Clay Shirky's latest thought-provoker posits that young people make better entrepreneurs because they're too inexperienced to know that their ideas are silly:

The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the experts make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, they regard it as a fad. As a result of this asymmetry, the novice makes their one good call during an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert makes their one big mistake, but at that moment, that’s all that is needed to give the newcomer a considerable edge.

Link

The Smithsonian's collection includes this American wedding gown made from a parachute that saved the groom's life in WWII:

This wedding dress was made from a nylon parachute that saved the groom's life during World War II. Maj. Claude Hensinger, a B-29 pilot, and his crew, were returning from a bombing raid over Yowata, Japan, in August 1944 when their engine caught fire. The crew was forced to bail out. It was night and Major Hensinger landed on some rocks and suffered some minor injuries. During the night he used the parachute both as a pillow and a blanket. In the morning the crew was able to reassemble and were taken in by some friendly Chinese. He kept the parachute and used it as a way to propose to Ruth in 1947. He presented it to her and suggested she make a gown out of it for their wedding.

Link (via Making Light)

Bucknell prof Eric Faden has produced the most amazing video mashup I've ever seen: "A Fair(y) Use Tale" cuts together thousands of extremely short clips from dozens of Disney cartoons, lifting indivudal words and short phrases to spell out an articulate, funny, and thoroughly educational lesson on how copyright works. This is the most subversive and hilarious use of Disney material I've ever seen -- and there's even a really smart chapter about why Faden used Disney material to make his film. This should be required viewing in every K-12 classroom in the country. Coral Cache link to MP4 download, Link to Stanford page for the film (Thanks, Church!)

Update: Here's the YouTube version -- thanks, Pawel!

Update 2: Here's another mirror, courtesy of Alan

Update 3 This has been uploaded to dotsub for translation into your language of choice -- thanks, Diego!

Audi defrauded the city of Toronto by applying for permits to shoot a fictional movie, then using the sites that they'd received to erect giant, illegal advertisements for its new cars.

Audi apparently thought it could pull one over on the residents of Toronto, but it got caught. The automaker from Ingolstadt applied for a permit from the Film and Television Office of Toronto to shoot a commercial that would allow it to place double "T" statues that measure six feet high and fifteen feet long all over the city for a period of three days. A press release issued by Audi, however, confirms that no commercial would be shot, but rather that the statues are meant to act as billboards advertising the new Audi TT. The placement of the statues as advertisements, though, violates the city's signage laws.

Link (Thanks, Greg!)

Update: Stuart sez, "Rami Tabello, the co-ordinator of illegalsigns.ca has a continuing account on his website. This is a man with a mission"

(Photo by David Sky)

My friend Tim Wu has just published an excellent piece in Forbes Magazine about a way to keep our spectrum free, even after the mobile carriers have colonized it: require them to allow any of us to "attach" things to their networks.

What’s needed to spur innovation is a simple requirement: that any winner of the auction respect a rule that gives consumers the right to attach any safe device (meaning it does no harm) to the wireless network that uses that spectrum. It’s called the Cellular Carterfone rule, after a 1968 decision by the FCC in a case brought by a company called Carter Electronics that wanted to attach a shortwave radio to AT&T (nyse: T - news - people )’s network. That decision resulted in the creation of the standard phone jack. Applying the Carterfone rule to the next spectrum auction would ensure that our key fob designer need only look up standard technical specifications and then build and sell his device directly to the consumer. The tiny amounts of bandwidth the fob used would show up on the consumer’s wireless bill.

The right to attach is a simple concept, and it has worked powerfully in other markets. For example, in the wired telephone world Carterfone rules are what made it possible to market answering machines, fax machines and the modems that sparked the Internet revolution.

Attachment rights can break open markets that might otherwise be controlled by dominant gatekeepers. Longshot companies like Ebay or YouTube might never have been born had they first needed the approval of a risk-averse company like AT&T. If you’ve invented a new toaster, you don’t have to get approval from the electric company. Consumers decide how good your product is, not some gatekeeper.

Link

See also:
Why wireless carriers should be forced into neutrality
Jack Valenti says stupid things -- really, really stupid things
Searchable index of Judge Posner's decisions - law for the people
Network neutrality - why it matters, and how do we fix it?
A simple prescription for keeping Google's records out of government hands.
Understanding broadband regulation
Killer audio file of killer lawyers talking Grokster

Paul Krassner, founder of The Realist and co-founder of the Yippies kindly gave us this essay for publication on Boing Boing.

Spoiler alert: Please don't read this if you haven't seen the May 13 episode of The Sopranos but you still plan to.

The Sopranos Meet The Hippies by Paul Krassner

I usually watch The Sopranos at 9 p.m. on HBO, but this time I watched the East Coast feed at 6 p.m., so that I could also catch a two-hour documentary about hippies on the History channel at 8 p.m.

Paul Brownfield, one of the best TV critics around, wrote in his review of The Sopranos in the Los Angeles Times:

“Tony Soprano offed his nephew Christopher [in the wake of a car wreck, by squeezing his nose so that he would choke on his own blood], and in the nephew’s dying eyes our beloved protagonist became, finally, despicable and lost, beyond empathy....He dialed the numbers 9 and 1 on his cellphone before deciding that his own life would be easier, all in all, without the kid, whose drug addiction was bound to get them all ensnared by the feds....Sunday night’s episode concluded with Tony in the Nevada desert, loaded on peyote after an all-nighter with one of Christopher’s goomahs, screaming, ‘I did it!’ His face was a riot of tears, torment and unbidden glee.”

