Avast, me hearties! We have charted dangerous waters to bring you this flotilla of films, from classic swashbucklers the likes of Michael Curtiz's The Sea Hawk, Jacques Tourneur's Anne of the Indies, and Alexander Mackendrick's A High Wind in Jamaica, to a strange brew of post-piratical features like Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate, Ulrike Ottinger's Madame X, and E. R. Nelson's The Pirates of the Great Salt Lake, each a broadside to the hull of the USS Hollywood. The recent rise of Pirates of the Caribbean has left us questioning just what kind of rogues these pirates be—are they ruthless renegades of the seven seas, gallant privateers swinging gracefully from mast to deck, or rouged and dandy buccaneers, drunk on the grog of grandiosity? And with the galley of pirate fanciers growing daily, between seafaring supply stores, fathomless blogs, and Blackbeard impersonators, we wonder what could be the course of this barbarous affection. While we divine what might a pirate be, we add a new member to the crew, the cultural scrounger who burns booty to fashion into artful trinkets of commerce and commentary. Craig Baldwin's Sonic Outlaws and He Jian-jun's Pirated Copy sail under these new colors, pirates to their dying day. Join us as we set to see.

On this lovely island sim you can find fully interactive educational demonstrations about the ocean and weather. Examples include a sea life submarine ride created by The Magicians, and two different tsnuami demos by Aimee Weber Studios and Electric Sheep Company (seen here). Other fun stuff includes a demonstration of a real-time temperature map powered by Yahoo, narration by Exploratorium Chief Scientist Paul Doherty, an airplane ride into a hurricane, and a melting glacier demonstration.

The NOAA's arrival may be a great sign of things to come. United States government agencies aren't exactly what you call flamboyant, trendy, or fashionable. Their interest in Second Life as a solid educational tool may give other companies a greater sense of comfort in the stability of the platform.

Now the mashup artists at Sound Advice have mashed up St Elsewhere with Notorious BIG tracks, producing an album called "Gnarls Biggie." The MP3 mixes here are inspired, particularly the recut of the Violent Femmes "Gone Daddy Gone" cover, Gone Biggie Gone. Link (via Kottke)

Update: Angus sez, "You have to share this mashup of 'Gnarls Barkley - Crazy vs Supertramp - Logical Song vs The Who - Go to the Mirror Boy (from Tommy) vs Rockwell - Somebody's Watching' It's million times better than the (already kickass) sum of its parts."

The company's credo is a George Bernard Shaw quote: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." But I'm sure Shaw would also agree that the overwhelming majority of blasphemies that go against bedrock principles of science are utter bullshit. Link

Reader comment: Scott says:

When I was a teen, I thought I had come up with a perpetual motion machine which relied on magnetic fields like this one does. The ring that moves around is a magnet on a wheel with the outside all of one polarity. It is attracted to one pole of a horseshoe magnet, as magnets of opposite polarity are, then repelled by the other pole as it moves past. The idea is that the attraction and repulsion of the magnets allow it to spin forever, and could allow a little energy to be drawn off to use for something else. The problem is the magnet on the wheel will instead come to rest caught between magnetic fields. It doesn't work unless the horseshoe magnets are electric so they can be turned on and off, and that takes more energy than can be extracted. My Dad, a physicist, let me build my machine and see the problem for myself. Nice to see I wasn't the only one fooled by the idea.

Study this and marvel at the man's genius. Link

Here's the site of an American named Bruce Gardner who has been making beautiful dorodango and sharing his recipe for making them. Link

Michael O'Leary, the outspoken chief executive of Ryanair, described the new restrictions as "farcical Keystone Cops security measures that don't add anything except to block up airports", as he issued the ultimatum.

Mr O'Leary ridiculed the notion of searching five- or six-year-old children and elderly people in wheelchairs going to Spain. Such scenes, he said, would have "terrorists laughing in the caves of Afghanistan".

Here's the Dalai Lama's statement -- snip:

"The internet's contribution to the diffusion and dissemination of knowledge and information is truly remarkable.

"By itself the internet cannot feed the poor, defend the oppressed, or protect those subject to natural disasters, but by keeping us informed it can allow those of us who have the opportunity to give whatever help we can."

Previously:

* Tibetan mesh org hosting community WiFi event in India in Oct.

* Tibetan refugee WiFi org: we were DoSed, China IPs involved

* Xeni's "reporter's notebook" trek blog.

* NPR Day to Day radio series "Hacking the Himalayas":

Starting tomorrow, I plan to spend the thirty days before the House of Commons reconvenes to highlight some of the exceptions and limitations that should be included in the event that a Canadian DMCA is introduced. Each day, I will post a new provision, focusing broadly on marketplace concerns, public protection, and fair circumvention. The postings will be collected on a single page to form a compilation of DRM policy issues. Moreover, I'm launching a wiki that will start with the postings and will hopefully grow as interested readers add examples and additional perspectives.

We should be working on a positive copyright agenda that includes an expanded fair dealing provision, reform to the statutory damages provision, the elimination of crown copyright, and protection from DRM. Instead, given the strength of the copyright lobby, we may need protection from the next copyright bill. The 30 Days of DRM page and the associated wiki will seek to provide a starting point for the kinds of protections politicians and policy makers should be contemplating.

When Thom Andersen's acclaimed documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself screened at the Egyptian Theater four times over the course of a week in late April, marking its second extended run in its eponymous city, there was very little media fanfare. The distributor didn't take out full-page newspaper ads. The publicist didn't wrangle magazine or TV coverage. There were no plans for a DVD tie-in. It almost seemed like a well-kept secret that the filmmakers finally, reluctantly, were forced to tell.

The reason was simple: the 206 separate film clips -- one for every bone in the human body -- incorporated into Andersen's 169-minute essay about Hollywood, its physical and psychic environs and the distance separating the two. Although there is no way to know for sure, since Andersen didn't bother to ask, the cost of licensing all of these clips for commercial exhibition, TV broadcast and DVD sales (domestic and foreign) could easily stretch into the millions of dollars.

Fun Home tells the story of Bechdel's girlhood growing up with her closeted, literature-obsessed father and her bitter mother in a Victorian house that her father was remodeling, bit by bit. More than anything, this is the story of Bechdel's father, a third-generation funeral home owner who teaches English to make ends meet. Bechdel grows up surrounded by, and oblivious to, his illicit affairs, including some with the young men he hires to babysit her and her brothers. Meanwhile, Bechdel struggles with her own sexuality, coming slowly to realize first that there is such a thing as a lesbian, and then that she is one.

Bechdel's drawing style -- familiar to many from her excellent syndicated strip -- is both friendly and confessional, painful truths revealed in the lines as much as the speech-balloons. She is merciless in cracking open her life and the life of her family, and the story veers from hilarious to tragic, often on the same page.

The story is told in a dreamy style, meandering forward and back in time, illuminated with renderings of her girlhood diary, letters her father wrote to her mother, excerpts from the books that were her father's secret encoded messages to her. As an artifact, the hardcover book is handsome and mysterious, with sly die-cuts in the staid green cover and neon orange boards beneath with illustrations revealing the hidden truths of Bechdel's family home.

"Fun Home" manages the painful trick of getting us to sympathize with people whose flaws are monstrous, by laying out the way that Bechdel herself came to that sympathy. Link

Coppard is worried about the large numbers of these shells and spines that have appeared for sale in the past five years. "We think they must come from illegal trawling," he says. "Unfortunately, the only use the bright colours seem to have is to make them very desirable to collectors."

Tech luminaries, big Silicon Valley companies, and Nepalese sherpas are heading to a community Wi-Fi hoedown this October in the Himalayan foothill town of Dharamshala, India. The agenda: connect the developing world with cheap, wireless mesh networks. I filed a report today for Wired News, after visiting the summit organizers in India:

In October, the Tibetan Technology Center will host the Air Jaldi Summit for wireless community developers from around the world.

Expected to attend is Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman and Wi-Fi pioneer Vic Hayes.

"We want to show people that it's possible not only to build out this kind of technology at low cost in developing areas, but that it's possible for the community to really integrate it into their lives," said Yahel Ben-David, a one-time Silicon Valley dot-commer who left his native Israel to build Dharamshala's mesh network.

October's summit will be less of a who's-who and more of a how-to, says organizer Oxblood Ruffin, who is a member of underground computer security group Cult of the Dead Cow.

In addition to representatives from Intel, Cisco and wireless activists from Europe, "Some sherpas from Nepal are coming," says Ruffin. "I'm trying to make the panels as diverse as possible, mixing grassroots activists, techies and enterprise folk in each."

Presenters will include wireless advocate and University of Limerick President Emeritus Roger Downer and Dave Hughes, who brought internet connectivity to the base of Mt. Everest.

Image: Tibetan Technology Center CTO and co-founder Yahel Ben-David (with laptop) checks signal strength at an antenna site that is also a Hindu temple. To his immediate left, with his back to the camera, is the temple's resident: a Japanese priest the locals call Japani Baba, who has a laptop of his own. From far left to right, here are the other people in the picture: The man leaning on the temple is a Hindu priest who also maintains this site, along with Japani Baba. Next to him, a young Gaddi man from a village nearby. At far right in the red dreads, a mesh network project volunteer named Aurelion who was visiting from Europe and developing some nifty network monitoring apps with Ben-David. I climbed up on top of this temple and shot some pictures of the mesh network antenna and solar panel perched up there: Link. (Xeni Jardin, 2006)

Previously:

* Xeni's "reporter's notebook" trek blog.

* NPR Day to Day radio series "Hacking the Himalayas":

• Part 1: The Gaddi of Dharamsala
• Part 2: Connecting Tibet's Exile Community via the Web
• Part 3: A Wireless Network for 'Little Lhasa'
• Part 4: Tradition vs. Change in 'Lhasa Vegas'

Tibtec.org, home-on-the-web for a wireless mesh network project aiding Tibetan refugees in Dharamshala, India, was reportedly the subject of a distributed denial of service attack today after being featured in Wired News. Snip from the update (I filed both reports):

Speaking to Wired News via Skype, project founder Yahel Ben-David said that while the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Tibetan Technology Center website appeared to come from IP addresses from a number of places around the world, they began immediately after scans from an IP address in China.

