We are lawyers in New York City. We practice law at Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP.

Through the Electronic Frontier Foundation we and our firm have undertaken to represent people in our area who have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for having computers whose internet accounts were used to open up peer-to-peer file sharing accounts.

We find these cases to be oppressive and unfair, as large law firms financed by the recording industry sue ordinary working people for thousands of dollars.

We have set up this blog in order to collect evidence and input about these oppressive lawsuits.

Boing Boing readers are eligible for a 25 percent discount -- just sign up using the code "Euor05rrd". Sign up before the 29th for an additional early bird discount.

To best adopt and exploit open source, you need three things: technology, contacts, and experience. We bring you all three. From web technology like Ajax, Ruby on Rails, or Plone; to server technology like MySQL, Apache, and Linux, we've sought out the latest and greatest essential open source technology. We also bring you the people who created these open source tools: Paul Everitt of Plone, David Heinemeier-Hansson of Ruby on Rails, and Larry Wall of Perl fame. And to cap it off, we bring case studies you can learn from: database migration, small-to-medium business adoption, and Apache deployment.

We went to our favorite illustrator/designer, Jim Leftwich, and asked him if he could come up with the ultimate Flying Spaghetti Monster logo. He was happy to take on the assignment to support the NCSE. Jim's logo is simply stunning. He came up with two designs for the shirts, which you can see at the Boing Boing store. All profits from the sale of FSM products will be donated to the NCSE.
Link

You have no chance to survive make your time.

It's one of many odd products featured on a blog post here about Japansese Porno Shop Curiosities.

My two other favorites are a manga character modeling the rectal funnel gizmo shown here ("ohnooooo! must you look inside my butt?") and vagina in a can.

Hey, what guy can't use a nice tall can of female genitals now and then?

Snip from Rob's blog confessional about a first-hand (snort) experience with the device:

And you know what? It felt alright. It did the trick. That is, until it was all over. Until the moment after, when I was hit by a sobering freight train of humility, looking down at my dick stuck inside a latex vagina housed in a plastic beer can. Moments like that you start to question everything - "How the hell did it come to this? Who am I? What am I doing with my life?" I probably sat there for an hour, silently with my plastic lover, pondering my existence.

The next morning, when the subject of the previous night came up and someone said, "oh, where's that funny beer can thing we got? Rob, you had it, right?" And everyone looks at me, and I just stare at them for a moment, and then say, "...I fucked it. I fucked it and I hated myself, and now it's gone." There was a slight pause, followed by uproarious laughter. The ridicule took months to subside.

Mike Fair, a state senator from South Carolina, has just introduced a bill that would require public schools to teach Intelligent Design alongside evolution under the banner of science.

Says Fair, "Many of us -- most of us, I hope -- come from homes where children are taught by their parents that there's a reason behind it all." While the rest of us heathens wallow in the meaninglessness of existence, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint and Congressman Bob Inglis have expressed their support for Fair's bill.

Personally, I think it's time for these old stodgy men to be graced by His Noodly Appendage.

Image: one of many Livejournal userpics remixed from FSM iconography. Link to set. (Thanks, VAspider)

Regarding Pastafarian holidays, BB reader Keith Kisser says:

The holiest of holidays for Pastafarrians, is of course the birthday of His Most Holy Prophet, Marco Polo (b. sept 15, 1254), who brought the word of his Noodly Appendage back from the East.

As Talk Like A Pirate Day falls on September 19th, this five day period constitutes Holy Pasta Week, durring which spaghetti is consumed liberally. With a nice chianti, of course.

Previously:

FSM: Give us this day / our daily noodle
FSM flotsam
Flying Spaghetti Monster Has a Posse, and more
Pastafarianism: Flying Spaghetti Monster cult grows
Boing Boing's $1 Million Intelligent Design challenge

Update: Don't miss Mark's post on Boing Boing's FSM fundraiser to benefit the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a group that works to defend science education in schools. Link

As recently as this time last year, a podcast—a digital audio program that lives on the Internet—would have meant very little to most people. But today there are thousands of websites devoted to the technology; major media outlets have started releasing some of their broadcasts via podcast; and even cult favorite Neil Gaiman has posted the first few chapters of the audio version of his Anansi Boys on his blog. Sigler’s podcasting got him a deal with the publisher Dragon Moon Press after the publisher heard his audio version of EarthCore. And a new site, Podiobooks.com, has launched, with five titles already available for download. Its co-founder, Evo Terra, a podcaster for the online talk show The Dragon Page, notes that, as of this writing, 19 new authors have signed on to release free audio versions of their books through the site.

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

Previously: Early Build Photos from Burning Man 2005
Hand-drawn Map of BRC 2005

Last month a federal judge awarded $35,000 in compensatory and $6000 in punitive damages to a man state troopers arrested for video taping them.

Given the Utah rave case and the Oakland police stop reported today, this seems like an important decision because it makes it clear that citizens are free to video law enforcement in action.

The ruling finds violations of the plaintiff's first and fourth amendment rights. It states "The activities of the police, like those of other public officials, are subject to public scrutiny...Videotaping is a legitimate means of gathering information for public dissemination and can often provide cogent evidence, as it did in this case. In sum, there can be no doubt that the free speech clause of the Constitution protected Robinson as he videotaped the defendants on October 23, 2002....Moreover, to the extent that the troopers were restraining Robinson from making any future videotapes and from publicizing or publishing what he had filmed, the defendants' conduct clearly amounted to an unlawful prior restraint upon his protected speech....We find that defendants are liable under § 1983 for violating Robinson's Fourth Amendment right to be protected from an unlawful seizure..."

The problem is that in return for access to PodCast music, you agree to a license that prohibits you from referencing "software piracy (warez, cracking, etc.), hacking, phreaking, emulators, ROM's, or illegal MP3 activity" or saying anything "deemed unsuitable or harmful to the reputation of PodShow or the Licensor."

This is pretty nuts. Since when does the guy who provides the music to the radio station get to dictate what you're allowed to talk about? Is the price of commercial music in a PodCast that you have to yield unlimited, arbitrary editorial control to a music label?

And it gets worse -- under the terms of the license, you also agree to pay legal costs and damages to PodShow if you say something that gets them sued -- even if the judge eventually finds in your favor.

If that's the deal, count me out. I'll go on listening to podcasts with CC-licensed music in them. Link

Peter Ash, of Lawford, Somerset, attached a generator to his hamster's exercise wheel and connected it to his phone charger...

He came up with the idea after his sister Sarah complained that Elvis was keeping her awake at night by playing for hours on his exercise wheel.

"I thought the wheel could be made to do something useful so I connected a system of gears and a turbine," he said.

"Every two minutes Elvis spends on his wheel gives me about thirty minutes talk time on my phone."

Marcus Hamilton, who took over the strip after Ketcham retired in 1994, said that the first volume of reprints may surprise longtime fans who view Dennis as a mischievous, but harmless little kid. "The strip was a little more risque when it first started," he said. For example, in one panel, Dennis tied a swan's neck in a knot.

The cleverest contribution is a two-part piece by Becca Baldwin. A small, doctored photograph appears to document Yves Klein's directing a group of bigfeet in a painting performance, as he once did using the bodies of naked women as expressionistic brushes. Next to the photograph is a work that presumably resulted from the performance: a canvas bearing a big blue footprint.

Other works are either portraits or fanciful narratives in a wide variety of styles. Ketta Ioannidou paints herself as a cartoonish bigfoot striding through the woods wearing only red bikini briefs. Megan Whitmarsh embroiders little yetis on fabric.

Update: Oops! Mark already posted this, back in 2002! (Thanks, Erik!)

Not long ago we told you about our new "Cooperating Techs" listserv to help connect technologists with attorneys working on cases that are core to EFF's mission but beyond what we can handle in-house. After a couple of weeks with only a few responses, we realized we made a technical mistake with the email alias for signing up!

