By Cory Doctorow at 10:00 am Wednesday, Feb 22
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VoiceBunny is an online spot-market for professional voiceovers for your videos, podcasts, voicemail systems, etc. I imagine that involving the "In a world where..." movie trailer voice in your threatening Anonymous video would sure leaven things and give them an air of professionalism and polish. They also offer work to voice actors.
Fast and professional voices for any type of project.
* You determine the price or royalties
* Use our site or our API
* 100k+ talents and 50+ languages
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VoiceBunny: Fast and professional voiceovers
Jeff sez, "Flying in from Miami to Seattle this morning on Alaska Airlines Flight #17, I was somewhat amused (and a bit horrified) when the flight attendant
said that the cabin doors would not be opened and that passengers would not be allowed off to catch connecting flights if the last video player (digiplayer, as she called it) was not returned. Partly, I'm amused because of the ridiculousness of the threat vs. the magnitude of the crime but also I have to wonder if this is against FAA regulations. I also have a brilliant tip for Alaska - when you rent a digiplayer, note down the seat number.
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 8:22 am Wednesday, Feb 22
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Here's a great, simple DIY project from A Beautiful Mess for using glued-on tapestry fabric to create a kind of floral saddle-shoe effect. They note that there's another version in the offing with stripey fabric, which sounds pretty rad.
1. Glue fabric to the part of you boots you'd like to cover. Brush the glue (or Mod Podge) on and let the fabric dry. One great thing about using a floral pattern is that you don't have to be so exact about matching the pattern. Ours was pretty messy! 2-3. Use an exacto knife to cut around the edge of the boot. Take your time to cut clean lines. 4. Use Mod Podge to secure the edges of the fabric. This will keep them from fraying and make them boots more durable. ♥
Floral Boots DIY
(via Craft)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:14 am Wednesday, Feb 22
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AdaFruit has released a set of plans for building your own Internet of Things Printer. It's a weekend project that ends up with a homebrew analog of BERG's Little Printer. They also have a kit for sale.
Build an "Internet of Things" connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4" wide receipt paper. The example sketch we've written will connect to Twitter's search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you've gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:08 am Wednesday, Feb 22
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Toronto's librarians are considering going on strike, as Mayor Rob Ford continues to make good on his election promise of "outsourcing everything that isn't nailed down." They're looking for your support, in the form of an endorsement for their "Love a Librarian" petition.
The City is pursuing a bargaining agenda to downgrade and reduce library staff and service. Their strategy is to slash service to diminish satisfaction in our public library. They think the public backlash will be smaller when the Toronto Public Library, in whole or in part, is placed on the market for sale.
Standing in the wings is the huge American library management firm Library Systems and Services, or LSSI.
Already, LSSI engaged the lobbying services of Paul Christie, a former city politician with close ties to Mayor Ford and at least one of his hand-picked members of the Library Board, to influence debate about the budget for our public library.
Christie quietly wined and dined officials extolling the virtues of private ownership of our public library during the budget debate.
This is the same Paul Christie who oversaw the decimation of public school funding under Conservative Premier Ernie Eves.
Even though LSSI has concluded its arrangement with Christie for the time being, they are ready to pounce if we give them the opportunity. This would be disastrous for Toronto residents. Every experience involving LSSI in the US and the UK where the company operates has resulted in higher costs, fewer books and less access for library users.
That is why we must strongly oppose the Mayor’s privatization agenda and keep our library public. Working together, I know we can prevail.
Please sign the Love a Librarian petition right now, then share it with your networks.
Love a Librarian Petition
By Cory Doctorow at 4:42 am Wednesday, Feb 22
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In this rousing video, Canadian comedian and commentator Rick Mercer adds to his earlier most excellent rant on Canada's bill C-30, a pending domestic spying bill that abolishes the need for a warrant when police (and appointed special investigators) want to spy on your Internet use.
