Dale Rippy endured the (25 pound) bobcat’s slashes and bites until it clawed into a position where he could grab it by the throat. Then he strangled it.

So now I'm reading other people's stuff -- at least until I get more in the can. I'm starting with Bruce Sterling's brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer. Bruce released the book as a free electronic download nearly 10 years before I did the same with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

This book changed my life -- and the lives of countless others. It inspired me politically, artistically and socially. Last week, I saw Bruce at his home in Serbia and asked him if he minded my reading this aloud for the next 20 weeks or so. He gave me his blessing -- so here it is. Link, Podcast feed link

The BBC chose the DRM instead of making good on its promise to deliver an open "Creative Archive" of freely licensed content that Brits could share and remix. Brits are required by law to pay for the programming that the BBC commissions, and most of that work ends up gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, never to be seen again. The BBC's "Worldwide" division markets a tiny sliver of it abroad (the proceeds from this account for less than five percent of the BBC's budget, with the other 95 percent being involuntarily extracted from the British public), and there was fear that producing a true Creative Archive would limit the BBC's ability to serve as a glorified Blockbuster Video for Americans. Link (Thanks, Joel!)

The broadcast treaty creates a copyright-like "broadcast right," for the entities that make works available. So while copyright goes to the people who create things, broadcast rights go to people who have no creative contribution at all. Here's how it would work: say you recorded some TV to use in your classroom. Copyright lets you do this -- copyright is limited by fair use. But the broadcast right would stop you -- you'd need to navigate a different and disjointed set of exceptions to broadcast rights, or the broadcaster could sue you.

That's just for openers. The broadcast right also covers works in the public domain that no one has a copyright in -- and even Creative Commons works where the creator has already given her permission for sharing! You can't use anything that's broadcast unless you get permission from the caster. What's more, they're trying to extend this to the net, making podcasting and other communications where the hoster isn't the copyright holder (that is, where you create the podcast but someone else hosts it) into a legal minefield.

Now, though, the treaty is in disarray. This week saw a new meeting on the treaty with the Chairman of the committee ignoring his orders from the WIPO General Assembly (which instructed him to prepare a treaty that stopped people from stealing cable, but didn't create this para-copyright regime), pushing for a rapid movement to a "diplomatic conference," the final step on the way to a global treaty. It looked bad for our heroes.

But the representatives of the world's governments wouldn't be railroaded. After a week of hard debate, all motion to a diplomatic conference has been abandoned. Instead, this has been turned into just another regular agenda item for future meetings, as in "OK, onto that broadcast treaty: is everyone in favor of this yet? No? OK, next item."

This is a gigantic victory for our side. When we started going to the World Intellectual Property Organization, we had no idea how we would manage it. There is no constitution to appeal to there. They control the venue and call the shots. But we went in and blogged the negotiations (the first ever look inside the sausage factory of a UN treaty negotiation), bringing unparalleled transparency to the negotiations. We rallied dozens of other organizations to come to Geneva. We argued. We posted guards over our position papers when someone started to throw them in the bathrooms and hide them behind the plants (first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you -- then you win!). We slashdotted them. We wrote them letters. We went all over the world and talked to librarians, activists, and hackers. We proposed a better treaty that would limit copyright around the world and give rights to archivists, educators and disabled people to use and preserve creative works.

We kicked ass.

And we won. (For now.)

A mighty congratulations to my colleagues at EFF, especially Gwen Hinze, EFF's international directory, who's been slugging away there like mad. And an even bigger thanks to all of you, the activists on the net, for your letters to WIPO, your blog posts, your donations to EFF. We did it!

The Diplomatic Conference had been scheduled to take place in November 2007. It has now been postponed indefinitely until Member States reach agreement on the objectives, specific scope and object of protection of the proposed treaty. Given the vast differences between Member States' positions that emerged this week on core parts of the treaty, agreement does not look likely in the near future. Although the treaty is still on WIPO's agenda and by no means dead, the practical effect of today's decision is that it is no longer on the fast track. That's good news indeed for the Internet Community, including the over 1500 podcasters who signed an Open Letter to WIPO expressing concern about the treaty, which EFF delivered to WIPO this week. Member States refused to set a date for a diplomatic conference. They rejected proposals from the WIPO Copyright Committee Chair, Mr. Jukka Liedes, to postpone the diplomatic conference to November/ December 2008, to convene a further "Special Session" of the WIPO Copyright Committee focused on finalizing the treaty, and to create a "modern framework" for "webcasting organizations". Instead, it was agreed that the subject of protection of broadcasting and cablecasting organizations would stay on the agenda and be discussed in regular sessions of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights.

