The folks behind Steal This Film, an amazing, funny, enraging and inspiring documentary series about copyright and the Internet have just released part II of the series. I taught part one (about the PirateBay crackdown in Sweden and the founding of The Pirate Party) in my class last year, and it was one of the liveliest classes we had.

Part II is even better than part one -- it covers the technological and enforcement end of the copyright wars, and on the way that using the internet makes you a copier, and how copying puts you in legal jeopardy. Starting with Mark Getty's (Chairman of Getty Images) infamous statement that "Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century," the filmmakers note that oil always leads to oil-wars, and that these are vicious, ill-conceived and never end well. This leads them to explore the war on copying -- which ultimately becomes a war on the Internet and those of us who use it.

This installment includes punchy interviews with a lot of the US's leading copyfighters -- EFFers like Seth Schoen and Fred von Lohmann, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Eben Moglen, Aaron Swartz, Yochai Benkler, Rick Prelinger, as well as folks in the UK, Sweden and Bangalore. Interspersed with this is are smart historical perspectives, and a brief interview with MPAA chief Dan Glickman, who all but twirls his mustache in glee at the thought of punishing copiers. There's also some interesting material here from new artists who embrace copying, but I'm guessing that that's going to be the main theme of a future installment.

Steal This Film II is available as a P2P download (natch) in several formats, including HD, and opens with a stern warning encouraging you to share it as widely as possible. Link (Thanks, Robbo and everyone else who suggested this!) See also: Steal This Movie: documentary on Swedish piracy movement

Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who co-writes the NY Times's Jetlagged Blog has written a corker of an editorial railing against the bullshit "security" procedures that the TSA has put into place. Smith is hopping mad and stops just short of calling for a revolution. Man, I'd be with him at the barricades.

No matter that a deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic, we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened, asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and loss of our belongings.

The folly is much the same with respect to the liquids and gels restrictions, introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and "unfortunate." The plot's leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as "speculative" and "exaggerated."

Link (Thanks to HeavyD and everyone else who suggested this one!)

A Korean newscast reports on a hybrid breed of carp with "human faces." Not exactly human, but helllp-meeee freaky Fly enough to give me the willies. Link (via Neatorama)

These heart-shaped tea-cups from Bits and Piece run $13 each ($10 in quantity). I wonder if they're a little sloppy to drink out of? Link (via Cribcandy)

LiveJournal user Phogg painstakingly created this fantastic Disneyland quilt -- "Keep in mind that short of a single mickey head patch on each panel, the moon in the center and Pooh's balloon in Critter Country, everything started out as white cotton. EVERYTHING was either painted directly onto the panel or painted onto a separate piece of white cotton then appliqued by hand using good old fashioned blind stitching onto the panel. All the lettering was done by hand too." Link (Thanks, Batty!)

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: an enormous mountain of assorted puzzle pieces, from the entranceway to the main hall for this year's Picnic conference in Amsterdam. Link

Show your religious fervor by baking Flying Spaghetti Monster cookies this year! Link (via Plasticbag)

Sanrio is launching a line of Hello Kitty stuff for men. Wait, those little pencil-boxes weren't unisex?

An Sanrio Co. employee shows Hello Kitty products targeted at young men at the company's headquarters in Tokyo Friday, Dec. 28, 2007. The cuddly white cat, usually seen on toys and jewelry for young females, will soon adorn T-shirts, bags, watches and other products targeting young men, company spokesman Kazuo Tohmatsu said Friday. The feline for-men products will go on sale in Japan next month, and will be sold soon in the U.S. and other Asian nations, according to Sanrio. (AP Photo)

Link (via Tokyo Mango)

An anonymous ex-Disneyland cast-member is selling irreverent, insider-jokey t-shirts (good looking ones, too!) under the naughty name of "Cryogenically Frozen." Link (via The Disney Blog)

In a fascinating article about trends in sound engineering, Rolling Stone notes that producers are now specifically mixing tracks to compensate for the failings in MP3 -- it seems to me that as a society, we're happy to sacrifice fidelity for ease of use, flexibility and low-cost (see, for example, the trend from landlines to cordless phones to mobile phones to Skype). Designing for that, as opposed to lamenting it -- is a damned good and realistic thing to do.

