By Cory Doctorow at 11:24 pm Thursday, Mar 2
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Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-N.J.) has introduced a bill to cripple all digital radios. The Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act of 2006 (H.R. 4861) requires all digital radio makers to build their devices so that they only permit "customary uses" of broadcasts. That means that no one ever gets to invent any new radio tech ever again unless the RIAA approves of it. Finally, it requires radio device makers to cripple their products to prohibit "unauthorized copying" -- which is a lot more broad than "illegal copying." As we've heard, the RIAA's position is that
no copying is implicitly authorized -- they don't even think you should be allowed to rip your CDs.
Fergusun is committing political suicide. No constituent of Fergusun's woke up this morning wishing for a way to do less with her radio. There's no manufacturer who can sell more radios by advertising "Now! With fewer features!" This is a bill to steal from tomorrow's entrepreneurs, who'll never get to invent the next generation of awesome music tech, in order to line the pockets of yesterday's recording industry fatcats.
For a picture of what the RIAA considers permissible, take a look at the comments they filed with the FCC on this topic back in 2004. Here's the list of restrictions they asked for then:
* Receivers may only record or permit recording of covered content: (a) in direct and immediate response to a consumer pressing a record button; (b) based on a date and time preprogrammed by the consumer.
* Preprogrammed recordings shall be for a minimum period of 30 minutes in duration.
* A replay buffer may be used to initiate a recording of a previously broadcast transmission provided that the buffer does not exceed 30 minutes in duration.
* Each recording of covered content shall be stored and retrieved as a singe continuous session and may not be divided into recordings of individual songs on an automated or non-automated basis using ID information or audio characteristics...
Watch this space for ways that you can tell your lawmaker that voting for this will cost her/him the next election.
Link
(Image courtesty of Dan Lockton)
Update: Nathan sez, "A grassroots group here in NJ started a federal PAC called Blue 7th PAC that is geared towards defeating Mike Ferguson in the 2006 election, and this is just another reason to go after him. We created the blog, target letters to the editor, raise money for area candidates, hold candidates nights, publish fact sheets, and have an e-mail list of about 1200 people. We think that a small, targeted PAC of local folks can do a lot to change the results of an election."
By Cory Doctorow at 11:02 pm Thursday, Mar 2
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Elliott Back's personal site about Cornell University has attracted a nastygram from the university, which argues that it's possible that someone (presumably someone very foolish) might mistake his site (whose URL is cornell.elliottback.com) with Cornell University's site.
Some trademark holders are confused to the point of ridiculousness on what TM does and doesn't protect. Trademark lets you sue people who use your mark in commerce in a way that's likely to confuse the public about the origin of goods and services. It isn't enough that Pepsi calls itself a "cola" when Coke invented and trademarked the word -- Coke has to prove that people who buy Pepsi Cola sometimes think they're buying Coca-Cola.
Elliott's site won't confuse anyone. It is, instead, a fan site about Cornell University, spreading goodwill about the institution. Priceless, genuine goodwill. They've squandered this goodwill and wasted the time of their expensive lawyers who have better things to do (or, if they don't, are a waste of money and should be laid off and their budget reallocated to teaching and research) because of the remote, infinitesimal chance that somehow, cornell.elliottback.com will be mistaken for Cornell University.
Chilling Effects gathers, publishes and analyzes letters that threaten web-writers with legal action in retaliation for free expression. I hope Elliott stands his ground and sends a copy of this notice to them.
I am writing to request that you remove the name Cornell University from the name of your blog and website at cornell.elliottback.com. While we appreciate your hosting a forum in which Cornell news and events can be discussed, your use of the words Cornell University on the blog is confusing and can easily be misinterpreted to mean that the blog is maintained and/or sanctioned by the university. In fact, neither is the case.
