• They've Got the Touch – The first official review of the iPod Touch is glowing. Link

• Join Us – "What it's Like to Switch to Ubuntu" Link

• S.H.E.E.P. – "Hype Sheet: HP Hollas Back, Girl" Link

• Come On, ePaper – One man's travails with a wi-fi picture frame. Link

• Sportsmobile Ultimate Adventure Vehicle: In a Van, Down In the River Link

• Time Box Calendar Spool from Biaugust Link

• Edible Nokia Handset Mooncakes Link

• Electro-Anachronistic, Neo-Victorian, Gaslightesque, Post-Dickensian, Vernesian, Clockwork, Grunge-a Din, Steampunk Metal Sculpture Link

• Husqvarna Auto Mower: Another Lawn Care Robot Link

• Smart New Speedometer Concept from Johnson Controls Link

• Winamp Lives! Link

• Griffin Technology iPhone Headphone Adapter Link

• Virgin America announces in-flight, air-to-ground broadband Link

• "Life Saver" Water Filtration Bottle Link

• Video: Microsoft MS-DOS 5 Promotional Rap Video. Yes, Rap Link

• Women's Spatial Acuity Improved By Videogame Link

• Hennessy Hammocks Link

• Not Everyone Loving the New iPod Interface Link

• Morning Tech Deals Highlights Link

Miro needs your donations -- the project is trying to raise $50,000 to pay programmers and designers to make its player even better.

Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) is the best and most promising video player I've ever used. It's free and open -- licensed under the GPL -- and it incorporates three different technologies that make watching videos easier and better than any of the proprietary players like Windows Media Player or iTunes. These technologies are VLC, a free and open video playback engine that plays all video formats, no matter where they come from; RSS, so that you can subscribe to "feeds" of your favorite videos (including subscribing to feeds of YouTube videos matching your keywords); and BitTorrent, so that you can download files without costing the people who host them -- so the more popular a file is, the cheaper it is to host.

Miro is a bet on a future for "Internet TV" that is as open as the Web, controlled by no one. Otherwise, the way things are headed, we could end up with one or two giant companies owning the future of video. No one -- not community activists, not video startups, no one -- benefits when just a few companies control the platform.

The Miro fundraiser will raise money to pay the talented hackers who have been producing regular updates to the Miro platform, ensuring that there's always an up-to-date version for the Mac, Windows and Linux. I believe in Miro enough to have volunteered for their Board of Directors since they started -- I hope you'll help us keep on producing the future of Internet video. Link

(Disclosure: I am a board member for the Participatory Culture Foundation, the 501(c)3 charitable nonprofit that oversees production of Miro)

A Welsh priest/Dr Who fan is planning Who-themed services to attract the young 'uns:

St Paul's Church, in Grangetown, Cardiff, was used as a location for an episode of the first series of Doctor Who starring the ninth Doctor played by Christopher Eccleston.

And parish priest, Father Ben Andrews, 32, says he loves the cult TV show so much he thought a themed evening would go down well with the youngsters.

He said: "I love the series and it has such a great following that we couldn't resist doing something for young people on a Dr Who theme.

"We will be looking at the idea of Jesus as a Lord of time and showing who Jesus was and the different images of him throughout time.

"We will try and get some Dr Who props in to try and make it as lively as possible."

Link (Thanks, Jennifer!)

A Polish paper has reported that a googlebomber ("23 years old Marek W. from Cieszyn") has been arrested for creating a googlebomb that turned President Lech Kaczyński's homepage into the top search result for Google searches on the word "kutas" ("penis"). Marek W faces up to three years in prison.

The man used the official website of Polish president Lech Kaczyński for testing the software. When internet users typed "kutas" ["penis"] they got the official president's site. Furthermore - it was the first result. They played with this for couple of months - right up to March this year. That's when the 23 years old was traced by investigator from the Katowice police office.

