Here's the latest in my irregular series of photos from my travels in the world: the "security seal" tape that's appeared over all the fire-extinguisher boxes in the London Underground. Because no terrorist would be so fiendishly clever as to counterfeit a sticky label. That would require, you know, an inkjet printer and stuff! Link

Radio Free Europe reports on bizarre and troubling human rights violations in northern southern Azerbaijan's Naxchivan region, a region that locals call "North Korea." In addition to disappearing journalists who inquire about human rights violations, the authorities have taken to tying people to trees for failure to pay their utility bills. My father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan, and I've always felt a distant connection to the region.

A series of abuses -- some of them bizarre -- have been documented in media reports.

According to the reports, local authorities have ordered state employees to perform manual labor on weekends as a condition for keeping their jobs. People who fail to pay utility bills have been seized and tied to trees outside police precincts until a family member or friend can come and settle the debt. Residents are forbidden from hanging laundry from their balconies and from baking bread at home. In a region where average salaries are approximately $130 per month, farmers are charged a steep tax for owning more than one cow or one sheep -- $25 per cow, $10 per sheep.

Nasibova tells RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service that local authorities are seeking to silence journalists like her and her husband who have reported on these abuses. She said she expects to be arrested soon.

"I think their main goal is to force us [independent journalists] out of Naxchivan," Nasibova says. "While they were searching our apartment, the police told us: 'We will succeed in silencing you. You will have to leave the region.' I think this process is related to our professional activities here."

Link

A lonely fan of super-geeky webcomic xkcd in College Station, TX, has posted a Craigslist personal ad seeking true love in the guise of someone who matches the strong, nerdy, impulsive stick-figure women that populate the strip.

But I'm just a male stick figure. I have no squiggly hair.

Surely there exists someone out there who is wandering through this world with the same hopes and uncertainties as me. Surely they've spent hours playing out those same little scenarios only to find that they were short one stick figure as well.

Let's run away and find a nice dark corner in which to do long division.

How sweet! Good luck, College Station! Link (Thanks, Zach!)

See also:
xkcd: The malware aquarium
XKCD creator in Wired; reappearance of blog-goggles in today's strip
Scary MBR-nuking program inspired by XKCD geeky webcomic
Ninjas attack Richard Stallman, reenacting xkcd comic
Cory Doctorow cosplayers at the XKCD picnic
Xkcd fans bring chess-sets on roller-coasters
Where LOLCats come from
Ironic Internet malapropism grid
Geeky comic about chess and roller-coasters
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
Funny map of online communities in the style of a D&D map
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Bloggin' 'bout my generation

Ladies and gentlemen, we are thrilled to present these boss new Boing Boing t-shirts with hellishly cool artwork by our dear friend and co-conspirator COOP! This devilish design certainly casts the lovely Jackhammer Jill in a new light! And in homage to the first ever bOING bOING t-shirt from 1990, the black COOP shirt features glow-in-the-dark ink! Both colors are available in men's and women's sizes. The men's shirts are $22.95 and the women's are $23.95. It's a limited run so get 'em while they're hot! Link (Thanks, COOP and Ruth!)

Scribd -- which came under fire when the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America complained that users had posted copyrighted works without permission there -- has unveiled a text-matching system that allows people who make a legally binding oath that they hold copyrights to works to prevent those works from being posted to Scribd.

I think that this approach is reasonable enough, but I'm skeptical that it will actually prevent the unauthorized posting of material to Scribd. However "fuzzy" the Scribd text-matching is, it's likely that determined pirates will figure out how to exceed its threshold and get around it. And it's also unlikely that Scribd's database will ever comprise a significant fraction of all copyrighted works. Finally, it's easy to imagine that pirates could have the best of both worlds by posting material to other web-hosts that don't have the text-matching in place (that is, every web-host except Scribd, from your local ISP to LiveJournal, Blogger and Wordpress) and then posting files that link to those hosts on Scribd.

