For the past 24 weeks, I've been reading Bruce Sterling's classic 1992 nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown aloud on my podcast. The Hacker Crackdown was the first free online book I ever heard of, and it tells the engrossing story of the 1990 "Operation Sundevil" Secret Service sweep of hackers, which led to the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.

When I told Bruce I wanted to read The Hacker Crackdown aloud, he said, "You're going to read the E911 document aloud?" The E911 document ("Control Office Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services For Special Services and Account Centers") is an impenetrable bureaucratic document that was pilfered from a Bell South compute by a young hacker, and which led to an incredible domino-chain of legal and political ramifications. Bell South claimed that the slim document cost more than $79,000 to produce (the calculus by which this number was arrived at is hilariously dumb), and that the document itself was so hot that it could not even be shown to a jury, lest it enter the court record and be used to crash the nation's emergency telecoms infrastructure. (It turns out that the document was not secret after all -- that another division of Bell was selling it for $10)

So this week on my podcast, I got to the E911 document. It took about 25 minutes to read it aloud. It is the most amazing jumble of acronyms, passive voice prose and gibberish that I've ever seen. It's a hoot -- and a guaranteed soporific. Go ahead and download the podcast and see if you can make any sense of it. Link, Link to subscribe to my podcast feed

Nature Magazine's announced that it's going to share all its human genome papers under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licenses.The genomes themselves are not copyrightable and go into a public database, but the papers -- which are a vital part of the science -- may now be freely copied by any non-commercial publisher.

In the continuing drive to make papers as accessible as possible, NPG is now introducing a 'creative commons' licence for the reuse of such genome papers. The licence (see http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/license.html) allows non-commercial publishers, however they might be defined, to reuse the pdf and html versions of the paper. In particular, users are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the contribution, provided this is for non-commercial purposes, subject to the same or similar licence conditions and due attribution.

In 1996, as human genome sequencing was getting under way, leading players stated: "It was agreed that all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society" (see http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/research/bermuda.shtml). These principles have continued to guide the field, and NPG has consistently made genome papers freely available in keeping with them. This new licence allows us to formalize the arrangement.

Link

Tim from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "At EFF, we've just sent out an urgent action alert. Monday morning, the Foreign Intelligence Service Bill bill finally goes to the Senate floor, and at noon the Senate will cast their most important votes yet on Telecom Immunity for participation in massive, nationwide illegal NSA wiretapping. We've set up an action alert page for Boing Boing readers to contact their Senators, and would be much obliged if you could share the link."

The Senate is poised to grant retroactive immunity for telecoms that broke the law! On Monday, there will be critical, make-or-break votes in the Senate -- contact your Senator immediately to stop telecom immunity!

Senate lawmakers must support Senator Chris Dodd and other heroes in allowing a full debate to proceed on Monday, and they must vote to strip telecom immunity from the bill.

The Senate should not let the telecoms off the hook. Granting immunity sets a dangerous precedent, sending the message that lawbreaking is acceptable and that the rights of Americans can be freely infringed by private companies in defiance of the law. And though the debate about the proper process of collecting foreign intelligence is complex, the issue of telecom immunity is not. The facts are simple enough: the telecoms broke the law, so the Senate should let Americans have their day in court.

Link

See also:
EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans
William Gibson on NSA wiretapping
StopTheSpying: Tell the Dems to keep AT&T on the hook for NSA wiretapping
Time's Joe Klein gets everything wrong in column about NSA domestic spying
Congress: don't cripple the suit against the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program
NSA domestic spying: reaction from a crypto mail-list moderator
NSA's domestic data-mining ops gathered vast troves of info
NSA spies on US: calls, emails intercepted without warrants
Data mining prompted fight over NSA domestic spying program
ACLU map of NSA's domestic phone, 'net surveillance
Liveblogging court hearings: NSA's spying, AT&T's alleged complicity
AT&T built warrantless wiretap rooms for the NSA
CALL CONGRESS NOW: NSA wiretapping to be legalized THIS WEEK!
Schneier op-ed on unchecked presidential power, NSA spying
Government appeals its loss in NSA/ATT domestic spying case
Act NOW to keep NSA cases in public court

