As many of you may already know, the courts of the Netherlands and of Canada have rejected the "investigations" conducted by the RIAA's "investigator", Tom Mizzone of MediaSentry. See, e.g. BMG v. Doe and Foundation v. UPC Nederland , based largely on the type of reasoning set forth in the indendent experts' report of Prof. Sips and Dr. Pouwelse of the Parallel and Distributed Systems research group of Delft University. Their report critiqued the "overly simplistic" nature of MediaSentry's work, in that it had omitted a number of procedures which would have been thought necessary to a sound online 'p2p filesharing piracy' investigation.

It should therefore come as no surprise that in the United States, more particularly in UMG v. Lindor, in Brooklyn federal court, the RIAA is trying to prevent disclosure of the "instructions", "parameters", and "processes" of MediaSentry's investigation. In fact, at the oral argument of its protective order motion, the RIAA took the positions that (a) MediaSentry and its investigators are not experts at all; (b) MediaSentry will not testify as to any copyright infringement, but will merely testify as to what it did, and (c) the only witness who will actually be testifying that there was a copyright infringement will be a Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, the founder and co-owner of Palisade Systems, Inc., who supposedly will connect the dots based on what MediaSentry will testify that it did.

Opening tonight, and continuing through March 31: "Island of Relative Stability," the debut Los Angeles solo show by artist Sean Higgins at sixspace:

By depicting purposely-vague environments where location and situation is left to interpretation, Higgins creates an environment where the viewer has no place to stand and no solid sense of place. His vague landscapes are constructed from images, either found or taken by the artist, that are transferred to the back of Plexiglas via an acrylic transfer process - the front of the Plexiglas is then hand-sanded by the artist to produce the desired hazy effect. He attempts to deal with landscape in the contemporary world of "Google Earth" where people interact with landscapes and place in a very different way than previous generations.

I'll be at the opening tonight with other friends of BoingBoing -- stop by and say hi!

We're using weather balloons to go up to approximately 100k feet armed with 4 cameras... 20 megabytes of camera! We'll be taking shots every 7 seconds for two hours and measuring the temperature with the Make: controller and thermistors!

It took 16 people working on this, countless cases of mountain dew, lots of take-out food, and a lot of sleepless nights, and we intend to fly Sunday!

Cloud cover, snow, and mechanical failure may postpone the launch, but we're ready to give it our best shot this weekend.

In this Make: Video Podcast, you'll learn all the details of how to put a weather balloon up into space! The weather balloon will make it up to about 100,000 feet. That's almost 20 miles up and more than twice the height of being in an airplane. It's high enough that the sky is black and you can see the curvature of the earth.

Why would we want to send a package into space? To take pictures and temperature readings of course! We'll be using the Make: Controller to boss around 4 canon sd cameras set up to take a spectacular panoramic picture every 7 seconds! It will also have thermistors on it to measure the temperature as it goes up?

We'll be tracking it with two different systems. The primary system is a gps module connected to a tinytrak which makes the gps data into aprs ham radio packets and then sends them out on 144.39mhz which will get picked up by our receivers and repeaters and then routed to the internet where anyone can watch on google maps and earth in real time!

Previously on Boing Boing:
• 50 most recent videos on Boing Boing

Kara Shallenberg says,

LibriVox volunteers have just completed a public domain audio recording of Charles Darwin's pivotal work, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" -- free to download, copy, and share. It's unabridged and over twenty-four hours long!

Jack follows the story of Jack (of beanstalk, giant-killing, spring heels, etc fame), a rogue Fable who is banished for the sin of making best-selling movies about his adventures. He is kidnapped by mysterious, ultra-violent "librarians" who are responsible for neutering the old, mean stories and turning them into tame, docile things, and plots a grand escape for he and his fellow captured/forgotten fables.

As with all the Fables books, the writing just sings -- snappy dialog, punchy plots, and the artwork is a great mix of the cartoony and the hyperreal. This is a kind of American comic magic-realism, a blending of the mythical and the real. Link, Link to all Fables collections, Link to free download of Fables #1

See also: Scheherezade meets every fable of every land - comic

The Mail.app fan-site Hawk Wings has a great tip for Mail.app users -- a simple command that many are swearing by as a means of evincing a gigantic speedup in Mail.app's performance. If you're suffering through the same hell I lived with back in my PowerBook days, you might give it a shot.