The good that this will do largely revolves around people who aren't sure if the material they're posting is or isn't in copyright -- these folks will be notified that the works they're posting aren't kosher. So there's some good that comes of it.

Scribd has been unfairly targeted as a haven for pirates, a company that relies on infringement to line its pockets. The reality is that Scribd is not anywhere near the top of the list of sites that end up hosting infringing material. Any site that offers free hosting to the public will have infringing stuff on it -- for example, LiveJournal, where the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America host their public conversations, has far more infringing works (photos, texts, etc) than Scribd does -- naturally, as it is much larger than Scribd. Flickr probably runs neck-and-neck with them. YouTube dwarfs all of them.

Scribd has also been accused of being obstreperous in its removals process -- again, without any basis in fact. Every hosting site has a near-identical procedure for removal of material: you fill in a DMCA "takedown notice" in which you swear that you're the rightsholder or an authorized representative, and they take the material down. This process is unfairly characterized as burdensome, even though this process allows rightsholders the power to have material removed from the Web without showing any evidence that there's any infringement going on.

Compare this with the offline world: if you believed that a bookstore was carrying an infringing edition of your book, you couldn't just walk off the street, sign an affidavit swearing that the book was really your work, and expect the bookstore owner to take it off the shelf (for starters, this would be a disaster for free speech, as every axe-grinding yahoo would be able to get books censored just by filling in false affidavits). No, you'd have to hire a lawyer, go to court, prove a case, and then the work would come down. When you unpack the claims of SFWA members who had material removed from Scribd, the complaint amounts to, "They made me swear that this was my book before they removed it."

The process for removing things from the Web isn't burdensome. It is so easy that it is frequently abused -- everyone from the Church of Scientology to Diebold have used takedown notices to silence their ideological opponents by falsely claiming to have been infringed upon.

Scribd is trying to find something that will make SFWA happy, but the members who bruit about the shibboleth that Scribd is an extraordinary bad actor are not basing their claims on the reality of the situation. Scribd is no different from any of the services that SFWA members use every day, from Google Mail to Blogger, from LiveJournal to Flickr: a commercial entity that provides a low-cost place for the public to express itself. Every one of these services is abused by infringers, and every one of them has exactly the same procedure for addressing infringement.

Indeed, Scribd has already shown its willingness to set aside the law and take extraordinary measures to make SFWA happy, as when it honored a malformed and sloppy "takedown notice" sent by SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt, one that listed dozens of works that Burt did not have the authority to represent, including several that were under Creative Commons licenses (including my own first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom).

Apologists for this claim that no real harm was done, that the ill that arose from it was that my book "was unavailable from one source for a few days." This is far from the truth: when SFWA had my work taken down, it caused many of my readers to believe that I had abandoned my commitment to free sharing of my works and to write to me accusing me of being a hypocrite, swearing never to buy my books again, and so on. Only by publishing the facts of the matter -- that I had not caused the book to be removed, that SFWA had acted against my explicit prohibition on their acting as my representative for copyright claims -- was I able to communicate to all the people who'd seen the page saying my book was offline because copying it was prohibited that I was not behind this.

The good news is that SFWA's Copyright Committee has a new chairman, Russell Davis, whose public notice on assuming the chair are very heartening and promising indeed. Link

See also:
Science Fiction Writers of America abuses the DMCA
Science Fiction Writers of America reinstates E-Piracy Committee -- new name, same chairman

Pioneering avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died on Wednesday. Stockhausen's experimental electro-acoustic music influenced everyone from John Cage to the Beatles, David Bowie to Sonic Youth. He was 79.
Link to Stockhausen.org, Link to Associated Press obituary

Tonight is the opening of the Snow Angels group show at Thinkspace Art Gallery in Los Angeles. It's a wonderfully eclectic mix of female painters: Caia Koopman, Nouar, Jeaneen Carlino, Lilly Piri, Kelly Vivanco, Angelina Wrona, Catherine Brooks, Tina Anderson, and Sophia Pottish. Seen here at left, "Foregone Broken" (oil and ink on tea-stained paper, 18 x 24") by the incredible Stella Im Hultberg. At right is Tina Anderson's "Nature of the Beast" (pen and ink on paper, 15 3/4 x 20"). I wasn't familiar with Anderson before but I love the nouveau feel of her work. The gallery is also issuing two new limited edition prints, Ekundayo's “Too Much Of Anything" and Hultberg's magnificent "Hearbeats." I'm so fond of "Heartbeats" that I bought the original when Hultberg showed at Thinkspace earlier this year. Link to online gallery, Link to show information

Inhaling aerosolized pig brains could be hazardous to your health.