Finding him wasn't difficult - the man used his home computer, which police easily traced by its IP address. The computer amateur confirmed that he wrote the program. "I just wanted to verify my skills and check if the software works" was his his explanation during the hearings.

Link (via Ars Technica)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel has spotted this sweet (and I do mean sweet) collection of edible, Nokia-handset-shaped mooncakes for Chinese mid-autumn festival. A couple nights back, I mentioned mooncakes at a dinner in Beijing and the table erupted in hilarity and derision -- my hosts advised me that mooncakes are the Chinese equivalent of Christmas cakes -- no one likes them, everyone gives them (I like Christmas cake!). They are haloed with weird possible urban legends, like the scandal of a mooncake manufacturer that was recycling last year's filling because no one can taste the difference between year-old and fresh mooncake stuffin'. The consensus was that the best mooncakes come from western chains, like Starbucks (the Starbucks in China and Singapore carry green tea and coffee flavored mooncakes in plastic wrappers with little silica packets to keep them "fresh") (they also don't charge extra for soy-milk, a smart move in the land of widespread lactose intolerance). Starbucks's cakes are apparently less incredibly sweet than the real deal. Practically every food shop, restaurant, duty-free and department store I've visited here has had some kind of mooncake boxed assortment on offer, in elaborate packaging. At the Carrefour grocery superstore in Beijing, they had a double aisle running the whole length of the store devoted to 'em. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

A man built his own guillotine and used it to kill himself.

Groundskeeper from the Fairlane Green shopping center at Outer and Fairlane drive discovered the body shortly before 11 a.m. Monday.

Allen Park Deputy Police Chief Dale Covert said the roughly six-foot tall guillotine was bolted to a tree and included a swing arm. Covert said police also found several store receipts detailing the materials used to assemble the device.

"I can't even tell you how long it must have taken him to construct," he said. "This man obviously was very determined to end his life."

According to investigators, the man had to make several trips to carry the wooden and metal parts to the area in the woods.

Link

Fosta says:

I was tucking into a toblerone today, and decided to have a look into the history of this unusual chocolate bar. Aside from a rather interesting history, (maybe Einstein handled the patent) I found that there is a secret bear hiding in the matterhorn logo. I've shown everyone in the office, and no-one has noticed it before. I love things like that!

It reminds me a little of the Land O Lakes trick. Link

Toronto's Seneca College is throwing its sixth annual Free Software/Open Source convention -- admission is as cheap at $20, and this year's speaker lineup includes Bob Young, Co-founder, RedHat and CEO and Founder, Lulu.com; Ross Turk, Community Manager, Sourceforge.net; Chris Blizzard, One Laptop Per Child Project; and Marc Kwiatkowski, Senior Software Engineer, Facebook.

Welcome to Seneca's 6th Annual
Free Software and Open Source Symposium
October 25-26th, 2007 - 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Seneca@York Campus, Toronto

The Symposium is a two-day event aimed at bringing together educators, developers and other interested parties to discuss common free software and open source issues, learn new technologies and to promote the use of free and open source software. At Seneca College, we think free and open source software are real alternatives.

Want to present? The deadline for presentation proposals for this year's symposium is September 1.

Link

Chris says: "Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence in the US, recently claimed that a temporary electronic-surveilliance law that gives 'the U.S. intelligence community broad new powers to eavesdrop on telephone and e-mail communications overseas without seeking warrants from the surveillance court' helped to stop a terror plot in Germany. Au contraire, the plot was actually discovered months before the law was even created, and it was done so by US military guards; no wiretapping involved."

McConnell's testimony that the new law helped in the German case was especially striking—since it seemed to contradict public statements by American and German officials about how the plot was exposed. About 10 months ago—long before the new law was put into effect—guards at a U.S. military base near Frankfurt noted a suspicious individual conducting surveillance outside the facility. U.S. military officials tipped off German authorities, who quickly identified the individual and several accomplices as militants affiliated with the Islamic Jihad Union, a violent Al Qaeda-linked group. The Germans kept the group under surveillance for months and discovered evidence that the militants—some of whom had been to an Islamic Jihad Union training camp in Pakistan—were assembling chemicals for bombing attacks on American military installations in Germany. (The U.S. Embassy in Berlin issued a public warning last April that it had received intelligence reporting about threats against U.S. personnel in that country.) One U.S. intelligence official described the law-enforcement operation as a case of "good old-fashioned police work."