The excellent Afrigadget blog has a post up today about a man named Peter Kahugu, in Banana Hill, Kenya (near Nairobi), who makes a living using his bicycle to sharpen knives for his neighbors:

AfriGadget reporter Afromusing and I had an opportunity to interview Peter who has modified his bicycle with a belt, a set of tensioning pulleys and a grinding stone to make it a knife-sharpening machine. By kicking the bike up onto its stand and engaging a gearing system, he is able to use “leg-horsepower” to drive a grinding wheel and sharpen knives while “on the move”.

Peter has been at this for 2 years now and he makes about Kshs 500 ( app. 10 US$) a day by riding his mobile workshop from client to client sharpening all their knives as he goes. The grinding stone he uses has lasted an astounding 2 years and he has had to replace his drive belt a couple of times but that is as simple as cutting up a long strip of rubber from an old car or bicycle tire inner tube.

Reader comment: Mauro says,

Xeni, when I was growing up in Brazil, that's exactly how you would get your knives and scissors sharpened... the guy on a bicycle like that would ride around through your neighborhood every now and then, blowing on a kind of whistle so people would know he was coming, the housewives would get their cutlery out and go to the front of the house to flag him down as he passed by.

This profession has pretty much disappeared nowadays, though, as far as I know. It's kinda sad, I think, in a nostalgic way.

I live and work in Buenos Aires. Every week or so, the man with the knife sharpening bicycle makes his pass on my street. Similar to Mauro's description, my sharpener blows on a blue plastic pan flute as he goes down the street. He consistently blows the same tune as he approaches, I imagine it's his signature tune. If I work from home one day and get lucky, perhaps I'll hear him, run out with my knives, and get the full experience.

There are a lot of reasons I love living here, but the fact that things like this still exist is one of them.

Thanks for the blog.

The same technology is used in Mexico, these guys are called "afiladores" which means sharpeners.

They would ride around neighbourhoods on their bikes, making a peculiar and easily recognizable whistle with some sort of flute. Any housekeeper who would have cutting tools in need of sharpening would come out and ask to have them sharpened for a low price.

On a silly note, there are other ways of sharpening your tools, like these guys on the SUV demonstrate: video link.

There's a fellow named Chuck that lives at the end of Zion Road in Gambier, OH. He's crazy about bikes... loves building recumbent chop-jobs, including a tandem recumbent for him and his wife. Anyway, I went over to his place one day to see about getting a spoke replaced, and I saw this most peculiar contraption... the bike powered belt sander... a stationary recumbent bike with that powers a sander at arms-reach. He uses the sander to take broken pieces of mirror and fashion them into rear-view mirrors to clip on bike helmets, among other things. A lot of people around here say that he invented the clip-on mirror. I choose to take that statement at face value.

I'm 40 and have lived all my life in Dublin, Ireland. When I was a very young girl I remember an old man coming round to offer the exact same knife sharpening service with the same bicycle contraption. I distinctly remember bringing him out a glass of water because my Mam asked me too. It was a hot afternoon. Unfortunately, I also remember that he didn't do a very good job - something I only found out much later in life.

Similar bicycle-bound knife sharpeners are quite common in Indian cities and villages. Such devices serve a dual purpose as it is both the equipment as well as a mode of transportation. There are variations of it in different regions of the country. In the hilly regions where cycling is not possible, the contraption is modified so that it can be easily carried on the head or shoulders.

In Australia we have our own knife sharpener... (well, some time ago, the actual 'trailer' is now in our national museum). It's the Saw doctor's wagon. Some pics and info here: Link. From memory it's about 30ft long and was pulled by a ute (Australian pickup truck).

In the flesh it's quite amazing, with different options for saws, knifes, kitchen blades, machetes, sissors, really anything with a blade. If anyone is in Canberra it's worth the visit.

I have seen the same things in Mumbai (Bombay), India, the city where I grew up. These things existed as recently as three years ago, but I have been in the US ever since and I dont know if those guys are still around. These guys often sell their owns knives that have been sharpened on the bicycle. I have used those knives and while the blade is somewhat flexible and can be bent by hand, the edge is pretty sharp, and it is very effective in cutting vegetables.

Bollywood has the best paean to these knifey heroes in Jaya Bhaduri's knife-sharpener cameo in the 1973 hit 'Zanjeer.' Video Link.

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

Military technology has inspired some of history's greatest films: Firefox, Stealth, Crimson Tide... the list is practically endless.  But never, to the best of my knowledge, has a gay porn house dared to plat in this arena, strived to go head to head with these timeless classics.  Friends, I can now report that this imbalance has been rectified:

Following the controversial political parody of Gaytanamo, released to huge critical acclaim earlier this year, New York'€™s most filthy-fun gay film studio Dark Alley Media today announced plans to kick the US Government while it'€™s down.