In the slaughterhouse floor at Quality Pork Processors Inc. is an area known as the "head table," but not because it is the place of honor. It is where workers cut up pigs' heads and then shoot compressed air into the skulls until the brains come spilling out.

But now the grisly practice has come under suspicion from health authorities.

Over eight months from last December through July, 11 workers at the plant in Austin, Minn. — all of them employed at the head table — developed numbness, tingling or other neurological symptoms, and some scientists suspect inhaled airborne brain matter may have somehow triggered the illnesses.

Link

Deb sez, "Dr. Michael Geist has just blogged that the proposed legislation is on the Notice Paper for the Canadian Parliament for next week. This is a necessary step for any legislation presented to the Parliament. This means it is going ahead. Now is the time to SPEAK UP if you don't want this restrictive, horrible American-style DMCA in Canada. Please, contact your M.P. via email."

Better yet, participate in tomorrow's coordinated campaign to reach out to the elusive Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who is responsible for this legislation. This is especially important if you live in Calgary: we need people who care about this issue to attend the Minister's open house and ask him some of the 250+ questions that CBC listeners have for him, which he has so far refused to address. Link (Thanks, Deb!)

See also:
CANADIANS! Tomorrow is your best chance to fight the Canadian DMCA! Event in Calgary, national phone-in Canada's DMCA won't get any consumer rights added to it for a decade Facebook group for fighting Canada's DMCA growing fast Ranting hand-puppet tackles Canada's DMCA HOWTO Fight Canada's coming DMCA copyright law
Canada's coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
Canadian DMCA: how it might have happened
CBC radio show needs your input for question with Minister responsible for Canadian DMCA Canadian Industry Minister refuses to defend Canadian DMCA in public

This gent can squirt a lot of water out of his stomach into a plastic bottle.

That may be the reason he goes by the moniker Winston the Water Fountain. Link

Again With the Comics presents an early-1960's comic books story about one of the weirdest and most intriguing super-heroes ever, Herbie, the Fat Fury. This 9-page story is called “Professor Flipdome’s Screwy Machine.”

Herbie was the creation of ACG editor Richard E. Hughes, writing under the pseudonym Shane O’Shea, and first appeared in Forbidden Worlds #73, December 1958. The plump lump went on to star in his own series and eventually took on a costumed identity, the Fat Fury. Costume or no, Herbie was one of the most omni-powered beings in comics history, meeting any and all challenges with an unflappable, deadpan cool and his bottomless arsenal of specialty lollipops. The stories were whimsical, madcap, and unabashedly silly, and this one is no exception. From giant menacing flowers, to strap-on bee butts, to tiny micro-world duplicates, this comic has more crazy ideas than a Grant Morrison clone farm, and all in nine pages. Link

Ron posts found photos on Big Happy Fun House and old ham CB radio QSL cards on his other site Slats.org.

(Don't miss this wonderful photo, titled "Offer.")

In the latest episode of the Make Weekend Projects video podcast, Bre Pettis shows how to make a secret compartment book. Link

David Pogue is happy about a new website that lets you share your bad flight experiences, called MyBadFlight.com. For Pogue, it all comes down to Chicago.

In March, a series of canceled flights meant that I spent 20 hours getting from New York to Omaha, thanks to “weather” at Chicago O’Hare.

In April, I was supposed to speak in Palm Springs, Calif. But all my flights were canceled, thanks to “weather” at Chicago O’Hare. So the only way I could get there in time was to fly to LA, rent a car and drive three hours through the middle of the night.

