T3knomanser has created a palette of web-colors corresponding to the sixteen "illegal" digits comprising the AACS key. This key -- part of a system to decode HD-DVD discs so that they can be backed up and played under Linux -- has been the subject of a firestorm of controversy, as the AACS licensing authority has used legal threats against dozens of sites, promising retribution if the number isn't disappeared. As of right now, more than 60,000 pages contain to the digits.
Link
(Thanks, T3knomanser!)
Update: Bronwen sez, "An Australain developer realised the code also be represented as a color-palette, which he now hopes to sell as T-shirts."
This is the law of the land, and it stinks. If there was ever an example of why the DMCA needs to die, this is it. The idea that a sixteen-digit number is illegal to possess, to discuss in class, or to post on a news site is offensive to a country where free speech is the first order of the Constitution. The MPAA and RIAA are conspiring to unmake America, to turn this into a country where free expression, due process, and the rule of law take a back-seat to a perpetual set of governmental handouts intended to guarantee the long-term profitability of a small handful of corrupt companies. Link
ZERO AND HER ORIGIN(...) and so on. Link to entire text. (Thanks, Karen Marcelo!)Zero, the number said to be discovered
Nine times by ancient magicians, was
Found again by a mysterious order of
Nine modern alchemists, who built
One machine after another, until finally
One exploded with fascinating results.
No fire emerged from its
Twin engines, but instead
Nine small automata crawled out,
Denying the proposition that energy,
Seven millenia or more in the accumulation,
For most purposes, remains
Ever constant, throughout the
Three ages of man's civilization.
David Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous" is the kind of book that binds together innumerable miscellaneous threads and makes something new, coherent, and incontrovertible out of them. Weinberger's thesis is this: historically, we've divided the world into categories, topics, and hierarchies because physical objects need to be in one place or another, they can't be in all the places they might belong. Computers and the Internet turn this on its head: because a computer can "put things" in as many categories as they need to be in, because individuals can classify knowledge, tasks, and objects idiosyncratically, the hierarchy is revealed for what it always was, a convenient expedient masquerading as the True Shape of the Universe.
It's a powerful idea: from org charts to science, from music to retail theory, from government to education, every field of human endeavor is tinged with hierarchy, and every hierarchy is under assault from the Internet. One impact of this change is that it reveals the biases lurking underneath the editorial carvery of our systems. From the Dewey Decimal system's laughable clunkers (mentalist bunkum gets its own category, but Islam has to share a decimal with a couple competing "Eastern" faiths) to the Britannica's paring away at "old" biographies to make way for the new, Weinberger makes a compelling case for a new kind of knowledge that more faithfully represents the messy, glorious hairball of the real world.
This celebration of hairiness is just the tonic for the fights being waged today over whether bloggers are real journalists, whether Wikipedia is a real encyclopedia, even whether chaotic guerrilla armies are real armies or mere "enemy combatants." Weinberger shows that Internet messiness has a special quality that distinguishes it from meatspace mess. On the Internet, messiness can be used to make sense of the world: Flickr tags can be grouped (people lump "rome" and "italy" together, so they must be related) with other characteristics ("lots of people call this picture their favorite") and combined with search terms ("more people search for "italy" than "itayl," so the latter is probably a typo) and the most interesting pictures of Rome, Italy can be automatically surfaced, thanks to all the messy, uncoordinated, unchecked, unintentional meaning that the Internet's users infuse its pages with.
Everything is Miscellaneous is the latest inspiration from Weinberger, whose Small Pieces, Loosely Joined and Cluetrain Manifesto were important contributions to our understanding of the Internet. Weinberger's conversational style, excellent examples, and extensive legwork (the places he visits and people he interviews can best be described as wonderfully miscellaneous) give this the hallmarks of an instant classic. And unlike many business/tech books, whose simple thesis could be stated in a single New Yorker article, but which are nevertheless expanded to book-length for commercial reasons, every chapter in Everything is Miscellaneous brings new insight to the subject. This is a hell of a book. Link
See also: Cory interviewed by David Weinberger about metadata
Are ad agencies so deprived of original thinking that the best they can do is recycle a forty-year-old soundtrack, and remake it shot-by-shot in CG?Link (Thanks, Evan!)What does this new version offer that the original didn’t? Less charm? Check. Uglier character designs? Check. Blander animation? Check. Fussy over-detailed backgrounds that overwhelm the characters? Check.
