Japan's 71-year-old health minister Hakuo Yanagisawa gave a speech in which he called Japanese women "birth-giving machines" and called on them to "do their best per head."

The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed. Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head, although it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.

Link

John sez, "I just spent a bunch of money on a new TV with an HDMI input and a Slingbox so I can enjoy my cable TV when I'm on the road. Check out the photos. Maybe I won't be able to after all. The title of the photo set is I Hate DRM. What a crock." Link (Thanks, John!)

Update: Larry sez, "The Slingbox Pro doesn't have an HDMI input; it has a connector that looks exactly like HDMI, even fits an HDMI cable, but it's not HDMI. It's a connector for Sling's optional HD dongle, which accepts only component video, not HDMI. Component video is DRM-proof, more or less, although some video source devices may limit the resolution on component output, or make it impossible to view output on both component (for the Slingbox) and HDMI (for the TV) simultaneously. The TiVo series 3 doesn't have this limitation... you can hook up the TV via HDMI, the Slingbox via Sling's component video dongle, and watch until your eyes fall out of your head."

Update 2: John responds, "Larry's comment doesn't really apply to my situation, but I should have been clearer. My original email didn't go into the details of my Slingbox set-up, but here it is if you'd like to add it.

"I've got the original Slingbox (now called Classic). I've got a Series 3 Tivo and a Samsung TV with an HDMI input. The Tivo connects to the TV with an HDMI cable. In addition, the Tivo also connects to the Slingbox via the S-Video cable. When the TV is on, the Slingbox will play all video. When the TV is off, the video on my Slingbox is disabled on most (but not every) channel. Sorry, the details are boring, but the situation is annoying none the less."

Google founder Sergey Brin told an interviewer that censoring China's search-results at the behest of the totalitarian government in Beijing was a "net negative" for Google. Before this, Google's position on China was the a kind of Orwellian doublespeak: "We have to censor China because they have lots of money and we can't have any without participating in censorship" and "If we censor China but tell Chinese people when they're being censored, they'll clamor for democracy." (Um... yeah... What about if you just send uncensored web-results to China about democracy? Wouldn't that aid the cause of democracy more?)

Since moving into China, Google has been compared to Microsoft because of its dominant position and power. "We are very sensitive to people talking about us in that way," said Mr Brin. Mr Page described the differences between the two technology companies by saying "we have very open partnerships, we are very clear about being fair with revenues."

Link (via Slashdot)

See also:
Exiled Tibetans in Dharamsala protest Google censorship in China
Google in China: The Big Disconnect
Censorship: Comparisons of Google China and Google
Hacktivists parody Google logo for protest, China human rights fundraiser
Report: China blocking Google.com; censored Google.cn to be only option?
Not just in China: Google localized, censored in Azerbaijan?
Update: reports China is blocking Google.com, censored Google.cn becoming only option
Record companies: Google should censor the US, same as China
Okay, *do* be evil: Google launches censored google.cn in China
Google.cn: Tibetans protest, misspellers evade, updates. Harsh words for US tech firms from House at China 'net hearings
Tech firms blasted over China policies on Capitol Hill
Proposed law targets tech-China cooperation
China 'net censorship: not one big brother, but many
Report: Online news of protest deaths blocked by China authorities
Google logo redesigned by Students for Free Tibet
Bloggers in China break silence on violent suppression of protest
China official: What 'net censorship? What jailed journalists
Tibetan poet's blogs shut down in China censorship wave
Net censorship: HOWTO bypass China's Great Firewall
China Communist party official: our net censorship modeled on West

ReasonableAgreement.org - the anti-EULA (Cory)

Autistic person translates from her language (Cory)

Ray Harryhausen tribute site with lots of good clips (Mark)

Faux cocaine seduces the ladies: creepy '80s TV (Xeni)

Terrorist sympathizer Andy Griffith rails against Patriot Act (Xeni)

Mongolian death worm documentary online (Mark)

HOWTO isolate stem cells from a placenta at home (Pesco)

HOWTO photograph smoke (Pesco)

Mike Love's Geneaology of Influence (Pesco)

Big factory pig farms are some of America's worst polluters (Xeni)

There are reports today that Sweden plans to open the first officially sanctioned embassy inside Second Life. Embassy officials won't be issuing visas or passports there, but they may just be wear rainbow codpieces when they offer you a Cyberian Angel Exotic Massage.

Link to Notes from Sweden blog post, here's a news article: Link. (thanks, Gabriel)

destinations
dolls
dating
portraits
text files
the anticraft

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Here's a gross but brilliant anti-coke PSA from the government of Colombia, which features one particularly desperate addict. Link (thanks, Nebe Barnett)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Faux cocaine seduces the ladies: creepy '80s TV ad

By popular demand (apparently the Mongolian death worm's eye sting is long-lasting): happy rainbow rooftop unicorn on an Indiana farm, spotted in google maps: Link. (thanks, Dave Shpritz)

BoingBoing reader ~~Pocky~~ points us to an anime fan tribute dance craze in Japan.