Note: I haven't tried this. You might nuke your mail forever. Make backups. Don't say you weren't warned.

1. Quit Mail.
2. Open Terminal.
3. Type the following:
cd ~/Library/Mail
sqlite3 Envelope\ Index
An sqlite> prompt will appear.
At that prompt, type vacuum subjects;
After a short delay, the prompt will return. Type Control-D to exit.
4. Restart Mail and enjoy the extra speed.

Update: Steve sez, "I have taken the idea of running the sqlite vacuum command on the database for Mail to speed it up and written a script to do the same things to Aperture's database."

It's amazing how the Olympics have come to symbolize bullying corporate greed; overreaching, violent "security measures;" drug abuse and destruction of public facilities and low-income housing.

Bernier has no time to deal with spam, spyware, privacy, or net neutrality but commits to legislation on behalf of the organizers of a sporting event? Moreover, the legislation grants the Olympic organizers enormous power to police the use of anything approaching association with the Olympics. For example, the bill contains a list of expressions to be considered by the federal court to determine whether someone has misled the public into believing that their business is endorsed or associated with the Olympics. The expressions include: winter, gold, silver, bronze, sponsor, Vancouver, Whistler, 2010, tenth, medals, and games. While this looks like a recipe for abuse, the Olympic organizers have assured the public that it "is committed to applying the proposed legislation in a disciplined, sensitive, fair and transparent manner." Perhaps, but many Canadians may justifiably be left to ask whether anyone should be granted the right to govern the use of generic words such as winter or Vancouver.

Update: Fat Cramer sends us this "trailer for a movie made by Conrad Schmidt (of the Work Less Party) documenting opposition to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics."

I was recently interviewed by Vancouver's Georgia Straight and we ended up talking about the public, outdoor urinals that the City of London sets out around Trafalgar Square (departure point for the city's night-busses) on weekends as a way of reducing the rivers of piss that otherwise course through the area. The article notes that some cabbies have taken to driving with empty soda bottles to relieve themselves into in extremis. I once had a cabby tell me that it was legal to get out of a cab and piss down the wheel-well.

In Beijing, where the average salary is a 10th of London's, there are 7,700 toilets, or one for every 1,948 people. China's capital plans to renovate 3,700 in time for the 2008 Olympics. London, which will host the 2012 games and has one toilet per 18,000 residents, has no such plans...

A 53 percent increase in London house prices during the past five years has helped fuel the decline of the public toilet, as authorities sell valuable real estate to developers.

``It's not cost-effective to keep them,'' said Tony Wood, a real estate agent who helped convert a multi-stalled Victorian- era toilet in Forest Hill into a split-level apartment that rents for 700 pounds a month.

Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.

Even if we had to make it all up.

See also:
Steampunk Star Wars
Steampunk watch
Beautiful steampunk laptop
HOWTO make a steampunk keyboard
HOWTO make etched brass steampunk journals
HOWTO make a steampunk spinning-wheel
Steampunk walking robot
Steampunk cartoon from SciFi channel: Amazing Screw-On Head
Homebrew mechanical steampunk lion from Belgium
Steampunk robotics
Steampunk weekly serial - handsome editions
Steampunk rayguns
Steampunk Transformer-bots
Ukrainian steampunk plane
Steampunk casemod with a "furnace"
Steampunk submarine free paper toy
Steampunk/dead media photoshopping contest
Brighton's steampunk rolling sea-platform
Steampunk Slashdot
Steampunk mecha-wars
Steampunk car-wars
New York's steampunk pneumatic subway

Um, correct us if we're wrong here but:

* People carry timepieces.

* The post office is not a casino. People aren't going to lose themselves in the fun and mail more letters than they'd originally intended.

Is this the best they can come up with?

Williams, whose father was born in India, has several Indian dishes in her bonus container, including Punjabi kadhi with pakora - vegetable fritters topped with yogurt and curry - and mutter paneer, a curry dish. The dishes are packaged to have a long shelf life in space.

Her U.S. crew mate, astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, is an even bigger "foodie." Lopez-Alegria, who was born in Madrid but grew up in California, had Spanish muffins known as magdalenas, chorizo pork sausage and latte in his bonus container.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.