Now that we've recognized our error -- as well as the irony -- we've corrected the problem. If you're a technologist who'd like to apply your skills to the fight for digital civil liberties, please send -- or re-send - an email to cooptechs@eff.org. We promise that this time, your request will get through -- and you'll even get a confirmation notice to prove it!

Previous Thomas Hawk run-ins with the anti-camera Man in the Bay Area: No taking pix of San Fran building from the sidewalk?. Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

When the tide is out, the polyps are contracted and quiet. As the tide covers the colonies, "scouts" move out into the border to look for empty space to occupy. Larger, well-armed "warriors" inflate their stinging arms and swing them around. Towards the center of the colony, poorly armed "reproductive" anemones stay out of the fray and conduct the clone's business of breeding.

When anemones from opposing colonies come in contact, they usually fight. But after about 20 or 30 minutes of battle the clones settle down to a truce until the next high tide.

It's not just polyps along the border between two clones that clash. Polyps three or four rows away from the front will reach over their comrades to engage in fights, Grosberg said.

Differentiation into warriors seems to depend on a combination of signals from enemy stings and the genetics of the colony. Different colonies react differently to similar signals, explaining why different clones are organized into so many different kinds of armies. But borders between colonies can remain stable for years, even though the two colonies organize their armies in different ways.

Update: What better way to prepare for Talk Like a Pirate Day than with this MP3 of the legendary BBC Million Pound Radio Show comedy sketch, Pirate Training Day? (Thanks, Steve!)

Science Cinémathèque is about the intersection of science and film. You can watch student films about science, watch the panel discussions we have here at the museum with scientists and filmmakers, and read articles about film and science, which are annotated with video clips.

The recordings reveal sounds that, experts say, are strikingly similar to those made by ivory-billed woodpeckers and provide compelling information that can be added to evidence already gathered of the bird's existence. One of the recordings, from Jan. 24, 2005, captured a distant double knock, "Bam bam!" followed by a similar and much closer double knock 3.5 seconds later -- possibly the drumming displays of two ivory-billed woodpeckers communicating with one another by rapping on trees.

"I immediately felt a thrill of excitement the first time I heard that recording," said Russell Charif, a bioacoustics researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "It is the best tangible evidence so far that there could be more than one ivory-bill in the area."

Professor (Nilli) Lavie said: “Because the parietal lobe is not part of the visual cortex it was at first surprising to find that activity in the parietal lobe is critical for visual awareness. We have always known that the parietal cortex was responsible for concentrating. But it was a surprise to find out it is also important for detecting visual changes in a scene. The finding that this region of the brain has both these functions, concentration and visual awareness, explains why we can be so easily deceived by, say, a magicians’ trick. When we’re concentrating so hard on something that our processing capacity is at its limits, the parietal cortex is not available to pay attention to new things and even dramatic changes can go unnoticed. If you’re concentrating on what the magician’s left hand is doing, you won’t notice what the right hand is doing.”

Update: Don't miss Mark's post on Boing Boing's FSM fundraiser to benefit the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a group that works to defend science education in schools. Link

A roundup of devotional urls for Pastafarians.

(1) It isn't a real meme until Ze Frank weighs in. Link

(2) Today's "Family Circus" comic contains what could be interpreted as a stealth FSM reference. Link (Thanks, Eric and WT Hellzatt)

(3) How To Debate a Creationist: this blog entry links to an MP3 of a leave-it-to-beaveroid '50s (or early '60s?) song about science. "It's a scientific fact / it has to be correct / because it is a scientific fact." Kind of scary to think that empirical logic was more generally accepted in fifties pop culture than it is today.

(4) Mike Everett-Lane says,

Inspired by the variety of FSM graphics you posted, I've created an 80 x 15 pixel "button" for those who want to help show their support for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Link.

(5) Hymns in His honor abound. It seems He has relatives. Is Cthulhu one of them? (Thanks, Larry White, Josh, and Michael Parker)

(6) Mein Gott, ein Nudelmonster! (via Al Dente)

(7) A 3D rendering. Link (Thanks, nico)

(8) A parody of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith's "First Vision." Link

(9) Boing Boing reader Adam Pava says,

Hi Xeni. I've enjoyed following the boom of FSM-related material you guys have been covering, but I noticed nobody has created a Pastafarianism holiday yet. How about asking the greater Boing Boing community for ideas? Here are mine:

Pastaover. It's obviously the night that the Flying Spaghetti Monster flew over the city, looking for the houses that had marinara sauce splashed upon the doorposts. Perhaps, during dinner, the youngest child asks the four questions: Why on this night do we leave a chair open for the Ghost of Blackbeard? Why on this night do we wear overturned bowls of spaghetti on our heads, like that cute picture of that baby I saw once? And so on. I'm not a theologian. Other possible holidays:

Ramendan
Yummy Kippur
Nosh Hashanah
Good Farfallday
Cinco de Macaroni
Pastille Day

I'm sure your readers can do better.

Previously:

FSM flotsam
Flying Spaghetti Monster Has a Posse, and more
Pastafarianism: Flying Spaghetti Monster cult grows
Boing Boing's $1 Million Intelligent Design challenge
DIY Flying Spaghetti Monster bumper sticker
Dear Kansas: Why stop at "Intelligent Design?"

In a frantic phone call before his disappearance, Christian Julian Irwin, 48, pleaded for help, telling a friend he was being chased down a ravine by people who he believed might kill him, police said. The call, about 3:45 a.m. Sunday, was his last; no one is known to have heard from him since. Investigators have few clues besides Irwin's glasses, found halfway down the hill behind his house, where it is believed that they fell as he ran.

Irwin's friends and relatives say his pursuers may be linked to con artists who had entangled him in a so-called Nigerian Internet scam.

...

Several months ago, Irwin told his friend and former business partner Fortunato Procopio, 47, that he had been unwittingly drawn into a Nigerian Internet fraud and had been threatened by the con artists, Procopio said.

"I told him it was clearly a scam — don't be silly," Procopio said Wednesday. But Irwin later received a mysterious $50,000 check, friends and relatives said, and became increasingly concerned. Procopio and some relatives offered few details, saying police had asked them not to discuss specifics of the case.

Kitchen also endured his share of hardships. In 1976 his local printer, who had no previous qualms about running Bizarre Sex and Dope Comix on his presses, decided to draw the line with Wet Satin: Women’s Erotic Fantasies, edited by Trina Robbins. A willing printer was procured in San Francisco where, notes Robbins, “they’ll print anything.”

In the mid-1980s Michael Correa, manager of Friendly Frank’s, a suburban Chicago comics shop, was convicted of possession and sale of obscene materials. Among the titles was KSP’s Bizarre Sex and Omaha, the Cat Dancer, written by Kate Worley and illustrated by Reed Waller (Fig. 16). As a publisher, Kitchen felt a responsibility to fight the verdict. He organized a fund-raiser, which garnered more than $20, 000, and was able to hire expert First Amendment litigator Burton Joseph. Consequently, an appellate court acquitted Correa. After Kitchen had paid the legal costs, he decided to use his few thousand in surplus to establish a permanent nonprofit group to help oppose similar injustices in the future. He established the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in 1986 and served as its president for its first 18 years.

Here are all the possible ways of factoring 225 into three integers:
9 + 5 + 5 = 19
15 + 15 + 1 = 31
15 + 5 + 3 = 23
25 + 9 + 1 = 35
25 + 3 + 3 = 31
45 + 5 + 1 = 51
75 + 3 + 1 = 79
225 + 1 + 1 = 227

Only two of those sums are the same, so the address of the house must be 31, as it would be the only scenario in which the census taker would need any additional information.  Presumably the implication is that if the solution had been 15, 15 and 1, the person answering the door would have said that there was another person his age, not that he was the eldest, so the answer is 25, 3 and 3.