"In America you have the Numa Numa Dance. In Japan, we have the Haruhi Suzumiya Dance. The dance is from a popular anime . But now everyone recreates their own version it." Link to a YouTube video montage of some examples. Here is the original dance: Link. Japan's TV star "Hard Gay" did a version too: Link. And here's a Gundam version: Link.

WARNING: The Haruhi theme song will stick in your head and wriggle there like a Texas Brain Worm.

Reader comment: Agent86 says,

If you want to learn how to do the dance yourself, you can try the step-by-step instructions at the SOS-dan website: Link. But please note, "The dance uses quite a lot of muscles not normally used... aching might result." There is also a companion video, slowed down and mirrored horizontally for your learning pleasure at: AVI Link

Alec Porter says,

I was stunned to see these handpainted Nazi toy soldiers on display in the Apple store in Korea's biggeset mall, in Seoul. It's not an official Apple Store, but it's certainly Apple's representative in Korea; everyone who shops for Apple considers that the place.

Korea is not know for being sensitive about the Holocaust or Nazi Germany. Perhaps they'd say the same about the west and how we're not very sensitive about Japanese Imperialism, and the horrors it inflicted on Asia. Still, this is pretty shocking.

Link.

Reader comments: Michael Shaughnessy, who is a professor of German at Washington & Jefferson College, says:

While tasteless, and Hitler in no way represents today's' Germany, Korea seems to have an obsession with all things German. You can see this in the use of German as a marketing language. Here are some interesting examples of German as an advertising language in Korea.You have to assume that most people don't know the significance of the language, but find it attractive nonetheless. Link. This mirrors the use of English is used in many European countries.My research deals with visualization of culture and students and I put together a collection of some examples during a research trip. Link.

Joe says,

A few years ago I was in Korea and travelling outside of Seoul. I noticed a big ad in a newspaper with a picture of Hitler and a pig. I asked my guide to translate and he said the ad encouraged pig farmers to use this company's nutritional supplements "to raise a master race."

Jonathan says,

The BoingBoing post about Nazi 'toys" at an Apple store in Korea could use a bit more context. First, there are no Nazi toys on display at the store. Clearly, the picture is of hand-painted models. These are not toys for children. Just like every other country in the world, there are people in Korea who study and enjoy history by painting models and trying to make historically-accurate miniture scenes. You can walk into any model shop in America and buy models of German tanks and Japanese planes from the Second World War. These stores are not being disrespectful of history. (It's likely that the customers know more about history than most people do.)

Why are the models of Nazis at the store in Korea? Commonly, stores that sell models (tanks, trains, cars, soldiers and robots) lend some of the better work done by their customers to stores in the same mall. At Co-Ex, the mall in the post, you can see some really interesting models just outside the movie theater. The Apple store is not using Nazi toys to promote its wares. It is most likely taking part in a common form of cross-promotion.

BoingBoing reader munkao says,

Hi Boing Boing. I love you. My name is munkao, and I am an artist from Malaysia. I recently did a series of Kaiju-inspired paintings for a two-man show at Giant Robot San Francisco: Link. Robert Bellm is the other artist and his fantastic art can be found on that website, too. Thanks Boing Boing! you have kept me company for many years!

Link to photos of munkao's paintings at the Giant Robot show (nsfw: some contain nudity, sexual themes, Ultraman kissing Gojira, or underwear perverts in a state of arousal).

"Assraelis" (nsfw) producer Oren Cohen shot his adult film in Hebrew with an all-Israeli cast. He stuck the the Hebrew letter kof, with a “k” tucked inside, on the cover. Then came the rabbinic nastygram:

“As a leading company in the area of kosher food certification, companies are only contractually authorized to utilize the Kof-K trademark to promote and/or market their food products,” the letter said.

The symbol is the trademarked property of the Kof-K company, which is based in Teaneck, N.J., and certifies food like bread, juice and cookies as abiding by kosher standards. Those who observe Jewish dietary laws consider any food lacking one of a handful of such symbols, known as hechsherim, as treif, or unkosher.

Mr. Cohen, the son of a Moroccan Israeli and the third generation of his family involved in the pornography industry, was a bit perplexed. “I thought, what — they own a letter?” Mr. Cohen said in an interview.

They do. And they have for more than 30 years, said Rabbi Yehuda Rosenbaum, the administrative director of the company.

Link to New York Times article (1/27). Here's an earlier item at AVN (1/25), and another at TMZ (1/25). Here's the DVD: Link (nsfw) to "Assraelis: never good enough for his mother!" (Thanks, Jason Schultz)

Reader comment: Anonymous says,

I think there's an important point glossed over in your blog post... "Kof-K" isn't *the* kosher symbol, it's *one company's* kosher symbol. It's not "a letter", as the porn producer indicates; it's a great big Hebrew letter with a tiny little English letter inside it, something that doesn't appear anywhere in any language. Basically it's a trademark in the classic sense, used to indicate that a bunch of rabbis in New Jersey approve of a particular product. While the bounds if intellectual property laws have often been stretched to the breaking point, this one seems pretty cut-and-dry. It's their brand, and they don't approve of it's use. I'm sure Good Housekeeping would feel the same way if their symbol was used to promote Mop Porn.

