Vernor Vinge has put the entire text of his magnificent, prescient, mind-alteringly good novel Rainbows End online as a free download. This was one of the best books of 2006, a book that practically defines what "post-cyberpunk" really means: stories about what happens when the world (and not the street) finds its own use for technology. The tech touches -- massive, augmented reality ARGs; adaptive full-body user-interfaces; destructive book-scanners -- are half-predictive, half-allegorical, and entirely provocative. What a treat!

The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for Defense against Disease. On July 23, schoolchildren in Algiers claimed that a respiratory epidemic was spreading across the Mediterranean. The claim was based on clever analysis of antibody data from the mass transit systems of Algiers and Naples.

CDD had no immediate comment, but in less than three hours, public-health hobbyists reported similar results in other cities, complete with contagion maps. The epidemic was at least one week old, probably originating in Central Africa, beyond the scope of hobbyist surveillance.

By the time CDD got its public relations act together, outbreaks had been detected in India and North America. Worse yet, a journalist in Seattle had isolated and identified the infectious agent, which turned out to be a Pseudomimivirus. That was about as embarrassing a twist as the public relations people could imagine: Back in the late 'teens, CDD had justified its enormous budget with a brilliant defense against the New Sunrise cult. The Sunrise Plague had been the second-worst Euro-terror of the decade. Only CDD's leadership had kept the disaster from spreading worldwide.

The Sunrise Plague had been based on a Pseudomimivirus.

Link, Buy Rainbows End (Thanks, Ori!)

See also:
Vernor Vinge on computers, freedom and privacy
Vernor Vinge interview
Vernor Vinge and Cory on the Singularity on NPR

A pair of new Electronic Frontier Foundation reports prove that Comcast is degrading and interfering with BitTorrent, and shows how you can use free software to test your own ISP to see if it is doing the same:

In addition to providing evidence of network interference, the EFF study also explains how Comcast's selective degradation of BitTorrent traffic undermines future Internet innovation. "The Internet has enabled a cascade of innovations precisely because any programmer--whether employed by a huge corporation, a startup, or tinkering at home for fun--has been able to create new protocols and applications that operate over TCP/IP, without having to obtain permission from anyone," the EFF wrote. "Comcast's recent moves threaten to create a situation in which innovators may need to obtain permission and assistance from an ISP in order to guarantee that their protocols will operate correctly. By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are the foundation of the Internet."

The EFF also published a second report (PDF), which provides detailed technical instructions explaining how to use Wireshark to reproduce their study and test for ISP packet injection.

Link

See also:
How the AP busted Comcast for blocking BitTorrent
Why Comcast's BitTorrent-fux0r is bad for quality of service
Comcast also screwing with Gnutella and Lotus Notes (!?!)
Comcast actively blocks P2P traffic
Modest proposal for Comcast's net-filtering

Google's chief spamfighter says that he's seeing less spam email coming into Google Mail and speculates that spammers are giving up on bulk spam because of the efficacy of filters; he predicts an enormous rise in quasi-spam from companies that you did business with once or twice and now feel entitled to email you all the time. I get craploads of this stuff myself -- PR releases (any PR person who puts me on a mailing list goes straight into my killfile, forever), circulars from some etailer I bought something from eight years ago, even monthly newsletters from a clinical massage place in Toronto I saw for a sore shoulder, once, in 1988. Unsubcribing to this stuff is time-consuming and only works about a third of the time, in my experience.

Of course, I also get thousands of spams a day (most of which are successfully repelled by greylisting, leaving only a thousand or so that get through to my mailer, which filters all but a couple hundred).

Google won't disclose numbers, but the company says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that's transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year. That could indicate that some spammers have gotten discouraged and have stopped trying to get through Google’s spam filters.

Link

The MiShare is a matchbox-sized $100 Linux appliance that interfaces between two iPods and allows you to transfer files back and forth between them. This'd be great for bands that want to share their work with people who show up at gigs, and for sharing your CC-licensed music with friends at school or work. It's pre-order only now, alas.

We want miShare to be both simple and powerful. Just attach two iPods, slide miShare's on-switch to music, video or photo, and press miShare's only button. You decide whether you copy the song or video that was last played through to its end, or a pre-defined photo folder. Give the miShare button a longer press (three seconds) and it will copy a collection of files. miShare uses the On-The-Go playlist for multiple songs—just create an On-The-Go playlist on the source iPod by selecting by song, artist, album, or even playlist.

