A growing catalogue of innocent things which, like Lite-Brite marketing campaigns, could be mistaken for Infernal Machines and inspire grandstanding by politicians. Submitted by the people who use them.

ROBOT ASSASSIN

I know most of you are thinking: "That is a small motor encased in a plastic tube, attached to a potentiometer and a pushswitch, so that some weird electric guitar player can use it to excite his guitar strings and magnetic pickups and generate an annoying electromagnetic whine." YOU ARE SO WRONG! It is actually a sophisticated robot assassin that flies and shoots lasers from it red side. It will track a genetic imprint by detecting genetic dust in the air and can find its target from 2500Km. Once near its target it will engage its Nuclearator (which is a secret super deadly technology that I can't describe here lest it fall into the wrong hands) and Whammo! Target is finished, and no more Frisbees shall fly in a very large radius.

Link (thanks natch, Wayne Correia, Nicholas Chaikin, Sean Bonner)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• State of Massachusetts insists on calling ATHF ads "hoax devices"
• Stickers: This is engineering, not bomb-making
• Boston LED terror scare: a message to the media
• Mark on ABC news about Mooninite devices
• Fake pipe bombs found in Boston
• Video of Mooninite menaces
• Boston Mooninite installer arrested
• Boston Channel photoshops Mooninite LED signs
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the Bomb T-Shirts
• LED ad campaign ignites terrorism scare in Boston

After reading about a 11' x 7' flat in London that sold for $335,000, Flickr user Simple Simon used SketchUp to draw up plans for a renovation of the place that would render it habitable. His ideas are pretty clever, though it's hard to imagine how this former closet could ever be worth $335K.

A flat roughly the size of a snooker table has gone on sale for £170,000 in London's upmarket Chelsea.

The former janitor's storeroom measures 11ft by 7ft and has a cupboard place for a shower and kitchenette area.

Potential buyers can expect to fork out an extra £30,000 to make the room habitable as there is no lighting and it is full of rubble.

Even the estate agent selling the property admitted the flat was "incredibly depressing".

Link (via Neatorama)

Update: Manooh sez, "I have read your post about a tiny flat in London, and so you might like 'micro compact homes' (m-ch), tiny flats in beautiful design. do check out the project photos on their website!"

Alden sends us an, "utterly brilliant mashup of clips from the Doctor Who story 'Dalek' with dialogue from 'Monthy Python and the Holy Grail!'"

Dearie me, this is some funny shit! Link (Thanks, Alden!)

Update: Of course, someone's done the same thing for Star Trek. Twice. (Thanks, Jon!)

I just got off the phone with Citibank after noticing a bunch of "Foreign Transaction Fees" on my bank statement -- turns out that when you use your credit or debit card outside of the US, Visa and Mastercard charge three percent in transaction fees on the spend. It doesn't matter if you use an ATM, buy over the Internet/phone, or walk into a store -- the credit-card companies always dip their beaks. When you pay your hotel bill, when you buy a plane ticket, every time you use Amazon.uk to order a British release (Citibank told me that they even charge the fee when I withdraw from my Citibank US account while at a Citibank UK ATM, using Citibank's own network!).

What makes this such a rip-off is that the credit-card companies already charge a fee -- up to five percent! -- to the merchants for processing the transaction. So Mastercard and Visa are getting a slice from the store, and a slice from the customer. In a global marketplace, Mastercard and Visa are acting like letting you spend your own money is a special service deserving its own fee.

The Citibank rep I spoke to told me that the fee used to be one percent, and that it was hidden on the credit-card bills, but that in 2006, the fees tripled and Citi started to break them out on the bill so you could see how badly you're getting hosed.

I called up Citibank UK and asked them if I was charged any fees when I used my Citibank UK debit card outside of Britain that they told me that no, Citibank UK customers are spared this particular screw-job from the credit-card companies.

When you add it all up, the credit-card companies must be making billions off of American customers -- and all the while they're double-dipping, charging the merchants, too. Link

Update: Steve sez, "Most UK banks will tax you if you take money out of a foreign ATM or use the card abroad (Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, Barclays). Barclays does something truly bad: if you buy foreign currency or travellers cheques *in the UK* they hit you with the handling fee, even though they are not even converting the money. Take the money out of the ATM outside the post office and pay in cash, and you save. Not only is there no moral justification for this, its an odd trend. Imagine if banks started charging you more for alchol or eating out compared to supermarket purchases.

"Nationwide and Citibank are the unusual banks in that they don't make up a bogus fee and stick it on your cards when you go abroad.

"This shows that:
1. its a bank thing, not a Visa fee
2. its entirely optional
3. they do it, because they can get away with it.

"Consider encouraging your UK readers to open up an account with Nationwide just for routing money abroad."

Update 2: Matt Gross sez, "I’m a travel writer for the New York Times, and I got a Capital One Visa card specifically because it was the only one I could find that does not charge a foreign transaction fee. Of course, they give me loads of other problems (like freezing my account every time I actually charge something overseas), but at least I don’t have to pay an extra 3 to 5 percent!"

Matt Goff sez, "I'm moving to London from the US in April, so I've been researching the credit card f/x transaction fees issue. Bankrate.com has a good summary of what ten major US banks charge for credit card, debit card, and ATM transactions in foreign currencies."

Michael Miller sez, "Wells Fargo is another American culprit bank for Foreign Currency Transaction fees. I've been living in Aotearoa (New Zealand) for 5 years now and a couple of years ago Wells Fargo started charging the 3% foreign currency transaction fee. 3% can add up to a lot of money if you're traveling abroad, especially when you add on Wells Fargo's $5 foreign ATM fee on top of it.

