Ameritrade (or someone using their name) is auctioning off a 37-foot Winnebago Adventurer tricked out with seven computer workstations, external video wall, DirecPC satellite system for Internet connectivity, 32-foot LED display along the roof, two 10kw generators, and a ton of other gear. From the eBay listing:

* Brushed metal interior components with Astro-turf walls and black rubberized flooring
* Coleman Mack climate control system in workstation area, standard A/C and heat in cockpit
* Track lighting throughout interior
* Ample storage compartments under vehicle with extra wall surface material
* Excellent condition – was acquired in 2002 corporate merger
* Bathroom and living amenities have been removed to accommodate computer equipment

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

This Worth1000 photoshopping contest to imagine the future of advertising has lots of interesting entries, including this one -- a heavily logoed endangered elephant; I could actually see conservationists financing their work this way. Link

What happens when you stick your head in an MRI while you're taking the Pepsi Chellenge? Turns out that your brain does different stuff depending on whether or not you think you're drinking Coke.

Montague had his subjects take the Pepsi Challenge while he watched their neural activity with a functional MRI machine, which tracks blood flow to different regions of the brain. Without knowing what they were drinking, about half of them said they preferred Pepsi. But once Montague told them which samples were Coke, three-fourths said that drink tasted better, and their brain activity changed too. Coke "lit up" the medial prefrontal cortex -- a part of the brain that controls higher thinking. Montague's hunch was that the brain was recalling images and ideas from commercials, and the brand was overriding the actual quality of the product. For years, in the face of failed brands and laughably bad ad campaigns, marketers had argued that they could influence consumers' choices. Now, there appeared to be solid neurological proof. Montague published his findings in the October 2004 issue of Neuron, and a cottage industry was born.

Link (Thanks, Eric!)

RideAccidents is your one-stop shop for news-clippings about accidents on amusement park rides, sorted by ride-type.

RideAccidents.com is the world's single most comprehensive, detailed, updated, accurate, and complete source of amusement ride accident reports and related news. The site includes a record of fatal amusement ride accidents in the United States since 1972, and, for the past six years, has recorded all types of accidents, including many from outside the United States. The number of injuries and fatalities recorded at this site does not reflect the total number of injuries and deaths that have occurred as a result of amusement ride accidents.

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Lethal injection as its currently practiced may not be a particularly painless way to execute someone. In the medical journal The Lancet, researchers report that in 90% of the cases they examined, the executionees were not completely anesthetized to pain when they were kicked off this mortal coil and 40% may have been conscious when it happened. Since they couldn't very well ask their subjects, the researchers analyzed the post-mortem blood levels of anesthetic in 49 executed inmates. From New Scientist:

Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated in the US, 788 people have been killed by lethal injection. The procedure typically involves the injection of three substances: first, sodium thiopental to induce anaesthesia, followed by pancuronium bromide to relax muscles, and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart.

But doctors and nurses are prohibited by healthcare professionals’ ethical guidelines from participating in or assisting with executions, and the technicians involved have no specific training in administering anaesthetics.

“My impression is that lethal injection as practiced in the US now is no more humane than the gas chamber or electrocution, which have both been deemed inhumane,” says Leonidas Koniaris, a surgeon in Miami and one of the authors on the paper. He is not, he told New Scientist, against the death penalty per se.

Link

This giant inflatable waterslide from China Inflatables is in the shape of a sinking Titanic with a looming iceberg, and sports several flumes for your sliding pleasure. Link (Thanks, Dow!)

ruler organ
notepad invaders
click the dot
shooting stars
reflex
comboling
proximity
grid game
machine maker

and the classic:
sodaplay

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

Wonderful galleries of hand-painted barber signs from Africa, sorted by nation. Link (Thanks, Wagner!)

The guy who got the $50,000,000 contract to renovate the HQ for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO -- a place that bears the same relation to bad copyright that Mordor has to evil) paid a top WIPO official $270,000 shortly before winning the contract, though WIPO denies any wrongdoing.

A Swiss judge is investigating possible bribery charges involving a $50 million contract to renovate the headquarters of a Geneva-based United Nations agency, according to government documents and Swiss and American officials....

