By Cory Doctorow at 5:02 pm Wednesday, Mar 8
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Diane sez, "Alpha, the SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers, is a one-of-a-kind residency workshop for teens who write genre fiction. The application deadline is coming soon--at the end of March. The best twenty writers (14 to 19 years of age) who submit original science fiction, fantasy or horror stories will be accepted. For ten days in July, the students will stay at the University of Pittsburgh branch campus in Greensburg, PA. They'll learn how to write from authors Timothy Zahn, Tamora Pierce, Dora Goss, Wen Spencer and others. This is Alpha's fifth year. Former Alpha students have sold stories to prominent
publications including Boys' Life, Realms of Fantasy, Writers of The
Future, Fantasy Magazine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Fantastic
Stories, Corpse Blossoms, Aberrant Dreams, and Fantastical Visions."
Link
(
Thanks, Diane!)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:12 pm Wednesday, Mar 8
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John Battelle -- "band manager" for Boing Boing and author of
The Search -- is upset that his publisher, Penguin, is suing Google over Google Book Search. That has resulted in The Search -- a book in large part about Google -- not being available through Google Book Search, despite John's wishes to the contrary:
Q: "Why didn't Penguin want your book to be in Google Book Search?"
John: "They're suing Google over Book Search. They're part of the Publisher's Association suit."
Q: "What are they afraid of?"
John: "They're afraid of the future. Afraid of what they don't know.... It's very irritating to me."
Link
(
via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:06 pm Wednesday, Mar 8
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iBill, a company that handles credit-card transactions for porn sites (and others) has leaked the personal information of 17 million customers, information that's being used by phishers, mortgage companies, and others:
Independently, Wired News found that entries from the smaller cache are listed as mortgage leads on a spammer community site, specialham.com. (The website's homepage offered no contact information and Wired News was unable to reach the registered owner of the domain, one "Juice Wobble.") This suggests that the database was marketed as a lead list for outside businesses. "I can attest to the fact that this goes on with phishing groups," says James. "They break in and steal leads and then sell those leads to (black market) leads companies, who resell them to legitimate companies, and sometimes the same companies they stole them from."
"The fact that a total of 17,781,462 iBill records have been found in the hands of criminal hackers is quite disturbing, be it an inside job or the successful work of criminal hackers," says Thomas.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:05 pm Wednesday, Mar 8
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Mashup man,
Party
Ben, creator of the "
Dean
Gray American Edit" project, straddles bastard pop and mainstream
radio on
this week's RU
Sirius Show.
There's also an interview with Reverend Ivan Stang of the Church of
the SubGenius about the Rachel Bevilacqua situation.
And on NeoFiles, RU
has an interesting discussion about renewable energy with Peter Asmus,
author of "Reaping The Wind."
Link
By David Pescovitz at 1:44 pm Wednesday, Mar 8
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Last month, I
posted about a $1 million Ferrari that was crashed in Malibu, California by Stefan Eriksson, who originally claimed to just be a passenger. The story is much stranger than it even first seemed. According to today's Los Angeles Times, Eriksson flashed a card to deputies identifying himself as a "deputy police commissioner of the San Gabriel Transit Authority Police's anti-terrorism division." It turns out that this particular police agency was formed, legally, by a nonprofit organization that transports disabled people. Apparently, private police departments are easy to establish but "police agencies cannot arrest people unless their personnel meet training and hiring standards set down by state law." So how did Eriksson become deputized? From the Los Angeles Times:
(San Gabriel Transit Authority founder Yosef) Maiwandi said he came in contact with Eriksson from another member of the transit board, Eriksson's civil attorney, Ashley Posner. Neither Posner nor Eriksson would comment.
Maiwandi said Eriksson approached him with an offer. Eriksson volunteered to install free surveillance cameras and a "facial recognition scan" – which could compare a person's image to one depicted in a wanted poster – on a bus to show law enforcement agencies how that could be helpful in catching criminals. He said he had given a similar system to transit agencies in England.
After a background check on Eriksson came back clean, Maiwandi said, he told the businessman he could use the authority's five buses to install the equipment.
In return for his volunteer efforts, Eriksson was made a deputy commissioner of the police department and given business cards...
Although the department's website suggests that it is a fully functioning police agency, Maiwandi acknowledged that it consists of six people, including himself and the chief, who he said is a former Los Angeles police officer who volunteers his services.
Link (Thanks, KVH!)
By David Pescovitz at 1:26 pm Wednesday, Mar 8
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Our friends at the Athanasius Kircher Society, who introduced us to the twisted 17th century
cat piano, point us to another of
Kircher's strange inventions. This time, it's a hall of mirrors that would almost certainly drive our feline friends insane if it was ever to be built. (And as a devoted cat companion, I would never ever encourage such a thing.) From a text by Gaspar Schott:
“You will exhibit the most delightful trick if you impose one of these appearances on a live cat, as Fr. Kircher has done. While the cat sees himself to be surrounded by an innumerable multitude of catoptric cats, some of them standing close to him and others spread very far away from him, it can hardly be said how many capers will be exhibited in that theatre, while he sometimes tries to follow the other cats, sometimes to entice them with his tail, sometimes attempts a kiss, and indeed tries to break through the obstacles in every way with his claws so that he can be united with the other cats, until finally, with various noises, and miserable whines he declares his various affectations of indignation, rage, jealousy, love and desire. Similar spectacles can be exhibited with other animals.”