Blumenthal said Wednesday that Best Buy has also confirmed to his office the existence of the intranet site, but has so far failed to give clear answers about its purpose and use.

Update: An anonymous Best Buy salesman objects to being called a "dirtbag" above -- he says that it's not known among the sales staff that they are participating in a enormous, systematic fraud on Best Buy customers who were being deliberately deceived by an illegal, unethical fake website:

That's exactly right. I take particular pride in trying to do right by the people who ask me a question. All I have is the internal system which we use; I can't get out to the public site from inside a store, because the computers are locked down to prevent general Internet access.

Since I heard about the differences between the internal and external sites, I have been telling customers (quietly, so the managers don't hear) that there can be differences. I've even submitted an "Ask the BUS (Business Direction Team)" question, requesting clarification on what the hell the company is doing with differing prices on the external and internal websites.

Does that sound like the actions of a dirtbag?

BoingBoing reader Vidiot asks:

How long until a phisher knocks up a copy of the P2Plawsuit.com online settlement page and starts intimidating people into paying up?

The design on that RIAA site -- which doesn't even display the RIAA logo -- is so low-rent, it already looks like a phishing site.

Update: Regina sez, "The Nemo was actually done up as a campaign in New Zealand...I so want one!"

Update: Laura sez, "I have a friend whose Dad loves chess, and seeing Cory's post about the Biggles chess cookie cutters made me wonder if anyone had them for sale. Sure enough, this website has six chess figure cookie cutters. I'm not sure what to do about the chessboard though."

Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles, by Will Elder.

Will Elder was a longtime contributor to Mad Magazine and a partner with Harvey Kurtzman on many post-Mad projects, including Playboy's Little Annie Fanny. This slim book features many pencil sketches and doodles from Elder's notebooks, revealing a whimsical and curious mind. The title "Chicken Fat" comes from the tons of little inside jokes and funny extra goodies Elder added to his super-dense yet highly-readable comic book panels. He's on the top of my list for all-time best comic book artists. (See also my review of Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art)

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, by Matt Madden

I can't believe I didn't find out about this book until a couple of weeks ago. The author came up with a one-page comic book script -- a very mundane one about a man walking to the refrigerator and getting interrupted by someone in another room who asks him what time it is, which makes him forget what he wanted to eat or drink. It sounds dull, but Madden has drawn 99 different comics based on this script and the result is enthralling. He draws the page in various genre styles (superhero, manga, paranoid religious tract, underground) and also using different literary and cinematic conventions. If you like Scott McCloud's books about comics, you'll want this one.

S Curves: The Art of Shane Glines

400 full color pages by one of the modern masters of Good Girl Art. His smooth lines and clean style has been influenced by the best magazine illustrators from the 1920s through the 1960s. This hardback book costs $100, because Shane self-published it using Lulu, but the quality is great. If you aren't familiar with his work, visit his site.

BONUS: Gilbert & Sullivan style version of "Baby Got Back" (Thanks, Jim!)

A physical time machine—a device available at Wal-Mart, as opposed to a natural wormhole somewhere in the cosmos—is possible. You begin with something square. Next, install mirrors at the corners and send a beam of light, perhaps from a laser, at one of the mirrors. The light will bounce to the second mirror, the third, the fourth and back through this cycle forever.

The force of this constantly circulating light will begin twisting the empty space in the middle. Einstein's theory of relativity dictates that everything happening to space must happen to time, so time begins twisting, too.

To fit a human inside this time machine we need to stack a bunch of these mirrors on top of each other, and add more light beams. Eventually, we'll have a cylinder of circulating light. Once we step inside, we're ready to fly through time....

Here's the catch: The time machine only allows someone to travel as far back as when the machine was first activated. Since no time traveler has shown up yet—check-out aisle tabloids notwithstanding—no such machine has yet been invented.

Link

How good are humans at identifying faces? Amazingly good, even with only a few sparse pixels' worth of information. Inspired by the research of Pawan Sinha, who had found that people can recognize faces using just 12 × 14 pixels' worth of information, we wondered if people can distinguish between faces and non-faces with even less information. So, last Friday, we asked CogDaily readers to try to identify faces as small as one-quarter the size of those used in Sinha's study: just 6 by 7 pixels. Readers rated 8 different photos in four different sizes ranging from 20 pixels wide to just 6 pixels. How'd they do?

Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War Two. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes...

"If I hadn't felt its weight, I wouldn't even have realised that it was a bomb," she said.

"Right now, my nose is burning and my throat hurts," she told the St. Petersburg Times, but she said she felt a lot better than she has in weeks...

She saw an infectious disease specialist, a neurologist, a chiropractor, a hypnotist and an acupuncturist. She tried a patented device that is designed to stop hiccups, plus all the old remedies.

Update:

Jenny Ryan let me know that Fantagraphics has more information about this. It's not Clowes, but it sure looks like him. Nick Parish says the illustrator is Felix Reiners. Why didn't they just hire Clowes in the first place?

More machine than man, Vader is the Empire's most decorated General and a very powerful practitioner of the Force's dark arts. He is obsessed with communicating with the spirits of the dead, spending every sleepless night trying in vain to contact his lost love. Twisted and broken in body and mind, Vader is driven with sadistic passion.

Because Cottrell is autistic, he has a hard time playing by the unspoken rules of prison life. The guards have taken a special dislike to him.

In his letters to the Weekly, [Cottrell] says one prison official took away his physics papers, telling him that the science he was studying conflicted with the teachings of Jesus. Another forbade his Chinese studies, even after he had learned Mandarin so well that, he says, he served as a translator between guards and a Chinese-speaking prisoner.

But his worst months in prison came late last year. Shortly after the Bureau of Prisons Office of Inspector General released a report suggesting that federal prisons — including Lompoc — were not dealing harshly enough with convicted international terrorists inside the prisons, Cottrell was told he would have to serve as a witness in a bizarre “investigation.”

The probe focused on Lompoc’s Department of Corrections education coordinator, who procured the Chinese-language study materials for Cottrell. Cottrell says that when he refused to testify against the education coordinator, he was thrown into the Hole at Lompoc, and denied visitors and phone calls.

Cottrell says he was not given a clear explanation for his detention. “I haven’t been given any formal sanctions, no lock-up order from the Captain [of the prison guards], no rationale, no date of release, no anything,” wrote Cottrell in a December 18 letter to the Weekly. “They’ve taken every single physics text, Chinese story and piece of literature I’ve accumulated . . . and told me it’s all going to be burned.

“As far as I know,” he concluded, “I’m in the Hole for studying Chinese.”

After being abandoned by their mothers shortly after birth, the four play fight, nipping and teasing each other, and cuddling up for a shared nap when they are worn out.

"This is unusual and would never happen in the wild," said zoo keeper Sri Suwarni, bottle-feeding a baby chimp on Wednesday. "Like human babies, they only want to play."

"Triumph of Victory" is a reenactment of a WWII airman's similar fall. I ballparked the amount of time he'd've spent airborne based on a terminal velocity equation I found online. Shot in a little studio in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, and starring Sean Kelly of the late, lamented Spanganga art space.

Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told (the Ottawa Citizen)...

"We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough," he said.

I am honored to address you today and am pleased that you, unlike so many members of Congress and most state legislatures, have recognized your solemn responsibility to examine whether proceedings should be commenced for the impeachment of the President of the United States.

Never before has there been such a compelling case for impeachment and removal from office of the president of the United States for heinous human rights violations, breaches of trust, abuses of power injurious to the nation, war crimes, misleading Congress and the American people about threats to our nation’s security and the supposed case for war, and grave violations of treaties, the Constitution, and domestic statutory law.

Link (Via Impeach for Peace)

It is a simple brute force attack, dumb as a rock that just tries keys. If it gets one, you manually have to check it and try activation. Is is ugly, takes hours, is far from point and click, but it is said to work. I don't have any Vista installs because of the anti-user licensing so I have not tested it personally.

The method of attack has got to be quite troubling for MS on many grounds. The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people

It won't take long for boxes bought at retail to be activated before they are bought, and the people who plunk down money for the mal^h^h^hsoftware for real get 'you are a filthy pirate' messages. Won't that be a laugh riot at the MS phone banks in Bangalore.