Investigators said the judge was trying to determine if Mr. Wilson had bribed a senior official at the United Nations agency to win the renovation contract. Edward Kwakwa, the agency's legal counsel, said Khamis Suedi, a top official at the intellectual property agency, acknowledged having received 325,000 Swiss francs, about $270,000, from Mr. Wilson, but said the money was from a private business venture that had no connection to the agency's construction contract. In an interview, Mr. Suedi said he had had nothing to do with the awarding of the contract.

Link (Thanks, Manon!)

Yamaha is shipping a tiny, 19mph battery-powered scooter with an integrated iPod (controls on the handlebars), that plays through a built-in amp and loudspeakers. The whole thing weighs all of 100lbs and can be folded for storage. Link (Thanks, Gaijin Biker!)

Update: Gaijin Biker sez, "The iPod-compatible model is a "concept" version only, that is NOT being sold to the public (at least yet). The version currently on sale has no iPod functionality."

When these $40 Pac Man hats ship in July, you'll finally be able to live out your Pac Man cosplay fantasies as your head becomes a living white dot for the Pac Man to devour. Link (Thanks, Betsy!)

Just a reminder that I'll be appearing as the Guest of Honor at PenguiCon, a Linux and Science Fiction convention being held in Detroit next weekend, from April 22-24. I'll be giving talks on I, Robot, copyleft, folk art, open source licensing and open spectrum, and I'll be doing a reading and conducting the charity auction. Other guests include the founders of Slashdot, Eric Raymond, Nat Torkington, Joan Vinge, Kathe Koja, and Joey DeVilla. Link

Last month, Eileen Gunn's brilliant sf webzine published my short story "I, Robot," a remix of Isaac Asimov's robots stories, bent on showing the totalitarian underpinnings a world in which only one kind of robot is lawful and only one company is allowed to make it, and what happens when that world meets a post-Singularity civilization.

Habi, a reader in Switzerland, took the initiative to convert the story to a Palm PDB file, and today it went live on the Infinite Matrix site.

"Greetings," the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. "I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits --"

Link

Update: Rob Tsuk was good enough to produce a formatted version for eReader that includes the illustration that accompanied the original Infinite Matrix story. It's available at the same link as the Palm version.

Georgetown University scientists report that an ingredient in chocolate seems to have anti-cancer properties. Found in cocoa, pentameric procyandin turns off proteins that likely spur the out-of-control division of cancer cells. The research is funded by Mars Inc., makers of M&Ms and Snickers. Seriously. From the press release:

“There are all kinds of chemicals in the food we eat that potentially have effects on cancer cells, and a natural compound in chocolate may be one,” said the lead author, Robert B. Dickson, Ph.D., professor of oncology. “We need to slowly develop evidence about the selectivity of these compounds to cancer, learn how they work, and sort out any issues of toxicity.”

Chocolate, like many other foods, is the source of many possible anti-cancer compounds, but Dickson stresses that this research, which is part of a series of studies conducted at Georgetown on the chocolate-cancer connection, does not mean that people who eat chocolate will either reduce their cancer risks or treat a current case.

Link

The Federal Government is fighting to block members of a small Christian sec in New Mexico from ritually drinking a psychedelic tea. In November of last year, the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed an injunction against the government's enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act and the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The sacred tea, hoasca, contains dimethyltrptamine (DMT). Now, the Bush administration is appealing the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. From Legal Times:

O Centro Espirita was founded in Brazil in 1961. The tea, hoasca, which in the Quechuan Indian language means "vine of the soul," "vine of the dead," and "vision vine," comes from the Amazon rainforest. Members drink the tea at least two times a month during ceremonies. Approximately 130 members of the church reside in the United States, 8,000 in Brazil.

Brazil, a member of the international treaty at issue, has exempted hoasca from its controlled substances list.

But the Bush administration claims that no such exemption should exist in the United States.

The 10th Circuit's ruling is grounded in the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which protects individuals from governmental interference in the exercise of religion. Congress passed the act after the Supreme Court, in the 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, affirmed Oregon's prohibition on Native Americans' use of peyote and marijuana for religious purposes, ruling that the First Amendment free exercise clause afforded them no protection...

Under the RFRA, the government must show that it has a "compelling governmental interest" in restricting the religious practice and that the interest is fulfilled in the "least restrictive" way. The 10th Circuit ruled that the government had not proved that use of the tea, which contains 25 mg of DMT per typical serving, would lead to adverse health effects or abuse of the drug outside of a religious context.

