Deborah Bowness sells handpainted wallpaper depicting a bookcase laden with weighty tomes, called the "Genuine Fake Bookshelf." Link (via OhGizmo)

Grant says: "This seller, awesome_electroincs (with 0 feedback) appears to be selling PICTURES of iPods and other electronics in auctions that sound as if he is selling the actual items."

You are bidding on a picture of a Galaxy 2517 10 Meter Ham Radio and Silver Eagle Mic. Radio in picture LOOKS AND WORKS GREAT. I only ship to the continetal United States. I do not ship to PO BOXS. This is an as is sale. There will be no refunds of any kind. Payment is due within 3 days of sale ending. Thank You for looking at my sale and GOOD LUCK!

Some guy bid $100 on this photo of a ham radio. This is an old scam, and it's sad to see people fall for it. Link

An Australian kid has won a lawsuit against his former school for its failure to intervene during a decade of brutal bullying; he will likely be awarded AU$1,000,000.

His mother, Angela Cox, reported the bullying to the police and to the school, where one teacher said the such incidents were character building, prompting the bully to make a death threat against Cox.

"Ben was getting scared, like being pushed into the school walls. He had a tooth punched out, he got whipped with a tree branch with welts across his back," Angela Cox told Australian radio outside the court.

Link

CrunchGear has published a great little beginner's guide to piracy, aimed at people who've never used P2P but want to try it out:

As you probably guessed, piracy is illegal. Getting caught can land you some serious fines or even jail-time depending on the offense. Those of you in college should probably stay the hell away from piracy. I personally know about three people who have been caught downloading via Bit Torrent or P2P. The only safe way to pirate is to not do it at all. There will always be a chance that you can get caught, whether it’s the MPAA poisoning a torrent, the FBI giving a plea bargain to your best friend who got caught 2 weeks ago, or one of thousands of other ways.

So how do you protect yourself? Download from private servers and torrent sites. Using public trackers and P2P is like announcing to the world “Hey! Look at me! I’m pirating!” Stay away from anything public related and download in moderation. Scooping up 2TB of files in a week will make you stick out like a sore thumb.

Link (Thanks, John!)

A panel of UK tax experts have raised alarms about the virtual goods market in online games, suggesting that they could be used to launder money:

“I see this as a virtual version of the hawala or hundi system,” said Johnson, who heads risk management firm TRMG, referring to the informal money transfer network that is commonly used through the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

“It’s trust based — I give you 1,000, you give someone else 1,000 — it serves to move money from A to B to C to D while obscuring the trail.”

He recommended treating virtual currencies like the Linden dollar as “real money”, including a requirement for virtual world operators like Linden Lab to report suspicious financial transactions, just as for real-world banks and financial institutions.

Link (via Futurismic)

Mommy's Chairs are designer chairs that appear to have been drawn by a five-year-old with a poor grasp of perspective. Made of bent steel rods in uncertain, shaky lines, they come in four sizes, with a breathtaking pricetag of £250. Link (via Gizmodo)

Here's the 10th and final installment from the diary of a Western man who spent 22 days in a Japanese prison.

All of the previous journal entries were made over the 22 days when I was locked up. I regret what I did and have paid for my stupidity and really, let’s face it; it wasn’t even a spectacular crime. Pretty lame actually. The journal was written in fits and starts as my passion to lose myself in my manga or daydreams, or my depression would allow. Being locked away and not knowing how things were going to work out was obviously an incredibly stressful experience and one that I would have found much worse if I did not speak or even read Japanese. Or have any money in the bank.

Link

Cute little cobra faces off against vicious human child, as grown-ups off camera guffaw to the hijinx. Who will win in the epic battle of infant vs. poisonous reptile? My money is on the kid, because someone sewed the serpent's mouth shut. Link

Here's a video of a tractor that's slowing down traffic and making a brain-curdling noise as it uses its shovel to push itself down the road like a dying animal. Link

The object of this Flash-based game is to prep a toy bunny for surgery, open it up, and save its life. You have 60 seconds. Link

Seth sez, "Illinois Libraries are invited to participate in some way to demonstrate opposition to a proposed state law about library censorware. Huge resistance, some by using censorware as much as possible as a 'work-to-rule' protest."

