Here is a Flickr photoset for people who enjoy pictures of tiny animals clinging unwittingly to human fingers. Link (Via Presurfer)

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) Dinsdale says: "re - the 'nasty toys' photoshop contest - there was an actual 60s toy called the 'Hippy Sippy' consisting of hypodermic syringe with small sugar pills." Link

badscience says:

This guy has been digging huge tunnels under his house in London, and beyond to the neighbours house and under the road, for 45 years and the council are stepping in to fill them with concrete. Nobody's quite sure how far they stretch but in 2001 the pavement collapsed and you could see a few tunnels veering off underground. He's certainly got down to the water table. Mad story.

Link

Reader comment: Derrick Schneider says:

There's an old book by Mick Jackson, called The Underground Man, about an old duke building tunnels under his estate (or having them built; can't quite remember). Perhaps it's an English affliction, though hopefully your guy doesn't go the same route as The Underground Man, who, if memory serves, ends the book with a self-trepanation (yeee).

From the Amazon.com write-up:

Through a fictional journal, Jackson constructs a portrait of William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, fifth Duke of Portland (d. 1879), a prodigious eccentric best known for the elaborate network of tunnels he built beneath his estate. The duke is portrayed as a repressed hypochondriac, an old man morbidly curious about the workings of his body and mind. During the months encompassed by the novel, he grows increasingly obsessed with the fleeting bits of memory that intrude upon his ruminations and hint at some horrific, long-buried secret. A prime example of the psychological bent of the contemporary British neo-Gothic novel, this first novel from a British filmmaker and teacher of creative writing explores the darker fringes of consciousness. A subdued, though peculiarly compelling, tale. -- Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.

On Saturday, I posted about the strange, dark week of despair dropped on the world by Garfield in a 1989 series of newspaper strips. Did Garfield die? Or was he just in the midst of a serious existential crisis? After all these years, the mystery has been solved. This week, BB reader Kevin Skinner happened to have the opportunity to ask the comic's creator, Jim Davis, about the so-called "Death of Garfield" series. From Kevin's email to me:

I read the ("Death of Garfield?") post a couple of days ago and was intrigued because I was scheduled to have a business meeting with Jim Davis in just a couple of days (I work for Hallmark). Well, I had that meeting at Paws (Davis' company) yesterday and I used the opportunity to ask him just exactly what he had in mind when he wrote those strips. The answer was simple. He was not inspired by any cartoon (though I could certainly see why the other commenter might believe so). Garfield is NOT dead, nor is he starving to death (Jim actually laughed loudly when I suggested these theories). It was simply a week before Halloween and Jim wanted to do something legitimately scary, as opposed to Halloween-scary. "Ghosts aren't scary..." he told me before explaining that before writing the strips he went around to everyone he knew and asked them what truly scared them. The answer he got most often was "being alone" or "dying alone". Just that simple.

I mentioned the post to Jim and he seemed tickled. I told him that I intended to set the record straight and he seemed fine with it. As a matter of fact he was unaware of the many internet-circulated theories about the strips (it took him a moment to even understand which strips I was talking about).

I have to admit that I am more than a little thrilled to have had the opportunity to address (and resolve) something that so many are speculating about. A rare opportunity indeed...

Thanks, Kevin Skinner and Jim Davis!

NYC artist Jasmine Zimmerman stretches rubber bands over subway entrances, stairways, and other public fixtures. Link

I have no idea whether or not this is real or Photoshop. Link (Thanks, Donnae!)

Reader comment: Army of Darkness says:

Pretty old in the Spanish side of the net... People still wonder if it was real or not. The story behind this was that someone found the frog in the "canónigos" (I don't know the English name for this vegetable) bag he bought and was trying to sue the company Florette SA. This company is known for sometimes letting these amphibians make their ways into the salad bags, usually dead unlike this one.

If this is a fake then it's not just a photoshopped image since there was a youtube video where you could see the frog breathing and moving inside the bag, that was unfortunately deleted by the user.

Proof: Spanish blog page that still links to the no-longer-available video, letting you see only a random frame before clicking the play button.

John Gilmore has asked the Supreme Court to strike down TSA's regulations about showing ID to travel, because TSA refuses to publish them. The idea of a "secret law" has been rejected in the US and British legal systems since the year 1200 or so. The Supremes have struck down secret detentions and secret tribunals, now will they say "three strikes and you're out?" Link (Thanks, John!)