Gay Bomb will take us into the future and the year 2012. George the Second has refused to step down as leader of the €œfree world,€ and the nations of Europe have banded together to fight the new American military dictatorship.

Desperate to fend off its attackers, the US launches the experimental gay bomb, designed to make the enemy forces drop their guns and turn fag.

But the winds of fate blow in a different direction, and soon America is brought to its knees.

They've just released a bunch of wonderful new titles. Here's a rundown of some of my favorites:

Jim Goad’s Gigantic Book of Sex, by Jim Goad

The author of the notorious ‘zine ANSWER Me!, Shit Magnet (Feral House), and the best-selling Redneck Manifesto (Simon & Schuster) lampoons every imaginable aspect of human sexuality in 224 hilarious, illustrated, full-color, R-rated pages.

Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product, by Dave Praeger

Is “The Origin of Feces” a Darwinian concern? Perhaps not, but it is the title to the preface of this tongue-in-cheek and unexpectedly revealing exploration of human behavior by the webmaster behind the popular PoopReport.com.

Mexican Pulp Art, from the Collections of Bobbette Axelrod and Ted Frankel

The lurid cover art of Mexican pulp novels is a pop culture revelation. Never before seen in an English or even Spanish-language collection are the often surreal and psychedelic images of extraterrestrials, robots, dinosaurs, dastardly killers, Zorro, Santo, and many other icons from stories involving suspense, mystery, romance and the supernatural.

Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ Warfare Laboratories, Clandestine Aircraft Bases, and Other Places in the United States You’re Not Supposed to Know About, by Harry Helms

Here is the unseen America of government facilities and installations protected by a wall of secrecy, deception, and misinformation. It includes huge, isolated areas (some larger than the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island), along with innocuous office buildings located in the middle of major cities. This “other America” has an enormous impact on your life, but you probably have little idea of its extent, scope, and power.

American Hair Metal, by Steven Blush

There was a time -- not so long ago -- when pomp and spandex dominated MTV and pop radio playlists. American Hair Metal celebrates this orgy of flamboyance, androgyny and animal magnetism, of big-haired alpha males and the beautiful women who surrounded them. Rare photographs of the biggest bands and unsung heroes surround revealing quotes about the sex, drugs and Rock & Roll style of ‘80s American hair metal.

Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with The MC5 and the White Panther Party, by John Sinclair

Guitar Army is the incendiary book that proclaimed “Rock and Roll is a Weapon of Cultural Revolution.” This 35th anniversary edition of Guitar Army includes two dozen previously unpublished period photographs, recent writings from John Sinclair, and an introduction from Michael Simmons. A bonus CD contains rare recordings of MC5 and other Detroit-area revolutionary bands, Allen Ginsberg, Black Panther Bobby Seale on the White Panthers, and original White Panther Party meetings.

And here a couple of upcoming books from Process and Feral House that look interesting:

The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, YaHoWha 13, and The Source Family, by Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian

It was 1972, time of the cult-occult-commune explosion. By day, the Source Family served organic cuisine to John Lennon, Julie Christy, Frank Zappa and others at the famed Source restaurant. By night, in a mansion in Hollywood Hills, they explored the cosmos through the channeled wisdom of their charismatic leader, Father Yod. Father was an outlandish figure who had 14 “spiritual wives,” drove a Rolls-Royce, and fronted the rock band Ya Ho Wa 13, now considered by collectors to be one of the most singular psychedelic bands of all time.

Here are some photos of Father Yod and his commune.

The Secret King: The Myth and Reality of Nazi Occultism, by Stephen E. Flowers and Michael Moyniha

The Secret King is the first book to explode many myths surrounding the popular idea of Nazi occultism, while presenting the actual esoteric rituals used by Heinrich Himmler’s SS under the influence of rune magician Karl-Maria Wiligut, the “Secret King of Germany.”

David Pescovitz and I are going to visit with Adam and Jodi soon for an on-location podcast.

Security guards in a Silver Springs business district are enforcing a "no photography" policy, under the false claim that the street in question is private property. The Peterson Company, which manages the buildings on this DC-area street, claims the right to protect their brand. Not to be dissuaded, photographers have contacted NowPublic contributor Bill Adler (he of sippy-cup fame) and formed a Flickr group to post photos of the area in defiance of the ban, and a protest is being scheduled by area photographers. this is the latest in the ongoing trend of private guards enforcing frivolous or nonexistent laws in the name of "security".

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Aussie mall defends its photons from terrorists
• No taking pix of San Fran building from the sidewalk?
• Photography student's odd run-in with Homeland Security
• Spy museum bans photography

Reader comment:

Joseph says:

That technique is called slit scan. It was popular in the 60's and 70's. I was inspired to google slit scanning and came up with this: someone de-slit scanned the 2001 images. This is the artwork (he infers) that was used in the movie. Kinda neat

The technique used in this case is called Time Displacement which is a cool After Effects effect that uses colors and grayscale gradients to play different parts of a video timeline in a single frame.