Link (via Gizmodo)

The Entirely Other Day blog has an inch-by-inch breakdown of all the cruft on a 1.5 foot-long Toys R Us receipt for four tubs of Play-Doh. Link (via Kottke)

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: "More Than Usual" -- pictures with extra stuff (eyes, limbs, branches, etc). Viscerally creepy! Link

Gary sez, "For Pixar's upcoming film Wall*E, they studio has created a very detailed website for Buy n' Large, the corporation that is credited as part of the cause of human civilization's descent into couch dwelling sloths. The site in and of itself is a fantastic, yet subtle, send up of corporate policies and puffery. Pixar's gentle, yet pointed, satire is amusing throughout the surprisingly massive site.

"But the true brilliance lays in the Buy n Large Disclaimer. It's fantastic. In fact, the brilliance starts on the homepage where they state 'Opt-out requests may be ignored as we do not send this site or any communications to anyone.'"

Buy n Large will share your personal information with third parties whenever it deems such sharing to be advantageous to it, including when you engage in certain activities on our site such as using a menu, viewing, clicking your mouse or breathing. Buy n Large will also share your personal information when you respond to promotional materials from Buy n Large and authorize a third party to use your personal information for purposes such as, for example, sending you additional promotional materials that further obligate you (and your family) to receive additional promotional materials, providing you a product or service, or entering you in a contest, sweepstakes or game that will usually require a financial obligation on the part of the user.

By visiting Buy n Large you are contractually obligated to read all email that is sent to you via the Buy n Large servers. Failure to do so will be considered of a breach of contract.

We automatically log all information about your computer's connection to the Internet, which we call "Buy n Large Property". Buy n Large Property consists of things such as IP address, operating system and type of browser software being used and the activities conducted by the user while on our site (or other sites). We may also use some of the Buy n Large Property, such as the pages you visited on our site (or other sites), to send you e-mail messages (such as "Buy n Large requires you to join our Buy n Large Corporate Street Team. Failure to do so will result in legal action") focused on products that we feel you should (or must) be interested in and now are contractually obligated to be interested in.

Link

See also:
ReasonableAgreement.org - the anti-EULA
Crazy EULA makes you agree to a bunch of other EULAs
Sony's EULA is worse than their rootkit
Old abusive EULA
EULA that really tells it like it is
CBC introduces RSS feeds with shitty EULA
Record company EULAs were abusive before 1909!
Lore Sjöberg riffs on Vista EULA
Two-word license agreement: "FUCK YOU!"
Customized SMTP server trumps stupid, made up email EULAs
MSFT anti-spyware violates spyware EULAs
By eating this food, you agree to the following:

Following up on yesterday's post about the forthcoming Canadian DMCA bill, Zelda's written a "satirical overview of how the upcoming Canadian copyright bill came about, and who the major players are."

Minister Stephen Harper lashed out Wednesday at critics who say the Canadian public was not properly consulted in the planned revision of the Copyright Act, widely expected to be tabled before Christmas.

"To suggest that we didn't ask Canadians what they wanted is irresponsible," he told reporters outside an upscale Ottawa restaurant. "There were thousands of pages of testimony from the public, and I can tell you it took [Time Warner CEO] Rich Parsons and I almost a full week to burn it at all that Whistler retreat."

Link

My cinephile pal and blog-colleague Pesco mentioned the French New Wave classic "Deux Filles, Une Tasse" earlier this week on BoingBoing -- and look here! One of our kind readers has just pointed us to a film student's review on the popular website Flickr. If you've never seen "2 GIRLS 1 CUP," as the Truffaut-influenced masterwork is colloquially known on the internet, do yourself a favor and do not bother because it is like goatse times a million tubgirls divided by maggots. Link, via fuxoft.

Noah Shachtman has new piece out in Wired exploring the reported drop in violence in Iraq in recent months. He argues that this is the result of the US abandoning its somewhat techno-centric approach to prosecuting the war -- and focusing instead on Iraq's social, political, tribal, and cultural networks. Snip:

The war was launched, in part, on a premise that you could wipe out more bad guys with fewer troops, as long as those troops were networked together. Businesses like Wal-Mart made their supply chain more efficient through information technology; the military could do the same with its "kill chain," the theory of network-centric warfare went.