Cool Hunter has photos of a stunning high-end children's bookstore in Beijing called "Kids' Republic." Judging from the pictures, this looks like the bestest kids' bookstore I ever saw. Link (via Neatorama)

Someone has set up a Splunk server for the the massive query database that AOL foolishly released to the public a few days ago.

Even though users' screennames have been replaced by unique ID numbers to hide their identity, you can learn a lot about the person from their searches, and maybe even find out who they are.

Look what Declan McCullough learned about AOL user 2708:

Whoever wrote that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned had clearly never experienced the Internet. For a three-month period, AOL user 2708, apparently a resident of the greater Boston area, was searching for little else.

Her search terms suggest that she signed up her ex-boyfriend for Columbia House CDs, articles on "gay life," and Christian literature--while shopping for women's Harley Davidson boots. User 2708's ex apparently lives in New Hampshire:

• revenge tactics
• the woman's book of revenge
• dirty tricks for chicks
• voice changer
• how to humiliate someone
• bill me pay later for cd's
• scams to play on people
• how to get revenge on an old lover
• i hate my ex boyfriend
• how to really make someone hurt for the pain they caused to someone else
• columbia house
• advice from women who have seeked revenge on old lovers
• makehimsuffer.com
• how to say goodbye hurtfully
• how to report child neglect in the state of new hampshire
• free articles on gay life that can be mailed to me
• free christian things
• free gay magazines
• free angry stuff to send to an ex lover
• how to permanently delete information from your hard drive
• makehimpay.net
• women's harley davidson boots
• www.match.com
• the worst thing to send someone via email
• thong dancewear
• locatecell.com
• what can i do to an old lover for revenge
• mean revenge tactics
• death records in hampstead new hampshire

If you search on "2708" you can sort of piece together this person's unfortunate life story during the last several months. Link

Reader comments:

Paul Boutin says:

To see all of anyone AOL user's searches in the Splunk index, click on the AOL-assigned ID number at the very start of the entry. Splunk returns all matching searches, sorted in reverse chronological order.

To plot search results, click "Show Events by Time."

The typeahead in the search box is fun, too. You can see that 622 searches for "boingboing" are in the index.

Kevin says:

Heres a New York times article detailing an AOL user that was tracked down by reporters after AOL released 3 months of search engine data by 657,000 users assinged "anonymous" numbers. It makes me feel good they found a nice old lady at the end of it all. I guess they steered clear of tracking down the guy searching for various types of pornography over and over -- would not have made such a heart warming piece. I think we all knew this process was / is possible, but its nice to be reminded.

Bumperactive, makers of fine, progressive and geeky bumper-stickers, have entered into a partnership with the Crawford Peace House, an anti-war center in George W Bush's hometown of Crawford, TX. Bumperactive is selling stickers in support of the Peace House, with 22.5% of the revenue going to the Peace House. Link (Thanks, http://www.bumperactive.com">Kyle!)

Jeremiah sez, "I recently did a mash-up of some vintage 1950s-70s wallpaper samples and some 1980s video games (Gauntlet II, Pitfall, and Frogger)." These are good and subtle -- I love this Frogger design. Link (Thanks, Jeremiah!)

Toolmonger has a nice review of MAKE's new email newsletter, Tools-N-Tips.

We’re pretty big fans of MAKE (in both print and blog format), so we were stoked to hear about their new Tools-N-Tips section which consists of “tools and tips that MAKE authors and fellow readers love the most,” all of which come from their massive list of writers, contributors, and readers. They’re also going to publish a bi-weekly newsletter featuring the best of the tools and tips submitted recently. We’re going to sign up, and we suggest that you do as well.

Link

Spammers are sending out mysterious messages filled with quotes from classic literature. For some time, spammers have culled repositories of written English to provide filter-confusing "word-salads" in their messages; I've even gotten spams containing passages lifted from my own online writing. The new messages don't contain any come-ons for boner pills or porn, which has led spamfighters to speculate that these are either ineptly sent messages coming from spambots that can't contact the mothership and find out what they should be advertising today, or messages that are supposed to "un-train" spam filters by making them think that statistically normal English phrases are suspect, making spam-recipients so frustrated over false positives that they switch off their filters.