“There was no immediately evident single source for the attack, but it started right after an extensive series of China-based scans,” said Ben-David.

The tibtec.org website was featured in a Wired News story published on Thursday about the group's efforts to build a wireless mesh network serving Tibetan exiles. The site is built with Drupal, and runs on Apache.

Previously on BoingBoing: Wireless Binds Tibetan Exiles.
Update: Ben-David said by email, "Here is the WHOIS information about the IPs involved in the attack." Info follows after the jump.

Lally, owner of nine of the two-headed animals, likes the idea of a world record. Lally, 65, and his wife spend several months a year traveling with Golden Girls; their Western Diamondback rattlesnake named Double Trouble; and their seven red ear slider turtles - Wild Ones, Ms. Hazel, Zip & Pip, Lyndon, Crooked Shell, Short Neck and Baby Gill.

They most often show the animals at fairs and festivals. But a world record could mean invitations from malls, which means air conditioning instead of steamy fairgrounds and hot asphalt parking lots at convention centers, Lally said.

"I'd much rather make up (a display) that could go inside malls," he said.

"There are a slew of lawsuits like this," said mannequin manufacturer Barry Rosenberg, who joked that stores should run background checks on dummies before letting them mingle with shoppers.

Most of the cases involved mannequins toppling over onto customers, but an Indiana woman claimed she caught herpes from the lips of a CPR training dummy. She dropped her lawsuit against the American Red Cross in 2000 after further tests revealed that she didn't have the disease, according to news reports.

After having engine problems soon after they left their home port, it seems the men were steadily pushed west across the ocean and were lost for 11 months. They apparently survived on a diet of rainwater, raw fish and seabirds. "We fished, and we ate the fish raw ... because there was no fire to cook with," Jesus Vidana, 27, told Mexico's Televisa news network...

Reports said that two other crew members had jumped overboard and presumably perished soon after they encountered engine problems.

The survivors said they read the Bible as their 27ft fibreglass boat drifted. At least once they had to endure more than two weeks without food but there was drinking water because it rained every day. "Sometimes our stomachs would hurt, because we would go up to 15 days without eating," said Mr Vidana. "There were times when we had only one bird to share among the three of us."

Update: Dan wrote to the BPI, who deny the accusation:

We didn't decide to ban the artist - not only is it untrue that we made a decision to ban her from the campaign - she was never in the running in the first place. We don't know what her views are on downloading, and even if we did, we don't condone censorship. Since we did not ban her, it's untrue to suggest we did so on the basis of her personal views.

We found no instances of forced overtime and employees confirmed in interviews that they could decline overtime requests without penalty. We did, however, find that employees worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct, which limits normal workweeks to 60 hours and requires at least one day off each week. We reviewed seven months of records from multiple shifts of different productions lines and found that the weekly limit was exceeded 35% of the time and employees worked more than six consecutive days 25% of the time. Although our Code of Conduct allows overtime limit exceptions in unusual circumstances, we believe in the importance of a healthy work-life balance and found these percentages to be excessive.

The supplier has enacted a policy change to enforce the weekly overtime limits set by our Code of Conduct. The policy change has been communicated to supervisors and employees and a management system has been implemented to track compliance with the Code of Conduct. Supervisors must receive approval from upper level management for any deviation...

Recognizing that some aspects of workplace auditing (such as health and safety) lie beyond our current expertise, we’ve engaged the services of Verité, an internationally recognized leader in workplace standards dedicated to ensuring that people around the world work under safe, fair and legal conditions. We are committed to ensuring compliance with our Code of Conduct and will complete audits of all final assembly suppliers of Mac and iPod products in 2006.

CopyCamp is an event about art, copyright, and the Net taking place here in Toronto in the last three days of September. We’re bringing together people from various worlds- around half will be artists, and the other half will be a mix of Free Software and Open Source advocates, government people, lawyers, journalist, academics, activists, and anyone else we think might contribute to a lively and useful conversation. The event draws heavily on emergent, participatory "unconference" models – lots of self-organizing, lots of conversation and cross-pollination between groups. We’re using ideas from Foo Camp, Bar Camp, Penguin Days and my own Trampoline Hall Lecture Series, as well as including a couple of more conventional conference elements.

For people who want to come: you can get into the event either by buying a ticket (recommended for suits) or applying to have your spot paid for (recommended for artists and other "creators"). We're trying to get the best participants we can, and we plan on giving away a lot of free spots to people who we really want there, especially people who are excited about contributing to the event.

For details, to register, or to apply for one of the free spots, see: www.copycamp.ca

The Arab Americans who were picked up after bulk-buying cellphones at a Michigan Wal-Mart have had all terrorism-related charges dropped - and have charged with fraud instead. It remains to be seen whether this represents an attempt to gently wind the story down, or the beginning of a whole new fight over what Americans can and cannot do with the crap they buy at Wal-Mart. The Saginaw News, bless them, has been all over this one. Keep an eye on their website to see where terrorism hysteria stories go to die.

1. Fingerprinting the Newly Dead.

When the fingers are flexible it is often possible to secure inked fingerprint impressions of a deceased person through the regular inking process on a standard fingerprint card. Experience has proved that this task can be made easier if the deceased is laid face down and palms down on a table (fig. 388).

The defendants "are permanently enjoined from directly or indirectly utilizing the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) in any way, including, but not limited to, conducting warrantless wiretaps of telephone and Internet communications, in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Title III," she wrote.

She further declared that the program "violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III."

I filed a story and photos for Wired News today on the innovative tech underpinnings of a community wireless project I visited recently in Dharamshala, India. Snip:

Across the border from Chinese-occupied Tibet, the tech infrastructure in this high mountain village is a mess.

But a former Silicon Valley dot-commer and members of the underground security group Cult of the Dead Cow are working with local Tibetan exiles to change that using recycled hardware, solar power, open-source software and nerd ingenuity.

The Dharamsala Wireless Mesh is an example of "light infrastructure," a concept gaining popularity among tech developers: decentralized, ad hoc networks that can deliver essential services faster than conventional means.

Attempts to deploy similar community wireless networks in America have been blocked repeatedly by national phone carriers. It takes a big company like Google to build citywide Wi-Fi networks (the company launched its first in Mountain View, California, this week).

So sustainable network builders are going where they're welcome -- in this case, a rural village 7,000 feet up in the Himalayas.

(...) Some of the technical challenges [network project founder Yahel Ben-David faces] are unique. This may be one of the only networks in the world where antennas must be monkey-proofed.

"Monkeys are everywhere," says Ben-David. "Often, you'll see a huge, gorilla-sized monkey hang on to an antenna, swing from it, eat it, try to break it. We lost a lot of cables that way, but now we use very strong equipment so that even monkeys can't break it."

Update: Here's a discussion about this article on Slashdot: Link.

Previously:

* Xeni's "reporter's notebook" trek blog.

* NPR Day to Day radio series "Hacking the Himalayas":

• Part 1: The Gaddi of Dharamsala
• Part 2: Connecting Tibet's Exile Community via the Web
• Part 3: A Wireless Network for 'Little Lhasa'
• Part 4: Tradition vs. Change in 'Lhasa Vegas'

"The skull is gone. The haunches and all the internal organs, too. The only fleshy parts left are the paws," said (Coleman). "It’s got some extra claws that I find interesting.

"They’re sticking up like the horns of a devil. I’ll be looking into that."

Coleman was the only expert on the scene Wednesday as the controversy over the unidentified animal reached levels bordering on hysteria.

His early opinion: That the beast was possibly a chow, a breed of dog, that had turned feral.

As I investigated this story, the campus cops stonewalled me, but used the fact that I was leaving messages for them to attempt to frighten Sandifer into allowing them to fingerprint and DNA-sample him, saying that a journalist was on the story and he'd better exonerate himself before the story broke. They went to Sandifer's (righteously angry and uncooperative) faculty advisors and, in front of them, leaned on Sandifer for his biometrics and threatened to retrieve his DNA from his garbage if he wouldn't concede to a DNA swab.

Mitchell J Silverman, an attorney in Hollywood, Florida, used the state's sunshine laws to get hold of the police reports on the event.

The report is remarkable for what it doesn't say: it is an apparent fabrication that contradicts the eyewitness reports of everyone I spoke to involved in this story. We're left to decide whether Sandifer and his advisors are lying, or whether it's the police -- who ducked reporters, used lies to intimidate Sandifer, and exhibited the poor judgement in investigating someone for unspecified murders because he published fiction about a murder.

It's an embarrassment to the University of Florida that its police force can attempt to dictate to English students and faculty what fiction can and can't be published.

Here's the police report. Mr Silverman has redacted it to eliminate the addresses of the people involved, but it is otherwise as delivered by the police. 750K PDF Link

"As it is a very lucrative game, we should expect bad behavior; disloyalty; rampant individual greed; irrational behavior (kids in toyshop style); back-stabbing; bum-fucking, and similar ungentlemanly activities." So reads a cautionary note in the prospectus for what's known as the "Wonga Coup." In March 2004, a group of men with a hired army of about 70 mercenary soldiers set out to topple the government of the tiny West African nation of Equatorial Guinea and install a new one. Ostensibly led by a political opposition leader but actually controlled by the white mercenary officers, this new regime would plunder the recently discovered oil wealth of Equatorial Guinea, enriching the coup's architects by billions of dollars.

The Wonga Coup never came off, but not because of the kind of double-crossing anticipated in that early planning document. Adam Roberts, a correspondent for the Economist magazine and a journalist steeped in the skulduggery of modern Africa, describes just how this "improbable escapade" was born and ruined in his new book, "The Wonga Coup." One of the strangest aspects of the story is that the Wonga Coup nearly replicated an earlier failed attempt to take over Equatorial Guinea in 1973. And that coup had since been fictionalized in a bestselling book, popular with the mercenary crowd, by Frederick Forsyth, "The Dogs of War." A case of life imitating art imitating life? The truth is even more bizarrely convoluted: Roberts has found evidence that Forsyth himself financed the 1973 coup. (And Forsyth has more or less admitted as much.)

Update: Kenneth sez, "If you are talking Rick Mercer, you can't leave out the video where he got author Pierre Berton to demonstrate rolling a joint!"

