The Australian Attorney-General's department is inviting submissions from the public on copying of movies and images in different formats for private use.
These were sections of the Copyright Amendment Act introduced in December 2006 that made it legal for Aussies to do things they'd been doing for decades, such as recording a tv broadcast to tape or disc, but illegal to watch such recordings more than once!
The Minister is required by the Act to review these exceptions after two years and is now inviting comment.
This is a good opportunity to argue for the exceptions to be expanded (not contracted!) to come into line with general consumer behaviour.
Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years -- this wrecked, rusting cargo ship off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, as seen from the deck of the Spirit of Freedom. Shot this on the same trip where I came up with the idea for my post-Singularity coral-reef story, I, Row-Boat. The ship wrecked in the sixties and has been rusting out ever since. Down below, in the shallows around the reef, there's a propeller and shaft so long that you can't see one end from the other end. We were chased by a school of 1.5m parrotfish in formation around us -- they executed a series of coordinated right-angle turns, then turned their backsides to us and emitted a cloud of sand, reducing visibility to zero. When the water cleared, they were gone. The wreck really does look like the Parthenon in this shot, I think -- apparently it's all but gone now, washed away in last year's storms.
Link
My buddy Roger Wood, the mad assemblage clock-sculptor, continues to wow me with his email newsletter featuring his latest creations. This pair of handsome fellas are the most recent products of his workbench.
Link
The European Green Party -- which controls about ten percent of the continentwide vote -- has put together a PSA in support of file-sharing and new laws that legalize the activity. Called "I Wouldn't Steal," it's an answer to the terrible "You wouldn't steal a car" nagware ads that run at the beginning of your store-bought DVDs (Hey, MPA, here's a hint: if I went to the store and bought the DVD, you don't really need to lecture me on the evils of downloading. I bought the DVD).
Whenever you rent a movie, the multinational media industry forces you to watch their propaganda. They claim that [downloading movies is the same as snatching bags, stealing cars or shoplifting]. That’s simply not true – making a copy is fundamentally different from stealing.
The media industry has failed to offer viable legal alternatives and they will fail to convince consumers that sharing equals stealing. Unfortunately, they have succeeded in another area – lobbying to adapt laws to criminalize sharing, turning consumers into criminals. They argue that their laws are necessary to [support artists], but in reality all they’re protecting is their own profits.
Cyberlawyer Denise Howell sez, "As far as I could tell, the same parents driving themselves to distraction with fear over their evening chardonnays about MySpace and FaceBook are willingly helping their kids fork over a slew of personal data when they visit Build-A-Bear. It's hard to fault them too much though, as the computers there masquerade as anything but a corporate info-racket."
You see, each Build-A-Bear critter is issued a "birth certificate," which is generated after the kids -- and hopefully their parents, though that didn't seem to be making a bit of difference on the common sense front -- visit a bank of computers. These are big orangey-purple affairs, sort of Dr. Seussian in presentation. The keyboard buttons include stars and other colored shapes to make data input all the easier and more intuitive for youngsters. In fact, the computer-plus-keyboard experience is very close (no doubt intentionally so) to something children and their parents might have experienced in a kids' museum, library, or school. Before their new friend can get its birth certificate, the kids are prompted to enter a host of very personal personal information: birth date, home address, gender, phone, and email among them. Along the way is the option to "skip" some of this input, but unlike what we're used to in the world of online retail forms, there's no effort to communicate what data is "required" for the transaction to proceed, and what's "optional." The overall effect is to sideline the privacy-savviness that might otherwise accompany the parent and/or child. I sat there and watched parent after parent prompt their kids to flex their memory muscles and practice their computer skills: "Ok Timmy, now, what's our address? What's your birthday? Do you remember our phone number? Good typing!!"
Here's a gallery of seventy horror and gore-effect Photoshop HOWTOs for bubbly burns, twisted scars, scary demons, zombies, vampires, and other spooks and scares. Just the thing for the run-up to Valentine's Day.
Link
(Thanks, Enrique)
I spent all fall tracking Josh, detailing his past exploits and watching as he worked on engineering his comeback. (Which doesn't look like it's going so great at the moment.) The real bonus, however, is that Ondi Timoner (who directed DiG!) has allowed us to post a 12 minute concept trailer for We Live in Public, the unfinished documentary about Harris that she's been working on since 2000. It has lots of great footage from Pseudo and of the Silicon Alley scene.
