants and hotels. If people had stuck to the law, women wouldn't have the right to vote. If people had stuck to the law, women wouldn't have the right to own property," Guyot said. "Our country has a history of laws that we are very proud we have moved away from."

Guyot said that the series is important because it shows "the power of ordinary people to get civically engaged and make policy changes." That's a crucial message for young people, in particular, to hear, he said.

"Now is the time to fight through the miasma of who owns Eyes on the Prize," Guyot said.

NO snow in seattle last night. It wasn't even that cold. Casey is just now done with a new update it should be up on the site in a day or two. Most likely two...I have a feeling that he is getting tanked tonight. As for me, I'm still out here in the cold playing on. To some, "just let it go" & to some I hope when you're at a bar tonight raise a glass for me & say "Play on jeff, play on."

You should aim a vicious blow at your assailant's head, holding your hand very high in order to force him to guard high. Simultaneously, you should jump forward from the attacking position, shown in the second photograph, to the position shown in the third photograph, and strike him with the open hand high up on the chest, pulling his foot away from beneath him at the same time -- in order to disturb his balance, and destroy his power to hit you. You could now strike your adversary such a blow with your fist on the face as to render him unconscious, or, of course, you could belabor him with your stick if it were suitable for the purpose.

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....

So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell :(

Update:: The source that told me about this has corroborated it with more detail in private email, but is leery of going public. I hope that more publicly available details appear soon, and will post them when I have them.

Gibbs: d00d y0u w4nt teh bl4ck p34rl 4g4in????//
Cap'n Jack: y34h i g0t s0m3 l3v3r4g3
Gibbs: ok ill g3t s0m3 cr4zy d00ds t0g3th3r
The Good Pirates: 4rrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!111
Cap'n Jack: i m teh cr4zy
Will: d00d wtf wtf??
Gibbs: j4ckz 4 l1ttl3 w31rd
Will: y34h, t0tlly
Gibbs: b4rb0ss4 fuxx0r3d h1m
Will: suxx0r

Update: Phil Carter, who wrote the leet-speak PoTC script, sent in a note with the original location of the document

Update: Boing Boing reader Roy Berman says,

I saw the post you made on the Mamederumon magic beans from Japan, but after checking out the original site I realized that the BBC story doesn't capture but part of the magic. I translated it and put the text up on my blog.

Mamederumon!
The bean with a message in it is being born!
The egg of Mamederumon!
From an egg a plant is born!
Exciting and thrilling!
The introduction of the egg!

Elizabeth : Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren -

Barbossa: First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate’s code to apply and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl , Miss Turner .

Clad in nearly identical, Russian-built Orlan spacesuits with red stripes - [Leroy] Chiao's suit sported a U.S. flag for identification - the Expedition 10 crew opened the outer hatch of the station's Pirs docking compartment at 2:43 a.m. EST (0743 GMT).

"Hello space, my old friend," said Chiao, a spacewalk veteran, as stepped outside Pirs compartment. The extravehicular activity was the fifth spacewalk of Chiao's career while marking [Salizhan] Sharipov's first foray outside a spacecraft.

"It's so cold, and so beautiful," said Salizhan as he followed Chiao out the hatch.

Update: Apparently the gas/smoke smell was caused by a big diesel fuel spill that occurred in the wreck, sparking small fires nearby. Link.

Update 2: LA City Councilman Eric Garcetti's office responded in the comments section of a post on Blogging.LA (yes, some of our lawmakers here actually read and participate on blogs). Here are the details on the spill, and the many dead and injured, from Garcetti's spokesperson:

More than 4000 gallons of diesel were spilled in the wreck. I've posted below a letter that Eric sent out to district residents -- the crash site was in the thirteenth district and Eric walked the crash site this morning:

Dear Friends, You will probably have heard by now about the calamitous train wreck that happened this morning on the border of Los Angeles and Glendale in Atwater Village.

At 6:04 this morning, two passenger trains and a freight train collided. A man attempting suicide had left his car on the track. He abandoned it before the first train hit it, but the ensuing wreck resulted in ten fatalities and more than one hundred people taken to the hospital. By the time you read this, more people may have died. Among the dead were a deputy sheriff and an employee of the Los Angeles Department of Aging.

This morning, I visited the scene of the wreck. It was horrible. The impact sheared one of the track rails in two. Emergency personnel were still searching for trapped victims.