RMR: Rick's Rant - Online Privacy
(via Michael Geist)
Amelia_G sez, "The German Pirate Party is
working out its platform online, transparently. One key concept is 'das Liquid Democracy,' intended to be a flowing interface between direct and indirect democracy. You can delegate your vote to someone who will represent you, but you can withdraw your vote from that person at any time without waiting for new elections."
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 10:29 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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On Wired, Robert McMillan has an inspiring profile of GitHub, the remarkably successful, self-funded startup that provides a streamlined, easy-to-use version of Git, the version control system beloved by millions. GitHub is a great example of a company that does something simple and well, which scales, doesn't cost much, and improves lots of peoples' lives.
“We don’t keep track of vacation days; we don’t keep track of hours. It doesn’t matter to us,” says CIO Scott Chacon. “I’ve been here at midnight and there are five people here. And I’ve been here in the middle of the day on a Thursday and there’s nobody here.”
And yet it’s the most productive software development team he’s ever worked on, Chacon says.
Preston-Werner’s bet has paid off. GitHub is now profitable. Users can sign up for free and start contributing, but they pay money if they want to privately host code there — starting at $7 per month. GitHub also sells an enterprise product that lets companies run your own version of GitHub behind the corporate firewall. That starts at $5,000 per year, but can cost hundreds of thousands annually for companies with hundreds of coders.
Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:01 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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From the August 1951 ish of Mechanix Illustrated, a modest HOWTO describing a "Snooperscope" that requires a 4,000 to 6,000-volt power-supply to fire infrared light at and through the materials around you.
Construction of the snooperscope: The image converter tube is mounted in a plastic drinking cup 3-1/2 in. high by 2-1/2 in. in diameter. The optical system required depends upon your intended use. We used a small tripod type magnifier lens of 10 power (1 in. focal length) for the front lens and objects from three inches to one and a half feet can be focused. There is no reason why a greater range cannot be had with this lens by moving it closer or farther away from the tube.
After selecting the lens system mount it in a hole cut into the bottom of the cup. A jeweler’s saw or coping saw is ideal for cutting the hole. Paint the inside of the cup with black paint. Black airplane dope works fine. No light other than that from the lens must be permitted to hit the tube. Place an infrared filter between tube and lens to reduce effects of stray white light.
The image converter tube is inserted with the graphite side toward the front lens and the metal ring toward the mouth of the cup. A thin flexible lead from the metal ring connects to the positive side of the power supply. Some tubes were manufactured without this lead, in which case a piece of spring metal pressed against the metal ring will work just as well. The front end of the tube has a graphite ring around it. This is the end where the infrared image is to be focused. The graphite coating is the cathode or negative lead. Connect this lead to the B minus side of the power supply. A piece of spring brass or even the flat sheet metal carefully removed from a tin can should be formed with the fingers so it fits snugly around the cathode terminal.
make this SNOOPERSCOPE and see in total darkness (Aug, 1951)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:55 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Here's the 1958 Ford brochure, in super-widescreen, showing all the models in a mural of tailspin desiderata.
It's also available on Flickr at a whopping 2380 px wide, suitable for framing.
1958 Fords
By Cory Doctorow at 6:59 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell has a WSJ op-ed condemning a treaty proposed at the International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency that oversees global phone systems, which would transfer much of Internet governance to the UN.
Commissioner McDowell correctly asserts that transferring governance to the ITU would be bad for Internet freedom. There are few UN specialized agencies that are more ossified and more prone to being gamed by the world's totalitarian regimes than the ITU. One UN acquaintance of mine memorably referred to the ITU as the place "where superannuated telco bureaucrats go to die." And let's not forget the vital role that ITU designates filled in creating surveillance and censorship regimes established by the failing governments of Tunisia and Egypt (and the similar role they're likely playing in other regional nations in the midst of popular uprisings).
But it's pretty rich for someone from the Obama administration to go around talking about how the Internet is in danger from political interference from special interests. This is the administration that gave us SOPA and the TPP, that argues that ACTA can be put into law without an act of Congress, and that has made a habit of extrajudicially seizing .com and .net domains on the sloppy say-so of its political donors from the entertainment industry.