Photographer Dave Bullock attended The Homeland Security Stakeholders Conference for Wired News, and shot photos of the security tech products on display. "From throwable video cameras to shotgun-wielding robots, these are the gadgets that help you sleep at night, unless you have something to hide..." Link to photo gallery.
Snip from a NYT article about Ramak Fazel, an Iranian-American artist whose art-quest to visit the capitols of every US state turned into a very different experience:
His mission was to photograph each of the nation’s 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it up, continuing until he had gone full circle back to Indiana.
But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to Honolulu, Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He later discovered that she had reported him as suspicious – perhaps to the pilot or the Transportation Security Administration – and taken a picture of him as he slept.
Maybe it was because he was vaguely foreign looking, he reasoned, and his photographic endeavor seemed menacing in a post-9/11 landscape. He also had a three-day growth of beard, he recalled. And, although Mr. Fazel grew up mostly in the United States and is an American citizen, there was his Iranian name.
In his view that woman’s report began a chain reaction, turning him into a person of interest for officials from local law enforcement agencies on up to the F.B.I. On a stop in Annapolis, Md., for example, he was interrogated about his activities and read his Miranda rights. Today, he said, his name lingers on what he thinks of simply as the “the list.” (He doesn’t know where it originated or who controls it.) He believes it has prevented him from receiving a visa to India and caused him be questioned at the border of Poland, both of which he had visited in the past. He said he has been interrogated the last four times he has entered the United States.
Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson visits the 8-bit music event Blipfest, then wreaks havoc at a Candy Expo. Link to video, and Discuss how awesome Joel Johnson is at tv.boingboing.net.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Old-school bOING bOING pal Jim Leftwich writes, "Today on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, nothing can really describe Dr. King's life and work better than his own words. Here's a SeeqPod playlist of a number of his speeches and sermons, gathered from across the net." Thanks for this amazing link of links, Jim. Link
RetroPlanet sells gleaming, restored amusement park Tunnel of Love carts for $4k. Yes, more than I want to spend. Yes, I would totally get one if I had a heptillion dollars. And yes, I'd love it to tiny pieces.
Link
(via Cribcandy)
Yochai Benkler writes in with word of a collaboration between Wikipedia and Kaltura to make open, peer-production video: "Kaltura in general is an interesting effort to create an open platform for
peer production of video and rich media. Very different, and from the
perspective of collaboration more interesting, than the aggregated
distribution platform of materials created by solo creators or off-site
collaborations, which YouTube represents, or the emphasis of some other of
the newer video sites on how to achieve monetization. Offers a collaboration
platform for video editing instead, with creative commons licensing (BY-SA)
of contributed elements and outputs built in. Software itself is already, or
on its way to being, free (still depends on Flash, but working to get GNASH
to the point where it'll be good enough to replace it)."
Link to Wikimedia announcement,
Link to Kaltura
(Thanks, Yochai!)
Steve Gould's magnificent young adult novel Jumper has been adapted for a big-budg movie (with Samuel Jackson, no less!) and there's a comic book tie-in from Oni, who've put the first 23 pages online as for free preview.
Link
(via IO9)
Tom Price's "Meltdown Chair" is made by heaping up a big cuddly pile of nylon rope, then melting an Eames-ish chair-shape into it. Don't miss the video of the hot former-on-nylon action.
This chair is created by heating and pressing a seat-shaped former into a ball of polypropylene rope. The rope begins to liquify as it comes into contact with the heated former and, as it cools, it sets in the shape of a seat creating a contrast in form and texture to the remaining rope. No additional material has been added to make the seat - it is all made from melted rope.
The Guardian reports that food prices are rising, which is coming as a surprise to "UK shoppers aged under 50 [who] have so far never experienced food-price inflation.
The article cites four reasons for the price increase:
1. Oil prices: "$100 a barrel means food that is four-times as expensive to plant, irrigate, harvest and transport as it was six years ago. Some commodities brokers are now betting on oil going to $200 a barrel within a decade."
2. Climate: "drought, hurricanes and floods around the world last year made for terrible harvests - from Australia to the Caribbean and the United Kingdom."
3. Market speculation and use of crops for fuel: "Since George Bush announced a rush to corn-based ethanol it's done well for American corn farmers - 20 per cent of whose harvest, subsidised by the government, went into fuel tanks rather than flour mills this year."