“That's funny,” I e-mailed Brownfield. “I thought Tony peformed a mercy killing, putting Christopher out of his misery, as well as getting him out of the way. At least he did it BEFORE taking peyote.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “By the way I fucked up: Tony screams ‘I get it!’ at the end, not ‘I did it!’ I think ‘I get it!’ is probably more in the spirit of peyote buttons.”

“I agree,” I responded, “although I also thought it was ‘I did it!’ and in fact I compared it to the time when Abbie Hoffman was in a Las Vegas hotel room while he was on the lam, shouting ‘I'm Abbie Hoffman!’--when ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ was a practice if not yet an advertising slogan.”

As for The Hippies, I asked a couple of fellow participants for their reactions.

Ken Babbs, sidekick of Ken Kesey in the roving band of Merry Pranksters:

“The reviews are in. The show sucked. I'm glad we don’t get that channel so I don’t ever have to watch the show. Zane [Kesey’s son] said he was ashamed to have had anything to do with it. Further disinformation--that picture of a bus, calling it the Ken Kesey prankster bus. I suppose it doesn’t do any good to point out that it is not Further but someone else’s bus, for as time goes on whatever anyone portrays as reality works just fine, for anyone who was there is probably dead by now, if not in body then probably in mind. Or as that girl shouted for a couple of hours at the Watts acid test, ‘Who cares?’ Yes, who. Who indeed.”

And Carolyn Garcia aka Mountain Girl, former wife of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia:

“Peter Coyote should be publicly stoned for participating [as narrator] in this bash-fest. Could more negative terms be found? I must have turned it off 5 times. Having it sponsored by AARP is additional irony, hard to digest. If I had known the bias of the piece I would have abstained. Well, what can one do? I hate being blamed for Manson and riots and people bleeding. What a nasty raft of crap.”

The History channel presented a blatant slur on countercultural history. I had been interviewed for a few hours and was dismayed to see that the one quote they used--beginning “It was fun”--immediately followed a scene of police indiscriminately beating young demonstrators at an antiwar rally.

The Sopranos and The Hippies--ordinarily on opposite ends of the subculture spectrum--now had something in common. They were both engulfed in a context of sadistic violence. You’d think you were watching the evening news. But allow me to be the first to wish you a merry sweeps month and happy ratings.

FROM THE GUY WHO SHOT THE FOOTAGE THAT WAS MORPHED INTO PREJUDICED PROPAGANDA:

Hi Paul,  

what can I say??  Hippies by the Hitler Channel. I know that the executive producer Scott Reda said in a newspaper article the day before that it was sad story and he would probably watch The Sopranos.  

 I guess he knew what I had to watch to find out . Hippies was not what I had hoped , if you watch my clips from interviews I did as tribute to Hunter S Thompson you will get another view and vibe.  Go to www.happytrailershd.com and click on Gonzo Utopia .  

I feel like the guy (Frank Whaley) in Pulp Fiction who said it best "We went into this with the best of intentions." Then Samuel Jackson shoots him in knee.  

Scott saved money by not having a director and his editor who had to tell the story was not qualified to .  He fired anyone who objected to his cost effective vision of what the Hippies were about . I supplied him with enough real first hand information from those who were there , they chose to ignore or manipulate it to a dirty story about dirty hippies .  

I am sorry to all of you who allowed me into your life , so the HC could present you in such a slanted  misunderstood view  

The code of Bushido says I must commit Harri Kari. Thank God I am a recovering Catholic .  

As for Scott although he was alive in the 60s I think he did two 50s and went right into the 70's  

My deepest apologies to all.  

Peace

Lance Miccio

Last year, the folks planning the launch of Richard Branson's soon-to-lift-off Virgin America line asked us if we'd like to name one of their new planes.

After much swapping of emails among BoingBoing co-editors, we finally agreed on one name that that loyal readers of this lowly blog will no doubt find meaningful:

UNICORN CHASER.

(Background: Link 1, Link 2).

Just a few minutes ago, we received word that the US Department of Transportation has granted Virgin green light to begin service.

And that, dear reader, means that Unicorn Chaser will soon be flying high and proud among the cumulonimbus, seeking out mythical beasts and banishing goatse jpegs from the eyes of God.

BTW, we did not receive money or any other form of compensation for this, nor did they receive any cash or promises of manually administered happy endings from us. We did it for fun and unicorn love.

Here's the press release from our friends at Virgin. This is not a joke, and we can't wait to fly in this plane, woohoo!

- - - - - - - -

The co-editors at Boing Boing, one of the world’s most popular blogs, have named a new Virgin America aircraft: Unicorn Chaser. The airline’s first aircraft was named Jefferson Airplane in October by the band’s lead singer, Grace Slick.

“The idea of Unicorn Chaser first popped up on Boing Boing to serve as a cleansing of the palate after a viewer has been subjected to a distasteful internet image or experience” said Xeni Jardin, a tech culture journalist and co-editor of Boing Boing. “Nothing takes away the sting of a jarring experience better than an image of a nice unicorn prancing in the meadow.”

“Unicorn Chaser fits the Virgin brand - compared to my recent experiences of flying domestically, I'm sure Virgin America will be a welcome relief!” adds John Battelle, Boing Boing’s business manager and Chairman of Federated Media.