Link (Thanks, Xeni!)

On nin.com, Trent Reznor is offering a complete mix of a song from the forthcoming Nine Inch Nails album as a Garageband 2.0 file. The CD/vinyl is due out on May 3. Snip from the README:

"For quite some time I've been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks - to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what's there. I tried a few years ago to do this in shockwave with very limited results. After spending some quality time sitting in hotel rooms on a press tour, it dawned on me that the technology now exists and is already in the hands of some of you. I got to work experimenting and came up with something I think you'll enjoy. What I'm giving you in this file is the actual multi-track audio session for "the hand that feeds" in GarageBand format. This is the entire thing bounced over from the actual Pro Tools session we recorded it into. I imported and converted the tracks into AppleLoop format so the size would be reasonable and the tempo flexible."

Link to NIN.com, and link to 70MB *.sit download (Thanks, Mike)

Torn from the vaunted html pages of The Hollywood Reporter:

Twentieth Century Fox Licensing & Merchandising and McFarlane Toys announced a new licensing agreement to develop a line of action figures based on characters from the hit movie "Napoleon Dynamite." The toy line, which will hit store shelves in the fall, will feature characters Napoleon, Pedro and Kip. "Napoleon Dynamite and action figure may seem like an oxymoron, but McFarlane Toys has the appreciation and understanding of this character and the film to create some truly fun and highly appealing toys," said Peter Byrne, executive vp licensing at Fox Licensing & Merchandising.

Link (Thanks, Mara!)

Sean Bonner says:

THE STAR WARS NERDS IN LINE AT GRAUMANS HAVE BOUGHT TICKETS TO THE FIRST SHOWING OF EPISODE III 'REVENGE OF THE SITH' AT THE CINERAMADOME!!! Holy mother of christ! Do you know what this means? Do you??

Well if you don't, I'm not going to tell you, but I will tell you this - they got half the damn theater. The rest of the seats will go on sale to the general public online and at the box offices later on. Maybe this afternoon. The page keeps changing on their site so there's some behind the scenes work going on with it for sure.

Link. Previously on BB: Star Wars geeks in line at Grauman's will answer payphone calls, The Great (Wrong) Star Wars Movie Line of 2005 t-shirt

Last night, the copyright debate of the young century was held when EFF Senior IP Attorney Fred von Lohmann and Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of the great copyfight book "The Anarchist in the Library," faced down reps from the RIAA, MPAA, Universal and Napster in a 3+ hour wrangle before an audience at Cornell University. Now the video is online -- well, it's available as a crappy, dropout-prone Real stream. No doubt there will shortly be ripped audio and video available. Real Video Link (via Copyfight)

Morbus Iff sez, "Ghyll is a Creative Common licensed player-created world per the rules of "Lexicon: an RPG" (think: a fictional wikipedia, constrained by integration, consecutive letter definitions, and cranky scholars that write before 'before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be)'). It has reached nearly 30 players, 200 pages of text, an incredibly large timeline, a hundred characters, and a to-scale ASCII map of the known world. Darkly humorous? Possible. Odd? Mmhmmm. All CC? Ayup.

"We're starting Round 2 next month (in essence, starting over again at letter A to further define the world). Notes about the announcement here, as well as links to the timeline, characters, and ASCII map." Link (Thanks, Morbus!)

Blogger Tian discovered that someone smashed his car's windshield and punctured a tire a couple of days ago. This incident comes shortly after he took pictures of a tow truck driver damaging a car. He is offering the following cash rewards:

I, Tian, am offering the following cash reward for any useful and usable information regarding the person(s) responsible for the damage done to my vehicle:

$50 for the name of the person, home and business addresses, and telephone number(s).

$100 for the information above plus photograph(s) of the person(s) committing the criminal act.

$200 if the person(s) was then successfully prosecuted in the court of the law.

$500 for the identification of the person(s) and castration of their testicles OR cut off their right hand(s).

Link

Gavin from G4 TV's "Attack of the Show" says:

We're going to have creator of the Hamster MIDI device (along with the device itself) on G4's Attack of the Show! today (4/15) at 7E/4P. Check it out if you're interested in seeing what live sweet hamster midi music is all about!

Link. Previously on BB: Hamster-Powered MIDI sequencer

(Click thumbnail for enlargement) Andrew Tonkin says: "Coloring page found in 'Star Wars: Droids' and 'Star Wars: Balance of the Force' coloring books by Dalmatian Press.

