Photographer Charles Gatewood, documentarian of underground culture, will show forty years of his work in a retrospective opening tomorrow, Friday, February 3, at San Francisco's Center For Sex & Culture. (Previous post about Gatewood here.) The doors open at 8pm. This photograph of Polywog is part of Charles's "Tattoo Pin-Ups" series. From Charles's announcement of the show:

I will show highlights from my career as "family photographer of America's erotic underground." The show will include 45 silver prints, several large silkscreen images, and recent collage work. Admission is free. There will be light refreshments, erotic readings and a ritual performance.

Link to Center for Sex & Culture, Link to Charles Gatewood's site (NSFW) (via Laughing Squid)

Canadians whose PCs were infected by the malicious software Sony deliberately included on its music CDs have launched another class-action suit against the company.

Sony BMG was outed on October 31, 2005, for including anti-copying software that employed "rootkits," a technique that made it impossible for users to uninstall without damaging their Windows installation, and which opened them to new security vulnerabilities. Subsequently, Sony was also outed for using a piece of spyware called MediaMax, from SunnComm, which also created security vulnerabilities.

One class action suit in the US has been settled, while other suits and government legal actions are pending in several US states, Ireland, Canada and Italy. It's not known yet whether Sony will face legal reprisals from the US government for the military and government computers that were infected with its software.

* Sony released at least 34 titles in Canada with sales of approximately 120,000 CDs

* Sony waited two extra weeks to begin recalling CDs in Canada as compared to the United States

* Sony did not do enough to remove the CDs from store shelves. One of the named complainants purchased the CD on Boxing Day, weeks after the recall was announced and the complaint alleges that the CDs are still being sold.

Second, the complaint includes considerable analysis of Sony's alleged violation of both consumer protection and national privacy legislation. Given the analysis, the question that immediately comes to mind is whether the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Competition Bureau have launched investigations into the Sony rootkit incident. If not, why not?

Link

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

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

Disney is shutting down Pirates of the Caribbean in both Walt Disney World and Disneyland from March to July to add in a bunch of scenes from the Pirates of the Caribbean films. I liked those films, but they never struck me as having the long term, repeatable appeal of the ride they're based on; I can (and do) ride Pirates hundreds of times. The films are something I could watch a couple-three times max. I have a bad feeling about this. Also: if there's no Pirates ride the next time I hit Disneyland, I'm gonna be pissed.

The attraction will feature the addition of two of Hollywood's most infamous buccaneers, Captain Jack Sparrow and his nemesis Barbossa. Joining the wildest crew that ever sacked the Spanish Main, Captain Jack and Barbossa add an exciting new twist to the attraction's original storyline as they race to be the first to claim a cache of plundered treasure.

"Successfully adding the popular characters from the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' films with the mythology of our classic attraction is an example of Disney synergy and Walt Disney Imagineering at its finest," said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. "These additions will result in an exciting new chapter for the attraction and an unforgettable experience for our guests, giving them another reason to come and be a part of our continuing 50th anniversary celebration."

Woven into some of the attraction's most memorable scenes, the rival swashbucklers will be seen interacting with some of the more familiar Audio-Animatronics buccaneers found inside the ride-thru adventure. Also making a guest appearance is the ghostly Davy Jones from the second movie in the series, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." But new characters are only the beginning. New special effects will also be added to enhance the "Pirates of the Caribbean" theme park experience.

Link (Thanks, Steve and via The Disney Blog)

Jed sez, "Google regularly brings in speakers to give 'tech talks' on all sorts of subjects. They've started to make some of these talks available for free (with the permission of the presenters) to the rest of the world via Google Video. You can find them by following the link, which does a search for [Google techtalks] at Google Video. For example, there's a talk by Peter Patel-Schneider of Bell Labs on 'Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web,' and a talk by Lauren Weinstein on 'The War for Privacy Rights.'" Link (Thanks, Jed!)

Hong Kong Disneyland was sold out for eight straight days during Chinese New Year, and the gates were shut to many visitors who brought their families from mainland China to enjoy the long lines, short rides, and even shorter tempers inside the filled-to-the-gills park. Here's an AP video of sorely vexed parents tossing their kids over the fence, rattling the bars, and gnashing their teeth.
Link (Thanks, Bemmu Sepponen!)