"I still need an American account for investments and a retirement account from my first job so last time I was in America I joined up with a local credit union which charges hardly any fees and only a 1% foreign currency transaction fee. The best advice I can give though is if you're working in large sums of money it's still best to open up an account at a good bank in a foreign country and transfer the money directly into the account.

"Truly American credit unions are a savior in a land of high fee thief banks. The idea that people can gather together and work in a non-profit way to make their lives better is a model that others needing essentials services should emulate. If America isn't going to offer universal healthcare for it's citizens then they should band together and make non-profit health care insurance unions. If there's one area of life that needs a non-profit union of citizens more than banking it's definitely health care."

Wifi Liberator lets you retransmit the pay-for-use WiFi at airports and cafes to your friends for free; it's an art-project from Jonah Brucker-Cohen:

Wifi Liberator is an open-source toolkit for a laptop computer that enables its user to "liberate" pay-per-use wireless networks and create a free, open node that anyone can connect to for Internet access. The project is presented as a challenge to existing corporate or "locked" private wireless nodes to encourage the proliferation of free networks and connectivity across the planet. The project was inspired by the ongoing "battle" between providers broadcasting wireless signals in public spaces, in particular: corporate entities, wireless community groups, individual users, and proponents of open networks. Like my Wifi-Hog project, the Wifi-Liberator critically examines the tensions between providers trying to profit from the increasingly minimal costs associated with setting up a public network and casual users who simply want to see the Internet transform into another "public utility" and become as ubiquitous and free as the air we breath. The project targets pay-per-use wireless networks as often found in airports, other public terminals, hotels, global-chain coffee shops, and other public waiting points.

Link (via Gizmodo)

In front of the famous Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd, dozens of people make a living by dressing up in costumes and asking tourists for money to have their photo taken with them. You'll find Elmos, Supermans, Jack Sparrows, Darth Vaders, and Chewbaccas sidling up to tourists from all over the world and then demanding money when a photo is taken.

On Friday, a 6-foot-5 man in a Chewbacca costume allegedly head-butted a tour guide after the guide chastised him for being mean to two female Japanese tourists. He was arrested.

(photo from Jimmy Kimmel Live)Tourists have complained that some costumed characters turn abusive when they refuse to pay them to pose for pictures. Two years ago, actors dressed as superhero Mr. Incredible, Elmo the Muppet and the dark-hooded character from the movie "Scream" were arrested for aggressive begging. More recently, an actor portraying slasher movie favorite Freddie Krueger was taken into custody for allegedly stabbing another man, although no charges were filed.

"The city will do something eventually. Yesterday's incident probably shortened that time span," said Thomas Fox, wearing a pirate's suit reminiscent of Capt. Jack Sparrow in "Pirates of the Caribbean."

"Things like this happen around Chewbacca all the time. I saw him in a fight with a music vendor. They knocked over a baby stroller," Fox said.

Link

My new InfoWeek column, "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen," is up -- it talks about the potential cost to business of the fine-print bogus agreements that litter our world.

The worst offenders are people who sell you movies and music. They're closely seconded by people who sell you software, or provide services over the Internet. There's supposed to be a trade-off to this -- you're getting a discount in exchange for signing onto an abusive agreement. But just try and find the software -- discounted or full-price -- that doesn't come with one of these "agreements."

For example, Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, comes in a rainbow of flavors varying in price from $99 to $399, but all of them come with the same crummy terms of service, which state that "you may not work around any technical limitations in the software," and that Windows Defender, the bundled anti-malware program, can delete any program from your hard drive that Microsoft doesn't like, even if it breaks your computer.

Link

See also:
ReasonableAgreement.org - the anti-EULA
Fruitbat "grounded bedding" site has even loonier terms of service

Graeme Cole set out to test a simile by nailing jello to a wall. He was diligent. He was imaginative. He was careful. It didn't work.

Given some jelly mixed according to standard procedures and a vertical wall, it is not possible to nail the former to the latter and have it stay there for any significant amount of time. Furthermore, these experiments were conducted by nailing the jelly to a horizontal surface which was then gradually tilted. Nailing jelly to a wall while the wall is vertical is an intractable problem in itself due to the difficulty in picking up jelly with the hands without it disintegrating.

Link (via Neatorama)

Viacom did a general search on YouTube for any term related to any of its shows, and then spammed YouTube with 100,000 DMCA take-down notices alleging that all of these clips infringed its copyright and demanding that they be censored off the Internet. YouTube made thousands of clips vanish, and sent warning notices to the people who'd posted them, warning them that they were now on a list of potential copyright infringers and telling them that repeat offenses could lead to having their accounts terminated.

This is shockingly bad behaviour on the part of both Viacom and Google, YouTube's owner. Viacom's indiscriminate spamigation is incredibly negligent and evil. They certainly know that a search for a term like "Redbones" will catch videos like Jim Moore's Sunday nite dinner at Redbones in Somerville, Mass (a 30 second clip of Moore and several friends "having dinner in a ribs place in Somerville"). The idea that they have members of the bar -- officers of the court! -- signing affidavits swearing that they have a good-faith belief that these clips infringe their copyrights is disgraceful. Practicing law is a privilege, not a right. The law societies should be holding these attorneys to account for this kind of behaviour.

But Google's lawyers should have known better, too. The DMCA says that if a web-hoster ignores a takedown request, it's liable for copyright damages if the material in question is found to be infringing. YouTube can't afford to just let any lunatic -- including the savage pricks at Viacom -- indiscriminately censor the content it hosts. That's not fair to its customers.