The injured and the dead are in all of our prayers. Let us also give thanks for acts of bravery and compassion. LAPD Northeast Division patrol cars were first to arrive, and officers rescued commuters as the second train was tipping over. More than 4000 gallons of diesel fuel were spilled from a freight car; firefighters prevented a disastrous blaze from igniting. Other first responders treated the injured on the scene, and the men and women opening up the Costco adjacent to the wreck provided first aid supplies from their store and assisted emergency personnel.

The only happiness at a time like this is to see the limitless desire of human beings to help one another.

The men split into teams and slowly, reverently, work at freeing the two from nature's reckless grip -- bodies, like baby sparrows, crushed by a clumsy, eager child. The man, stripped of clothes, is floating near a patch of reeds. Five wade in to get him. One pulls a large plank from the water and uses it like a lever to loose the suction of mud attached to the body. He slips it under the chest and poles it carefully, feet first into the end of a large black plastic bag the others hold open.

Meanwhile another group is deconstructing the debris pile from around the woman. Only her arm is visible, but with each piece they remove more of her is revealed until twenty minutes later, the body is fully exposed. They slide a rectangle of plywood under the corpse. As they drag it out on the homemade stretcher I can finally see her face. I look away…but my eyes are drawn to it again. Her top and bottom lips are pulled back in a frozen grimace. It's clear to me that her death was neither quick nor painless.

Now the man's body is being carried from the water to firm ground. His feet are exposed and the white, flesh is beginning to fall away after so many days of being immersed.

Once on shore, the men begin trussing it up in more black plastic. I watch their uncalloused hands, hands not used to such tasks, skillfully wrapping the shape with twine, transforming what had been a violent an chaotic death into something more orderly, peaceful – something that the living could make sense of and that the dead may have ultimately wished for.

Newly-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko is blogging! Unfortunately, I don't know Ukranian (Russian?) so I have no idea what is written here, but none the less, it's pretty impressive that such a political figure is blogging. He's even got an RSS feed!

Update: ...not exactly. Boing Boing reader Denis Perelyubskiy says:

This is not entirely correct. The site appears to be akin to whitehouse.gov, in that these are just the site that follows the president. press releases, opinions, news, etc. The site also summarizes and rewords the things he says at various events and press-conferences.

Tweiten and his tiny blue couch were made to move by Seattle Police just hours after a police spokesman told me Tweiten had not been booted because there had been no complaints. Not one since the 27-year-old began a 139-day squat in anticipation of the May 19 opening of "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith."

Suddenly, according to SPD spokesman Sean Whitcomb, an anonymous caller did complain. "So the individual (Tweiten) was provided with a copy of the (no sit/no lay) ordinance, the individual was given a verbal admonition and told that, if he did not move, the individual would be cited the next day," Whitcomb said.

It's not clear whether or not this has ever actually happened, but apparently someone asked Kaspersky Lab if they knew "how to cure a virus, which 'infected the onboard computers of automobiles Lexus LX470, LS430, Landcruiser 100 via a cell phone,'" and they conjecture that a virus could potentially use Bluetooth to jump from a Symbian-powered cellphone to the navigation system of certain Lexus models.

SUMMARY: The Copyright Office seeks to examine the issues raised by ``orphan works,'' i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate. Concerns have been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such works available to the public. This notice requests written comments from all interested parties. Specifically, the Office is seeking comments on whether there are compelling concerns raised by orphan works that merit a legislative, regulatory or other solution, and what type of solution could effectively address these concerns without conflicting with the legitimate interests of authors and right holders.

Downhill Battle has decided to stage some direct action around this. They're running a site called Eyes on the Screen, which is distributing copies of Eyes on the Prize via Bittorrent, and they're organizing a national network of screenings on February 8th -- have your friends over to watch your downloaded copy of the documentary.

At 8pm on February 8th we will celebrate the struggle and triumph of the civil rights movement with screenings of Eyes on the Prize Part 1: Awakenings. Eyes on the Prize is the most renowned civil rights documentary of all time; for many people, it is how they first learned about the Civil Rights Movement (more about the film). But this film has not been available on video or television for the past 10 years simply because of expired copyright licenses. We cannot allow copyright red tape to keep this film from the public any longer. So today we are making digital versions of the film available for download. Join us in building a new mass audience for this film: organize or attend a screening in your city, town, school or home on February 8th.

There are times when America needs to defend itself, and it cannot wait for the doddering approval of our vaunted "allies": the United Nations, Europe, the CIA, Congress. In times like these, when facing down an imminent threat to Freedom - or a grave and gathering threat, or a distant and someday possible threat, or threat-related program activities - it is imperative that the United States be able to go to war to defend itself without waiting for the sanction of bureaucrats in our own legislative branch.