Cornell University is a trademarked name and can only be used with the permission of the university. More specifically your use of the Cornell University name in this manner is unauthorized, misleading, and in violation of Section 397 of the General Business Law of the State of New York.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 10:58 pm Thursday, Mar 2
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Now open for voting on tomorrow's Worth1000 photoshopping contest: animals remixed with household objects.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 3:47 pm Thursday, Mar 2
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A new shark species was discovered in Mexico's Sea of Cortez. Postgraduate student Juan Carlos Perez noticed the 5-foot long, dark gray-brown animals in 2003 while on a fishing boat studying sharks, but only recently confirmed via genetic testing that they represent a new species. Perez and his colleagues named the shark
Mustelus hacat, a term that apparently means "shark" in alocal dialect. From Reuters:
"What I first noticed was their color. They are dark in color, like dark coffee, and have white markings on the tips and edges of their fins and tails which jump out at you because they are so dark," Perez told Reuters on Thursday...
"There must be more undiscovered species there but access is difficult. If we hadn't been on those boats I'd never have seen them because that's the only place they are caught. And it's not a region that attracts scuba diving..."
The Mustelus hacat lives in the ocean's depths feeding on shellfish and shrimp," Perez said, adding: "They have very, very small teeth. They are really not aggressive or dangerous."
Link (Thanks, Kate Wing!)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:23 pm Thursday, Mar 2
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The USC's Julian Bleecker has just published an astonishingly awesome paper called "A Manifesto for Networked Objects – Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things," subtitled, "Why Things Matter." It's a paper about the coming wave of "blogjects" -- objects that blog -- which is to say, manufactured goods that emit a steady stream of information about their world and what they make of it, and take action to change it. The idea is high-falutin' big-brain academic stuff, but the approach is simply, folksy, plain-language and exciting as hell. I just devoured it and man am I jazzed.
Blogjects don’t just publish, they circulate conversations. Not with some sort of artificial intelligence engine or other
speculative high-tech wizardry. Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of
conversations in the same way that human bloggers do – by starting, maintaining
and being critical attractors in conversations around topics that have relevance and
meaning to others who have a stake in that discussion. If the contribution to that
discussion happens through some seemingly mundane bit of networked dissemi-
nated insight matters little in terms of their consequence. A Blogject can start a
conversation with something as simple as an aggregation of levels of pollutants in
groundwater. If this conversation is maintained and made consequential through
hourly RSS feeds and visualizations of that same routine data, this Blogject is go-
ing to get some trackback.
940K PDF Link
(
via Beyond the Beyond)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:08 pm Thursday, Mar 2
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A site for and effects house that build static and animatronic prop animals for use in films has a page of used animal props, including animatronics, for sale, from surprised hamsters to creepy vampire bats:
Animatronic (Head Nod/Head Tilt Animation)
These creepy little crawlers was scaring audiences on Halloween (2005) in the CBS movie "Vampire Bats". There were 32 pieces, made up of animatronic heroes, Crawlers, Flappers and static props that were used in the production.
This is a radio radio controlled rod puppet. Animations include a head nod and a head tilt.
Link
(
Thanks, Waylon!)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:52 pm Thursday, Mar 2
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Master game designer Raph Koster ponders the thinness of the role of the healer in massively multiplayer roleplaying games, and noodles around with ideas for a healer-centric game:
Picture an MMORPG just like the ones today, but everywhere you see combat, replace it with healing. A six-man encounter would be a surgical operation that required teamwork. Soloing would be a brilliant doctor doing drive-by diagnostics. Raids would be massive experimental treatments.
Rather than spawning mobs, spawn ill people. Instead of weapons, have medicines. Instead of managing aggro, manage fever. Instead of armors, we have disinfectants.
Quests would include tasks to find and gather new plants for pharmaceuticals, and bespoke missions to fix the sanitation in a remote village. Puzzles might involve finding the standing water where the mosquitoes are breeding.
It goes on from there, every sentence a perfect mind-bomb of fun speculation.