It would cost a lot in lawyer-hours to investigate takedown requests and pick out the ones worth paying attention to, but that's part of the cost of doing business as YouTube. It costs a lot to provide the bandwidth for the files, but YouTube/Google wouldn't dream of skimping on connectivity. Lawyer-letters are just another load that GooTube needs to provision for.

And Google can take steps now to reduce that load: sue the living shit out of Viacom. We've got precedent -- the Diebold debacle -- for the idea that abusing the DMCA takedown process is illegal. Courts have been willing to punish this kind of excess by awarding fees and damages.

If Google sued every company that used indiscriminate takedown notices to remove material that it hosted -- on Blogger, YouTube, and elsewhere -- they'd put the fear of god into bullies like Viacom. They'd change the landscape so that DMCA notices were only used by people who were genuinely being ripped off, and not firehosed by idiots to every site that matches a search-term.

Big companies can sometimes make the world a better place by using the courts to set clear precedents that work for all of us. Sony gave us the Betamax decision. Verizon gave us RIAA v Verizon. Google could save us from takedown spammers. Link

A fully mobile, remote-controlled audio-animatronic "Mobile Muppet Lab" made an appearance at the Disney Christmas Party this year, and now the same beast has been spotted making the rounds of the Imagineering parking-lot. No word yet on when it'll appear in the parks.

The sculpts of Bunsen & Beaker were based on the really-for-real puppets that were used in the production of "Muppets Tonight." The folks at Muppet Holding Company LLC (Now Muppet Studios LLC) made these cloth characters available to WDI. And the Imagineers then carefully measured each Muppet to make sure that they got the scale on each of these new "Living Creature Initiative" figures just right.

More to the point, Dave Goelz made a trip down to Glendale late last year to consult on the Muppet Mobile Lab project. And he reportedly seemed thrilled with the job that WDI had done with his character, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

So when will Bunsen & Beaker stop playing the party circuit and finally make an appearance in the theme parks? According to what I've heard, the Imagineers weren't entirely pleased with how the Muppet Mobile Lab performed at Disney's corporate Christmas party. Which is why this "Living Creature Initiative" unit was then taken back to Glendale for a little tweaking. (More to the point, so that the roughly-worked-out scripts for Bunsen & Beaker's mostly improv routines could be punched up a bit).

Link (Thanks, Ricky!)

Cnet's Elinor Mills has a great article on the demise of "pithy, witty and provocative headlines" -- the bread-and-butter of print publishing. You can win awards with a headline like "BASTARDS!" over a shot of the Twin Towers in flames, but in a search-engine results-page, that headline is invisible. Instead, you want a clean, informative headline that alphabetizes well (no punctuation, numbers or articles at the start), along with a totally straight, totally informative lede graf.

I first encountered this idea in Jakob Nielsen's "Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines", and we're great fans of it here at Boing Boing (though we sometimes let a great joke come ahead of an informative headline...). I actually think that this is part of the secret of our success -- we write headlines like wire-service stringers, headlines that are meant to be easy to grok from a cluster of RSS links, search-results, and so on.

The Boston Globe is a recent convert to this philosophy, and it's working well for them: though they're ranked 15th in print circulation nationwide, they're number four on the Web, all down to attending to the ways that search engines consume and regurgitate information.

On January 2, The Wall Street Journal Online posted a story with the headline: "Green Beans Comes Marching Home."

It happened to be an article about the Green Beans Coffee Co., which serves overseas U.S. military bases, opening its first cafe in the United States.

Let's say you were interested in the subject but didn't know the Journal had written an article on it. You might type into a search engine some combination of keywords like "Green Beans," "coffee," "U.S. military," "bases" and "soldiers." Various combinations failed to return a link to the article in the first page of results on Google. Using all of the keywords and terms separated like that did find the article, but not on The Wall Street Journal site. Instead, it was on a blog site that had reposted the article word for word.

Link (via /.)

These cufflinks sport (nonfunctional, but) handsome clockworks. I can stare at watchworks forever; my grandfather was a watchmaker and I was endlessly fascinated by the thousands of movements he had lying around the place. All these little precision-manufactured gears, and if you stare at them long enough, you can see how they work... Link (via Gizmodo)

See also:
Sterling skull cufflinks
Space Invaders cufflinks
Wrist-mounted instrumentation: nerdy cufflinks
HOWTO make cufflinks out of Ethernet connectors
Nintendo cufflinks
Lego jewelry

It wasn't all ATHF all the time on Boing Boing this week, even though it may have seemed that way. Here are our favorite posts from the last seven days.

• Disney's employee manual, 1943
• Snakes eat poisonous toads and collect their poison
• Horizontal gene transfer explains evolutionary jumps
• Interior shots of Putin's jet
• Inside organized credit-card fraud
• NPR Xeni Tech - Guatemala: digital archives may help find "disappeared."
• Amazing Hot Wheels video
• Boston LED terror scare: a message to the media

Here's a press release I received from the office of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. She insists on called the ATHF signs "hoax devices." I assume that's because the case against the two young men who placed the signs around Boston depends on convincing the court that the two defendants were perpetrating a hoax. Of course, they didn't perpetrate a hoax because they didn't do anything deceitful.

This is just another example of the extreme over-reaction by the city of Boston in this farcical incident. Neither Cartoon Network nor the two men who were arrested yesterday are responsible for the fear and inconvenience that the citizens of Boston had to endure on Wednesday. And it's not the police's fault, or the emergency response workers, either. They were commendably doing their job and putting their life on the line without question or hesitation.