We have acquired 10 temporary licenses from NetNanny and are offering Internet service but as it would be under HR1727. It is insane! We are jumping up every 2 seconds to unblock a site for a patron. I had originally estimated that we would need one full-time staff member if the bill became law but I am beginning to think it might take 2 additional staff positions. The burden is such that we will probably not be able to continue for the full day. Our patrons, however, are getting the message.

Prairie Skies Public Library has set their filters as high as they can go on all computers starting today and will do it for the entire a week to reach as many patrons as possible. We also have accompanying fliers explaining why and how to contact their local Senators. Anyone who wants to get on an unfiltered computer this week will not be allowed during this time of protest. The reason for this is we are small library and if it passes we may have to remove internet access entirely because we don't have the staff to sit with anyone under 21 on an unfiltered computer. Explaining to the public and letting them experience it is a whole different thing.

Link (Thanks Seth!)

There's something charming (and gross) about this 1934 Popular Science article on the new miracles of factory-processed food:

Huge disks, rotating under corrugated rollers, knead spaghetti dough to a uniform consistency. Noodle dough is rolled into thin sheets by machines a thousand times the size of the kitchen rolling-pin, wound up on rollers like printing paper, and then deftly formed into various kinds of noodles. In fruit and vegetable canneries, refrigerators produce arctic temperatures to freeze fruit juices solid in the can and so preserve indefinitely the tree-ripened flavor.

Link

I love this 1932 Modern Mechanix ad for a kit to convert your old car into a new tractor. Link

On Friday, a large delivery truck drove right over UW-Madison student Ryan Lipscomb's head, but all he suffered was a concussion and spent just a few hours at the hospital. He had noticed that truck wasn't stopping, so he slammed on his brakes and flew from his bike. The truck rolled over his head, smashing his helmet but left his noggin in fine shape. So it seems. From The Capital Times:

"I didn't see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head. It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head."

His helmet, a Giro, was crushed, but Lipscomb's head was fine.

Madison Police Department Sgt. Chris Boyd said the officer at the scene urged Lipscomb to keep the helmet. He did. It is all flattened and mangled and broken, unlike his head.

Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Previously on BB:
• Bike helmets inspire unsafe driving Link

BB pal Adam Parfrey of Feral House/Process Books points us to a terrific 1960 video of avant-garde music pioneer John Cage performing "Water Walk" on I've Got A Secret, an old game show hosted by Garry Moore. Water Walk was written for a number of unusual instruments, including a bathtub, blender, rubber duckie, watering can, prepared piano, tape recorder, and five radios. Apparently though, a union dispute over who would plug in the radios erupted before show time, so Cage instead hits and throws the radios at the times he was meant to turn them on and off.

Moore: "Mr. Cage, these are nice people but some of them are going to laugh. Is that alright?"

Cage: "Of course. I consider laughter preferable to tears."

Link (via WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

Previously on BB:
• John Cage's 639-year long song has started to play Link
• As Slow As Possible Link

Aaron Hertzmann says:

There's a long article in today's New York Times Magazine (and video) about geeky folk-rock singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton, who distributes all his music online, and spends six hours a day communicating with his fans. The article discusses the state of music promotion and distribution for the "B-list" musicians who use online forums to communicate with their fans and spread the word.

(Photo of Jonathan Coulton by Jennifer Karady for The New York Times)

Coulton also produces the terrific PopSci podcast. Link

Update:

Coulton is also profiled in the latest issue of Psychology Today.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Jonathan Coulton's First of May song
• Jonathan Coulton mashed up with Sir Mix a Lot on youtube
• Nerd folksinger covers Baby Got Back
• More favorite podcasts
• Nerd folksongs
• Funny music video using Creative Commons Flickr photos

Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe (and founder of a wonderful but defunct zine called The Hermenaut) wrote a column defending GOP hopeful Mitt Romney's favorite science fiction novel, L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth.

