Cycle Thieves is a new short story published on the excellent sf site, Futurismic. I've just read and thoroughly enjoyed it -- it's a great blend of hard-boiled detective story, fact-paced action, nerdy post-cyberpunk and thought-provoking rumination on the future of social technologies. Duffy is a dotcom veteran in London who uses an impressive and well-realized suite of social technologies to stay in touch with his old pals from the boom-times, like You-Who?, a bit of phone software that sounds a special ring whenever he gets within a few blocks of a pal, allowing him to manufacture lucky, serendipitous encounters. His good pals are actually rather unlikable -- arrogant, rude. . . Actually -- it's worse than that: it turns out that one of his friends has installed trojans on all his devices that rip off the data of those nearby and funnel it away, and the police have threatened to bring him down for the crime unless he figures out which friend it is first.

Mark Ward wrote the story and it's only his second publication. Based on this, I'm certainly looking forward to reading his next.

The policeman placed a sheaf of papers before Duffy. "And this is the evidence. You, well, your phone, is the key. When it meets other blocks of code spread around the gadgets of your mates those strange things start to happen. We think the code was crafted from some brutal utility turned out by a People's Republic propaganda unit turned spam outfit. Very clever stuff. Different attacks get kicked off when different people are together. That's why it took so long for us to work it out. It also grabs any spare processor cycles to crack away at any passwords or security software it finds. Cycle theft, that's what it's called. Among other things."

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

At News.com, Anne Broache reports:

Politicians on Wednesday attacked Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo for declining to appear at a briefing about China's Internet censorship and called for a new law to outlaw compliance with such requirements.

The four technology companies said earlier this week that they were not able to schedule an appearance with short notice but would testify at a similar House of Representatives hearing scheduled for Feb. 15.

"These massively successful high-tech companies, which couldn't bring themselves to send their representatives to this meeting today, should be ashamed," said Rep. Tom Lantos, the California Democrat who is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which organized the briefing.

"With all their power and influence, wealth and high visibility, they neglected to commit to the kind of positive action that human rights activists in China take every day," Lantos went on. "They caved in to Beijing's demands for the sake of profits, or whatever else they choose to call it."

Link to story. More background on the story -- and the full text of response statements submitted to Congress today by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft -- in this politech post: Link.

Reader Comment: Matt Browner-Hamlin from studentsforafreetibet.org says,

Students for a Free Tibet launched NoLuv4Google.com today to help people "break up" with Google on Valentine's Day.

We have online actions for them to take part in, resources to form protests at Google offices, downloadable images, lists of alternatives to Google, testimonials for them to read written by people who've broken up with Google, and answers to some FAQs about our campaign. We've also formed an online action for people to tell Microsoft and Yahoo how they feel about their ongoing partnerships with the Chinese government. We also have a video blog post up on our blog, Tibet Will Be Free.

The blog also currently has a script that changes the Google homepage for any local Google domain to our jammed Google logo -- "I'm feeling lucky" is replaced with "I'm feeling repressed".

...gunpowder. The latest installment in NASA's Apollo Chronicles is all about the smell of Moondust. Apparently, the stuff would make its way back into the landers stuck to boots and gloves. From Science@NASA:

"It is really a strong smell," radioed Apollo 16 pilot Charlie Duke. "It has that taste -- to me, [of] gunpowder -- and the smell of gunpowder, too." On the next mission, Apollo 17, Gene Cernan remarked, "smells like someone just fired a carbine in here."...

What is moondust made of? Almost half is silicon dioxide glass created by meteoroids hitting the moon. These impacts, which have been going on for billions of years, fuse topsoil into glass and shatter the same into tiny pieces. Moondust is also rich in iron, calcium and magnesium bound up in minerals such as olivine and pyroxene. It's nothing like gunpowder.

So why the smell? No one knows.

Link

Linden Labs, makers of the virtual world Second Life, is offering a $4k scholarship to an art student to go and hang out in the world and make stuff:

This $4,000 fellowship will provide a young artist with a chance to be free for a semester or summer to explore the use of the digital world of Second Life as an artistic medium. In doing so, we hope that we will see Second Life used to even greater potential in the expressive arts to the benefit of both the Second Life culture and the broader world of art.

Link (via Terra Nova)

Charlie Anders and Annalee Newitz from Other Magazine (subtitled Pop Culture and Politics for the New Outcasts) are on the RU Sirius Show this week talking about the freakiness of everyone, Rae Dawn Chong, and how gender confusion inevitably resolves into chase scenes and parades.