Instead, the ones to blame are the Boston city officials, whose astoundingly incompetent response to the report of a suspicious device triggered the panic. The people of Boston should be clamoring for the resignation of the mayor and the head of the department of security for being the only city in the ten-city ad campaign that didn't notice the signs hanging in plain sight for two full weeks and then misidentifying them in a way that caused widespread panic.

Now these shamefaced bureaucrats are rounding up scapegoats and asking Turner to pay for the damages caused by their own ineptitude. Talk about a hoax.

STATEMENT OF MASSACHUSETTS ATTORNEY GENERAL MARTHA COAKLEY REGARDING ONGOING SETTLEMENT DISCUSSIONS WITH TURNER BROADCASTING & INTERFERENCE, INC.  

“The Attorney General’s Office, on behalf of the various state and local agencies who responded to the hoax device scare earlier this week, is engaged in ongoing discussions with those parties and with Turner Broadcasting and Interference, Inc., regarding restitution of claims and issues raised by Wednesday’s events.  As has been reported, Turner Broadcasting has offered to pay restitution and other costs associated with the response and investigation, and the company has been very cooperative with our office.  At this time, we believe we are close to reaching finality in a resolution of this matter.   

We have also begun discussions with the attorneys for the two defendants who were arraigned yesterday in connection with the placement of the hoax devices regarding a resolution to the criminal charges.  

Obviously, there are a number of parties involved in these negotiations, all of whom must meet agreement on any settlement.  Due to the complicated nature of these negotiations, as well as our desire to reach a conclusion that is fair and appropriate for all of the agencies involved, and is in the best interests of the Commonwealth, we will meet on Monday, February 5, 2007, and we hope to finalize amounts and arrangements.  A public announcement of the settlement should be made shortly after the parties are in agreement.”

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Stickers: This is engineering, not bomb-making
• Boston LED terror scare: a message to the media
• Mark on ABC news about Mooninite devices
• Fake pipe bombs found in Boston
• Video of Mooninite menaces
• Boston Mooninite installer arrested
• Boston Channel photoshops Mooninite LED signs
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the Bomb T-Shirts
• LED ad campaign ignites terrorism scare in Boston

Link to instructions on how to pre-emptively abort those horrendously annoying Snap preview bubbles on websites you visit. There are actually several methods, one of which involves accepting a cookie *from* Snap.com. Alternately, as a commenter on that blog entry points out, you can use Firefox + Adblock and block spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js. (via Bruce Sterling)

Gar says: Holy Gopod. Have you seen this video, from 1975, of Telly Savalas ah... speaking that warhorse of '70s wedding cheese "If?" I've never seen anything more mind-scouring in my life.

I like how he almost burns one of his... harem-members(?). And are we looking at this scene out the neck of a brown-glass beer bottle or down the barrel of a gun? I vote for the latter. Okay, I think I'll grow my hair back now...
Link

Reader comment:

Jon Adams says:

I think you're watching him from the inside of a womb. From the point of view of one of his unborn offspring. And you're supposed to decide, knowing he's the man who's seed created you, whether or not you want to come out.

John sez, "My friend Francine is big into both crafts and alternate histories, so she turned her spinning wheel into a steampunk delight. Her blog explains how she did it and her pics are on Flickr." Link (Thanks, John!)

When I lived in London for a short while in the mid-80s, I used to come across old comic book "annuals" at street markets. The stories were pretty bad. Mister kitty has a page of the worst ones. Link (Via Why, That's Delightful!)

The LA Weekly has an interesting article about a snow cone vendor who was allegedly murdered by his girlfriend after a witch doctor told her the snow cone vendor had placed a curse on her.

(Shown here: photo of suspected killer Maria Gomez) In the 1950s, Cuban-Americans opened L.A.’s first botanica, which was closely associated with Afro-Cuban religion. Eventually, many botanicas became religious-supply stores that sold herbs and candles touting mystical powers. They are often centers for immigrant faith, supporting the folk-religion practices of Mexican and Central American traditions.

Southern California has close to 500 botanicas — at least a dozen near the intersection of Alvarado and Sixth streets in Los Angeles. Heavily Latino Huntington Park has more than 30. The shops and their spiritualistas are believed to influence the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Link

Entertaining video showing how Microsoft would re-designed Apple's elegant and understated packaging for the iPod. Link (Thanks, Scott!) The video of the redesigned iPod packaging first appeared last year. Later it was confirmed by Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla that their own packaging team created.

Reader comment:

Andrew says:

The video of the redesigned iPod packaging first appeared last year. Later it was confirmed by Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla that their own packaging team created it.

"Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla on Tuesday confirmed with iPod Observer that his company initiated the creation of the iPod packaging parody video that was first reported last month. "It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding," he said via e-mail."

From iPod Observer 3/14/06:

Simon Lovell's "How to Cheat at Everything: A Con Man Reveals the Secrets of the Esoteric Trade of Cheating, Scams and Hustles," is a veritable encyclopedia of cons, scams, tricks and rip-offs. Lovell is a magician by trade, and much of the book is given over to detailed sleight-of-hand HOWTOs for palming, greasing, fixing and cheating cards, dice, coins, and so on. Truth be told, this section bogged down a little for me -- unlike, say, The Big Con, which tries to give a representative sample of the world's con-games, Lovell is bent on detailing all of them. But this is more than made up for by the charming, breezy anaecdotes about rip-off bar-bets, boiler-room operations, and so on. I picked this up as reference for stories -- con-jobs are great fiction fodder -- but found myself absorbing its message in pro-active self-defense. Reading this thing cover-to-cover can leave you feeling pretty damned paranoid. Link

Update: Harry sez, "For one summer Simon Lovell was a Councilor at "Camp Island Lake" where he headed up the card magic program. Somehow he had convinced the management to let him teach an activity called "Cheats, Con's and Swindles" which was very popular. About three weeks in however management shut the activity down because, shockingly, many of the kids taking it were swindling other campers out of cash."