For the last couple of months, I've been buying a lot of instructional drawing books. Most of them turn out to be pretty bad -- not because the art isn't good, but because the artist doesn't do a good job of explaining what to do.

I was happily surprised by You Can Draw Star Wars, written by Bonnie Burton and illustrated by the supremely talented artists who work for Lucas. While the book focuses on the character, robots, and vehicle of Star Wars, the lessons in the book are valuable for drawing anything.

One unique feature of the book is the use of tracing paper overlays that have the rough pencil drawings on them. The pages below them contain the finished drawing. Special sections include inking and coloring, and creating a comic book. Link

Justine Larbalestier has concluded her wonderful young adult fantasy trilogy, Magic or Madness. The third volume, Magic's Child, brings the series to a really satisfying, complex conclusion that's both brave and thought-provoking.

In the Magic or Madness series, we are introduced to a magic system in which those born to magic die a little every time they use it -- but go insane if they refuse to use it (hence the title).

Reason Cansino, the 15-year-old narrator, starts the series by being separated from her maddened mother, and being sent to live with her "evil" grandmother. There, she learns that magic-wielders can extend their lives by drinking the magic of others, draining them to live.

By book three, the cast of characters includes nigh-omnipotent deceased relatives, evil, dysfunctional parents, and a trio of spunky young people whose hormones war with their senses.

I won't spoil the conclusion for you, but there's something really disturbing and thought-provoking that happens by the end of the book, a direction I hadn't expected and that has me thinking about it still.

This trilogy is ready-made for smart, curious kids who look to fantasy for more than escape -- who look to fantasy literature to stretch their understanding of the real world. Link

See also: Kids' fantasy novel blends magic with modernity - Tolkien meets Coupland

"In My Language" is a youtube video in which a non-verbal person with autism "speaks in her own language" -- a combination of sounds and visual cues and gestures -- and then explains what this all means by means of a text-to-speech program. It's a fascinating and compelling statement from someone who's given the problem of communication a lot of good thought.

The first part is in my "native language The first part is in my "native language," and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.

Link (via MeFi)

A rare, 1947 "walking elephant car" is up for auction:

Powered by a four cylinder Chevy engine, all hydraulics, tucked neatly inside the body cavity. The elephant literally skates along at speeds of up to 20 mph.

Stuart made three of the in 1947. One is permanently housed in a museum in Austria, one as well used for decades by the Hudson Department store in Detroit (it was later sold to a private museum in Chicago where it resides today) and one was kept by the inventor. It is the latter pictured here and it comes to us from his family who cared for it after his demise. In all likelihood, it will be the only one ever to come up for public auction.

Link (Thanks, Stet!)

Slyck has a fascinating interview with muslix64, the hacker who broke HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (he broke Blu-Ray without even owning a Blu-Ray player!). He says he didn't care about DRM until it stopped him from doing something legit, and then he broke it wide open in an act of "fair use enforcement":

IMHO, AACS is totally busted. The only thing I can see for now to prevent the attack I have described is to put different keys on every disc! It will cost a fortune for the manufacturing, so I'm not sure they will go that way...

People say I have not broken AACS, but players. But players are part of this system! And a system is only as strong as his weakest link. Even if players become more secure, key extraction will always be possible.

I know many people of the industry try to cover up this breach, by saying I have only poked a tiny hole in AACS, but it is more serious than that. Only the future will tell.

The AACS security layer is almost the same for both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, so they are both busted for good.

The only extra security layer is for the Blu-ray format, and it's called BD+. BD+ is not there yet, and I don't know when it will be. May be my "exploits" will speed up the adoption of BD+, we will see...

Link (Thanks, Ray!)

See also Report: HD-DVD copy protection defeated

Fox Studios says that half of the camcorder-recorded, pirated movies come from lax, bilingual cinemas in Montreal. They've demanded that Canada do something, or they will.

"In Quebec, it is much more advantageous because you get both English and French. You cover a bigger part of the world," said Ellis Jacob, chief executive of the Cineplex Entertainment theatre chain. "They are using Canada because they can have the movie out on the street in the Philippines and China before it even releases there."

Jacob said he was warned in a letter from Bruce Snyder, president of Fox's domestic distribution, that if Canada doesn't do something to curb its growing piracy problem, Hollywood will.

"They are definitely thinking about delaying releases in Canada," said Jacob. "This is very, very bad for our Canadian consumer and it's bad for the industry as a whole."