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Never- mind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

Link (via /.)

Carl Malamud says,

For the past 18 months, Jacqueline Trescott and James V. Grimaldi of the Washington Post have covered the never-ending scandals that have plagued the Smithsonian, reporting for which they deserve the Pulitzer Prize. They've broken the story of the resignation in disgrace of the previous Secretary, the subsequent resignation in disgrace of the previous Deputy Secretary, and then the resignation in disgrace of the "CEO" of Smithsonian Business Ventures. Enough for one year? Not on your life!

Today, they bring us the story of W. Richard West, Jr., who as head of the National Museum of the American Indian, felt that the taxpayers should foot the bill for $250,000 in "first-class transportation and plush lodging in hotels around the world, including more than a dozen trips to Paris." (Paris being noted as one of the centers of American Indian culture!)

What struck me particularly hard was a quote from West buried deep inside the story. When asked about his $292,000 salary and his outrageous expenses, all West could manage to say was:

"I am grateful for at least the past year to have been the highest-paid director of a museum in the Smithsonian. Even at that status I have yet to earn even two-thirds of what I earned as a private attorney in my last year in private practice."

Jeez. What is amazing is not that one greedy lawyer tried to bilk the taxpayers, what is amazing is that the Regents of the Smithsonian (which includes 6 members of Congress, the Vice President, and the Chief Justice) let him get away with it without objection. It shows how deeply institutional the problems are in our attic.

Link

Netscape Navigator, once the de rigeur browser for more than 90% of web users, will no longer be supported by current owner AOL after February 2008. Link. Post your ode to this code in the comments. Extra points if you can manage to refer to yourself as a "netizen" with a straight face. (thanks Bill)

Related to today's earlier post about an interview with author of Love & Sex With Robots, my friend Paul Spinrad wrote this excellent short story called "The Sex Singularity: When Machines Surpass Human Hotness."

2010

Following the Supermod Doll's success, Pygmalion introduces Supermod Series II, a line of sexbots with motion-triggered vocalization -- moans, screams, and dirty talk. The bot also has "Inheat Inside," a new behavior engine designed by a leading primate biologist, which makes the bots' movements, expressions, and iris dilations even more powerfully seductive. Demand for the bots grows, but their high price continues to limit sales.

Later in the year, Pygmalion introduces the Supermod Pornstar line, in a cross-marketing and licensing partnership with adult video producer Digital Playground. The new line of sexbots are realistic, laser-scanned replicas of Jesse Jane and other leading porn actresses. Tagline: "You've watched me; now fuck me."

A reclusive bot-owner commits "double-suicide" at his home in Los Angeles, hacking his bot to pieces with an axe, then shooting himself in the heart. The story makes national headlines and draws attention to the high suicide rate among sexbot users.

Botboy, a successful chain of Japanese doll clubs, opens 15 branches in the U.S. and Canada. The company also launches Botboy magazine, a monthly celebration of sexbots and the botboy lifestyle that features lavish erotic photography, plus fantasy fiction, sexbot advice and maintenance tips, and the latest in sexbot technology. The magazine is a hit, and proves to be a popular ìgatewayî for non bot-users.

The 1st annual International Interdisciplinary Conference on Sexbots and Social Upheaval takes place in Rome, Italy.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Interview with author of Love & Sex With Robots
• Real people who have (un)real relationships with Real Dolls
• One slightly used RealDoll for sale
• Real Doll sex toy maker has an anime doll
• Real Doll photography
• Nerve.com "Science" experiment: sex with a RealDoll
• Video of ultra creepy animated dentist training robot
• Japorn anime cosplay and living-doll erotica, part two: Kigurumi
• Supreme Court denies Alabama women mechanically induced orgasms

Genius babies sells a toy called "Boing, Boing, Pop'n Pirates" -- "Pirates will delight toddlers who are fascinated by cause-and-effect play. Three wooden pirates (each with a patch on his eye) fit into three slots in a sturdy red ship, then pop up and down on springs when pushed by little fingers." Delight toddlers? Hot damn -- this thing delights me! Link (Thanks, Justin!)

This comes too late for Christmas -- 45 years too late. But the 1962 Sears Christmas catalog is still a treat.