Update 2: Mark sez, "For more current Rick Mercer material go to the official website for his current fake news program the 'Rick Mercer Report,' or Rick's blog (check out the 'Photo challenge' results)."

Striding through the narrow, cobbled streets of Gamla Stan, Falkvinge looks nothing like a politician in his "Pirat" baseball cap and polo shirt. "We have a lot in common with the environmental movement," he says. Where environmentalists see destruction of natural resources, the pirates see culture at risk. "(We) saw a lot of hidden costs to society in the way companies maximize their copyright."

Falkvinge is interrupted by a passing teenager. She's a young punk, with green dreads and a jacket covered in an indistinguishable combination of angry quips and band names -- in short, exactly the type who once would have spent her disposable income on music.

She takes out a piece of notebook paper and asks Falkvinge for an autograph.

Every launch resonates deeply in patriotic nerve centers and causes celebrations throughout the country. Some cities fire off so many fireworks the sky stays thick with smoke for hours. In other places, people pray for the success of the mission in temples and mosques. They may not know what's on board the rocket, but its liftoff certainly lends credibility to India.

Still, India's rocket scientists are humble about their work. Launching missiles with massive payloads into space is a tricky business and things can go wrong at any stage.

After 11 consecutive successful launches, the most recent launch of India's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle on July 10 had to be aborted when one of the engines failed. But these sorts of setbacks are par for the course in the space business -- and aren't confined to India. In 2003, a similar satellite launch by Brazil's space agency resulted in disaster when the rocket exploded on the launch pad, killing 21 technicians and briefly forcing the country to suspend its space program.

To keep the odds in their favor, some scientists make pilgrimages to the famous Venkateswara temple in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, with a small bronze replica of the payload. The model is sprinkled with holy water and placed in front of an idol of Vishnu to be blessed for success.

"Once you are airborne there is not time to make changes," said Rajeev Lochan, assistant science secretary of ISRO. "Maybe it helps to have the divine in your corner."

Also in this Wired News series:
* India's Rocket Man Powers Up
* Gallery: Inside the ISRO
* India Rolls Its Own Space Tech

A suspect has been arrested for the 1996 Colorado murder of "child beauty queen" JonBenet Ramsey, after online communication led authorities to his whereabouts in Thailand. Snip from CNN report:

A law enforcement source identified the suspect as 41-year-old John Mark Karr, a one-time schoolteacher and American citizen who has lived in Conyers, Georgia. Karr has confessed to some elements of the crime, law enforcement sources told CNN. The sources added that Karr had been communicating with someone in Boulder and that online investigation played a key role in leading authorities to the suspect.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

Christians traditionally think of Satan as Lucifer, God's enemy, who rebelled against Him out of pride and then caused Adam and Eve to sin. But, as Kelly shows, this portrayal is not biblical but a scenario invented by the early Fathers of the Church which became the 'New Biography of Satan'. The 'Original Biography' must be reconstructed from the New Testament where Satan is the same sort of celestial functionary we see in the Book of Job - appointed to govern the world, specifically to monitor and test human beings. But he is brutal and deceitful in his methods, and Jesus predicts that his rule will soon come to an end. Kelly traces the further developments of the 'New Biography': humankind's inherited guilt, captivity by Satan, and punishment in Hell at his hands. This profile of Satan remains dominant, but Kelly urges a return to the 'Original Biography of Satan'.

Reader comment: Alexander Platt says,

The title reminds me rather strongly of the (not very good) book by Peter Stanford, "The Devil: A Biography" with much the same premise. And I've never read Kersey Graves' "Biography of Satan: Exposing the Origins of the Devil" but I understand it's the classic reference. For my money, though, it'd be really hard to do better than Elaine Pagels' "The Origins of Satan". As far as I'm concerned it's the definitive work.

There's also a great old book on this exact topic originally published in 1900 entitled "The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil" by Dr. Paul Carus. It's still available in various reprints.

Here's another for the list of books on Satan: "The Origins of Satan" by Elaine Pagels does an excellent job of acquainting readers with the original conceptions and development of Satan in Christianity. Serpents (Snakes on a Plane) & Biographies of Satan, Boing Boing is on a wonderfully diabolic track...

As long as bb is disseminating wonderful resources on the history of Satan, may I also suggest "A History of The Devil" by Gerald Messadie. This book traces the concept of "devil" chronologically across world civilizations. It is interesting to see how often the concept evolved in tandem with the political whims of warring opponents -- especially when so many wars (past and especially present) are being fought for these same antiquated notions of absolute holy and absolute evil.

Here's another knuckle for your finger... "The Anthropology of Evil" by David Parkin

Uber-historian Jacques Le Goff's The Birth of Purgatory provides a highly developed view of the conscious reconstruction of the afterlife, including the creation of Purgatory. It's not a light read, but it is a very complete and thought provoking discussion of how the manipulation of hope (to motivate people to contribute to the church to save the newly categorized souls in purgation) and fear (the explicit construction of a devil, of hell, and of what you had to do to get there) was managed, out of pretty thin sources in the bible. There's a lesson to be learned about how any power structure with world-wide ambitions manipulates popular sentiment, and how unverifiable assertions made by those in power are constructed to do so. If they could repackage it to match My Pet Goat, it would be a hit with the current US administration...

A criticial component in this process was the creation of the Divine Comedy, by Dante, who was, after all, not a theologian, but a poet. Milton too (although not Le Goff's concern) is also responsible for a big chunk of what passes for theology regarding Satan.

ISBN: 0226470830

How can you help prevent damaging privacy invasions like AOL's data leak? Along with spreading the word about this debacle, you can take steps to protect yourself online. (...) [W]e've listed some tips and tools that will help keep your search history private.

• Don't put personally-identifying information in your searches, at least not in a way that can be associated with your other searches. You should take the precautions below to avoid giving away your identity to your search engine anyway, but they're especially necessary if you want to do a search to see if your personal information has appeared online or want to do a vanity search for your name.
• Don't use a search engine operated by your ISP. Most ISPs inherently know who their users are, at any given time and over the long run. If you use their default search tool, they know who you are and everything you search for. Use someone else's search tool instead.
  

"U.S. authorities are advising women not to wear gel bras on airplanes as information developed in the foiled London plot points to an expanding role for women in smuggling explosives on to an aircraft."

Intelligence about the Hair-Gel Bombers was extracted through torture in Pakistan, as in "Please stop electrocuting my testicles! What? Only if I reveal a -- OWWWWWW -- terrorist plot -- AAAAAAHH? All right -- SCREEEECH! -- the terrorists will be blowing up a plane with, with, oh man, I don't know, hair gel! Yes! Hair gel!"

MattyMatt says,

When the MPAA established MyMovieMuse.com a few weeks ago, they said it was a way for them to get feedback from audiences; to get (according to Variety) "consistent, focused consumer intelligence." The public would be able to take surveys "about all things related to the movies -- from theater attendance to homevideo rental and advertisements to piracy."

Well, guess what topic they want to talk about first?

Their very first survey launched today, and started with a few simple personality-questions -- what's your favorite movie, what's your favorite movie quote, etc. Then suddenly it switched gears and became an obvious push-poll. I took screengrabs of the loaded survey questions and put them at the above ImageShack URL. I thought BoingBoing might be interested.

Back when I was at Industrial Light + Magic I met an artist who had worked on the 1997 remake of "Lolita". (For the unfamiliar: Originally a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita" tells the story of a Humbert Humbert, an older professor who falls obsessively in love with his landlady's 12-year-old daughter.)

The first film adaptation of "Lolita" was directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962. As a concession to the MPAA, Kubrick raised Lolita's age to fourteen, and largely desexualized her relationship with Humbert. As directed by Adrian Lyne (9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction), the 1997 version attempted to be truer to the source novel in those respects, and even showed a topless Lolita in the bedroom with Humbert.

This is where my co-worker came in. Since the filmmakers were not legally able to film their underage actress topless in a sexual situation, they filmed her with a beige body stocking with X's of electrical tape where her nipples would have been. They then re-filmed the same scene with a rather busty (but entirely legal) 18-year-old actress. My friend was then given the task of seamlessly tracking and compositing the nekkid 18-year-old bosoms onto the 14-year-old body.

Obviously there's a difference between a professional VFX artist performing such manipulation for the sake of art, and some anonymous perv performing such manipulation for the sake of, er, self-manipulation. But how does one discriminate between these two goals? And more importantly, how does one /legally/ differentiate them? Defining what is and isn't "art" has never been something that the legal system has shown itself to be particularly adept at.

And how does the quality of the representation affect that judgement? If a photograph can be deemed pornographic, is a stick figure rendering of the same scene also pornographic? And if not, at what point between those two poles (symbolic / photo-realistic) does the threshold fall? What about an obviously poor photo composite? Or highly realistic, but entirely synthetic vector art, such has recently been popular on the internets?

Regardless of these quandaries, rest assured that so long as the technology exists to create such imagery, someone, somewhere will be busy creating it.

Reader comment: Blender says,

It would be worthwhile checking out Brit comedian Chris Morris's 'Brass Eye' special, which satirised British media hysteria surrounding such issues. There's a fantastic scene featuring an interview in an art gallery. The episode was aired on Channel 4 and received record numbers of complaints but also a lot of critical acclaim. Many politicians and media pundits described it as 'shocking' but then later had to admit to having not seen the programme.... Interesting.... Link.

Well, my involvement with Spectator may have destroyed my life, health, savings, and sanity, but in the end I *am* glad I had a chance to be associated with it and its parent company, Bold Type, Inc. Over the years Bold Type was a party in two cases that made it to the US Surpreme Court; the first one we lost, but the second -- Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition (00-795) -- resulted in the sections of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 that criminalized 'virtual' child pornography being declared unconstitutional: Link

Stephen Knox seems a similar case. Stephen was an honors grad in history at Penn State. He was caught with tapes of girls, 10 – 17 in their underpants, not naked. He was charged with possession of child porn when a U.S. District Court ruled that the thigh was a part of the girl’s genitals. The case went to the Supreme Court who refused to hear the case and thus the District decision was upheld. Stephen served seven years in a federal penitentiary. It’s considered the first case where a presumed interpretation of an image is used as a way to define pornography when the image itself isn’t. The case is noted in this EFF article on child porn: Link.

