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 ï¿¥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 ï¿¥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!)