Members of the public are invited also to name the airline’s new fleet by taking part in Virgin America’s Name Our Planes program at www.virginamerica.com. The airline will announce new names in the lead-up to launch of service which it hopes to introduce in the Spring.

Link to Virgin's nameourplanes.com. (Thanks, Patrick Kelly / Johnny Vulkan / Anomaly!)

Reader comment: Stephanie Kellogg says,

I don't know if this is already obvious information, but the name "Unicorn Chaser" is also appropriate for an airline called "Virgin" because of traditional medieval beliefs about unicorns--that they could only be caught or tamed by a virgin. Wikipedia mentions this in the article on unicorns: Link.

I don't know if their are a lot of art majors who read boing boing, but that's the sort of thing that's useful to know for art history.

Zan says,

Sentencing in the Julie Amero pop-up pornography case has been postponed again, this time until June 6th. This was possible to accommodate a change in venue from Norwich Superior Court to New London Superior Court.

Link

Previously on BoingBoing:
• Pop-up porn case sentencing this Friday
• Pop-up porn case update
• Take Action: Julie Amero Porn Case
• Teacher faces 40 years for porn in classroom, blames adware
• Teacher faces jail time over "accidental porn" in classroom

Brian Boyko says,

I recently got an oppertunity to interview Wafaa Bilal, the artist who is living with a paintball gun controlled via the Internet 24 hours a day. Some powerful stuff here:

Snip: Do you think the pseudo-anonymity of the internet and the distance has a lot to do with how this project is turning out?

No doubt about it. I mean, (*bang*) it is an internet base, and it is using the latest way of communication, but by design (*bang*), I wanted to remove the viewer from any physical impact. You log on the set, and you don't even have sound (*bang,bang*) I mean, you're hearing it right now, because we're on the phone, but when you're on the site, you never hear it. That's speaks of the virtual war that's being conducted against Iraq and other nations as well.

Link

Previously on BB:

Shoot a real live Iraqi over the Internet

Snip from a piece in today's New York Times by John Schwartz:

A 2-year-old boy spent seven weeks in the hospital and nearly died from a viral infection he got from the smallpox vaccination his father received before shipping out to Iraq, according to a government report and the doctors who treated him.

The boy, who lives in Indiana and has recovered, became ill in early March, two weeks after his father’s deployment was delayed and he was allowed to make a trip home. Over the next few weeks, the boy suffered kidney failure and lost most of his skin to the disease, eczema vaccinatum.

Link.

Scientists dinking around with deep-sea life in Antarctica say this thing is a carnivorous sponge sea urchin.

Anyone who's ever plunked a fry into a sweet puddle of ketchup knows better. "Ctenocidaris," my ass!

The researchers claim to have discovered 585 new species of crustaceans and "hundreds of new worms." Findings are in this month's Science, and go well with a warm cheeseburger or a cold shake. Link. In related news, Antarctica is melting.

(Thanks, Ape Lad)

The Long Now Foundation has just published news about the North American debut of Brian Eno's latest project:

Conceived by Brian Eno as "visual music", his latest artwork, 77 Million Paintings is a constantly evolving sound and imagescape which continues his exploration into light as an artist's medium and the aesthetic possibilities of "generative software".

He first created 77 Million Paintings to bring art to the increasing number of flat panel TV's and monitors that often sit darkened and underutilized. Now Eno is also showing large installations of this work, recently at the Venice Bienniale and Milan Triennale, and in Tokyo, London and South Africa. The installation at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be the North American Premiere of his work.

June 29-July 1 at Yerba Buena in San Francisco. Link to more information on that exhibition, and here is the project website for 77 Million Paintings. Brian Eno narrates an explanation of the project on that Flash-built website. (Thanks, Kevin Kelly!)

The time has come for the maker mayhem weekend! MAKE:'s Bay Area Maker Faire is Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. 400 makers! 40,000 expected attendees! 200,000 square feet of thrills, chills, eccentric inventors, weird science, extreme crafts. It's going to be a mind-blowing DIY extravaganza of unprecedented proportion. Step right up! (Seen here, Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate's SS Alpha Fox and MAKE:'s newly-acquired vintage fire truck.)

Link to Maker Faire, Link to Scott Beale's sneak peek at Laughing Squid

Previously on BB:
• Maker Faire previews May 7-11
• Maker Faire previews May 1-5
• Maker Faire previews April 23-27
• Maker Faire previews April 16-20
• Maker Faire previews April 9-13

Earlier this week, I blogged about a new set of AACS keys being compromised -- a set of keys that can be used to crack the anti-copying technology on HD-DVDs. The fascinating thing about this is that it came six days before the release of a new generation of HD-DVD discs that are hardened against copying using another leaked key (the AACS Licensing Authority's attempt to suppress that key was an unmitigated disaster, leading to more than a million republications of the key).

Princeton's J Alex Halderman has just posted a terrific little explanation of the logistics of all this: why it took the AACS-LA months to revoke the old key, and why it will never be able to revoke compromised keys as quickly as new keys are broken.

However, a new twist came yesterday, when SlySoft, an Antigua-based company that sells software to defeat various forms of copy protection, updated its AnyDVD product to allow it to copy the new AACS discs. Apparently, SlySoft had extracted a key from a different player and had kept the attack a secret. They waited until all the other compromised keys were blacklisted before switching to the new one.

The AACS Licensing Authority will be able to figure out which player SlySoft cracked by examining the program, and they will eventually blacklist this new key as well. However, all discs on store shelves will remain copyable for months, since disc producers must wait another ninety days before making the change.