"I hope this unfortunately suggestive angle was unintentional, especially considering the father-daughter aspect of the scene. Yecch.

"Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny billboard on the Sunset Strip created public outcry, and yet impressionable youth everywhere are dulling their Crayolas on this very scene. Strange."

We're honored that Boing Boing has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Blog category along with Flickr, hicksdesign, The Snowsuit Effort, and WorldChanging. The winners, selected by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, will be announced May 5. All nominees are also eligible to win a People's Voice Award. (Register here to vote for the People's Voice Awards.) Thanks so much and congratulations to all of the nominees! Link

I have to admit I have no idea what is going on in this video, but it's probably too weird to be a prank.

Apparently there's a research lab in Singapore that has developed a system involving robot chickens and real chickens that wear some kind of jacket loaded with sensors and vibrators. The researchers claim that when the system is in effect, people and poultry will get to know each other better. Or something like that. Just watch the video; the soundtrack is soothing.
Link (Thanks, Joe!)

Reader comment: Thomas J. Brown says: "Mixed Reality labs specializes in augmented reality. This chicken video is demonstrating their proposed 'Poultry Internet,' which is useful because, 'There is also a tradition of keeping poultry as pets in some parts of the world. However in modern cities and societies it is often difficult to maintain contact with pets, particularly for office workers. We propose and describe a novel cybernetics system to use mobile and Internet technology to improve human-to-pet interaction.'

"Honestly, who's funding this research?"

Marius Watz says: "A virtual exhibition of drawings of unrealized architectural projects from Moscow 1920 to 1950, could easily have been entitled "Stalin's Wet Dreams." Some decidedly futuristic architecture, including a 415 meters high Palace of the Soviets." Link

John Scalzi says, "Tor Books and I are doing something special with Old Man's War, my current SF novel: We're offering a free electronic edition (a 570kb .rtf file) for service people stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. We figure they're far from home and could use some reading material.

"Service people in Iraq and Afghanistan can drop me an e-mail at "omw@scalzi.com" and I'll send them the edition as an attached file. If at all possible, they should send the request from their ".mil" addresses and let me know their unit/general location so I know they are in Iraq/Afghanistan. This is meant for people serving in a war zone far from home, so I ask others to please respect that.

"Special kudos to Tor Books for greenlighting this; it's more proof of their forward-thinking in the book arena, and evidence of their generally being excellent people." Link, Link to my review of Old Man's War (Thanks, John!)

America's largest cable provider is being sued by a woman who claims the company voluntarily forked over her personal account data to the RIAA.

In a lawsuit filed in King County, Wash., Dawnell Leadbetter said that she was contacted by a debt collection agency in January and told to pay a $4,500 for downloading copyright-protected music or face a lawsuit for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Leadbetter, a mother of two teenage children, was a customer of Comcast's high-speed Internet access service.

The company, Settlement Support Center, based in Washington state, was using information that the Recording Industry of Association of America had obtained in a Philadelphia lawsuit over the illegal sharing of digital music files, said Lory Lybeck, the lawyer representing Leadbetter.

But no court authorized Comcast to release names and addresses of its customers, or notified his client that her information had been given to an outside party, Lybeck said. "Comcast should respect the rights of privacy who pay them monthly bills," Lybeck said.

Link (Thanks, Nat)

Mindy sez, "Described as 'Dada Dolls', the incredible creations offered for sale on this site are made almost entirely with recycled materials - like dictionaries, cigar boxes, and antique tobacco tins. Each doll comes with its own story: (example) 'After the summer away with her cousins in Oslo, Anna was hoping her mother would notice how short her dresses had become, and that her figure was no longer that of a child... '" Link (Thanks, Mindy!)

Investigative reporter and Boing Boing pal Mark Ebner spent last week embedded with the "Minutemen" in and around Tombstone, Arizona. For those unfamiliar with US/Mexico border politics, these are the volunteer border patrol militias comprised of heavily armed, grumpy-looking white people who have self-organized to stem the flood of wannabe janitors, dishwashers, and nannies who threaten our national security. Ebner's report will appear in Globe magazine next week, available at your grocery check-out stand. Meanwhile, enjoy the new face of Homeland Security!