There's also a great conversation with Wrye Sententia and Richard Glenn Boire of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics on the NeoFiles show, also hosted by RU on the MondoGlobo Network. Link

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, a survey about American attitudes toward invention and innovation, has gathered some interesting data about teenagers' opinions of technology and science. The survey of 500 teens indicated that they're optimistic about technology's potential to improve the world. They consider engineering to be the third most attractive career choice. And science? Not so much. From the MIT News Office:

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index... found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past.

Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent)...

When asked to select the career field in which they are most interested, arts and medicine were teens' top choices (17 percent each). Teen girls were significantly more likely to be interested in medicine or health-care careers than teen boys (25 percent vs. 9 percent). Engineering was the third most-attractive career choice (14 percent of all respondents), but it was significantly more popular with teen boys than girls (24 percent vs. 4 percent). Only 9 percent of respondents chose science and only 8 percent chose business as their top career choices.

Link

Reporter Natasha Tynes, a friend of kidnapped freelance journalist Jill Carroll, today blogged a roundup of links to analyses of the kidnapping video aired earlier this week. "Knowing that she is still alive is enough consolation to make me keep the faith," says Tynes. Snip from a story in Editor and Publisher magazine:

To him [a member of the Washington Post's Iraqi staff], Jill Carroll's white head scarf conveyed specific meaning: "He could tell by watching the video that basically she was still with the Sunnis because Shiites would never have put a white scarf on her," Spinner related. She [Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner] noted as well that "Jill and I both wore headscarves, two-piece things that you don't really have to hook--it's difficult to get your scarf to look exactly how an Iraqi woman wears her scarf if you haven't done it since you were an adolescent. So you can cheat and use these two-piece things that you just flip over your head."

But her Iraqi colleague noted that the way the scarf was tied in the latest Carroll video was "a well-known way that women scarf themselves in the Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad."

Link to update post on Natasha Tynes' blog. Also today, the the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued another appeal in Arabic to mideast media outlets calling for Carroll's release.

Previous BB posts on Jill Carroll: Link

Update: Dory Adams of Paper Street Press tells Boing Boing that by through literary blogs, some writers are organizing a symbolic act: send blank books to Al-Jazeera News "in the hope that Jill Carroll might soon be able to fill it." With the blank books, participants are asking the network to "do [its] best to convey this message to her captors: Let Jill Carroll go."

Dory explains,

Writer Abby Frucht is trying to organize readers and writers in this act. Abby’s original idea was for authors to send their published books (see her previous posts at Readerville), and it has since evolved to this wider symbolic act so that readers and authors without book publications can also act. As Abby explains in an earlier post, “. . .they are being sent to Al-Jazeera because it is the conduit by which the kidnappers have elected to communicate with the rest of the world. Therefore it should be the conduit by which we attempt to communicate with the kidnappers in return.”) Writer Gayle Brandeis has also posted the same info at her blog.

Boing Boing reader Norman Shetler says,

An interesting side-note on the debate around Stephen Soderbergh's movie "Bubble." While it's certainly a commendable experiment to release a film on three different platforms simultaneously, bypassing age-old, rigid marketing techniques, I was surprised to see that the DVD of Bubble is listed as being Region 1 encoded.

While this is obviously (and thankfully) not an issue for most people with a keen eye on international DVD releases, it still uses (and thereby supports) a technology which essentially was created to keep us (non-Americans) from watching films released on DVD in the United States.

This whole region-coding thing is a disaster from a cultural POV, considering how many films are released exclusively in the US, and there are LOTS of them (including a substantial amount of European films), and if some of the bigwigs in Hollywood had their say, we wouldn't even be allowed to buy them in the first place (never mind that you are not allowed to openly sell them here, not even on ebay).

Additionally, there's the whole issue of computer DVD-drives -- only being able to switch the regions up to five times before it's locked. WTF is that about?

From a marketing standpoint I understand the idea of implementing a region code. But since multi-region players are freely available in Europe (even though, to the best of my knowledge, they aren't allowed to be marketed as such) why bother? Will the eventual European release cover all countries? Will the DVD be available day-and-date over here as well? Who's interests are being protected by using this restriction?

I don't know for a fact that the dvd *is* actually region-1-encoded, so far I only have the cover scan to go by.

DVD Link on Amazon.

Previous BB posts on Stephen Soderbergh's Bubble: Link

Reader comment: Gary says,

Although your burner and software may tell you that you can only change your drive's region 5 times you have full control. It just takes a bit of work research. Link

Reader Comment: Ben Laurie says,

Not sure where "here" is for Norman, but certainly in the UK region-unlocked DVD players are freely available. Even from Amazon. They're also damn cheap! Also, no idea what he means by "can't sell them openly" - see, for example: Link OK, it isn't "Bubble", but it is region 1 and they'll deliver worldwide. Not that I disagree with the foolishness of region-encoding, just wanted to point out that its completely ineffective in the UK, and always has been.