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

Tyler Cowen, a Star Wars fan, has blogged an elaborate theory about the Jedi -- "The public choice economics of Star Wars: A Straussian reading" -- essentially being a bunch of useless dicks:

The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted:

1. The Jedi and Jedi-in-training sell out like crazy. Even the evil Count Dooku was once a Jedi knight.

2. What do the Jedi Council want anyway? The Anakin critique of the Jedi Council rings somewhat true (this is from the new movie, alas I cannot say more, but the argument could be strengthened by citing the relevant detail). Aren't they a kind of out-of-control Supreme Court, not even requiring Senate approval (with or without filibuster), and heavily armed at that? As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends.

3. Obi-Wan told Luke scores of lies, including the big whopper that his dad was dead.

4. The Jedi can't even keep us safe.

5. The bad guys have sex and do all the procreating. The Jedi are not supposed to marry, or presumably have children. Not ESS, if you ask me. Anakin gets Natalie Portman; Luke spends two episodes with a perverse and distant crush on his sister Leia, leading only to one chaste kiss.

Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)

See also R2D2: Secret leader of the rebellion

Flickr user Lyzadanger uploaded this stupendous photo of a giant Fred Meyer grocery store in Oregon. Seen from this angle, it's like an entire industry laid bare. Link (via Megnut)

Pictaps is a web-toy that invites you to draw a stick-figure and then creates a delightful, gigantic animation of your figure, multiplied into a cast of thousands, doing a joyful, Busby Berkeley show-number, with dancing and cavorting and so forth. Link (via Wonderland)

When you feed the names and connections in the King James Version of the New Testament into the ManyEyes social visualization tool, you get this incredible hairball map of the social relationships between the characters in that novel. Link (via Waxy)

The latest installment of the great sf story podcast Escape Pod is "How Lonesome a Life Without Nerve Gas" by James Trimarco. Escape Pod always publishes great science fiction audio, but "How Lonesome a Life..." is a standout, even so. It's the story of an artificially intelligent battle-helmet, testifying for its life, in front of a judge of the Earth Imperial court system. It unravells the story of how it started in the forces, as the headgear of a soldier sent to quell a Martian agrarian rebellion, and as the story unspools, Trimarco sketches out an often comic, always intriguing tale of AI in war. Frank Key, of the Hooting Yard podcast, gives it a dry, sardonic reading that fits perfectly.

Link, Link to text of story, Link to subscribe to Escape Pod podcast feed, Link to Hooting Yard

See also:
Cory's Printcrime audio on Escape Pod
Escape Pod -- great sf story podcast
Paul Di Filippo's "Shadowboxer" - Twilight Zonesque story podcast
Di Filippo's story "Little Worker" as a podcast
Podcast of Cory's story, "Craphound"
Science fiction podcast: a modern Paul Bunyan story (funny!)

From a 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix -- a giant magnet used to "remove steel cinders from patients's eyes." I wonder if you could use a neodymium magnet to do the same thing? Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Implanting a magnet in your fingertip adds a sixth sense
• Black, magnetic silly putty
• Dangerously strong magnets
• Anti magnetic ribbon site

Pancho says:

Here's a link to an online list of all the top scoring films from the notoriously stringent Halliwell's film guide.

Single-handedly authored by Leslie Halliwell (until his death in 1989) his yearly updated eponymous guide is considered to be one of the most authoritative, balanced and (crucially) comprehensive critical lists of the movie canon.

It pioneered the four-star rating system whereby films only receive one (or more) stars if they are remarkable, interesting, challenging or brilliant. Most films in the guide receive no stars with only a handful (well, 251) receiving a four-star rating. this top grade has long been considered one of the highest accolades for the discerning film director. The Halliwell's Four Star list has been accused of favouring Black and White films from the '30s and '40s but, needless to say, that is some of its charm

Link

Reader comment:

Dave says:

While Halliwell's Film Guide may well be the most comprehensive in print, but "most authoritative [and] balanced" is far off the mark! Halliwell was an absolute master of waffle (meaningless remarks like "Some people have found pleasing things in it") and gross inconsistencies. He'll compliment a film and then give it no stars at all, and then he'll diss another film for being average and then give it two stars. Usually an entertaining read, but far from balanced.

Ray Harryhausen is a stop-motion-animation wizard who is widely regarded as the master of old-school special effects. Harryhausen called his method of animating small models of monsters and superimposing them into live action scenes “Dynamation,” and it was used to great effect in such movies as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

I'll never forget the first time I saw the rousing and meticulously choreographed skeleton fight in Jason, in which a team of seven undead creatures spawned from a hydra’s teeth are acrobatically knocked, flipped, and stabbed out of commission by Jason and his cohorts, or the gray-skinned, 20-foot-tall Cyclops who gets seriously pissed off when Sinbad and his crew impale him with spears.

This website has short clips of the monsters from most of Harryhausen's movies. Link (Thanks, Joe Alterio!)