Slit scan is a cool technique, but this is NOT slit scan.

Neither was it invented by Adobe; in fact it predates the original (COSA) After Effects by a good five years.

Normally it's hard to track down the exact provenance of a technique, but in this case there is absolutely no ambiguity.

It was invented by the brilliant filmmaker Zbignew Rybczynski in an experimental film called The Fourth Dimension in 1988.

I highly recommend his three DVD collections; The Fourth Dimension is contained on DVD No 2 (Steps). DVD No 1 (Media), which contains work from 1972 to 1982, is absolutely mind-blowing. Jam-packed with ideas that were so far ahead of their time that, well, some of them still are. Required viewing for anyone involved in digital/nonlinear/database/etc cinema. Link

I just posted an item in Salon about a crazy Chicago Alderman who wants to ban a new radar detector that alerts drivers to red-light cameras. He's afraid that if people can learn about upcoming cameras, they will -- you know -- stop at the red lights. And if people stop at the lights, Chicago will lose all the fine money. That's really his reason. He wants people to run through red lights so that the city doesn't lose money.

A BB reader says, "The book is about domestic bioterrorism. The plot arose when the Department of Homeland Security about Bear and others to speak about the future of crime. Good interview." Link

This inflatable bouncy playground set that supposed to be a cowboy monkey perched on a tunnel looks more like a creepy monkey showing off it's engorged giant monkey crotch. Phallus or labia? You decide. the amount of children this playground toy has warped and traumatized must be staggering. It can only be seen to be believed. when I say it's a giant monkey crotch playground play toy, I really mean it.

Reader comment:

Isaac B2 says:

Seeing Mark's post about the monkey crotch reminded me of a party I went to a few weeks back with a giant inflatable train for kids to bounce in that I had to take a picture of... it looked more like a penis than anything else. All aboard!

This unfortunately shaped inflatable jungle gym contraption was spewing out children at an apple-picking farm in the Catskills a few years ago. (Animated gif of children spewing forth out of the hole)

A girl's feet were cut off Thursday when a free-fall thrill ride malfunctioned at the Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom Amusement Park in Louisville, Kentucky, police said.

A cord wrapped around the 16-year-old's feet and severed them at her ankles while she was on the "Superman Tower of Power," a police dispatcher said. The girl was taken to a local hospital.

The Unbinding of Spirits

What frail spectres can we begin to conceive
out of darkened bedrooms and glass-blown pride?
Conjuring tongues and gin-chilled fingers relieve
us of our private hauntings, turn them inside
out upon the carpet. Can we not inspire
peace—not this hag-ridden, ghost-hackled perturb
of an existence? Give one thought to what dire
sorrows may come forth, what we may disturb?
Yet here is grief. I have been waylaid.
I am gone to frantic clutching, a raving
of words, braiSitting, steadying the tilting world; smoking, obscuring the truthsding together things unsaid,
things imagined. Mourning’s bright weaving.
From my drowning bed, dragged by tides’ rebound,
my spectral words, pulled to depths where they unsound.

On June 5, I posted three semi-finalists out of the 334 comments:

* Butterflies and beverages; water must be banned.
* Dimethylmercury; security checkpoints must be banned, but of course they can't be. Oh, what to do!
* Oxy-hydrogen bomb; wires -- earphones, power cables, etc. -- must be banned.

Well, we have a winner. I can't divulge the exact formula -- because you'll all hack the system next year -- but it was a combination of my opinion, popular acclaim in blog comments, and the opinion of Tom Grant (the previous year's winner).

I present to you: Butterflies and Beverages, posted by Ron.

It's called the sitting cage, a cage made in the mold of the human body. Once inside the thing you can't move. Totally insane and not one for claustrophobics.

The site is semi-safe for work. No nudity or anything.

This week, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization is holding a critical debate on the "Broadcast Treaty." This treaty would establish a new copyright-like right, but whereas copyright goes to people who make creative works, Broadcast Rights go to companies that broadcast other people's copyrighted works. The Broadcast Right isn't subject to the same fair use limits as copyright, which means that even if copyright lets you record a broadcast for criticism or parody, you will need to separately get an exemption under the Broadcast Right. More gravely, if means that if you license your work under Creative Commons, the people who distribute the files or air the program can overrule your generosity and insist that your fans not copy your work.

This treaty threatens the Internet as we know it. Novel services like YouTube and novel practice like podcasting would not exist today if this treaty was already implemented.

