By Cory Doctorow at 11:42 pm Friday, Dec 2
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I'm giving the opening keynote at Apachecon, the conference for users and developers of the Apache open source Web server and related tools. Other keynotes are coming from Sun's Simon Phipps, XML-inventor Tim Bray, and VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, and there are sessions and tutorials on Xpath, SpamAssassin, Subversion, mod_python and mod_perl, as well as open source business models and tons of other topics.
ApacheCon is in San Diego, and runs from 10-14 December, 2005 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, and there are still several scholarships available for students working with Java.
My talk, "Open Source is not a crime -- yet!" is on Monday, December 12 at 9AM. I'll be talking about US and international legislative threats to copyleft, Free Software, and Creative Commons -- hope to see you there!
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 11:32 pm Friday, Dec 2
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This airdart launcher draws power from your USB and is aimed using your mouse. Twenty quid at M&S.
Link
(
via Red Ferret)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:16 pm Friday, Dec 2
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From the packaging, it's very hard to tell if a music CD is going to infect your computer with spyware, a rootkit, or similar malicious, anti-customer technology.
There is no standard way that music companies use to warn you that a CD is infected with Suncomm's Mediamax spyware, which reports on your listening habits back to Sony, and which can't be uninstalled using the Windows uninstaller. The MediaMax spyware installs itself even if you decline the "agreement" that is put on your screen when you first insert the CD.
Sony is being sued for including both the MediaMax spyware and the XCP rootkit (which enables virus-writers to opportunistically and invisibly seize control of your PC) on its music CDs, but lots of other labels use MediaMax spyware, along with numerous other malicious DRM programs.
EFF has prepared a guide to helping you spot and avoid Mediamax spyware, with a list of CDs believed to carry the infection, along with a gallery and slideshow of the numerous different stickers, fine-print, and other indicia that Sony has used to disclose that the CD on the shelf contains spyware.
But buyer beware: this problem goes well beyond Sony. Most of the major labels have decided that they need to punish their remaining customers with infectious technologies. I don't trust them, so I've just stopped buying CDs. Between mashups, Creative Commons licensed music, Internet radio, and my gigantic collection of tracks ripped from my old CDs, I have all the music I need for now. If a hot band comes out with a hot album, they'd better be willing to sell me Oggs or MP3s, 'cause I've had it with CDs. There's no music worth risking my data for.
Link
(Thanks, Kurt!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:15 pm Friday, Dec 2
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My friend
Dale wrote this terrific essay about the way news stories are often made, using the example of the inevitable "Black Friday" holiday shopping story that every newspaper and radio and TV news program runs after Thanksgiving:
There should be a book titled "How News Is Made," a book that could be for journalism what "The Jungle" was to the meatpacking industry. My version would offer no conspiracy theory, but I'd point out the preponderance of sloppiness and lazy thinking coupled with a herd mentality, most especially in business journalism. I found a great example to illustrate what I've been thinking about, tipped off by an article written by Carl Bialik in the Wall Street Journal.
(Continue reading...)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:39 pm Friday, Dec 2
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France may soon enact the worst copyright law in Europe, sneaking it through in a legislative session scheduled for December 22 and 23.
Europe's equivalent to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a controversial directive called the EUCD. Each EU state is responsible for implementing the minimum set of EUCD restrictions (which are far from minimal!) but each state can exceed the minimum, and the entertainment lobby pushes hard to see to it that they do. They've run amok in France, subverting the lawmaking process with a farcical wish-list of penalties, mandates and software bans.
Copyfighters in France have published a detailed alert in French; what follows is a loose, machine-assisted translation (substantive corrections gladly sought):
* A prohibition on all software that permits transmission [disposition is
unclear without greater context] of copyrighted material that does not
integrate both a watermark and DRM
* A prohibition on marketing or advertising such software
* These prohibitions include legal sanctions<
* DRM mandates for digital radio transmission
* A universal wiretapping system for private communication [This is defined elsewhere as a system to check for, say, music files attached to email messages, and not one that would violate the "secret of private correspondence".]
* Creation of a universal filering system for all ISPs
Link
(
Thanks, Paula!) (
Thanks to "C" and Kirk for help with translation)
Update: The French Department of Culture has also threatened to ban Free/Open Source Software:
Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: "You will be required to change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill proposal pass in the Parliament.
(
Thanks, Rob!)
Update 2 Here's a petition against this hijacking of the legislative process (Thanks, Henri!)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:27 pm Friday, Dec 2
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Virtuoso mashup king dj BC sez, "This is a Christmas album of mashups and unlicensed remixes of Christmas chestnuts by remix artists from the US and UK. All songs (mp3) and the cover art are downloadable. Contains mixes from Go Home Productions (who has done official remix work for Blondie and Bowie among others), Poj Masta (the young prodigy of the UK scene), dj BC (The Beastles, remix work with Heaven 17), and lots of others. 18 tracks total." I'm listening to this now and actually cried out with delight when I happened on Voicedude's Janis Joplin/Santa Baby mashup, "Santa Benz."