Cryptomundo has some scans of the Fate covers illustrated by Robert Crumb. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Old copies of Fate magazine
• R. Crumb and Aline Crumb in the New York Times

65-year-old Nell Hamm and her 70-year-old husband Jim were hiking in Humboldt County CA when a mountain lion pounced on Jim and clamped its jaws on his head. Nell was able to fight of the mountain lion and take her husband to safety.

Jim Hamm, who was trying to tear at the face of the cat, told his wife to grab a pen from his pocket and stab the cat in the eyes. She did, but the pen broke.

"That lion never flinched," she said. "I just knew it was going to kill him."

Nell Hamm picked up the branch again and this time slammed it butt-end into the cat's snout. The lion had ignored her until then. Finally, she had its attention. The cat stepped back, and glared at her with its ears pinned back.

"I thought he was going to attack me," she said.

Instead, the cat slipped into the ferns and disappeared.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Zoo lion kills man who thought God would protect him
• Mule vs mountain lion

Andrew says: "Have you guys seen these ear wax picks with LED lights? I just spotted one last night at a Korean grocery store and posted a photo on my site." Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• The joy of earwax picking in Japan
• Excellent video of earwax picking
• When will I stop writing about earwax cleaning?
• Asians carry gene for dry earwax
• The earwax cleaning madness must stop, says reader
• Still more on Japanese ear cleaning
• Ear coning is a scam
• How to clean your ear with a bobby pin
• Ear Cleaning Manga

Link 1, Link 2 from Islamabad metblog, both posts are being updated with details as news is reported on blogs and in mainstream venues. (Thanks, Sean Bonner)

Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan says,

After just over two years, Google has finally defused the "Google Bomb" that has returned US President George W. Bush at the top of its results in a search on miserable failure. The move wasn't a post-State Of The Union Address gift for Bush. Instead, it's part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass link pranks from working.

Link, more here and here.

Sandwichgirl is stationed at McMurdo, in Antarctica. She took a trip from there to the South Pole, and in this photo she is doing cartwheels in a bathing suit at that site: - 25.5° F, -44.7° F windchill, 9.4 knots. This chick's got some major cojones. Link. (thanks, T. bias!)

Link to skeevy ad for "synthcoke," once sold "at adult bookstores throughout Manhattan." Beats Clorox!

UPDATE: Turns out this ad came from a long-running adult cable access show produced by none other than SCREW Magazine's Al Goldstein.

You can buy a DVD of archived editions of the show, including weird ads they ran like this one for SynthCoke: Link.

From 1975 to 2002, MIDNIGHT BLUE was late-night cable's most depraved cavalcade of politics, pornography and perversion... meet the real legends behind DEEP THROAT... Carol Connors: Uninhibited bisexual co-star, extreme animal lover, and mother of award-winning actress Thora Birch. Harry Reems: The prolific porn stud whose criminal indictment on obscenity charges galvanized Hollywood. Gerard Damiano: Hairdresser turned visionary porn director... Chuck Traynor: Linda Lovelace's bluntly outspoken husband, manager and alleged abuser... And much more, including the show's original commercials for swinger clubs, adult toys and escort services that dropped jaws and pants all over New York City and lit the fuse on the battles against the FCC that still rage today.

Jacob Blickenstaff says,

Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group (and probably others) have been cracking down on the sale of 30-year old + vinyl bootlegs. Most of these recordings are of concerts, sometimes unreleased demos, etc and were manufactured decades ago. Many titles are collectable and have sold sometimes for hundreds and even thousands of dollars, their value being more of an artifact than contraband. Recordings of Brian Wilson, Led Zeppelin and Neil Young, for example, have been removed from my listings by eBay under a program caled VeRO. Link.

Someone is out there searching for certain titles and artists and requesting their removal from ebay. I can't tell whether the system is powered by computer searches or the eyeballs of bottom-of-the-totem-pole record company interns. It just seems a little up-tight. Record companies aren't making a cent off of ANY used LP auctioned on eBay so why the big fuss over these obscure collector-fetish objects?

Here is a list of who participates: Link.

(Thanks, Consumerist!)

Baron sez, "This is a fascinating read on how S. Korea with all the fancy 3G phones, best broadband coverage, and electronics is shackled to Windows because of a government proprietary encryption format based on Active X. It prevents people from using Linux, Firefox, and is even holding back Vista because all secure transactions require it!"

Remember how Active X controls were and continue to be a significant vector of viruses and malware because Microsoft originally architected Active X to run by default instead of with a user action? Maliciously programmed websites would be able to automatically install software on users' computers just by visiting a web page in IE 6. In IE 7 and in Vista, Microsoft has re-architected Active X controls in such a way to make them "more safe" by requiring a user action for the control to run. This is obviously impacting every web site and company that uses active X controls on their websites, which include just about every website in Korea that handles any kind of secure transaction. Every online bank, every governmental agency, every ecommerce site. Without enough time to re-architect Korean websites, 3 S. Korean governmental ministries, the Ministry of Information and Communication, the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, and the Financial Supervisory Service, warned S. Korean users that upgrading to Vista would disable the user from making any secure transaction online. Can you imagine spending thousands of dollars on a new machine (because the requirements of Vista generally require new hardware) and a new OS from Redmond only to be locked out of any secure transaction online? It's Kafkaesque.