I can't find a way to have multiple computers fully share a single iTunes library. I first ran into this when Alex got her new PC, and I wanted both of our computers to be able to access the same library. I'm not talking the shared music function, I mean full access -- being able to create playlists and sync iPods -- from a single library.

I think this is possible, given that the library never changes. But if new songs are added, the changes will only be reflected on the computer on which they were made -- I think (ie if I add a song from my computer to the library via iTunes, the change won't be reflected on Alex's computer). So the ideal situation would be to have all our music in one place, preferably the Mac mini or an external drive attached to it, then have the three instances of iTunes (the mini, my PowerBook and Alex's PC) all use the files from that one location, and for changes made to the library on any computer show up across all three.

When you hired me three years ago, you had to realize that I was going to speak my mind, no matter what the consequences. You told me that if I ever hit a wall with Steve or his people, I should let you know. Well, here goes. (Yes, again.)

After all our technical and strategic conflicts, I bet you never guessed we'd be at each other's throats over a matter of pronunciation. But the fact is, when Steve goes to a marketing meeting, as he did yesterday, and pronounces our desktop system "Winux," he jeopardizes not only my personal reputation, but, more important, the very foundation of our business and software approach for the next decade. The desktop system is not "Winux," as in Linux. As he knows very well. WinX is pronounced like "winks."

Why is this important? Because the name WinX was not random. It was deliberately chosen to express the strategy behind a 24-month engineering marathon inside Microsoft. We've built a Windows desktop and application framework around a Linux operating system, and both sides of this equation - open source and proprietary - are needed for our plan to continue to work. By talking about "Winux," Steve blurs the distinction between Linux and WinX. Worse, he implies that we have taken over Linux for our own selfish ends. This makes the development community nervous, slows contributions from coders, and creates a huge amount of unnecessary noise.

"If you look at the general shape of the [hippo] it could be related to horses, as the ancient Greeks thought, or pigs, as modern scientists thought, while molecular phylogeny shows a close relationship with whales," Dr. (Jean-Renaud) Boisserie explained. "But cetaceans - whales, porpoises and dolphins - don't look anything like hippos. There is a 40 million-year gap between fossils of early cetaceans and early hippos."

Inside the pad, an array of coils spread a low-power magnetic field low and wide over the pad's flat surface so that devices anywhere on the surface can intercept charging flux (see Graphic). The pad has numerous flat primary coils embedded under the surface. The coils can be of different sizes and shapes: rectangular, circular or ellipsoid.

Splashpower-compatible cellphones, digital cameras or camcorders will have a thin, flat receiver attached to them or inside their casing. The receiver is a sheet of magnetic alloy, the size of a stick of chewing gum, with a coil wound round it. Current induced in the coil when it is on the charging pad is then fed to the device's charging circuit.

The O'Reilly Mind Hacks blog frequently posts cool neuroscience links, but this one describing research on the neuroscience of the orgasm was especially interesting. They discuss, among other things, a Dutch study on the male orgasm using PET scans: "[T]hey asked couples to practice at home. The participant's partner (who had the more difficult task by far) needed to be be able to make her partner ejaculate - while he was standing, being injected by radiation, watched by neuroscientists and, most importantly, during a precise 50 second time-slot. With all credit to the women involved, 8 ejaculations were recorded from the eleven men who volunteered."

The great majority of animated cartoons produced by the commercial Hollywood film studios, from Disney's Steamboat Willie in 1928 through the shift to television cartoons in the 1960s, have a decidedly straight sensibility. Mickey Mouse is straight; Popeye is straight; Woody Woodpecker is straight. This fact is hardly surprising; these films are intended to have a wide appeal for a popular audience, and so play into that audience's social expectations. A select few of these studio cartoons, however, abandon the straight world view for the wilder realm of camp. The camp mode in cartoons appears consistently only in the short features of the Warner Brothers studio, and even here almost exclusively in the work of director Chuck Jones. Yet over time, these are the cartoons that have held the public imagination, just as much as (if not more than) the full-length works of Disney. They are the ones known intimately by cartoon cognoscenti, often memorized line-for-line and take-for-take, recited in unison by gleeful aficionados. Jones, more than any other single figure, is lauded as the master of the cartoon directorial art.

Link to paper.

Also: BB pal Jonno points us to a film called Was Bugs Bunny Gay? that ran on the GLBT film festival circuit a few years ago. Here is the only web reference we found, but if any sleuthers out there can find a copy, do let us know.