But that's why I love this crazy, anachronistic compound populated with dozens of goats, chickens, ostriches, emus, cattle, llamas, ponies, and other farm animals, most of them freely mingling with the human visitors.
When my kids ask me to take them to Chuck E. Cheese's, I would rather set myself on fire and roll in broken bottles to quench the flames. But The Farm, just minutes from our house, offers genuine and surprising experiences every time we visit it. For instance, the last time we went, the ostrich made a grab for my camera, scaring the bejesus out of me. If you are foolish enough to walk into The Farm holding anything resembling food, large goats will jump on you. They knocked my kid down to get the cup she was holding.
If you ever visit the San Fernando Valley, you owe it to yourself to visit The Farm. Link to Flickr set
Reader comment:
Josh says:
I used to go to Cleveland High School, right down the street (graduated in '00, so not even that long ago), and I remember the Farm. Sometimes for it being pretty smelly and the cause of dumb jokes when we went to Ma's Chinese Food, sometimes for being the alleged site of smokeouts and makeouts and other high-school appropriate outings. But in particular, I remember in either my junior or senior year when we were warned about a possible outbreak of 'viral cow pneumonia' and held inside for a bit and told not to go near it, to keep an eye out for unusual coughs or anything, yadda yadda yadda.Eventually, the story that got back to us was that a *rival petting zoo* in the SFV had called in the complaint to local authorities as a way to try to drive down business, and that inspections showed the animals were fine.
I guess it's old-school valley drama -- the weirdo semi-agricultural vein, as opposed to the Hummer + Jamba Juice or Canoga-Park-Strip-Club kinds.
Link to the entire Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" painstakingly redone as a series of still images in the style of LOLcats. (thanks, katre)
Previously on BoingBoing:
UPDATE: Former Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton responds. Link.
Anil Dash has a thoughtful post up on his blog about LOLcat linguistics ("kitty pidgin," or "cweeole.") Link.
(Pearson) believes he is entitled to $1,500 for each violation, each day during which the "Satisfaction Guaranteed" sign and another sign promising "Same Day Service" was up in the store -- more than 1,200 days.Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)
And he's multiplying each violation by three because he's suing (Custom Cleaners owners) Jin and Soo Chung and their son.
He also wants $500,000 in emotional damages and $542, 500 in legal fees, even though he is representing himself in court.
He wants $15,000 for 10 years' worth of weekend car rentals as well.
After enlisting neighbors and fellow customers, he sought to expand the case into a class action suit, but was denied, angrily, by District of Columbia Civil Judge Neal Kravitz.
"The Court has significant concerns that the plaintiff is acting in bad faith and with an intent to delay the proceedings," the judge wrote in court papers. "Indeed, it is difficult to draw any other conclusion, given the plaintiff's lengthy delay in seeking to expand the scope of the case, the breathtaking magnitude of the expansion he seeks, his failure to present any evidence in support of the thousands of claims he says he wishes to add, and his misrepresentation concerning the scope of his first amended complaint."
The Houston Museum of Natural Science will pay $0.25 each for the first 1,000 living cockroaches brought in by the public at specific times over the next two weeks. The roaches will be part of an exhibit on the "'sanitary' engineers of the insect world'" within the new Brown Hall of Entomology. Those who bring in cockroaches after the 1,000 are already collected receive passes to the new exhibition hall. Link (Via PCL Linkdump)At the end of the day, all I really want from a record is a faceless rhythm section with a full orchestra backing it up. If the group wants to add some originals, that’s fine; but really, it’s all about “instrumental performances of the same exciting vocal versions.” This album delivers those requirements in spades. Hell, all you have to do is look at the cover and you know you’re in for some excitement. Whoever titled this record really knew how to market their product.
Comparing the results with those compiled by US psychologist Professor Robert Levine in the 1990s, the study showed that people were, on average, now walking 10 per cent faster. Men are generally 25 per cent quicker on their feet than women.LinkPeople were in the greatest hurry in Singapore. Following in their footsteps were the residents of Copenhagen and Madrid, the two fastest-paced European cities.