The Phone Recording Archive sports hundreds of samples of recorded voices from different phone systems around the USA, including a ton of old Bell System clips, such favorites as:

* Invalid Access code
* Not from this calling area
* All circuits are busy
* Can't process custom calling request
* Dial 1 first
* Disconnected number
* Don't dial 0
* Don't dial 1
* Please hang up and try again
* Due to heavy calling...
* Please check the instruction manual
* Call not completed as dialed
* Call did not go through
* Call not completed, please check number or call operator
* Due to telephone company facility trouble...
* Not from the phone you are using

Link (Thanks, Luke!)

The latest in my ongoing series of photos from my travel: discarded books on the streets of New York (near Union Square). Note Future Shock at the top of the pile. In my experience, this is one of North America's most discarded books -- it's a reliable yard-sale find, a couple copies can be had at any decent used book store, and they even turn up on the street sometimes. I've sometimes dreamed of rescuing all these poor, abandoned futures and making a ziggurat out of them. Link

Update: From the comments, Vincent sez, "Here's even more Future Shock color-based art." (Photo: "Lots of Future Shock" by Joshua Callaghan)

Van sez, "Nice bar-chart showing skyrocketing increase in federal contracts for shredding services. In 2000, the government spent a little over $450k to dispose of pesky documents; by 2006, the cost of keeping secrets had risen to $2.9. And 2007? At midpoint, $2,7 million and rising..." Link (Thanks, Van!)

Today's Salon features a long first-person account of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, who was kidnapped to a CIA "black site" torture camp. It's strong and scary stuff, and the people responsible deserve to be hauled into court, shown up for the criminals they are, and stuck in a cell for the rest of their lives. The traitors in government who sanctioned this program should join them. Torture is a cancer. Extrajudicial imprisonment is a cancer. These things rot democracy. They rot nations.

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated its network of secret prisons known as "black sites." But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on -- there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation -- one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words "I am innocent" in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die.

Link

Joshua Jaffa has a beautiful, lyrical story in the New York Times about the declining sport of homing pigeon racing. The sport has a long and honorable history, and you can really sense the incredible, magnificent obsessions of the players in the article.

New York’s pigeon clubs, loosely organized by geography and custom, are a cross between an urban sportsman’s lodge and a time capsule of immigrant, working-class New York. Even as recently as a generation back, fleets of racing pigeons swirled above New York like pulsing gray clouds, but the numbers of racers and birds have thinned, with not enough new fliers to replace the old.

Yet the dynamics of a pigeon race have remained mostly the same. The birds are trucked to a central “liberation point” anywhere from 100 to 500 miles from the city, where they are released so they can fly home. The birds’ owners sit waiting by the coops on their rooftops, or in their backyards. Most birds return within several hours, but some take days or even months. Others never come back...

Pigeon fliers, whose flocks usually number 40 to 80 birds, do indeed treat the birds like fine automobiles, feeding them a careful tonic of antibiotics and vitamins, and birdseed blends with names like Tipple Mix and Vinny’s Candy. Steroids are forbidden, and there is random drug testing at many larger races. A champion pigeon can fetch several thousand dollars at auction, with the hope that it will breed future generations of winners.

“It’s like having your own sports team,” said one Viola club flier. “And you’re the owner, the trainer, the doctor.”

Link (via Kottke)

(Photo: Downsized, cropped thumbnail from a NYT photo credited to Jeff Swensen)

Google today announced Knol, which would appear to be their response to online knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Mahalo:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.

Link to Scott Beale's post, with pointers to some of the many online discussions around this today.

The Onion AV Club has posted an extensive and excellent list of redonkulous band names in 2007. I am fond of the "ANIMALS" section of this list:

Pistol Whipping Party Penguins

SuperHeavyGoatAss

Baboon Torture Division (Their site proudly boasts that it ranks "1 for Baboon Torture Porn on Google.")