In the past, the question about child pornography was always related to the child being involved, and the harm done to the child. Now that these things can be created without harm to a child, I think the question is whether the images increase or decrease the desires of those that are sexually interested in children. Do the images decrease the urge to actually molest children, and thereby give them an oulet (however disgusting) for this problem? Or do they increase the urges? In a free society, in the privacy of your own home, if no one is hurt, can you draw what ever image you want? If beastiality is illegal, do people go to jail for drawing pics of people with horses?

The Infinite Matrix Intergalactic Publishing Empire is very amused by Xeni's BB post on TSA restrictions on sex toys.

Our intrepid illustrators, Paul Mavrides and Jay Kinney, created a "no butt plugs" graphic in 2002, for a story by Ray Vukcevich.

This reaffirms the predictive power of science fiction, having been drawn well in advance of the current butt-plug singularity.

The administration has listed several well-known Websites, such as Sina, Sohu and Netease, as authorized providers of online video programs. But others face an uncertain fate as the administration will inspect the online video content they release and take strict measures to prevent any malpractice.

(...) A 10-minute video using clips from "Sparkling Red Star" [image at left], a 1974 film about the Chinese revolution, is the most recent short to draw a huge audience and plenty of criticism. Pan Dongzi, a heroic boy in the original movie, is portrayed as a popstar wannabe who competes in a televised singing contest. The video has attracted millions of viewers. ... Some commentators have argued satire should not go too far and the distortion of heroes and China's revolutionary history is immoral and unacceptable.

According to an online survey, more than 60 percent of Web users who have watched it agree that a parody should remain within bounds."

Update: Adam sez, "Thought you might like to know that the "Ultra-violent Charlie Brown student film" you posted on Boing Boing was made by Jim Reardon, a Simpsons director who's currently working on a Pixar project. Another Simpsons director, Rich Moore (who was also a supervising director of Futurama), is mentioned in the credits as one of the voices for Charlie Brown."

Update 2: Joe sez, "I thought you might be interested in a link to 'Billy Schulz', a short mockumentary about the illegitimate son of Peanuts cartoonist, Charles Schulz. The film stars Emmy-winning actor and comedian Rick Overton in the title role."

Northwest Airlines published a pamphlet for employees with the sadly realistic title "Preparing for a Financial Setback" and included a section labeled "101 Ways to Save Money." Some of those "ways" suggested not being "shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."

The attic bedroom - the perfect place to lock the doors and trip balls all weekend.

Brad Searles says

An article describing the experience of a Vermont-based St. Michael's College professor Nick Clary as he tried to return home from London on the day the new restrictions were enacted. Officials confiscated thousands of pages of his research on Shakespeare, which was contained on three thumb-sized flash drives.

The English professor was halted at one of the many security checkpoints. An airport official looked suspiciously at the three rectangular flash drives Clary had emptied from his pockets and placed in a plastic bin.

"No, you can't have them," the British Airways official told Clary. The uniformed woman nodded toward a large garbage bag, where banned items were being thrown out by the dozens.

After a few tense moments, Clary persuaded officials not to discard his research. Instead, the tiny files were placed inside Clary's eyeglass case, which were then put into a clear plastic bag and ticketed with a baggage claim check bound for Baltimore.

RAKAHANGA

There are few written accounts of life on Rakahanga. An Englishman, Julian Dashwood, who went there for a year in the early 1930s, reported that food was frequently a problem since it consisted chiefly of coconuts and fish. In his book which he wrote under the nom-de-plume of Julian Hillas, "South Seas Paradise" he said:

"I spent a year on Rakahanga and put on 18 pounds, which I lost again within six months of leaving. I developed a marvellous appetite and have never felt better than I did during that period."

He attributed this mainly to the fish and coconuts which formed 80 per cent of his diet, as well as a complete absence of worry in any form. He wrote in 1964:

"Looking back over nearly 30 years, I still give Rakahanga top rating. If there are places left where a man can grow old contentedly, it is on some such quiet, drowsy atoll, where today is forever and tomorrow never comes; where men live and die, feast and sorrow, while the winds and the waves play over wet sands and gleaming reefs."

As best as I've been able to uncover, this abandoned structure was built as a hotel-spa... a place for vacationing Taiwanese to escape from the rat race of Taipei! One could relax in one of its two delightfully large pools or simply lay back in plush comfort, gazing out a picture window at an endless sea!

Reader comment: Justin Gauvin found some other incredible photos of the same place. 1, 2, 3, 4.

RU also creates his own wayback machine on the RU Sirius Show, where he talks with the quirk-riddled staff of GettingIt.com, the webzine he founded in 1999 that featured regular columns by Robert Anton Wilson, Lydia Lunch, Mark Dery and Andrei Codrescu. Link

The IAU proposal says that a planet is an object large enough to have become rounded due to the force of its own gravity.

But it's not that simple. What counts as a planet also depends on what it's orbiting around.

A planet has to orbit a star, so rounded objects floating freely through space won't make the cut.

But if an object is orbiting another, much larger object that's not a star, it wouldn't count as a planet either.

Astrophysicist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., is... critical of the proposed definition.

"It doesn't have the elegance I was hoping for," Boss said. "It looks like it was written by a committee of lawyers rather than scientists."

The positions that writers such as myself hold in America are... very lowly. Science fiction is considered to be something for adolescents... high school kids... and for disturbed people in general to read.

Michelle O'Donnell of Turner spotted the animal near her yard about a week before it was killed. She called it a "hybrid mutant of something."

"It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget," she told the Sun Journal of Lewiston. "We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I've lived in Maine my whole life and I've never seen anything like it."

For the past 15 years, residents across Androscoggin County have reported seeing and hearing a mysterious animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night.

Reader comment:

Chad Arsenault says:

My heart skipped a beat when I saw this post. I grew up in Turner, and the legend of the "wolf creature" was a source of childhood pride for me. It never failed to scare the pants off of my friends while we were out walking at night. It's sad to see my hometown legend dead. RIP, little scary wolf-thing.

Until Tuesday, the search for the tapes was a spare-time deal and retirement hobby for (Goddard engineer Richard) Nafzger and the 81-year-old (retired NASA TV camera manager Stan) Lebar - not anything organized. Now with news reports of the lost tapes and NASA wanting data for its new lunar missions, the agency ordered a search of its cosmic attics...

Starting in 1970, the tapes were shipped to the National Archives' massive record center in Suitland, Md. And Lebar had hoped he hit pay dirt when he went to the record center, which he compared to the massive warehouse of long-forgotten boxes seen in the final scene of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

But when Lebar got to the area the boxes were supposed to be, he found empty shelves. Later, he and Nafzger determined all the boxes were returned permanently to Goddard.

"They're not lost," Lebar said, "it's just we haven't gotten to the next step yet."

To convert the originals, engineers essentially took a commercial television camera and aimed it at the monitor. The resulting image is what was sent to Houston, and on to the world.

"And any time you just point a camera at a screen, that's obviously not the best way to get the best picture," says Richard Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He worked with Apollo's lunar TV program, and says that conversion was the best they could do at the time.

A few recent entries on the "reporter's notebook" blog where I'm posting coredumps from a recent trip through Tibet, India, and China:

* Travel HOWTO: shots I gots, and altitude data sites

* Words I read on a door in Dharamshala

* Nonprofit offers vaccines to Gaddi villages in India

* China pledges "fight to the death" with Dalai Lama

* Windies vs. Tiggas

Previously, NPR Day to Day radio series "Hacking the Himalayas":

• Part 1: The Gaddi of Dharamsala
• Part 2: Connecting Tibet's Exile Community via the Web
• Part 3: A Wireless Network for 'Little Lhasa'
• Part 4: Tradition vs. Change in 'Lhasa Vegas'

I documented my three-day misery at London's Heathrow airport at perhaps the peak of chaos. Highlights included:

• 15 hours later, our plane was cancelled while sitting in the place and after they served food.
• The plane cancelled flew to our destination without us, only to pick up more passengers, Boston to London.
• I was behind the counter making reservations.
• Many were crying on the floor.
• The airline could not re-book for us, but we could call and re-book, what crap!

So, I went through 3 security checks but some unlucky individuals went through more if they were randomly selected. The security line was long, 2-3+ hours each. The first line was for checking in luggage, which was your only chance to check in everything and only carry on what was allowed (many people tried cheating this). The second line was the first security check to get into the terminals with x-rays, pat downs, and hand searches into your only plastic bag. This is also where a great deal of good were thrown away. There was a trashbag on the floor full of cell phones, ipods, cameras, jewelry, razors, notebooks, usb sticks, key fobs, lipstick, some really expensive pens, and many other items that would be hard to throw away.

* Bruce Schneier's secure handshake is so strong, you won't be able to exchange keys with anyone else for days.

* Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the life and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.

Link, here's why it's funny, and here's the Real Bruce Schneier. (thanks, John)

A computer expert in Great Britain has been told to “be prepared, at least, for a prison sentence”. His crime? He scanned photographs of adult porn stars into his computer, and photomanipulated them to reduce the size of their breasts and add schoolgirl costumes. Again...pictures *of adults* photoshopped. No actual children involved, and no one is asserting otherwise.

He pled guilty after being told "a pseudophotograph of a child is defined as an image, whether made by computer graphics or otherwise, which appears to be that of a child. Such an image is treated in law as showing a child even if some of the physical characteristics are those of an adult. "

At an earlier court hearing, even the judge the analogy of a “tarts and vicars” party...would photos from women at such an event be considered child pornography?

(Note: I originally found the link from a Second Life member's blog where they were discussing related issues as they are related to Second Life. A notable quote from that blogpost: I can't help thinking that his offence pales into insignificance next to the sort of activity that happens in SL. )

Reader comment: Kyle Marriott says,

Thought you might like to hear a little story, because I too am caught up in something very similar and a little more worring.

Some years ago, I did HTML and graphic work on a website for a few friends of mine. It was never intended to be anything commercial, just a small site for them to attempt to be 'funny on the Internets' for their friends.