Inspired by the fact that several friends of this Internet weblog recently forwarded us the same excerpts from a 1977 JC Penny catalog, Telstar Logistics reached into our vast corporate archive and emerged clutching a pristine copy of the 1962 Sears Christmas Book.

As you browse the Sears catalog, keep in mind that, according to the Inflation Calculator, $1 in 1962 was equivalent to $6.51 in 2006 dollars. Conversely, $1 in 2006 was equivalent to $0.15 in 1962.

Link

I enjoyed this video of 19-year-old Koharu playing accordion. She's in the Japanese street brass band Minority Orchestra, shown here (video of Minority Orchestra). Link

My favorite Nintendo DS title is Electroplankton, a music synthesizer that lets anyone create pleasant music.

The creator of Electroplankton, Toshio Iwai, made a standalone synthesizer for Yamaha called the Tenori-On, and Chris Pirillo reviewed it on his video program. He loves the $1200 instrument. I can't wait for the price to drop to about $250. Link

Jan Kempenaers took these spectacular images of monuments erected in communist Yugoslavia. Link

Danger Room has scanned a copy of the holiday card sent out by Blackwater Worldwide: Link to larger-rez scans. Hey, this eggnog tastes like blood.

A new law in New Jersey gives authorities the right to take away computer and internet access from convicted sex offenders, regardless of whether computers or the internet played a role in their crime. Snip from Ars Technica:

According to one of the law's backers, state Senator John Girgenti, the law makes it easier for sex offenders to stay on the straight and narrow, "reducing the risk of them being tempted to be a repeat offender."

Bill S1979 gives the state broad authority to regulate a sex offender's computer and Internet usage so long as the person remains on parole. And the law is tough: anyone who uses a computer to help commit sex crimes will be prohibited from using computers or the Internet at all. The State Parole Board may also impose restrictions at its discretion on offenders even if they did not use computers to plan their crimes.

Link (Thanks, Glyn)

David Levy, author of Love & Sex With Robots, was interviewed by Jeff Simmermon.

Simmerman: Would you personally use one of these robots?

Levy: I would certainly experiment with one, to find out what it was like — how much like the real thing.

Simmermon:Would your wife? Probably not — she is not interested in anything of a technological nature.

Simmermon:Would she mind if you used one? Surely you’ve talked about it by now …

Levy: Actually, no, because it is purely hypothetical since they do not yet exist.

Simmermon:I ask because I was talking about this with my girlfriend, who, had she found one of these in my closet in the early stages of our relationship, would have hailed a cab and never seen me again.

Levy: She says that, but why? Has she never used a vibrator? And if she has, why does she think that you shouldn’t have left her immediately you found out?

Link

At a Bethlehem church built over the manger where Jesus was alleged to have been born, two groups of "robed and bearded" Greek Orthodox priests and Armenian priests fought each other for over an hour "using fists, brooms and iron rods as weapons." Seven people were injured in the brawl.

The brawl apparently began when Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church after the Christmas Day celebrations.

Armenian priests claimed that the ladders encroached on their portion of the church, which led the two sects to exchange angry words which quickly turned to blows.

Photographers who came to document the annual cleaning ceremony instead recorded the entire event.

Link (Thanks, jjasper!)

The TSA has discovered that on January 1st, 2008 lithium batteries are going to become more dangerous than they were on December 31, 2007. Thankfully, they've taken action by forbidding them beginning in 2008.

Lithium Metal Battery, Spare or Installed (over 2 grams lithium):
In checked bag? Forbidden
Carry-on? Forbidden

The Department of Transportation's web site doesn't say why they're forbidden. They just are. Link

(Thanks, Andy!)

A silent concrete monster follows a nervous businessman through Montreal in Terminus, an eerie and darkly funny short film directed by Trevor Cawood. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

Doran says:

Two men working at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station got into a "drunken Christmas punch-up." One man, an unidentified Raytheon employee, was injured so badly he couldn't be treated at nearby McMurdo station and required an emergency medical evacuation to a New Zealand hospital. The other man was flown back to the US.

Link

This Sunday, Jeanne Robinson, co-author of the Hugo-award winning novel Stardance, will perform the first piece of zero-gravity choreography onboard a "vomit-comet" free-fall jet, and the result will be filmed for Imax:

Wherever humans go, we bring our arts—and in zero-gravity, we will create amazing new forms of art never before seen, as our imaginations are set free by weightlessness.