"Battlefield" falls in a well-established sub-genre of speculative fiction known as "post-apocalyptic." These novels center on an alternate reality in which life as we know it has been dramatically altered -- by flood, fire, famine, or by nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, a pandemic, meteorites, or even alien invaders. Indeed, it could easily be argued that fans of post-apocalyptic fiction are big-thinking idealists: Readers of "Battlefield Earth" and its ilk aren't weird; they're worried about where our society is headed, and whether we have what it takes to defend our way of life. The real weirdos are those who never give a thought to such things.

Link

Constance says:

Photographer Chris Jordan's "Running the Numbers" shows us what, for instance, thirty seconds of aluminum can consumption in the US would look like if the cans were all gathered together. Seeing these statistics as images makes them far more real than just hearing the abstract numbers.

Photos show 2.5 million plastic bottles, (the number used in the US every hour), 426,000 cell phones (equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day [Every *day?* Is this statistic accurate?]), 29,569 handguns (equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004), 2.3 million folded prison uniforms (equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005) and more.

Each photo is followed by a zoomed-in detail and a zoomed-in detail of the detail. Link

Reader comment:

Conor says:

I think that number [426,000 cell phones retired in the US every day] is probably accurate (DEAR GOD!!) The Google turned this up, showing 130 million cellies retired annually in 2005 (which is roughly close to the 155 million one gets based on the daily rate in your post).

Twenty years ago, crybabies called people they didn't like "commies." Now they call them "terrorists." Chris says:

There are many crybabies these days who cry "terrorism" when criticized. It's a sickening new trend that needs to crawl back under the rock from which it came. I think boing boing should point out these losers whenever they play the "terrorism card," making light of their cowardice. The URL included reports the Vatican called an Italian comedian a terrorist for criticizing the Pope. Unsurprising, really...

"The Pope says he doesn't believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved," [Andrea Rivera] said.

He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia as he lay paralyzed with muscular dystrophy. He died in December after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator.

"I can't stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn't the case for (Chilean dictator Augusto) Pinochet or (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco," he said between musical acts at the open-air concert.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Crybaby Scientologists call reporter a "terrorist"

Cerealart makes fantastic toys, tzotchkes, and other pop multiples created by artists like Yoshitomo Nara, Dalek, and Kenny Scharf. The stuff is super-high quality and beautifully designed and packaged. In the last year, I've bought Nara's PupCup and Little Wanderer kinetic dolls and Marcel Dzama's Saddest Ghost Lamp for my son, and he absolutely loves them. Ryan McGinness's Bucky Ball (left, $150) and Takashi Murakami's Flower Ball (right, $400) look like a lot of fun too. Link

UCLA just launched a profoundly awesome historical archive of news photographs from the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Daily News.

Of the 5,124 images in this database, the oldest is from 1914. One fun way to search is typing in a year, say "1921" or "1928," and browse by date.

I spent about 4 hours straight on Friday poring through by keyword, related themes, and date, and found the two images you see in this post.

Photo above: the first generation of Trekkies, a bunch of Caltech students, protest the rumored cancellation of Star Trek at NBC's studios. I love how that one guy's sign says, "IT IS TOTALLY ILLOGICAL TO CANCEL STAR TREK."

These, dear BoingBoing reader, are our ancestors.

Photo at bottom: "Research assistant in automobile simulator during drug and alcohol experiment at Southern California Research Institute, 1977."

Try keyword-searching by "prohibition", or "zoot suit riot," for incredible images from specific political eras. For instance, "draft" will yield images related to Vietnam, but also protests from 1948.

Here's a list of more photos I found and was fascinated by, in no particular order:

1965: A beatnik robot that "ferrets out the undesirables-including censors, book-burners."

1959: Beatniks with tikis!

1959: The "Miss Beatnik 1959" finalists!

1966: Walt Disney with "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride heads.

1973: Disney imagineers with Space Mountain model.