In many ways, transgastric surgery is a natural extension of keyhole surgery, in which slim surgical tools are inserted into the abdomen via small incisions in the skin, avoiding a large cut in the belly. It has now become routine for procedures such as gall bladder removal.Link (via Neatorama)
Transgastric surgery promises to go one better. Much of the discomfort and recovery time after conventional surgery – even keyhole surgery – is due to the incisions made in the abdominal wall. However, because transgastric surgeons reach the abdominal cavity through the mouth, there is no need for an incision, so patients should be back up on their feet much faster, says Jürgen Hochberger at St Bernward Hospital in Hildesheim, Germany.
This is from a Philco collector's site and it is a wireless radio remote from the late 1930s. It is an incredible piece of equipment.Link
This came to me because my elderly father, a former Philco engineer, has one up on eBay, though the photo there isn't great.
My dad is one of the original hackers/makers/computer geeks/etc. Growing up I was surrounded by all sorts of wonderful things like this Philco mystery box. Its bittersweet to see him starting to sell some of the treasures.
Touyama's original speech is funny in its own right, but fun-lovers around the world have created a number of edited variations. Japundit has posted many of them in its site. My favorite is the "vintage version." Link
Kouichi Touyama is a 36 year old Street Musician and dissident activist who recently served 2 years for sedition. He recently ran for Governor of Tokyo and this is his official broadcast message. It is an incredible rant by a very, very angry man. He received about 10,000 votes. The video is in Japanese with sub-titles. It starts out:
"Registered voters! I am Kouichi Touyama. My countrymen! This country is an abomination! Political reform, whatever reforms, I have absolutely no interest in these things. Our problems go beynd reformation or repair. There is no choice but to abandon this country. Destroy this country now! I don't have a single constructive proposal!"
The best part of this 1970 magazine article about mideast-localized versions of Western comics is the sound of Batman punching someone with an Arabic THWOCK and POW. Link, and see also Superman in Arabic: link. (thanks, Ethan Persoff!)
Reader comment: Warren Grant says,
I just thought you might want to point people at a modern example of Arabic language superhero comics. There is a good summary on Wikipedia here: LinkSamir M. Nassar says,
Awesome! Superman in Arabic!Nabil Fawzi roughly translates to 'Noble Victory' which gives the Arabic Superman an interesting depth. Not only does he have to be Superman but he has to live up to his name.
The added weight of the name doesn't take away from the 'everyman' feel of the name. Nabil, Fawzi and combinations thereof would be common Arab names in the eastern Mediterranean.
BoingBoing and Arabic, my two favorite things combined!
In the natural nose the thin layer of mucus dissolves scents and separates out different odour molecules in a way they arrive at the noses receptors at different speeds/times. Humans are then able to use this information on the differences in time taken to reach different nose receptors to pick apart a diverse range of smells.Link
The Warwick and Leicester team have employed an artificial mucus layer to mimic this process. They placed a 10-micron-thick layer of a polymer normally used to separate gases on the sensors within their electronic nose. They then tested it on a range of compounds and found that their artificial snot substantially improved the performance of their electronic nose allowing it to tell apart smells such as milk and banana which had previously been challenging smells for the device.
Last month, MAKE: publisher Dale Dougherty and I visited UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. One of the amazing things we saw was a beautifully-designed and engineered spherical array of speakers, basically a single "ball" of speakers that radiates sound in 360 degrees like an acoustic instrument. Instructables has plans to make your own poor man's spherical speaker array out of Ikea salad bowls and car stereo speakers.Note about "The Eye of Argon" (From UKSFA):Jim Theis's horrible sword-and-sorcery tale, "The Eye of Argon," has inconsistent characterization, turgid pacing, and sentences like, "Hence, he may have been imprisoned for ten minutes or ten years, he did not know, resulting in a disheartened emotion deep within his being." Its only saving grace: the plot does in fact go somewhere, eventually.
Leonard Richardson destroys that distraction by randomly rearranging its sentences in "The Cut-Up Eye," so you can better appreciate Theis's unique diction. Changes every 5 minutes, "the wench stated whimsicoracally."