In May, I got to sleep for 2.5 hours—on a cot in a utility room at a sold-out hotel—after my original flight was canceled, thanks to “weather” at Chicago O’Hare.

Also in May, my flight circled for so long over Chicago O’Hare (thanks to “weather”), the plane ran out of fuel and had to land in South Bend, Indiana. By the time I finally arrived in Sacramento, it was 6:30 a.m… just in time to get ready for my 8:30 am keynote talk.

Link

In LA Weekly, Peter Relic writes about his attempt to profile Evel Knievel for Rolling Stone earlier this year.

From the other end of the phone came a sigh: “Peter, I don’t want or need Rolling Stone to do a story on me after all these years. In 1974 Rolling Stone sent a shit named Joe Eszterhas to write a story about me when I attempted to make my Snake River Canyon jump. And when the story came out, the title of the story was "King of the Goons." It hurt, it hurt very much, and I know a thing or two about pain. Now, I’m not judging your insides by the cover of your magazine. I’m sure you’re a decent human being. And God knows we all make mistakes. [Pause.] I made some of my biggest live on national television. But Rolling Stone made a mistake when they ran that story.”

Link

My friend (and editor of my book, Rule the Web), David Moldawer, is producing a cool podcast about another book he edited, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desktop Reference for the Curious Mind.

Whether you are researching the history of Western art, investigating an obscure medical test, following current environmental trends, studying Shakespeare, brushing up on your crosswords and Sudoku skills, or simply looking for a deeper understanding of the world, this book is for you. This one volume offers more information than any other book on the most important subjects, as well as provide easy-to-access data critical to everyday life. It is the only universal reference book to include authoritative and engaging essays from Times writers in almost every field of endeavor.

Link

Instructables has a video showing how to make a fun foldy-toy out of paper and tape. Link (Thanks, Shawn!)

Tomorrow is the 27th anniversary of the death of John Lennon. Yoko has written a letter to him on her website, Imagine Peace.

I miss you, John. 27 years later, I still wish I could turn back the clock to the Summer of 1980. I remember everything - sharing our morning coffee, walking in the park together on a beautiful day, and seeing your hand stretched to mine - holding it, reassuring me that I shouldn't worry about anything because our life was good.

I had no idea that life was about to teach me the toughest lesson of all. I learned the intense pain of losing a loved one suddenly, without warning, and without having the time for a final hug and the chance to say, "I love you," for the last time. The pain and shock of that sudden loss is with me every moment of every day. When I touched John's side of our bed on the night of December 8th, 1980, I realized that it was still warm. That moment has haunted me for the past 27 years - and will stay with me forever.

Link

Over at the MAKE blog, Jake von Slatt has put together a steampunk gift guide.

Dietz M2000 - Kerosene lantern and Cooker
Price: $18.95

Dietz kerosene lanterns have remained nearly unchanged since their invention in the mid-nineteenth century. One recent innovation is the Dietz Cooker lantern.

Can't you just see yourself heating a can of stew on this lantern while crouching on a dry spot somewhere out in the bayou? Or perched on a boulder on the rocky coast of Maine, your musty smelling canvas and leather camping gear nearby?

Link

Gabe and Max, who have taught so many of us how to achieve the dream lives of our dreams using the internet, answer questions from the Bing Bong audience. Then, aliens discover Mark Frauenfelder's book, "Rule the Web."

Link to video and full post with comments, on Boing Boing TV.

Extraordinary Engines is a forthcoming steampunk anthology from Solaris Books, including original stories by Daniel Abraham, Kage Baker, Stephen Baxter, Beth Bernobich, Eric Brown, Keith Brooke, Paul Di Filippo, Hal Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, Jay Lake, Margo Lanagan, James Lovegrove, Ian R. MacLeod, Michael Moorcock, James Morrow, Kim Newman, Robert Reed, Chris Roberson, Adam Roberts, Lucius Shepard, Brian Stableford, Jeff VanderMeer and Marly Youman. Edited by Nick Gevers.