Reader Adri adds:

Continuing with the cross-dressing aspect of bugs bunny.. the library of congress has a subject just for this topic "Gender identity--cross dressing". And has a few vaudeville plays online which involve the topic. And better yet if you search their main site and enter "cross dressing," it brings up a couple hundred cross dressing artifacts in the LoC online collection. I guess J Edgar Hoover wasn't the only librarian interested in the topic. ;-)

"In the new work, the researchers tested the reactions of pairs of chimpanzees to exchanges of food that varied in quality. The animals received either a grape, which they coveted, or a less appealing cucumber and they could see what their partner obtained. In pairs of chimps that had lived together since birth, the individual given the cucumber was less likely to react negatively to the situation than was the short-changed member of a pair that did not know each other as well. Indeed, chimps in the short-term social groups refused to work after their partner received a better reward for the same job."

Lisa Dallos, a spokeswoman for Rolling Stone publisher Wenner Media LLC, said Tuesday that the company had "addressed the internal miscommunications that led to the previous misstatement of company policy and apologize for any confusion it may have caused."

Liu Binjie, deputy director of the administration and director of the state anti-porn office said here Wednesday that the Chinesegovernment in 2005 will focus on combating illegal publications. This especially concerns pirated textbooks, electronic publications and illegal journals that will have negative influence on the youth.

Among the 50 illegal games, 26 are pirated game software including Age of Mythology: the Titans, The Sims 2, Manhunt, FIFA 2005, Battlefield Vietnam and Painkiller: Battle out of Hell. The remaining are illegally distributed foreign games including Conflict Vietnam, Vietcong: Fist Alpha and Devastation.

Update: Matt sez, "I think this has become a huge area of misunderstanding.  The Chinese govenrment is not per se banning Sims 2, they're cracking down on piracy and illegal imports of the listed titles.  Presumably some of the more popular recent titles are more prone to being pirated, so instead of having to check every copy of everything they find they've settled on a subset that are more often than not going to be pirated when they stumble across a copy.  (Why some of them may be classed as 'illegally imported' is probably more interesting -- possibly they're not available legally in China -- but this is an entirely seperate issue, and is not limited to a list of 50 things.)"

The PBS series Nova has a new series called Nova Science NOW that they describe as "[a] lens on the timeliest developments and most intriguing personalities in science and technology." I found the premiere easy to watch without feeling that my intelligence was suspect. The really great part, though, is each segment from the show is viewable online and the entire episode will be viewable online a few weeks after airing. The segments are available as Quicktime, RealVideo and Windows Media.

Let it also be known that Boing Boing's own "band manager" John Battelle is in the Davos hizzouse (Davizzouse?) and anything he may blog on the event can be found here.

Groups on both sides of the fence are filing their briefs now for what will be the defining moment for Internet freedom. It's exhilarating reading, and Ed Felten has already begun to critique the other side's filings.

This history could hardly be more wrong. The ability to share files between any two computers on the network was an explicit goal of the Internet, from day one. The web is not a traditional aspect of the Internet, but a relatively recent development. And the web does not require or allow only large, centralized servers. Anybody can have a website -- I have at least three. Searching for files and retrieving copies of files is a pretty good description of what the web does today.

What the Solitor General seems to want, really, is a net that is easier to regulate, a net that is more like broadcast, where content is dispensed from central servers.

The anti-porn amici come right out and say that that is what they want. Their brief uses some odd constructions ("Like any non-sentient, non-judgmental technology, peer-to-peer technology can be misused...") and frequent recourse to the network fallacy.

Their main criticism of Grokster is for its "engineered ignorance of use and content" (p. 9; note that the quoted phrase is a reasonable definition of the end-to-end principle, which underlies much of the Internet's design), for failing to register its users and monitor their activities (e.g., p. 13), for failing to limit itself to sharing only MP3 files as Napster did (really! p. 17), and for "engineer[ing] anonymous, decentralized, unsupervised, and unfiltered networks" (p. 18).

Even if you aren't trying very hard when you walk in the gates of Disneyland there are often one or two characters hanging out by the mickey mouse topiary in front of the train station. In my experience this is often Alice and the Mad Hatter or sometimes Goofy or Pluto. Its a great feeling to arrive at Disneyland and be able to walk 5 feet before you see a character.

It is at these times that monitors hear husbands arguing with their wives, mothers yelling at their children, and dog owners throwing fits at disobedient pets, all when they think no one is listening. Most times, the only way a customer can avoid being recorded is to hang up.

The former Beatles drummer has undertaken a joint venture with Stan Lee's POW! Entertainment to develop a multimedia franchise in which Starr will play a superpowered animated version of himself.