It turns out that in the early days of seeking popularity, they decided to batch upload a load of hentai (basically Japanese cartoon porn). Some of this is a little disturbing, as seems to be the case with anything combining the words 'Japanese' and 'erotic', but nothing that seemed to be illegal; they even got their hosts to check to make sure nothing was going to get them in any trouble.

This sat fine for almost three years, until the registrar of the domain, my friend Michael, got a knock on his door at 7am. The police were stood there with a warrant to search his house and seize his computers. They did the same at his parent's house, and then arrested him for distribution of abusive images of children.

Since then, they've requested that the other friend go in for questioning, and then also myself. We both had all of our computers and hard drives seized too, as well as being arrested and bailed. All of this over a few cartoons, which whilst being admittedly graphic, are not in my eyes abusive to children.

This was over 3 months ago. The investigating officers don't have an answerphone, do not return my calls, and it took me over a week to get through to someone to update my address when I moved to a new apartment. Since then, the only contact they've given me has been a voicemail to tell me not to come in for my bail date because the Crown Prosecution Service can't decide whether the case can go to court. That was three weeks ago, and I haven't been able to get in touch with anyone since.

Right now I'm left wondering if I'm still on bail, whether I can leave the country for a holiday, and whether I'm actually going to be charged and put on the sex offender's register or not. I think that this country really needs to review it's policies and laws with regards to this, as every day I read about real paedophiles who hurt children getting slack sentences and leniency whilst I'm left in the dark over a few drawings.

People readily assert they are willing to travel without any hand luggage at all, undergo elaborate full-body, luggage (and shoe) screenings, dump all liquids together into collecting bins, including the soft drink purchased while waiting hours due to these procedures, or wait for the eventual retrieval of their piece of the at least 10000 misplaced bags of British Airways passengers gone missing since the beginning of the security alert, etc. -- all in exchange for an increased level security, of course.

To fool such a system, it takes a 12-year-old boy, as reported by newspaper FAZ (in German). He managed to get onboard a plane at Gatwick airport in London (at the origin city of the planned attacks) during the ongoing high-alert phase -- without even possessing a passport of ticket! The airport spokesperson stresses there was no danger for anyone -- maybe because the drink and snack that the boy was already consuming in the plane during the head count just before take-off (which finally revealed that there was one passenger too much and stopped the affair) had been offered to him by the crew and had not been smuggled into the cabin. The mother of the boy and the airline, however, have different opinions and are concerned about the fact this could happen at all. Apparently, the boy had run away from a care home and taken the train to London, again without ticket, prior to boarding 'his' flight to Lisbon.

What's really amazing is when he gets into why seizing liquids won't keep explosives off of planes, describing how you could make undetectable thermit canes, exploding baby-powder, deadly laptop batteries -- even explosive clothes.

A mix of H2O2 and H2SO4, commonly called "piranha bath", is used in orgo labs around the world for cleaning the last traces out of organic material out of glassware when you need it *really* clean -- thus, many people who work around organic labs are familiar with it. When you mix it, it heats like mad, which is a common thing when you mix concentrated sulfuric acid with anything. It is very easy to end up with a spattering mess. You don't want to be around the stuff in general. Here, have a look at a typical warning list from a lab about the stuff.

Now you may protest "but terrorists who are willing to commit suicide aren't going to be deterred by being injured while mixing their precursor chemicals!" -- but of course, determination isn't the issue here, getting the thing done well enough to make the plane go boom is the issue. There is also the small matter of explaining to the guy next to you what you're doing, or doing it in a tiny airplane bathroom while the plane jitters about.

Now, they could of course mix up their oxidizer in advance, but then finding a container to keep the stuff in that isn't going to melt is a bit of an issue. The stuff reacts violently with *everything*. You're not going to keep piranha bath in a shampoo bottle -- not unless the shampoo bottle was engineered by James Bond's Q. Glass would be most appropriate, assuming that you could find a way to seal it that wouldn't be eaten.

Founder Gottfrid Svartholm was working as a programmer for a security consultancy on a one-year assignment in Mexico City, when he volunteered to help a Swedish file-sharing advocacy group called Piratbyran set up its own BitTorrent tracker. Svartholm's spare bit of caseless hardware wasn't meant to be extraordinary -- it was just meant to be a specifically Swedish site.

He chose the name Pirate Bay to make clear what the site was there for: no shame, no subtlety. These people were pirates. They believed the existing copyright regime was a broken artifact of a pre-digital age, the gristle of a rotting business model that poisoned culture and creativity. The Pirate Bay didn't respect intellectual property law, and they'd say it publicly.

To win a judge's permission for the search, AOL submitted receipts reflecting large purchases by Hawke of gold and platinum bars, Graham said. The company indicated it believes Hawke buried the loot on his parents' property using a shovel.

Greenbaum said the family believes Hawke buried gold in the White Mountains 130 miles north of Boston. She said he once confided to her that he bought gold -- rather than expensive homes or cars -- because it would be more difficult to seize in lawsuits.

Paul Boutin says,

Is anyone plotting the AOL data in detail? A friend had a suggestion: Plot search terms by time against the phase of the moon. With three full lunar cycles and 658,000 subjects in the data, are there undeniable patterns of search terms that peak with the full moon?

You just know they do this stuff at Google.

Wendy and I went to Belize and Guatemala for our honeymoon and had a wonderful time, but we got bitten by bugs aplenty and went through almost half a tube of Benadryl Itch Stopping Cream. Before taking a shower one eve, I felt something foreign on my posterior nether regions-- I thought it was a flap of skin or perhaps, um, a "Klingon," until I pinched it off and saw that it was a large flat tick with a chunk of my pale butt-skin still visible in its mouth parts. Here's a photo I took of the tick, after it had released the chunk of skin.

A couple days later Wendy found a similar tick on her leg. Speaking of flesh-eating, we also visited Lake Petén Itzá about a week after I'd suffered a bad sunburn. My skin was peeling, and I found that the tiny fish in the lake loved eating the pieces of skin that were rolling generously off of my back at the time. Here's a pic of me feeding the fish. They crowded and jumped for every morsel.

Starting Thursday, August 17 for three nights, there’s a cool multimedia theater piece in San Francisco by the Builders Association: "SUPER VISION tells three stories about dataveillance, using a seamless blend of video, sound, new media, and theater design." Link, and here's a Wired story on an earlier edition of this show that ran at BAM last year. (Thanks, Melanie Cornwell)

After dinner they told me to put on a track suit they’d given me two days earlier, and remove my head scarf. I wanted to wear my hijab if they were going to film me; they said no, they wanted to make my hair messy, make me look bad.

They brought me back into the sitting room, and men began filing in, carrying AK-47s and RPGs.

Then the leader turned and coached me intently. I must say that they were mujahideen fighting to defend their country, that they wanted women freed from Abu Ghraib prison, and the US military, particularly the Marines, were killing and arresting their women and destroying their houses.

And I must cry, on cue.

I started to give my speech. A man standing behind the camera ran his fingers down his cheeks, to signal that I needed to cry.

It took me a while to work up to the crying part. But I had a lot of pent-up emotion and stress, and by the time we finished, I was crying for real.

As the taping ended, I put my head down and I just kept crying. I heard Abu Rasha behind me go, “ughh”, in a sympathetic way, like he felt bad that I was sitting there crying in front of them.

Ink Eye’s reaction was different. He showed no sympathy. And I knew his opinion of me – my personal character – might make the difference in whether I lived or died. He said, “We have to do this again.”

Hot damn this is a kick-ass piece of video -- the Mansion with the lights on, it's like a cross between seeing your parents having sex and catching the hand of God rearranging the laws of physics while your back is turned.

On 08/13/06 we were riding Haunted Mansion at Disneyland when the lights suddenly came on. We later learned that it was because a few kids tried to steal a prop. They were escorted outside by CM's and dealt with by security.

Update: Andrew sez, "I instantly thought of the video I had recorded of Space Mountain with its lights on, which I recorded on my trip to Disney World last week."

Update 2: This video has been flagged as private, so you and I can't watch it anymore. Man, that sucks.

Update 3: Ricky sez, "I've mirrored the Haunted Mansion lights-on videos from YouTube (snagged them before it went private) on my blog."

Jonathan Abourbih says,

The TSA has a really informative article on how to bring service animals through airport security, including helper monkeys. Fortunately for us all, "TSOs have been trained not to touch the monkey during the screening process."

Liebe meine abst-monkey. Now is ze time on ze security screening when we dahnce.

Thu, Aug 24

* 11AM: Sign at Asimov's table, dealers' room
* 2PM: Sign at Borderlands table, dealers' room
* 4PM: Podcasting Science Fiction, with Stephen Eley, Paul Fischer and Evo Terra

Fri, Aug 25:

* 1PM: Bloggers as Public Intellectuals, with Kevin Drum, MaryAnn Johanson, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Phil Plait
* 3PM: Autographing
* 5:30: Can Science Fiction Change the World? with David Brin, Sean McMullen, Craig Newmark and Cecilia Tan

Sat, Aug 26:

* 1PM: Open Source Software, with Andrew Adams, Loretta McKibben and Eric S. Raymond
* 4PM: The Singularity -- What Is It And Why Should You Care? with Todd McCaffrey, David F. McMahon, MD, Mark L. Olson and Toni Weisskopf

Sun, Aug 27:

1PM: Kaffeeklatsch

2PM: Reading

While debugging why YouTube videos are not working on one of my PCs, I tried the 'Share' link to try to get to the URL. In the popup that appeared, the NoScript extension was blocking some JavaScript. Clicking on the button to enable the code revealed that the JavaScript was hosted at -- gasp -- Plaxo (no linkee for them), the company that enlists its users to send spamalicious address book related emails. So from the looks of it, when you share a YouTube video with your friends, you may be unwittingly adding your friends' email addresses to Plaxo's databases. Slick. Or, should I say, slimy. At least it appears so. There is no confirmation that this is what is happening, but it certainly does look suspicious.