Reader comment: Marc Kelsey says: "Here's why I think the answer to the 1960's puzzle is bullshit:

"If the census taker had to ask the person at the door if they were the oldest, it must have been because he couldn't tell whether the person at the door was the oldest or not. If he had been talking to a 25 years old, and the others in the house were presumably 3 and 3, he would not have had to ask. Therefore, he was talking to a 15 year old, and wanted to know whether they were the oldest 15 year old (by a month, say), or the youngest 15 year old.

"In other words, the question is wrong, not the answers."

Reader comment: Mark Jaquith says: "Regarding Marc Kelsey's response.

"The census taker asked because he didn't know whether the person he was talking to was 25 or 15. That may be a wide swath of years, but what if someone looks about 20, and must be either 15 or 25? Also, if the census taker believes the person at the door to be 15, why not the 15 year old from the 15 + 5 + 3 set? Because the census taker says that he needs more information, it must be because he is undecided between two sets that add up to the same house number.

"Rather, the strongest objection relates to the definition of "eldest." If there are two 15 year olds in the house, one of them MUST be older, even though their integer ages are the same. But, if the person at the door is the older of the 15 year olds, and he answers "yes" (that he is the oldest), the riddle is unsolvable, as both the older of the two hypothetical 15 year olds and the 25 year olds are the oldest of their respective sets. You must consider that the person proposing the riddle (the person at the door) knows this, and would not give an answer that would leave the riddle unsolvable, and would answer by saying that there is another person of their age in the house, or simply answering "no" (because they are the same integer age). If the person at the door says they are the oldest, it must mean they are 25, because that answer would leave the riddle unsolvable if they were 15.

"Admittedly, it would be better if the riddle had the person at the door had say "no," because then there is no doubt at all that the person is 15. Of course, then you have to consider the oddity of two 15 year olds owning a house and raising an infant."

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Aristocrat P. Chid
Date: August 25, 2005 12:05:01 PM CDT
To: Editor
Subject: About your loove probleem, Editor

Hello Sir, Editor

How do you do there in New-York? Me and Mahatma are waitin' for any news from you. Don't you forget all your friends in India? :) As for us, we are all right. Mahatma got new job in farmaceuticals company here in Bjenin. You ask me recently what to do to fuck longer. Hm, thats a problem, dude.

But Mahatma told me about one shit she making on she's job. Just put halv a pill under your tongue 15 minutes before boom shakalaka :) and fuck all night long.

BTW, they could send it to you. Here their internet page [redacted] It will solve all your problems, trust Mahatma :) Hope to see ya someday, write me about live abroad.

Reader comment: David says: Here's a page with 57 optical illusions and visual phenomena. The purple dot illusion is also on there, but figured other fellow BB readers would be longing for more."

Update: Here's a non-Flash Link.

In the past year, the adult obesity rate rose in 48 of America's states, and nationally from 23.7% to 24.5%, Trust for America's Health found.

In 10 states, over a quarter of adults are now obese...

Currently, about 119 million, or 64.5%, of US adults are either overweight or obese.

According to projections, 73% of US adults could be overweight or obese by 2008, Trust for America's Health warned.

One stone was the size of a baseball and the other three were as big as golf balls. They added up to 553 grams, a little over a pound -- which is a lot for an animal like Cactus, who normally weighs 8 pounds and enjoys eating his namesake...

During last week's 90-minute operation on Cactus, Dunker cut a 3-by-4- inch rectangle in the tortoise's plastron, or underbelly shell, partially scoring the flap closest to the head.

"I hinged it and left it up like the hood of a car," Dunker said. "Then we had our starting point."

After removing the stones, he applied a fiberglass patch and sealed it with five-minute epoxy. It will take two years to heal.

"It was like fixing a ding in a surfboard," said Dunker, who performed a similar operation in 1992 on a tortoise from San Francisco's Randall Museum.

Enter the RailDriver, a model train simulator controller. Using RailDriver, you can have a more lifelike model railroad experience while simulating the model railroad inside your PC. Woah, I thing I just imploaded. Link (via Red Ferret)

Today, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed [PDF] the trial court's order, holding that third parties can lawfully repair and maintain another company's software under Section 117 of the Copyright Act and, more importantly, that the DMCA cannot be used to sue such vendors when the repair and maintanence itself doesn't violate any rights under copyright law. The decision follows up on the Court's previous vindication of Skylink in its DMCA case against Chamberlain over garage door openers.

Update:: Here's another alleged subway flasher.

Update 2: He made the cover of the NY Daily News!

Game manufacturers are apparently cooperating, though it's not clear from the article whether they'll be expected to coordinate with one another to stop a gamer from switching from one game to the next as her three hours run out.

If gamers can indeed switch games and reset the clock, perhaps the game manufacturers see an opportunity here to capture some of their rivals' customers, as gamers move from playing (and paying for) only one game at a time to playing several at once in three-hour chunks.

According to the Interfax news service, an official arm of the Chinese government, the system reduces the ability level of a player's online game character if the game is played beyond the three-hour limit. Basically, play more than three hours and the system cuts a game character's ability by half. Play more than five hours and the system reduces a game character's ability to the lowest level possible.

Gamers must wait a minimum of five hours before returning to gameplay, or the system will not reset..

Update: Here's the kit-company that sells plans to build your own teardrop trailer like this one, which you can tikify yourself. (Thanks, Earl!)

Now there's ItPlaysQuake -- the site that catalogs the implementations of the likewise open-source Quake as hacker after hacker ports Quake to device after device. Link (Thanks, Brandi!)

I thank the folks at Ticket Assassin for helping me beat this ticket. I paid $25 for the TicketAssassin Shareware, "an arsenal of forms, examples and guidelines assembled to help you fight your ticket via Trial By Written Declaration, a process you can do entirely by mail. This collection includes specific court documents needed to contest your case, dozens of examples, and comprehensive, easy-to-follow directions and guidelines for their proper use."

The TicketAssassin folks also answered my emailed questions about the specifics of the ticket.

And it worked! The ticket was dismissed and the check I sent for $190 is being returned.

Trial By Written Declaration is the best way to fight a ticket. I am thrilled with TicketAssassin!

There's no apprenticeship in porn. No boot camp for nervous recruits. You're thrown naked into the gladiator ring to prove your mettle, and three weeks in the business gives you enough experience to accumulate quite a bushel of colorful anecdotes and pungent impressions. Three years as a porn thespian and you're a regular Gielgud, full of lore... Paired with Ken-doll porn stalwart Peter North, Christy Canyon learns that there's one part of his anatomy that's strictly No Trespassing:

"Can I just tell you one thing Christy," Deep concern set in his brown eyes... "It's really the only thing you have to know about me in a sex scene."

"Of course you can tell me." Maybe he was going to tell me that he easily formed a crush on girls that looked like me.

"Do not touch my hair." … He glanced in the mirror. "It takes me a long time to get my hair like this, and if anybody touches it in a sex scene, I lose all of my concentration."

I didn't want that on my conscience. "I promise you Peter, I will not touch your hair."

Just checking i said thank you for lovely dinner and lovely evening xx

Are we eloping?TTT

Unexpectedly detained overnight for phone theft and breach of promise. Breakfast surprisingly good tho' and you're worth it. Horas Mami,aku sehat&baik2.Aku doakan Mami juga sehat,sejahtera&selalu disertai TUHAN.Aku terima SMS jam 24(6 pagi WIB ini).

hello babe

salut!merci pentru mesajul de ieri..cam scurt..dar e suficient si atat.Tu ce mai zici..bine, fericit? ne mai auzim:)

jim this is a tune,, from the top , alan

"The event will be held at 826 NYC, 372 Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.  Tickets are $50, reservations can be made by calling 718.499.9884." Link

I applied the brilliant blue with the same #14 brush, but I really slopped it on extra thick, to build up an impasto texture. I love throwing around paint, it makes me think I know what I'm doing.