I was sitting at my desk in New York on Wednesday night, writing a BarlowSpam, when Skype started to emit the old-fashioned bell tone that signals a request for a voice chat. I looked at the window associated with the request and saw a bunch of Chinese pictograms where the name should be. Some kind of Asian chatspam, I figured, and I ignored it. A few minutes later, it rang again. The name of the caller was "Kitty11_3". There was also a text chat box on the screen, also from kitty11_3 which read, "I need a friend." I was skeptical. I figured that whoever it was probably looking for "friends" to come see her "relax" in her web-cam equipped "bedroom." But I took the call. A delicate Asian-sounding voice came from someplace in Cyberspace. "Will you talk to me?" she said.

"Why?"

"I want to practice my English."

"Why me?"

"Because your name is John. I think that anybody named John speaks English."

I remained skeptical, but further conversation convinced me that she was telling the truth. She really had no idea who or where I was and had plucked me at random from all the Skype users named John. Kitty11_3 turned out to be a 22 year old girl from Hanoi, who, like her father, works for the state-owned oil company. She had managed to get five of her neighbors in the Hanoi suburb where she lives to go in on a DSL line and WiFi which she had set up herself. Her boyfriend is off in Korea getting a master's degree in telecommunications. She has three sisters, and her real name is Vu My Dung.

UPDATE:Matt Snider sez: "As a long time BoingBoing reader, I was pleasantly surprised to find one of the site's stories featuring my school, Ohio University. I would like to point out one thing in the defense of this hapless weatherman: the news program he is forecasting for is a university station. WOUB is all university programming, and therefore he isn't a fully licensed and bonded weather person. Rather, he's a weatherman-in-training, and so perhaps it isn't fair to judge him on quite the same scale as an individual who has completed his training.

The original 9’ sphere, Eve, has closets on either side of the door.  These function as partial bulkheads and reinforce the door opening.  There is a double bed on the left centered under the 4’ window.  A settee with table is placed in front of the 4’ window on the right.  The back wall opposite the door provides a galley area with counter and cupboards.  A circular shelf, with an opening at the door, rings the ceiling.  It makes a keyhole out of the ceiling.  The shelf reinforces the attachment points and provides easy access storage.

Future improvements include a washroom/shower/sauna sphere complete with its own effluent treatment system.  It will produce only clean water and compost with luck.  Something that could serve a whole colony of spheres on a remote setting.

La Spirale: You emphasize that some of those magazines from the past are strangely not outdated. Can you give us some examples and explain why these magazines are not outdated?

Thomas Brinkman: The Rebel Breed #1 published by Press Arts is the best example of what I was talking about, as it had, in 1968, articles on body decoration and tattooing, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and a couple of articles on outlaw bike clubs. I suppose you could make the argument that these mags are all outdated, but what I meant by that was that a lot of the topics covered in them back then are still with us today, i.e., tattooing, biker lifestyle mags, Ed Roth has, since the eighties, become a modern icon and not just a footnote on the sixties. Many of the bizarre fetish mags that were really strange and underground for 1963 now have their modern counterparts sold on newsstands openly.

Workshop: Terrorism, Democracy and the Open Internet
Despite their anti-modern ideology, some of the most violent terrorist groups have also been the most skilled in exploiting the advantages of the Internet. How can we stop them from abusing the opportunities of modern communications technology whilst preserving the advantages and freedoms it offers? The workshop will also show how the Internet and new technologies can be used to promote the spirit and practice of democracy. We believe that while unarguably new information technologies have the potential to cause serious damage there is much more on the Internet that promotes and shows democracy at work. Democracy thrives on the net and we want to debate how to use it more productively to fight global terrorism.

Patent fees of around US$20 per unit are currently levied on manufacturers of Chinese DVD players, accounting for some 20 to 30 per cent of their production costs.

However, US manufacturers' patent fees are much lower, only 3 to 5 per cent of their production costs.

The high patent fees have hit Chinese DVD manufacturers hard, with exports of Chinese DVD players falling sharply last year.

The thing is that while there is certainly a small commercial audience for newspaper archives -- corporate researchers, the occassional grad student with a grant -- the noncommercial audience for archives is much larger: people who want to read the news from their birthdays, researchers amateur and pro looking up historic dates, Bloggers writing about seminal moments.

Conversely, there is a large commercial audience for new news, that is, people who'll pay to see today's news while it's still news and before it becomes history. That's why the news business is so much larger than the history business.

The problem with the NYT's system is that it ensures that the Times can't be the paper of record any longer, because even if a thousand bloggers point to a great article on the day it comes out, thirty days later it will be invisible to the 99.999 percent of the Web who won't pay for access to fishwrap, no matter how interesting.

