FutureFeedForward, the venerable comedic science fiction mailing list, is back! After several years' hiatus, FFF is once again publishing short news missives from a darkly funny future (and there's even a novel in the works).

MOUNTAIN VIEW--Information search giant Google, Inc. announced Thursday the release of Google Body, a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet. "Google has long been dedicated to making information both useful and universally accessible," notes Google VP of Product Development Eric Hind. "We're happy now to extend search to information about human bodies, mine and yours, inside and out, from the number of follicles on my head to the length of the President's toenails."

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Ars Technica has some good commentary on France's insane new copyright law proposal: the copyright cartels are promising DRM-free access to their works if the government will order ISPs to serve as unpaid copyright enforcers, required to spy on every French Internet connection on behalf of a bunch of giant foreign multinationals.

The proposal looks to be an early Christmas present for the movie and music industries—and a major scrooging for French consumers. For the first time in either Europe or North America, Big Content will be able to offload the tiresome and expensive work of copyright enforcement to ISPs and the commission called for by the law. If the proposal is approved by the French parliament next year, proponents suggest it would go a long way towards slowing the torrent of P2P traffic to a trickle.

Meanwhile, French Internet users will have all of their traffic subject to monitoring by ISPs to ensure that content is not being pirated; that's not good for privacy. And as is always the case with such technological measures, there's always the potential for legitimate content, including the increasing amount of legitimate P2P traffic, to be caught up in a copyright enforcement driftnet. Sure, consumers are thrown a few bones—DRM-free archives, faster DVD releases, and no more massive fines for copyright infringement—but the tradeoff is harsh since it comes with a giant government subsidy for Big Content's interests, paid for in lost privacy and an expensive oversight organization.

Remember, like the RIAA says, "When you go fishing with a driftnet, you catch a few dolphins." This plan will shut down the legitimate network traffic of many innocents, all day, every day. ISPs will face legal penalties if they don't enforce heavily enough, but there will be no penalties for over-enforcing. As a result, the procedure by which French people lose their right to communicate online will be automatic, faceless and instantaneous. The process by which they protest their innocence and get the right to communicate back will be slow, bureaucratic, and manual.

The cost of this system will be borne by all French Internet users, whose connections will rise in price to reflect the cost of the ISPs being co-opted to do the copyright cartel's dirty work.

This is the presumption of guilt: the idea that software can tell the innocent from the guilty without a trial, without the chance to face your accuser, without even being charged. The hallmark of a democracy is that we do not punish the innocent to get at the guilty -- or, as Cardinal Richelieu once said, "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him." Link

Nathan Sawaya's 2003 sculpture "Sweet Heart" is an anatomically correct 3D heart made from hundreds of Necco Conversation Hearts. Says the artist, "I'm not a fan of Valentine's Day. It is a made up holiday and makes more people feel sad than happy. It can make your heart feel vulnerable. Almost edible." Link (via Neatorama)

The Department of Homeland Security is asking firefighters to snoop around in homes they're called to for emergencies. The DHS likes the idea because firefighters aren't bound by pesky warrants and probable cause and can therefore report on suspicious material like blueprints, anti-American literature, and potential bomb-making materials (e.g., the bedrooms of every friend I had, circa 1985). Firefighters are just the latest legion of potential snoops the DHS is leaning on -- they've also asked meter-readers to peer into our windows and sheds to find evidence of bad-guy-ery. This stuff doesn't work and won't work: amateur pecksniffs snitching on their neighbors just flood cops with bad intel, and turn the country into East Germany, a land where everyone is on alert lest they say the wrong thing and get turned in to the secret police. Link (via Digg)

See also: War on the Unexpected -- Schneier's dynamite essay on the War on Terror

Update: From the comments, andrewslayman writes:

As a volunteer firefighter, I will say that turning firefighters into spies is a bad idea.

If criminals have to worry that by calling the fire department they are also calling the DHS, they may be less likely to call in the first place, putting lives and property at further risk. If they do call, they may treat firefighters as hostile parties, placing firefighters' lives at risk beyond the normal hazards of the job.

If firefighters have to worry that each call may be a hostile one, that will distract them from the job at hand--saving lives in immediate peril--and could delay response time in a business where a few seconds or minutes often does make the difference between life and death.

The list of "suspicious" things that firefighters are supposed to be on the lookout for includes cameras, photographs, maps, and chemicals. In my professional life I am a photographer, so my house is full of cameras, photographs, maps, and chemicals (not to mention rubber gloves, an organic vapor mask, etc.)--all perfectly legal--that might fit the DHS's definition of "suspicious."

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: shopping celebrity faces onto Star Wars characters. Link

The Disneyland sign-generator does just what you'd imagine: creates custom text for the old (sadly departed) Disneyland sign. Link

Two more fan-translations of my story Scroogled (originally published in Radar, about the day Google became evil) have come in this week: Stefan Talpalaru's Romanian translation and Aleksandar Balalovski's Macedonian translation. These join eight other translations into Spanish, Russian, Persian, Bulgarian, Dutch and Polish, and I hear there's an Italian one underway! Scroogled in Romanian, Scroogled in Macedonian

Boing Boing reader Jesse Walker has scanned and published part of his extensive collection of rave flyers from Idaho, circa 1992-1995. Link to gallery of posters, and details on the artists who created them.