Those Fucking Unicorns

Unicorn Dream Attack

Sex Rat

Penguins With Shotguns

Tigers Can Bite You

Link to full list, which includes links to real live band myspaces and websites on some of the internets. (thanks, Paul Hoffman)

"I am making a small book and needs fact in regard to End of the world. If you believe that now is the end of the world and you have solid fact I will buy the info from you for $5.00 each fact, For example you can say: According to ABCD- EFG this is the end of the world. I need a total of 200 solid believable facts it equals $1000." Link. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!

Lokulokus are little plastic toy pigs from Japan. Throw them onto a tabletop and they'll be squashed flat. Then they'll slowly return to their normal roly-poly shape. The video is a delight. Link

Jehane Noujaim (the documentary filmmaker of Control Room) and TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) are asking professional and amateur filmmakers to submit their work for Pangea Day -- a "global film event showcasing short films from around the world."

How to produce and submit your short film:

Pangea Day films are meant to be visual stories, ones that can be understood despite language barriers, and therefore should not rely on dialogue. If dialogue is required, Pangea Day organizers are asking that videos have English subtitles so that all films can be translated. In order to show as many videos as possible, submissions must be 5 minutes or less.

Filmmakers with submissions should upload their films at http://www.youtube.com/group/pangeaday and register their film at www.pangeaday.org.

A panel of jurors, led by Noujaim and other renowned members of the film community, will review all submissions and select the winning films to be screened on Pangea Day.

Link

Arglebargle! lovingly compiled a bunch of cutaway drawings of the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building.

One of the great things about the Fantastic Four comics was all the super-nutty Kirby gizmos and gadgets. Crazy stuff --like James Bond gear on steroids and acid! And talk about high maintenance... the team needed enough space for a Fantasti-car, a Pogo Plane, a Fantasti-Copter, a Private Passenger ICBM, an Observatory, an entrance to the negative zone, a computer room, a chemical lab, a photo analysis lab, a projection room, a gymnasium, trophy room and living quarters (just to name a few).

Link

The Best That Ever Did It, by Leonard S. Zinberg (aka Ed Lacy), is a mystery novel from 1955.

Barney Harris, 248-pound auto mechanic and private investigator, is hired by a policeman's widow to root out police corruption and bring her husband’s murderer to justice.

Link

Matthew says: "Reuters and the Washington Post reports that amongst other unusual and possibly illegal behavior, Ginger Cruz, a deputy to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has threatened to curse employees with magic."

Current and former SIGIR employees have told investigators that Bowen's deputy, Ginger Cruz, a self-described wiccan, threatened to put hexes on employees and made inappropriate sexual remarks.

Link

Tim says: "Bryan Mumford makes some interesting gadgets -- none more interesting than the Mystery Box. Designed to look inviting, it automatically slams its lid when approached, then teasingly creeps it back open when you leave."

The Mystery Box consists of a polished cherry wood box placed on top of a spruce pedestal. The box has a hinged lid, which is open, and the inside is lined with black velvet.

When you see this box on a pedestal, you think to yourself

"This is some special box, and something special is inside of it."

So you walk over to look inside. But as soon as you get within 6 feet of the box, the hinged lid slams shut and won't open.

If you walk away from the box, it begins to feel safe again, and the lid opens an inch or so. If you leave it alone, after 5 or 10 seconds, it opens another inch or two. If you still leave it alone, it will open a bit more. Finally, it decides it's safe once again and, like a cautious anemone, it opens all the way up. But as soon as you approach it, it slams shut.

Yes, there is something special inside and no, I won't tell you what it is.

Link

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio programme Search Engine did a great segment this week on the Canadian DMCA kerfuffle, focused on the grassroots campaign that packed the house at Industry Minister Jim Prentice's Christmas Party last week and the Parliamentary fight that followed. This is inspiring stuff, hearing from all these friendly geeks who're trying out activism for the first time because this issue really moves them. You gotta hear the Parliamentary fight -- the New Democratic Party's copyright critic is on fire, and Prentice comes across as a bumbler. Link

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for Search Engine)