The idea -- first popularized in article published ten years ago, next month -- pretty much worked as advertised, for a while. The problem is, killing people more efficiently is one of the last things you need to do a counterinsurgency situation, like the one the U.S. is facing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, you need to take steps to reinforce civil society, rather than blowing it apart. And that takes an understanding of the society you're trying to build.

For the story, I scored a rare opportunity to spend time with a U.S. "psychological operations" team, getting into the heads of the people of Fallujah; hung out with an Army colonel who worked his tribal connections to bring stability to one of Iraq's roughest towns; spent time with the heads of a controversial program to embed anthropologists into combat units; and interviewed General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq.

Link. More out-takes from the reporting process will no doubt show up in Noah's blog posts at Danger Room.

Photo: shot by Todd Hido in Iraq for Wired. A tattered flag flies from a cell phone antenna.

Chris says:

An incredible 4-unit motel designed by John Lautner in 1947 is on the market. It’s in Desert Hot Springs.

The owner died in March and the price has been falling rapidly. it’s been reduced from $745 to $495. There has been some discussion of a group purchase over on the ModCom message board.

I wonder if you know someone that would like this desert vacation property – or they could continue to run it as a motel. Lautner’s work is amazing and interest will certainly soar with next year’s major exhibition at the Hammer museum.

(Photo by Paul Cloutier)

Link

A friend sent this video of Maurício Ricardo cleverly drawing people and animals by starting out with naked body parts. Link

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets I had a little conniption over the radio you see above, which I proceeded to buy. After I got over the retail shock, we looked at razors made from recycled yogurt cups, fiberglass propane tanks, an odd mouse and keyboard replacement, a pressurized backpack canteen bag, a spot cleaner with a built-in UV stain detector, Greenpeace's swipe at Nintendo, the Blip Festival and its participants, Harmonix's confirmation of broken Rock Band guitars (but nothing about broken drums), a mount for putting your TV on a tow hitch, a coffee table ottoman that is not a pillow (no sir!), an intriguing prototype device that can guess your desired function based on the way it is held, a two-person toilet (seriously), speculative Apple concepts, a knife-sharpener that lots of readers raved about, and an incredibly junky (but cheap!) projector. And deals and salted assorted links.

Cartoonist Johnny Ryan has an art exhibition this Friday, November 30 at Secret Headquarters.

HORRORSHOW features almost FIFTY brand new paintings inspired by a variety of whacked-out horror, cult and exploitation films. Malo Cantina will be providing a margarita bar, and we'll have movie theater-style treats like popcorn and candy on hand too. Hope to see you at the opening!

Shown here: one of the awesome "Baseball Furies" gang members from The Warriors. These guys never spoke a word throughout the entire movie. Link

Investigative journalist Scott Carney has been working for the last half a year or so on a story about grave robbers in Calcutta who steal skeletons and sell them to medical supply companies in the US and Europe.

"To research the story I combed the state of West Bengal and saw huge piles of police-confiscated bones," he explains. "I even spoke to some of the people who deflesh human bodies for a living."

The story is now out in Wired, and NPR News still more on Scott's blog.

Images here (shot by Scott): (left): A police officer in Burdwan, West Bengal, displays a cache of skulls confiscated from a bone factory run by Mukti Biswas on the outskirts of Kolkata. (right top): A bag of femurs recovered by West Bengal police. (right bottom): The gated entrance to Young Brothers in Kolkata. The company sells human remains at wholesale prices.

Previously: Boing Boing tv feature -- "Gangs of India."

This Darth Vader tea-towel from Etsy seller JennyDee tickles my sithbone. This would make drying dishes into an exercise in resisting the Dark Side of the Force. Link (via Wonderland)

Dave Katznelson of the marvelous Birdman Records pointed me to The Tape Project, an interesting subscription service for reissues of great music on reel-to-reel audio tape. Each release, from Sonny Rollins's "Saxophone Colossus" to Jacqui Naylor's "The Number White," comes on an engraved reel in a leather case and includes cover art printed on high-quality claycoat paper. Depending on the subscription package, each release costs around $129. From The Tape Project site:

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: Most people have not had the experience of hearing studio master tapes. Many formats have been introduced with the promise of bringing master tape sound into the home listening room.

Yeah, right.

We don’t expect that this tape project will replace any of your other favorite formats, so we see no need to dwell on the drawbacks of any other format. Suffice it to say that we don’t offer an “analog-like” listening experience. We are offering a chance to have in your own listening room an actual analog listening experience as close to the original master tape as practical.