To add insult to injury, the monopolist who absolutely controls the Korean market for computers won't delay the launch of Vista to allow for Korean websites to re-code their sites. "We've been testing Vista with banks and other service providers since September, but we encountered more delays than we expected. We plan to release the product as scheduled.

For years I've been writing about how DRM can take an entire nation hostage, requiring it to pay a tax to the US for infrastructure technology instead of developing it at home or using free/open source software. I couldn't ask for a better example than this -- Korea is eminently capable of developing its own technology. Instead, the government has created a subsidy program for Microsoft by insisting that citizens use foreign software to do business at home.

Link

See also: How DRM will harm the developing world
Norway's public broadcaster sells out taxpayers to Microsoft
MSFT employee: Cory is a liar and a Communist, MSFT is good for Norway
Help Norway build an open streaming video platform!

Barenaked Ladies frontmen Steve Page and Ed Robertson did an appearance on CBC TV's The Hour yesterday in which they wittily and sensibly explained their position on DRM, explaining that fans don't want to buy music that they can't use as they see fit, and that as entrepreneurs, they have to sell what fans want to buy. It's a great interview (they also talk about their novel approach to environmentalism on tour, and life as an indie) from a great band. Link (via Michael Geist)

See also:
Barenaked Ladies Are Me tour - great music, politics, and tech!
Barenaked Ladies release album on USB stick
Barenaked Ladies go remix crazy
BNL endorse Jack Layton
Hollywood's MP denounces "users," "EFF members" -- video
New Barenaked Ladies single as free, remixable multitracks
Barenaked Ladies guy on Universal's DRM SpiralFrog service
Canada's New Democratic Party embraces copyfighting musicians
Barenaked Ladies frontman on copyright reform

These remarkable photos of French psychiatric hospitals from the 1950s have just been published -- some for the first time:

In 1954 Jean-Philippe Charbonnier documented French Psychiatric hospitals and this exhibition includes rarely seen photographs from the series.

Some of the photographs were first published in Réalités in January 1955. Here a selection of the original reportage is shown followed by the magazine layouts - published in the magazine with two fluffy cats on the cover. It is interesting to see that a number of most most powerful images were not published due to the sensitivities of the 1950s and that the eyes of the patients are at times masked to protect their identities.

In 2006 a 24 page booklet Jean-Philippe Charbonnier: HP hôpitaux psychiatriques was published by Le traitement contemporain n°4 in conjunction with gallery Agathe Gaillard.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

The Las Vegas police have redesigned their recruiting ads so that they look like a scene from Frank Miller's Sin City. Link (via Warren Ellis)

Kim Moser has lovingly captured a bunch of old Commodore PET and C-64 demos from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and saved them as movies you can play online. "The early ones had blocky black-and-white graphics, crude sound, and consisted of less than 8K of BASIC code," Kim says, "which makes them particularly retro-licious." Shown here, a screengrab from DROMEDA. Link

Those who seek to preserve online content for the future may find inspiration in internet smut. Snip from CNET article:

"I guarantee that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form (because) it's a social model that's working extremely well," said Kurt Bollacker, digital research manager at the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit fostering several digital-works preservation projects. Bollacker spoke Thursday at a symposium called "New Media and Social Memory" at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

He held up the adult industry--always the digital pioneer--as one example of a self-selected community on the Web that swaps images and videos so regularly and widely that that activity will ultimately help preserve an archive over years. Similarly, he pointed to successful niche archives like the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME, a collective of programmers who preserved video games from the 1980s with CPU and hardware emulators.

"Anyone interested in preserving digital art should evaluate ongoing distributed data efforts," said Bollacker, who has a background in artificial intelligence and previously worked with the Internet Archive, a Web preservation project.

Link.

BoingBoing reader Patrick Tufts went to the event and says, "This was a good talk - mostly not about porn, but when you bring up a topic like this in the afternoon of an all-day seminar, it's going to get someone's attention."

Snip from a New York Times piece by John Schwartz about blog controversy over a study that sought to determine why some sheep prefer to bonk others of their own gender:

Charles Roselli set out to discover what makes some sheep gay. Then the news media and the blogosphere got hold of the story.

Dr. Roselli, a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, has searched for the past five years for physiological factors that might explain why about 8 percent of rams seek sex exclusively with other rams instead of ewes. The goal, he says, is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of sexual orientation in sheep. Other researchers might some day build on his findings to seek ways to determine which rams are likeliest to breed, he said.

But since last fall, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals started a campaign against the research, it has drawn a torrent of outrage from animal rights activists, gay advocates and ordinary citizens around the world — all of it based, Dr. Roselli and colleagues say, on a bizarre misinterpretation of what the work is about.

The story of the gay sheep became a textbook example of the distortion and vituperation that can result when science meets the global news cycle.