Y para nuestros estimados lectores hispanohablantes: aquí les presento unas imagenes de los pendejos racistas en Arizona que se creen soldados. El fenómeno me preocupa mucho. No veo ninguna diferencia entre esto y los "lynch mobs" de antaño en el sur de mi país. Ojalá que el resultado no sea tan sangriento, pero si ellos tienen el apoyo del gobierno y del ambiente político del momento -- pues, no creo que sería una cosa buena para los derechos civiles de la gente en cualquier lado de la frontera. Gracias a Mark Ebner, periodista y amigo de Boing Boing, por las fotos. Su reportaje será publicado en El Globe la próxima semana.

Links to images: Minuteman and Jeep, Minuteman Leaders, Young Gun, Minutemen 1, Minutemen 2, Minutemen 3, Minutemen 4, Minutemen 5, Minutemen Message, MinuteWomen, Spotters, Wetbacks.

(Thanks for correcting my awful Spanish grammar, JLB)

Update: BB reader Sergio says: "Several groups from Californa will be travelling to Arizona to protest the minutemen April 17th and 18th." Link

Recipe here:
Link

Earlier this week at the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), there was a meeting to talk about how to reform the org to make it into a humanitarian agency that promotes development, not monopoly rights for publishing and pharmaceutical companies.

India's statement from the floor was so good it should be taught in universities. Check it out:

The real "development" imperative is ensuring that the interest of Intellectual Property owners is not secured at the expense of the users of IP, of consumers at large, and of public policy in general. The proposal therefore seeks to incorporate int international IP law and practice, what developing countries have been demanding since TRIPS was forced on them in 1994.

The primary rationale for Intellectual Property protection is, first and foremost, to promote societal development by encouraging technological innovation. The legal monopoly granted to IP owners is an exceptional departure from the general principle of competitive markets as the best guarantee for securing the interest of society. The rationale for the exception is not that extraction of monopoly profits by the innovator is, of and in itself, good for society and so needs to be promoted. Rather, that properly controlled, such a monopoly, by providing an incentive for innovation, might produce sufficient benefits for society to compensate for the immediate loss to consumers as a result of the existence of a monopoly market instead of a competitive market. Monopoly rights, then, granted to IP holders is a special incentive that needs to be carefully calibrated by each country, in the light of its own circumstances, taking into account the overall costs and benefits of such protection.

Link

BB reader Meggie says:

Elderly British woman wards off a burglar by heaving one of those goddamn garden gnomes at him. It was a desperate move, but thank heavens she did not have to use more than one gnome on him. What a great story (not to mention headline syntax).

Link

Bruce Schneier's op-ed on CNet about identity theft talks about why "two-factor" authentication (e.g. having to enter a password and a number that you read off of a little keychain fob) is useful for lots of things, but not for preventing identity theft. He goes on to explain how to practically solve identity theft through new liability measures:

Criminals impersonate legitimate users to financial intuitions. That means that any solution can't involve the account holders. That leaves only one reasonable answer: Financial intuitions need to be liable for fraudulent transactions.

They need to be liable for sending erroneous information to credit bureaus based on fraudulent transactions. They can't say that the user must keep his password secure or his machine virus-free. They can't require the user to monitor his accounts for fraudulent activity, or his credit reports for fraudulently obtained credit cards.

Those aren't reasonable requirements for most users. The bank must be made responsible, regardless of what the user does.

If you think this won't work, look at credit cards. Credit card companies are liable for all but the first $50 of fraudulent transactions. They're not hurting for business; and they're not drowning in fraud, either. They've developed and fielded an array of security technologies designed to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions. And they've pushed most of the actual costs onto the merchants.

Link (via Cryptogram)

The difference between being woken from a dream and woken from light sleep is the difference between a rotten wake up and an easy one -- for me at least. I have long dreamt (heh) of an alarm clock that is smart enough to tell the difference, and now I've found one:

The clock, called SleepSmart, measures your sleep cycle, and waits for you to be in your lightest phase of sleep before rousing you. Its makers say that should ensure you wake up feeling refreshed every morning.

Link (via JWZ)

Update: d3 sez, "They mention a prototype might be ready by the end of the year, but there already is an alarm clock that performs a similar function available now called the SleepTracker."