1964:"Miss Formula", a computer created rendering of the "perfect female."

1965: "Gyro jet hand gun," a rocket-propelled personal weapon "not regulated by existing laws."

1949: A cross-dressing man in jail identified as "Sidney Cochin, The Nutty Housewife." (no more information available, what's this guy's story?)

1941: A transgendered person and companion.

1948: Hollywood hookers getting busted.

1950: Hollywood actors simulating nuclear blast preparation.

1969: Porn!

1980s: Proto-punks! More punks!

1971: Custom conversion vans!

1980: Lesbian Navy Nurses!

1965: Astronaut food!

1950: Librarian robots!

1964: Thalidomide baby.

1947: Opium chocolates!

1969: Indian re-possession of Alcatraz.

1938: movie marquee says "closed tonight to protest Nazi horror." 1948: Nazi graffiti on Jewish community sign.

1965: a bank computer.

1930s: People dancing in a black nightclub. A black couple doing the jitterbug.

1948: Chicks with guns.

1964: "outer space influenced" furniture.

1947: Chinese-American pyro-baby! See also this lovely 1939 shot of actors in a Chinatown theater.

1970s: Muhammad Ali in Watts. Stormtroopers prepare to beat the shit out of people in Watts. Child next to funky soul art in Watts.

1965: An early computer network for police.

1961: an early voice recognition computer.

1965, a man working at a computer with a circular display.

1986: Quotron, the stock market computer.

1965: Credit processing computer.

(via blogging.la and LA Observed, thanks also to BB reader Eric "Pocho!" Jasso.)

Reader comment: Ole Squirrelly Eyes says,

I found the gubner! Link to Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 1975.

Cabinet Magazine has an interview with Victor Stoichita, an art history professor who wrote the book A Short History of the Shadow. In it, Stoichita explores the shadow in art, psychology, and culture. It sounds quite heady, with Stoichita delving into Plato, Pliny, Leonardo, and Warhol, photography, writing, painting, and philosophy. The interview is a nice dip into this curious intellectual terrain though! (Seen here: "Illustration from Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Athanasius Kircher's seminal 1646 treatise on light and shadow. In explaining the principle of the camera obscura, the illustration associates the image and the shadow with the devil.") From the interview:

Your book is the first study of its kind. Why do you think the subject was previously so overlooked?

I actually started my research with that very question. Just before the publication of my book, an exhibition on shadows was organized at the National Gallery in London, accompanied by a short but interesting text by the late Ernst Gombrich. But previously art historians took a long time in paying attention to shadows because shadows are, so to speak, heavy, dark, and ugly. Perhaps this is because for the Greeks, the shadow was one of the metaphors for the psyche, the soul. A dead person’s soul was compared to a shadow, and Hades was the land of shadows, the land of death.

Link

Dig this NEXX X60 Open Face motorcycle helmet wrapped in denim.
Link (via Gizmodo)

Dori Hadar, the crate-digger and flea market funk aficionado who "discovered" Mingering Mike (BB posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), just blew my mind by sending me this link:

Elton and Betty's Myspace Page.

Sexually explicit outsider funk produced by an unlikely couple from Little Rock, Arkansas. From the Elton and Betty White artist description (Betty is now deceased, btw):

In the early 1980's, Betty was a more or less normal, married secretary in her late 50's/early 60's at a Little Rock law firm (allegedly working with Hillary Clinton) with a slight psychiatric problem for which she took medication. At some point, though, she stopped taking her medication and experienced a psychic and sexual renaissance of grandiose proportions: out with the husband and respectable job, in with the matching hot pink hair-do and spandex pants.

Elton, meanwhile, was a much younger (30 years younger, to be exact!) man renowned in Little Rock for his phenomenal basketball skills until the day he claims someone "put something in his drink." Elton met Betty in a homeless shelter, and it was love at first sight. The two were married and became notable Little Rock eccentrics, playing music all around town while sometimes delivering newspapers on the side. Elton ran for a seat in Congress, while Betty challenged Bill Clinton in an Arkansas gubernatorial race with the sole platform of lowering the age of consent to 14.