I agree with Commissioner McDonnell that the Internet needs to be free of political interference. I agree that this won't happen at the ITU.
But that's where we part ways. McDonnell describes a present-day Internet where wise American stewards neutrally steer the net's course. I see a world where political hacks and appointees from the lobbyist/regulator revolving-door are ready to destroy the Internet to maximize profits for one or another industry, and where an amok defense industry is ready to destroy whatever is left after Big Content gets through with its dirty work.
The Internet does need stewards, and the Obama administration has spectacularly demonstrated that it is unfit to carry out that stewardship.
Merely saying "no" to any changes to the current structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition. A more successful strategy would be for proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity within every nation to encourage a dialogue among all interested parties, including governments and the ITU, to broaden the multi-stakeholder umbrella with the goal of reaching consensus to address reasonable concerns. As part of this conversation, we should underscore the tremendous benefits that the Internet has yielded for the developing world through the multi-stakeholder model.
Upending this model with a new regulatory treaty is likely to partition the Internet as some countries would inevitably choose to opt out. A balkanized Internet would be devastating to global free trade and national sovereignty. It would impair Internet growth most severely in the developing world but also globally as technologists are forced to seek bureaucratic permission to innovate and invest. This would also undermine the proliferation of new cross-border technologies, such as cloud computing.
The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom
(via Reddit)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Motörhead has officially disavowed the "Complete Early Years Box Set" new $600 product issued by the band's former label, a division of Universal Music Group, which controls the rights to the band's early recordings. Quoted on CNN, the band's frontman Lemmy Kilmister said "Unfortunately greed once again rears its yapping head. I would advise against it even for the most rabid completists!" (I can't locate an underlying source for this quote -- it's not clear whether the band published the statement somewhere, issued a press-release, or were interviewed by CNN). Writing in this Motörhead forum, a fan called Juggernaut describes the set as a "re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-release."
Housed in a Motörhead-style skull with red light-up eyes, the package includes the eight early albums -- from the self-titled debut to "No Remorse" -- plus the band's early singles, along with some posters and a photo book.
"Motörhead have no control over what's done with these early songs, and don't want fans to think that the band is involved in putting out such a costly box set," the band said.
CNN notes that the band has a new DVD/CD set out called "The Wörld Is Yours," which they do endorse.
You may recall that Elvis Costello recently decried his own label's box set reissue of his discography, and exhorted his fans to buy a Louis Armstrong box-set instead, and, if necessary, to acquire his own music by "unconventional means."
Motorhead: Don't buy our new box set
By Cory Doctorow at 4:45 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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This lovely squid-shaped USB drive makes for a fine way to transfer information around. 4GB for $35.
Squid USB Flash Drive
(Disclosure: the vendor is a Boing Boing advertiser, though I didn't know it at the time that I wrote this post)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:41 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation profiled FinFisher and Amesys, two of the companies that had been caught selling network spying tools to despotic regimes around the world, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi's Libya. This week, EFF continues the series with profiles of Italy's Area SpA (which sells electronic tracking software to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria) and Germany's Trovicor (which sells spyware to a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa).
In 2011, at the same time that news of Syria’s violent crackdown on democratic protests graced the pages of the world’s newspapers, an Italian company called Area SpA was busy helping the Syrian’s dictator Bashar al-Assad electronically track the dissidents his army was firing upon in the streets. Area SpA had begun installing “monitoring centers” that would give the Syrian government the ability “to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country” as well as “follow targets on flat-screen workstations that display communications and Web use in near-real time alongside graphics that map citizens’ networks of electronic contacts.”
Worse, as the violence in Syria escalated in mid-2011, “Area employees [were] flown into Damascus in shifts” in the government’s push to finish the project, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
Spy Tech Companies & Their Authoritarian Customers, Part II: Trovicor and Area SpA
By Cory Doctorow at 3:00 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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One of the most interesting technical presentations I attended in 2012 was the talk on "adversarial stylometry" given by a Drexel College research team at the 28C3 conference in Berlin. "Stylometry" is the practice of trying to ascribe authorship to an anonymous text by analyzing its writing style; "adversarial stylometry" is the practice of resisting stylometric de-anonymization by using software to remove distinctive characteristics and voice from a text.