Link. Image: "Some sheep from a university study of homosexual behavior. About 8 percent of rams are said to seek sex with other rams instead of ewes." Lynn Ketchum/Oregon State University.

reader comment: Hugo says,

Ben Goldacre wrote a good article in the Guardian concerning this rather impressive misunderstanding. Link

Update: The British paper accused of inaccuracies in earlier reports on this story has issued an apology for its errors:

The Sunday Times January 28, 2007
Corrections

The report “Science told: hands off gay sheep” (News, December 31) contained several inaccuracies in its description of research into the brain’s role in sheep’s sexual partner preference being conducted at Oregon Health & Science University and Oregon State University. The research is aimed at understanding the role of the brain in sexual attraction. The researchers deny that they were trying to “cure” homosexuality in sheep, a statement that is backed up by their published studies. The research included a study that limited androgen in sheep to determine if this resulted in same partner preference. Our report misconstrued this experiment. The researchers also stress that contrary to our report they have had no success in altering the sexual preference of the animals. The research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and is not being conducted to improve farm productivity. The authors of our report were not science specialists and we should have ensured that the story was checked by the science editor before publication. We apologise for the errors and any subsequent confusion.

The Wired News blog Table of Malcontents has posted an interview with astronaut Buzz Aldrin about his new documentary In The Shadow Of The Moon which is premiering at the Sundance film festival this week. John Brownlee of Wired News says, "He gave us some of his thoughts on what it was like to land on the moon, pre-flight jitters, and about his thoughts on a slew of matters, from religious extremism to Martian colonization."

John, I hope for your sake that you did not ask him to swear on a bible that he had been on the moon.

Here's a snip from the interview:

Q: You are a big proponent of manned missions to Mars. Would Mars be any more hospitable?

Aldrin: Conditions on Mars are much better. But in order to get to Mars, it takes a much bigger effort. And you can’t just go and then turn around and come back right away. The planets are not in the right position. Mars requires that we stay for a considerable period. You have to come back from Mars before the next people arrive, so if you don’t bring everybody back, it’s empty there, and that’s no way to build up permanence. You have to keep leaving more and more people there and have the confidence to do that.

Q: Would you want to be left on Mars?

Aldrin: Well, you’re not really left on Mars. It’s just that the train doesn’t come by for a year and a half. And no, I don’t think I’m suited to that.

Link (Thanks, John Brownlee)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Xeni floats in zero-G with Buzz Aldrin

Moment of Buzz Aldrin/Emmy Awards Zen

Aldrin punches out lunar conspiracist

Buzz's Barsoomian Bus Business

The EFF's Cindy Cohn says,

Have you had any difficulties entering or leaving the United States? If so, EFF would like to hear from you.

After focusing attention on the Department of Homeland Security's secret Automated Targeting System (ATS), we're keen to uncover and document its effect on the law-abiding public. We're interested in hearing from any travelers who have had repeated problems at the border or have been told by government agents that they are on a "list" or that there is some unexplained "problem" that needs to be resolved.

Please share your story with us by writing travel@eff.org and providing as much detail as possible. We will treat all responses confidentially and may contact you to follow-up.

"In 2005, Richard Freeman led a four man team from the Centre for Fortean Zoology to Mongolia in search of the notorious Mongolian Death Worm; a fabled reptilian beast said to spit venom and kill its victims with electric blasts. This is their story."

(Image by by Belgian painter Pieter Dirkx, from a Wikipedia article on the death worm.)

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Brain worms in Texas
• Worm from a pork taco
• Six horrifying parasites
• Hairworms brainwash grasshoppers into watery suicide

Peter Gutmann, author of the "Vista Suicide Note" paper (in which he added up the cost of implementing all the dumb DRM in Vista), has responded to Microsoft's answer to his paper, in which they tried to spin the issue to make it all seem harmless. As with the original paper, the response is savage, funny, and fact-filled:

"Do things such as HFS (Hardware Functionality Scan) affect the ability of the open-source community to write a driver?

"No. HFS uses additional chip characteristics other than those needed to write a driver. HFS requirements should not prevent the disclosure of all the information needed to write drivers. "

This claim is directly contradicted by a document by the same author which states:

"Such tests could involve loading a surface with an image, and then getting the chip to apply various visual effects to the image and reporting back the resulting pixels. "

and then later on:

"The internal workings of the graphics chip must be kept secret, such that a hacker building an emulator could not find out the required information."

So this document, the primary reference for Vista's content protection, states exactly the opposite of what's said in Microsoft's response, namely that standard chip functionality (in this case graphics rendering in a GPU) is exercised for HFS, and that the device details have to be kept secret to prevent someone emulating the functionality.