Stardance combines artistic and humanistic themes with the backdrop of science and space exploration—exemplifying the grandeur, intrigue and promise of space, through the grace of dance unhindered by gravity.

The Stardance Experience is slated to be produced and presented in the 70/15 “Large Format” pioneered by the IMAX corporation. The film will push the boundaries of the medium, combining live action and digital FX to create an emotional and visceral connection with the audience.

The Stardance Experience intends to reignite humanity’s fire to return to space - to reach ordinary people and communicate the majesty, beauty, mystery and transcendence that await us all, just above our heads: the bliss of the stars. Only from that perspective can we hope to create futures that exemplify the best in humanity.

Our birthright is the propensity to dream, dance, and evolve.

Jeanne's husband and co-author, Spider Robinson, is blogging all week in the runup to the flight, and has podcast a lengthy excerpt from Stardance as well. Link (Thanks, Spider!)

Today in my series of photos from my travels: a collection of painted underwear-pervert miniatures on a game-dealer's table at last year's ComicCon in San Diego. I love painting miniatures -- when I was a teenaged D&D player, it was my absolute top favorite part of the game. I ruined more shirts, tables and carpets with my hobby! There's a great gaming shop in Covent Garden, The Orc's Nest (awesome name, too!) where they always have a window-full of painted intricate miniatures, usually on sale for just a little more than the unassembled, unpainted versions (and charmingly, the finished ones are glued to tuppence coins as bases). I've never guessed, but I've always just assumed that the reason that these finished pieces -- which must have hours of labour in them -- are available for just a pound or two more than the unfinished ones is that the painter is an obsessive like I was, whose living and working space is completely jammed with painted minis, leaving quick sales as the only way to practice the hobby without drowning in figs. Link

Update Whoops! I stand corrected! These are "HeroClix" miniatures and they come pre-painted. Man -- stop playing tabletop games for twenty years and they get all pre-packaged on ya!

Unknownuser2007 has posted a great little HOWTO on Instructables -- a "senior remote" for a TV with only five buttons. I'd love one of these, but I'd also add a Play/Pause button (a few years ago I would have needed "mute" -- but with everything coming through a PVR, pause works even better when the phone rings).

My mom was born in 1931. She is from the generation of radio and WWII. Her eyesight is failing and she isn't good with anything electronic. TV remotes confuse her. This mod came to me after she called me one day, claiming her TV remote stopped working. It turns out, she inadvertently hit the button that activated the VCR functions. She didn't know or couldn't see the button to reactivate the TV functions. So I decided to "dumb" down the remote to only three functions: On/Off, Channel and Volume.

Link (via Wonderland)

Flickr user Tikaro made this needlepoint semacode QR code (a kind of two-dimensional barcode) -- it scans to the Semapedia URL for "pillow". Link (via Wonderland)

(Image: Downsized crop from P1060816.JPG, appearing in tikaro's Flickr stream, used here for commentary, under the aegis of fair use)

Logo Lounge has a good piece on logo trends from 2007:

Charlie the Tuna and the Jolly Green Giant, these are not. Advertising characters have danced the line between logos and mascot for years. Even the Cingular Jack was a bit of a hybrid with a personality that animation played out beyond the printed page. Urban vinyl is a subculture that is starting to cross over into logo design. These small vinyl characters are ubiquitous shelf clutter, enshrined in nearly every designerís desk collection.

First made popular in Hong Kong by Michael Lau in the 90's, these imaginative imps have become highly collectable and have entire stores, KidRobot and magazines, Super 7, dedicated to their notoriety. The art of Tim Biskup may start on canvas but it soon translates to designer vinyl characters. Usually they can be as mundane as fire breathers to as outlandish as slimy cyclops ghost aliens. Though not a serious influence on Fortune 500 identities, urban vinyl has its place in pop culture, and that has translated to two-dimensional applications in logo design.