4. Economic boom in China and India: "Around the world, and through history, people have eaten more meat as they have become richer. This is called the nutrition transition and it's now happening, very quickly, in the two most populous nations on the planet."
Jacques Diouf, head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, spoke recently of a 'very serious crisis' brought about by the rise in food prices and the rise in the oil price. Various global economic bodies are forecasting rises of between 10 per cent and 50 per cent over the next decade.
Adrian says:
According to the Swedish daily newspaper Expressen.se, police suspect that a team of thieves operating in Sweden are using little people hidden in hockey bags and placed in the cargo holds of buses to loot passengers luggage while in transit.
Passengers noticed the oversized hockey bags being quickly carried off to the trunk of a waiting car when they reaced their destination. Their valuables, however, were nowhere to be found in their luggage. Police launched the theory that it would be possible for a small person to hide in the luggage compartment (ala Shanghai "trunk man") and have now issued a public warning.
Link (Swedish)
Robot High School is a music video directed by Roel Wouters with music by My Robot Friend.
Despite how it may appear, the video was shot in a single take with no significant computer-generated effects added, just some minor post-production cleanup.
Robot High School allegorically questions what happens when our perspective and views of reality are manipulated by those in authority without any moral concern for the outcome.
Robot High School is the title track on My Robot Friend's newest album due in 2008. You can download free copies of the video and song and find out the latest news about the album at:
I don't know if Mike Brickley's engine is more efficient than others, but the animated rendering is pleasant.
The Brickley engine configuration is projected to improve fuel mileage 15-20%. CO2 emissions are cut as well by 15-20%. This accomplishment is made through reducing engine friction: turning energy normally lost in heat into useful work. With petroleum prices increasing and global warming on the rise, there is an urgent need for us to provide a more efficient, less polluting internal combustion engine.
The Configuration
By changing how the pistons connect to each other and how they connect to the crankshaft, a great deal of friction can be eliminated. The configuration employs a combination of pinned linkages to determine the paths of the pistons to within a few thousandths of an inch of linearity, and thus basically eliminates the need for piston skirts. It connects the pistons efficiently to each other and to the crankshaft at a fraction of the losses incurred in a typical configuration. The top end of the engine remains basically the same and uses the technology available in current engines.
Gerry Canavan has compiled a nice little gallery of images of the Statue of Liberty's fate in science fiction stories, movies, and comic books.
...I was struck by the recurrence of a ruined Statue of Liberty as perhaps the quintessential icon of disaster since the 1940s. So struck, in fact, that I began to obsessively collect these images from the 'net wherever I could find them. Submitted for your approval, the fruits of my labor.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
My son loves the excellent children's show Yo Gabba Gabba! (as does his dad). We recently saw an episode featuring this terrific ska cartoon about picking up after yourself. It made us laugh and laugh. I later found out that the catchy tune is performed by ska musicians GOGO13 and Hepcat's Alex Desert. Link
Previously on BB:
• KidRobot's Yo Gabba Gabba! hoodies Link
• New kid's show: Yo Gabba Gabba! Link
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Cockroaches recently conceived in space are superior to those born on Earth, reports the Russian Space Agency. The roaches were conceived during a September flight of the Russian Foton-M biological research satellite. From the Russian Information Agency Novosti:
The research team has been monitoring the cockroaches since they were born in October. The scientists established that their limbs and bodies grew faster.
"What is more, we have found out that the creatures... run faster than ordinary cockroaches, and are much more energetic and resilient," Dmitry Atyakshin said.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Beet juice is useful as a de-icer for streets. Road crews in Cincinnati, Ohio will dump a slurry of 10 percent beet juice, salt, and calcium chloride on streets during the coming snowstorms. According to an Associated Press article from last month, beet juice is now becoming a popular deicer in the Midwest because of the liquid's low freezing temperature and harmlessness to roads and cars. I'm glad I don't live in Cincinnati anymore. I can't stand beets. Link(Thanks, Carlo Longino!)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
This illustration by Anton van Dalen is part of an exhibition spanning forty years of the artist's career. The show, titled The Drawing Room and on display at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York City, closed in October, but fortunately the incredible pieces are still viewable online. Seen here, Untitled (2006), Ink and graphite on paper, 8 1/2" x 11". Link(via BibliOdyssey)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
The Times ran an excerpt of surrealist science fiction author JG Ballard's forthcoming autobiography, Miracles Of Life. Ballard, my favorite living novelist, wrote such mindbending books as Crash, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights. His boyhood in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai became the book, and movie, Empire of the Sun. Accompanying the excerpt from the new autobiography is a brief profile of Ballard that publicly reveals for the first time that he has advanced prostate cancer. I'm very saddened by this news and wish him comfort. From the interview:
Ballard is courteous and genial in a slightly donnish way. At 77, he takes his time assembling his thoughts, but they remain unflinching and provocative, expressed with the verbal tics of his colonial background. But time, the malleable stuff of his science fiction, is running out. After being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, he sat down at his electric typewriter – “The computer age came too late for me” – and rapidly wrote his autobiography.
