By Xeni Jardin at 6:59 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Wired News is running a special series by Chennai-based tech journalist Scott Carney about India's "I can get it into orbit for you wholesale" space program:
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."
Link. Image: Mr. Madhavan Nair, president of ISRO (Photo: Scott Carney).
Also in this Wired News series:
*
India's Rocket Man Powers Up
* Gallery: Inside the ISRO
*
India Rolls Its Own Space Tech
By Xeni Jardin at 6:33 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
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.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 5:35 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
I was driving around earlier today, listening to a show on Los Angeles NPR affiliate station
KPCC called "
Air Talk," and caught guest host Jon Beaupre's interview with Henry Ansgar Kelly about his new book, "
Satan: A Biography." I just ordered the book. The interview was terrific, and here's an online archive of the audio:
Link.
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'.
That's right! Bring back old-school Satan, woo-hoo! Here's an article about the book in
The Australian:
Satan a victim of bad PR, professor says.
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.
William Vanti says,
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.
The Lizardman says
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...
Cathoderay says,
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.
T.O.M. says,
Here's another knuckle for your finger...
"The Anthropology of Evil" by David Parkin
Omnivore says,
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
By Xeni Jardin at 5:14 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a terrific, concise guide on how to avoid the fate of
AOL Searcher No. 4417749 and countless others:
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.
Continued
here. (
thanks, Cyrus Farivar)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:55 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
More news from the War on Hair-Gel:
"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!"
By Xeni Jardin at 4:53 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
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.
Link. SPOILER ALERT: Then, on the final frame of the questionnaire, they hook you up to an e-meter and check your voltage for possible thetan activity.
By Xeni Jardin at 4:39 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Following up on
an earlier BB post today about a UK man who may face jail time for having created synthetic, digital images that depict artificial child figures in sexual situations, Aaron Muszalski / SFSlim says,
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.
Previously:
UK man faces jail over 'made-up' child porn images
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.
W. Vann Hall says,
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
Tony Sanfilippo says,
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.
Connerss says,
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?
By Xeni Jardin at 4:21 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Eileen Gunn says,
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.
By Xeni Jardin at 4:05 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
China's state administration of Radio, Film, and TV has issued new rules that ban websites from distributing short films without government approval.
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."
Link. And
this blog-post at Kaijushakedown points to a few places where you can find the "Sparkling Red Star" political parody videos online.
By Cory Doctorow at 3:10 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown in an old, ultra-violent student cartoon that takes off on the Peanuts gang, turning them into a cast of savage murders hunting a berzerk, mohawked, Taxi-Driveresque Charlie Brown.
Link
(
Thanks, Jon!)
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."
By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:40 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Better Living Through Miles says:
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."
Link
By David Pescovitz at 2:16 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
My friend Mike Love, newly living in sin, trash-picked an excellent vintage volume from the The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement (1970). Mike was kind enough to post some select pages on Flickr. (More from the same Encyclopedia at the
Wee Wonderfuls blog.) Mike's caption for this beautiful boudoir:
The attic bedroom - the perfect place to lock the doors and trip balls all weekend.
Link
UPDATE: Several readers, including James Lileks, kindly point out that James Lileks's Interior Desecrations online gallery and
book from 2000 document this same high point in home decor. Indeed, Mike Love told me that his appreciation for Lileks's earlier work inspired him to post those pages from
The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement with the dream of helping inspire an Interior Desecrations renaissance!
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:01 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
This photo offers incontestable proof of the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:58 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Scott says: "Here's a visually relaxing video of pinstripe artists in work. It proves the art of sign painting is not lost in the modern, vinyl decal world. I could watch these guys work all day."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:48 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
A Vermont professor had 12 years of Shakespeare research confiscated at Heathrow.
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.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:43 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Pacific Expeditions Ltd is offering a tour of "five extremely remote islands," in the Cook Islands chain. One of these is Suwarrow (shown in photo above. More
here), the island that
Tom Neale lived on alone for many years. I would love to take this trip.
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."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:48 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Myst co-creator Robyn Miller pointed me to this photo of a "crumbling Taiwanese retro-fantasy-space-apartment-thing." It's no wonder the hauntingly beautiful photo appeals to him —— it looks like a screen shot of some long lost version of
Myst!
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!
Link
Reader comment:
Justin Gauvin found some other incredible photos of the same place. 1, 2, 3, 4.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:40 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
On
NeoFiles this
week, RU Sirius finishes his conversation with neo-cyberpunk writer,
Chris Nakashima-Brown, who focuses on being influenced by and compared
to J.G. Ballard.