Link

Exterminknit is a (delightfully named) pattern for knitting your own Dalek. Link (via Making Light)

See also:
HOWTO build a working Dalek
Crocheted Dalek
Dalek cake
Record-breaking Dalek gathering in Manchester
HOWTO make mechanized Dalek-o-lantern
HOWTO bake a chocolate Dalek

A reader says:

Fake street signs declaring the Mexico City neighborhood of Itzacalco a "Tolerance Zone" for prostitution and murder. Nice use of graphic design. It's not know who put these up, or whether they're intended to encourage or protest such activty.

Link

The US Army's MQ-5B/C Hunter unmanned aerial vehicle made its first kill in Iraq this month, reports Defense Tech. (The CIA and Air Force's drones have been killing for years, but this is a first for the army.)

A Hunter unmanned aerial vehicle engaged and killed two suspected improvised explosive device emplacers overwatching a major thoroughfare for Coalition Forces during a historic flight near Qayyarah, Iraq, in Nineveh province Sept. 1.

A scout weapons team from 2nd Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment, 25th Combat Aviation Brigade, observed the two unknown enemy fighters in a tactical overwatch near the roadside. The SWT requested support from the Hunter UAV.

The pilots guided the Hunter operator to the scene where it set up for a strike mission and dropped its precision munition, killing both unknown enemies and marking a first in Army Aviation history.

"It’s very humbling to know that we have set an Army historical mark in having the first successful launch in combat from an Army weaponized UAV," said Capt. Raymond Fields, commander, Unmanned Aerial Surveillance Company. "This would not be possible without my soldiers and civilians working hard day in and day out in Iraq to accomplish this feat."

Link

Welcome to Moon 2.0. Snip from announcement coverage at Wired News:

Google will award $30 million to the first private team to put a robot on the moon, the company and the X Prize Foundation announced at Wired NextFest in Los Angeles Thursday. Members of the public will also get the chance to send digital mementos to the moon. In this advance from the October issue of Wired magazine, contributing editor Spencer Reiss explains what's behind the Google Lunar X Prize, and what it will take to win it.

Link, here's more about today's announcement.

Two young US soldiers who contributed to a collaborative New York Times op-ed about the war were killed in Iraq this week. Link to story in UK Guardian, Link to report in NYT, via themorningnews. Read their op-ed: The War as We See It, Link. (Thanks, Susannah)

A sneaky flower dealer near Sunset and Vermont in Los Angeles has a sign on the sidewalk that tricks drivers into thinking it sells roses for $4 a dozen.

But if you get down on your hands and knees and use a magnifying glass, you can see a tiny "1/2" in front of the large "DOZ,"and an equally miniature "99" above the dot after the "$4."

That said, the sign's design and colors are quite attractive. Link (Via Museum of Hoaxes)

Daryl Caesar, an ESL EFL teacher in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, shot this adorable video of children learning to speak and spell in English using the time-honored "Hammer Time" method. Video Link to their on-stage performance, and here's another clip of the kids practicing in the clasroom: Video Link. (via Souris' tweetstream)

Museum of Hoaxes has a run-down of 20 cruel and/or unusual experiments performed on both man and beast. They're from a new book, Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, by Alex Boese.

#18: “Would You Go To Bed With Me Tonight?”

If you were a man walking across the campus of Florida State University in 1978, an attractive young woman might have approached you and said these exact words: "I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?"

If you were that man, you probably would have thought that you had just gotten incredibly lucky. But not really. You were actually an unwitting subject in an experiment designed by the psychologist Russell Clark.