Stanford's Arvind Narayanan describes a paper he co-authored on stylometry that has been accepted for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2012. In On the Feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identification (PDF) Narayanan and co-authors show that they can use stylometry to improve the reliability of de-anonymizing blog posts drawn from a large and diverse data-set, using a method that scales well. However, the experimental set was not "adversarial" -- that is, the authors took no countermeasures to disguise their authorship. It would be interesting to see how the approach described in the paper performs against texts that are deliberately anonymized, with and without computer assistance. The summary cites another paper by someone who found that even unaided efforts to disguise one's style makes stylometric analysis much less effective.
We made several innovations that allowed us to achieve the accuracy levels that we did. First, contrary to some previous authors who hypothesized that only relatively straightforward “lazy” classifiers work for this type of problem, we were able to avoid various pitfalls and use more high-powered machinery. Second, we developed new techniques for confidence estimation, including a measure very similar to “eccentricity” used in the Netflix paper. Third, we developed techniques to improve the performance (speed) of our classifiers, detailed in the paper. This is a research contribution by itself, but it also enabled us to rapidly iterate the development of our algorithms and optimize them.
In an earlier article, I noted that we don’t yet have as rigorous an understanding of deanonymization algorithms as we would like. I see this paper as a significant step in that direction. In my series on fingerprinting, I pointed out that in numerous domains, researchers have considered classification/deanonymization problems with tens of classes, with implications for forensics and security-enhancing applications, but that to explore the privacy-infringing/surveillance applications the methods need to be tweaked to be able to deal with a much larger number of classes. Our work shows how to do that, and we believe that insights from our paper will be generally applicable to numerous problems in the privacy space.
Is Writing Style Sufficient to Deanonymize Material Posted Online?
(via Hack the Planet)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:19 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Tokyoflash's latest Kisai watch is the Kisai Stencil, based on a concept design submitted by a math teacher named Heather Sable. It uses "negative space" to draw the numbers, a display that is cryptic at first but is easy to read at a glance once you've figured out the knack of it.
I found that I had a knack for creating read-at-a-glance designs with cryptic looking, yet easy to read digits. I designed the digits for this concept by starting with rectangular shapes, and cutting out unnecessary pieces using line segments and dots. By arranging them into four quadrants with some connecting lines, the display appears to be just a bunch of stencilled in lines and dots, while if you read the background, you can see the digits clearly.
When I got an email from Tokyoflash telling me they were interested in this design, I was absolutely elated. I had a huge smile on my face for the entire day. Now that I see how my concept has been brought to reality as Kisai Stencil, I am super-excited. The fact that Tokyoflash decided to emboss the digits I created on the strap fits so perfectly with the fact that I am a Math Teacher - of course there are numbers on my watch strap!
Kisai Stencil LCD Watch
By Cory Doctorow at 12:48 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Tim Hutchings, who maintains the most excellent PlaGMaDA (Play Generated Map and Document Archive) has recovered a bizarre but strangely compelling amateur RPG about dolphins and he's producing a published volume (with guest art) on Kickstarter:
Everything is Dolphins occupies a curious place. While it is clearly the work of someone new to the design of role-playing games, it also displays the some of the sophisticated sensibilites one would expect from an old hand. Rather than the excess of complexity that clutters most freshman efforts, Everything is Dolphins offers concision and simplicity. The author gives few examples to illustrate how to use the system and no sample adventure, leaving much to the player’s imagination (and effort). With its bare bones, lacunae, and undeniable beauty, Everything is Dolphins is the role-playing game analogue of outsider art.
Included in the lengthy Appendix of the book you will find scans of the author's original game notes and lots of playtest material. The inclusion reveals to us where the game began, how it was played over time, and what it looks like when it's played. And the game notes and documents are fun to look at.