It is a remarkable story, told modestly and with great eloquence. If Ballard’s Shanghai years seemed like a fantasy to him, his subsequent life reads like even stranger fiction. His agenda to pin down reality led him to cut up corpses as a medical student and to provoke uproar by speculating on the links between sex and smashed cars in his novel Crash.
Link to interview with Ballard, Link to Miracles Of Life excerpt, Link to buy JG Ballard books, Link to pre-order Miracles Of Life (via Ballardian, thanks Mark Dery!)
Wubi looks promising: it's an installer package that lets Windows users install Ubuntu Linux like any other Windows app, without worrying about disk partitions and whatnot. I've used Ubuntu exclusively for more than a year now (and yes, I know, I owe you all a "What Ubuntu is like" post and I'll get to it RSN), and Wubi sounds like a low-threshold way to get people to try out life on the free and open side.
Wubi is Safe
It does not require you to modify the partitions of your PC, or to use a different bootloader.
Wubi is Simple
Just run the installer, no need to burn a CD.
Wubi is Discrete
Wubi keeps most of the files in one folder, and If you do not like, you can simply uninstall it.
Wubi is Free
Wubi (like Ubuntu) is free as in beer and as in freedom. You will get this part later on, the important thing now is that it cost absolutely nothing, it is our gift to you...
In today's edition of Boing Boing tv, we continue our ongoing series of conversations with automotive engineering guru and multiple land speed record-holder Gale Banks, known to many as the godfather of speed. Today -- Banks shares insight on diesel and the DIY revolution.
Envy the Thai. While we're stuck with only four iPods in the West (Nano, Classic, Touch, and Shuffle) in the black markets of Bangkok they've got dozens of 'iPods' in every shape, size, and color. I took some photos in mid-December while I was traveling there.
Boing Boing Gadgets's Joel Johnson has just posted unedited footage of his appearance on AT&T's The Hugh Thompson Show, where he asked Thompson and his audience how they felt about AT&T's plan to spy on all its customers to find copyright infringers.
Joel Johnson, you are my hero:
Yesterday, I was invited to talk about gadgets onThe Hugh Thompson Show, a television-style talk show sponsored exclusively by AT&T for distribution on the online AT&T Tech Channel. I eventually did talk about gadgets, but in light of AT&T's shocking and baffling announcement of their plans to filter the internet, I thought that a much more interesting and important topic.
So that's what I talked about.
As you can see from the video, the crew ended up scrubbing the interview about half-way through. Figuring that might happen, I asked my steely-nerved friend Richard Blakeley to tape the first take. I wanted to make sure that we had a record of the event, primarily to ensure that AT&T would have no reason to try to bury the interview entirely–the same reason I am running this clip now, while discussion about what to do with my segment in post-production is surely underway.
The March, 1936 ish of Science and Mechanics featured this dubious DIY project to keep street urchins from riding on your horseless carriage's bumpers: electrocute 'em! Didn't I see this in a Little Rascals short?
IF your auto is pestered by hitchers-on, here is a good cure. Fit a Ford coil with a piece of chain which will drag along the ground (but must not touch the car), and ground the other end of the coil to the car. Complete circuit as shown, and close switch for results–Rocco Conte.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien writes,
On Tuesday, the
CULT committee (the part of the European Parliament responsible for culture
and education) is voting on what needs to be done to support the "Cultural
Industries" in Europe.
The report, headed by Member of European Parliament Guy Bono, started off well
- but the music industry have
stuck in several hand-grenade amendments that could mess up European
culture and the Internet for decades: They're pushing for ISPs spying on
traffic, "dangerous" sites being blocked online AND copyright extension, all in
one document!