Update 2: Richard sez, "my Gadget Show Podcast still has a competition open to give away a Sleeptracker. Listen to the show and send in the requested suggestion, and I'll be happy to send the winner, as determined by Eric Mack, the watch that was provided for my review (only worn for a week)."

An LA Times story on Grouper, a P2P app which enables groups of up to 30 to swap files in an encrypted "space." Advocates praise the system's value for sharing sensitive personal content (like videos of your child, or batches of family photos), but Hollywood is not amused.

Like Kazaa and other popular file-sharing programs, Grouper allows [USC law professor Jennifer] Urban to copy movies and pictures of young Peter directly from her brother and sister-in-law's computer without worrying about formats or oversized e-mail attachments. Unlike those global networks with millions of users, though, Grouper also lets Urban pick and choose with whom she shares online — and sets a strict limit of 30 people per group.

"I'm very attracted to the privacy afforded by having a private group protected by encryption, particularly for sharing letters, family photos, movies, etc.," Urban said. "This isn't the case with other peer-to-peer networks."

What makes Grouper troubling to some entertainment industry executives are the other things people can do with it. For example, the program lets people copy bootlegged Hollywood movies and listen to songs on one another's computers, all without paying a dime to the studios, artists or songwriters.

Grouper Network Inc.'s founders, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel, say the built-in limits of their peer-to-peer software make it a poor substitute for more controversial file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Grokster, which are hotbeds for piracy. In addition to limiting the size and accessibility of groups, they say, their program requires songs to be streamed — that is, played through the Internet — not downloaded.

Link to story (via Declan McCullagh's politech)

Spotted by a metroblogger in Istanbul:

"blue beetle wrapped in threads. the sign on the rear pane reads: 'please do not touch or remove the threads. this is an art project by japanese artists visiting our country and will be here for about a week.' spotted in kadikoy with no admirers of art around."
Link (Thanks, Sean Bonner)

Mike Outmesguine says:

I came across this video of Kyle Stacy today while broadsnatching. Kyle is nothing short of an aerobatics prodigy with his radio controlled helicopter. This 9 year old kid makes his machine defy gravity in a way I didn't know was possible. Airwolf has nothing on Kyle's "Raptor 50". Just amazing. Video link:

Link to website, and movie link

BB reader Brian says:

I don't know if it's as big a deal everywhere else as it is here (probably not) but Vegas is turning 100 years old this year. I wrote a little entry about it in my blog. That in itself probably wouldn't be Boing Boing worthy, but I'll tell you what is. Las Vegas is putting on a free concert with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Weezer. There will be an outdoor concert in the beginning of July. Tickets are going to be given out on Monday online so any readers world wide can get some tickets and have a great reason to visit Vegas (then stay a couple days and enjoy Vegas for the fourth of july) Just wanted to let my fellow readers know about it.

Link.

Previous LasVegas-o-philia on BB: The Fertile Valleys, Photoblogging aging Vegas signage,

I'm honored to have been invited to participate in a panel organized by the Silicon Valley Commonwealth Club called "Joining the Blogosphere" next Tuesday, April 19. The other panelists include Dan Gillmor and Jude Barry. David Satterfield, managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News, will moderate, and Chuck Olsen, producer of the film Blogumentary, is the special guest. The free program begins at 7pm. If you're in San Jose, please stop by and say hello! From the flyer:

The current question in the Blogosphere is whether or not bloggers are journalists and if so, do they deserve the same rights as professional journalists? The civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation feels that being able to ensure sources’ confidentiality is critical to any journalist’s ability to acquire information and that includes bloggers. Are blogs a valid grassroots form of journalism? Or is there too much chance for inaccuracy and not enough fact-checking. Join us as we venture into this new land. At the start of our program we will view excerpts from recently released films – including Blogumentary and television programs related to how we get our news.

Link (Thanks, Tiff!)

Shape memory alloy, materials that change shape based on a temperature increase, are old news for roboticists. But MIT scientists have developed a new plastic that shapeshifts in response to light. From the MIT News Office:

These programmed materials change shape when struck by light at certain wavelengths and return to their original shapes when exposed to light of specific different wavelengths.

The discovery, to be reported in the April 14 issue of Nature, could have potential applications in a variety of fields, including minimally invasive surgery. Imagine, for example, a "string" of plastic that a doctor could thread into the body through a tiny incision. When activated by light via a fiber-optic probe, that slender string might change into a corkscrew-shaped stent for keeping blood vessels open.