UPDATE: No reply from YT, but Joseph Smarr, an engineer with Plaxo, explains that the answer the question in this blog-post's subject line is "no." Smarr says:

Nothing nefarious is going on here—no e-mails are being “unwittingly added to our databases”. YouTube is using our Address Book Access Widget so their users can easily pick people from their hotmail/gmail/outlook/etc address books to send video links to. It’s completely optional and no personal info is sent to Plaxo when our JavaScript loads on YouTube’s page. Furthermore, all the data we pass through as a result of using the widget is dropped as soon as the user is done selecting contacts. Lots of other sites are also using our widget (zazzle, break.com, etc.) so they don’t have to write their own auto-importers for the myriad address book services out there.

I’m not sure how many of your readers have been following Plaxo, but we’ve taken serious steps to curtail the amount of update e-mails our users send out, and we’ve publicly apologized to the people who were annoyed by the e-mails in the past. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about this effort, including from some of our toughest former critics, like Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. Our usefulness as a service has also increased a lot recently, with sync clients for Mac, Thunderbird, and AIM, an open API, and over 10M Plaxo members that provide up-to-date contact info automatically (no e-mails). So I hope people will take a fresh look at Plaxo!

This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity. In short -- stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, "The street finds its own uses for technology." I welcome suggestions of links, and contributions from others to include in this compendium.

It would be hard to find a better example of "street use" than these hardened street trucks outfitted for desert war. A guy named Defensor Fortis, who was stationed in Iraq, posted some photos on Flickr of truck modifications performed by contractors. These are desperate attempt to protect a factory-issue truck from roadside bombs or enemy fire. They also boast their own artillery posts to return fire. When asked about the effectiveness of the jury-rigged armor Defensor said, "I have seen no proof, but I imagine they're fairly safe from small arms fire and more than like fitted with "run flat" tires."

... "the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."

Using malware or software designed to infiltrate a computer system, hackers steal account information for users of MMO games and then sell off virtual gold, weapons and other items for real money.

"Those of you who are working on massively multiplayer online games, organized crime is already looking at you," said Dave Weinstein, a Microsoft security development engineer at the company's Gamefest video game development conference...

"The police are really good at understanding someone stole my credit card and ran up a lot of money. It's a lot harder to get them to buy into 'someone stole my magic sword."'

Even he wasn't convinced it was a good idea at first when a friend suggested he consider buying Cracked. "I said 'not interested. It's comics. It's for little kids,'" Sarhan recalls. But the seed had been planted and "for the first time I stopped thinking about Cracked for what it was and started thinking about Cracked for what it could be and what the potential was." ...

Sarhan, who is 33, has gathered a stable of contributors that includes writers for "Saturday Night Live" and Comedy Central's "Chappelle's Show," as well as the satirical author Neal Pollack and the actor Michael Ian Black, co-star of the former NBC comedy "Ed" and snarky commentator on VH1's "I Love The..." series.

Following on the now-infamous pictures of confiscated liquids and gels being dumped into plastic bins, some other bloggers and I thought that this called for a new anthology of short fiction. We're launching a contest to find stories for a new anthology called "It Came From Airport Security."

In a nutshell - stories can be of any genre (and we mean *any*) as long as they deal with the results of someone (or something) being exposed to the chemicals in one of the confiscation bins. There are prizes (and room to add more prizes, should we come across any additional to give), and yes, there is a submission fee - but we've tried to keep it small. All stories must be licensed under a BY-SA 2.5 license, and the resulting anthology (and the website accompanying it) will be licensed the same. All entries - not just the top selections - will be considered for publication on the website.

"Adrian, you have a million friends," his mother said. "That's an audited stat. I'm sorry if you feel isolated, but none of us are moving to Bangalore just so you can chum it up with this fellow."

Adrian fought to control his irritation. His mother was always cranky before breakfast, and a full-blown fight could extend that mood through the whole day. No one needed that. "Mom," he said, twisting his body in the narrow, three-person coffin he shared with his folks so that he could look her in the eye, "I'm not asking you to move to India. All I'm doing is explaining my paper."

His mother snorted. "_The Last Generation on Earth_, really! Adrian, if I were your instructor, I sure wouldn't graduate you on the strength of something like that. I don't really care if that boy in India has convinced the ITT people that his trendy little thesis holds water. The University of Toronto has higher standards than that."

It had been a mistake to even discuss it with his mother. At 180, she was hardly equipped to understand the pressures he and his miniscule generation faced. He should've just written it and stuck it in his advisor's public directory. Only just that he'd had the coolest idea in the night and he'd reflexively bounced it off of her: once his generation reached maturity, the whole planet would be post-human, and a new, new era would start. The Bitchun Society, Phase II.

Snip from BBC: "The world's largest manufacturer of personal computers, Dell, is to recall 4.1 million of its notebook computer batteries because of a fire risk." Link, and here's the NYT report. (Thanks, tim)

Update: Some Persian speaking readers wrote in with word that the Iranian president's blog has been mentioned on television in Iran in official context -- it's real. I have no doubt now. But below the jump, reasons I thought it possible that the blog was a hoax. Look, I'd rather be foolishly skeptical than just plain foolish.

Reader Ehsan Nourbakhsh says, "It is not a hoax, the national TV has announced it, as I've heard. Also this one is a news article from ISNA news agency."

Scroll to the very bottom of this post for some insight from readers.

Update: Shanghaiist has some fun coverage here. (thanks, Wang Wei)

A spokesman confirmed that it had sent the letters. "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues."

But although an attempt to protect the company's trademark, the letters have raised snickers after they were leaked on to the web. Bloggers have been making fun of the examples Google's lawyers deem acceptable. They included: "Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie."

I just, ah, googled some related past posts by my blog-colleage Cory Doctorow:

* Can Anyone Own Web 2.0?
* Google's trademark counsel sending out dumb lawyer-letters over "to google"
* Trademarks, an essay on OpenP2P.com by Cory.

Reader comment: George Hotelling says,

I find it interesting that Google has a problem with people using "google" as a verb, since Pontiac ran an ad telling people to "Google Pontiac" and in response Google said "We are happy that Pontiac has featured Google search in their television ad campaign."

Hilarious. I wrote a blog entry about just this. The fact it's listed as a verb in Japanese dictionaries. As a "godan-verb of the Iku/Yuku special class", to be precise.

It's ironic but not surprising that "Google" has also spawn verbs in french, italian and spanish. In each language, it means both "looking something up in Google" and "searching the Net for something".

French : googler
Italian : googolare, gugolare
Spanish : googlar, googlear, guglear

Good luck to the firm if they want to enforce their "no Google verb" policy!

Exception: some limited amounts of snakes may be allowed if Samuel L. Jackson is traveling; licensed snake charmers are allowed to have snakes in their check in baggage only if the name on the snake charming license matches the one passenger’s ticket; people who'se name is Snake will be allowed on board but only after full body cavity search

* Snakes purchased in the sterile area must be consumed before boarding because they will not be permitted onboard the aircraft.
* Passengers traveling from the U.K. to the U.S. will be subject to a more extensive screening process.

Link to "Snake Threat Level Change for the Aviation Sector." (Thanks, Luke)

Previously: Liquids on a Plane

Reader comment: The Lizardman says,

I enjoyed the entry, and thought I might note that the TSA has actually banned snakes from planes for some time now. Back in 2002, I was looking into bringing along a snake I use in performances on a flight from Texas to Florida. The snake in question was an absolutely harmless rough green snake about 18 inches long - physically incapable of even biting a finger! When I called the airline I was told not to bring the snake and further referred to a local TSA contact who told me that if I even brought the snake to the airport it would cause a security shutdown of the terminal and I would be arrested. No explanation was given nor were alternatives suggested. In the end I drove to Florida for the gig and I have since found that some package carriers will transport for snakes under certain conditions - I guess their planes aren't afraid of snakes. Here's an image of the snake during the performance: jpeg link.

Findings from the report, obtained by The Associated Press, did not stop the Transportation Security Administration from announcing Sunday that all airline passengers must remove their shoes and run them through X-ray machines before boarding commercial aircraft. (...)

In its April 2005 report, "Systems Engineering Study of Civil Aviation Security — Phase I," the Homeland Security Department concluded that images on X-ray machines don't provide the information necessary to detect explosives. Machines used at most airports to scan hand-held luggage, purses, briefcases and shoes have not been upgraded to detect explosives since the report was issued.

Reader comment: Dr. Paul J. Camp says,

In World War II, the OSS used to send spies and saboteurs into occupied Europe with, among other things, knives concealed in the soles of their shoes. I doubt the trick has been forgotten, and if it is ceramic rather than metal, the knife wouldn't set off the metal detectors. You can easily obtain a ceramic knife blade at any of your higher end cooking-as-a-fashion-statement stores. Just because X-rays don't catch the terrorist-du-jour doesn't mean they are useless. Now that I've written this, the NSA will probably be listening in on all my future phone calls.

Time Magazine identifies the explosive that the [alleged, would-be] plane bombers were going to use: TATP, according to UK investigators.

So I typed that into Google... number one result leads to a Wikipedia story about Acetone Peroxide, aka triacetone triperoxide, peroxyacetone, TATP, and TCAP.

Interestingly, "...TATP is used in a a toy pyrotechnic device known as a "torpedo", consisting of a twist of paper containing gravel coated with a small quantity of TATP. These are thrown onto the ground, producing a satisfying bang. These "torpedoes" are available legally in states that allow firework sales such as Louisiana and Wisconsin. They are sold illegally in the "Chinatown" districts of San Francisco and Los Angeles (California)..." (Ed note: see update below).

The fourth triacetone triperoxide Google result leads to this WikiBooks link, which actually spells out the procedure to making the stuff!

It may also have been used in the 7/7 London bombings and in Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid's shoes, and is said to be a favorite of Hamas.

All the news organizations I saw refrained from mentioning TATP but it's an open secret. The public should know so they can pressure the government to seek ways to detect it. Researchers at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology claim to have done just that. That article also has some interesting data points on how TATP works:

"...The research team demonstrated that TATP exploded not by releasing thermal energy, but by suddenly breaking each molecule of TATP in the solid state into four molecules of gas. Although the gas is at room temperature, it has the same density as the solid, and four times as many molecules, so it has 200 times the pressure of the surrounding air. This enormous pressure – one-a-half tons per square inch – then pushes outward, creating an explosive force 80% greater than that of TNT..."