Everything is Dolphins - an RPG and art book
(Thanks, Tim H!)
(Image: Sean McCarthy)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:23 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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On Project Gutenberg, the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's "Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue," a compleat look at all the dirty cussin' of the early 1800s. It was produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team, who clearly have admirably filthy minds. Some of my favorites:
ACCOUNTS. To cast up one's accounts; to vomit.
ADMIRAL OF THE NARROW SEAS. One who from drunkenness
vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite to
him. SEA PHRASE.
AMBASSADOR OF MOROCCO. A Shoemaker. (See Mrs.
Clarke's Examination.)
APE LEADER. An old maid; their punishment after
death, for neglecting increase and multiply, will be, it is
said, leading apes in hell.
APPLE DUMPLIN SHOP. A woman's bosom.
APPLE-PYE BED. A bed made apple-pye fashion, like what is called a turnover apple-pye, where the sheets are so doubled as to prevent any one from getting at his length between them: a common trick played by frolicsome country lasses on their sweethearts, male relations, or visitors.
ATHANASIAN WENCH, or QUICUNQUE VULT. A forward girl, ready to oblige every man that shall ask her.
BAG OF NAILS. He squints like a bag of nails; i. e. his eyes are directed as many ways as the points of a bag of nails. The old BAG OF NAILS at Pimlico; originally the BACCHANALS.
BAYARD OF TEN TOES. To ride bayard of ten toes, is to
walk on foot. Bayard was a horse famous in old romances,
BLANKET HORNPIPE. The amorous congress.
BODY OF DIVINITY BOUND IN BLACK CALF. A parson.
BORN UNDER A THREEPENNY HALFPENNY PLANET, NEVER TO BE WORTH A GROAT.
Said of any person remarkably unsuccessful in his attempts or
profession.
TO BOX THE JESUIT, AND GET COCK ROACHES. A sea term for masturbation; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society.
BUTTOCK AND TONGUE. A scolding wife.
CHOAKING PYE, or COLD PYE, A punishment inflicted on any person sleeping in company: it consists in wrapping up cotton in a case or tube of paper, setting it on fire, and directing the smoke up the nostrils of the sleeper. See HOWELL'S COTGRAVE.
CHRISTMAS COMPLIMENTS. A cough, kibed heels, and a snotty nose.
COFFEE HOUSE. A necessary house. To make a coffee-house of a woman's ****; to go in and out and spend nothing.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
CORPORAL. To mount a corporal and four; to be guilty of onanism: the thumb is the corporal, the four fingers the privates.
And that's just up to C.
(see also: The Internet was made for cussin')
Project Gutenberg's 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose
(via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:19 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Charles Tan sez, "Ekaterina Sedia translates a Russian fictional Table of Contents for Encyclopedia of Feminism According to Harry Potter."
The Practice of Female Separatism in Daily Life of Luna Lovegood
Hermione Granger on Liberal Feminism
Female Empowerment in Academia Through the Eyes of Minerva McGonagall
Women in Politics: The Dilemma of Dolores Umbridge
Women in the Military and Psychological Violence: The Case of Bellatrix Lestrange
Consequences of Limiting Abortion Rights: The Tragedy of Lily Potter
The Death Toll of Unpaid Labor: The Duel of Molly Weasley and Bellatrix Lestrange
Replication of Violent Family Practices: Family Strategies of Nymphadora Tonks
The Duality of Economic Strategies for Women: Narcissa Malfoy
Russian Language Harry Potter Fandom is Awesome
(Thanks, Charles!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:17 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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Karen sez, "Instructables user abetusk has designed her own animatronic cat ears." Holy awesomely cute. I mean keee-yooo-te.
I saw the demo video for the neurowear "necomimi" brain controlled cat ears and I thought they were pretty awesome. I'm just starting to learn electronics and I thought a fun project to start out would be making my own version. Sadly, I don't think I'm adept enough yet to take on making my own EEG and I don't think the EEG's that are available are very reasonably priced, so I settled for having a button input to control the cat ears.