A variety of explanations for the spurt and its source are emerging. One theory, according to several Web developers and analysts, is that spammers are seeking to thwart spam filters by confusing them. Spammers sometimes embed passages of this type of story text, also known as "hashbusting text," throughout their spam message in a bid to pass as legitimate email. (Spam filters may classify certain mail as spam if its combination of words and phrases deviates too widely from those typically found in legitimate email.) By sending spam consisting only of this story text, they are hoping that users will report it as spam, throw the filters off and make them less able to catch malicious spam later on, according to this theory.

Others, arguing that most spam filters are far too advanced to be thrown off by this technique, posit a different explanation. Richi Jennings, an email security analyst at Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based market-research firm, says the "empty spam" is most likely caused by a communication failure between the server originating the spam and the infected computers sending it.

Most spam is first sent by a host server and then modified and pushed out by virus-infected computers known as zombies. If the host and the zombies aren't communicating, either because the host has been shut down or as a result of some software glitch, the zombies could be sending blank emails with the "hashbusting text" tagged on, he argues. The likelihood of both possibilities is increasing, he says, as Internet companies remove spam servers from the network.

Link (via /.)

I forgot all about this funny, profanity-infested voice mail that a gentleman left for me a few months back. He was upset that I linked to a how-to piece written by Deke McClelland about scanning currency in Photoshop, which has certain features that prevent you from scanning and printing US currency.

I recently completed an illustration for MAKE Vol 7 that required an image of a dollar bill (shown here; click here for enlargement). Ironically, the purpose of the illustration was to show people how to detect counterfeit money, not how to make counterfeit money. I wonder if this will assuage the concerns expressed by the caller?

I had no problem using Photoshop to scan the dollar bill and paste it into Adobe Illustrator, but I'm glad Deke figured out a workaround to help other illustrators who use currency in their art and photography.

Here, for your enjoyment, is the voice mail. The gentleman's language is colorful, so be careful listening to it at work. Link

Reader comment:

Matt H says:

I fear that you may have a torrent of angry voice mails, all complaining about the subversive, seditious nature of your posts. All in hopes of getting a few minutes of fame for coming up with angry responses. Maybe this is the next big "Web 2.0 Killer App," a service that records your voice, extracts phonemes, and then uses RSS, a Bayesian filter, and a light sprinkling of AI to construct an angry response. It then scans the DNS registration for the site to find a phone number and uses the PSTN relay found with many VoIP services to dial up the listed office phone number to deliver the complaint.

You've tweaked the pink boys. Well done, Sir! Well Done!

Matt sez, "Nicole Gordon (my sister, incidentally) does multimedia art which combines scenes from 19th c. French scenic wallpaper, Medieval murals, and a number of other sources, with contemporary suburban scenes to create luscious and whimsical anachronistic scenes. Although it's hard to tell from the photos, she also uses a lot of craft materials like glitter and sequins to add texture and light." Link (Thanks, Matt!)

The Canadian Library Association has written a blistering open letter to Access Copyright, the organization that collects authors' royalties from libraries in Canada. The librarians wrote about Captain Copyright, kid-targeted copyright maximalist character that Access Copyright spent its money promoting:

The most disturbing aspect of the Captain Copyright advertising campaign is the targeting of children with propaganda-style tools. Advertising Standards Canada, a self-regulating trade association, reminds us that advertising to children is illegal in Quebec and its Canadian Code of Advertising Standards provides guidelines for the rest of Canada. It explicitly states that exploiting children's credulity, lack of experience or sense of loyalty is forbidden. As an entity mandated by law, Access Copyright should be held to the highest standards of accuracy and should carefully reconsider Captain Copyright in light of the Code.

CLA believes that any copyright advocacy initiative intended to be used directly by children or in the classroom by teachers should be developed, if required, by the institutions which represent the education community, like the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, the Canadian Teachers' Federation, and with the library community. Captain Copyright is a unilateral initiative on the part of Access Copyright and reflects its own perception, not the broader Canadian perspective.

PDF Link (Thanks, Kim!)

TiVo's anti-user technology has malfunctioned again, preventing TiVo customers from storing the shows they record. Last year, there was a rash of problems following from TiVo forcing a downgrade on its customers, one that added Macrovision software to TiVo devices. This software allows broadcasters to specify whether and for how long a show can be recorded. Supposedly (and by law), this will not be used on unencrypted standard broadcast shows, but Fox has some kind of sloppy or malicious procedure by which they frequently tag their programming in such a way as to prohibit or restrict recording of their broadcasts.