Link
(
via Negatendo)
By David Pescovitz at 1:25 pm Thursday, Mar 2
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Wonderful toy photographer Brian McCarty pays tribute to the Hollywood store
Meltdown, a hub of pop culture and comix on Sunset Boulevard for more than a decade. (Previous post about Brian McCarty
here.) Whenever I visit my co-editor Mark in L.A., we rarely leave the house except to make a pilgrimage to Meltdown. This year marks the tenth birthday of the Meltdown mascot Mel, designed by BB pal
Dan Clowes. From Brian's latest ePostcard:
Collaborating with the Devilrobots design studio in Tokyo, Meltdown turned to Japanese sculptor Monster 5 to bring Mel to life. The resulting "Melto-Fu" figure is seen above on his return home to Sunset.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 11:41 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Knight Ridder published a curious article surveying various religious beliefs about the joy of sex when you're dead. Most of the info comes from Columbia University religion professor Alan Segal, author of the book "
Life After Death: The Afterlife in Western Religions." From the article:
Plato and Aristotle taught that the body dies, but a conscious soul lives forever. There would be no sex for the Greek philosophers, but they could continue to do what they really loved – to learn, to teach and to think.
Segal said while modern Judaism focuses more on this life than the next, early Jews introduced the notion that martyrs would be bodily resurrected in the hereafter.
Early Christians believed that after the end of the world they'd all get their bodies back in heaven, and this led inevitably to questions about sex and marriage. On pondering resurrection of the flesh, St. Augustine decided we'd keep our sex organs for aesthetic reasons, but we wouldn't use them...
...Heavenly sex is problematic in Christianity, he said, since intercourse for pleasure was considered "depravity." That changed somewhat for Protestants after the Renaissance. They loosened some of the sexual prohibitions, and some started to lobby for it in the afterlife, said Segal.
In Islam and Judaism, sexual pleasure is not considered filthy, he said, making its possible appearance in heaven less shocking.
Zoroastrians, he said, believed there was sex in heaven, but people would wean themselves away from both food and sex as they got used to being dead.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 11:28 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Check out these amazing fan-tees for the fine and funny nerd sitcom,
The IT Crowd:
Roy: Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes. No, there you go, I just heard it come on. No, that's the music you hear when it comes on. No, that's the music you hear when... I'm sorry, are you from the past?
Link
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Thanks, Fuzzy!)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:55 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Today the Escape Pod podcast included a wonderful short story by Paul Di Filippo, a consistently great science fiction writer. The story is "Little Worker" and it's pure gold Di Filippo, a reprint from his collection of bio-punk stories
Ribofunk The reading by Jonathon Sullivan is likewise stellat. Escape Pod features some great fiction, but with this story, they've really gone to a new level. Bravo!
At home, Little Worker could do pretty much as she pleased, as long as she was there should Mister Michael need her. At the office-and in other public places-she had to be more circumspect and diligent. Little Worker was on duty her, in a way that was more intense than behind the electrified fence and active sensors of the estate. (Once, one of the men at the Training School had said: "Little Worker, you are the most diligent companion I've ever trained." The men of the school had been nice, in their stern way. But no one was like Mister Michael.)
Today, however, Little Worker's mind was not on her work.
Link
(
Thanks, Bazooka Joe!)
Update: Here's an interview with Di Filippo from the Small World podcast -- thanks, Bazooka Joe!
By David Pescovitz at 9:49 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Installation artist Peter William Holden built a delightful machine consisting of eight umbrellas that "dance" to "Singin' In The Rain." The video of the mechanical performance is terrific. From Holden's description of the work:
Busby Berkeley choreographed dancers to mimic the motions of machines and modern inventions. “AutoGene” is the flipside of this. It’s a simple aesthetic looking robot composed of eight modified umbrellas mounted in a circular pattern. A cocktail of air hoses and electrical cables join these umbrellas to a central computer which enables “AutoGene” to produce a choreographed dance to music which erodes the machine's mechanical qualities and transforms the mundane umbrellas into magical animated objects.