News is increasingly a substitutable good: there are so many ways to get the basic facts on an article, from Yahoo's AP wire to the Sydney Morning Herald to pastebombed articles in the archives of mailing lists like Interesting People and Politech that a savvy searcher or blogger has no good reason to pick the NYT to get a set of basic facts on any subject. The NYT often does an extraordinary job of covering the facts, but it doesn't matter a whit to posterity if a link to that job will staledate in a month.

If the NYT can't make it on advertising alone, it might just be dead in the long run, since these substitutable goods that require no subscription will crowd it out of the market eventually. But if it wants to try a subscription-based system, then for heaven's sake, why not charge money for the news (which lots of people want to pay for!) and give away the history (which relatively few people want to buy)?

There was a Wired News article a couple months back that suggested that the paywalls on newspaper archives were being driven by their agreements with Lexis-Nexis, a company that provides expensive search services to newsrooms, lawyers and other specialized entities. I think that protecting the Lexis-Nexis deal at the expense of relevance is the wrong move: if the NYT's need to lock up its archive makes it irrelevant, then Lexis-Nexis will drop its contract with the Times anyway. Meanwhile, if the NYT puts takes its archives out from behind the paywall, it won't need Lexis-Nexis to market them for it any longer -- hell, maybe it can start charging Lexis for access to its database!

One of these days, a newspaper currently charging a premium for access to its article archives will do something bold: It will open the archives to the public -- free of charge but with keyword-based advertising at the margins.

I predict that the result will pleasantly surprise the bean-counters. There'll be a huge increase in traffic at first, once people realize they can read their local history without paying a fee. Eventually, though not instantly, the revenues will greatly exceed what the paper had been earning under the old system. Meanwhile, the expenses to run it will drop.

And, perhaps most important, the newspaper will have boosted its long-term place in the community. It will be seen, more than ever, as the authoritative place to go for some kinds of news and information -- because it will have become an information bedrock in this too-transient culture.

Update: Tony Hardin points out that you can buy these at CompUSA too.

If you doubt this, see this quote, from Viacom's December 2002 filing on the Broadcast Flag, where they lied to the FCC about their intention to do the vault-and-huff thing.

Specifically, if the broadcast flag is not implemented and enforced by next summer [of 2003], CBS will cease providing any programming in high definition for the 2003-2004 television season.

• Best Novel: Eastern Standard Tribe, Tor, 2004
• Best Novelette: Anda's Game, Salon.com, 2004
• Best Novelette: Appeals Court, with Charles Stross, Argosy 2004
• Best Novelette: Unwirer, with Charles Stross, ReVisions, DAW 2004

What it is: True Films contains the best 100 documenatries I've reviewed in True Films as of December, 2004. (There may be additional films reviewed in 2005 posted here but they will not be included until version 2.0.) I winnowed some from this list, and came up with an alphabetical collection of 100 documentaries I feel are worth your time. Most people will enjoy the majority listed. There's been one private film club launched around this booklet.

By the way, if any of you chocolate sushi companies would like to send me complimentary stuff to -- um, *analyze*, a la Silicon Valley 100 (an elite schwag club for which I didn't make the cut), by all means feel free. Consider me your chocolate sushi whore.
(Thanks, Katie Dean!)

See also this Keith Olbermann segment from MSNBC: Will Spongebob Make You Gay? Link.

Update: And they ask me why I love Boing Boing readers so much. Reader J. Buck says,

Back when he was a grad student, my brother-in-law, Bob McEachern, got an academic paper published that had the title

Gender Twouble: Bugs Bunny, Cross-Dressing, and Patriarchy.

I can't find the text, but the abstract says:

Is Bugs Bunny gay? This article discusses the cross-dressing tendencies of Bugs Bunny, and the importance of this trait in Bugs as one of the most recognized cartoon characters of all time. In many cases, there are confrontations and competition between Bugs and rival Elmer Fudd concerning masculinity. The author raises many heretofore un-asked questions concerning Bugs' actions.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo 'God's machine,' and its devotees have been known to declare, 'You can take my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!' But suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo -- or, for that matter, an iPod? Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn't grow up to threaten the status quo? That's the strategy the entertainment industry is using to control the next generation of TiVos and iPods. Its arsenal includes government-backed technology mandates, lawsuits, international treaties, and behind-the-scenes negotiations in seemingly obscure technology standards groups. The result is a world in which, increasingly, only industry-approved devices and technologies are 'allowed' to survive in the marketplace. ... Rather than sit back and watch as promising new technologies are picked off one-by-one, EFF has created the Endangered Gizmos List to help you defend fair use and preserve the environment for innovation.