Now Dave Zatz reports that his TiVo has refused to store his recording of a 37-year-old movie on Fox, giving him 24 hours to watch it before it expires.

No law required TiVo to take this functionality away from its customers. Indeed, it's arguable that when you bought your pre-Macrovision TiVo, you bought a machine that could record anything aired, and that by changing the deal so that now you can only record some things, TiVo has broken its contract with you. Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

Part two of my four-part NPR "Day to Day" series "Hacking The Himalayas" airs today.

When the Dalai Lama fled Chinese rule of Tibet in 1959, he found refuge just across the western border in India. Waves of refugees followed their spiritual leader out of the once-isolated kingdom when India provided them with land. Today, nearly 50 years after that first exodus, more than 100,000 people of Tibetan heritage live in the area. The Dalai Lama and leaders of the Tibetan government-in-exile now call the northern village of Dharamsala their home.

Even though two full generations of Tibetans have grown up outside their native land, the Tibetan community is still very close-knit, and many still harbor dreams of returning to a country free of Chinese domination -- something unlikely to happen any time soon.

But with the help of some technology experts from the West, the Tibetan community in India hopes to get the word out about their cause via the viral grapevine that is the Internet. It's an enormous challenge. Electricity, phones and Internet access are expensive and hard to come by. Phone lines can go down for days at a time, leaving the region cut off from the world. But there's an effort under way to change that, and to teach young Tibetan refugees about computers and the Web.

Link to archived audio, and multimedia extras. Here's the series home page.

And over at xeni.net/trek I've posted a few new items on the related "reporter's notebook" blog from this project:

* Corrected by a monkey: the meaning of "rinpoche."

* Gear notes: my sound recording equipment

* Biker gangs of the Tibetan plateau: nomads on motorcycles

* Tibetan photojournalist Lobsang Wangyal

* Tigga, please: wannabe gangsta-ism among Tibetan refugee teens

Image: (Xeni Jardin, 2006) Both adults and children take computer classes at the technology center of the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamshala. Web publishing is one of the favorite subjects. Left, Tashi Phuntsok, and right, Nyima Woeser -- two geeks I met who were studying javascript and PHP.

Previously: Hacking the Himalayas, Part 1.

In this lovely bit of video, YTMND mashes up Senator Ted Stevens' ridiculous "the Internet is a series of tubes" speech with a forgettable summer horror movie trailer, making something better than either of them. Link (Thanks, Damnhooligan and everyone else who suggested this!)

British ATM cards all come with RFID smartcard chips that are used to verify that the card hasn't been cloned. So British card-skimmers email the numbers to India, clone the cards there, and clean out their marks' bank accounts in Sri Lanka:

Under the direction of a computer savvy crime boss, the thieves collected credit card numbers from an unscrupulus gas station attendant in London and uploaded the electronic information to the magnetic strips on the back of phone cards. Then they caught a flight to India.

Since the Indian ATMs only had single point verification the gang was able to exploit the technology gap all across Tamil Nadu and netted a neat sum. They would have gotten away with it, too. The police didn't have a clue it was happening, and it was only when an unusually attentive security guard posted outside an ATM noticed a man withdrawing cash from multiple cards in succession that he was able to tip off the cops.

Link (via Schneier)

Update: Peter sez, "No emailing took place; the fake cards were made in the UK (apparently using phone cards), and then the thieves flew to India with the cards.

"The criminals are Sri Lankan, but the withdrawals all took place in India (Tamil Nadu is a state in southern India; since the criminals are Sri Lankan, I'd guess they're Sri Lankan Tamils, who could operate more easily in Tamil Nadu than could Sinhalese Sri Lankans)."

Ten Thousand Waves, a luxury spa in New Mexico, will rent you a "room" in a refurbed, vintage Airstream trailer. They compare these to Japan's "capsule" hotels, but roomier and funkier and with less drunken vomiting (presumably). At $99/night, they're not a bad deal, either. Link (Thanks, Kowgurl!)

Update: Steve sez, "This reminds me of a great motel/trailer park in Bisbee, AZ, where all the rooms you can rent are old trailers, some Airstream, some other brands. I stayed there once and it was a great experience. Inexpensive too. It's called the Shady Dell."