The General Assembly of WIPO has ordered Jukka Liedes, the chairman of the relevant committee to cut this out, instructing him to oversee a much narrower treaty that will block "theft of signals" (hacking free cable or satellite), while leaving all this other business off. The chairman has gone rogue, ignoring the direction of the Assembly and producing a draft that's even worse than the previous draft.

The Chairman isn't the only one who's gone rogue, though: the National Association of Broadcasters of America has been lobbying hard all week for the treaty. One problem: PBS and NPR -- members of NABA -- oppose the treaty and have not authorized the association to lobby for this measure.

"National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service do not support a Diplomatic Conference to adopt a treaty based on the April 20, 2007 non-paper because they do not believe the treaty provides adequate protection for the fair use of broadcast and cablecast matter for newsgathering and other purposes. Bell ExpressVu does not support a Diplomatic Conference because it believes the proposed exclusive retransmission right exceeds what is necessary to prevent signal piracy or protect investment and does not contain a reservation that would permit a signatory to limit or not apply the application of the retransmission right."

Link to gigglesugar, where someone astutely pointed out the resemblance. (thanks, Barbara!).

As you will see from the attached article from today’s The Miami Herald, President George W. Bush’s daughters made him a presumably illegal compilation CD, a so-called “mix CD,” as a Father’s Day present. As the article, at http://www.miamiherald.com/692/story/142726.html states, “[President] Bush's twin daughters, gave him [as a Father’s Day present] a CD they had made for him to listen to while exercising.”

This is a serious violation of copyright. As you know, whichever of your member organizations that are right-holders for the copied musical works may be entitled to statutory damages of $150,000.00 per musical work copied.

I hope and expect that you at the RIAA will display the same vigor in prosecuting this matter and protecting the rights of your rights-holders that it has displayed in enforcing those rights against other alleged violators.

When I viewed the new iPhone site something struck me: did Apple change the dimensions of the unit?

A quick comparison of the official Apple photos revealed they've just changed handsize.

(Wikipedia has an interesting page on forced perspective by the way)

BoingBoing reader Destiny Land says,

YouTube joined CNN for a bold experiment -- letting YouTube users upload questions for the 2008 candidates for President. But one week in, how's it working out?

The Washington Post rounds up the best videos they could find: Link.

...but 10 Zen Monkeys found the WORST! Link.

I loved the hard-hitting questions from the audience during the Kerry/Bush debates -- but what happens if YouTube can't deliver enough good questions? In the end, couldn't this trivialize the primary process -- and the role of "citizen video-bloggers" -- rather than expand it?

What if my President was selected by MySpace? It’s the nagging concern raised when young video bloggers lob questions at the Presidential candidates. In July when the Democrats gather in Charleston, they’ll find CNN has swapped in questions that were uploaded as videos to YouTube.

At least that was the hope when the CNN/YouTube “debate” was announced. Unfortunately, no one cared about the announcement (except the commenter who added “omg the youtube guy is fucking HAWTT!!!”). Nearly a week later, YouTube has barely managed to assemble more than 50 questions to choose from. And five of them are the dogs below.

This has become a motif among net-critics, whose vanguard is Andrew Keen, who wrote a sloppy, intellectually dishonest book called The Cult of the Amateur that damns the Internet for much the same reasons (Clay Shirky wrote a great response to Keen). Shirky has made a little cottage industry out of taking these people apart, writing articulate, snappy essays debunking their claims and explaining the real way that the net and expertise interact. This is highly recommended reading.

These two theories cannot both be true, so it’s odd to find them side by side, but Gorman does not seem to be comfortable with either of them as a general case. This leads to a certain schizophrenic quality to the writing. We’re told that print does not necessarily bestow authenticity and that some digital material does, but we’re also told that he consulted “authoritative printed sources” on Goya. If authenticity is an option for both printed and digital material, why does printedness matter? Would the same words on the screen be less scholarly somehow?

Gorman is adopting a historically contingent view: Revolution then was good, revolution now is bad. As a result, according to Gorman, the shift to digital and networked reproduction of information will fail unless it recapitulates the institutions and habits that have grown up around print.

Gorman’s theory about print — its capabilities ushered in an age very different from manuscript culture — is correct, and the same kind of shift is at work today. As with the transition from manuscripts to print, the new technologies offer virtues that did not previously exist, but are now an assumed and permanent part of our intellectual environment. When reproduction, distribution, and findability were all hard, as they were for the last five hundred years, we needed specialists to undertake those jobs, and we properly venerated them for the service they performed. Now those tasks are simpler, and the earlier roles have instead become obstacles to direct access.

Digital and networked production vastly increase three kinds of freedom: freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly. This perforce increases the freedom of anyone to say anything at any time. This freedom has led to an explosion in novel content, much of it mediocre, but freedom is like that. Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline. Experts the world over have been shocked to discover that they were consulted not as a direct result of their expertise, but often as a secondary effect — the apparatus of credentialing made finding experts easier than finding amateurs, even when the amateurs knew the same things as the experts.