Don Stewart says: "Thanks for posting my VW Bug story on Boing Boing a couple weeks back. One of the developments to come out of this situation is awareness of a new trademark law that is creeping through the Senate. Thought you (and every illustrator and journalist everywhere) would want to know:

"HR 683 has just passed the US House of Representatives, and is now being considered in subcommittee hearings prior to presentation to the Senate Judiciary Committee. This new law, if enacted, will severely restrict the rights of your readers to portray trademarked items and phrases in their work. Quite literally, if someone paints a picture of flowers in a Coke(r) bottle, they may be liable for damages under the proposed statute.

"I encourage you to educate your readers regarding this pending legislation, and ask them to contact their Senators in anticipation of these rule changes." (Fortunately, Warhol created Brillo in 1964, before this foolishness arose. -- Mark) Link

The Mini Desk, a car converted into a work table, is available from UK-based Mini Statements for £2500. Apparently, the best way to contact the company is via email. Link (via MAKE: Blog)

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) I just had a meeting at Boing Boing headquarters with a Perplex City representative named Bill. He revealed to me a few pieces of this exceedingly rich and chewy alternate reality game. My head is still spinning, but the gist of Perplex City is that you buy packs of six cards for $5 a pack and enter a world of puzzle solving, interactive fiction, and real-world/fantasy crossover. (The makers of the game are happy to admit the inspiration came from Kit Williams' 1979 treasure hunt book, Masquerade, which provided clues to help readers locate a valuable "golden hare" hidden in the real world. The current edition of Masquerade includes the solution to the puzzle.)

Each Perplex City card has a puzzle on the front. Sometimes the puzzle will lead you to a faux corporate website or blog with additional hints. By entering your answer on the Perplexity website, you get points and can compare your ranking with other players.

Some of the cards have delightful gimmicks, like heat sensitive or ultraviolet inks that contain hidden clues. In addition to the obvious puzzle (I think there are 260 cards in the entire series, half of which have been released), each card contains elements of meta-puzzles of varying complexity.

Sometimes you have to send text messages to get information, or check the classified ads of newspapers in China, or in one case, be a published author to gain access to a research library that contains critical information:

Some time ago, the players had to get a character credentialed to do research with a library. In order to do this the character needed to be a published author. So a group of players *wrote a book* for it and it is going to be published shortly and distributed under a creative commons license from Lulu. The Perplex City publishing company is http://seaside-press.com/ (though the book being published has not been updated there yet).

Eventually, someone is going to solve enough of the puzzles and pick up enough additional clues to locate a real artifact secreted somewhere on the planet and claim the $200,000 prize -- a six-inch block called the Receda Cube. (My eight-year-old daughter, who is as enchanted by Perplex City as I am, is convinced the cube is in our neighboring town of Reseda.)

Here's more information about the game from a spokesperson:

Two years in the making, Perplex City has defined a genre by creating its own self-supporting universe. First off, players can purchase silver packs containing six, cryptic puzzle cards have been created by a range of leading designers and illustrators. They range in difficulty from 'fun and easy' to 'captivatingly complex,' the wide range of unusual puzzles include beautifully crafted riddles, origami challenges, pop culture trivia, logical mindbenders, 3D mazes and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Many of the cards can be assembled together to create large maps or new puzzles, and there is often hidden content to find. Once solved, they provide the player with their first clues to the location of the buried treasure. However, the cards are only the entryway into Perplex City. Go deeper and there is a further series of interlinked puzzles which spill into the real world - from baffling websites, coded newspaper ads, TV clips, billboards, cryptic anonymous phone calls, stray emails, sky writing, mystifying text messages and urban treasure hunts in random cities around the world.

I don't play games, because I don't have time for them, but I'm making an exception with this one. I think it's going to be a genre-busting bestseller that will break open the floodgates to a new form of popular entertainment.
Link

Owen "Ditherati" Thomas shares the following original monstrosity masterpiece of pop music parody with BoingBoing. "If you film the music video," says Owen, "I'd gladly pay $1.99 on iTunes for it."