I would profess some expertise on the subject of TATP, as I have worked extensively with it under various contracts with the federal government. All are in the past, and well behind me- before 9/11, to be precise. However, I understand a great deal about the synthesis, handling, and testing of the compound in question.

That TATP is used in "snappers" or, as you cite from Wikipedia, "torpedos," is categorically false. The compound used in these is called silver fulminate, and the Wikipedia entry for that compound is quite accurate, noting that "Silver fulminate is used in "trick noise-makers", a popular type of novelty firework."

TATP would be of little to no use in toy noisemakers as the compound is prone to subliming, i.e.: going straight from the solid form to the gaseous form. Again, the Wikipedia entry is incorrect, stating that this compound goes from the trimeric form to the dimeric form. Instead, it simply forms vapor and disappears. From the Wikibooks page: "Storing acetone peroxide is not recommended, because it quickly sublimes." In this regard, it is the same as dry ice: it simply evaporates.

I would appreciate insights from 'privacy-loving reader #2" on TATP

1) The dry-ice property means it is quite difficult to plant such bomb into check-in lugguage. (and easy to detect, just search for low temperature spots in the luggage.
2) similarly, even preparing it in airport terminal toilet is not easy. we can use (far) infrared sensor at the gate
3) if it can be detonated so easily (friction heat/etc), there is no point banning iPod and other batteries
a) one can use the eletric wire (eg short-circuiting the shaver outlet, or lights)
b) perhaps even striking 2 pieces of stones (disguised as jewel)
4) the key to detecting TATP preparation is plane is perhaps to look for coolants?

i think such discussion and analysis would help us improve the efficiency of TSA, and also eliminate the unneccesary hassles.

The similarity between dry ice and TATP ends with sublimation. TATP sublimes at room temperature not because it is cold, like dry ice, but because it its intrinsic properties. Its sublimation is slow, and can be reduced; I cannot comment on specifics, but Wikibooks notes the following: "But if it must be stored, it is recommended that it is stored under water and in a container without a cap with threads, as opening it could result in an explosion from crystalized [sic] acetone peroxide."

Ultimately, this is a passing fad; as with many issues, the government has to do something, and hope the problem gets better on its own. Realistically, there are tens or hundreds of ways to disrupt air travel; historically, it has been everything from the fake bomb employed by D.B. Cooper to nitroglycerin in Philippine Airlines flight 434 to Semtex in Pan Am 103. TATP is just the latest thing to get everyone all worried, until something new comes along. Then we'll hail the new detection schemes as being brilliant and effective and worry about the next problem.

Ultimately, all solutions to terrorism issues are political, not technological, as the origins are political. It took years for the British to figure this out; finally, they sat down with the IRA and said, "What the hell do you want?" The IRA had slowly progressed from blowing up people to blowing up cars to finally calling in bombs that were going to go off at 2 AM when the streets were deserted. "If you don't mind, please keep this bomb from going off. We found out killing people makes us unpopular. Thanks!"

A combination of arrests, killings, and negotiations brought the problem to a halt- not better bomb-detectors, or silliness about removing shoes before getting on planes.

There's a serious misconception in the comments you recently posted by sun-bin. He seems to believe, due to PLR#2's analogy to dry ice, that because TATP sublimates it's solid phase must be very cold, which is obviously false. It's actually similar to naphthalene, the substance used in mothballs, in that it sublimates but can be a crystalline solid at room temperature.

So it appears the Feds were anticipating that terrorists were going to bring the raw materials for acetone peroxide (acetone, hydrogen peroxide, and a bit of hydrochloric acid {I think]) and were then going to set up a laboratory where the AP would be synthesized, precipitated from solution, collected and dried before use? what was their cover story going to be - that they were making a cup o' noodles?

There are explosive compounds that exist and are used in the liquid state - Astrolite, for example (once touted as the world most powerful non-nuclear explosive) but Astrolite needs a blasting cap to set it off - otherwise it burns like charcoal lighter. Really bad smelling charcoal lighter, yes; but it won't just go boom unless it gets a high velocity shock wave propagated through it. That's why professionals like it - it is safe to handle and predictable.

What's next? Al qaeda buying up vast quantities of tincture of iodine to make nitrogen tri-iodide? Scraping the "good stuff" off of match heads? I didn't know the Anarchist's Cookbook was available in Arabic.

I was a high school chemistry geek back when it was legal.

Our hearts go out to the Scantleberry family for their loss. We had decided to temporarily suspend the productive settlement discussions we were having with the family. Mr. Scantleberry had admitted that the infringer was his stepson, and we were in the process settling with him shortly before his passing. Out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case.

I wrote back to ask him this followup question:

Where was the "abundance of sensitivity" when the RIAA failed to initially drop its case against the Scantleberry family following the death of the named defendant in the case? Given that this "abundance" only materialized within 24 hours of this story hitting several large news outlets and blogs isn't it fair to say that the RIAA is demonstrating sensitivity to its public image, and not its sensitivity to the Scantleberry family?

This is par for the course with the RIAA. A year ago, the RIAA contacted me to say that a takedown notice sent on their behalf to RPG Films was a forgery. When I asked if they intended to sue RPG Films for real, and whether these forgeries were common, and whether the RIAA would investigate the forgery, RIAA Director of Communications Jenni Engebretsen promised me she'd get back to me with answers. After repeated emails and phone calls, I finally took the extraordinary step of calling her from a different, borrowed phone (suspecting that she was ducking my calls) and reached her -- only to be told that the RIAA had no further comment.

The RIAA's approach to PR is much like their approach to culture in general: read-only. The RIAA issues statements like the Pope emitting a bull, and we mortals may squabble over its meaning among ourselves, but they are not available to participate in any further discussion. This is reminiscent of the RIAA's approach to things like YouTube lipsynch videos: "our songs are released to be listened to and nothing more; should you dare to make them part of your life, we will use the copyright law we bought to break you."

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I have ever heard. The latest gems come from people like Pat Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Rev. John Hagee of Christians United for Israel. Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the publication of his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," in which he argues that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon (which will mean the death of most Jews, in his eyes) and the Second Coming of Christ.

In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West. Shortly after the book's publication, he launched Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which, as the Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he said would cause "a political earthquake." With the outbreak of the war on Lebanon, he and others have called to their followers to pray for Israel, and for the continuation of the war on Lebanon. They have demanded that Israel not relent in what they call the need to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. They seem to have completely forgotten the very core of the Christian faith.

Link to previous BB posts about Daoud Kuttab's work.

Wow this is amazing, alcoholic beverage maker Bacardi totally ripped-off San Francisco’s infamous underground prankster group The Cacophony Society with their recent “Bacardi Salmon” television commerial.

Since 1994, The Cacophony Society has had their salmon running in the opposite direction during the annual Bay to Breakers 12K race through San Francisco. The salmon would enter at the mid point of the course and then spawn their way upstream. The salmon are mini-celebrities at the race and always get a huge cheer as they go by. This Cacophony event is known as Breakers to Bay and more salmon info can be found on Tribe.net, as well as photos on Flickr and video on YouTube.

So I was pretty surprised when I was sent a link to the “Bacardi Salmon” commerical. It was developed for Bacardi by the ad agency RKCR/Y&R (Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, the UK office of Young & Rubicam) , who used the production company Hungry Man, with Jim Jenkins as the director of the spot. The ad steals the entire concept of The Cacophony Society’s Breakers to Bay event, featuring salmon spawning upstream during a foot race through New York (instead of San Francisco). They make no attempt to give any credit to the event’s origins or the person who came up with the idea for the event. In fact, I shot video of the 1996 Breakers to Bay salmon running and this commerical is eerily close to my footage (which has been in circulation for ten years), even including the salmon showing up at the bar at the end.

Well I guess if you can’t come up with something orginal, you can just follow Bacardi’s lead by co-opting someone else’s idea and “run upstream” with it. Oh yeah, be sure to drink a bunch of rum first.

Nearby, in Ohio, a prosecutor today said he lacked evidence to present felony terrorism charges against two more Arab-American men arrested in a similar incident last week over bulk cellphone buys. Link to AP story, via MSNBC (Thanks, Malik Mitchell).

Today's Detroit Free Press includes an interesting article on the cottage industry of buying and re-selling prepaid mobile phones -- apparently quite popular in Arab-American communities. Snip:

In Michigan, "you can talk to almost any family in the Arab-American community, and they all have some relative in the cell phone business," said Warren David, a Lebanese American from Northville. If police knew that, perhaps five Arab Americans would not have been arrested last week on terrorism charges after they bought hundreds of cell phones, said David, who recently sold his cell phone business to an Iraqi American.

"If they understood us a little more, they might not jump the gun so quickly," he said.

In Ohio on Tuesday, a store employee called police after two 20-year-old Arab-American men from Dearborn bought a large number of cell phones at a Wal-Mart. The same thing happened Friday in Caro after three Arab-American men bought 80 phones at one store. In the Ohio case, Osama Abulhassan and Ali Houssaiky were just trying to make money by buying cell phones so they could sell them to a distributor for a profit, family members said.

"The two young men were engaged in a perfectly legal practice based on the most fundamental principles of our free market economy," the Abulhassan family said in an e-mail.

Previously on BoingBoing:
* Van full of cellphones leads to arrest of 3 on terror charges

Reader comment: KC says,

Caro, MI is only about 1/2 hour from Decker, MI, ( Link ) which is where Terry Nichols' brother's farm was, (known to the world from the Murrah Fed. Bldg. investigation).

In other words, it's pretty rednecky. I'm sure they see Arab-Americans from time to time, because one of the largest communities of people of Middle-Eastern descent outside the Middle East is in Dearborn, only a couple of hours away ( Link, and link ). They just don't see them that often, and my guess is that not everyone up there likes it when they do.

You don't ever read about the Police Chief of Dearborn being involved in things like this.

While I was sitting in Tulsa, Oklahoma waiting for a flight yesterday I saw this whole thing unfold. I could not believe my eyes. A mere 100 feet away from the terminal the ground crew was directing in a flight and they directed it right into the fuel truck.

[T]he system is generally designed to measure physical responses to hot-button questions like "Are you planning to immigrate illegally?" or "Are you smuggling drugs."