Link (via Kottke)

Buoyed by the news that three of the four labels are now making music available as DRM-free MP3s, Wired's digital music columnist Eliot Van Buskirk has resigned from all the DRM-based subscription services he had subscribed to: Yahoo, Napster and Rhapsody. In a fascinating piece, he recounts the process of resigning from each one. Yahoo only took one minute, but check out the rigmarole Napster puts you through!

Napster
What a pain. There's no way to cancel online, so I called the cancellation number (800.839.4210) and waited on hold for about 20 minutes listening to messages like "Did you know that your Napster subscription lets you access over 5 million tracks? Please hold, and a customer service representative will be with you shortly."

A woman came on the line and asked me a bunch of questions (Was this my first call? Could I confirm my email? Is there a phone number on which she could call me back in case something goes wrong with the call? Can I hold again?). Granted, this is two days after Christmas, but still, I wasn't too happy at how long this was taking.

When she took me off hold again, I told her I wanted to cancel because 2007 was the year 3 of the major labels started selling music without DRM. Back on hold.

She came back -- presumably after consulting a manager or the internet to find out what DRM is -- and then responded, "I don't understand, because all of our music contains DRM." Back on hold. This time, I told her I wanted to cancel because the files were DRMed, and she finally canceled my subscription.

Total time for cancellation: 30 minutes and 32 seconds

(Emphasis mine) Link

Warner Music has announced that it will begin to sell non-DRM'ed MP3 music files on Amazon, making it the third (of four) major labels to sign up for DRM-free distribution of their music, Universal and EMI being the other two. Only Sony BMG have held out -- and that's the same label that gave us the infamous Sony Rootkit, a dangerous hacker-tool that Sony infected millions of PCs with in a failed bid to prevent copying of its music.

Warner will not sell its music in DRM-free form on iTunes, which is in keeping with the general tenor of the move to DRM-free music. Apple's dominance in online music sales has been reinforced by the fact that nearly all the music it has sold is locked to Apple's players with a DRM scheme called FairPlay. Thanks to laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's illegal for competitors of Apple to break this DRM and offer competing products that will play the music you bought from Apple. This lock-in gives Apple a Wal-Mart-like degree of control over the business-practices of the labels, since Apple customers who make a substantial investment in iTunes music face the prospect of losing their money should they switch to competing players.

The only way to maneuver around this is by offering DRM-free MP3 tracks, which can be played on iPods and their competitors. Apple CEO Steve Jobs called on the labels to deliver DRM-free music last year, even as several European nations were considering legislation, regulation or court action to force Apple to open up its DRM to competitors.

Warner's move to sell its music in the superior DRM-free form only through Apple's competitors seems like petty gamesmanship, since MP3s are MP3s, no matter where you buy them, and an Apple customer who buys an MP3 in the iTunes Store is every bit as able to shop somewhere else for music and players as is someone who buys music from Amazon. This is a move that pits Warner's long-term corporate strategy -- punishing Apple to reduce its market power -- against the needs of its artists, who benefit from having the largest possible pool of retail outlets for their music in its most superior form.

Of course, the labels -- Warner included -- already shamelessly steal from their artists in the realm of digital downloads, through a crooked accounting process. Here's how it works: artists are generally entitled to a seven percent royalty on "sales," but are contractually guaranteed a fifty percent royalty on "licensing." When the labels "sell" you a song online, they actually claim that they're only giving you a license to the music (and that's why they can attach all kinds of unreasonable conditions to the transaction -- see next paragraph for more). If you're only getting a license -- rather than making a purchase -- then 49.5 cents from every $0.99 track should go straight to the artist. Instead, they get a measly seven cents.

What kind of unreasonable conditions are attached to the "license" you get when you buy online music? Well, of course Sony made you "agree" to let them install spyware and a rootkit on your computer in order to listen to your music. But they're hardly alone -- Amazon's "license agreement" tells you you're not allowed to loan, re-sell, or make other uses of your music that would be consistent with a sale. If you buy a CD from Amazon, they not only don't try to stop you from selling it used -- they encourage you to do so, and will even broker the transaction. But if you "buy" (sorry, license) the same album from Amazon as a download -- often at a higher cost than the used CD will run you -- they make you "agree" that you won't even loan it to your kid brother, or give it away to the school library when you get tired of it.