Link

This frightening animated robot is for training dentists. I don't know about you, but I'd rather practice dentistry on a white cockroach.

Simroid’s body and control system was developed by Kokoro Company Ltd., creators of the Actroid receptionist robot. Like her Actroid sister, Simroid is equipped with a system of air-powered muscles and soft silicone skin. However, she has something the Actroid does not — sensitive teeth. Thanks to a mouth loaded with sensors, she knows when her dentist-in-training makes a mistake. And to express her pain, she grimaces, moves her hands and eyes, and says, “That hurts.”

Kokoro says that for an extra touch of realism, Simroid exhibits a gag reflex when instruments are inserted too far into her mouth.

Link

Bedazzled has an old black and white video of the Beatles sitting on a plank laid across two sawhorses, lip syncing to Help!

The umbrella doesn't do a good job of catching the fake snow. Link

Our friend RU Sirius has published two intriguing calls to action on his blog, 10 Zen Monkeys:

The QuestionAuthority Proposal

It's time for all those who oppose authoritarian governance and culture to put aside their differences and join together in a coalition that can act as a counterforce to this gathering threat to our liberties. Link

The Open Source Party Proposal

A call for dynamic discourse about the things that really need to change, and how to evolve a new political organization that could kick up some noise by the time the next political season (2010) rolls around. Link

Photojournalist Adam Huggins, who has been living in India for the last five years, visited the factory in Calcutta where New York city manhole covers are made. He made an audio slideshow about his visit for the New York Times. Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Designers Irene Pereyra and Tom Klinkowstein recently exhibited their wall-sized digram called "A Day in the Life of a Networked Designer's Smart Things or A Day in a Designer's Networked Smart Things, 2030." The map not only presents a narrative of how a designer "gets things done with the help of all her smart things" but at a higher level also seems to hint at how we may deal with mass amounts of information in the future. My Institute for the Future colleague Anthony Townsend saw the project in person and wrote a bit about it at the Future Now blog:

It's like reading the log file of a sensor-laden person. It seems also to be a potential inspiration for user interfaces to the vast amounts of personal data and media we'll throw off in the future... Finally, there is a fractal quality to this map that's really useful - big themes and events pop out at you, but you can zoom into the excruciating detail at will.

Link to Future Now, Link to PDF of "A Day in the Life..." diagram

Chris Spurgeon says:

Following up on your post about the book bound in human skin about to go on the auction block in England, what if you want human skin for YOUR next art project, but don't want to be involved with murder, illegal sale of human remains, desecration of corpses and the like? The LA-based gallery/workshop Machine Project may have the answer!

This weekend they're hosting a lecture and workshop by members of the bio-art group SymbioticA . On Saturday night SymbioticA will be talking about some of their past projects, such as growing humane leather from individual skin cells and using a rotating micro-gravity bioreactor to create an actual human ear. Even better, on Sunday they're running a workshop at Machine Project on the basic principals of animal tissue culture and tissue engineering, aimed at would-be bio-artists and other interested parties. The workshop has a $55 fee and space is limited, so sign up early.

Link

Funny Cracked article about nine "badass" parts of the Bible.

(When did Sylvester P. Smythe's humor magazine start using such naughty words?)

We've all been there. You're walking along, minding your own business, when a gang of cocky, young bastards start hurling abuse at you. Most of us would just keep walking, or maybe, yell some insults back or flip them the bird. Elisha (commonly regarded as the Luke Skywalker to the Prophet Elijah's Obi-Wan Kenobi), however, decides to take it one step further. Invoking the name of God, he summons motherfucking bears to come and claw the shit out of them.

Christians are constantly asking for prayer in schools to help get today's kids in line, but we beg to differ. We need bears in schools. If every teacher had the power to summon a pair of child-maiming grizzly avengers, you can bet that schoolchildren nowadays would be the most well-behaved, polite children, ever. It's a simple choice: listen to the biology lesson, or get first-hand knowledge of the digestive system of Ursus horribilis.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Because cockroaches are gross!

Enjoy these photos of a white cockroach, taken by Ester Beatriz. From the Albuquerque Tribune:

Every once in a while, you might find a white cockroach. If you do, you're seeing one in transition. As cockroaches mature, they discard their skin and grow a new, bigger skin. In the nearly 12 hours it takes to shed and then grow new skin, the roach is white.