Just looking at this stuff is making me want to do one of those little hyperactive zinging kid dances behind my laptop.
Link.

1. This Fox News weatherman is incredibly obnoxious. (He was fired last year for substance abuse)

2. Actor Crispin Glover, who seems to enjoy being weird for for weirdness' sake, has a trailer of his movie that'll screen at Sundance. He's been working on it for about ten years, I think. I have a feeling the trailer is going to be better than the movie. (Not safe for work.) (Thanks, mister skye!)

3. After I wrote about Claude Shannon's juggling puppets, someone pointed me to the promo video for the World Juggling Federation competition, taking place January 27 and 28. It'll be on EPSN 2. Remarkable stuff. I also have a feeling though, that you can get 90% of the enjoyment from the show by watching this two-minute clip.

Jim Mitchell sez: "There's an unbelievably good audio file of a howling Tasmanian Devil in the travel section Sunday's SFGate.com. This may be the worst sound ever emitted by a carbon-based life form." Link

UPDATE: Boing Boing reader Mike has requested that someone make a ringtone out of this. Great idea. I just uploaded it to freeloader.com. Link

UPDATE:Lesley Miller sez: "The photo you used to accompany today's post on the Tasmanian Devil doesn't do them justice. I visited the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary in Queensland last year, and took the attached photo of one their Devils. I used to say that all animals with snouts are cute, but I've had to adjust that view in light of seeing the Tasmanian Devil in person. "The zookeeper said that when they find road kill on the way to work, they pick it up, freeze it for 6 months to kill any bacteria, then feed it to the Devils. While they didn't have any to feed them the day I was there, I did witness a regular feeding: a chicken carcass in a cardboard box, securely taped shut. They tossed the box in the Devil's habitat, and he attacked it, shredding bits of cardboard with his teeth and claws. It only took about 15 seconds before his head was in the box, crunching on the chicken bones. It was absolutely horrific watching this little mammal go into such a feeding frenzy."

(Photograph CC by Lesley Miller)

UPDATE: Charming video of Tasmanian devils devouring a roadkill wallaby. Link

Update: Reader Henry Tero says, "The Twinkie sushi was created by Clare Crespo, (yummyfun.com, bad Flash warning) a CalArts grad food artist who has written two whimsical books on cupcakes and other food art. She deserves the credit for such beautiful work! She's created such wonders as: The Jello aquarium, a roast turkey with three legs, and here's an interview with Clare which features more sushi cupcakes."

Holy crap, that Jello-aquarium is lovely.

No American entity has flown to any sub-Saharan point since Pan Am's routes (to Monrovia, Dakar, Nairobi and elsewhere) were abandoned prior to that airline's collapse in 1991. Continental also will become the only U.S. airline operating to six continents, a distinction it will share with numerous foreign counterparts.

New York-Lagos, which would not have garnered my wager as a likely candidate for such a premiere, is considered a highly lucrative market. "Our Lagos service will be highly attractive to Nigerian and American transatlantic travelers," said Continental CEO Larry Kellner in a statement. "Particularly executives in energy-related industries." The route was previously covered by the long-embattled Nigeria Airways, which finally closed its doors in 2003.

Nigeria, by the way, was ranked the world's third most corrupt nation by a watchdog organization called Transparency International. The group says 40 percent of the country's petroleum income is stolen or squandered by government corruption and mismanagement. Allegedly -- though I can't confirm this -- one of the reasons British Airways ceased its London-Lagos flights was because its airplanes were routinely stripped of equipment, including galley supplies, furnishings and even cockpit electronics, during layovers. Rumors say armed guards will accompany crew and passengers on Continental's flights from Newark.

Update: BoingBoing reader Robbie Honerkamp says,

A slight correction on your post. Ritetime Aviation, an Atlanta travel agency, had direct scheduled flights between Atlanta, New York and Lagos in 2003 and 2004 using aircraft operated by World Airways. Internal problems at Ritetime caused them to miss payments to World Airways, who promptly ceased flying the route. Ritetime's website is still online, but they're now out of business. World Airways' website is here.

The Salon article's mention of British Airways no longer flying to Lagos is also not true- a quick check of British Airways' web page shows regular BA flights from Heathrow (though it looks like they've stopped flying from Gatwick to Lagos). BA makes money hand over fist with the London-Lagos route and it'd take a lot for them to stop flying the route. As for "layovers" in Lagos, the airplanes are on the ground in LOS for only three or four hours before they're off on the night flight to London. I haven't heard of any airplanes being looted at the international airport. Over the past few years I've been extremely impressed with what the Nigerian aviation ministry has done to clean up the airport. I humbly suggest the author of the Salon article is smoking crack.