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
By David Pescovitz at 12:15 pm Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Missed this while on holiday last week, but there's another Philip K. Dick biopic in pre-production. (I
posted a couple weeks ago about Panasonic, to be directed by Matthew Wilder and starring Bill Pullman.) Dick's estate is producing this other biopic with a screenplay by Tony Grisoni who helped bring the drug-fueled tale Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to the big screen. According to Sci Fi Wire, Paul Giamatti is in negotiations to fill PKD's shoes.
Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)
By David Pescovitz at 11:12 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Our solar system may have at least twelve planets, including Charon, Ceres, and 2003 UB313 (AKA Xena). That's based on an official definition of planet now being debated at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague. According to the definition, Pluto, Charon, and certain other small objects with tilted orbits would be deemed planets but part of a separate class called "Plutons." Astronomers will vote on the proposed definition next week. From National Geographic:
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."
Link
By David Pescovitz at 10:15 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
In these short excerpts from a 1977 interview conducted at the "Festival du livre de science fiction," surrealist SF author Philip K. Dick talks about paranoia during the Nixon administration, the Berkeley counterculture, and A Scanner Darkly. From the interview, incorporated into a video made to promote the recent film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly:
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.
Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:07 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Shawn says: "An animal found dead along the powerlines over the weekend may be the mystery creature that has roamed the area for years, mauling dogs and frightening residents."
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.
Link
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.
By David Pescovitz at 9:50 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Paul Saffo recently mailed me one of these terrific stickers that are given away free to young travelers at SFO. When Mark F. and I traveled back from OSCON in Portland, Mark asked the TSA screeners for stickers to give to his daughters as souvenirs but the PDX agents weren't yet aware of this wonderfully inspirational promotion.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 9:43 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
NASA
lost can't seem to find right now 13,000 original tapes of the Apollo moon missions, including footage of Neil Armstrong's "giant leap." Apparently, the quality of the raw reels is several times better than the ghosty images caused by reformatting for TV broadcast. From the Associated Press:
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."
Link
UPDATE: National Public Radio did a recent piece on the search for the tapes with interesting detail about why the footage looked so crappy on TV. From NPR:
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.
Link (Thanks, Nicolas Soichet!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:22 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Tango from Designverb says:
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.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:12 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Ze Frank's August 14 episode of his wonderful
The Show is about politics as a baseball game. It's hilarious.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 7:13 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Joe sez, "Top Glasgow-based fantasy author Mike Cobley (writer of the Shadowkings series) has posted a piece to YouTube called 'Cyberned' in which he looks a bit like a cross between a Glaswegian Max Headroom and Holly from Red Dwarf. BTW, a 'ned' in Scotland is like a 'chav' in England." I don't know if it's the dialog, the video, or the Glaswegian accent, but this is the most compelling nonsense I've ever seen.
Link
(
Thanks, Joe!)
By Xeni Jardin at 7:09 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
* Bruce Schneier doesn't need steganography to hide data in innocent-looking files. He just pounds it in with his fist.
* 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)
By Xeni Jardin at 7:01 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Ken Kennedy says,
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.
)
Link to UK Times story. Another interesting snip from that piece: computer forensic analyst Ray Savage, with the Cleveland police department -- "These images can be as crude as someone having pasted a cut-out of a child’s head on to an adult’s photo."
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.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:49 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Moritz sez,
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.
10,000 lost bags? Woah. Now
that's security.
Link
(
Thanks, Moritz!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:17 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
On Dave Farber's Interesting People list, a chemistry grad student posts his analysis of the implausibility of mixing acetone peroxides in and airplane out of ingredients smuggled aboard (his caveat: "I'm working entirely off of news reported by people who
don't know the difference between soft drinks and nail polish remover,
but the information I've seen has the taste of being real.")
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.
Link
(
via Schneier)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:11 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
Wired News just published part one of Quinn Norton's tremendous feature on the story behind Sweden's notorious Pirate Bay, and the political movement it spawned, The Pirate Party. Today's installment tells the story of the founding of the Pirate Bay and the yeoman technical effort undertaken by its runners when the MPAA coaxed Swedish police into seizing their servers, and the political backlash. Also included is an archive of documents showing that the MPAA was responsible for ordering the raids. The next installment promises to cover "A Nation Divided over Piracy" -- the Pirate Party its fortunes.
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.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:03 am Wednesday, Aug 16
• Comments • Share
AOL won a giant judgement against a spammer named David Wolfgang Hawke, and they suspect that Hawke's spam-fortunes were converted to gold and platinum bullion and buried on his parents farm. AOL plans on using bulldozers and geological teams to find and excavate the buried loot:
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.
Link
(
via /.)