Link

A rare book believed to be bound in human skin will go up for auction in South Yorkshire, England on Sunday. This example of anthropodermic bibliopegy, titled "A True and Perfect Relation of The Whole Proceedings against the Late most barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuit and his Confederats," was printed in 1606 and is likely bound in the skin of the executed Jesuit priest, Father Henry Garnet, who is the subject of the text. From the BBC News:

Sid Wilkinson, from Wilkinson's Auctioneers, said: "It's a little bit spooky because the front of the book looks like it has the face of a man on it, which is presumed to be the victim's face..."

The lot is considered so unusual there is no reserve price attached to it.

Link to BBC News article, Link to auction site

Previously on BB:
• Books bound in human skin Link
• Human skin-bound book found in street Link

UPDATE: Thanks to BB community participant Evilrooster who found a great photo of the skin-bound book with the spooky "face" that has appeared on the cover. Link

Judge loses his job over mobile-phone rage. Nothing says judicial like collective punishment.

A US judge has been removed from the bench for jailing an entire courtroom audience after none of them admitted being responsible for a ringing phone.

A commission on judicial conduct said Judge Restaino had acted "without any semblance of a lawful basis" and behaved like a "petty tyrant".

The judge had been presiding over a domestic violence cases when he heard a mobile phone ring. It upset him so much that he threatened that every single person in the court was going to jail unless the offending mobile phone was handed in to him. When no-one came forward, the judge ordered that the 46 people in the audience be taken into custody.

Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

Dan sez, "The swell blog 'Isn't Life Terrible' has a small yet perfectly formed collection of non-Disney Disney songs available for download, including an apparently non-ironic ditty about how nifty it is to be a Walt Disney World annual passholder (or, as the Disney cast members will call you, 'passhole'). There are also couple of choir numbers from Rev. Billy's Church of Stop Shopping, spoken bits, and a nice parody of Randy Newman's transformation from a snarky satirist into the sappiest Disney songwriter since Mousketeer Jimmy Dodd." Link (Thanks, Dan!)

Dave sez,

Who cares about about Swiss copyright laws? Nobody it seems, not even Swiss citizens.

On the 5th of October 2007, the Swiss law makers adopted a new law to comply with the WIPO treaties. Thanks to the entertainment lobbies, apart from criminalizing DRM circumvention devices, you can now win a one year visit in jail if you share a copyrighted file on a P2P network.

Did anybody hear about this new law ? No. Not even Swiss citizens. The media is quiet about this.

The thing is, Switzerland uses a direct democracy system, and this new law could be the subject to a federal vote if 50,000 people sign a request for it. That's called a Referendum request, and the deadline for its deposit is the 24th of January 2008. If there's no Referendum request by then, the law will become effective.

There's little doubt that if federal votes were to made today, the law would pass anyway. But at least a public debate could be created around the issue and people could react.

I'm sending you this news item because I just read your news post about Canada. It seems that in Canada some people are fighting because they're aware of the situation. Please somebody stand up and start a debate in Switzerland. Please.

Link (Thanks, Dave!)

Mark checks out a 15-times-larger-than-life Atari joystick replica by Jason Torchinsky, on display at Felt Club XL. Then, 8-bit help for those suffering from projectile dysfunction disorder.

My latest Guardian column, "Downloaded BBC programmes should be forever," talks about how the BBC has sold us out with its failed, DRM-based iPlayer (a reliable source puts the number of active iPlayer users at less than ten thousand and a second reliable source says, "That number sounds high") and how it and the Trustees should have had the guts to go to rightsholders and say, "Sorry, we can't accept any deal that doesn't give the public at least as much freedom as they have with their existing VCRs."

You might decide, hell, I'm a paid-up licence-payer, why shouldn't I use iPlayer to store up several months' worth of the kids' favorite cartoons for them to watch in an all-day marathon on New Year's day - while I sleep off New Year's Eve? You might just reach into the guts of your iPlayer and change the line of code that says, "Delete my shows after 28 days" to "Delete my shows after 28,000 years".

If you did you'd be part of a grand old tradition of shed-tinkerers. A few years back I attended a DRM meeting in Edinburgh. We were wrangling over a DRM for DVB, the digital video standard that is used throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. It was nearly Christmas, and one engineer slipped off at the break to buy his son an electronics kit at John Lewis. When he showed it around, all the engineers in the room immediately broke into nostalgic recollections of "building crystal sets with grandad in the shed" when they were growing up. These were the formative experiences that made engineers out of these gents, and yet there they were, busily designing a broadcast system that would prohibit user modification.

Link