I wanted to build something that wasn't too expensive and was easy enough to be done in a sitting or two. I picked out some cheap servo motors, some craft supplies, spent a weekend or two developing code to control the servo's from a microcontroller and after much trial and error, I built some kitty ears that I think are pretty decent.
Animatronic Cat Ears
(Thanks, Karen!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:45 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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In this YouTube video, someone in Anonymous garb has threatens a massive, embarrassing document dump for Vic Toews, the Canadian MP and Public Safety Minister whose domestic spying bill will require ISPs to log information on Canadians' Internet use and to turn that to police and appointed inspectors over without a warrant (and which immunizes ISPs from liability should they voluntarily turn over even more information, like the contents of email). The Anon demands that Toews retract his legislation.
Toews is a "family values" candidate who has consistently stood on a ticket that opposed gay marriage and espoused other supposedly conservative ideals, and he was publicly embarrassed when an anonymous Twitter user going by @Vikileaks30 tweeted choice quotes from the affidavits in Toews's messy divorce (which was precipitated by an affair with a much younger woman, whom Toews impregnated, and led to what his ex-wife described as an abandonment of his previous family). If there were further embarrassments of this nature in Toews's closet, it might alienate the voters who elected him on the basis of his "sanctity of the family" platform.
"All this legislation does is give your corrupted government more power to control its citizens," a synthesized voice says in one of the videos still posted to the site Monday.
"We know all about you, Mr. Toews, and during Operation White North we will release what we have unless you scrap this bill," it states.
The RCMP has been called in to investigate apparent death threats against Toews as controversy swirls around the legislation. Police said Monday they haven't yet decided whether a full investigation will be launched.
Hacker group Anonymous threatens Vic Toews
By Cory Doctorow at 10:27 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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A reader writes, "User of popular music discussion board 'I Love Music' designs, builds and posts photos of a tiny home-made cardboard model of a record store. Fellow posters give their suggestions for albums he can add to the scene."
I made a little tiny record store and I'm boasting about it
By Cory Doctorow at 10:00 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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The rather unfortunate product name ("Borden's Hemo") along with the odd, stilted smile of the young man as he approaches the beverage suggests a vampiric note that probably wasn't intended.
Bordens Hemo
Hey, Austinites,
Bruce Sterling's giving away his books at the ATX, the Austin Hackerspace, on Saturday from 5-7PM.
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 9:00 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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On Play This Thing! (my favorite games-review site), Greg Costikyan reviews "Realm of the Mad God," a strange blend of vintage graphics and contemporary, MMO-inspired gameplay.
Realm of the Mad God takes the compulsion loop of a conventional MMO and boils it down to its essential nutrient broth, eschewing all the frippery and getting down to what such games are all about: Kill, loot, level-up, kill some more.
With NES-level pixellated graphics, frenetic top-down shooter play with WASD movement, and permadeath, it feels like a game from another era, yet informed by the tropes and techniques we've come to expected in dikuMUD-likes; games from another era are not, obviously, browser-games and massively multiplayer. It's a game that might have been developed in 1985, if we had an Internet in 1985.
Realm of the Mad God
By Cory Doctorow at 8:00 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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Radiolab covers the strange saga of Marvel Comics's fight against the US customs authority over whether X-Men dollies were "dolls" or "toys" -- the difference being that dolls (which are defined as characters that represent humans) are taxed at twice the rate of "toys." The case turned on whether a mutant was, indeed, human, or whether they were monsters. Despite Professor X's long advocacy for the essential humanity of mutants, his corporate owners argued that he and his cohort were mere monsters (for tax purposes).