Clarion West board member Eileen Gunn sez, "The Clarion West Writers Workshop is running an unusual fundraising auction on eBay this week, offering bidders the right to appear in stories by various science-fiction and fantasy writers: Paul Park, Eileen Gunn, Vylar Kaftan, and K. Tempest Bradford. Eight auctions are underway already and will end at some point after 9:30 p.m. PST on June 26." Link

Update: Matthew sez, "The "toy soldier table" is very remenescent of the super-cool 'Floor' installation by Do-Ho Suh at the Indianapolis Museum of Art."

Update: Gavin sez, "I could only be reminded of the wall I painted with magnetic paint leading into my kitchen. It's very entertaining, and it is a living scrapbook for everyone to enjoy!" Pic 1, Pic 2

The government goofballs who reject tourist visas for no good reason also delight in using confusing language to explain why tourist visas were rejected:

The provenance of the funds depicted is not evidenced allied to other financial commitments.

You have failed to complete pivotal areas of Section 6. P>I can only assess your mutual knowledge in a subjective context.

There was a thread in a comic book chat room about two years ago that discussed the "Robin Corner Shock Pose" Its superbly funny. In a nutshell the late 50's and 60's Batman comics have Robin in the bottom left or right corner looking shocked at whatever is going on. This occurs on about 30 covers. Nearly exact same pose every time. Here's a link with the page showing a poster picture of the covers.

"But you haven't explained for what purpose."

"I explained; for air, and to see, and just to walk."

"Have you done this often?"

"Every night for years."

The police car sat in the center of the street with its radio throat faintly humming.

"Well, Mr. Mead," it said.

"Is that all?" he asked politely.

"Yes," said the voice. "Here." There was a sigh, a pop. The back door of the police car sprang wide. "Get in."

"Wait a minute, I haven't done anything!"

"Get in."

Reader comment:

Nathaniel says:

On the general subject of "21st century turning out rather badly so far," I noticed that corpo-police-state super-macho riot-cop motifs, presented as dystopian in the '80s in for example "Robocop," reappeared years later in the filmed version of "I, Robot" -- as a comforting, familiar connection to the present! When Will Smith interrogates his robot suspect, the array of locked-and-loaded human SWATistas behind him don't seem to connote dystopianism but rather to remind and reassure us of the human power of self-determination and to offer a connection to our actual 21st century present reality. I thought it was interesting how culture has rotated itself around the Riot Cop as an icon, and normalized the security state.

In another, more recent and disturbing example, I just finished reading Hartwell's "Year's Best S.F. #4," from 1998, and while most of the stories in it are already dated, some surprisingly so, I was shocked at how relevant, how much MORE relevant, Swanwick's horror story "Radiant Doors" has recently become. Swanwick has seen something very important about the mass psychology of our new era, and saw it very early.

No matter how much you may know about the internet, there's always something new out there that can make your online experience better. Tonight on the Front Porch, we talk with editor, blogger and tech expert Mark Frauenfelder about all the hidden gems the web has to offer. Mark is the founder of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, and he's the author of the new book Rule the Web.

SEEING ANEW: A LECTURE BY TREVOR OAKES + RYAN OAKES
Co-hosted by The Institute For Figuring and Machine Project
7pm Sunday June 24, 2007
FREE

It is hard to believe there is anything new to be discovered about perspective drawing. But in 2004 twin artists Trevor and Ryan Oakes made a startling discovery about how to render perspectival images on the inner surface on a sphere. Their discovery is all the more intriguing in the light of recent controversy surrounding David Hockney's thesis about the use of spherical lenses in the making of perspective drawings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In their first public talk the Oakes will discuss their perspectival research and will demonstrate their unique spherical rendering technique. The lecture will include a historical account of other optical tools used to depict three-dimensional space - including the concave mirror-lens, the camera obscura, and the camera lucida - by way of introduction to their own method, which explores the interplay between the visual cortex and the human retina using pen and "concave paper."

The Institute For Figuring is a Los Angeles-based organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics.

Link

---------------------------

Build a Blubber Bot Robotic Blimp - Instructor Jed Berk
Saturday June 30th, 2007
10am - 4pm (w/ a break for lunch)

One-day workshop w/ materials included. $185
Enrollment is limited to 7 people.

Blubber Bots are DIY robotic species that navigate autonomously and intelligently. Blubber Bots float, dance, seek and sing. They are light-seeking helium-filled balloons that graze the landscape in search of light and cell-phone signals. If you make a call and wave your phone near a Blubber Bot, it will go into a flocking dance or sing you a special tune. They bellow sounds similar to a whale’s song and serenade you with melodies. When not being played with, they rest for awhile, awakening periodically and seeking attention.