Link (via Pwned)

Dart Coat Hooks are stainless steel darts with screws instead of points on the end. A set of three is $34 from Elsewares.
Link

Previously on BB:
• Voodoo coat hanger: sadistic and practical way to hang coats Link
• Lamp lamp Link
• Shotgun shell vase Link

I dig the styling of Torquil Harkness's homebrew laptop PC. He played around with the component arrangements in a cardboard box before welding together the aluminum chassis. From Harkness's build notes:

This, my first original computer design came out of frustration and I hope one day we will see a case that allows people to bolt together their own laptop in a weekend - and not have to spend days in the shed annoying the neighbours with my angle grinder and learning how to mig weld aluminium like I did!

There are 'bare bones' kits from some manufacturers, but you are still expected to pay through the nose. To have one designed around standard Mini-ITX components would be great for the kind of people who do not want a laptop that we can fit in an envelope, rather a unit that we can use all around the house for a decent price.

I decided to create a laptop that at any point, I could upgrade every component as they grew too old.

Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Welcome to ReasonableAgreement.org -- where we make mincemeat of End User License Agreements. As you move through space, as you look at the Web, when you buy things, when you travel, it's increasingly the case that you end up making "agreements" to give up your rights. For example, by installing software, you might give up the right to sue the company that made it if it didn't work. Or by subscribing to an online music service, you might give up your right to loan the songs you buy to a friend. When you install a game like World of Warcraft, you agree to install spyware on your computer. When you sign your credit-card slip at Best Buy or Fry's, you waive all kinds of rights you get under consumer protection law.

Who knows if this stuff is enforceable? The case law is all over the place. What if you're under-age? Drunk? Using someone else's computer -- do you agree on your parents' behalf when you install software at their place over the holidays?

Frankly, it's all bullshit. The way the system should work is, you buy something, you own it. The law of the land governs your interactions with the seller. What's the point of having a consumer-protection law if all it takes to get around it is to announce that you've agreed to waive your rights by buying something? If consumer protection laws don't protect people who buy stuff, whom do they protect?

That's not to say that we can't have reasonable agreements -- like when you and your boss sit down and draw up your employment contract, negotiating the terms on which you'll work. But the idea that an agreement can be made by shouting, "By standing there doing nothing, you agree to let me stab you in the eye!" is just dumb.

Enter the anti-EULA. Here's the text of it:

READ CAREFULLY. By [accepting this material|accepting this payment|accepting this business-card|viewing this t-shirt|reading this sticker] you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Put this at the bottom of your emails; print it on your stationery. Stick it on the bottom of the credit-card slips at Best Buy, put it on your warranty cards before you mail them off. Print them on the back of your business-cards.

It's no more enforceable than any of the other dumb-ass, abusive agreements out there, but this one works for you. It's time to stop "agreeing." It's time to come up with some real, reasonable agreements.

The good people at Bumperactive have printed up stickers -- receipt-sized, laptop-sized and bumper-sized -- and MondoTees have t-shirts ("BY READING THIS T-SHIRT, YOU AGREE..."). I don't make any money off of this, and part of every sale goes to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a charity that sticks up for your rights.

There's no copyright in any of this. Make your own shirts, sell 'em or give them away. Stickers, stationery, window-signs, door-knockers, welcome-mats -- whatever. Do it, make as much dough as you can, just spread it around.

Buy stickers

Buy t-shirts

Submit abusive EULAs to the Small Print Project

(Thanks to Steve Simitzis for suggesting this!)

William Andrews, former curator of the now-defunct Time Museum and a master clockmaker, is trying to build an advanced sundial that melds horology, cartography, and a passion for antique scientific instrumentation. His Longitude Dial was inspired by a 1610 map created by mathematician Franz Ritter. That map and Ritter's others are considered the first examples of a gnomonic map projection, a method to accurately represent the curvature of the earth on a flat surface. In the new issue of Smithsonian Magazine, Dava Sobel, author of the critically-acclaimed book Longitude and other works, profiles Andrews and the maker mindset behind his unusual project. From the article:

"My original goal in this," he said... "was to produce an accurate timepiece with no moving parts—an original creation that combined art and science, drawing from the long traditions of both in its design, and incorporating the finest craftsmanship and latest technology in its construction." What really set his idea apart, however, was his intention to base the dial on an unusual type of map, and to center the map on the very spot where the dial would stand. The map's meridians of longitude would serve as the sundial's hour lines, creating a union of time and space for that particular location—something no dialist or clockmaker had ever before achieved...

Today the work of measuring precise time has been relegated to government agencies such as the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., the International Earth Rotation Service at the Paris Observatory and the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Sevres, France, all of which measure a second by the interval it takes a cesium atom to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times. Because the Earth goes its own way in space, however, heedless of atomic time, "leap seconds" are periodically added to our years to keep our clocks in sync with the turning of our planet. A sundial requires no such adjustment. "A sundial lets you see the Earth turn," Andrewes says. "Of course you know it's turning, but when you witness the shadow moving across the dial you feel something. Many people have no idea why the seasons occur—that the hemisphere tilted toward the Sun actually changes from winter to summer. Time has become separated from space, and I think that's a mistake."

Link