A music distribution startup founder emailed me last week and asked what kind of terms and conditions I would consider reasonable for digital music sales. The answer was easy: "Don't violate copyright law." Anything more than that is just picking your customers' pockets by confiscating the rights that copyright law grants them -- the right to loan, sell, give away, format-shift, time-shift, etc.

But it's still good news that Warner has joined the war on DRM, even if they're screwing their artists (and the rest of us) to do so. At this rate, all four labels will go DRM-free by 2008, and by 2010, they'll finally start offering us a fair shake on their products, just as the last music fan and the last new artist defects to P2P, convinced that buying or selling music through the labels only gets you screwed, one way or another. Link (Thanks, Adam!)

Wired News contracted with P2P survey company BigChampagne to pull together a series of top-ten charts for P2P music, movies, TV and artists. Interestingly, these diverge in some important ways from the box-office charts . For example, box-office-smashing turds like Spider-Man 3 didn't even crack the top ten -- neither did Shrek 3; and Transformers, ranked third at the box office, slipped to seven on the P2P chart.

Top Movies of 2007

1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World's End
3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
4. Ratatouille
5. Superbad
6. Beowulf
7. Transformers
8. American Gangster
9. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
10. Stardust

Link

Ape Lad (nickname: Adam Koford) is selling this cute Pip hoodie for just $27.16. Link

Chris Null got some cheap Chinese toy "spy" pens for Christmas, and the text on the packages is funny. Link

A humanoid octupus gives a lap dance to a bear in this TV commercial for Orangina soda. It's funny, but I prefer Orange Crush myself. Link (Via VSL)

On her TV show, Martha Stewart showed off the handsome ceramic Nativity creche that she made while in prison.

"Even though every inmate was only allowed to do one a month, and I was only there for five months, I begged because I said I was an expert potter -- ceramicist actually -- and could I please make the entire nativity scene," she said.

Link (Thanks, Darren!)

Maid Taxi in Japan is a taxi service for disabled people. But Japundit reports that able-bodied otaku used the service so much that the intended customers were shut out.

[The weekly magazine Nikkan Gendai] notes that maid-obsessed otaku came from all over the country to ride in the taxis, swathing themselves in bandages or pretending to have broken bones to circumvent the Road Traffic Law’s ban on the able-bodied using vehicles designed for the disabled.

Take a rideKEC Hire Hokuriku’s President Keiji Endo, the father of a disabled child, was disappointed at the outcome.

Link

A 15-year-old boy was arrested in Orange County for aiming a laser pointer at at a jetliner, a commuter bus and police helicopter.

Police Sgt. Evan Sailor says officers aboard the helicopter traced the laser beam to a Newport Beach home where the 15-year-old Las Vegas boy was staying with relatives. The boy was given the laser as a Christmas present.

It was the third laser-related arrest in Orange County this week. Two men were arrested earlier for aiming laser devices at an Orange County sheriff's helicopter.

The article doesn't say, but I'm guessing it was one of those green laser pointers that outdoor astronomers use to point out stuff to their fellow scholars.

Here's an article about other recent laser pointer incidents. One couple in California faces up to 20 years in prison for shining a green laser beam into the cockpit of a Kern County Sheriff’s Department helicopter. Link

Just as cars run better when washed, games play better when the device has an opalescent sparkle paint job.

Shawn says: "I just finished a paint job on an Original DS as a gift for my girlfriend. It was part of a multi staged attack plan to get her into gaming. She never gamed before she met me and thought all games were first person shooters... After playing Nintendogs, New York Times Crossword Puzzle, Cooking Mama, and My Word Coach on a shinny Purple DS she is now Wii bowling with the best of them and playing Zelda on occasion." Link

Rankin, photographer and founder of Dazed and Confused magazine, created an incredible photographic series of more than a dozen decontextualized irises. Scrolling horizontally back and forth across these images is quite trance-inducing. The project is called Eyescapes. Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Here is a fun demonstration video of Japanese machine artist Nobumichi Tosa's bizarre electromechanical musical instruments. From a description of Tosa's work on Sweatfrog.com:

Maywa Denki is an art unit produced by Nobumichi Tosa. It was named after the company that his father used to run bygone days. Its unique style is indicated by a term he uses: for example, each piece of Maywa Denki's work is called "a product" and a live performance or exhibition is held as "a product demonstration." The products produced so far include "NAKI Series," fish-motif nonsense machines, "Tsukuba Series," original musical instruments, and "Edelweiss," flower-motif objet d'art. Although Maywa Denki is known and appreciated as an artist, its promotion strategies are full of variety: exhibition, live stages, performances, producing music, videos, writing, merchandising toys, stationery, and electric devices.