Evan adds, "Simon Lovell is crazy but extremely nice, I've known him for quite a while and seen him perform. He was once gambling with an asshole in Macau who was being rude to a cocktail waitress. To get him back he scammed him out of his car and gave the keys directly to the cocktail waitress as a tip. He was formally trained in Oxford as a mathematician but has spent years in jail for cons and scams. As a joke he once slid into the back seat of his friends car, put a burlap sack over him and while they passed a police car he wiggled around as if trying to escape just to see how the cops would react. He was arrested."

While sharing a stage with Bill Gates at a Vista launch, Romanian president Traian Basescu said that Romania's software industry owes its existence to pirated software. Gates pretended he didn't hear him.

According to Reuters, Basescu said, during a joint news conference with Gates, that piracy helped the younger generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania.

It also helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world. He claimed that all this piracy "ten years ago" was an investment in Romania's friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.

Link

Raph Koster has just uploaded the full, 62MB, 31,406-message archive of the seminal MUD-DEV list, the Ur-list where virtual world designers all started out, laying the groundwork for all the MMORPGs (like Second Life and World of Warcraft):

[I]it occurs to me that likely there are many readers who do not know why this matters. MUD-Dev was the principal location of high-level technical and design discussion for all forms of online world design — which was, of course mostly MUDs, but folks from Meridian 59, UO, Dark Sun Online, The Realm, EverQuest, and many of the other graphical worlds participated as well. Many of the snippets on the site come from there, and combing through these very archives was the source of the original Laws of Online World Design. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom there.

Link

These MP3s from a 1960s corporate LP for the Monroe Calculator company combine schmaltziness and slickness for a result that's both infectious and obnxious.

After an overly lengthly instrumental overture, the Monroe sales staff was treated to a full production that introduced new product lines, boasted about smashing the competition, and reinforced company ideals and values. The salesmen’s egos even got a stroke with the sultry number, ‘Monroe Man‘. Who knew that calculator pitch men held such power over the ladies?

Link (Via PCL Linkdump)

Great 1969 video of Desmond Dekker performing "The Israelites" Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• 9 great old punk videos
• 7 punk and post-punk female singer videos
• Boing Boing's 60 most recent video posts

Check out Roadrace, the "Citizen Kane of Hot Wheels car chase videos," according to COOP!
Link (Thanks, COOP!)

In 2002, hospital worker and teacher Adel Hamad was picked up in a routine sweep of Arabs living in Pakistan and promptly shipped off to Guantánamo. The allegations against him are ridiculous. Hamad's lawyer went to Afghanistan and Pakistan and interviewed the people who knew him, creating a short documentary in the process. By all accounts, Adel Hamad is a kind, apolitical man who dedicated his life to helping others.

However, the Bush administration nullified habeas corpus, and so Hamad is not able to get a trial to prove his innocence.

His supporters have launched "Project Hamad," using "Andre has a posse" style posters to raise awareness of his plight. The video is about 9 minutes long.

Adel Hamad was a teacher of elementary school orphans, a hospital worker, and someone who coordinated the delivery of food, medicine and blankets to refugees. He has been imprisoned for 5 years and classified as an enemy combatant, despite the lack of any allegations or evidence that he ever acted against the U.S. or its allies, or even had political sympathies for those who did. His friends and colleagues describe him as a funny, apolitical man who loved charity work and ping-pong. One of the U.S. Army Majors at his Tribunal called his detention unconscionable.

Link

The University of Southern California has a ridiculous "free speech zone" -- the only place you're allowed to stand on campus and speak your mind without prior approval. Yesterday, a student group held a "knit-in" in front of the campus bookstore to protest the sale of sweatshop-produced clothing inside, and the administration ordered the students to relocate to the Free Speech Zone.

I teach at USC and I can't imagine how this is consistent with our values. Universities should dream of students who organize themselves to take action on social issues -- this is exactly the kind of thing we should be encouraging. Universities are meant to be marketplaces for ideas, not planned economies where the commissars tell you when and where you're allowed to speak your mind. What an embarrassment.

The USC Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation (SCALE) held a knit-in in front of the Pertusati University Bookstore to protest the university's contracts with manufacturers it claims use sweatshop labor to produce Trojan merchandise, but the knit-in was broken up minutes after the participants began knitting.

Lori White, associate vice president for Student Affairs, told SCALE it would have to relocate its protest to Hahn Plaza, an area near Tommy Trojan and the Student Union that allows for large group gatherings without informing the university beforehand.

Link (Thanks, Lewis!)

Update: Richard Morgan suggests his "long feature I did for Playboy about the systemic oppressive forces college students are going through. It actually started out from my time covering federal student policies for The Chronicle of Higher Education."

David adds, "the University of Central Florida also has a 'free-speech' zone, which is currently a hotly debated topic on campus. The campus is rather large, and the areas that this allows are off of the main portion of campus, with much less foot traffic than the Student Union and SGA area, where different companies can set up booths and stands to sell products and get new customers. Also of note is the ongoing battle between the Students for a Democratic Society, which reformed on campus in the fall, and the administration. Apparently, you're allowed to sign people up for the military or entry-level jobs, or sell them cellphones and vacations, but not give donated items such as clothing and books and bicycles to students."

t-shirt
night writer
throwies
usb christmas tree
clock
kevin mccormick
instructables
lite brite

Link

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!).