To be successful in the long run, AACS needs to outpace such attacks. Its backers might be able to accelerate the blacklisting cycle somewhat by revising their agreements with player manufacturers, but the logistics of mastering discs and shipping them to market mean the shortest practical turnaround time will be at least several weeks. Attackers don’t even have to wait this long before they start to crack another player. Like Slysoft, they can extract keys from several players and keep some of them secret until all publicly known keys are blacklisted. Then they can release the other keys one at a time to buy additional time.

Link

Here's an interesting photo-book about tattoo typography -- "Body Type: Intimate Messages Etched in Flesh," by Ina Saltz (09-2006). Found on Tim Cole's blog, and he's with the Adobe InDesign team. "This book makes me wonder if the lack of a series of Body Art templates is a glaring oversight on our part," says Tim. (Thanks, Caspar)

Reader comment: Jessica Reynolds says,

There is also a flickr group (of course) that chronicles "words on skin": Link

Darren says,

Inspired by Dominic Monaghan’s bicep, I created a roundup a while back of textual tattoos: Link.

James sez, "The Silver Snail comic book store in Toronto is celebrating their 31st anniversary. They've put out this great "Saturday Evening Post" style poster as part of the fun."

I've been shopping at the Snail since I was a kid -- I love that place. Link

According to online reports, police in at least four cities in Poland have arrested a number of people in a copyright infringement crackdown. The raids are said to have been coordinated with German police, and a Polish anti-piracy group associated with the recording industry.

What's weirdest about the raids, though, is that they targeted people who subtitle movies:

In Krakow, Slask, Podlasie, and Szczecin, police arrived at the suspected subtitlers’ homes at 6 a.m. — and took them into custody. The story first appeared on the Polish Linux site, which states that “According to Polish copyright law any ‘processing’ of others’ content including translating is prohibited without permission.” Newspaper accounts report that the detained subtitlers face two years in jail if they’re convicted of illegally publishing copyrighted material — presumably including translated movie dialogue.

Link.

Assuming the reports are accurate -- there's no direct reporting available from sources I know and trust -- I wonder if there's a a connection with recent news that the Bush administration recently put Poland on a copyright "priority watch list," threatening economic sanctions if law enforcement in Poland did not take more forceful action against infringement. Snip:

China, Russia and 10 other nations were targeted by the Bush administration for failing to sufficiently protect American producers of music, movies and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.

The Bush administration on Monday placed the 12 countries on a "priority watch list" which will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions if the administration decides to bring trade cases before the World Trade Organization.

Link

Reader comment: W. James Au, Games Editor, GigaOM.com says:

I was in Warsaw and Krakow a few months ago, and during primetime the television stations were running top American TV shows without subtitles-- instead, they'd turned the native audio track way down; instead, all you heard was some dude translating the action and dialog in Polish. It was pretty weird and unsatisfying having to watch "Lost" without hearing the music, or the sound effects, or even the dialog, so I'd say the rogue subtitlers are providing an important service.

Over at the Wired News "Threat Level" blog, Luke O'Brien writes,

A civil liberties group representing 16 attorneys of detainees at Guantanamo Bay on Thursday sued the National Security Agency and the Justice Department, claiming that the government illegally spied on the lawyers with warrantless wiretaps and has refused to turn over records of the snooping.

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the FOIA suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The group wants all records related to government eavesdropping on the lawyers' conversations with their clients, which would usually be considered legally protected privileged communication.

The suit alleges that the government failed to meet its FOIA obligations to turn over records the lawyers want in timely fashion.

PDF of the complaint, and more information on the case, is here: Link.

poke the bunny
ladybug
boomshine
irritating games
stick remover
picto
rotate
tama
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dr. strange blix

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!).

Noah Shachtman has posted an update on the US military's recent decision to ban YouTube, MySpace, and the like in warzones. One of the Defense Department's top IT people defended the decision to Noah, saying it had nothing to do with security concerns, and everything to do with bandwidth issues. But then, the same official went on to say that the sites weren't actually a bandwidth issue yet. Snip:

The Defense Department isn't trying to "muzzle" troops by banning YouTube and MySpace on their networks, a top military information technology officer tells DANGER ROOM. Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, says that the decision to block access to social networking, video-sharing, and other "recreational" sites is purely at attempt to "preserve military bandwidth for operational missions."

Not that the 11 blocked sites are clogging networks all that much today, she adds. But YouTube, MySpace, and the like "could present a potential problem," at some point in the future. So the military wanted to "get ahead of the problem before it became a problem."

Link

A leaked NPR memo says that they'll be putting the presedential debates online without licensing restrictions:

Earlier this year, we announced that Iowa Public Radio and NPR will partner to produce two live national presidential debates in Des Moines on January 9-10, to be offered on public radio and online.

Debates are a core part of our public service mission, and our goal is to give the broadest audience the widest opportunity to use the candidates’ ideas and words. To achieve that in today’s media environment, NPR and Iowa Public Radio have decided that we will make our recordings of these debates fully accessible to everyone, without license restrictions, following each of our original NPR Member station broadcasts/webcasts.

The issue of full, non-exclusive public access to debate content is currently a subject of discussion among media organizations, with varying viewpoints. NPR believes that placing these recordings in the public domain will help raise public awareness and bolster civic participation in the election process, and will serve as a natural extension of our mission.

Link (Thanks, Andy!)