Here's the back-story. The International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI) has been lobbying Euro-parliamentarians to introduce ISP
filtering and blocking across Europe, and pushed to get language supporting
these ideas into this report. EFF
briefed the committee members on why this would be a terrible idea for privacy,
Europe ue process, free expression - and wouldn't work to stop infringement.
So now IFPI has changed tactics. A new amendment, number
82, has popped up, proposing EU-wide law that would extend EU copyright
terms "to protect artists who risk seeing their work fall within the public
domain in their lifetime, and to consider the competitive disadvantage posed by
less generous protection terms in Europe than in the United States".
(The UK's Gowers
report already put pay to both of these canards: artists hardly benefit
from extensions 95 years after they recorded the song. And there's no
"competitive advantage" when extending EU copyright terms means you're paying
foreign rightsholders more by charging your own citizens extra.)
Europeans who would like their Internet free from constant monitoring for
suspected infringement, and their cultural works not trapped in amber for
nearly a century, write to your CULT committee members now. Phone numbers and
email addresses are available
on the Europarl site. Tell them to keep ISP filtering, site-blocking, AND
copyright extension out of the Guy Bono Report, and out of Europe!
Update: My MEP, Tom Wise, wrote in to say this: "I am proud to have been the proposer of an amendment in July 2005
which
scrapped the proposal for an EU software patent. What worried me then,
and still does, was the response from an EU Commission official at the
time. I quote, "Colleagues, we are disappointed, WE will just have to
bring this back before a more acquiescent Parliament"
I guess that this is part of that process.
"Please believe me, YES, I will vote against this and collaborate with whomsoever wants to join me to defeat it."
Here's a freaky Parasite Rex moment for you: an Amazonian nematode makes infected ants swell up to resemble bright red berries, which entices birds to eat them and then spread the nematodes around the jungle:
This bizarre lifecycle of a parasitic nematode, or roundworm, plays out in the high canopy of tropical forests ranging from Central America to the lowland Amazon, according to Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It's just crazy that something as dumb as a nematode can manipulate its host's exterior morphology and behavior in ways sufficient to convince a clever bird to facilitate transmission of the nematode," Dudley said.
"It's phenomenal that these nematodes actually turn the ants bright red, and that they look so much like the fruits in the forest canopy," said co-author Stephen P. Yanoviak, an insect ecologist and assistant professor of biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who noted that numerous tropical plants produce small red, orange and pink berries. "When you see them in the sunlight, it's remarkable."
Old-school bOING bOING pal 
Yochai Benkler writes in with word of a collaboration between Wikipedia and Kaltura to make open, peer-production video: "Kaltura in general is an interesting effort to create an open platform for
peer production of video and rich media. Very different, and from the
perspective of collaboration more interesting, than the aggregated
distribution platform of materials created by solo creators or off-site
collaborations, which YouTube represents, or the emphasis of some other of
the newer video sites on how to achieve monetization. Offers a collaboration
platform for video editing instead, with creative commons licensing (BY-SA)
of contributed elements and outputs built in. Software itself is already, or
on its way to being, free (still depends on Flash, but working to get GNASH
to the point where it'll be good enough to replace it)."
This Darth Vader Hello Kitty tattoo is a brilliant real-life take on the unfortunately 
Steve Gould's magnificent young adult novel 
The Brickley engine configuration is projected to improve fuel mileage 15-20%. CO2 emissions are cut as well by 15-20%. This accomplishment is made through reducing engine friction: turning energy normally lost in heat into useful work. With petroleum prices increasing and global warming on the rise, there is an urgent need for us to provide a more efficient, less polluting internal combustion engine.
For people who like to smoke 40 cigarettes with their morning cup of coffee, Japan's AM/PM minimarkets are offering this convenient package.
Ballard is courteous and genial in a slightly donnish way. At 77, he takes his time assembling his thoughts, but they remain unflinching and provocative, expressed with the verbal tics of his colonial background. But time, the malleable stuff of his science fiction, is running out. After being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, he sat down at his electric typewriter – “The computer age came too late for me” – and rapidly wrote his autobiography.
This Evil Devil Clock keeps time by the pendulum action of its swinging pendulum beard.
This bizarre lifecycle of a parasitic nematode, or roundworm, plays out in the high canopy of tropical forests ranging from Central America to the lowland Amazon, according to Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