Join us at Machine Project to build your very own Blubber Bot with inventor Jed Berk. Link

This is the funniest 5 second internet video ever. Maybe just the funniest internet video ever. Video Link. With all that gravitas, I think he must be Mr. Romance's pet or friend. (Thanks, Kent Nichols!)

Reader comments: Paul Berger says,

The star of "Dramatic Chipmunk" appears to be a Prairie Dog (Cynomys sp.) as opposed to a chipmunk (Tamias sp.). Either a great example of cross=species casting or a call to action for chipmunk-americans to stand up for their rights. Loved the video.

And warning, some readers claim to have experienced possible malware risks at the video link above. Rob says,

using Internet Explorer (I'd rather use FF, but...) and a pop up tries to con you into installing software (and I bet its not something nice).

This one is a bit different from what I've seen before: The pop up is in the same language as the version of IE you are using (when I used a danish IE the popup was in danish, and when I used an US IE the pop up was in English).

Using FF and your are as so often before; immune.

Anyhow: You might want to warn the readers of your great blog (or the poor sods like me, forced to use IE at work, where I really should not surf BoingBoing :o) or perhaps remove the link all together.

The link you guys provided to the dramatic chipmunk (who is very splendid, but not a chipmunk - he's a prairie dog) is heaving with popups, prompts to download spyware and other nastiness. Here's a YouTube link to the same video, without the ads and popups.

I just thought you might enjoy our small friend in animated .gif form. (I didn't make it. I'm not sure who did, actually. I just found it on a message board.)

Rafael says,

Link to the "dramatic chipmunk" video but with dramatic subtitles, hilarious.

After posting the animated .gif version of the dramatic chipmunk Xeni posted earlier, forum members from my website created a number of different versions. My favorite is the one with the monocle. Link.

Back when I was working at Cutler's Records in New Haven, CT in the late (or was it mid?) 1970's my manager Barry told me about these things and how they used to sell 'em like hot cakes back in the 50's. He wasn't the kind of guy to make shit up but I still found it kinda hard to believe that you could have a record player in your car. For some odd reason I was just thinking about it and managed to google up this article.

A House Homeland Security subcommittee is holding a hearing [today] into security breaches, hacking and IT security failure at the Department of Homeland Security, that totaled more than 800 incidents in two years.

"What did you find regarding US Visit in terms of cyber security?," Logren asked. Keith A. Rhodes, the director of the Center for Technology and Engineering at the Government Accountability Office, seemed to be waiting for this one:

Security issues are pervasive. As matter of fact, i realize that there was earlier statement that our audit was a year old, but actually our audit started a year ago. As matter of fact, we curtailed our assessment since we kept getting more and more findings. If we continued to this day, we would still be finding problems. The problems are pervasive and systemic.

Actually, a lot could be fixed. Systems were out of date or misconfigured. A lot of them are zero cost fixes. I reiterate the systems are run by contractors.

"Was the US Visit database hacked?" Lofgren asked.

Rhodes hesitated and then said.

"I did not see controls in place that would prevent it and did not see defensive perimeter and detection systems in place to tell whether it had or had not been been hacked.

THREAT LEVEL needs not hestitate, since WIRED already found out through government sunshine litigation that US VISIT computers -- ostensibly not connected at all to the internet -- were hit by the Zotob virus, an infestation the government tried to cover-up.

This is a solid-state Tesla coil. The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear.

What's not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it's firing.

Now you can get it on a shirt, and remember a time when governments tried to keep us safe by making us secure, instead of scaring the shit out of us. Link (via Neatorama)

BoingBoing reader Pete Mortensen says,

My co-worker Isabel O'Meara booked a flight on Southwest a week ago and ended up with the most inappropriate confirmation code ever. It's CUNNTT. Swear to god. I've seen it in person. And she just blogged it, with a scan of the receipt in question here. Amazing customer service. Amazing.

Reader comment: Glenn Fleishman says,

The CUNNTT code reminded me of an anecdote from Nathaniel Borenstein's wonderful, out-of-print book Programming As If People Mattered. In it (I paraphrase from memory), he notes how a system that he was working on that generated random sequences of letters for some file data was producing dirty words that some executives were unhappy with. A group of developers are in a conference room, thinking about generating lists of dirty words and so forth when a snot-nosed intern says, "drop the vowels, use base 30 [10 numbers plus 20 letters], and you're all set."

I used to work for a game company that made kids games for Nintendo DS. We had a cheat code system that used alpha-numeric characters, and these codes would randomly generate after each level you passed. The publisher complained that it was possible to get cuss words as codes at times.