Image: Aqua Teen Bomber Force t-shirt: Link.

This recut trailer for When Harry Met Sally does an admirable job of reimagining the rom-com as a creepy horror film. It's the music that makes it. Link (Thanks, Wendy!)

See also:
West Side Story becomes trailer for zombie flick
Mary Poppins horror movie remix vid - SCARY!
Sleepless In Seattle - recut as a horror movie
The Shining, if written and directed by Nora Ephron

Update: John sez, "I'm the guy who made that when Harry Met Sally Trailer. I've lurked on Boing Boing forever. Thanks for the link today!

"I noticed something a little ironic today regarding Viacom, YouTube, and my little video. iFilm, owned by viacom, took the recut, copied it, and uploaded it to their own viral video site, without referring back to the original video embed. Meanwhile VH1, also part of viacom, was nicer about it and embedded the youtube on their best week ever blog. What's funny is that it all happened the same day Viacom takes public their spat with YouTube and orders 100,000 videos to be taken down. A little contradictory, eh?"

Gritty cyberpunk writer Chris Nakashima-Brown has a great new story, RPM, up on Futurismic today, about a troupe of media hacking guerrillas fighting against the War on Terror. Chris's turns of phrase and ideas are so hilariously over-the-top-demented, it's impossible to read him without grinning:

“The revolution will be televised,” smiles 0z0, tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel. 0z0 has a tendency for drama. He is an actor, after all, under the stage name Jackson Booth. You may know him better as Derek, the taboo black boyfriend on the ABC daytime soap Burning Hills.

Percy is his revolutionary consort, more Tanya than Patty Hearst. A Green raised in the shadows of Empire, she’s the muse that keeps pushing 0z0 to move from culture jamming whimsy to bandolero-emptying direct action. Prone to wearing fetishized remixes of extreme Islamic fashion, on good days she’s the Taliban Batgirl.

If you believe our press packets, we are the Celebrity Liberation Front, a group in which I serve as the Che Guevara to 0z0’s Fidel, or maybe the Pancho to his Cisco. We detonate cathode ray information bombs: suicide bombing for the remote control generation. Definitely a bigger charge than my day job as product placement middleman.

Link

See also:
RU Sirius interviews neo-cyberpunk writer Chris Nakashima-Brown
Science fiction take on the future of Mid-East media
Magic-realism as Weapon of Mass Destruction
A Brief History of Negative Space
Sf story about Saddam's Frazetta-dealer

Michael has notes and video from Jimmy Wales's talk at NYU tonight; the founder of Wikipedia focused on one of his new venutres, Wikia, which offers free hosting for specialized, open wikis:

Given the audiences familiarity with Wikipedia, Wales skipped most of his prepared speech on that and after he gave a brief background on open source software, how it works, and the fact that you can be commercially successful doing and using it, he spent most of his time talking about Wikia.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

WorldChanging's Alex Steffen sez, "Our colleague Cameron Sinclair at Architecture for Humanity is about to launch the beta of the Open Architecture Network, which will let users upload, share and modify designs for humanitarian/ sustainable innovations, under a Creative Commons license. It's essentially a way to rip, mix and burn blueprints for solutions to the problems posed by poverty, urbanization and environmental decline."

With a coalition of sponsors and partners, including Sun, Architecture for Humanity built and is starting to test a system designed to be not just a repository of good ideas, but a tool for collaboration and research. Users will be able, Cameron says, to search existing ideas based on a number of criteria (such as, say, "housing, affordable, tropical, community-designed, passive solar, bamboo materials) and the ratings of other users.

This is no elitist playground, either. "We're not defining an architect as someone who's been through 7 years of education," Cameron says. "If this thing isn't useful to informal community designers living in favelas, it'll fail. We aim to prove that you don't need $15,000 worth of CAD programs to come up with design solutions. You can participate with a napkin sketch, a borrowed scanner and a public Internet connection." (However, it should be noted that the site will be available initially only in English, which will further limit its utility to barefoot architects.)

The Network will also provide insight not only into what people have built elsewhere, but how they built it: "It's not just designs, it goes all the way through to implementation -- it will have not just innovative abstract solutions, but actual projects and built buildings."

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

The state of West Virginia is putting a Dance Dance Revolution game in every public school in order to stem the tide of childhood obesity:

The state, which plans to put the popular dancing video game in every one of its public schools, said on Wednesday research suggested that it helped put a halt to weight gain.

Preliminary results from a 24-week study of 50 overweight or obese children, aged 7 to 12, showed that those who played the game at home for at least 30 minutes five days per week maintained their weight and saw a reduction in some risk factors for heart disease and diabetes.

Link (via Raph Koster)

See also:
High-speed Dance Dance Revolution kid juggling three pins
Dance Dance Revolution, the CBS TV series
Dance Dance Revolution as free software/free culture
Dance Dance Revolution for pocket-calculators
DDR for weight-loss
DDR is not eeeevil! Game enthusiasts respond
A darker tale of DDR -- theft, hot chicks, destruction
CC-licensed step files for Dance Dance Revolution
Life on the pro Dance Dance Revolution circuit
Dance Dance Revolution at 765 schools
Dance Dance Revolution as teen weightloss aid
Dance Dance Resurrection
Dance Dance Immolation: interpretive arson art
Dance Dance Revolution remix teaches fundamentals of genetics

Virtuoso hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has a new batch of stickers for Bostonians and anyone else who's worried that some idiot National Security technophobe will mistake an engineering project for a time-bomb: stickers that say, "Don't Panic! This is NOT A BOMB! Do not be afraid. Do not call the police. Stop letting the terrorists win," and "Improvised device: contains no explosives, not a bomb. I am a hacker, not a terrorist." Link