"BLOGUE"

Strike a post
Strike a post
Blogue, blogue, blogue
Blogue, blogue, blogue

Surf around, every page you load is tragic
Tripe everywhere that you go [surf around]
You try everything you can to escape
The mainstream media you know [media you know]

When all else fails and you long to read
Something better than your feeds today
I know a place where you can have your say
It's called the blogosphere, and here's what it's for, so

Chorus:

Come on, blogue
Let your fingers move to the music [move to the music]
Hey, hey, hey
Come on, blogue
Let your fingers go with the flow [go with the flow]
You know you can do it

You don't have to do real reporting
Link to it, that's what it's for [that's what it's for]
Stay inside, for your finest inspiration
No need to open the door [open up the door]

It makes no difference if you're black or white
If you're a boy or a girl
If the server's pumping it will give you new life
You're a microstar, yes, that's what you are, you know it

(chorus, substituting "groove" for "move")

Traffic's where you find it
Not just where the AdWords mine it
Hits are in the trivial
That's where I feel so pivotal
Whimsical, like Justin Hall
So get up on the blogosphere

(chorus)
Blogue, [Blogue]
PageRank's where you find it [move to the music]
Blogue, [Blogue]
PageRank's where you find it [go with the flow]

Mark Cuban, Malik, Om,
Nick Denton, Doctorow
Calacanis, Weblogs Inc.
Written up in Wired magazine

Daily Kos, Wonkette, Kaus
Fierce with a computer mouse
Metafilter, Dave Winer
Peter Rojas, gadget finder

They had style, they had grace
Kottke had the interface
Arianna, Ana too
Robert Scoble, Bill loves you

Ladies with an attitude
Fellows that were IMterviewed
Don't just stand there, let's get to it
Strike a post, there's nothing to it

Blogue, blogue

Oooh, you've got to
Let your fingers move to the music
Oooh, you've got to just
Let your fingers go with the flow
Oooh, you've got to
Blogue

(c) 2006 Owen Thomas with apologies to Madonna

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman looks at the story of a cougar captured yesterday in a residential neighborhood of Willmar, Minnesota. According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the nearest wild cougar population is in South Dakota. Well, the nearest known wild cougar population anyway.
Link

UPDATE: Please post any comments or other tales of misplaced big cats on Cryptomundo. Thanks!

Today's New York Times fashion section features an article about people who are choosing to be implanted with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips, a trend that BB readers are quite familiar with. (Previous links here, here, and here.) The article also includes some insights from my Institute for the Future colleague Alex Pang. However, Amal Graafstra is incorrectly identified as the "first known person to independently have himself implanted with a chip" in 2005. Technology artist Eduardo Kac did it in a well-publicized project in 1997 and UK professor Kevin Warwick was implanted the following year as documented in this Wired cover story. From the NYT article:

People who feel naked without their cellphones, who carry around a set of keys with storage devices like flash drives that contain their digital life, who have their entire music collection on an iPod, have already created an information envelope around themselves, said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif.

"They are living a life in which they have a symbiotic relationship with communication technologies that are as familiar a part of the body as braces or glasses," Mr. Pang said. "For these people, the idea of putting an RFID tag in themselves is no stranger than putting in fillings."

Link

Start your own country by purchasing one of the many islands listed for sale here.
Link (thanks, John!)

Snip from "The End of the Internet?," an article by Jeff Chester in the current issue of The Nation:

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency.

According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Link

Boing Boing reader Jenny says,

My friend Steve Akers is out in LA working for a company that provides blow-up dolls to serve as extras in background shots for films. He made a nicely edited and scored little movie showing his crew inflating, dressing, masking and arranging 5,000 blow-up torsos to fill seats at the Rose Bowl for an upcoming Clint Eastwood film. Reminds me of "The Lonely Guy".

Link

Jordan sends in "a bunch of archaic anatomy drawings, with the several works of the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch(1638-1731) whose 'repository of curiosities' included displays of infant and fetal skeletons, placed in landscapes of human and animal body parts. The second amazing thing in Ruysch's work was the striking similarity with Tim Burton's Nightmares before Christmas characters." Link (Thanks, Jordan!)