Clark had persuaded the students of his social psychology class to help him find out which gender, in a real-life situation, would be more receptive to a sexual offer from a stranger. The only way to find out, he figured, was to actually get out there and see what would happen. So young men and women from his class fanned out across campus and began propositioning strangers.

The results weren't very surprising. Seventy-five percent of guys were happy to oblige an attractive female stranger (and those who said no typically offered an excuse such as, "I'm married"). But not a single woman accepted the identical offer of an attractive male. In fact, most of them demanded the guy leave her alone.

At first the psychological community dismissed Clark's experiment as a trivial stunt, but gradually his experiment gained first acceptance, and then praise for how dramatically it revealed the differing sexual attitudes of men and women. Today it's considered a classic. But why men and women display such different attitudes remains as hotly debated as ever.

Link (Via TDG)

This safety video offers scary scenes of MRI magnets sucking metal objects into the bed. A deadly serious Rod Serling-type (same pose, no cigarette) narrates.

It's both educational and a source of cheap thrills, at least for the first few minutes. (For a quick thrill, watch this YouTube video of an oxygen tank shooting through an MRI tube.) Link (Via TDG and Mind Hacks)

At first, I thought this was a photo of a glass eye with a snakeskin design. Actually, it's a bell jar that was placed over an opening in a beehive.

Here's a slideshow of the bees building the honeycomb inside the bell jar. Link (Via That's How it Happened)

[ Boing Boing Gadgets ]: Virgin America shared more details today on its partnership with in-flight wireless broadband provider AirCell -- air-to-ground wireless internet will be available on all VA flights "sometime in 2008," and will be offered two ways: BYOD (bring your own device, laptops or pdas or whatever), and also through VA's inflight entertainment system called Red.

AirCell also has a deal in the works with American Airlines for air-to-ground wireless, but from what I can suss out in the press release, two things make the VA deal different...

Link to details and full post at Boing Boing Gadgets. Discuss.

Previously on Boing Boing:

Getting high with Richard Branson: Virgin America's virgin flight

Forbidden Lego is a book of Lego projects that could never pass muster at the company's design headquarters in Denmark. Written by two former Lego kit designers, Ulrik Pilegaard and Mike Dooley, the book contain five sweet, elegant projects that either fire small objects or overclock Lego vehicles to go off-road. Each project is lavishly illustrated in classic Lego style (though you've never bought a Lego kit that included a little stylized set of tin-snips cutting a trimming down a brick to size, nor a little bottle of Krazy Glue joining two pieces together into a frankenbrick). Best of all is the explanatory text accompanying each project, which provides a great deal of insight into the Lego company's design ethos (by explaining how each project violates it). Even better is the introduction, in which the authors provide a formula for coming up with your own kit designs -- and provide good advice for all makers, like prototyping a complex model by "quickly building something that does not necessarily look anything like what you want the model to look like, but that satisfies one or more of the key functions that the final model will have to perform. By going through the process for each major function, you quickly discover some of the major design challenges that would only have shown up later when you tried to build the entire model." Another useful exhortation is to save the intermediate steps of your models so that you can go back and refer to your prototyping steps to see if you can improve on some early stage of the project. I was also tickled to discover that Lego is Europe's leading tire manufacturer (albeit of very, very small tires). This book is the perfect set of projects to give to the adolescent budding builder in your life, or to buy for yourself as you push the limits of what you and your legos can do. Link

See also: Forbidden Lego: dangerous Lego projects!

This eBay seller is getting rid of an insanely detailed articulated full-size Halo Master Chief costume. It sounds like the seller didn't make the suit, which is a bit of a disappointment, but this is some kinda costume.

You are bidding on the best and most accurate Master Chief Costume on Ebay. This suit is my own personal suit that I am now giving up. The suit is so awesome, it has been featured on Spike TV, G4 TV, and in a Dell Commercial. This suit is FAMOUS!