One last small thing for the day. I painted the fingernails with my beloved cadmium red. I'll go back over this a few times to ensure that the red is really vibrant.

As more and more of the blank canva fills with color, the color harmony starts to make more sense, but it also creates new challenges. I'll be spending tonight figuring out the color I wanna use for the highlights in the hair.

Previously: Paint by blog with Coop

This one is too funny. Basically, the parent company of Dish Network is running a contest where towns in the United States who officially change their name to "Dish" will be eligible to receive free DISH Network service - in ALL households of that city - for 10 years. They mention that everyting must be officially done, federal paperwork, renaming municipal buildings and schools, etc.

Here's why:

In SSL you have a sender, a recipient and an attacker. The attacker is never supposed to be in possession of the cleartext. It doesn't matter, however, if the recipient gains access to the cleartext. That's why you can have open source SSL.

In DRM you only have a sender and an attacker, who is also the recipient. DRM relies on the attacker/recipient only gaining access to the cleartext while their machine is in the grips of non-user-accessible code that restricts what they can do with the cleartext (in particular, DRM seeks to ensure that the cleartext can't be saved back to the drive while still in the clear).

If you have an open source DRM "client" or "player," then how can it keep users from modifying it to allow the saving and manipulation of the conditionally rendered cleartexts?

There has never, ever been a DRM implementation that was intended to be user-modifiable. There can't be. It's like trying to make "dry water" or "hot ice." DRM is supposed to keep users from manipulating their players. Open source is supposed to encourage users to manipulate and modify their players. They are utterly incompatible.

Crypto isn't about algorithms. Crypto is about threat-models. The threat model for SSL is a third-party eavesdropper. The threat model for DRM is that the intended recipient of the cleartext will gain long-term access to the cleartext. Link

Update: A Boing Boing reader has produced "a Bullshit Protector PDF that looks as close to the original photo as I could make it. And, yes, it really does say "cooties"."

Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.

The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.

The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans, Nisbett said.

In the latest test, the researchers tracked the eye movement of the Chinese and Americans as they looked at pictures.

The Americans looked at the object in the foreground sooner -- a leopard in the jungle for example -- and they looked at it longer. The Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the background and back and forth between the main object and the background, he said.

The usual price-setting method is to look at the entire potential market, from the many at the economic lower end to the few at the top, and set a price somewhere in between the top and bottom that will maximize total revenues. But if you cede the bottom to piracy, you can set a price between the top and the middle. The result: higher revenues per copy, and potentially higher revenues overall.

The only exception I take to Chris's argument is the idea that some "copy-protection" (DRM) technology can reduce downloading. The thing is, if I want to download a song instead of buying it, then all I require is a search tool and a copy of that song that someone, somewhere has cracked. It doesn't matter how strong or weak the DRM is on the copy that I choose not to buy -- all that matters is how much resource one cracker, somewhere in the world, was willing to devote to breaking the DRM. The first copy may be very expensive, but all subsequent copies are free.

The only way that DRM could stop me from downloading is if:

• Every copy of the song circulated, from the recording studio to the record store, had strong DRM on it
• No analog to digital converters were available to anyone, anywhere in world, who might have an interest in breaking the DRM (since you can just avoid the DRM by making taking the analog output off the player and re-digitizing the song in an open format)
• Peer-to-peer networks ceased to exist
• Search engines ceased to index file-sharing sites
• No "small worlds" file-sharing tools were in circulation

Now comes the report of a sheriff in Arkansas who says that the local tweakers occupy their nerves by methodically searching nearby fields for indian arrowheads. The sheriff says that many of the tweakers he busts have large collections of indian arrowheads in their homes.

Tony Young of Velvet Ridge says the sheriff is on to something. Young is in jail awaiting trial on a meth charge. He says looking for arrowheads gives people wired on meth something to do. To pay for his legal defense, Young sold his arrowhead collection to a local dealer.

Young says that many nights he found himself in fields full of fellow arrowhead hunters and many of them were high on meth.

Arkansas State archeologist Ann Early says she's seen meth users collecting arrowheads in the Ozarks. She says it is troubling that they have taken to collecting Indian artifacts.

Update: Slate's Jack Shafer recently covered this phenomenon and get the word that neurologists call this behavior "punding": "I received a polite e-mail from Joshua Kershen of the Tufts-New England Medical Center. He informed me of the neurological concept of "punding," the restless and repetitive assembling and disassembling of mechanical devices (watches, carburetors, radios), the obsessive lining-up of small objects, or the picking at one's own skin. The phrase was coined to describe the 'prolonged, purposeless, and stereotyped behaviour in chronic amphetamine users,' according to this scientific paper (additional punding papers can be found on PubMed). Punding is also observed in people experiencing dopamine excess states, such as when patients are overtreated with Parkinson's disease medication. Because meth, like amphetamine, causes a flood of dopamine, it stands to reason that a meth user would pund."

Update 2: More on the guy who sold his arrowheads to finance his meth-bust defense here (Thanks, Greg!)

Unbeknown to the attendees, many of whom came from China for the occasion, the supposed bride and groom were FBI agents. The government said Monday that the pair had spent four years investigating a sophisticated racketeering enterprise suspected of smuggling into the United States vast quantities of black-market cigarettes, high-tech weapons, Ecstasy, counterfeit Viagra and virtually undetectable counterfeit $100 bills...

"They were literally being taken out of their limos and into custody," one Justice Department official said. "Some of them were bearing gifts — expensive ones like Rolex watches."

Yesterday, Sun Microsystems announced its new "Open Media Commons," with a goal of "[s]pecify[ing] open, royalty-free digital rights management and codec standards" to "ensur[e] intellectual property protection." The problem with this approach is that making DRM "open" and "royalty-free" doesn't make it any less damaging and counter-productive.

People have the legal right to make fair uses of content. They have the legal right to use materials in the public domain. They have the legal right to use publicly owned works, such as government-gathered facts. Any software system, open or not, that blocks us from making these legal uses of our digital content is bad, especially when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal for us to circumvent the copyright protection to make these legal uses.

This "Open Media Commons" says a lot about fostering sharing and so forth, but there's precious little to indicate that it will be any less threatening than the Microsoft DRM that it's supposed to challenge.

# it's become clear to me on investigation that these folks are indeed paying us for our Google rank, and not just for clickthroughs. We just aren't targeted enough for their ads to be justified on a click-through basis. What's more, using Google's link: keyword to check for top links to these particular advertisers shows that the O'Reilly sites they advertise on are among their chief link sources. They aren't getting independent links from users. In short, these advertisers are using O'Reilly and other highly ranked sites who accept their advertising to improve their chances of being discovered via search engines, rather than in quest of direct click throughs (although those may also provide some value for their ad buy.)

# Google has an authorized way for people to show up arbitrarily high on searches: i.e., to pay for relevant Adwords. However, nearly all of the terms used in these links are quite expensive. So advertising on a site with a high page rank instead of via Google Adwords is a way of arbitraging the relative cost of advertising on the two sites. However, it has a downside in terms of the search engine user experience. The ad shows up as a sponsored link on the originating site, but as a legitimate result in the search engine.

The alleged suspect was dressed as a Stormtrooper, a soldier for the Galactic Empire in the science fiction movie series "Star Wars."

"Apparently some people who saw him felt there was a threat," said Sgt. Kay Nikolaus of the Janesville Police Department.

In addition to two Chinese variants of Windows, the Super WinPE disc includes dozens of boot-time utilities for troubleshooting system snafus. One is an experimental "pre-installation environment" that uses a "mini-Windows XP" for system scanning and file recovery, similar to the popular Knoppix LiveCD version of Linux...

