Over at Valleywag, Paul Boutin writes,

Hold the phone. Take a closer look at the image that took over Apple's front door this week. It's 744 pixels wide and 420 high. Recognize that ratio? Those are the 16:9 dimensions of an HDTV screen, not the 4:3 of iTunes video downloads. Apple's teaser does recall the Monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose only readable information was the perfect 1 to 4 to 9 ratio of its sides.

To be precise, they're 1.5 pixels off from being a perfect 16 to 9, but whatever. More likely Cupertino's perfectionist artists wanted to make it look exactly right to human eyes. I hesitate to go against the rumor mill, but where are home consumers spending most of their money now? On big-screen TVs that say Phillips, Sony, Panasonic --- every logo but Apple's in the most sacred spot in the house.

Link to full post. Macworld takes place this coming week, January 8-12, at Moscone Center in San Francisco. At 9am Pacific on January 9 Apple CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the expo keynote, and we'll learn whether Paul is a psychic, or a pixel ratio conspiracy theorist.

Following up on an earlier BoingBoing post about a court decision in Brazil to "shut down" YouTube over an unathorized celebrity sex video (links to the video file here), Bruno Maestrini says:

Brasil Telecom, a popular ISP in Brazil has already banned user access to youtube.com. As far as I know all other ISPs are still normal.

I, as a journalist, have tried to reach Brasil Telecom without any success. The only way I got to talk to them was through customer support, and they told me that the problem was with the company that authenticates my login. That sounds stupid. I have interviewed people from all around Brazil using BrT and none of them could access YouTube, except with a foreign proxy.

Janio Sarmento says,

Here's a story about how ADSL users from BrT are now prevented from accessing YouTube. BrasilTelecom is one of the major phone companies and bandwidth providers, and they just blocked YouTube, without a single word for the customers.

If your ISP blocks access to specific websites, some of the tips in the BoingBoing document "Defeat Censorware" may help -- including Tor.

Previously on BB:

Brazil orders YouTube shut down over celebrity sex video

Reader comment: Solon Brochado says,

I just wanted to note that, even though I do find the timing suspicious and Brazilian ISPs track record is definitely not a good one, it is still possible that this is just some sort of screw up on their part. About a year ago, lots of people - in particular those who used Virtua, the country's largest cable ISP - found that all of a sudden they were unable to access Flickr's image server (static.flickr.com), even though the site was working just fine.

In the NYT, John Markoff covers the botnet phenomenon -- networks of compromised home PCs that are remote-controlled and used to send spam, blackmail net-casinos with denial of service shakedows, and harvest credit-card data and other valuable intel. I keep hearing that botnet numbers are swelling (which makes sense -- if Internet Explorer was insecure for 284 days last year, that's a lotta pwned PCs). If that's so, I would expect that the value of botnet time would be crashing -- I wonder when it'll become too cheap to even sell... Who needs volunteer PCs for Folding@Home when some Bulgarian hacker will sell you a month on a ten-million PC botnet for ten bucks?

ShadowServer, a voluntary organization of computer security experts that monitors botnet activity, is now tracking more than 400,000 infected machines and about 1,450 separate I.R.C. control systems, which are called Command & Control servers.

The financial danger can be seen in a technical report presented last summer by a security researcher who analyzed the information contained in a 200-megabyte file that he had intercepted. The file had been generated by a botnet that was systematically harvesting stolen information and then hiding it in a secret location where the data could be retrieved by the botnet master.

The data in the file had been collected during a 30-day period, according to Rick Wesson, chief executive of Support Intelligence, a San Francisco-based company that sells information on computer security threats to corporations and federal agencies. The data came from 793 infected computers and it generated 54,926 log-in credentials and 281 credit-card numbers. The stolen information affected 1,239 companies, he said, including 35 stock brokerages, 86 bank accounts, 174 e-commerce accounts and 245 e-mail accounts.

Link (via /.)

Ruth Whiting has a show of her oil-paintings of giant power-cords on in Gainesville, Florida. I thoroughly approve. Link (Thanks, Ruth!)

Link, $16 for a pair of four "emotibuds." (Thanks, shanalyn)

AKI International's laser-cut DIY models are insanely cool -- they piece together to make weird, volumetric shapes that suggest everything from human forms to fanciful animals; they can also be used as packaging, surrounding fragile bottles and other goods. They've even got a full-sized mannekin intended for clothing stores.

Materials such as acrylic, corrugated cardboard, wood, and metals are used to construct models, which are designed in 3D by computer and then precision cut by laser. This allows for fast and easy assembly, and attractive finished products.

Link (via Gallery of Functional Art, which should REALLY put more of its stunning inventory online!)

From Iconoculture: "Duda Farm Fresh Foods in Florida has engineered celery stalks with hollow centers." The celery can be used as a Bloody Mary straw or an edible swizzle-stick. Link (via Neatorama)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written up a list of her own Devil's Dictionary-style definitions of publishing terms as an adjunct to Paperback Writer's "Devil's Publishing Dictionary" (part 1, part 2):

Cover Art; Book Jacket: A small poster advertising the book to potential readers. Authors who have failed to take into account the fact that it has been bound to the outside of the book, rather than printed on an interior page, will often come to the mistaken conclusion that it is meant to illustrate the story, and be distressed by its inaccuracy.

Earn Out: To the author, proof that the publisher didn’t pay enough for the book.

E-book (electronic book): The publishing format that has the highest ratio of “time spent discussing it in meetings” to “copies sold.”* Authors fondly believe that tens of thousands of readers who’ve passed up the opportunity to buy attractive, inexpensive hardcopy editions of their works will nevertheless go to great effort to illegally download wonky, badly formatted e-texts of the same books in order to read them in Courier on their computer screens.

Managing Editor: In trade book publishing, the person in charge of production. Normally, there are multiple layers of insulation between the author’s behavior and the Managing Editor’s production decisions. That’s a good thing.

Mass Market: A smaller, cheaper edition of a hardcover novel that is nevertheless more difficult, expensive, and uncertain to publish.

Link

These intrepid PC builders decided to convert their machines to water-cooled, ripping out the fans -- and for water, they used an entire nearby swimming pool, hooking up a pump that circulates cool pool-water through their PCs and back into the pool. Thus, they get "quieter, cooler" computers and a warmer pool.

Cooler, quieter computers and [possibly] warmer pool water with very little extra cost and added energy savings...

This is the plumbing around the pool without modification. We can see where there are two returns on this corner from the filter pump.

Next, we insert a check valve into the system. This has no affect on the operation of the filter pump but it will come in handy later.

Water for the cooling system will be drawn in from the upstream side of the check valve and returned after the output of the check valve. This ensures that even when the filter pump is turned off, fresh pool water is drawn in and returned to different areas of the pool.

Link (via Digg)