We did the math and figured that the chances of getting a cuss word was about one in one BILLION, but in the eyes of the publisher this was too risky. So, we ended up replacing all vowels with happy faces and such. It wasn't a big deal, but it just amazed me how sensitive the game industry has gotten since the coffee-mod fiasco.

Unfortunately you can't see it clearly, but Cancun's airport code is CUN, and this is a photo of an airport vehicle painted with the code CUNT5: Link.

Back in the day... early 90's, before the interwebs was really popular, I was a travel agent, using Sabre, which is/was (I'm not sure now) American Airlines' reservation system. Those confirmation codes are more commonly known, in the industry, as record locators. Pretty much anyone on the system could retrieve anybody's record by record locator. When I was bored, I would pull up random record locators, by typing in words of the correct length (I believe they were 6 or 8 chars long) Doing this, I found a number of records in which American Airlines employees would chat in the comments fields. I joined them and made some friends that way. The way it works is you would add some comments to the bottom of a record. Then you save the record, and others would add their comments. Unfortunately, if you put your comments in there, but someone else saved before you did, you would lose your changes and get a "SIMULTANEOUS CHANGES" alert. You would then reload it to see whatever changes someone else had added. It was kind of like having a shared text file. I also found a number of records where the American Airlines employees recorded the bizarre behavior of passengers and stuff. It was a good, fun way to kill time before the advent of email and internet. Back in the olde tyme Fax era.

I work as a programmer on an airline reservation system. There is a "dirty words" list that automatically blocks most of those insulting "PNR locators" whick contain rude words. It's obvious why this one got by, since the bad word is misspelled.

Your post reminded me of the Yamaha RY9 drum machine:

It had a simple display, only five characters available for text descriptions of sounds, patterns etc. Some of the sounds were for simple metronome like duties and were called Count1, Count2 etc. I think you can guess which letter Yamaha in their infinite wisdom dropped...

Just google'd it, the manual (with sounds listed in the appendix) is available here: PDF Link.

Maybe not as good as that, but I had an AOL cd once which had the activation code: "cloaca-market". They used to use (they may still) word pairs pull from the dictionary, apparently.

Back in 2003 I made a reservation over the phone with a very friendly Delta Airlines reservation agent who had a strong Jamaican accent. I give her my details, reserved a flight, and she read me my confirmation number very clearly: "RNIGGR." Needless to say, I didn't repeat it for confirmation.

Back in 1988, I was taking a System Admin course for Prime Computers (remember them?)

The lady who sat next to me was a very outspoken, funny, and very fat woman. At one point the instructor was showing us the automatic password generator - he walked out the room for a moment, and us students were amusing ourselves, generating random words.

At one point, the woman next to me started laughing hysterically. I looked over, and saw the password that had been generated for her.

The password was 'FAT'

She composed herself to normal, and had lots of fun complaining to the the instructor about how their computers had personally insulted her.

Your post reminded me of a the hoops we had to go through to deal with obscene/naughty words in the spell checker of a now defunct word processor app.

There were two real-world scenarios our team heard about: First, a high school principal who misspelled "high school principal" in a school newsletter and got the suggestion "asshole principal"; second, a young girl named Ashley, whose own name was not in our dictionary and so the spell checker suggested "Asshole". Both the principal and Ashley's parents sent irate comments to our support staff.

As we were working on a major rev of the product, we decided to tackle this issue. The first first solution was to just remove all the "bad" words from the main dictionaries. Of course, this meant that a document with correctly spelled obscene words (we envisioned Norman Mailer using our product) would have all of those flagged, which was deemed a poor alternative result, not to mention potentially forcing our users to fill their custom dictionaries with all those words. After much thought and debated, we finally decided on tweaking the spell checker code so that we could give it a list of words that it would never offer as suggestions. Therefore, the spell checker would properly ignore "asshole" as being correctly spelled, while "ashole/asshol/Ashley" would be flagged as as misspellings, but the suggestions would never include "asshole" itself.

After congratulating ourselves on solving the problem, we suddenly realized that we had to create the "correctly spelled obscenity" list, which were sent around the internal email system for review for completeness, appropriateness and much amusement. We had to decide whether words like "asswipe" or "shitfaced" should be included, or does the program only know the hyphenated versions. We had to deal with transatlantic slang: "fanny" and "bloody" in the UK vs. "fag" and "pissed" in the US. Then, our poor, internationalization team had to create localized lists of "bad" words for the 14 Roman based languages (including the two main variants each of Portuguese and Spanish).

I wonder if the airlines people didn't have an inkling of the how much work it'd take to avoid generating "CUNNTT" and decided that it was much easier (and cheaper) to apologize to offended passengers (and maybe offer a voucher).

Update:Barry points to the original source of the map.