Apart from PS2 games, that is - I want Katamari Damacy, but it doesn't work on UK PS2s!

Reader comment: Chris McMahon says,

Thankfully in Australia region-free DVD players are generally the norm, with even large retail chains openly selling them region-free out-of-the-box. DVD player manufacturers are contractually bound by the DVD licensing terms to implement RPC (Regional Playback Control). They get around this by having a 3rd party modify their players before sale at no extra cost to the consumer. In fact region-free players are so widespread that any manufacturer selling non-modified players is at a commercial disadvantage in the Australian retail market.

The A.C.C.C (the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - a national government watchdog organisation) is on the side of consumers on this issue. In a statement from 11th May 2001 (available in PDF on their website here), the Commissioner of the ACCC stated, under the section "DVDs & THE TRADE PRACTICES ACT";

"The Commission believes RPC is anti-competitive with Australian consumers lacking a choice of DVD videos and possibly paying higher prices." (...) "The RPC prevents the importation of DVDs from smaller filmmakers around the world. Their sales are generally too small to justify catering for region 4. This reduces competition to the advantage of US studios." (...) "The essential point here is that in the Commission's view, there is an attempt to use copyright laws for a purpose related to areas beyond their real purpose. This coding system is a mechanism to allow price discrimination, not to protect the inherent rights of Intellectual Property owners."

Buying and importing DVD movies from other regions is also legal for personal use, under the Copyright Act 1968. More information about RPC on the ACCC's website can be found here.

Reader comment: Anil Kandangath says,

It may interest you to know that *all* the DVDs produced by the Indian movie industry (including Bollywood and the regional movies) are region free.

Reader comment: Norman Shetler says:

I apologize for the lack of basic information on my part. I live in Austria and should have clarified this, as well as the fact that much of what I was complaining about applied to Germany, Switzerland and Austria. I'm sure there are similar problems in other European countries but I have no details on this. In any case, there have been numerous instances of people being sued (and even having their homes raided) for privately selling Region 1 (and in one instance, a Region 4) DVDs on ebay.de. One was even sued for using the cover-art of the Region 1 disc! And others for selling (legally) imported music CDs before they were released in Europe.

While it's doubtful anyone would make a fuss over someone selling, say, "Bubble Boy" on R1, it's still, essentially, illegal in these countries (dunno about UK...).

But to return to the point I was actually trying to make: I find it saddening that a unique and in ways even visionary approach to releasing and marketing a film is marred by the most useless and ridiculous forms of restriction. I realize that slapping regional coding on the DVD of "Bubble" essentially doesn't change a thing, but symbolically I find it regretful.

link, quite old and in german, but the copyright laws certainly haven't changed for the better since then: Link (detailed article about regional coding, copyright and various examples of "crackdowns" on sellers of R1 discs)

Brokeback Mountain + Back to the Future = Link.

Produced by a group of Emerson College students known as "Chocolate Cake City" (thanks, Paul Simpson, and Ian W.)

Also, this Defamer post herds up some of the many examples of Brokeback-inspired fan-art roamin' around on these here cold, lonesome internets. Link

Huh. This image reminds me of... something... I've seen... somewhere... before. If only I could remember. [shrugs]. Link (Thanks, anonymous fan of the Motion Picture Association of America's logo)

Fortean Times has posted a deep exploration of the tarantella, an 18th century dancing "cure" for the bite of a tarantula. From the article:

One of the oldest documents on the subject of tarantism, Ferdinando Ponzetti's Sertum Papale De Venensis (1362), had suggested that the victims of shade-dwelling spiders were hostages to the music of the tarantula's bite, to its 'cantum tempore'. Ponzetti's contemporary, William de Marra, scoffed at the ignorant and ill informed who believed that the tarantula actually sang as it bit, but all classes of Apulian society, from peasant to noblewoman, turned to the tarantella. The bite of the tarantula was thought to be potentially fatal. Each summer, moreover, it was liable to re-awaken and the same tarantati would again be called to dance beyond exhaustion.