See also:
Boston LED terror scare: a message to the media
Mark on ABC news about Mooninite devices
Fake pipe bombs found in Boston
Video of Mooninite menaces
Boston Mooninite installer arrested
Boston Channel photoshops Mooninite LED signs
Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the Bomb T-Shirts
LED ad campaign ignites terrorism scare in Boston

Alice from the Wonderland Blog bought a Sony laptop last year and sprang for an extra $300 worth of "home service" warranty. The first time it broke down (faulty hard-drive, plus Sony "forgot" to install the Bluetooth module) the service tech put it back together wrong and now it doesn't work. Sony says she's had her quota of service calls, so she's out of luck. The moral: don't buy Sony, and don't trust their warranties.

Long story short: Sony sent out an engineer who replaced the parts, but didn't put my machine back together properly, and now won't send out someone again because I've had my quota of home visits. Yep, even though their work was shoddy, and even though I paid an extra 300 bucks for an extended policy. I also had to bribe the engineer to let me keep my dead HD, because otherwise Sony's policy is to keep it (and all the data!) - because a customer shouldn't get a replacement drive for free

Link

The PDF edition of the (uncopyrighted) 9/11 Commission Report has Adobe's DRM turned on. Even though you're legally allowed to copy, paste and remix the report (US government docs can't be copyrighted), the technology stops you. And it's illegal to break the technology. But hey, who needs democracy when you're busily designing DRM systems? Link (via Michael Geist)

Update: Brian sez, "another official government agency, the Government Printing Office, has it available for download with no DRM."

The Pirate Bay has expanded on its plans to buy Sealand and create an autonomous, no-copyright-zone. Now they've established the Free Nation Foundation, which "aims to found a new society based on the ideals of freedom, equality and sustainable growth" -- a nation where "important ideals" and not "wealth accumulation" rule the day.

What islands are you considering?

* The most likely island at the moment is Ile de Caille, off the coast of Grenada. We are still open to considering other islands – suggestions are welcome.
* However, the focus is not on a particular land mass at this time. The focus is building a strong foundation.

Link (via Digg)

Update: Patrick sez, "The Free Nation Foundation isn't connected to The Pirate Bay, the idea simply began there and a group who had been involved/interested in the TPB Sealand project moved out on their own. There is no direct connection between them, and no plans for the new country to be a server farm. They're really trying to make their own society with the long term goal of buying an island and inhabiting it."

Delightful primitive Michelin Man photographed in Rice Hill, Oregon. Link (Thanks, Coop!)

Image: Ed Adkins, who lives in Guam, has a memo for big media outlets he believes are botching the hell out of the Boston LED terror story.

Sean Bonner feels the same way, and says:

From Metroblogging Boston, here's the first and last posts on the topic. Also reports from Chicago and Austin. Here in Los Angeles I wrote about it yesterday and again this morning. On MSNBC about 45 minutes ago they had some woman in a power suit pontificating about it all saying that there is no way you can "over react to a situation like this" and that "when you idea of a prank is someone elses idea of terrorism you have a problem." No, the problem is when a goofy cartoon character made out of a home made Light-Bright giving you the finger if your idea of terrorism you are the one who needs a Bahamavention.

Link. Infernal machines, indeed.

Link to image (by Kalapusa). As commenter "stretch" on Sean's blog post said,

If the last six years needed a punchline, it was delivered in Boston yesterday.

BB reader Margaret Maloney says, "Boston's best paper, The Weekly Dig, is properly ashamed of the way our city has reacted to a bunch of LEDs and D batteries." Snip:

Next, let’s all get out our dictionary and look up “hoax”, shall we? Because while “War of the Worlds” was a hoax, this was not. There was no subterfuge involved, and no effort made to convince people that these devices were bombs. If I see a scary looking tree out my bedroom window, think it’s a monster, and then discover upon closer inspection that it isn’t, it doesn’t mean the tree has perpetrated a hoax against me. What it means is that for a moment I took leave of my senses. And just because I’m embarrassed about it doesn’t give me the right to go cut down the tree.

Link.

(Image: thanks, Jason)

Related posts on BB:

Stickers: This is engineering, not bomb-making

Boston LED terror scare: a message to the media

Mark on ABC news about Mooninite devices

Fake pipe bombs found in Boston

Video of Mooninite menaces

Boston Mooninite installer arrested

Boston Channel photoshops Mooninite LED signs

Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the Bomb T-Shirts

LED ad campaign ignites terrorism scare in Boston

Today on NPR "Day to Day," the fourth of a 5-part report I brought back from Central America -- "Guatemala: Unearthing the Future." In the series, we learn how new technology is being used to solve old problems, and this fourth segment is all about infrastructure tech devices hecho a mano -- made by hand -- in Guatemala.

Link to today's episode, "Grassroots Technology at Xela Teco," with streaming audio (Real/Win), and some short video clips. MP3 Link. Link to narrated slideshow. Here are more photos: Link.

Link to series home page.

"Xeni Tech" home, and podcast feed. Here's a reporter's notebook blog with more background on these stories: Link.

Many of Guatemala's rural indigenous communities lack infrastructure basics such as clean drinking water, sanitation and electricity.

A group of American eco-engineers in the United States from the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) is working with a number of Mayan villages to change that.

At Xela Teco, a workshop in the town of Quetzaltenango (or Xela for short), tech-minded Guatemalans build eco-friendly devices. The workshop is a small business supported by the U.S.-based nonprofit Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group.