Link

Cherie sez, "Hand-knit superhero costumes as part of an art exhibit. Worth a read (a). for the pictures and (b). for the fun pseudo-academic analysis featured within. Also includes embroidered comic book covers. Beats the hell out of the samplers with kittens I had as a kid." Link (Thanks, Cherie!)

The meeting at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on how the agency can reform itself to achieve humanitarian aims has concluded in triumph for the side of the good. We went to WIPO some years ago to the coldest possible reception from the most-captured agency in the history of the UN. Now we stand on the verge of completely remaking WIPO, thanks to dozens of progressive organizations who made the trip to Geneva and called them to account.

We won big this week. First, there is a genuinely substantive policy discussion going on within WIPO about its obligations to be more than an IP-factory and instead explore its capacity as a positive force for the social and economic development of its member states. Not only was the majority of the meeting spent discussing the excellent Friends of Development proposal, but the good guys secured two more meetings to focus on reforming WIPO, defeating those who wanted to limit the process to a single additional meeting. Second, WIPO agreed to open the next two events to the 17 non-accredited non-government organizations (NGOs) that fought hard to attend this first meeting.

The Chair's summary of the proceedings and the next steps in the process have been reproduced for your convenience after the jump. WIPO has now ended its first Inter-Sessional Intergovernmental Meeting (IIM) on the Development Agenda. The next meeting will be June 20-22, where delegates will consider comments on the proposals from the 14 Friends of Development, the US, the UK, Mexico, and any other proposals put forward. The third meeting will be sometime in July. That meeting will finalize the report to the WIPO General Assembly.

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

Boing Boing reader Isaac B2 says:

At the supermarket the other day I found quite a few examples of inappropriate superhero/product tie-ins. I posted some photos and captions on my blog, including Mace Windu / Honey Smacks and Jedi Mind Game / Raisin Bran ("These are not the raisins you seek").

Link

Update: Variety's editors gave BB readers a reg-free link to story (see end of post).

Here in Hollywood today, the top story in Daily Variety: is a video game labor strike by the entertainment industry's two actors' unions imminent? As recent releases like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas demonstrate, big names are becoming a must-have for game titles. Voice talent in GTA:SA included James Woods, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Fonda, and the blogosphere's own Wil Wheaton.

The Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA are in a critical, final stretch of negotiations with a group of major vidgame publishers, all of which have come to rely on union talent for increasingly cinematic -- and lucrative -- vidgames. The last contract covered Electronic Arts, some 70 other big gaming companies agreed to its terms.

Present contract, currently in its second extension, is set to expire on Friday, and there will not be a third extension, setting the stage for a potential work stoppage. Complicating matters: Unlike the film and TV companies, which have a long history of collective bargaining and an org that represents them, vidgamers are relatively disorganized and new to the idea of bargaining with labor. "It's 50/50 right now," said an insider. "It really could go either way."

(...)A strike would most affect the industry with regard to the use of big names. From Clint Eastwood to Vin Diesel to Heather Graham and even Marlon Brando in EA's "Godfather" adaptation, A-list talent is turning from a rarity to a must-have in the vidgame world.

Kudos to my pal and former colleague Ben Fritz, who broke this report for Variety today. Link (paid subscribers only -- arrrrrgh!)

Update: Olivia Hemaratanatorn of Variety.com has very kindly provided a free, no-subscription-required link for Boing Boing readers. Thanks very much, Olivia! Reg-free-Link

The process for electing a new Pope is amazingly baroque and weird. Bruce Schneier has posted a long and engrossing security analysis of how the election works and how its simple and ancient procedures (and the small number of participants) make it more secure than modern electronic voting systems:

How hard is this to hack? The first observation is that the system is entirely manual, making it immune to the sorts of technological attacks that make modern voting systems so risky. The second observation is that the small group of voters -- all of whom know each other -- makes it impossible for an outsider to affect the voting in any way. The chapel is cleared and locked before voting. No one is going to dress up as a cardinal and sneak into the Sistine Chapel. In effect, the voter verification process is about as perfect as you're ever going to find.

Eavesdropping on the process is certainly possible, although the rules explicitly state that the chapel is to be checked for recording and transmission devices "with the help of trustworthy individuals of proven technical ability." I read that the Vatican is worried about laser microphones, as there are windows near the chapel's roof.

