From Techdirt: "BPI, the UK version of the RIAA, has banned a twelve year-old singer songwriter from a new music chart they were creating for schools. The reason, apparently, is that BPI doesn't want to promote young Amy Thomas' music, since she's signed to a music label that doesn't support BPI's stance on suing file sharers." Link (via Wonderland)

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.

In June, a British newspaper reported on working conditions in "iPod City," the gigantic factory complex in Longhua, China where iPods (and other vendors' products) are manufactured. To Apple's credit, they assembled an independent inspection team that visited the factories and did in-depth, random audits of working conditions. They found that the conditions were generally good by local standards, but sometimes lacking:

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.

Link (Thanks, Trip!)

Misha sez,

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

Link (Thanks, Misha!)

BoingBoing reader Sir Novelty says,

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.

Link. Previously: Cellphone terror detainees not guilty, just inconveniently brown

David sez, "I wrote a little guide on my website as to where I get my DRM-free scifi ebook reading." Got more good sf ebook spots? Add them to the comment-section of David's post. Link (Thanks, David!)

Project Gutenberg is hosting this remarkable 1963 FBI fingerprinting manual, with an introduction by J Edgar Hoover.

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).

Link (via Schneier)

The ACLU and others have just won a gigantic victory in a federal court, getting the Bush administration's program of warrentless wiretapping of Americans ruled unconstitutional. I just renewed my ACLU membership.

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."

Next on the block: EFF will beat AT&T over its assistance in the warrantless wiretaps. Link (Thanks to Les and everyone else who sent in this link!)

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."

Link to article, "Wireless Binds Tibetan Exiles", and Link to an extensive photo gallery: "Dharamsala Dreamin'."

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'

Brain says: "I'm reading An Island to Oneself on your recommendation. It's fantastic. You've probably gotten this before, but you should check out the book and video about Richard Proenneke's escape into the Alaskan Wilderness. Richard Proenneke is perhaps the bizzaro Tom Neale (or vice versa)!" Link

Baby Rock Records is releasing a slew of lullaby cover CDs of alt.rock tunes by the likes of Nivrana, Radiohead, The Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, and Queens of the Stone Age. Lots of synth glockenspiels, chimes, vibraphones, in lieu of fuzz boxed guitars. The song samples are much more promising than most of the lullaby cover schlock out there today! Link (via Daddy Types and thanks Vann Hall!)

Yesterday, Mark posted about the mystery creature found dead in Turner, Maine. Since then, my cryptozoologist pal Loren Coleman traveled to Turner and examined what was left of the creature. His visit was documented in a Sun Journal article, reprinted on Cryptomundo with a few additional comments from Loren. (Illustration contributed to Cryptomundo by Mike Lemos, more info here.) From the article:

"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.

Link

Back in May, I wrote about Phil Sandifer, a grad student in English at Gainesville's University of Florida who was harassed by campus cops for publishing fiction on his LiveJournal. The cops -- acting on a tip that appears to have originated from people displeased with Sandifer's Wikipedia editing style -- argued that because Sandifer's story depicted a murder, he should be fingerprinted and have his DNA taken in order to ensure that he wasn't responsible for any unsolved murders.

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

Salon reviews a fascinating-sounding book called The Wonga Coup, about a gang of rich western thugs who proposed a competition to hire mercenaries and topple the government of Equatorial Guinea and loot its treasuries -- the winner got to keep the country's wealth.

"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.)

Link

Someone's uploaded a segmented version of Rick Mercer's CBC special, Talking to Americans. Talking to Americans was a segment on the uproariously funny "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" CBC news/commentary show, in which Rick Mercer would go to the USA and ask Americans whether they believed that Russia should given the Chechens in Saskatechwan their freedom, or for help defending our national igloo, or for congratulations on legalizing insulin. This show is a national institution, but it has never been aggressively marketed to Americans. You'd be hard pressed to get a funnier outside look into the USA. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 (via Digg)

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)."

The Tribeca Film Festival is screening a documentary on Al Franken called "God Spoke." The trailer catches my favorite moments of Franken's polticial/comedy schtick. I think that between Franken and Jon Stewart, we've found two of America's greatest political commentators. I hope he runs for -- and wins -- high office. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)