Link Mirror
(
Thanks dj BC and Manuel!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:13 am Friday, Dec 2
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Warning sign at a Chinese beach has smile-inducing Engrish rules.
Have no the adult the child that look after with the old man prohibition against the next sea swimming
Link (thanks, CrisDias!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:00 am Friday, Dec 2
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Charles Shopsin says: "Thought you might like this in reference to your post about how to beat carny games. It's an article scan from a 1934 issue of Modern Mechanix Magazine."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:54 am Friday, Dec 2
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The "Pardon Our Dust" TV commercial for Gap was directed by Spike Jonze and it's a hoot.
Link Alternate link (thanks, Scott!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:05 am Friday, Dec 2
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Aaron Dunlap is selling these excellent USB 9-Volt charger
kits in an Altoids tin for the ridiculously low price of $9.50. I can't think of a better stocking stuffer.
Link
Update: Aaron Dunlap says: "I should point out that what I have for sale is kits to build your own charger in an Altoids tin or whatever you want. You get the electronic components and a walk-through manual. You might want to mention this on the site, since I've had a lot of people place orders thinking they're getting the whole kit & cabootle when I don't have the time to solder together 300 cabootles."
Reader comment: avidd says: "I call prior art on that USB charger featured in today's post. I built one for my trip to the amazon rainforest. While the guy is providing a service by selling the kits for cheap, he's being silly about keeping the design so mysterious. Buy a 5v IC regulator like the NTE960 or NTE977 from jameco.com for $1.65. Solder it between the battery leads and the usb leads. Don't forget the matching heatsink. For the NTE977 I chose to put some capacitors to ground as recommended in the manual on page 8 though that might have been overkill.
"That's really all there is.
"Go ahead and sell the kits, but Information wants to be free. Link
Reader comment: Aaron says: "Why does McDonald's stay in business when you could just make your own burgers? You can even get cookbooks for free from the library.
"Information should be free free; parts, however, aren't. My kits are
meant for beginners who wouldn't know how or where to get the parts
themselves or what to do with them. I have the full manual posted online
if someone wanted to just
do it themselves."
By David Pescovitz at 9:48 am Friday, Dec 2
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Apparently some proponents of "Intelligent Design" are suggesting that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) research follows the same "logic" they say supports their claim.
SETI Institute senior astronomer
Seth Shostak calls bullshit on that. From Space.com:
In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:41 am Friday, Dec 2
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Gareth Branwyn says: "The annual Street Tech Gift Guide is up. We've called our guide perhaps the unsexiest gift guide in cyberspace, 'cause we almost exclusively cover products that we've actually used, lived with, and love ourselves. It's not the latest objects of desire, it's tried n' true gadgets we're almost certain the recipient will enjoy. It's 'sucks-less' gift-giving."
Link
By David Pescovitz at 8:25 am Friday, Dec 2
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A tiger shark was caught off Australia's Tannum Beach with another small shark hanging out of its mouth mid-bite. From ABC Capricornia:
Apparently the smaller fish was caught on Tannum's shark lines.
While being pulled in, the movement attracted the attention of its larger colleague.
The tiger shark was so reluctant to let go of its free meal, it was eventually pulled in to shore.
Link to ABC Capricornia report,
Link to an Underwater Times article with more about tiger sharks
(via Fortean Times)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:03 am Friday, Dec 2
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Yesterday, I
blogged about Foxspose, a Firefox plugin that renders all your open tabs as a collection of thumbnails you can click to quickly jump to the right tab.
Tabpreview is a similar plugin that drops a thumbnail of whatever's loaded in each tab as you mouse over it. Just tried it out and it worked well in a short round of testing. This will be way useful, I can tell already.
Link
(Thanks, Tim)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:55 am Friday, Dec 2
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Here's a six-minute MP3 of reggae hero Eek-A-Mouse jamming with a bunch of traditional Irish pub musicians -- fiddles, pipes, etc -- at his 50th birthday party. The result is great; Eek-A-Mouse's schtick is to sing in a high, Chinese-sounding falsetto, but to groovy reggae beats. Add to that some lively Irish fiddlers and you've really got something.
Link
(
Thanks, Matt!)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:39 am Friday, Dec 2
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Happy Palace is an eclectica blog that just inlines images from the sites it links to, with no descriptive text. Scrolling through the pix on this is hypnotically cool.
Link
(
via WHY THAT'S WONDERFUL, blog of Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:24 am Friday, Dec 2
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Atheist Agenda, an atheist group at U Texas San Antonio, staged a "Porno for Bibles" event, where they gave free pornography to people who traded in religious scripture.
Link
(
via Zombiebite)