During this time they recorded at least three albums: "The Best of Elton and Betty" (which is not a compilation), "Sex Beyond the Door," and the mysterious, elusive "Hard Deep Sex Explosion." Each album - but "Sex Beyond the Door" in particular - is a searingly honest, bizarre gem in which the two expound on aspects of their daily lives and sexual inclinations while playing dubiously-tuned ukuleles and tiny guitars. "I Am the Master of Love," "I'm In Love With Your Behind," "I Don't Really Like Oral Sex Much at All," "The Little Dicks Fit Me Best," "My Three Feet Red Hot Tongue Is Sweet as Sugar," "Your Breast, I'd Love to Carresst [sic]" - it is through songs such as these that the true depth of their love for each other is revealed, in the process making their oeuvre arguably the most listenable and entertaining in the entire genre of Outsider Music.

Here are some video clips from public access television: Video 1, Video 2, Video 3.

Image: a young woman in Nagpur, India (cc-licensed, shot by Flickr user dhyanji).

Alex Goldman says,

My dad worked for the U.S. Embassy in India during the Johnson administration. He says that if you draw a straight line from India's four cities, they intersect there.

Now India wants to turn the city into a metropolis to take the load off of the other cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkotta (sp?), and Madras that's five so I'm not sure what specific cities it's between).

He remembers a city that was a rural village with a massive airport. Every day a mail plane would leave from each of the four major cities and fly to Nagpur and exchange mail bags and fly back.

One day dad was late in Madras and caught a ride on one of the mail planes back to Delhi, where the embassy was. Landed in Nagpur c. 4 AM and the locals were all lined up at the fence, watching the airplanes. Dad asked one of the people on the plane why people were at the fence and he was told there was nothing else to do in Nagpur.

Now the government is building an air conditioned mall and other urban infrastructure but the road and rail are Indian quality, so the only reliable transport is air.

Will the city develop? Can a government build a city? Brasilia, D.C., and Canberra are all artificial but they are seats of government. This is new.

Statistics from an Economist article on urbanization suggest that in the future, the average city dweller will live in a slum in Asia or Africa.

Perhaps this is the start of a trend -- artificial cities built to draw the misery from slums.

The density (shacks packed so tightly that many are accessible only on foot); the dust (in the dry seasons) and the mud (when it rains); the squalor (you often have to pick your way through streams of black ooze); the hazards (low eaves of jagged corrugated iron); and the litter, especially the plastic (women, lacking sanitation and fearing robbery or rape if they risk the unlit pathways to the latrines, resort at night to the “flying toilet”, a polythene bag to be cast from their doorway, much as chamber pots were emptied into the street below in pre-plumbing Edinburgh). Most striking of all, to those inured to the sight of such places through photography, is the smell. With piles of human faeces littering the ground and sewage running freely, the stench is ever-present.

Link to related NYT story today.

Reader comment: Rudrava Roy says,

To clarify's Alex Goldman's comment/question: (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkotta (sp?), and Madras that's five so I'm not sure what specific cities it's between)

Historically, India has had 4 'metros' - Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata to use the new names). Bangalore is considered a metro now but it has achieved that status only within the last 7 years. India also has the following metros that can be considered 2nd tier - Chandigarh (in Punjab - close to Delhi), Pune (close to Mumbai), Ahmedabad (also close to Mumbai) and Hyderabad (not quite close to any of the other major metros). Nagpur is quite a 2nd tier metro - I'd consider it 3rd tier rather than 2nd esp because it is very low key and too far away from most major hubs to be of interest. On the other hand, Nagpur, along with another very small town (Itawa) in the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh, sit spank in the middle of the national rail network and hence are of immense strategic importance. Mind you, trains have been, and still are, the de facto means of long distance travel in India for the masses. So, the relevance to the rail network is of significance.