FYI, Richard Branson of Virgin is launching a new airline just for Nigeria. It's called "Virgin Nigeria" and will fly the Lagos-London route as well as routes from Lagos to other Nigerian and African destinations. Link to BBC News article.

A Baker's Dozen Ways to Celebrate National Pie Day on January 23

Register for the 2005 APC Crisco National Pie Championships being held on April 22-24 in Celebration, Florida. Entry forms will be available after Labor Day.

Eat pie. Whether you make it yourself, buy it at a supermarket or bakery or order it at a restaurant, eat some pie on National Pie Day. Pie is great with lunch or dinner or as a late-night snack.

Make pie. Bake your favorite homemade pie on National Pie Day.

Share pie. If you make or buy a pie, share it. By its very nature, pie is meant to be eaten with others. Have a pie potluck get-together.

Teach pie making. Stage classes and demonstrations and samplings at stores and schools. Invite seniors who KNOW pie to teach a class. If you don't know how to make pie, ask a pie maker to show you or attend a pie-making class.

Hold a pie night. Gather family and friends for a pie celebration. Everyone must bring one homemade pie for the pie buffet. We have heard of events where more than 100 folks come with 100 pies.

Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much....

Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or "sponsored" results and unpaid results.

Domestic microwave appliances are based on the magnatron; an electronic device which converts electrical energy to microwave energy, which is fed via a waveguide to the cooking chamber. Since the conversion is somewhat less than perfectly efficient, the magnatron has to be cooled by a stream of air from a fan. This air is then led to the oven to help remove steam produced during cooking. Once in the chamber, the microwaves are reflected by the metal walls until they are absorbed, (usually by water-containing food), their energy being converted to heat. Should absorption not take place - if, for example, the oven is activated when empty, some energy will re-enter the waveguide and cause over-heating of the magnetron. Usually a safety switch turns the machine off when this happens. Note that the reflecting walls and the constant frequency of the microwaves set up standing waves in the chamber. This results in some areas being much more active than others and is the reason why food must be rotated through the varying field to cook evenly.

To be of use for metal casting, a domestic microwave oven rated D or E (850W or 1000W) needs two slight modifications: the rotating glass plate must be removed and the holes which admit air to the cooking chamber must be taped over (masking tape works reasonably well). The air from the magnetron cooling will then be re-directed to the exterior. No other modifications should be made. Microwaves are potentially dangerous and the uninitiated should treat the oven with respect.

The more we can create and remix, the more enriching those communities become. When you can set-up a band with your mates, or run a music night in a local club, or make some video clips - be they funny or serious - you're doing something profoundly social and human.

This creative ability is far more important than the ability to simply access cultural items cheaply. If we just want to be a nation of consumers, a culture based around buying goods and becoming couch potatoes, then the ability to consume really matters a lot. But if we want to be vibrant, interesting people, sharing culture in communities, we need to think more about the ability to create, which implies access.

Journalist Samantha Dempsey never imagined her life would turn out like this. Her 19 year-old son has fallen in love with an older woman. Her mother is a basket case, still haunted by the death of Samantha's brother in a car accident years ago. Her once-promising career as a journalist has ground to a halt. And the cracks in her marriage are wide and getting wider.

In the midst of all this turmoil, Samantha gets an email from a desperate friend whose 21 year-old daughter has joined The Daughters of Freya, a California cult that believes sex is the solution to the world's problems. He wants Samantha to write a story that will expose the cult as a fraud.

Samantha pitches the story to Jane Sperry, the editor of a San Francisco magazine and an old college friend. Sperry sends Samantha to Marin County to write a piece on the cult but she soon finds out that there is more to the cult than meets the eye.

She discovers that the cult's 'spiritual guide' has a secret and insidious agenda, and wealthy and powerful partners who will stop at nothing to prevent her from revealing the truth.

As Samantha risks her life in an attempt to penetrate the inner workings of the cult, she must deal with a personal life that is threatening to fall apart and a past she thought she had left far behind.

The CIA required Sanborn to write the solution down and present it to (former CIA director William) Webster so the agency wouldn't be embarrassed if the sculpture turned out to contain a message that was pornographic or critical of the agency. Sanborn gave officials an envelope with a wax seal. But Sanborn said he didn't give Webster the whole story.

"Well, you know, I wasn't completely truthful with the man," Sanborn said, laughing. "And I'm sure he realizes that. I mean that's part of trade craft, isn't it? Deception is everywhere....