"The Eye of Argon" was published in 1970 in OSFAN, the journal of the Ozark SF Society, issue number 10. Photocopies -- invariably with the last page missing -- circulated for decades, and it became a regular sf convention challenge to read Jim Theis's mangled prose with a straight face. This HTML document is based on the standard ASCII text of the story, widely available on line. In the January 2005 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction it was revealed that a complete copy of OSFAN #10 had been unearthed in the Jack Williamson SF Library at Eastern New Mexico University... Jim Theis himself, who was 16 when "The Eye of Argon" first appeared, reportedly died circa 2001 at age 48. He will be long remembered in sf fandom.Link
Over at Shorpy they've got a post up that takes the text out of a freeze-frame close-up of a letter from Leave It To Beaver. The text, which was never meant to be actually seen by viewers, is hilarious:LinkAnd so on. Awesome!My Dear Mr. Cleaver:
This paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with anything. It is here merely to fill up space. Still, it is words, rather than repeated letters, since the latter might not give the proper appearance, namely, that of an actual note.
For that matter, all of this is nonsense, and the only part of this that is to be read is the last paragraph, which part is the inspired creation of the producers of this very fine series.
The principal officers of E-Gold have been indicted on charges they allowed the service to be used by criminals in financial scams and child porn operations. Their online payment system offered users the ability to convert currency into its worth in stored physical gold. In the DoJ's announcement of the E-Gold sting, an FBI spokesperson linked online payment systems to terrorism.
More around the web: DoJ announcement on DOJ website, and pr-inside.com. Reports in Washington Post, CNET. (Thanks, Tom B)
Reader comment: Charles says,
Reading about the DOJ takedown of E-Gold made me think about the UIGEA (The anti-internet poker bill: Link ).Golden Bastard says,While the outspoken public opposition to internet gambling came from B&M casinos (who don't get a cut yet) and from anti-gambling prudes, I think the bulk of the support is really because of the offshore, unregulated eWallets that are used to fund online gambling accounts. Without proper regulation, the prospect of money laundering and illicit transfers is not insubstantial. The poker community is rightfully up in arms about the regulaton of poker by Puritans but they should take seriously the real concerns of the government about the Wild West that is international internet banking.
E-Gold's founder responded to the charges here: Link.
Text by Jasmina Tešanović | Photo by Goranka Matic (Link to larger size).
You cannot miss something you didn't have, you cannot go back somewhere you've never been.
I've never been in Sarajevo: not in the seventies, when it had the best rock scene and street smarts culture in Yugoslavia, not in the eighties, when the winter Olympic games where held there in 1984. Or in the nineties, when the Serb-military committed a cruel and prolonged act of urbancide.
Sarajevo is a meta place and a meta name for Balkan history: the first world war was caused when a student from Sarajevo shot the Austrian Archduke. Though I never visited Sarajevo, the city was part of my life: I listened to the music of Bjelo Dugme and Goran Bregovic, I saw the films of Kustirica. When war came, my women peace activists made public standing in the Sarajevo square in solidarity with the murdered city. I published a book from the Sarajevo author Alma Lazervska in the midst of the war. I have family and relatives who fled the city or survived its ruin.
Now, in 2007, in a car, I finally descend from the hills into the city. There is a soccer match in town, wild kids on adrenalin, swarming among the police.
The famous quince trees are in flower, just like they say in the old "sevdalinka" folksongs. During the war, we pacifists sang mournful sevdalinkas for years on end, as a hymn of never lost friendships and solidarity. My driver is a retired policeman, with a yellow tie and a black leather jacket. He chain-smokes and drinks heavy Bosnian coffee, and yet, due to a war injury, he has literally had no stomach for the past eleven years.
We bound along the road past cemeteries of all creeds and races: improvised, extended, continuous fields of human slaughter.
DK publishing is launching a new series of books for kids called History Dudes ("Dudes from the past tell it like it was"). They do a good job of presenting both the daily life and important events in the lives of civilizations of the past. My daughter was genuinely interested in them, and we had fun going through them togther. Knowing next to nothing about the ancient Egyptians or Vikings aside from what I picked up in movies and Thor comics, I learned something, too.
They're written by Laura Buller, and illustrated by Rich Cando, the creator of the fun Star Wars cartoon tribute, Star Dudes.