See also:
Canadian DMCA rally/celebration in Toronto next Tuesday
Canadian DMCA cancelled (again) (for now)
Canadian DMCA to be reintroduced -- your action needed NOW!
Canadian DMCA stalled, won't be introduced (today, at least)!
Canadian DMCA rally in Calgary -- photos, videos, reports
O Canada! The Canadian DMCA version of the national anthem
Canadian DMCA introduced
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

Elizabeth McGrath is a Los Angeles artist who creates exquisitely creepy and lovely dioramas and sculptures involving nightmarishly mutant animals, circus sideshow decadence, and delightfully gross horror movie gore. Liz is a master of faux taxidermy. She doesn't use animal parts at all, instead creating her terrifying beasts from resin, fake fur, and fake leather layered over taxidermy armatures and beautified with paint, roofing tar, and hand-sewn fabric. Seen here, "Deer House" (37" x 20" x 12") and "Ready for the Parade - Strip XXIII" (35" x 30" x 6.5"). Liz has a new solo show, titled The Incurable Disorder, opening this Saturday at the Billy Shire Fine Arts gallery in Culver City, California. Along with dozens of sculptures and watercolors, a new 3D video from Liz's goth-country band Miss Derringer will be screened. Earlier this week, I visited Liz's studio and found her to be wonderfully charming, funny, and light-hearted. I think her art embodies this juxtaposition of the cute and scary, the hysterically funny and brutally tragic. Look for my interview with Liz McGrath on an upcoming episode of BBtv.

Link to online gallery at Billy Shire Fine Arts
Link to Elizabeth McGrath's site
Link to Miss Derringer on MySpace
Link to buy Elizabeth McGrath's monograph, Everything That Creeps

A man nearly died at a Nuremberg airport security checkpoint after necking two litres of vodka rather than letting the security people confiscate it.

The incident occurred at the Nuremberg airport on Tuesday, where the 64-year-old man was switching planes on his way home to Dresden from a holiday in Egypt. New airport rules prohibit passengers from carrying larger quantities of liquid onto planes, and he was told at a security check he would have to either throw out the bottle of vodka or pay a fee to have his carry-on bag checked as cargo. Instead, he chugged the bottle down — and was quickly unable to stand or otherwise function, police said.

Link

Bruce Schneier just passed through Heathrow Airport and noticed that they're speeding up the shoe-scanning process by having you go through a metal detector first and then have your shoes scanned at a second system. Being a security guru, he gave it ten seconds' thought and figured out how to defeat it.

Here's how the attack works. Assume that you have two pairs of shoes: a clean pair that passes all levels of screening, and a dangerous pair that doesn't. (Ignore for a moment the ridiculousness of screening shoes in the first place, and assume that an X-ray machine can detect the dangerous pair.) Put the dangerous shoes on your feet and the clean shoes in your carry-on bag. Walk through the metal detector. Then, at the shoe X-ray machine, take the dangerous shoes off and put them in your bag, and take the clean shoes out of your bag and place them on the X-ray machine. You've now managed to get through security without having your shoes screened.

Of course, X-ray machines are useful for spotting metal, not plastic explosive, so none of this stuff matters anyway. Ho ho ho. Link

(Photo: Travel Hungry Shoes, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Stuporglue's Flickr stream)

Chicago's venerable gag factory Fun, Inc., was profiled in the Tribune last Wednesday. Fun, Inc. is the home of the finest hand-made fake vomit in the land, made tenderly by a company vomitmaster who keeps his secret recipe close to the chest.

It's the world capital of fake vomit, where it's still made the old-fashioned American way, ladle by ladle, formed and coagulated for the next generation of pranksters and troublemakers.

Helping put the ick in America since 1941, Fun Inc. is a repository of practical jokes, magic tricks and gag items -- from chattering teeth to hot pepper gum, oversize sunglasses to oversize toothbrushes to oversize anything. The building, near Grand and Major Avenues in the industrial Hansen Park neighborhood, is where springs were once manufactured and, later, Cracker Jack prizes...

The exact blend is a proprietary secret, but this much is revealed: Production of fake vomit begins with 55-gallon drums of natural latex, which resembles thick milk. Colored bits of foam the size of coarse bread crumbs are added: red, yellow, "natural," two shades of brown, but no green. "Too strong a color," Putnam said.