Reader comment:

Ian says:

The number of people on the planet is a bit over 6 billion. Let's say for argument sake that there are 10^10 people alive. Let's ignore the actual character set used for Vista keys and assume for argument sake that it just uses decimal digits*. That gives a keyspace of 10^25 keys. So, if every person on the planet brute forced a key they would only have used 10^-15 of the keyspace. Assuming that Vista keys are randomly distributed in the keyspace the probability under these conditions that a forced key will match a legitimate one is vanishingly small (the birthday paradox means that it'll be greater than the naive 10^-15 but I haven't time to calculate it because m'dinner's arrived.). Obviously the real keyspace is even bigger, probably on the close order of 36^25 (8 x 10^38).

* This is just to simplify whipping up an example and saves me from having to find the actual character set used in Vista keys.

See also: My 2004 UNC talk
iBiblio's speaker series

John Brownlee of the Wired blog Table of Malcontents says,

John Edwards' Blog has a wonderful account up about how their Second Life headquarters was defaced with "Marxist/Leninist posters and slogans, a feces spewing obsenity, and a photoshopped picture of John in blackface." John Edwards' is apparently working with Linden Labs now to figure out the perps. I love it, especially the shrill, self-righteous tone of the post: they just can't believe it, which is a riot. You see countless news stories about this, over and over again: the sorry gray drones of political parties or corporations rushing to establish a presence in Second Life because it's the thing to do, only to find themselves staring in horror directly into the collective Goatse.cx of the Internet's soul.

Consumerist points to a PDF of the "pre-litigation settlement letter" RIAA lawyers sent to college students accused of copyright infringement. The accused are invited to fess up and pay up in 20 days (at this website, for instance), or the RIAA will sue (and, this FAQ says, tell their parents):

We have asked your Internet Service Provider to forward this letter to you in advance of our filing lawsuit against you in federal court for copyright infringement. We represent a number of large record companies, including SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, as well as all of their subsidiaries ("Record Companies,") in perusing claims of copyright infringement against individuals who have illegally uploaded or downloaded sound-recordings on peer-to-peer networks.

We have gathered evidence that you have been infringing copyrights owned by the Record Companies. We are attaching to this letter a sample of the sound recordings you were found distributing via the AresWarezUS (Ares) peer-to-peer network. In total, you were found to be distributing 321 files, a substantial number of which are sound recordings controlled by the Record Companies.

The reason we are sending you this letter to you in advance of filing suit is to give you the opportunity to settle these claims are early as possible. If you contact us within the next twenty (20) calendar days, we will offer to settle the claims for a significantly reduced amount compared to the judgment amount a court may enter against you...

Previously on BoingBoing:

States must start issuing the new internal passports by May 2008, or else their citizens will not be able to board planes or enter federal courthouses...

DHS estimates that it will take only 44 minutes for a current driver's license holder to get a certified copy of their birth certificate, travel to the DMV and get a new license when it expires. No current driver's license holder will be allowed to renew a license by mail. They estimate the costs to states and individuals over 10 years will be $23 billion.

Congress may move to negate this ruling by repealing the Act or reverting to an earlier process.

Reader comment:

jkd says:

Clearly, this would be a really, really bad thing. But there's also good reason to suspect that such a rule would be,

a) not implemented because Congress actually might pass legislation:

Bills to Repeal REAL ID Introduced in House and Senate.

Senators Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and John Sununu (R-NH) have introduced legislation to repeal the REAL ID Act (pdf)

S. 717, the "Identification Security Enhancement Act of 2007" seeks to fix the many problems created by the REAL ID national ID scheme. S. 717, which includes Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jon Tester (D-MT) as co-sponsors, contains strong security and privacy protections. In the House, Congressman Tom Allen (D-ME) has introduced similar legislation.

H.R. 1117, the "Real ID Repeal and Identification Security Enhancement Act of 2007." (Feb. 28),

and/or,

b) probably challenged (on many levels) by several of the states on a number of grounds, as has already happened with the REAL ID Act,

and/or

c) ruled unconstitutional for equal protection violations

In any event, something to be concerned about, but I'm not quite so cynical that it will go forward without substantial resistance (if it goes forward at all).