Link to Maywa Denki video Link to Sweatyfrog.com (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

COOP sent me this link to a very strange animation, circa 1960s, titled "Colormation Screen Test." The technique, similar in look to rotoscoping, appears to involve a combination of live actors, high-contrast cinematography, and hand-drawn backgrounds and foregrounds. As COOP writes, "The end result is unsettling but not without charm."
Link

Snip from a post by Momekh on the Lahore metblog:

On the evening of 27th December 2007, Ms Benazir Bhutto died due to injuries sustained in a suicide bomb attack on her life. I feel like repeating this to actually believe it. I feel that almost everything within the Pakistani political makeup will change. There is already incident reports of people ransacking offices of political officials, of protestors burning vehicles and the subsequent sense of fear that things will turn for the worse. I, unfortunately, also feel that the same unjust rule, the same all-consuming lust for power, the same indifference that seems to be root cause of everything evil and the same 'wheeling and dealing' associated with the politicians of today will continue unabated.

This death, this tragic, tragic incident will provide more intrigue and more 'play' to what is already happening in the echelons of power in this country. When Liaquat Ali Khan was murdered, General Ayub writes in his autobiography, most of the politicians of the time were immediately looking for ways to fully exploit the vacuum obviously created by a deceased Prime Minister. I do not see why this tragedy will be any different. And that in itself, is a bigger tragedy.

A related post there addresses concerns over chaos; the Islamabad and Karachi metblogs are also covering the news.

It's time again for the EFF Pioneer Award nominations -- for the awards given "to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology." I was honoured to receive one of these last year, and EFF is once again seeking your nominations for this year's recipients.

The awards will be given out in March, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego.

There are no specific categories for the EFF Pioneer Awards, but the following guidelines apply:

1. The nominees must have contributed substantially to the health, growth, accessibility, or freedom of computer-based communications.

2. To be valid, all nominations must contain your reason, however brief, for nominating the individual or organization and a means of contacting the nominee. In addition, while anonymous nominations will be accepted, ideally we'd like to contact the nominating parties in case we need further information.

3. The contribution may be technical, social, economic, or cultural.

4. Nominations may be of individuals, systems, or organizations in the private or public sectors.

5. Nominations are open to all (other than current members of EFF's staff and operating board or this year's award judges), and you may nominate more than one recipient. You may also nominate yourself or your organization.

6. Persons or representatives of organizations receiving an EFF Pioneer Award will be invited to attend the ceremony at EFF's expense.

Link

Carl sez, "Public.Resource.Org and the Internet Archive have jointly announced an effort to scan a large number of historical U.S. government documents, including congressional hearings, the Congressional Record, and the Federal Register, known as "govdocs" in the library trade. The venerable Boston Public Library signed up as the first contributing library.

"Govdocs is part of a 2-prong effort to free up the $4b/year 'market' for legal information, the other prong being making U.S. case law available. Larry Lessig and Creative Commons recently joined with Public.Resource.Org to make U.S. case law available as a downloadable tarball. Link to announcement, Link to NY Times story

Negativland's new DVD, Our Favorite Things, goes a long way to proving the band's maxim, "Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value." There's hours and and hours of mind-meltingly weird, funny and entirely illegal art here, video renditions of Disney's Little Mermaid spouting obscenities recorded from a phone conversation with an abusive entertainment exec, a blasphemous remix of The Passion of the Christ (The Mashin' of the Christ) and plenty of fun bonus material documenting the band's long history of media pranks and hoaxes. It's strong stuff -- I couldn't watch it all in one sitting -- and there's plenty of noise (visual and auditory) mixed in with the signal, but this is an altogether brilliant bit of plastic for your living room or laptop. Link

Today in my series of photos from my travels: the beautiful scaffolding array that was holding up the roof at Heathrow Terminal One last month -- bamboo-thick pipes in safety yellow stretching off into infinity. Link

Last night I got an email from a company called "ApplyYourself" informing me that one of my former students was applying to grad school, and could I go to their site and fill in a letter of reference for her? ApplyYourself appears to be a web-based reference-letter-management system that contracts with a number of universities, which seems like a sensible enough idea -- I've been on all three sides of the reference-letter headache (writing them, evaluating them, and soliciting them) and that's definitely a part of the process that could stand to have some automation.