...

More than 80% of those approached are quickly dismissed, he says. The explanations for hiding emotions often are innocent: A traveler might be stressed out from work, worried about missing a flight or sad because a relative just died. If suspicions remain, the traveler is interviewed at greater length by a screener with more specialized training. SPOT teams have identified about 100 people who were trying to smuggle drugs, use fake IDs and commit other crimes, but not terrorist acts.

...

The company's goal is to prove it can catch at least 90% of potential saboteurs -- a 10% false-negative rate -- while inconveniencing just 4% of innocent travelers.

Reader comment:

Gryftir says:

I took a upper division psychology class called Deception, the Brain, and Behavior not to long ago, which covered most of the techniques for mechanical lie detection, and related fields.

No device of the type described measures sweat levels. It instead measures Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) which are changes in the skin's electrical field tied to sweat production and stress. The idea is that the conductivity of your skin changes when you sweat, and you sweat when you are stressed or anxious. Of course, that also assumes you somehow unsweat when you are anxious, then tell the truth.

Second of all, such devices are fairly easy to beat when you know how. My class covered the fact that their are things you can do to degrade such devices accuracy to 50% or below (50% is chance). They might catch some illegal immigrants and untrained drug smugglers, but terrorists can use the many physical and mental countermeasures to such devices, and can even practice taking them. They may even utilize the devices in the airports themselves for training purposes, observing which techniques get them further questioning, and which allow them to pass.

This device will do nothing more then provide a false sense of security, while remaining permeable to terrorists and inconveniencing innocent travellers.>

"There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet," says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. "If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check. The right to exchange information in private is fundamental to the democratic society. Without a safe and convenient way of accessing the Internet anonymously, this right is rendered null and void."

A member of the Free State Project, Russell Kanning, was arrested recently for attempting to distribute a flyer to IRS agents in his home town asking them to quit their job. The flyers contain anti-war content, criticism the Bush administration for its erosion of civil rights, and a form resignation letter addressed to President Bush, which he is asking IRS agents to sign. Kanning remains in a maximum security and will not be allowed visitors. The Free State Project recently passed 7,250 members more than 1/3 of its 20,000 person goal.

If airport security says your long strip of printed cloth doesn't count as a garment you can either wrap it around your head like a giant turban, or you can print it on a narrow scarlet sash and tell them that it's an emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League and proceed to wind it several times round the waist of your overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of your hips.

Reader comment:

Chris Knight says: Actually, at the 01sj.org conference on Saturday, a nice lady at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles demonstrated cloth specifically meant to be fed through a standard inkjet printer. The cloth has a stiff backing and is pre-treated to make the ink permanent. I was trying to think of an interesting art project using this technology (I'm currently thinking bar codes would be interesting, the resolution and clarity is good enough to support bar codes) but perhaps this would be a decent way to make something to read on the plane. I believe there are a variety of manufacturers, some of whom can produce long rolls of the stuff for continuous feeding through your favorite inkjet. Here is one.

Heard Aug. 11, an NPR interview with Michael Chertoff, US cop of cops. The question he addresses is long-term anti-terrorist policy, the need for psychological studies of what makes "a person turn from an ordinary person to a bomber."

This is his answer:

"Clearly at the end of the day, we've got to eliminate that pool of people who are susceptible to becoming killers."

"Eliminate"? The interviewer did not ask him to elaborate.

Il a la tete de l'emploi, as one says in French.

See also: London Copyfighters: Speak at Speaker's Corner on Mar 19!

Update: David Goodman, pictured here, sez, "Man, I wish I'd worn a cooler t-shirt. I was actually reading out a letter that I wrote to my MP about ID cards and how they're a majorly bad idea."

Under the new rules, travelers can take up to four ounces of non-prescription medicine, glucose gel for diabetics, solid lipstick and baby food, the agency said.

The head of Homeland Security is pushing for more surveillance and the imprisonment of more innocent people in the USA - citing the 'liquid bombers' that were caught in the UK this past week. Scary stuff. He cites the fact that the British authorities were 'nimble' in their catching liquid bombers...Completely missing the fact that a neighbor was the one who betrayed them to the authorities, and that they were aware of the cell for months.

As we have seen from all the evidence, there is no decrease in this activity when we keep taking people's rights away. In fact, the terrorist activity keeps rising no matter how much they tap our phones, or check our bank account statements.

This is especially ridiculous seeing as how the 'liquid bombers' weren't even caught here in the US. So electronic surveillance and more imprisonment of innocent people here in the US isn't going to change anything.

We drove to the second house, which appeared to be the home of one of the kidnappers.

They took me upstairs to the master bedroom. Within a few minutes an interpreter arrived, and an interrogation began.

They wanted to know my name, the name of my newspaper, my religion, how much my computer was worth, did it have a device to signal the government or military, if I or anyone in my family drank alcohol, how many American reporters were in Baghdad, did I know reporters from other countries, and myriad other questions.

Then, in a slightly gravelly voice, the interpreter explained the situation.

“You are our sister. We have no problem with you. Our problem is with your government. We just need to keep you for some time. We want women freed from Abu Ghraib prison. Maybe four or five women. We want to ask your government for this,” the interpreter said. (At the time, it was reported that 10 Iraqi women were among 14,000 Iraqis being held by coalition forces on suspicion of insurgent activity.)

“You are to stay in this room. And this window, don’t put one hand on this window,” he continued. “I have a place underground. It is very dark and small, and cold, and if you put one hand on this window, we will put you there. Some of my friends said we should put you there, but I said, ‘No she is a woman.’ Women are very important in Islam.”

Previous BoingBoing posts about Jill Carroll: Link.

Technorati Tags: video

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now has a blog, according to various reports. Good heavens, there's even an RSS feed. At first, I thought this might be more Greg Gutfeld mischief -- we have him to thank for Al Zarqawi's Mom's Blog. But no. They're saying this is the real deal.

In the Iranian president's first entry, he reminisces about his childhood in poverty, and asks readers if they think the US and Israel want to start World War Three. Reuters reports that the man...

whose speeches are riddled with anti-U.S. rhetoric, also described how he was angered by American meddling in Iran even when he was at elementary school. (...) But he admitted his opening blog [post], which runs to more than 2,300 words in the English version, was too long. 'From now onwards, I will try to make it simpler and shorter,' he wrote.

Reader comment: Wagner James Au says, "Worth remembering during the yucks:"

TEHRAN, Iran, Aug. 13, 2006 (AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- Sayeed Habibi considers himself a marked man. The reason: his Internet blog that challenges some of the policies of Iran's theocracy. He predicts that someday _ perhaps soon _ he'll be taken to prison and his site will be shut down. "And another voice will be silenced," said Habibi, a 34-year-old postgraduate and an unofficial elder statesman for student-led activist movements. "I fully expect to see the inside of a jail cell."

He's not alone. Iranian authorities are stepping up arrests and pressure on popular bloggers as part of a wider Internet clampdown launched after hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president last year, ending years of freewheeling Web access that once made Iran among the most vibrant online locales in the Middle East.

Three men with Texas driver's licenses were arraigned yesterday on terror-related charges when police searched their minivan and found about a thousand cellphones inside. Prosecutors say the men, all of whom were of Arab descent, planned to use all of those phones to blow up a bridge in Michigan. Police stopped the men not long after they'd bought 80 phones at a Wal-Mart. Their families say they're innocent, and were wrongfully targeted because of their ethnicity.

Hey, at least they weren't reselling van-loads of hair gel. Snip:

But two of the men said they were only trying to buy and sell phones to make money, and one said the money was intended to help pay for his brother's college education. A magistrate set bond at $750,000 for each of the men, who are charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes. No pleas were made at the arraignment at a District Court in Caro, about 80 miles north of Detroit.

Officials have not said what they believe the men intended to do with the phones, most of which were prepaid TracFones. But Caro's police chief said cell phones can be used as detonators, and prosecutors in a similar case in Ohio have said that TracFones are often used by terrorists because they are not traceable.

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Abdelhamied Othman told the magistrate. He said authorities had previously stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin. (...) "We've been checked by the FBI before," he said. "They even gave us their card and everything."

Reader comment: We don't know whether these men did anything more sinister than selling TracFones at higher prices than Wal-Mart. Perhaps there's evidence to support charges that they were involved in more dangerous activities. But Mantari Damacy is among readers expressing concern over the logic that [van full of cellphones] + [Arab ethnicity] = guilty 'til proven otherwise, in the present terror-phobic climate.

As for why these men were buying cell phones, it is apparent that they were buying those special pre-paid cell phones that are locked into a pre-paid network. These phones are sold below cost because the companies make back their money by selling the MINUTES. (Give away the razors, sell the blades.) Recently, companies have found out how to unlock these cell phones to work with standard cellular networks. Thus, with a little work, a very cheap cell phone can be turned into a regular cell phone. There, apparently, is some good money in this. This also explains pockets in the story, like Wal-Mart trying to enforce a vendor's desire that no more then three be sold to a person.

[I am] outraged at how completely stupid the overblown terror threat is. "They needed 1000 cell phones as a detonator to blow up a single bridge, which the batteries can be used to make drugs, and they were going to resell the phones in order to raise money for terrorism because they're Arabs."

Reader comment: minivan-commando says,

How to unlock your cellphone is Hack #7 in a recent O'Reilly jihadist instruction manual book, Nokia Smartphone Hacks. Last time I checked, it wasn't a crime.

Update: Kelly sez, "For those lucky enough to be able to get to the Whitney museum in N.Y., Calder's circus is on display through September 3rd. Besides the circus display they are also playing the videos that are linked to in the main story. Ingenious stuff!"

Update 2: Dutch sez, "I originally posted the videos as part of a huge post on Calder's toy designs for my parenting blog, Sweet Juniper.

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.

You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open – open protocols and systems so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the world. Another group – scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats – points out the problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?

It's easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it'll catch the sloppy and the stupid -- and that's a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely -- but it won't catch a well-planned plot. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly keep them off airplanes.

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports...

The official shed light on other aspects of the case, saying that while the investigation into the bombing plot began "months ago," some suspects were known to the security services even before the London subway bombings last year.