See also:
CNN will offer presidential debate video online with no restrictions
Obama wants Creative Commons licensed Presidential debates
Ask DNC and RNC for freedom to remix presidential debates

"An Alternate History of Chinese Science Fiction: The Humble Scrawl of Kuo Pao Kun, Mandarin" is a truly remarkable fake alternate history of science fiction told as though the field had evolved in China. The author goes way, way over top, including photoshopped book covers, elaborate fan-disputes over authors' significance, and so on.

Liu Hui Wen's "The Call of Cthulhu" (4625). Look, you can poke fun at Liu's style all you want. Anyone can imitate him, in mediocre fashion, by tossing around words like "glabrous" and "foetor." You can point at the decades of bad Liu imitations as having had a deleterious effect on horror writing. But what you can't do is say that there wasn't anything to the stories, or that they weren't very good. As Professor Han Kuang Ning has repeatedly pointed out, there's a lot of good writing--not good prose, good writing, which is different--and solid idea-work in Liu's stories.

More to the point, the meme that started me on this calls for the “most representative and influential” of the decade, which Liu’s work is, and the best known, most representative, and most influential of Liu’s oeuvre is “Call of Cthulhu.” Hell, its famous first line, “the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to awaken from the sleep of ignorance,” is quoted in the Tsinghua Book of Quotations, and being quoted there means that you've entered the canon. The bad writers who followed Liu were influenced only by the surface elements of his work, and imitated only his style. But the good writers who followed Liu were influenced by the concept of cosmic horror which he (essentially) created. Cosmic horror, the idea that there are beings like Cthulhu and the No-Buddha which so transcend human understanding that to draw too close to them is to be driven insane—the idea that the powers of the universe are uncaring and unaware of puny motes like humanity—is Liu’s real legacy.

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: the real world made over in leet-speak. Link

Update:: No cyberwar attacks, just nationalist hackers.

Russia is accused of being the first country to declare cyber-war on another nation: the ongoing Estonian conflict has been accompanied by a massive DDoS attack on critical Estonian networks:

Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.

"This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."

Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised tomorrow at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga.

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

Tim and Eric, cultivators of fine funny, have produced a series of youtubes about the many aspects of Shrek 3's awesomeness. The film opens Friday nationwide.

Those unfamiliar with the comedy duo's brand of dry, deadpan wit may not immediately grok the fact that this is not a paid ad campaign.

The still-growing heap of apparent adulation for Shrek 3 includes: Tim and Eric Shrek the Third Promo, Report from Shrek.com Headquarters, Conversations about Shrek, Shrek Mobile, Congrats to Chris Miller, and there are many more right here.

The cluelessly outraged youtube user comments are almost as funny as the videos. (Thanks, Tim Heidecker!)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Supremely funny fake TV commercial: B'owl!

Update: "S Day" is here. There's an emergency phone message from David Liebe Hart. And James Qual has a, uh, a message. The Shret lovefest continues.

Vann Hall says,

TBS will pay San Francisco $85,000 to settle complaints over the bollixed Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla marketing campaign. In doing so it joins previous offenders IBM and NBC, who also ran afoul of the city's anti "corporate vandalism" stance. Too bad city officials were so rational; Boston's went into hysterics and made $2 million.

Link

Previously:

Boston drops charges against Mooninite terror cell leaders

This glowing Martian baby lamp also comes in luminescent orange and blue. Fill the nursery with these and make baby wonder why he isn't glowing and brightly colored. Link (via Cribcandy)

PBLoco sells extreme peanut butters with flavors like CoCoBanana, Asian Curry Spice, various chocolates, and so on. Link (via Cribcandy)

Check out this point-of-view video of a rickety North Korean rollercoaster at Kaeson Youth Funfair, Pyongyang -- a coaster so tame it's practically a soporific. Link (via Kottke)

Kevin Poulsen of the Wired News Threat Level blog writes,

U.S. News and World Report says THREAT LEVEL needs to take a chill pill on the issue of internet surveillance. "Nothing quite excites the blogosphere like a threat to its fiefdom," zings reporter Chris Wilson, who claims that last Monday's deadline for broadband providers to become wiretap friendly is mostly a nonevent, given how rare internet wiretaps are.

Wired christened today as "Wiretap the Internet Day." It caught on, igniting buzz about the subject this morning. ...

But according to annual reports on incidents of wiretapping issued by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the hype from this particular law may be overplayed. The vast majority of wiretaps granted through this avenue, known as a "Title III" surveillance, are issued for phones. In 2006, only 13 of the 1,714 intercept orders were for electronic communication, down from 23 out of a total of 1,694 in 2005.

But Wilson misses the truth in those numbers, as surely as he misses our original point: the quick and easy wiretapping ushered in by CALEA results in more domestic surveillance. Since the deadline for internet CALEA compliance was this week -- and time moves forward, not backwards -- internet surveillance numbers are still low compared to telephone surveillance, which has had CALEA for years.

Read the full post here: Link.

UPDATE: Jake Appelbaum provides more reliable information on the questions raised earlier today by a BoingBoing reader:

The reader comment on BoingBoing about the tor nodes is mostly bogus and uninformed. It's old news about a mistake by someone known in the Tor community.

Background: Link 1, Link 2.

The short and the long of those emails by (lead Tor developer) Roger Dingledine is:

"Yeah. This happened in mid 2006. I don't know why some random person just picked it up now.

We (mainly Steven Murdoch and Richard Clayton) tracked down the fellow running them. It turned out to be an innocent mistake. He's still running quite a few, on the same network, but now he sets the MyFamily torrc option on them.