The symptoms of the tarantula's bite were extremely varied. The most immediate of effects – nausea, headaches, livid complexion and difficulties in speech – might be followed by paroxysms of laughter or tears, sexual excitement, paranoia or a state of mute and listless abjection. These different responses were commonly believed to reflect the different characteristics of the offending spider itself. To purge the venom, musicians attempted to evoke cadences that matched the music of each individual spider. The lively and impassioned Panno rosso, the wistful pastoral of the Panno verde, the slow and staggering Spallata were some of the melodies that were performed. Before the musicians began to play, they would attempt to establish the colour of the spider and the physical location of its bite – clues to its musical character.

Link (free reg. required to read the entire article)

Inspired by George W. Bush's State of the Union Address last night, this Human-Animal Hybrid t-shirt is now being sold through Cafe Press. From Bush's Address:

"Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator -- and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale."

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

This video from All-Tribes shows how to make an amazing t-shirt folding machine out of cardboard and packing tape.
Link

UPDATE: Thanks, I'm aware of the video of someone hand-folding a t-shirt in a really neat way. Mark linked to it in 2004 here.

Forrest M. Mims III, author of the world's best practical electronics primer, Getting Started in Electronics, summarizes the findings of a 2004 study on the increased likelihood of catching a cold after flying on a commercial plane.

Depending on three different flight scenarios, Hocking and Foster found that airline passengers in three different scenarios were 5, 23, or 113 times more likely to catch a cold than if they had not flown at all!

...

The most logical reason for infections would seem to be the limited amount of cabin air shared by the passengers. But Hocking, Foster and other scientists have found this is only one factor. The very low humidity in an airplane seems to be much more important.

...

Very dry air dries up the mucous system that captures and expels bacteria and viruses from our noses. This may be a key reason why airplane passengers catch more colds.

Link

My friend Jens-Martin Skibsted, co-founder of the innovative Danish bicycle firm Biomega, just designed an ingenious new sneaker for Puma. The shoe comes, er, on the heels of Jens-Martin's Biomega/Puma city bike that I posted about last year. The Biomega/Puma shoe, reflective almost in its entirety, has an elastic strap tucked into a heel pocket. You just pull out the strap and wrap it around your pants leg before you start pedaling.
Link

This terminal program for OSX mimics a vintage glass teletype machine, with screen warpage and everything!

GLTerminal emulates a 1970’s terminal monitor, complete with flaws in brightness, warped display curvature, and flicker. It even simulates baud rate lag. And! for extra verisimilitude, the character colors can be green or amber.

Link (Thanks, Karl!)

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I'll report on a new type of audiobook -- fan-created podcasts. Amateur narrators are voicing classics like Frankenstein, A Little Princess and Treasure Island and making them available to listen online. But bookcasting isn't just for public domain works -- some contemporary authors are making their work available for others to voice. They see fan-created audio as a way to reach new reading audiences. Link. (Thanks, Cory!)

Reader comment: Doug Kaye of The Conversations Network says,

Probably the first fan-created book podcast was a weekend project suggested by AKMA (Link) for Larry Lessig's "Free Culture" in March of 2004. See also this link.

The Chairman of Sony BMG, the company that infected millions of computers with malicious spyware and rootkits in the name of restricting what people could do with the CDs they purchased, is giving a public talk tomorrow at the London School of Economics tomorrow (closest tube stations are Holborn and Charing Cross). I'll be in Geneva, but I know there are plenty of Londoners out there with pointed questions to put to this guy. It'd be great if some of them turned up and asked them.

Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, a member of the executive board of Bertelsmann AG and the board of trustees of the Bertelsmann Foundation, and chairman of the board of directors of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, will participate in an LSE Director's Dialogue with Howard Davies on Thursday 2 February at LSE...

Director's Dialogue with Rolf Schmidt-Holtz is on Thursday 2 February at 6.30pm in the Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, LSE, Aldwych, London WC2A. This event is free and open to all with no ticket required.

Link (Thanks, Ian!)

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

International human rights organization Amnesty International has taken up the case of Shi Tao. The journalist was sentenced to a decade in jail last year, after Yahoo shared his "anonymous" account identity with Chinese authories. Snip from announcement:

Imprisoned for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression, a right entrenched in international law and the Chinese Constitution, Shi Tao is considered a Prisoner of Conscience.

Companies must respect human rights, wherever they operate. Yahoo’s business ethics are becoming questionable due to its role in assisting the Chinese government to sentencing Shi Tao. The company has signed the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Internet Industry, effectively agreeing to implement China’s draconian system of censorship and control.

Amnesty International has raised its concerns with Yahoo. The company has responded without addressing all the concerns raised.

Link (Thanks, Nathan)

Previously:
Xeni's LAT op-ed: war, blogs, news, and profit.
Yahoo rats out Chinese reporter to Beijing