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 10:02 am Wednesday, Mar 8
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Here's my notes from Brian Dear's
presentation on Eventful at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference -- Brian presented on his company, EVDB, an events database that tries to do for live shows and other gatherings what IMDB does for movies. The neat thing is his new feature -- "Demand" -- which helps fans get together to create demand for the kinds of shows they want, and then communicates the demand to performers.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 9:31 am Wednesday, Mar 8
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Here are my notes from Clay Shirky's inspiring
presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego: "Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies." Clay's talk recapitulates one of the most important ideas about technology I know of, Mitch Kapor's seminal notion that "Architecture is politics." He works though how the design of social technologies produces political outcomes, and calls on designers to join an online conversation about the politics of their design:
Pattern language for moderation strategies
* Increasingly a developer problem
* No catalog of successful/unsuccessful strategies
Imagine "communal freedom" -- the X axis
* How much freedom does the software allow the group to have in intercommunication
* Notepad can't catalyze group conversation
* Usenet is for group conversation -- no restriction on user-registration,
no control, implicitly global
Imagine "annonyingness" -- the Y axis
* Flaming, trolling, etc
The more communal freedom, the more annoyingness
Even moderate amounts of communal freedom yields lots of annoyingness
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 7:16 am Wednesday, Mar 8
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I'm in San Diego at
O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference and taking some notes through the sessions -- unfortunately, tech difficulties meant that I didn't get great notes for a bunch of the sessions yesterday, but I did get two really interesting ones:
Musical Myware, Felix Miller, CEO Last.fm. Felix introduced me to the term "myware" -- spyware that you run on your own activities, which helps you get a better handle on your needs and wants and helps your computer help you better.
I love this idea: people are good at making decisions and computers are good at counting them (and computers are bad at making decisions and people are bad at counting them). My computer should note, count and process every decision I make -- it should notice that I never answer emials from certain people, it should notice that I never click through certain stories in my reader, that I load certain pages every day, that I often search my mailbox for certain kinds of messages and so on. That's stuff I'm totally unqualified to keep track of, and that computers are really good at:
Myware is like spyware, but it lets you spy on yourself.
Why would you spy on yourself? Why would you share the data with Last.fm?
Last.fm: Tell us what music you listen to, anytime, all the time, without even realizing it
Why?
Napster made all music ever recorded available -- so how do you know what to listen to? Mission: "Harness the knowledge of the crowd." Someone out there knows what you should be listening to; no need to read tedious editorial.
Audioscrobbler installs in media-players like iTunes, etc and reports what you're listening to at any moment and updates your user-profile. Only records stuff you listen to, but not stuff you skip -- just the stuff you pay attention to.
and
Root Markets: Applications for the New Attention Economy, Seth Goldstein, ROOT Attention Exchange. Seth's idea is to give you tools that capture your decisions -- say, your entire browser clickstream -- and parse it to help you make better decisions about the future, and let you sell and trade that clickstream.
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am Wednesday, Mar 8
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The always-hilarious Lore Sjöberg, late of the screamingly awesome comedy site
Brunching Shuttlecocks, has put together a rendition of the Tolkienesque massively multiplayer online game that presents it as a Zork-style text adventure:
"I have another task for you," the elf says. "In the east there are ..."
> Click Accept
"Take this bag of jelly to Commander Wolfchow in Cramhollow Dale."
> Go to Cramhollow Dale
You run to Cramhollow Dale. You run and run. You run and run and run. You keep on running. Someone runs past you, faster. You keep running. Two gnomes run past you in the opposite direction. Still you run. You're not there yet. What are you going to do?
> Run
That's right, bunky. You're gonna run. You continue to run and run and run and run and ... whoa, you're in Cramhollow Dale. A tall man who looks like a lot of the other tall men around here has a question mark over his head.
> Give bag of jelly to man
"Good!" says ...
> Click Complete Quest, Accept, whatever, just get on with it
"Take this crate of liver back to Elfiwee Muttonscorner near the gully stream."
> Go back to stream
You run. You run and run. You run and run and run.
> Wonder aloud why I find this so damn compelling
You hear a voice in the distance. "Need group! No quitters!"
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:56 am Wednesday, Mar 8
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Quinn Norton profiles the body-modification practice of subdermal implants, through which substances like molded silicone are slid beneath the skin to produce raised, shaped lumps.
BMEZine's Shannon Larratt -- whose site and work often appear here -- is featured in the story, which covers the connection with this work and implanted RFIDs, and why the plastic surgery establishment won't touch it.
The process creates a raised area on the skin in a shape of the artist's choosing. The effect is dramatic: Implants can be most any form you can think of, from Star Trek ridges and small horns, to little stars and hearts sprayed across the chest. Many people with body modifications have combined their implants with tattoos to create often beautiful or terrible effects.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:50 am Wednesday, Mar 8
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A Texas bankruptcy judge replied to a Defendant's motion with a ruling that concluded, "The Defendant's motion is accordingly denied for incomprehensibility
1." With the following footnote:
1Or, in the words of the competition judge to Adam Sandler's title character in the movie "Billy Madison," after Billy Madison had responded to a question with an answer that sounded superficially reasonable but lacked any substance,
Mr Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I've ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response was there anything that could even be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Deciphering motions like the one presented here wastes valuable chamber staff time, and invites this sort of footnote.
Link
(
via Vertical Hold)