Xela Teco builds environmentally friendly technology that can be used to bring survival basics to poverty-stricken villages in the Mayan highlands: clean water, electricity and fuel.

While Americans are part of the Xela Teco effort right now, their goal is to step aside. The hope is that arming rural communities with certain skill sets will help break a cycle of poverty, disease and malnutrition.

If the effort is successful, Xela Teco may end up becoming a blueprint for the future of development work.

IMAGES: 2007, Xeni Jardin. SPECIAL THANKS to Alex Lee, a longtime BoingBoing reader who emailed and suggested this story in the first place! (Link)

Previously:

Guatemala: Digital archives may help find "disappeared." (part 3)

Guatemala: Storm Victims' Remains Exhumed in Guatemala (part 2)

Guatemala: A Database for the Dead. (part 1)

Reader comment: Jeff says,

Why does Xela Teco use a flying spaghetti monster logo? What's with the dual flying spaghetti monster's fighting it out head-to-head in the screenshot photo? Is this some kind of mayan manichean splinter-cult? Do FSM true believers need to take action?

Peter Haas, director of AIDG (the organization that "incubated" the Xela Teco workshop) says,

No need to worry for the FSM followers, Xelateco is a non-denominational enterprise. That picture on the screen is in actuality a blow up of a circuit diagram of an interface for a buffer circuit for a sound card oscilloscope program. See the final figure on the following page: Link. Hope this clears up any confusion.

On The RU Sirius Show, Jimmy Wales talked about Jaron Lanier's "Digital Maoism" essay and swore his ongoing fealty to Objectivism.

RU SIRIUS: You have a history with Ayn Rand's objectivism. And then, thinking in terms of my friend Jaron Lanier's recent articles about Wikipedia -- you may be the first objectivist (or person even vaguely associated with objectivism), to also be accused of Maoism.

JIMMY WALES: [Laughs] I did think that was quite amusing. I said, "Well, I must be doing something right if I get called such wildly different things. I'm somehow mysterious, even though I'm pretty simple, actually."

That essay was a good example of a critique that had some very interesting and good points. I mean, you could certainly say some of the specific practical problems he identified are things that we have to deal with and struggle with. At the same time, his sort of view of the ideology of us -- of our group -- as being, Maoists or collective intelligence people, or something like that, was really wide of the mark.

Link | Text Version of Jimmy Wales interview

I was on ABC News talking about the ATHF fracas in Boston. Here's the video. (Gee, I like being placed side-by-side with Orson Welles.) Link

D. Ruuska says: "OK here is an interesting development in Boston. It turns out that someone actually planted 2 fake pipe bombs. This matter is totally unrelated to the Cartoon Networrk advertising gone awry. But in this case, the person identified as the alleged culprit, was NOT arrested, even though these items were intended to create fear. Go figure."

The two devices found in an office at Tufts-New England Medical Center and attached to the Longfellow Bridge yesterday morning were not the marketing devices that sparked a daylong panic in Boston, but simulated pipe bombs, police officials said last night.

In the hospital incident, investigators believe a former hospital employee planted the phony bomb in an office at 185 Harrison Ave. He has been identified but has not been charged, the sources said.

Boston Police bomb squad cops detonated the pipe bomb, which was a very realistic-looking fake, the sources said.

Link

An Australian sleeping pill called Stilnox (called Ambien in the US and elsewhere) is suspected of provoking unusual behavior in people.

A suspect sleeping pill is causing Australians to paint the front door, binge-eat, and drive while still asleep, a new study reveals.

The Federal Health Department has received 16 separate reports of odd "sleepwalking" behaviour caused by the drug Stilnox, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

A woman taking the drug "woke with a paintbrush in her hand after painting the front door while asleep," the Adverse Drug Reactions Advisory Committee said in a bulletin published yesterday.

The health department also received 104 reports of hallucinations and 62 of amnesia relating to the drug.

Link

Reader comment:

Paul says:

Stilnox, the “Australian sleeping pill” (sounds like our Prime Minister) you posted about on Boing Boing, is zolpidem tartrate; the same drug known in the US as Ambien – there have been reports of similar effects in people taking Ambien, as you may be aware.

Whitney says: "This is a post to my blog describing what happened when I recently logged on to my long-held Lycos mail account, only to discover all my emails were gone. Apparently if you don't log in at least every 30 days, you must pay $19.95 to get everything back. The person who responded to my request for help seemed to enjoy being an asshole about it."

I’m sorry, no one here has any intentions of helping you with anything.

I am the manager of all of Customer Service. There is no one higher than me that you will speak with.

You violated our policy, which is, despite what you say, completely clear.

No one is holding anything hostage. Your e-mails have been completely deleted, and no amount of money can now restore them.

Link

Cherekee says: "Like the Aqua Teen Hunger Force story, today the Wausau Daily Herald featured an article about a lady in rural Wisconsin who mistook the base to a garden parasol for a landmine(!!). A bomb squad from Fort McCoy came to her house to inspect it." Link

Wearing these bras in Boston could get you arrested. Link (Thanks, D Ruuska!)

RU Sirius will be teaching a six week online course on bOING bOING patron saint Timothy Leary. RU writes, "We’re going to deal with Leary’s personal biographical history head on… contextualizing it all within a framework that understands his project. We will also be dealing with the rarely acknowledged role Leary has played in creating the Transhumanist movement. And we’ll play some games, up and down the brain circuits." The course, titled "Timothy Leary: Personas, Medias & Messages," is being hosted by the Maybe Logic Academy, founded by the late, great Robert Anton Wilson. Class begins online February 26 and costs $130.
Link