And ApplyYourself did a perfectly fine job of managing this process, except for one gigantic turd in the punchbowl: in order to leave a letter of recommendation for my former student, I had to enter into an end user license agreement in which I waived a bunch of my rights:

Limitation of Liability. In no event will ApplyYourself or other third parties mentioned at this site be liable for any damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, those resulting from lost profits, lost data or business interruption) arising out of the use, inability to use, or the results of use of this site, any web sites linked to this site, or the materials or information contained at any or all such sites. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation and exclusion may not apply to you.

This is the standard ridiculous EULA junk (we can be as negligent as we want and you can't ever sue us, no matter what), so after I sent in the letter for my student, I immediately fired off an email to the address listed, explaining that I didn't agree to this non-negotiated "agreement" and closing with my standard anti-EULA:

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Since then, I've been having an hilarious, robotic exchange with some nameless person(s) at the other end of the email bank, where they keep sending me this:

Thanks for your message. I apologize for the inconvenience you experienced. We are not able to release you from the term and conditions via this email.

The purpose of the Terms is to protect you, the institution and ApplyYourself (as their partner) in the event a user inappropriately uses the Recommendation form. If you are using the form as intended, none of the offending items are relevant. Many websites that collect important information have these types of statements primarily as a protection of their users, such as yourself. Our intent is not to make you uncomfortable and we tried to reflect that in the language that is being used.

And I keep answering back, "No, you don't understand -- you've already released me, just by reading my email! And that's also for your protection as well as mine, OK?"

I know it's tilting at windmills, but this is insanity. It's a matter of principle. You shouldn't have to agree to three screens' worth of legal junk in order to send a letter of reference to a university. Link

I'm intrigued by this Netgear ReadyNAS box -- it's a network-attached storage box with four SATA slots that comes empty or with up to 4 terabytes of storage and is approximately the size of the little practice amp I had when I was learning to play bass guitar.

One of my new year's projects is get a little MythTV Linux-based video box running under the TV. The plan is to get around 3TB of storage and rip all the DVDs and music in the house to it, toss in MAME for gaming, and use it as backup for all the family data, photos, etc. Then we'll get all the DVDs out of the tiny living room (they're already overflowing the shelves and crowding out our books) and into a storage box. What's more, we'll be able to find any video by doing a text search, instead of hoping that we can find it on the shelves (we alphabetized the videos last week and found three Blade Runners, each bought because the others had gone AWOL). Add DynDNS and a streaming server program and we'll be able to access our movies from anywhere in the flat or the world. Plus we'll run Miro on it and get all our video podcasts directly on the TV.

One thing I'd worried about was offsite backup, but I have an office a mile away that I'm also building a desktop Linux system for. My thinking now is that if I bought two 3TB boxes and synched them up initially, I could bring one to the office and use it as storage for my desktop system, and keep the two in synch with rsync over the Internet (our home DSL connection should be able to handle syncing up a new DVD or recorded TV show every day or two).

I even envision having an automated process that downsamples all our video into a format that plays on one of the cheap pocket video-players I bought in China (I even have one that's a watch!) so any time I'm leaving the house, I can just grab a couple episodes of something I'm following or a movie I've bought recently and toss it onto the device (and with network access, I'll be able to grab those shows from the road as well).

The thing I love about the idea of using NAS for this is that the big, noisy part of the system can live in a cupboard somewhere instead of right there under the TV. What's more, I can just pick it up and carry it to the office if the backup system blows up and needs to be resynched (or vice-versa). And with a separate storage box, I don't have to worry about finding a media center enclosure with a stupid number of drive bays. With 3TB of headroom, I don't have to worry about not having enough space to backup any of the working systems at home, either.

Anyone tried anything like this yet? Got sage advice? Leave it in the comments. Link (via Dvice)