Minimalism defines many tweaked versions. Windows XP SP2 Corporate Edition is 580 MB in stock form, but can be pared down to as little as 235 MB, the size of the so-called "WinXP SP2 Lite Edition."

The Lite Edition strips out everything but the very basics: no Windows Media Player, no documentation and a far smaller library of drivers. It also forgoes the standard check for minimum system requirements, shortening the overall install process.

In fact, many cracked editions feature an install process that dispenses entirely with the standard setup dialog. Pop in the system burned to CD, reboot, and a few minutes later come back to a freshly installed, custom copy of Windows.

(2) Textbook stickers "inspired by both the creative FSM items posted to BB earlier and the dim-witted Georgia Dep't of Edumacation." Link to PDF designed for easy sticker printing. (Thanks Matt)

(3) Spotted at Camp Casey? Xon Lopez says, "Check out the 'Where we are from' map on the first page. If you look closely you can see the spaghetti monster beginning to emerge." Link.

(4) WWFSMD? Boing Boing reader Preya says, "I decided to put a 'sticker' on my blog to show my support for Flying Spaghetti Monster. I think this would be a great idea to share with other Pastafarians!"

(5)"What If God Wanted Pasta Sauce?", a song parody sung to the tune of "What If God Was One Of Us." A vocals-only version is also provided for remix hijinx. Link (Thanks, Alex)

What if God wanted pasta sauce
With some meat ’cause He’s the boss
Just a monster flying over us
Trying to make his way home

(7) Creator of "Diesel Sweeties" comic creates a LiveJournal icon "Thou Shalt Have No Entree Before Me": Link (Thanks, Justin)

(8) BB reader Chris says,

Instead of "My Boss is a Jewish Carpenter" the FSM version should be "My Boss is A Flying Noodle". You should have a contest to come up with FSM sanctioned replacements for: "WARNING! In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned" "Dont let the car fool you-- my treasure is in heaven" "Big Bang theory-- God Spoke and "Bang!" It happened" "No Jesus, No Peace...Know Jesus, Know Peace"

Flying Spaghetti Monster is awesome. S/he can fly around and have all the meatballs he wants, even seconds. I once heard that when Flying Spaghetti Monster was just cruising over a campsite in the woods on a mountain somebody's dog barked and Flying Spaghetti Monster rained down fury in the form of mushroom sauce. My friend Karl even once said that Flying Spaghetti Monster sent unfriendly faxes to municipal workers. And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you don't believe that Flying Spaghetti Monster has REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or it will write letters to the editor about you!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.

Flying Spaghetti Monster is sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants. I can't believe it sometimes, but I feel it inside my heart. S/he is totally awesome and that's a fact. Flying Spaghetti Monster is fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet. I can't wait to start cooking classesnext year. I love Flying Spaghetti Monster with all of my body (including my pee pee).

Flying Spaghetti Monster Has a Posse, and more
Pastafarianism: Flying Spaghetti Monster cult grows
Boing Boing's $1 Million Intelligent Design challenge
DIY Flying Spaghetti Monster bumper sticker
Dear Kansas: Why stop at "Intelligent Design?"

Google Talk is a downloadable Windows application that lets you send instant messages to your friends and make free phone calls over an internet connection. Google Talk offers excellent voice quality and works with any computer speaker and microphone.

UPDATE: Here's another link to the video. Link (Thanks, Ben Houston!)

Sontoku (Kinjiro) Ninomiya, a Johnny Appleseed-like national folk hero often represented in statues outside bookstores and schools... most often remembered reading as he walks, burdened with bundles of firewood gathered in daily chores. The book points to this multitasker ancestor as a precursor of contemporary nagara ("while-doing-something-else") mobility, a concept now embodied in students who wander from home to class and back again, eternally gazing into a palm full of e-mails.

This sense that Japan's technological modernity (and even avant gardism) might be rooted not in incomplete emulations of the West but in something very ancient, folksy and specifically Japanese is exactly what I feel about the country; that it's a place where (...) trains may look like Western trains, but are actually "a set of Japanese etiquettes and assumptions travelling through space".

I asked Hisae about this idea of the "multi-tasking tribe", the Nagara-zoku, and she came up immediately with an even older, more folksy ancestor: Prince Shotoku Taishi, a medieval multi-tasker so intelligent that he could listen to what ten people were saying, all speaking at once. He's the man in the statue to the left, and he would have loved the keitai.

It might seem odd to hold the view that Japanese phenomena are so rooted in local Japanese traditions, and yet applicable (by "Japanization") to the rest of the world, but I don't think it's a contradiction. When I think of the really successful Japanese products -- Pokemon, or the films of Miyazaki, for instance -- they're successful because they're full of a very specific Japaneseness. Their universality is rooted in their particularism, and their global reach comes from their local resonance.

Link to Momus' blog-post "The multi-tasking tribe", and here's his first Wired News column, "Reading Green Tea Leaves in Tokyo."

One day after losing Bob Moog, the electronic music community has lost one of its greatest composers, musique concrete and found-sound composer Luc Ferrari. Ferrari not only was the founding director of an academy dedicated to musique concrete but continued to advance the notion of recorded sound as music with experiments like turning a recording of a Yugoslav village into music. The fact that we now find such innovations old-hat is partly due to the influence he had.

Previously: In Memoriam -- Bob Moog

When Geek Squad "double agent" Mark Reardon was pulled over by the Highway Patrol on Interstate 680 near Walnut Creek in June, he wondered what he had done wrong. Then he found out. Reardon was ticketed because his company-owned Volkswagen Beetle too closely resembled a police car. "I was amazed," he said this week.

Now, the Geek Squad mobile computer technician service is repainting all of its 150 black and white Beetles to the CHP's liking. The CHP officer who stopped Reardon cited a state law that prohibits the painting of a privately owned or commercial vehicle to resemble a police car.

"Obviously it would be a pretty far shot to mistake a Volkswagen Beetle for a cruiser, but it comes down to protecting our unique color scheme," said Officer Steve Creel, a spokesman for the CHP's Dublin office.

The officer who issued the citation is on vacation and unavailable for comment.

Reader comment: A Former Geek says,

I worked for the company back in the late 1990s when it was 35 people in Minneapolis’s Warehouse District. The Geek Squad’s owner (or, I suppose, Vice President now), Robert Stephens, has always been quite the marketer. He loved to regale us with stories about how he’d tried to acquire roof lights for all of the Geekmobiles, but ran into problems with Minneapolis city ordinances prohibiting this sort of behavior. Robert also spent some time trying to figure out how to stamp the Geek Squad logo onto urinal cakes for distribution throughout the bathrooms of high-end restaurants and bars in the Twin Cities. This never panned out, but he did have a box of urinal cakes underneath his desk for quite a while.

Christine de Pisan at her computer reflects my interest in combining historical female icons with contemporary imagery. The work was inspired by the 14th century feminist writer, Christine de Pisan (1364-1430). She is the first woman to earn a living from writing. In her Book of the City of Ladies (1405), she argued that women’s education should be equal to man’s."

Check out the other amazing patch-work on her website -- Control Panels (shown above), Feminine Appliances, Breast Exam and Mastectomy, and others. I'd love to buy a bunch for my laptop case, but they're costly, one-of-a-kind objets d'art.

Link to artist website (Thanks, Siege)

Just a quick update about our upcoming Future of Music Policy Summit, September 11-13, 2005 at GWU's Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC. We've had incredible success in recent weeks building panels that address emerging issues with top-level panelists. Here's a sample:

GROKSTER: On June 27, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in MGM v. Grokster. Now, on September 13, some of the major players in this lawsuit including the movie and music industry’s lead counsel Don Verrilli, EFF’s Fred von Lohmann, RIAA president Cary Sherman, Creative Commons' counsel Mia Garlick, ASCAP's Chris Amenita and NYU professor Siva Vaidhyanathan will debate the impact of the Supreme Court decision on musicians and the music industry.