"It's kind of like Grandma's recipe," he observed. "A pinch of this, two shakes of that. You kind of know when it's right."

The slurry is then ladled onto one Teflon sheet.

The vomitmaster smooths the mixture with the back of the spoon, the way a short-order cook does with pancakes on the griddle. Depending on weather, season and humidity, the pools of fake vomit, 500 to a batch, take overnight to a day and a half to dry. Like snowflakes, no two fake vomits are ever alike, which in the world of manufactured practical jokes is a rare trait.

Link (Thanks, John L!)

See also: Cheap Laffs: the history of the gag

Love is forever. So is being undead. Excerpts from "Zombie Love," a film by Yfke Van Berckelaer which was recently released on DVD (special thanks to Ben Rodkin!).

Link to video and full post with comments thread on Boing Boing tv.

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman takes a look back at the Top Ten Bigfoot Stories of 2007. Here's his #7, the "Nguoi Rung Kidnap Story":

Ro Cham H’pnhieng, 27, was discovered on the edge of the Cambodian jungle in January 2007, after she was caught trying to steal food left under a tree. She was seen with a hairy Wild Man, known by the local name, Nguoi Rung. Reportedly, she had been kidnapped in 1989 by the wild people and taken into the jungle. Attempts to find the Nguoi Rung were made, with no positive results.

In October 2007, after Ro Cham H’pnhieng’s family tried to have her live with them again, after several incidents of her running away into the forest, she escaped for the final time, apparently to return to the Forest People. She had made her choice, her family felt.

Link

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) is hosting a conference at Stanford next month about "Technology in Wartime." Annalee Newitz says,

This excellent conference is about the ethical implications of using computer technology in warfare. There is still plenty of room for people to register for the conference, and it's open to the public.

Speaker roster includes:

Bruce Schneier (Counterpane Security), Barbara Simons (ACM), Herb Lin (National Academy of Sciences), Cindy Cohn (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Patrick Ball (Benetech), Terry Winograd (Stanford University), Neil Rowe (Naval Defense Academy), Nick Mathewson (the Tor project), Ronald Arkin (Georgia Tech's Mobile Robots Lab) and Noah Shachtman (Wired magazine's war correspondent). The proceedings will be broadcast live on the Web, and the presentations collected in book form online, released under an open license, and made available to the public and policy makers looking for expert opinions on wartime technology issues during the election year.

Link. The one-day event takes place on January 26, 2008, registration is $50-100.

Sorry folks, this isn't a real unicorn chaser. It's a deer with an extra antler right between its eyes that was caught on a motion-sensitive game camera. Hunter Dave Ebeling captured the image in Elma, New York. Biologists quoted in a Buffalo News story propose several theories about the odd extra antler's origin, from a genetic mutation to an injury. Ebeling offers a very enlightened suggestion of how the mystery might best be solved: “I just wish somebody would shoot it so we’d know what that was," he told the newspaper.
Link (via Fortean Times)

Just in time for your winter holidays to parallel universes, the Imaginary Foundation has released several mindbending new t-shirt designs. Seen here, "Look Darling, A Sustainable Future," printed on 100% organic cotton t-shirts.
Link

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: Snoopy and Lucy Banana Milk-flavored popcorn, for sale at the giant Peanuts store across the street from the Harajuku train station in Tokyo. Link

Some of the Toronto members of the Fair Copyright for Canada group are planning a demonstration against the legislation next Tuesday. With the legislation dead (for now at least), this might just turn into a celebration!

Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Time: 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Location: Queen's Park
Street: 1 Queen's Park Crescent E
City/Town: Toronto, ON

Link to details on Facebook group

See also:
Canadian DMCA cancelled (again) (for now) Canadian DMCA to be reintroduced -- your action needed NOW!
Canadian DMCA stalled, won't be introduced (today, at least)!
Canadian DMCA rally in Calgary -- photos, videos, reports
O Canada! The Canadian DMCA version of the national anthem
Canadian DMCA introduced
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