Link (via Salon, thanks Dale Dougherty!)
By David Pescovitz at 8:50 am Thursday, Mar 2
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The New York Public Library purchased the William S. Burroughs archive, including 11,000 pages of writings (published and unpublished), correspondence, collages, diaries, notebooks, photographs, and 50 hours of unreleased tape recordings. The WBS archive will join the Jack Kerouac archive as part of the Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. I hope that someday, the entire archive will be scanned and made freely available online for study and mash-up in the Burroughs tradition.
(Photo by the amazing Charles Gatewood.) From the New York Times:
Though scholars have never seen most of the material, they were made tantalizingly aware of its existence by Burroughs himself, who published a descriptive catalog of the archive in 1973. Oliver C. G. Harris, a professor of American literature at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, who edited a collection of Burroughs's letters published by Viking in 1993, said the material was the Holy Grail of scholars of the Beat generation.
"My sense is that it will really change the picture of Burroughs that scholars have known," Mr. Harris said, because that picture has been based almost exclusively on Burroughs's work in the 1950's. Much of his more avant-garde experiments, including most of his cut-ups – works created by slicing typewritten text into fragments and rearranging it to create a new narrative – came later, in the 1960's and 1970's...
Much of the archive sheds light on the relationship between Burroughs and the others of the Beat generation, including Timothy Leary, Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso, Terry Southern, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and, of course, Kerouac and Ginsberg.
"The archive is particularly interesting because Burroughs clearly intended it to be read and absorbed as a work of art," Mr. Gewirtz said. Handwritten notes by Burroughs adorn many of the folios of written material, explaining the contents, and the author often added collages of photographs, newspaper clippings or other media to the folders.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 7:58 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Small Beer Press, which publishes wonderful science fiction and fantasy titles like Kelly Link's
Magic for Beginners, is having a giant sale to raise cash to cover its printers' bills. This is a rare opportunity to get hold of some of the finest genre lit being published today while doing a solid for an amazing, ground-breaking, Creative Commons-friendly specialty press:
Get a Massive Box of Books: The Mount, Carmen Dog, Report to the Men's Club, Travel Light, Mockingbird, Perfect Circle, Trampoline: an anthology, Kalpa Imperial, Meet Me in the Moon Room · 9 good books: Only $59
Carol Emshwiller 3-for-1 Super Special:
The Mount, Carmen Dog, Report to the Men's Club
Don't forget to tell us which titles you'd like!
1 book: $7 2 books: $12 3 books: $15
Waldrop Package Deal: Howard Who? and Howard Waldrop Interview
Readercon 7/03: Howard Waldrop interviewed by Ellen Datlow.
July 2006 Howard Waldrop, Howard Who?
trade paperback
$19
Link
(
Thanks, Gavin!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:55 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Scott Granneman has an excellent editorial on the risks of DRM at SecurityFocus; Soctt's an educator and a security expert, and his perspective on this is informed by both those careers:
The final indignity is that, although other DjVu readers provide for text selection, The New Yorker has removed that feature from its DjVu reader. You can print, but you can't select or copy. As a teacher of several technology courses at Washington University in St. Louis, this limitation, frankly, completely sucks. Suppose I want my students to read ten paragraphs from a New Yorker story that I provide on a password-protected web page. Too bad! I want to copy and paste some sentences into a presentation? Nope! A student expresses an interest in a topic, and I want to send her a New Yorker article via email that would help further her education? No can do.
Link
(
Thanks, Scott!)
By Xeni Jardin at 6:17 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Investigative blogger Kathryn Cramer says,
I just went to the site of the Kenya Broadcasting corporation to look at something on Google News and it looks like they're in the middle of a fullscale media shutdown. Some subversive soul has found a way into the corporate site and has added the shot of the burning newspapers at the printing press while I've been looking at it.