John Battelle blogs:

Last week YouTube announced a new partners program (TC coverage here, Om's first coverage here). The program elicited a fair amount of negative response - see the comments in that partners program post - and a lot of head scratching as to how YouTube chose its partners, and what the Terms of Service might be. I happen to be friendly with a number of well-known YouTube "stars" and I emailed one of them for a read. What I got back was quite a rant. Below is a response that I can verify is from a well-known video blogger, who has a very large audience, but who asked for anonymity.

I have spoken to the folks at YouTube about this and suggested that they be given a chance to respond to this post, once it goes up. That certainly seemed fair to me. Should they wish to, I'll post their response here. Meanwhile, read on, in the first person words of a former YouTube star....

Read the entire rant from the now-formerly-YouTube-star who shall remain anonymous, but whose identity is pretty obvious if you're a fan: Link.

As regular BB readers know, I frequently refer to the work of Charles Fort, a "collector" of anomalous phenomena in the early 1900s. Fort spent years in libraries, taking copious notes on bizarre news events, from frogs falling out of the sky to unidentified flying objects, to teleportation, a word he coined. Fort wrote several great books presenting the odd phenomena that he'd cataloged. He was the ultimate skeptic, opposing belief of any kind. "I offer the data," Fort wrote. "Suit yourself." Every fringe dweller should have a copy of The Complete Books of Charles Fort on her or his bookshelf. In Fortean Times magazine, Ian Kidd explores Fort's philosophy that goes much deeper than that of your average crank toiling away in the corner of a dusty library. From the article:

The motivation for Fort’s 30 year long researches is not as straightforward as one might think. Many sources will report, reasonably enough, that Fort was opposed to ‘scientific orthodoxy’ and its unprincipled rejection of anomalous phenomena through the exclusionist processes of denial, dismissal, suppression and explaining away. This is all true enough, but only a part of the whole story. Throughout his books, Fort describes and reiterates his purpose: his opposition to the conservatism which damns what is new and innovative in favour of preserving the established and conventional, even in the face of data which overtly contradicts that establishment. This is the antidogmatism that many readers find both commend able and refreshing. However, it is also only one aspect of Fort’s work and arguably subservient to the deeper motivations which commentators have hinted at but never really identified...

He stated that he had a theory and “because of the theory, I took hundreds of notes a day” to test its reasonableness. The theory was simple: “that all things are one; that all phenomena are governed by the same laws” and that a comprehensive survey of human scientific and artistic knowledge will reveal uniformities and generalities that might indicate the presence of these underlying laws or principles. A monistic intuition – some might call it mystical – motivated the enormous researches from which the criticisms of orthodoxy and celebration of the anomalous only later emerged. Fort’s critical attitude towards authoritarianism was a feature of his personality; his abandoned auto biography Many Parts 1 offers various episodes demonstrating the wilfulness and defiant independence of the young Fort, usually in the face of his autocratic father. Fort was motivated by a resistance to the unjust tyrannies and strictures of authoritarian orthodoxies and so sought the empirical and philosophical weapons to resist it.

Link

Because "hardy bacteria embedded in the natural asphalt are eating away at the petroleum and burping up methane," say UC Riverside researchers. Link to LA Times story. (thanks, Dan)

BB reader Joe says,

The Eagle Awards, the major comics awards for the UK, were given out on Saturday evening after the Bristol International Comic Expo and the Newswarama folk had them up first (they won best comics related site). I couldn't find mention of them anywhere on Sunday, save one that came up on a Technorati search which had Warren Ellis saying he had a garbled message from Brian K Vaughan to say he had won a pile of awards at the Eagles. Quite surprising it took over a day for them to appear online anywhere, but at least they are up now. I was there during the day on Saturday and posted a bunch of pics on the FPI blog and more on the Flickr stream.

Shown here, a page from Ellis' Nextwave (more scans here).