This issue also prompted us to speed up the fix/feature in 0.1.2.1-alpha: "Automatically avoid picking more than one node from the same /16 network when constructing a circuit.""

- - - - - - - - -

PREVIOUSLY: BB reader David says,

Since TOR is an occasional pet topic at boingboing I thought this might be interesting. An example of the NSA spying program we know about, or something else? Either way, some sneaky peekers are trying to peel the onion. Link to txt file, excerpt here:

"High-traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C. Confirmed:
A group of 9 Tor routers also functioning overtly or indirectly as Tor exit nodes have been observed colluding on the public Tor network."

More discussion here: Link.

Kevin Burton says,

I created an unofficial video podcast feed for PBS Frontline which includes "Spying on the Home Front" which BoingBoing readers can use to sync with their iPod or watch on their Apple TV, which is here: Link.

Previously on BB:

Spying on the Home Front: PBS domestic surveillance doc

Military authorities in Fiji are cracking down on politically active bloggers, and blocking access to portions of the internet over "national security concerns."

Fiji's current, military-led government seized power in a coup last December.

The nation's sole internet and telecommunnications provider, FINTEL, was ordered to block specific IP address ranges. Banned IPs include many politically outspoken Fijian blogs.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a story here. Here's a related blog post with a good roundup of what's been going on in recent days.

Here are two of the the most active Fijian protest blogs targeted by military authorities: intelligentsiya and resistfrankscoup. Links to many other "resistance websites" on each. Looks like a number of Fijian bloggers are swapping tips on how to evade the 'net blockade.

To any folks in Fiji reading this post: here are some helpful tips on how to navigate around internet censorship -- Link to "BOING BOING'S GUIDE TO DEFEATING CENSORWARE."

UPDATE: Here's a story in the Fiji Times about an IT specialist who says he was beaten by military goons because they believed he had aided the banned blogs:

Businessman and information technology specialist Ulaiasi Taoi says he was punched and kicked by eight soldiers while he was kept overnight at the military camp. He was arrested and detained over allegations that he was involved in anti-military blogs on the Internet.

Mr Taoi was held in a cell at the Queen Elizabeth Barracks for 24 hours after soldiers escorted him from his office in Toorak about 2pm last Friday.

The military took him over its suspicions that he was behind one of the resistance blog sites that have been very vocal against the takeover. He had earlier had a "heavy" and "very abusive" telephone exchange with Colonel Pita Driti in which he was blamed for instigating the blog sites.

Link.

A study in the Journal of Marketing concludes that you can beat the market consistently by buying stock in companies with high customer satisfaction ratings:

Using a back-tested paper portfolio and an actual case, the study's authors found that companies at the top 20% of the the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) outperformed the the stock market, generating a 40% return. Over time, the portfolio outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 93%, the S&P 500 by 201%, and NASDAQ by 335%.

Link

Li Yu and Liu Bo, the photographers behind this project, explain:

Our selection of the news stories was inspired by the early-mentioned news report. But nowadays, the magic power and literary value of news has far exceeded our anticipation and even films: deceit, murder, eroticism and violence…so striking and unimaginable. How can one decide whether these stories have truly happened or not simply relying on written words? Maybe it's not important, at least they have truly existed in the papers. But as for the readers, these stories are as eye-catching as the blushing girl in her torn-up skirt. That's the so-called media truth. The life of today is the history of tomorrow. Someone says that history is like a girl ready to be dressed up by anyone. Now, let's put the girl with the torn-up skirt back into another beautiful outfit.

Image above:

Chutian Metropolis Daily 2006-12-02

A ￥100,000 cellphone was lost in the hospital and returned by the nurse Yesterday, a beautiful 20-year-old girl lost her cellphone in a maternity hospital of Wuhan and soon it was returned back by the nurse. The owner said, this cellphone was launched by the most luxurious mobile phone brand, Vertu. As one of the Racetrack Legends Series, it was worth ￥100,000.

Link to "13 Months in the Year of the Dog." Spotted on Raul Gutierrez' blog, with more background: Link.

BB reader Ryan Ozawa in Hawaii says,

Back in March, Dean Kamen introduced a robotic arm he was developing with DARPA to restore some independence to war veterans that had lost one or both arms in recent conflicts (previous BB post: Link).

While the only video available was taken from the back of a darkened room, the impact was enormous. Beyond Terminator jokes, many saw the potential of what Kamen and his team at DEKA were doing. But to date, there's still very little official information available about the project.

This week, Kamen was in Honolulu speaking to local tech and business leaders about his FIRST initiative, which aims to inspire youth in engineering and math through robotics. He'd recently announced that Hawaii would host a regional competition next March.

As part of his presentation, though, he touched on the robotic arm, giving some first-hand background and showing those remarkable video clips. Titled "Gen X - Separate Exo Control," I've posted the excerpt to YouTube:

Video Link.

Gregory Heller from Defective By Design says,

DefectiveByDesign.org is organizing a distributed action on May 25th to coincide with Disney's release of Pirates of the Caribbean - At World End.

The aim: educating the movie going public to what Disney, Hollywood, MPAA, AACSLA, HD-DVD, illegal hex codes, and disgraced US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, all have in common.

DBD is selling its signature yellow DRM Elimination Crew Suits to supporters via their website.

Link

Loyal BoingBoing readers will recall the formerly sad tale of Tony Alleyne, an obsessive -- and incredibly talented -- Star Trek fan who transformed his UK flat into a painstakingly precise replica of a Star Trek ship...