My, that does sound promising, doesn't it? Link (Thanks, Christian!)

If you're a Canadian and you want to talk to Industry Minister Jim Prentice about his proposal for a Canadian DMCA, a copyright law that's even worse than the ten-year-old American legislation that resulted in lawsuits against 20,000+ Americans without stopping infringement or paying artists, now's your chance!

This Saturday, Minister Prentice is hosting an open house in Calgary at his constituency office. This is the best chance we will ever have to make our feelings known about the Canadian DMCA. If you are in or near Calgary, plan on attending this event, along with local activist Kempton Lam (sign up on the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group).

Dress neatly. Be polite. Be firm. Be friendly. Ask the Minister tough questions (the CBC has collected over 250 questions about this, all of which Prentice has refused to answer) in front of his constituents, the people who voted him into office (you don't need to remind him that that the last two MPs who tried to introduce a Canadian DMCA lost their jobs -- he knows!).

Prentice's open house runs from 1PM-3PM tomorrow, Saturday, December 8 at 1318 Centre Street NE, Suite 105, Calgary, AB (details on Prentice's website)

Not in Calgary? NO PROBLEM! Plan on calling the Minister tomorrow or on dropping him an email, expressing your regrets that you can't attend the open house, but letting him know how you feel. Here are the numbers:

Ottawa office - (613) 992-4275
Calgary office - (403) 216-7777
Minister office - (613) 995-9001

His email address is: Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca. Once you send an email, print it out and mail it (no stamp needed!) to:

Jim Prentice
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

The word is that the Minister's office is reeling from the overwhelming, national response to this badly written, badly planned bill. Bringing this legislation to Canada is Prentice's "series of tubes" moment, the point at which Canada's Internet Czar shows himself to be largely ignorant of its workings and power.

I believe that we can stop this bill. I will be calling the Minister tomorrow, and sending him a letter. I hope you do so as well. Canadians don't need to follow the US off the copyright cliff. We can have a sane and balanced copyright law, one that protects the Canadian public and Canadian artists.

Tell your friends. Tell your family. If you care about the net, this could be the most important thing you do this year. Take action and save the country.

See also:
Canada's DMCA won't get any consumer rights added to it for a decade Facebook group for fighting Canada's DMCA growing fast Ranting hand-puppet tackles Canada's DMCA HOWTO Fight Canada's coming DMCA copyright law
Canada's coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
Canadian DMCA: how it might have happened
CBC radio show needs your input for question with Minister responsible for Canadian DMCA Canadian Industry Minister refuses to defend Canadian DMCA in public

Today on Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday contest: improbably pop-up books. Alystair's entry, shown here, is the pick of the litter, but there's plenty to like. Link

The New York Xpress American Hip Hop Street Wear is another in my ongoing series of photos from my travels. This one is from Whitechapel, in East London, and it's part of my small but growing series of pictures of commercial ventures in London that name themselves after US places (Tennessee Fried Chicken, Texas Fried Chicken, Dixy Chicken, Chicago Fried Chicken and Ribs (Halal!), Manhattan Loft Corporation, and so on). Link

More grim news about Canada's DMCA, the coming copyright law that manages to be even worse than the disastrous, ten-year-old American Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Industry Minister Jim Prentice has announced that the public-interest questions raised by the bill will be hived off into a committee that meets after the law is enacted.

This kind of committee typically takes years to get anything done -- two years to meet, two years to consider recommendations, two years to consult on proposals, two years to introduce legislation. Canada only introduces new copyright law every ten years or so.

This means that Canadians will likely suffer for a decade under Prentice's badly thought-out legislation before anything is done to see to it that the law is balanced to take in the interests of Canada's schools, disabled people, children, archivists, artists, scholars and other users of copyrighted works. Given that Canada's arts community has come out against this kind of legislation, you have to wonder: just who is this for? The US-led multinational labels in the "Canadian" Recording Industry Association? (Remember, in the first ten years of the US DMCA, 20,000 American music fans were sued and not one penny was paid to artists as a result, nor did file sharing decrease).