Now it can be yours. The suit is made from a very hard Urethane Plastic. It isn't one of those cheaply casted vacuumformed suits. You could probably pound in a nail with your forearm if you wanted to. I'm 6"1' in the pictures, so you can figure out how well it might fit you from that.

Also included is an Assault Rifle Display. The reason I say display is because it's ONLY HALF OF A GUN - the other side is flat. See pictures for what I mean.

Link (via Gizmodo)

The Morning News's Martin Klimas takes remarkable photos of shattering porcelain figurines -- he drops them in a dark room and uses a sound-sensitive camera and strobe to get pix of them just as they disintegrate. Link (via Plastic Bag)

Update: Adam sez, "Back in 2005 me and my friend Lars Erik decided to make a magazine as our final thesis project at Westerdals School of Communication in Oslo, Norway. We sold some advertising, got a great paper sponsor, printed 2000 copies and manually distributed every last one free of charge. For one of my favorite features we celebrated the inevitable fate of a porcelain cup: death. For a split second just before loosing all functionality, these cups live more than they ever have before, in a flash of fragmented energy. I called every manufacturer and distributor of porcelain in Norway and managed to convince some of them to donate some cups to us. Our approach to photographing this split second was far more primitive than Martin Klimas' though, we had to rely on some borrowed lights and perfect timing."

I've been travelling in Asia for a month now and I've grown absolutely addicted to soba noodles -- and now this word of a working soba-maker toy from Japan!

Check out this cool new toy from Takara Tomy, slated to arrive on the market in late October. It's a home soba maker. All you have to do is put soba powder and water inside the red bowl, and turn the crank on the right side. The crank then mixes the water and soba powder at just the right consistency to produce perfectly even, delicious-to-eat soba noodles.

Link

The Spark Talking Bug Identifier is a magnifying glass with a bug-identifying expert system built into the handle. Find a bug and answer a series of directed yes/no questions and the glass will tell you what bug you're looking at (as far as it can tell, anyway).

Is it a cricket or a katydid? Help your budding entomologist identify more than 50 real live bugs - simply by answering a series of yes or no questions.

Link (via OhGizmo)

Communistar sells these novelty coat-hangers in the shape of Superman's underwear-pervert logo. "Call for pricing" -- I'm guessing this means "If you have to ask, you can't afford it." Link

The Watchismo Times has a great feature on the J Oswald Company's "Rolling Eye Clocks," novelty timepieces in which the eyes of a sculptural head rotated around to display the time.

Rolling eye clocks - first patented in 1926 by the J. Oswald Company of Germany with early models carved of wood and cast from metal after World War II.

The dials are represented as the eyes separating the hours on the left and minutes to the right. This collection of cross-eyed genies, skulls, monkeys, gnomes, owls, and dogs (LOTS of dogs) are an interesting cast of antique novelty clocks.

History of spy-cam watches
Solid wood pocket-watch from 1900
Pictorial history of kids' watches
History of armored military watches
History of slide-rule wristwatches
Early days of plastic watches Mechanical "LED watch" from 1970
History of calculator watches
Steampunk watch
Belt-drive watch
Watch guts of great beauty
All-plastic watch movement from the 70s
Awesome, impractical, expensive watch

The blog "A Soviet Poster a Day" does just what it says on the tin: posts a new Soviet propaganda poster scan every day, with witty and informative commentary.

Vietnam Lives, Fights and Will Finally Win!
Suryaninov R., 1970

According to Geneva Accords which granted Indochina independence from France in 1954, Vietnam was partitioned into two states - the North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and the South Vietnam. The Northern part has got the communists in power, and the Southern, which was to remain under temporary protectorate of France, was governed by political forces supported by the USA. The situation in the split country was far from peace and quiet. Between 1963 and 1967, South Vietnam was extremely unstable as no government could keep power for long. So in 1965, the USA with its president Lyndon Johnson made a fatal mistake of sending troops to South Vietnam to secure the country from the communist influence. The USA generals had very limited experience of guerrilla warfare in the jungle. Also the North Vietnamese partisans were armed with latest arms provided by Soviet Union and China, like loads of sturdy AK's-47 and soviet aces on MIG-21 "Fishbed" jet fighters. In 1975 the South Vietnam regime fell and the country was united under the communist government. Of course in Russia this was considered to be the victory of Soviet arms over the Evil Empire of the USA.