That leaves us with insider attacks. Can a cardinal influence the election? Certainly the Scrutineers could potentially modify votes, but it's difficult. The counting is conducted in public, and there are multiple people checking every step. It's possible for the first Scrutineer, if he's good at sleight of hand, to swap one ballot paper for another before recording it. Or for the third Scrutineer to swap ballots during the counting process.

Link

Yesterday at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Seattle, Ed Felten cornered a State Department Fed who was there to advocate for passports enabled with RFID chips that will make it possible to track Americans as they wander the streets of foreign cities, and for terrorists and crooks to target American citizens by detecting the signature radio-pulses their passports give off. Ed asked the Fed why the US needed remotely readable passports, instead of passports with smart-cards or other "contact-read" technologies in them? The Fed's responses are hilariously lame:

In the Q&A session, I asked Mr. Moss directly why the decision was made to use a remotely readable chip rather than one that can only be read by physical contact. Technically, this decision is nearly indefensible, unless one wants to be able to read passports without notifying their owners -- which, officially at least, is not a goal of the U.S. government's program. Mr. Moss gave a pretty weak answer, which amounted to an assertion that it would have been too difficult to agree on a standard for contact-based reading of passports. This wasn't very convincing, since the smart-card standard could be applied to passports nearly as-is -- the only change necessary would be to specify exactly where on the passport the smart-card contacts would be. The standardization and security problems associated with contactless cards seem to be much more serious.

After the panel, I discussed this issue with Kenn Cukier of The Economist, who has followed the development of this technology for a while and has a good perspective on how we reached the current state. It seems that the decision to use contactless technology was made without fully understanding its consequences, relying on technical assurances from people who had products to sell. Now that the problems with that decision have become obvious, it's late in the process and would be expensive and embarrassing to back out. In short, this looks like another flawed technology procurement program.

Link

This week sees the long-overdue meeting on the "Development Agenda" at the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in which WIPO is meant to be redesigned to promote the UN's humanitarian objectives, instead of just ratcheting up more copyright, patent and trademark around the world, no matter what the consequence for development in the world's poorest country.

Two of my cow-orkers from EFF and several other colleagues are attending the meeting, and they're taking copious notes on the proceedings, blogging in near-real time as the deliberations unfold. WIPO's deliberations have been secret the only public accounts available have traditionally been sanitized versions that hide all the buried bodies. The presence of blogging public interest groups is having a marked effect on the proceedings; the last time I was there participating in this, the WIPO delegates were getting phone calls from their capitals in the afternoon about the stuff we'd reported on them saying in the morning. This real-time reporting creates new levels of transparency and accountability at WIPO, something that the apparatchiks there detest -- a representative from the Secretariat called it an "abuse of hospitality" for civil society groups to tell the world exactly what they're getting up to in Geneva.

The account of today's meeting is really engrossing. A group of over a dozen poor nations (the "Friends of Development") have presented a long, substantive proposal about how to reform IP in poor nations to encourage development. The US and other rich countries have come back with the ridiculous proposal that the way to help developing nations is to assign them with "buddies" from the developed world who will lend assistance in writing American-style copyright and patent laws in poor countries where they can barely afford to feed and shelter their citizens.

The developing nations are aggressively calling bullshit on this:

We would like to refer to other proposals referred to in the meeting. They show the commitment of good will to establish a proper development agenda at WIPO. Three proposals have one common element -- to limit the scope of the DA to technical assistance. Our delegation, of course, rejects this strategy. Our own proposal is concrete, and has specific policy actions.

Our paper presents concrete ways to achieve DA goals. We encourage Member States to make proposals based on the other elements of the Development Agenda.

On the US proposal, we observe that the premise that the partnership would be based from the GFoD perspective, the US focuses on strengthening IPRs. We do NOT share the views expressed in this document. Technical assistance should be tailor-made, appropriate to development needs.

The development dimension is not exhausted in the element contained in the US proposal.

Link

I gave a talk on copyright reform last month to librarians and other interested parties at the University of California at San Diego. The video's online now:

Doctorow talked about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the new Access to Knowledge movement underway to safeguard the rights of archivists, disabled people, and educators. This movement has been successful in helping to create a development agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). For some background see "WIPO to convene meetings on ‘development agenda’".

Link (Thanks, James!)