Purchase links: Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., Vol. 1: This Is What They Want, and Nextwave: Agents Of H.A.T.E. Volume 2 - I Kick Your Face

Designed by Made Her Think, this flashy-goth necklace of crystal skulls and Swarovski roundels is available through Vivre for $1385. The same design but with resin skulls instead of crystal is $550.
Link

BB reader Chris says,

Teachers (including the assistant principal) of an elementary school in Murfreesboro, Tenn. staged a fake attack on a class trip, convincing 69 students on the trip that a gunman was on the loose, even dressing up a teacher as a would-be assailant (and having them pull on the locked handle of the door in order to be even more convincing).

The teachers apparently made very clear that this was not a drill, and the students (understandably) believed them, many of them crying while hiding under desks.

This could easily be as disturbing as an actual attack, especially for an elementary school student. At any rate, it's more of a 'hoax' than a freakin' LiteBright is.

Link

Reader comment: Alvin says,

Looks like this might have gotten a little sensationalized. According to this (link here), the kids were staying in a dorm on a visit to a state park, and were expecting a traditional prank from the teachers. The kids were not told that anyone was after them, just that some idiots were randomly firing in the forest.

The most important thing to consider here is exactly how lame this prank really was.

Snagged from this Neatorama post, which points to more "Last Supper"-mods (even tattoos!) over at myconfinedspace. No credit given to the artist behind this one. Well, Da Vinci, duh, but I mean the person who zombified it. (thanks, Sean Bonner)

Previously:

What do Jamestown + 28 Weeks Later have in common? BRRRAINS.

Glyn sez, "70 British MPs have now signed an Early Day Motion (think of it as a petition for parliamentarians) calling for retrospective copyright term extension. This ignores the fact that a year long review on the subject consulting widely in the UK concluded that this would be a bad idea and a report commissioned by the European Commission rejected term extension in even stronger terms. If you constituent of one of these 70 MP the Open Rights Group recommends you write to them." Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

Phil sez, "With the trend of shifting to Reality programming, NBC is picking up NO comedies this fall and only ONE comedy series for a mid-season replacement, THE IT CROWD."

It's been an across-the-board retreat from comedy this pickup season, with only a few new half-hour projects getting series orders by the networks. NBC ended up ordering only one new comedy series, the geek-themed "The IT Crowd," which is said to have received a six-episode order for midseason. "

Link

John Sweeney, a BBC reporter who worked on a Scientology documentary that's shortly to air, describes the way that the cult psy-opsed him, following him around (even at his wedding!) and calling on his family members and neighbors (I have a friend who did a Master's thesis on the "church" and got inept, threatening phone calls at 2AM for years afterward). Eventually, Sweeney "snapped" on camera and shouted at a Scientology leader he was interviewing.

Scientologists recorded the outburst and then complained that Sweeney had made a "terrorist death threat." Oh, puh-leeze. If there's anything worse than being a sinister, greedy, brain-washing cult, it's being a crybaby sinister, greedy brainwashing cult.

While making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists, brain-washed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.

Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law's house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.

I have met mothers who say they have suffered Scientology "disconnects" - meaning that their children have cut them completely out of their life so that they can spend more time with an organisation which a judge in 1984 characterised as "corrupt, sinister and dangerous".

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

Spam researchers have discovered an ongoing turf war between "botnet" masters who are attempting to infect rivals' computers and then kick out rivals' own spyware so that the computers they compromise become uniquely theirs.

Botnet computers are machines (generally running one of the notoriously insecure Windows OSes) that are infected with malicious software that lets criminals use them to send spam and launch denial-of-service attacks as part of extortion rackets.

It's not uncommon for a computer to be recruited for more than one botnet, but when this happens, the different criminal masters have to share its resources. With the latest turn, botmasters are turfing each other out of the machines they compromise.

Kaspersky Lab senior virus analyst Alexander Gostev writing in the latest Viruslist.com Malware Evolution report states that “war had been declared in cyberspace between the groups producing Warezov and Zhelatin. Taking into account the size of the botnets used by both groups, and their clear aim to conduct a large number of attacks, the situation was clear: this was threatening to become one of the most serious problems on the Internet in recent years.” Gostev identifies three groups from different countries who were all busy with the same thing, creating spam harvesting and distribution botnets. “This brought the three groups into conflict with each other, and they are willing to use everything at their disposal to gain an advantage” Gostev concludes.