Link (via IZ Reloaded)

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was in Beijing last week for a rock festival. In a great, inflammatory interview with Music2dot0, Reznor excoriates the labels, promises to go independent and sell through his website -- and he exhorts Chinese fans to download his music for free rather than buying it from pirate CD sellers.

"As for the special situation in China, it does not seem to be easy to obtain Western music via legal channels, so I have the following suggestion for our fans: If you can find and buy our legal CDs, I express my thanks for your support. If you cannot find it, I think that downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable option than buying pirated CDs. Our music is easy to find on the Internet, and you might not need to spend much effort to find most of our songs. If you like our songs after you've heard them, please feel free to share it with your friends. As I have put all my effort and heart into my music, I sincerely hope that more and more people can share the enjoyment with us."

Link (Thanks, Mathew!)

Back in June, the VeganYumYum site featured an article on knitting with marzipan, featuring a bunch of cupcakes decorated with miniature knit sweaters and other edible crafts. They're fantastic -- and the site features a tutorial for knitting your own marzipan. Link (Thanks, Eris!)

A lone quixote in Seattle is suing Autodesk for sending copyright infringement notices to eBay, where he is a professional seller. At issue is Tim Vernor's listings for used copies of Autodesk's AutoCAD software -- Autodesk says that when you buy its software, you only "license" it and so you don't get the right to sell it after you're done with it. Vernor is seeking $10 million.

Autodesk is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to have legal copies of their software removed from eBay so they can sell more new copies. The latest version of AutoCAD software is around $4,000 a copy. Autodesk's lawyer, Andrew S. Mackay states "AutoCAD software is licensed, not sold and that license is not transferable." AutoCAD software is available for purchase at most major software retailers. There is no indication your purchase would be different from any other until you get it home and open the box. There is a piece of paper tucked inside that says it is a licensing agreement with the statement "by opening the sealed software packet(s), you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this license agreement". This is called a "shrink wrap" contract. It cannot be read until you open the package which according to the contract constitutes agreement. US courts have not held a "shrink wrap " contract to be valid. Furthermore the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is only intended to enforce copyright violations, not breach of contract.

The lawsuit also alleges perjury since the notice that was sent to eBay is required to be signed under penalty of perjury and fraud. Using illegal means to make a legal gain (i.e. sell more new copies) is a civil definition of fraud. Autodesk's attorney Andrew S. Mackay is currently under investigation (# 07-24456) by the California State Bar Association for his actions in this matter.

Link (Thanks, Bruce)

Scientists report that the massive 200-yard spider web recently discovered in Texas's Lake Tawakoni State Park was woven by spiders from many different species working collaboratively. Thousands of spiders have rebuilt the web three times after it's been torn up by rain and wind. Texas A&M University entomologist Allen Dean has identified spiders from such families as funnel web weavers, sac spiders, orb weavers, mesh web weavers, wolf spiders, pirate spiders, and others working on the web. From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (photo from Tx. Parks & Wildlife Dept.):

The motive may well be food, researchers say. The larger the web, the more flies and bugs get stuck, providing an abundant food supply for the spiders.

"Spiders generally are cannibalistic and keep their webs distinct," Dean said. "We're not sure what started the initial webbing ... but there probably have been thousands of spiders working on the web.

"With the amount of rain that has occurred this year and the huge food supply available, it just created the right condition for all of this."