PAYOLA: On July 25, NY State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced a settlement with Sony BMG in his payola investigation. Now, on September 13, Terryl Brown Clemons, Assistant Deputy Attorney General for the Division of Public Advocacy and lead investigator, will explain the implications of the settlement as well as what we should expect from Spitzer and the FCC on payola in the near future.

It all started with those Dove ads that show all the hot, mostly naked girls in weirdly desexualized lingerie with the tagline: “Real women have curves.” I can only assume it’s from this sentence alone that we are supposed to guess that the women in the ad are fat or have otherwise culturally unacceptable bodies (a few are people of color, one has a large tattoo, another is sort of tomboyish). The ads are part of Dove soap’s “campaign for real beauty,” another tip-off that we’re supposedly looking at women larger than the usual “unreal” models.

And yet if it weren’t for Dove’s helpfully-condescending slogans for these women, I would never have pegged them for “real.” Sure, their underwear is kind of drab, but every model has flawless skin, shiny hair, a radiant smile, and not a dimple of cellulite anywhere on her “real” body. None of them have flab or wrinkles. And their breasts are perfectly perktacular! I’m definitely in the audience of “real-bodied” women the ads are aimed at, but I don’t see my body up there. I see the same old airbrushed cuties, except with less makeup, slightly more muscle, and no Victoria’s Secret.

In New York, people with magic markers started doctoring the ads with occasionally fat-phobic, occasionally anti-corporate, and occasionally utterly random comments. In Dusseldorf, a local branch of zippy advertising agency Ogilvy took up space on local bus stops with a parodic campaign for real men’s bodies.

The first recorded story of a person actually being shot from a cannon was in England, circa 1877. And yes, it was a girl, (14) called "Zazel" (Rossa Matilda Richter). She went on to tour with the P.T. Barnum Circus. Unfortunately (as some stories are told), during one of her performances, she broke her back and had to spend the rest of her life in a back brace. Since then, dozens of brave (?) souls have been propelled from cannons at speeds up to 90 mph and as far as 201* feet at a height of 100 feet. They endure "G" forces of around 12 G's when hitting the net. More than half of these entertainers were killed while performing their act, most by missing the net. New York State even issued a law prohibiting anyone from being shot from a cannon.

David Wilde, the researcher running the project, said, "There are several theories as to why people have OBEs. A common link between them is the idea that in certain circumstances the brain somehow loses touch with sensory information coming in from the body. This triggers a series of psychological mechanisms which can lead to someone having an OBE.

"In this study we aim to take the theory a stage further, by looking at the way people see and experience their bodies, and how - through perfectly ordinary psychological processes - these images and experiences may create the impression of seeing their bodies from the outside."

While working, I typically leave my digital camera on a tripod, and snap a photo every so often. This helps me to look at the painting with a fresh eye, and figure out if things are working out the way I'd like. I thought it would be interesting to document the whole process step-by-step.

My working methods are pretty basic. I start with a preliminary pencil drawing, then transfer the drawing to bristol board, and ink the drawing with a Windsor Newton series 7 brush, #02 size. The line art is digitally scanned, then I play around in Photoshop until I find a composition I like. The line art is output at about 5" square, then mounted with spray mount on a small piece of masonite. Using my school-surplus opaque projector, the image is then transferred by hand to the 6' square canvas.

Perversely a lot of my drive is based on my interpretation of success. I would love to succeed – but I can’t really decide what ‘to succeed’ is, as it tends to flip-flop from one thing to another – leaving me with a very frightening, but at the same time, strangely comforting notion that I will never be able to put my feet up because I won’t know when I’d be happy enough to do so.

Over the next day and week you'll hear about the new PSP 2.0 update from all the usual places, but don't update- really. There are a couple new features, like a web browser, image transfer/wallpaper, some other video and network tweaks -- but it's a yawn. You'll lose all the amazing homebrew playing capability, emulators and cool applications the PSP makers are cranking out -- so don't do it -- it's just not worth it, it removes fun (until the version 2.0 firmware can play homebrew, then it's ok to update).

"The adaptor costs almost nothing because it is simply a system of lens linked to a webcam costing just about $30.

"In total I had to buy only the scope, which is about $800," Dr Huy told the BBC World Service programme Go Digital.

"A Pentium 4 computer with a colour printer is all that is needed for image processing.

"Using the Windows operating system, we have programs to record the images and put them in a database of patients."

"I can now make a complete endoscope system in just one week."

"Little Red Riding Hood Strays Into the Neutral Zone and Is Never Heard From Again, Although There Are Rumors ... Awful, Awful Rumors"

"Hansel and Gretel Offend Vlad the Impaler"

"The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates"

Link (via Make Blog)

I've been a Buddy Holly fan ever since reading Bradley Denton's comic science fiction masterpiece Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, which I rate as one of the best comic novels ever written. I've worn thick black-framed glasses ever since.

The bag, belonging to Buddy Holly, contained a roll of adhesive tape (same size as what was used on the taped handle), a toothbrush, a half-used tube of Colgate toothpaste, a hairbrush and a comb (there must have been two combs as a BHMS member was given one of the combs by Larry Holley some time ago), a jar of Dusharme lanolin hair sheen, a Remington shaving powder stick, Sea And Ski tanning cream (8 fluid ounce plastic bottle hardy used), a small bottle of Anacin, a small clothes brush used to remove lint (with much lint on the bristles), a tube of Chapstick lip gloss, a packet of five Ronson lighter flints with two missing (no lighter was found in the bag. A lighter was found at the scene and returned to Jay Richardson.), a Ban lotion deodorant tube, and a few other assorted items, most in pieces.

Acme made this 1.1 meter tall, 50 cm diameter, 15 Kg clear Pyrex Klein bottle in conjunction with Toronto's Kingbridge Centre and Killdee Scientific Glass. Link (Thanks, Adrian!)

The Wikinews roundup is probably the best coverage on the net:

The promoter says the party took place on private property, named Child's Ranch, with express permission from the owner. The property owner has apparently had at least one previous run-in with police over a similar event. Utah County requires a permit, bond and county commission approval for all gatherings with more than 250 people present. According to a DJ at the event, "they presold 700 tickets and they expected up to 3,000 people total". He added that by the time police arrived "the crowd was about 1500 people thick".

The police have publicly stated that these permits were not obtained, but the promoters claim otherwise. Officials also claim that the party had spilled over onto public land. Police reported in local press that more than 60 arrests were made for weapons offenses, driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, underage drinking, drug possession and distribution, resisting arrest, assault on a police officer and disorderly conduct. Officers claim to have found cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana, mushrooms, alcohol and large amounts of drug paraphernalia. Some of the drugs may include those confiscated from partiers by security guards.

But thieves in Cambridge have cottoned on to an alternative use for the function, using it as a scanner which will let them know if another Bluetooth device is locked in a car boot.

Det Sgt Al Funge, from Cambridge's crime investigation unit, said: "There have been a number of instances of this new technology being used to identify cars which have valuable electronics, including laptops, inside.

Update: A number of you have written in to say that this is implausible, given that laptops don't transmit their Bluetooth ID when they're shut up in a car trunk. I agree -- this is fishy.

I've called the Cambridge policeman, Al Funge, quoted in the piece, but he's on holiday until Sept 5. His colleague says that he doesn't know where Funge got the information that thieves had successfully used this measure to locate laptops locked up in Cambridge car-trunks.

I've also just spoken to the Cambridge Evening News -- the newspaper that published this -- and asked if they have any more info; they've promised to get back to me about it. I'll post here when they do.