The end result has been a huge increase in attacks on users, with an emphasis on developing new techniques to infect end users and evade detection by AV filters. If you need any evidence of this, 32% of all malicious code in email traffic during March 2007 was made up of Trojan-Spy.HTML.Bankfraud.ra according to Kaspersky, and indicating clearly that Bagle, Warezov and Zhelatin have created an epidemic.

Link (via /.)

Some body builders are injecting themselves with a posing oil called Synthol, which acts like a silicone injection and causes their arms to puff up like Popeye's:

Synthol, which is a mixture of triglyceride oils and benzyl alcohol, was originally intended as a form of “posing oil” for bodybuilders. When injected into a muscle, however, the body is slow to break it down, so giving an inflated appearance...

“Also, because it gives a fast swelling, you will get cramp from a squashing of the nerve. Then you can get crushing of the actual blood vessels and blood flow cut-off.” Some authorities in the US have said bodybuilders also risk giving themselves a pulmonary embolism, which can be fatal, by injecting synthol directly into a major blood vessel.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Update: Mark sez, "The bodybuilder in you picture is Gregg Valentino. He denies taking Synthol in much the same way Lance Armstrong points out he has never tested positive. Steroid abuse by American kids is on the increase, just as they are doing less sport. Are they emulating celebrities? Stallone was recently busted for having illegal Human Growth Hormone, while Anna-Nicole Smith also took HGH. Gene doping, meanwhile, is already with us."

After many earlier rounds of saber-rattling and FUD, Microsoft has announced that Free Software users -- including everyone who, like me, uses Ubuntu Linux -- are violating at least 235 of Microsoft's patents, though they don't say which ones. Microsoft are now threatening end users of GNU/Linux (that's you and me again) with lawsuits unless we pay them protection money. "Nice operating system you got there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."

The Microsoft position is this: even if you don't use Windows, you still have to pay them as much money as they would have gotten for selling you a copy of it.

The free world appears to be uncowed by Microsoft's claims. Its master legal strategist is Eben Moglen, longtime counsel to the Free Software Foundation and the head of the Software Freedom Law Center, which counsels FOSS projects on how to protect themselves from patent aggression. (He's also a professor on leave from Columbia Law School, where he teaches cyberlaw and the history of political economy.)

Moglen contends that software is a mathematical algorithm and, as such, not patentable. (The Supreme Court has never expressly ruled on the question.) In any case, the fact that Microsoft might possess many relevant patents doesn't impress him. "Numbers aren't where the action is," he says. "The action is in very tight qualitative analysis of individual situations." Patents can be invalidated in court on numerous grounds, he observes. Others can easily be "invented around." Still others might be valid, yet not infringed under the particular circumstances...

If push comes to shove, would Microsoft sue its customers for royalties, the way the record industry has?

"That's not a bridge we've crossed," says CEO Ballmer, "and not a bridge I want to cross today on the phone with you."

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this link)

See also: Ballmer: Linux users are patent-crooks

Today, Monday May 14, is the day that all US network operators are required by US law to install back-doors to make it easier for cops to snoop on their traffic. This has been the law for voice switches for over a decade, where it represents a potential holiday for dirty cops who don't have warrants use these back-doors (and criminals and corporate espionageists who want to eavesdrop on sensitive calls). Now it's part of our data infrastructure as well. Nice one, America.

May 14th is the official deadline for cable modem companies, DSL providers, broadband over powerline, satellite internet companies and some universities to finish wiring up their networks with FBI-friendly surveillance gear, to comply with the FCC's expanded interpretation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.

Congress passed CALEA in 1994 to help FBI eavesdroppers deal with digital telecom technology. The law required phone companies to make their networks easier to wiretap. The results: on mobile phone networks, where CALEA tech has 100% penetration, it's credited with boosting the number of court-approved wiretaps a carrier can handle simultaneously, and greatly shortening the time it takes to get a wiretap going. Cops can now start listening in less than a day.

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this link)