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) Like most DK books, the information is presented in a highly graphic, non-linear form. So far, DK has announced two titles in the series:
Viking Dudes | Ancient Egyptian Dudes
Noah Shachtman, writing for the Wired News defense blog "Danger Room," says:
The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.Read the full post, including updates from active duty milbloggers, here: Link.Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.
The new rules, obtained by Wired News, require a commander be consulted before every blog update.
"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."
Previously on BoingBoing:
Following up on yesterday's post about the 4/29 coverup, BoingBoing reader and 429 TruthSeeker MadCarlotta says,
I just posted in the comments on the 4/29 blog, but thought I'd let you know too... I was just enlightened to the fact that "429" is code for "gay" because of the positioning of the letters on a mobile phone, so that is probably why it's being filtered. The word "gay" is offensive apparently ;)Conspiracy all right. A conspiracy of The Gays to blow up California's freeways. Did no one at the New York Times or CNN notice how close this "accident" was to the Castro? While it may be true that no Mossad agents were driving on the 580 freeway at the time of the "gasoline truck fire" and subsequent collapse last Sunday, the liberal-biased MSM has "overlooked" the fact that there were also no homosexuals there, either.This reminds me of the other recent BoingBoing post where a (coincidentally, gay) woman named Gay was filtered from her telephone company after sending an inquiry email that was deemed offensive for the same reason.
So you've uncovered a whole different conspiracy, it seems - congratulations!
What sickens me is that some BoingBoing readers think all of this is some kind of internet joke, instead of what it is: the paradigm-shattering revelation that 4/29 was the worst terrorist attack on California soil ever perpetrated by friends of Dorothy.
Previously on BoingBoing:
As regular visitors to BoingBoing know, I love the cat macros! And LOLgays, and H.A.M.S.T.E.R.S art, but most of all -- gebrils. Here's a new gebril macro. If only we could understand the beautiful language of the animal kingdom! Link to a cute picture hosted on Flickr.
Previously on BoingBoing:
Update: Thanks to r. stevens for pointing us to this pic, found floating around on the internets today. Thanks also to the anonymous reader who points us to the source for the original -- Flickr user "Seattle Roll," whose stream contains many more hypercute photos: Link. Also, turns out it's a hasmter, not a gebril. Sorry!
Update 2: Sean Bonner points us to some new LOLsloth pictures! Link.
Last night, Digg.com underwent a user rebellion. Digg removed many posts -- and terminated the accounts of some of its users -- for posting a 16-digit hexadecimal number that is used to lock up HD-DVD movies. The number -- a "processing key" -- was discovered by Doom9 message-board poster muslix64, who was frustrated by his inability to play his lawfully purchased HD-DVD movies because of failure in the anti-copying system.
The AACS Licensing Authority, which controls the anti-copying technology underlying HD-DVD, sent out hundreds of legal threats to sites that had posted the key, including Digg. It appears that Digg took a pro-active stance and began to seek out new examples of the key and delete them immediately, instead of waiting for notice from the AACS-LA. It's likely that their lawyers advised them to take this course of action, since the penalties for posting "circumvention devices" can be stiff.
Digg's users revolted at this stricture, and saw to it that every single item on the front page of Digg contained the forbidden number. Users accused Digg of taking money from the HD-DVD manufacturers (Digg ran an ad campaign from the company in the late summer of 2006), and complained about the site's deletion of user accounts.
At 9PM last night, Kevin Rose, Digg's founder, posted about this on the Digg blog, and said that he would no longer take material down, even though it could very well cost him the site. It's a brave stance, and it seems to have quieted the Digg users' protests.
I think another way of doing this would be to take down each user post on receipt of a takedown notice, then post PDFs of each takedown notice that he received in their place, which PDFs will contain the magic number. That way, the information stays alive and Digg doesn't get sued. I'm not a lawyer, but this has been the strategy I've pursued with my class blog, which received a takedown for the same number.
In the meantime, AACS-LA's attempts to suppress the number have been an abject failure. Google lists 36,000 pages that contain the number, most of them posted in the past few days in response to the story of AACS LA's letters. So much for keeping it a secret.
So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.Link (Thanks, Andrew!)But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
I'm almost finished Everything is Miscellaneous, and it's fantastic -- I'll post a review very soon! Link
See also:
Geeky comic about chess and roller-coasters
Pi joke
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Ironic Internet malapropism grid
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
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