Update 2: Bruce Schneier sez, "I don't think it's fishy. Read the comments from my blog posts. Some Bluetooth devices can work even when turned off."

There's a lot of controversy about CAPTCHAs, not least because visually impaired users have a very hard time using them, but also because there are a lot of programmers who believe that creating an app to read CAPTCHAs just isn't that hard (the easiest way may be to inline a CAPTCHA from the site you're attacking on a site where you're offering free porn, and get the people signing up for the free porn to solve the CAPTCHAs for you).

PWNTCHA is an app that decodes different vendors' CAPTCHAs, to varying degrees of accuracy, producing evidence for the case that CAPTCHAs don't do a great job of keep bad guys out nor of letting good guys in:

PWNtcha stands for "Pretend We're Not a Turing Computer but a Human Antagonist", as well as PWN capTCHAs. This project's goal is to demonstrate the inefficiency of many captcha implementations.

For an overview on why visual captchas are a bad idea, see Matt May's excellent presentation, Escape from CAPTCHA, as well as the W3C's Inaccessibility of Visually-Oriented Anti-Robot Tests working draft.

Icer Air 2005, slated for Aug. 27, will put snow, a ski jump, camera crews and crowds on Fillmore Hill to help celebrate Olympic skier Jonny Moseley's 30th birthday and hawk Icer's line of apparel, ski waxes and snowboard waxes. Moseley and 30 other professionals -- including several Norwegians -- will fly off a jump at Fillmore and Vallejo streets, do mid- air acrobatics and land near Green Street.

Hay bales will keep them from plowing into oncoming traffic, and the athletes will be competing for a $100,000 prize and a Jeep. Organizers hope to make it an annual event in different cities.

Update: Famed photographer and Boing Boing buddy Steve Diet Goedde, who shot this, says:

Your posts today of the Fisher house reminded me of the phonecam shot I took of it last year (shown above -- link to original post). I stopped by there about a month ago and noticed that the owners replaced the stain-glassed windows with regular modern windows. I guess since the show was ending, they no longer had to keep up the appearance.

Also, here is the MSN Virtual Earth satellite photo of the Fisher house. Much closer with more detail.

One common form of pareidolia is seeing faces in objects (like the flying spaghetti monster on a tortilla, or the face of Sean Hannity on a human being). There is an excellent book filled with pictures of faces on objects, called Faces.

My friend Jim Leftwich has been taking his own pictures of faces for a while, and has a flickr gallery with them. As I expect from Jim, the photos are whimsical and surprising.
Link

Update: Here's another, from Scott Shanks.
Link

Update: Another set, from FINK.
Link to Adobe Illustrator file

Update: A stencil friendly version, from pATCH, who says: "I endorse nothing illegal, but graffiti is beautiful."
Link

"It's obviously generated by some sort of algorithm that takes Google search terms and writes copy based on them. In this case "Prostitute Phobia" generated this amazingly funny copy.

"An excerpt:

To add insult to an already distressing condition, most prostitute phobia therapies take months or years and sometimes even require the patient to be exposed repeatedly to their fear. We believe that not only is this totally unnecessary, it will often make the condition worse.

"We like government levies when they benefit us," Bronfman said. "I would like none of the legislators in France, for instance, to say they should no longer pay us a levy for all the blank CDs that are being sold, (though) it doesn't make up for the revenue that we're losing...If the government mandated filtering technologies, we'd be delighted."

Previously, we'd blogged other work from the dudes including their Channel 101 short series The 'Bu, and a supremely deadpan music video called "Just Two Guys."

But here's the big news -- a blog exclusive. BoingBoing's Hollywood informant raises his nose mid-snort from a line of blow along a stripper's butt-crack to tell us that three Lonely Island-ers have been hired by NBC's Saturday Night Live.

On SNL's forthcoming season, Andy Samberg (far right in photo above) will become a member of the new cast, while Jorma Taccone (far left) and Akiva Schaffer (to the immediate right of Jack Black in colonial drag) will support him as writers.

Link

Previously: Lonely Island: wack-ass online shorts and mp3s

"Lonely Island"-er Andy Samberg on Comedy Central

A national newspaper reported on Monday that the man had finally broken his silence and stated he was German, before leaving the UK.

The health trust said the patient had been discharged following a marked improvement in his condition but the rules regarding patient confidentiality meant there would be no further statement...

The German embassy in London said it had been contacted on Friday morning by the Little Brook Hospital, in Dartford, with a report of a man claiming to be a German national.

"We contacted his parents and his identification was confirmed," an embassy spokesman said.

"We gave him replacement travel documents and he left the UK using his own arrangements on Saturday morning.

"This was a neutral affair for us, it was someone who had lost his passport and needed to get back to Germany and we helped him."

See also: FSM Flickr pool (Thanks, Buz Carter)

The Pesto Manifesto: Link.

The boundary separating diet and deity grows thinner with the rise of Bacontarianism, an Atkins-compliant response to Pastafarianism. Link. Praise the Lard.
And Boing Boing reader Alan says:

You blogged:

"So, here's a question. If some people see Jesus in a tortilla, or the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, where does the Flying Spaghetti Monster show up to avoid redundancy?"

Cables.

He appears in every server room or near computers everywhere.

Previously:

Pastafarianism: Flying Spaghetti Monster cult grows

Boing Boing's $1 Million Intelligent Design challenge

DIY Flying Spaghetti Monster bumper sticker

"The robot is not controlled all the time through a predefined trajectory - as is typically done in robotics," says Max Lungarella, who works at the lab where R Daneel was developed...

The research project is aimed at exploring more flexible - and graceful - ways for robots to interact with the world around them. "The main idea behind the design of the robot is the exploitation of body dynamics," Lungarella told New Scientist.

The same blend of control and flexibility used in standing up could also be applied to other robot tasks, Lungarella believes. "All kinds of tasks - particularly dynamics-based ones - can be addressed with our framework. We are currently looking at jumping, rolling, walking, trotting, swinging, reaching and grasping."

The Retro Kid... focuses on children's book illustrations from the mid-40's through the the mid-60's, as that is one of my favorite eras for that sort of thing. But I don't want to limit it to just books, as I'm open to seeing anything that was illustrated for kids, such as textbooks, booklets, pamphlets, albums, 45's, ads, games, toys, etc. As long as it has that mid-century modern stylized look with the characters and colors, I'm down with it. Oh, and if it looks cool. Yeah. Cool.

In the description for the group, I mention some illustrators as examples that I dig -- Aurelius Battaglia, JP Miller, Art Seiden, The Provensens, Mary Blair, M. Sasek, and many more with similar styles. They were a prolific bunch, and I feel that there is not enough out there on the web about these incredibly talented artists to really get a sense of how influential they were. Thus, The Retro Kid was born. Hopefully this group will give exposure to these fantastic artists, and give credit where credit is due.

As part of an ongoing trial [at the San Diego Naval Hospital, Dr. James L.] Spira treats Marine and Navy personnel with the system. Some of his PTSD patients are veterans; others remain on active duty. One of the patients Spira worked with in the VR therapy trial was a Marine sniper, the sole survivor of an attack in which he witnessed at close range the violent deaths of fellow squad members.

"One of them was cut in half, literally, with machine-gun fire. (My patient) ran out on impulse to help him, and was shot in the arm and leg. He picked up the body, scooped up the intestines, brought him back to their vehicle as the guy looked up at him and spoke, dying. His squad truck headed back with them for safety, and was then hit by IED (improvised explosive device), which killed everyone but him." The Marine was rescued and transported to a hospital, and eventually returned to the United States, where he started VR treatment with Spira.

"Snipers are very tough in general, and during the session, he kept saying, 'I'm fine.' But I had him hooked up with physiological monitors, and when I asked him to tell the story of what happened, his system went through the roof.