It shows him plummeting 12,000ft to earth after both his parachutes failed, saying goodbye to the world... and hitting the ground with a sickening thud at 80mph. Michael's friend, who jumped from the same plane, also filmed the whole event. He found his pal bleeding and unconscious - but alive.

Reader comment:

Alex says: "There seems to be something about my security-aware Firefox configuration, which prevents the video from playing in the browser. I've found that the video file can be downloaded from here. (It's about 55Mb big. :-/)"

Update 2: Peter, the author, affirms that this is non-fiction.

A Belgian UN worker travelling with a full diplomatic passport recount the nightmarish experience he had with US customs when he landed in New York to chair a UN meeting:

im#3: You tried to enter on your Belgian passport, but this one is not valid to enter the US. me: Why not? I was in New York two weeks ago. I fly to the US three-four times a year. I always use my Belgian passport.

him#3: Sorry, but the rules changed. As of last week, Belgian passports have to be machine readable.

me: ?!?!

him#3: They need a strip on the ID-page which is machine readable. Yours does not have that.

me: But two weeks ago, nobody said anything about that at the New York’s immigration office.

him#3: Sorry, but I do not make the rules. And they changed since last week. We can not let you enter the US.

me: But I am on a diplomatic mission. I have a diplomatic status. You have my diplomatic passports.

him#3: Sorry, but that does not matter. Just last week, we stopped a foreign minister from a Middle Eastern country entering the US also. Not the right paperwork neither.

me: Is it possible to speak to your supervisor please?

him#3: I am the supervisor, sir.

Brian, This is an email I was really hoping I would never have to write, but it is what it is. When I came on board here at Sony, I made every effort to be as inclusive as possible to media and the blogging community in an effort to improve previously damaged relationships. This included getting people access to executives, opening our events to more individuals and personally responding as quickly as possible to inquiries. This was done in good faith with the thought that the people I was working with would operate with the same integrity and courtesy I think I demonstrated when I was a reporter. Basically, I went out on a limb for a lot of people -- people SCEA PR and SCEA management had written off. I caught a lot of flack for it from folks, but I felt strongly it was the right thing to do.

I am very disappointed that after trying to work with you as closely as possible and provide you and your team with access and information, you chose to report on this rumor.... I can't defend outlets that can't work cooperatively with us.

So, it is for this reason, that we will be canceling all further interviews for Kotaku staff at GDC and will be dis-inviting you to our media event next Tuesday. Until we can find a way to work better together, information provided to your site will only be that found in the public forum.

Again, I take absolutely no joy in sending you this note, but given the situation you have put me into, I have no choice.

Dave Karraker
Sr. Director, Corporate Communications
Sony Computer Entertainment America

I think this only highlights the differences that PR people and journalists have. My interest is not in making sure that Sony has positive news or that the timing of their news is correct...

Update 2: A little adverse publicity, and Sony apologizes

“Most of the science-fiction authors are more tech savvy than romance authors,” Mr. Terra said. Podiobooks features primarily unpublished writers, and has rejected books only because of “hate speech,” Mr. Terra said. The site also includes guidelines on recording a book.

“Compared to audiobooks these authors break every rule in the business, including using sound effects,” Mr. Terra said. The podcast books also use music and a full cast more liberally than traditional audiobooks. Still, what Podiobooks’ offerings might lack in polish, they tend to make up for in brash enthusiasm.

A man who was found dressed in latex and handcuffs brought a donkey to his room in a Galway city centre hotel, because he was advised “to get out and meet people,” the local court heard last week.

Thomas Aloysius McCarney with an address in south Galway was charged with cruelty to animals, lewd and obscene behaviour, and with being a danger to himself when he appeared before the court on Friday. He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage.

Update: Many a kind reader has written to inform me that this is a hoax.

Members can access favorite online sites through their mobile device with the addition of Boing Boing, craigslist, Digg, Metroblogging and Wikipedia to the Helio WAP deck. Offered for the first time by a mobile service, these sites are optimized for mobile and will be available to all Helio members.

The inmates will be watched by prison guards, who will be paid by the farms. The cost is subject to negotiation, but farmers say they expect to pay more for the inmate labor and its associated costs than for their traditional workers [...]

Prisoners who are a low security risk may choose to work in the fields, earning 60 cents a day. They also are eligible for small bonuses [...]