Link to more on Kathryn's blog. Cropped screengrab above,
Link to full-screen image of KBC's website.
Update, 715am PT:
Lede from AP item -- "Masked, plainclothes police carrying assault rifles staged a midnight raid on the country's oldest newspaper and its sister television station early Thursday, burning tens of thousands of newspapers in the most dramatic attack on the press in Kenya's history." Link.
Kathryn adds,
A couple of days ago I spotted this hard-hitting set of photos from Flickr user mwasb having to do with the corruption scandal in Kenya -- here they are. Charity Ngilu, shown in this photo, is the minister of Health in Kenya.
Further along in that stream is a photo of a freshly killed man taken a while back with the explanation that "A suspected robber who was shot by police in the streets of Nairobi, Kenya. Cold blood execution of suspects by police officers is a common occurence in Kenya due to high level of violent crime."
Some of those photos are from October, 2005 -- from a different or earlier scandal. However, the scenes do demonstrate the Kenyan government's relationship to the press.
By Xeni Jardin at 6:09 am Thursday, Mar 2
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I filed an item for Wired News about the new IMAX movie Deep Sea 3D (trailer). Yeah, you have to wear goofy glasses to watch it, but the results are pretty awesome. I attended the film's premiere with my nrrdpals Sean and Michael, and we were "dude!"-ing and "OMG!"-ing like 6-year-olds for hours after we left the theater. "Awwwthat mantis shrimp was kigASS, man, 20 feet high on that screen with ninja moves like Chuck Norris!1!11" Snip from report:
Narrated by Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, Deep Sea 3D chronicles the interconnected lives of underwater critters -- and the destructive impact of human pursuits back on the planet's surface.
The film's cast of characters includes a feathery Rainbow Nudibranch, a giant Pacific octopus that shifts colors as fast as a strobe light and many other beings of diverse size and form. With claws as powerful as a 22-caliber bullet, a 10-inch shrimp squashes a mussel for lunch.
Huge sea turtles and supersized fish hang out in ocean floor "day spa" spots, where schools of tiny fish who would otherwise be prey whisk algae off their backs.
We witness what might be described as an undersea smartmob: off the coast of Mexico, eight nights after the August full moon, every coral organism on an entire reef spawns, at precisely the same time -- exactly one hour after sunset. How do such simple life forms coordinate such a complex act? Nobody knows, but text-messaging has nothing to do with it.
Link to story, with pics.
Image: click for large size. Reef fish nibble algae from a green sea turtle's shell off Hawaiian shores for the filming of Deep Sea 3D. Courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. / Peter Kragh.
See also this related Wired Magazine story:
Stereo-Vision Camera Dives Deep, by Sonia Zjawinski.
Update: Here's a phonecam snap of Sean "metblogs.com" Bonner and I inside the premiere, wearing stupid-looking goggles that made the movie (not us) look great: Link.
By Cory Doctorow at 4:09 am Thursday, Mar 2
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An LJ user has posted photos of a bizarre Ziggy Stardust comic where David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Freddie Mercury, Ozzy Osbourne and Batman (!) fight crime together. The commentary is priceless.
Link
(
Thanks, Conor!)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:14 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Here's artwork from an upcoming Transformers minicomic set in the early part of the 20th century, featuring steampowered, steampunk transforming robots!
Link
(
Thanks, Morgan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:23 am Thursday, Mar 2
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Frank Cifaldi has uncovered a long-lost Penn and Teller video game that was never released in stores, and Waxy is hosting a torrent of it. The game involves lots of tricks, shenanigans, and genuinely weird and improbable easter-eggs, and has cameos from Lou Reed and Debbie Harry. Penn mentioned the torrent of the game on his talk-show yesterday and sounded pretty cool with it! You'll need to install a free Sega CD emulator to run it (unless you actually have a working Sega CD).
The most infamous part was "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point.
Link