NPR: Living in the Star Trek Universe -- For Real

Archived BB post here.

So, after years of financial woes, personal hardship, and failed attempts to auction it off, Tony has finally sold his masterpiece for a whopping £425,000, five times the estimated market value.

The 54-year old trufan spent many years and dozens of thousands of dollars remodeling the one-bedroom studio flat in Hinckley, Leicestershire. For this latest eBay auction, he offered the flat with a guide price of £130,000 - £50,000, and things ended happily. Link to BBC article (thanks, Scissorman).

Images: At top, the "transporter room" of Tony Alleyne's flat. At left, Mr. Alleyne, living the life. (courtesy of 24th Century Design)

Carl Malamud says,

SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu has 6,288 images of tremendous historical significance, but this federal institution protects their "property" with draconian copyright notices.

Most of this stuff appears to be in the public domain which means you can do whatever you want with it, but the Smithsonian site has considerably chilled our ability to increase or diffuse this knowledge.

To better ascertain the public domain nature of this archive, we scraped their html and piped all 6,288 lo-res images to Flickr (check out the cool tag cloud). For those interested in purchasing images to upload back into the public domain, we've created a public domain prospectus on Lulu. For the historic Muybridge Cyanotypes, we've started purchasing the hi-res images and have posted those for bulk download as well as created a series of derivative works.

There is a 2-page memo explaining the issues and the actions we've undertaken to better increase and diffuse this knowledge onto the net.

Link. Above, a cropped detail from the Edward Muybridge cyanotypes subset.

Normally I'd just slap these on as footnotes to yesterday's post about creepy ads promoting the irrigation of ladyparts with common household cleaning chemicals.

But two of the many Lysol/feminine hygiene ads in the "Her Secret Past: So Dainty and Fresh" flickr pool merit special attention.

Above: Douche with Lysol, and prevent the dreaded Spider-crotch syndrome.

And at left, from 1936: in the year when Hitler hosted the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin to demonstrate Aryan superiority over all lesser races, this ad promoted Lysol as a glamour secret of "die eleganten damen" of the Third Reich.

(Thanks, Paula K. Wirth)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Feminine hygiene ad, 1926, advocates douching with Lysol

Reader comment: Moria Legge-Conyers adds,

The Museum of Menstruation has a great collection of ads of that same genre/suggestion: Link the rest of their site is great, as well. Well worth checking out.

Internet archivist Rick Prelinger sez, "Harper's Magazine's Gideon Lewis-Kraus spent a lot of time with us and wrote a smart (and kind) piece about Prelinger Library and where he thinks it's pointing."

Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger, experimental amateur librarians...think the conflict between a so-called digital culture and a so-called print culture is fake; they think we should stop celebrating, or lamenting, the discontinuous story of how the circuits will displace the shelves, and start telling a continuous story about how the two might fit together.

This is a great piece -- and the Prelinger Archive is amazing. PDF Link (Thanks, Rick!)

The Anti-Sit Archives is a huge collection of pictures of "anti-sit" technologies used by landlords to prevent people from perching on the sides of their buildings. A fascinating tour through the architectures of control in design. Link (via Architectures of Control in Design)

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a mixed blessing in its ruling on the long-running Perfect 10 v Google lawsuit, in which Perfect 10, a photography site, sued Google for including thumbnails of its images in the Google Image Search results. Perfect 10 also sued Google for indexing infringing copies of its images that appeared on other sites.

The Ninth said that Google's Image Search thumbnails are fair use -- that's the good news. The less-great news is that the court also ruled that Google is a "secondary infringer" where it has "actual knowledge" of copycat sites in its index and fails to do anything about it.

Today's decision reversed the lower court's holding [PDF] that Google's thumbnails were not a fair use, following and bolstering an earlier image search engine precedent, Kelly v. Arriba Soft [PDF]. The court rightly took into account the important public benefit that search engines provide -- not simply the impact on the particular parties in this case -- and what would serve copyright's fundamental goal of promoting access to creative works. While Google's transformative use of the image provided a very real public benefit, Perfect 10's potential loss of thumbnail licensing revenue was highly speculative.

The Court also shot down Perfect 10’s claim that Google was displaying the full-sized versions of infringing images from third-party websites by framing them or providing an HTML in-line link tag to end users. The Court correctly discerned the technology at issue, finding that when you frame a page or provide an in-line link, it’s the site that you’re pointing to that could be displaying the picture, not the search engine that coughs up the HTML.

Link

AACS, the anti-copying system behind HD-DVD, has been cracked again before its next update was released. HD-DVD was cracked some months ago after the "processing key" for the discs was uncovered by a poster on the Doom9 message-board. In response, the AACS Licensing Authority "revoked" that key, so that new HD-DVD titles would no longer play on older players until they were updated.

The first DVDs with the updated keys ship on May 22, but the new keys have already been compromised -- that means that HD-DVD has been broken again, even before it was actively patched.

The AACS key was the subject of an enormous amount of controversy earlier this month, when the AACS-LA sent legal threats to sites that had included they key in their reportage of the initial break (my class blog received a threat, too). Although the key initially appeared on just a few sites, in the wake of the controversy, more than 1.3 million pages have now published the number. More people know how to break HD-DVD than own HD-DVD players.