"If they can't get slaves from Mexico, they want them from the jails," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors restrictions on immigration.'

Who would have thunk it? To transform a couple of dirty worn-into-the-ground pieces of blackened gum into a simple yet eye-catching piece of public art. And so easy and fast to do! With a few swift strokes of white paint on a teeny brush (remember "White Out"?) voila: you have Subway Stickman - who could well bring on the next NYC Subway graffiti movement. Anyone can do it. You don't need hours of practice doing pieces with your crew and you most likely will never get caught. Just pretend you're fixing your laces as you speed-paint Stickman.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Mr Jalopy's gum machines
• Boy sticks gum on abstract painting
• Gum Blondes - portraits of blonde women made out of bubble gum
• Chewing gum removal machine costs $8000
• Chewing gum target
• Celebrity faces as used-gum targets
• Artist uses mouth to make chewing gum sculptures
• Painted ABC Chewing Gum Photoset
• Bubblegum Alley

For today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," I filed a report on a new anti-piracy offensive from the Recording Industry Association of America that targets college students.

The RIAA recently sent out 400 "pre-litigation settlement letters" to students accused of illegal downloading at 13 universities, and launched p2plawsuits.com, where the accused are invited to avoid lawsuits by turning themselves in and paying fines online.

In the report, you'll hear from RIAA chairman Mitch Bainwol, from University of Southern California law professor Jennifer Urban (USC is one of the 13 schools targeted in this campaign), and from Gizmodo.com co-editor Adam Frucci.

Gizmodo is organizing a month-long RIAA boycott that kicks off today. They've published this manifesto, and they're encouraging people to contact lawmakers, write protest letters to the RIAA, and purchase indie MP3s instead of copy-protected songs from RIAA member labels.

- - - - - -
LISTEN:
Link to archived audio (Real/Win) and transcript. Or, listen to this report as an MP3 in the "Xeni Tech" podcast, and you can subscribe via iTunes here.

Archive of previous NPR "Xeni Tech" features, with narrated image slideshows and transcripts, here. (Special thanks to NPR News producer Nihar Patel!)

Also in today's show, host Alex Chadwick talks with University of Southern California students Nicole Williams and Richard Masland about the RIAA campaign, and filesharing culture on college campuses: Link to archived audio for that interview.

Al Capp was the creator of one of the great works of satire - in any medium - of the 20th century: the comic strip Li'l Abner, which ran in the daily papers from 1934-1977. It was an hilarious and cutting rebuttal to slick hucksterism and phony sophistication...

By the 1960s and 70s, though, his persona seems to have undergone a change; or was it simply that the culture had changed around him in the fifty years since his youth? I don't know what his personal politics were throughout his life, but I imagine this quote from his bio at Wikipedia is a pretty cartoonish (ha!) conclusion:

"In the '60s, Capp's politics swung from liberal to conservative, and instead of caricaturing big business types, he began spoofing counterculture icons such as Joan Baez... "

Since when are "big business types" and "counterculture icons" mutually exclusive? It's embarrassingly clear, especially in hindsight, how opportunist and careerist many (if not most) of the Baezes and Dylans of the 60s actually were -- Capp was merely doing what he had always done, deflating the fatheads and phonies. That he now had even more platforms (his strip, newspaper columns and reportedly a very popular - if increasingly controversial - presence on the college lecture circuit) to express his opinions may have inflated his tendencies to mock and goad those he saw as deserving figures and institutions...

Only a few repo men possess the guile and resourcefulness for such a job. One of them is F. Max Hardberger, of Lacombe, La. Since 1991, the 58-year-old attorney and ship captain has surreptitiously sailed away about a dozen freighters from ports around the world.

"I'm sure there are those who would like to add me to a list of modern pirates of the Caribbean, but I do whatever I can to protect the legal rights of my clients," said Hardberger, whose company, Vessel Extractions in New Orleans, has negotiated the releases of another dozen cargo ships and prevented the seizures of many others.

His line of work regularly takes him to a corner of the maritime industry still plagued by pirates, underhanded business practices and corrupt government officials, waters the Aztec Express sailed right into.

The saga began in 2003 when the vessel's Greek owner died and his company did not keep up payments on a $3.3-million mortgage.