Link to Star-Telegram, Link to Texas Entomology site about the web

Previously on BB:
• Massive spider web Link

The platonic ideal of a kilogram is represented by a lump of metal in a vault outside Paris. This lump of metal appears to be losing weight, however, having shed the "weight of a fingerprint" since it was stored. No one knows why.

Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.

"The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he said. "We don't really have a good hypothesis for it."

The kilogram's uncertainty could affect even countries that don't use the metric system -- it is the ultimate weight standard for the U.S. customary system, where it equals 2.2 pounds. For scientists, the inconstant metric constant is a nuisance, threatening calculation of things like electricity generation.

Link (Thanks, RickB!)

(Photo credit: Fair use is made here of a reduced-size crop from a larger image attributed to AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

The Computer and Communications Industry Association has just released a study it commission to calculate the value returned to the US economy by fair use and other exceptions to copyright. We often hear stories about how much money the US economy generates by giving certain sectors and companies exclusive access knowledge and information, but it's rare to see such a quantitative approach to the value created by not creating regulatory monopolies in certain cases. Even more interesting is the sum that the study comes up with -- according to the economists (who worked "in accordance with a World Intellectual Property Organization methodology"), "$4.5 trillion in revenue [was] generated by fair use dependent industries in 2006, a 31% increase since 2002, fair use industries are directly responsible for more than 18% of U.S. economic growth and nearly 11 million American jobs. In fact, nearly one out of every eight American jobs is in an industry that benefits from current limitations on copyright."

"As the United States economy becomes increasingly knowledge-based, the concept of fair use can no longer be discussed and legislated in the abstract. It is the very foundation of the digital age and a cornerstone of our economy," said Ed Black, President and CEO of CCIA. "Much of the unprecedented economic growth of the past ten years can actually be credited to the doctrine of fair use, as the Internet itself depends on the ability to use content in a limited and nonlicensed manner. To stay on the edge of innovation and productivity, we must keep fair use as one of the cornerstones for creativity, innovation and, as today's study indicates, an engine for growth for our country"

Link (Thanks, Trey!)

A contractor that manufactures Disney toys in China has been caught violating China's own labor laws -- which are hardly regarded as exemplary throughout the world.

Workers at a Chinese factory making Disney toys are overworked, underpaid, exposed to dangerous toxins and forced to live in filthy conditions, a labour rights group said in a report Wednesday.

The study, released on the second anniversary of the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland, said factory workers complained they were forced to work 28 days a month and up to 15 hours a day.

Staff at Haowei Toys in southern China also are not allowed to take time off during peak seasons, according to the report released by the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM).

"The conditions at Haowei reflect the failure of the Disney system to monitor and respond effectively to violations of the Disney code of conduct and the workers' rights the code professes to defend," the report said.

Link (Thanks, Shelby!)

A reader writes, "The Canadian government has launched a private consultation on new rules that would require Internet service providers to hand over a wide range of subscriber information without a court order. The new rules would cover cell phone data, email addresses, and IP addresses. The government has not made the consultation public nor identified who it is consulting."

That said, this is an important issue and I believe that the government should hear from all interested stakeholders, not a hand-picked, secret group. In the consultation, Public Safety claims that "law enforcement agencies have been experiencing difficulties in consistently obtaining basic CNA information from telecommunications service providers. In the absence of explicit legislation, a variety of practices exists among TSPs with respect to the release of basic customer information, e.g. name, address, telephone number, or their Internet equivalents." After identifying what it considers CNA data (including cell phone identifiers, email addresses, and IP addresses), the departments propose a series of safeguards including limits on who would have access to the information, limited uses of the information, and internal audits on the use of these powers.

It is extremely disappointing to see that the departments continue to believe that ISPs should be required to hand over potentially sensitive personal information without a court order or other judicial oversight. Moreover, the claim that law enforcement has faced "difficulties" in obtaining CNA data remains completely unsubstantiated (to the extent that some ISPs ask for a court order, this reflects an appropriate balance that Parliament established when it enacted PIPEDA).

Link