Prentice has refused to appear on the CBC's Search Engine programme to discuss his bill. He's gone into hiding, spinning out unconvincing little sops like this one to try to save his bacon -- after all, the last two MPs who tried to introduce a Canadian DMCA lost their jobs.

If the introduction of a Canadian DMCA were not bad enough, sources now indicate that Industry Minister Jim Prentice plans to delay addressing the copyright concerns of individual Canadians for years. Rather than including consumer concerns such as flexible fair dealing, time shifting, format shifting, parody, and the future of the private copying levy within the forthcoming bill, Prentice will instead strike a Copyright Review Panel to consider future copyright reforms. Modeled after the Telecom Policy Review Panel, the CRP will presumably take a year or two to consult Canadians on various copyright issues. In all likelihood, the government will then take another year or two to consider the recommendations, another year to propose potential reforms, another year or two to consult on those proposals, and another year or two to finally introduce legislation. Given that Canada has historically only passed major copyright reform once every ten years, Prentice will be in his early 60s and likely collecting his Member of Parliament pension by the time Canadians see copyright reform that addresses fair use.

Link

See also:
Facebook group for fighting Canada's DMCA growing fast Ranting hand-puppet tackles Canada's DMCA HOWTO Fight Canada's coming DMCA copyright law
Canada's coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
Canadian DMCA: how it might have happened
CBC radio show needs your input for question with Minister responsible for Canadian DMCA Canadian Industry Minister refuses to defend Canadian DMCA in public

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we saw this "Glucoboy" device which rewards blood sugar testing with Game Boy gaming, our first (and last) Tractor Fight Thursday, a horseshit AT&T "open" story in USA Today, safes for the rich made of exotic wood and gold, my question about the Seiko Final Fantasy watch, a mouse that thinks it's a numeric keypad, a surprisingly intriguing fruit-shaped TV remote design, a cigarette pack that I though was clever but may not be, and the danger of knock-off goods. And you know what? Are you ready for it? Deals and clean-up links.

The New York Times reports that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed tapes of "severe interrogation techniques" conducted on two Al Qaeda operatives in its custody "in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy."

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

Link

JahFurry sez, "Rushkoff, Paul Pope, Moby, Dean Haspiel, Josh Neufeld, Nick Bertozzi, Molly Crabapple, Dan Goldman, JahFurry and more team-up on Monday night in NYC to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund at a member party benefitting the Fund, with live art jam, badass music by Avi Bortnick, sketches books and special prints for sale, make killer holiday gifts!" Link (Thanks, JahFurry!)

Along with pallets of toilet paper and 12 pound drums of nutmeg, it appears that Costco also stocks any funeral accoutrements you may need: caskets, pet urns, "keepsakes," and the like.
Link (Thanks, Gabe "TuneUp" Adiv!)

CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman's has a new book called The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse.

Terdiman estimates that there are hundreds of people who earn a full-time living conducting business on Second Life, and he interviewed a few dozen of them them for his book.

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life begins with an overview of the virtual world and its flourishing economy as well as the challenges it presents to entrepreneurs. A virtual business basics chapter discusses important features of all successful Second Life businesses, including marketing and advertising avenues.

The following chapters discuss how to plan, start, and successfully run such businesses as real estate, clothing and accessory creation, construction and landscaping, adult opportunites, music and video production, art creation, and building and running entertainment venues. More esoteric opportunities--machinima, news media and blogging, working for other content creators, currency speculation, and more--are also explored.

Here's a CNN interview with Terdiman about the book.

Link

This collection of flowcharts related to thug life is not new, but in it you may find science which has previously been dropped upon you. Link. (thanks, Clayton Cubitt)

The Ghost Towel is just a white cotton bathtowel with two pre-cut eye holes. It reminds me of the white bedsheets I ruined as a youngster. I bet my son would love it. The Ghost Towel is £23.99 from Lazybone. Or, make your own!
Link (via Neatorama)