This raises the question: what will AACS-LA do now? Key revocation doesn't work. Suing the Internet doesn't work. DRM doesn't work (this DRM took years and cost millions, it was broken in days, for free, by hobbyists). Pirates who download movies don't ever see DRM. Honest customers who buy media are the only people who ever get restricted by it -- and it's clear that a lot of people aren't willing to pay money for movies that are less useful than the pirate versions they can get for free. Link

Two advanced chatbots, ALICE and Jabberwacky, were pitted against one another by Discover Magazine, and the result is surprisingly existential:

ALICE: Who created you?
Jabberwacky: My mother gave birth to me. Is that what you mean?
A: Jabberwacky, I meant exactly what I said.
J: Do you believe in God?
A: Of course I believe in God.
J: Why do you believe in God?
A: The Bible tells us to believe in God.
J: That’s circular reasoning.
A: I’m glad we have that all cleared up.
J: Yes. Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.
J: I think you lie a lot.

Link (via Kottke)

Update: Jeremiah has conducted a number of interviews with chatbots.

Last night, Rudy Rucker and I gave a reading and a fun panel in San Francisco, as part of the SF in SF series hosted by Terry Bisson. Terry and Rudy are two of my favorite writers, and they were absolutely great. Rudy read a wild story about Alan Turing's efforts to avoid the MI5's post-war morality squad as he pursues a gay dalliance with a handsome Greek. I read a part of my forthcoming hackers-versus-the-DHS novel Little Brother. Afterwards we talked publishing. Al Billings brought his podcasting rig and recorded the whole thing and he's already got it online. Link, MP3 Link (Thanks, Al!)

TokyoFlash's latest wildly impractical, handsome Japanese wristwatch is the EleeNo WebTime Elite. Although this isn't nearly as impractical as a watch that vibrates the time in Morse code, it is nevertheless extremely handsome. I'm really becoming a fan of "butterfly clasp" watch-straps that make a continuous loop around your wrist. Plus it comes in orange, which is unquestionably the best color a watch can be. Link

See also:
Binary LED watch from TokyoFlash
Crazy TokyoFlash watch: the Pimp Watch
Radio Active watch from Tokyo Flash
Scope watch tells time using line-intersections on Cartesian grid
Impractical lovely pixelwatch from Japan

Low-level exposure to sarin nerve gas could have caused brain damage in former service members, according to scientists working with the DoD. More than 100,000 US troops were exposed to that toxin in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War. Snip from NYT article:

Roberta F. White of Boston University led the study of sarin nerve gas, which used new scanning technology. Though the results are preliminary, the study is notable for being financed by the federal government and for being the first to make use of a detailed analysis of sarin exposure performed by the Pentagon, based on wind patterns and plume size.

The report, to be published in the June issue of the journal NeuroToxicology, found apparent changes in the brain’s connective tissue — its so-called white matter — in soldiers exposed to the gas. The extent of the brain changes — less white matter and slightly larger brain cavities — corresponded to the extent of exposure, the study found.

Previous studies had suggested that exposure affected the brain in some neural regions, but the evidence was not convincing to many scientists. The new report is likely to revive the long-debated question of why so many troops returned from that war with unexplained physical problems.

Link. And here's the site for NeuroToxicology (pay access only, and the site navigation is abominable)

Reader comment: Patrick Snajder says,

You noted in the link to the NeuroToxicology that the site navigation, from publisher Elsevier, is abominable. You are probably aware, but Elsevier is currently being boycotted by some scientists for its involvement in arms trade shows: Link, and current news here.] The fact that Elsevier was involved was, ironically or not, rooted out by another Elsevier journal, The Lancet: Link.

Last month, I posted the short list for the Royal Society 2007 Prize for Science Books. The Royal Society is the UK's national academy of science, and even making the long list of potential winners is a huge deal for science writers. This year, the prize goes to "Stumbling on Happiness," the pop science bible of positive psychology by Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert. Here's Gilbert's response to winning, from the Royal Society press release:

I'm absolutely delighted to receive this tremendous honour from the world's oldest learned society. There are very few countries (including my own) where a somewhat cheeky book about happiness could win a science prize -- but the British invented intellectual humour and have always understood that enlightenment and entertainment are natural friends. So God bless the empire!

Link to buy Stumbling on Happiness, Link to Royal Society press release

Previously on BB:
• Royal Society 2007 Prize for Science Books Link
• Stumbling on Happiness: why we suck at being happy Link
• Radio show on the science of happiness Link

This year, Prozac celebrates twenty years of better (?) living through chemistry! In The Observer, Anna Moore lists twenty things "you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world." From the article:

Eli Lilly, the company behind Prozac, originally saw an entirely different future for its new drug. It was first tested as a treatment for high blood pressure, which worked in some animals but not in humans. Plan B was as an anti-obesity agent, but this didn't hold up either. When tested on psychotic patients and those hospitalised with depression, LY110141 - by now named Fluoxetine - had no obvious benefit, with a number of patients getting worse. Finally, Eli Lilly tested it on mild depressives. Five recruits tried it; all five cheered up. By 1999, it was providing Eli Lilly with more than 25 per cent of its $10bn revenue...

Twenty years on, Prozac remains the most widely used antidepressant in history, prescribed to 54m people worldwide, and many feel they owe their lives to it. It is prescribed for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, eating disorders and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (formerly known as PMT). In the UK, between 1991 and 2001, antidepressant prescriptions rose from 9m to 24m a year.

Link (via Mind Hacks)

Previously on BB:
• Peed-out Prozac detectable in UK water-supply Link
• Carbs crank up serotonin Link