"He flew out of his wheelchair in public once, and started pounding on a guy who said we shouldn't be in Iraq," Spira said. "But over time, as the therapy continued, he became calmer and was able to get along with people better."

Previously:

NPR "Xeni Tech": Virtual reality to treat PTSD for Iraq vets

Reader comment: Tim Holt says,

Here's a great satellite view of burning man's land scars. An interesting companion image to that amazing hand drawn map. Link

I've collected some Burning Man maps here, and here is a Google Maps Slideshow I made.

Tim Holt refers to Burningman's "land scars" in the Google satellite image. I think that's misleading. Judging by the amount of settlement at the site, I'd estimate that the picture was taken at this time of year--that is to say, about a week before the event started. What you're seeing is the beginning of the city, not the aftermath. I don't know if Tim meant to suggest that the site is visible year-round, but given the controversy that's sometimes swirled around questions of the event's environmental impact, I thought it would be worthwhile to set the record straight.

Thomas explains:

I am gifting a silver-plated bowl as the actual physical trophy. A group of Canadians (mostly from Calgary, Alberta) are hosting the event again this year on Thursday (September 1st) from 4 to 7 PM. Kamp Kanuckistan (representing the "stateless state" of the Free United Cartel of Kanuckistan) will be at 5:20 on Fetish.

The pronounciation of "Xeni Cup" would link it to an alternate name for the sport: Link.

Bonus extra -- a chart of 8 years of Black Rock City street names: Link.

This is such stupendously good news that I frankly didn't believe it. This is what EFF has been calling for for years now, a Voluntary Collective Licensing Scheme will break the file-sharing deadlock and give the majority of Internet users who file-share today the chance to get legit while compensating rightsholders.

I spent the day going back and forth with the two principles from PlayLouder MSP, Paul Sanders and Paul Hitchman, and based on what they've told me, I'm prepared to say that this is the best thing to happen to the copyfight all year -- maybe all century.

Here's the deal. PlayLouder MSP DSL costs about the same as comparable DSL offerings in the UK (though right now, PlayLouder MSP's one-meg speeds don't compare to the high-end offerings from ISPs like Bulldog, who are offering 8-meg DSL). For their money, PlayLouder MSP customers get their regualr DSL lines, as well as:

• The right to share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog
• Even if it's out of print
• In any file-format
• Using any file-sharing software
• At any bitrate

PlayLouder MSP is using audio-analysis software provided by Audible Magic to analyze the P2P traffic that it can detect on its network and count approximately how many times each track is traded, and will deliver that, along with a cut of its revenue, to Sony.

They're also filtering traffic to the Internet to prevent Sony music tracks that Audible Magic recognizes from leaving its network via recognized P2P protocols and going to ISPs whose customers have not paid a license fee. However, they will not be stopping any tracks that Audible Magic fails to recognize, nor will they be resticting traffic using unrecognized protocols.

PlayLouder MSP has deals with many indy labels as well as Sony, and those labels will also get a proportional cut of the money that PlayLouder MSP takes in based on their network monitoring. The ISP says that it is negotiating with other major labels and hopes they'll come into the fold soon.

They'd be crazy not to: this is free money, just for letting music fans go on doing what music fans have always done.

More, this is a chance for the labels to extract themselves from the unsustainable quicksand they've sunk up to their necks in: suing their customers by the thousands in the hopes that some day, with enough lawsuits, the music-buying public will finally see the light and go back to the malls.

PlayLouder MSP is live at the end of September if their schedule holds. I'm subscribing. Link (Thanks, James and Chris!)

Should Amazon be considered any different than any other fly-by-night "publisher" who offers to publish first, pay later? We'll have to see, but provisionally, I can think of a number of reasons why the answer here would be "yes." First: Unlike any number of nebulous "publishers," Amazon does not appear to be saying that author payment is contingent on some vague profit goal or on whether the magazine/site sells advertising or whatever; what it appears to be saying is "you get a cut from the very first sale" -- Meaning that as soon as Amazon starts taking in money, the author starts making money. If indeed this is the case, then Yog's Law is not violated.

Second: Unlike any number of nebulous "publishers," Amazon is Amazon, the industry leader in online retail, with a well-established history of working with (and paying) third-party vendors, which in this case is what the author would be. Amazon has nothing to gain by attempting to scam authors out of their work without paying them, and rather a lot to lose, since if it did so it would anger publishers, agents and authors, from whom Amazon derives one of its main sources of income, i.e., books. The proof of Amazon's business practices for Amazon Shorts will be at the end of however Amazon has structured its payment periods, when the participating authors get cut a check. But until that time, given who Amazon is and its history in business, I'm willing to assume they're not out to screw the authors.

We, the undersigned, wish to demonstrate the pointless nature of forced web site registration schemes and the dubious demographic data they collect.

On November 13th we will each register an account using fake details at one or more of these top 10 offending sites:

www.nytimes.com
www.washingtonpost.com
www.latimes.com
www.ajc.com
www.chicagotribune.com
www.dallasnews.com
www.nypost.com
www.baltimoresun.com
www.philly.com
www.mercurynews.com

For example, the first search result for a Google search for Boing Boing is listed as "boingboing.net/". If you hover your mouse over the link on the results page, the status-bar in your browser displays the link URL as "http://boingboing.net". However, if you right-click on the link and copy the link location, it is revealed to actually be "http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1& url=http%3A//boingboing.net/&ei=U4gJQ6_fBqKiQevXjYIO" (it will probably be a slightly different URL for you).

I have no doubt that most of Google's intended uses for this are beneficial to Google users. For example, Google can use this to refine its search results based on which links Google users click most often.

However, there is a grave privacy implication here, especially when coupled with Google's never-expiring cookie: this new (?) practice means that Google now has a record not just of all the searches you performed, but potentially of all the links you've clicked through on its site.

It may be that Google is simply tracking click-throughs and not associating them with users, but it sure doesn't look like it. Look at the letter-salad at the end of the real URL there: "U4gJQ6_fBqKiQevXjYIO". That looks like a unique identifier to me -- if all Google cares about is which result is most popular with searchers, there'd be no reason to uniquely identify each click.

At the end of the day, the thing about this that bugs me is that it is stealthy and non-transparent to the user. If my search-engine is collecting info on every click I make on its site, I want to know that. Further, I want to know what it's doing with that information.

I hope Google will release more info on this today. Link (Thanks, Dylan!)

Update Loadquo sez, "If you check the unique identifier, it is constant for each search, but not constant over searches. Which suggests it is part of ploy to see what people click on for certain searches. Whether the search identifier is linked in any way to your user cookie would deterimine whether Google had broken its 'do no evil' code."

Update 2: Koz sez,

I believe the letter-salad you're seeing is related to google's personalised search & search-history features. In my case, I have an option in the top right which is:

"Turn OFF Personalized Search for these results"

Which reloads the results without the unique ids.

If I want to turn it off, I can click my account and then Delete personalised search. I don't know if my experience is different because I'm logged into gmail, but it doesn't look like anything evil is happening here.

Update 3: Rev Jeffrey Paul sez, "One of their features is a 'search history', which includes links to the pages you clicked through to from each search's result page (You must be logged in to your Google account for this to work.)

"It's great for when you found something useful off of Google then close the tab/window/whatever and end up needing the information again. There's direct links to just the pages you found important from the results."

Update 4: Dylan sez, "After deleting all Google-related cookies /and/ turning off personalized search and the search history feature, it is /still/ doing click-tracking URL's in the search results."

Update 5: Dave points out that Google's been experimenting with this since at least last February.

Update 6: Knock me over with a feather. There's a Greasemonkey Script to pull out Google redirects (Thanks, Kap!)

Update 7: The author of the CustomizeGoogle Firefox plugin sez, "Today I've added a new feature to the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension. The feature is to remove click tracking in the Google search results."

Image: Mr. Moog in 1965.