- dice wars
- cow commander
- missle 3d
- turbo tanks
- gravitypods
- cruel 2 b kind

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

The Cabaret Mechanical Theatre Online Shop sells all manner of automata, pre-assembled, papercraft, and even a kit for DIYers. I've assembeld one of the papercraft models before and it ran superbly -- and was an awful lot of fun to put together. Link (via Paperforest)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien sez, ""Word from the EFF on the Hill: The House just passed their FISA reform bill without clauses that would give telecoms like AT&T immunity from prosecution for assisting in illegal wiretapping programs. No vote yet in the Senate, but a version of the bill without immunity passed Judiciary, and rumors say that's the version that Dem. Senate leadership is going to put forward for Senate vote." Link (Thanks, Danny!

See also:
AT&T wiretapping: Your two-minute guide
StopTheSpying: Tell the Dems to keep AT&T on the hook for NSA wiretapping
EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans
AT&T logo improvement
AT&T's guilt-by-association algorithm for finding "terrorists"
AT&T retrofits privacy policy: your data is not yours.

Fox News Porn is a collection of raunchy outtakes from the Fox "News" Network, where hypocritical prigs like Bill O'Reilly revel in prurience while condemning it. This condemnation is largely indistinguishable from a celebration -- as when Sean Hannity visits a brothel and asks snotty, explicit questions of the workers there while his camera lovingly pans across their bare flesh.

The site is the creation of filmmaker Robert Greenwald, whose documentary Outfoxed is a masterful takedown of the Murdoch empire. Fox News Porn created a brief but spectacular net-storm when an overzealous moderator for Digg took the site off the Digg front page and threatened to suspend Greenwald's account for violating Digg's Terms of Service. However, a day later, Digg management reversed the decision. In founder Kevin Rose's words, "Our fault. Digg on." Link (Thanks, Kevin and Pete!)

See also:
Iraq For Sale: documentary about profiteering contractors
Movie -- WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price
Critical Wal-Mart documentary to be shown in houses of worship
Uncovered: War in Iraq torrents under CC license
Outfoxed interviews .torrent for remixing
"Happy Talk From Hell" -- Salon reviews Outfoxed

Cameron sez,

I thought BB-readers would be interested to know of this year's Creative Commons Flickr photo contest. It entails creatively photographing some CC swag and uploading said photos to Flickr group CCswagphotocontest2007. All photos must be CC-BY licensed.

A weekly winner will be announced every Monday starting on November 19, 2007 - December 17, 2007. The two overall winners will be announced on Jan 2, 2008.

The weekly winner will be blogged on CC's main page and posted on CC's website for that entire week. The two main winners will be awarded 100 postcards of their winning photo. These postcards, properly attributed of course, will be distributed internationally to promote CC.

Link (Thanks, Cameron!)

The Book Design Review Blog has picked its top book covers for 2007 -- there are some superb covers here -- I'm especially fond of these two, for Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, and The Worst Years of Your Life. Got favorites of your own? Link 'em in the comments. Link (via Kottke)

James Patrick Kelly recently concluded the 49-part podcast of his wonderful classic novel Look Into the Sun, a superb novel of first contact and faith. The whole podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, so you're free to share it with your friends. Link (via Futurismic)

See also:
James Patrick Kelly's new podcasts: "Look into the Sun" and a story every week
James Patrick Kelly's wonderful sf stories online as free audiobooks
Hugo nominee James Patrick Kelly video podcast
Three James Patrick Kelly audio stories free and CC-licensed
James Patrick Kelly's podcast
James P Kelly's "Burn" short sf novel podcast concludes
Asimov's magazine on DRM, copyright and Creative Commons

John Tehranian's paper, "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap," from a forthcoming symposium issue of the Utah Law Review on "Fixing Copyright," is a great, tight little essay on the way that the growing gap between what technology allows us to do and what copyright tells us not to do is turning us all into mega-crooks. Just by doing the normal, everyday stuff -- chatting with friends, sharing the moments of our lives -- we commit billions of dollars' worth of infringements:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).50 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

PDF Link (Thanks, John!)

I recently became acquainted with the work of NYC-based funnyman Dave Hill, by way of John Hodgman and Jesse Thorn's respective blogs. Dave has a metric dungload of videos up on Superdeluxe.com: here is a Link to his archive. I think my favorite is "Dave Hill Gets Schooled In Actor's Movement." I love it so much that I have recently begun muttering a certain phrase he uses in that video again and again. My friends and cow-orkers are sick of me saying that Dave Hill line now. I, however, AM NOT.

Dave's "NYC fashion week" videos (one, two) are also pretty fcking sweet. OMG, no wait, this dental services commercial is my favorite: Link.

Remember the Black Metal Dialogues? Witchtaint? The email exchange? Classic internet excellence. Dude, that was Dave Hill, too!