Reporter Ike Sriskandarajah tells Jad and Robert a story about two international trade lawyers, Sherry Singer and Indie Singh, who noticed something interesting while looking at a book of tariff classifications. "Dolls," which represent human beings, are taxed at almost twice the rate of "toys," which represent something not human - such as robots, monsters, or demons. As soon as they read that, Sherry and Indie saw dollar signs. it just so happened that one of their clients, Marvel Comics, was importing its action figures as dolls. And one set of action figures really piqued Sherry and Indie's interest: The XMEN, normal humans who, at around puberty, start to change in ways that give them strange powers.
Here's the actual court opinion (PDF).
The solomonic court divided the mutants into varying degrees of humanness. In the human camp were the Invisible Woman, Punisher, Daredevil, U.S. Agent, Peter Parker, and Jumpsie were humans. The remainder (including the Fantastic Four) were mutants.
Mutant Rights
(via MeFi)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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Water scientist Peter Gleick admitted that he was the source for the anonymous leak of documents from the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute. The documents -- obtained under a false name, and then leaked -- showed Heartland's budget, corporate donors (Koch Industries and Philip Morris featured heavily), and a plan to produce deliberately confusing materials about climate change for use in middle school curriculum.
It is clear from the documents that Heartland advocates against responsible climate mitigation and then uses that advocacy to raise money from oil companies and "other corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies." Heartland particularly celebrates the funding that it receives from the fossil fuel fortune being the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
Heartland also continues to collect money from Philip Morris parent company Altria as well as from the tobacco giant Reynolds American, while maintaining ongoing advocacy against policies related to smoking and health.
Heartland's policy positions, strategies and budget distinguish it clear as a lobby firm that is misrepresenting itself as a "think tank" - it budgets $4.1 million of its $6.4 million in projected expenditures for Editorial, Government Relations, Communications, Fundraising, and Publications, and the only activity it plans that could vaguely be considered policy development is the writing of a curriculum package for use in confusing high schoolers about climate change.
Leaked Heartland documents
Heartland Insider Exposes Institute's Budget and Strategy (notes on the leaked documents)
The Guardian on Gleick's admission
By Cory Doctorow at 6:41 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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Lawrence Lessig's new ebook One Way Forward is one of the most exciting documents I've read since I first found The Federalist Papers. One Way Forward is more of a long pamphlet than a book. It's tempting to call it a "manifesto," except that it's so darned reasonable, and that's not a word that comes readily to mind when one hears "manifesto."
At the core of Lessig's reasonable manifesto is the corrupting influence of money in politics, a corruption that predates the notorious Citizens United Supreme Court case. Lessig ascribes to this corruption the outrage that mobilizes both Occupy and the Tea Party, and he believes that the corruption can't be ended until both the left and right realize that though they don't have a common goal, they do share a common enemy, and unite to defeat it.
To this end, Lessig has a series of extremely practical suggestions, legislative proposals that, individually, strike at the root of the corruption, and, collectively, could kill it. Most of these don't require any kind of constitutional amendment. All are designed to be passed through the nonpartisan action of activists of all political stripes, working together on ideals that neither should find fundamentally objectionable.
Indeed, the steps laid out in One Way Forward remind of nothing so much as Creative Commons, in that they constitute a set of principles and actions that we can undertake individually, but which grows into a movement the more of us join in, and that are designed to reside in a sweet spot that does not violate any dogma or ideology. This is Lessig's special gift, the ability to design movements around legal and social principles that use a series of attainable, independent goals to build towards larger, more powerful solutions.
A mere 62 pages, plus a few more pages of model legislative language and end-notes, One Way Forward is an hour's read and a lifetime's work. If you want to get a sense of what this is all about, visit TheAntiCorruptionPledge.org (a pledge for civilians and politicians alike to take against corruption), AmericansElect.org (a project to put a third, reform-oriented candidate on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, with the goal of making reform into a national issue in the 2014 election); and CallAConvention.org, a dress-rehearsal for a series of citizens' constitutional amendment conventions that may some day change Citizens United forever. For a broader outline, see Lessig's own oneway.lessig.org, and the organization he founded, RootStrikers.
We must first build a system to fund campaigns in which all of us, or at least the vast
majority of us, become the effective funders. Not through a system that forces one side to
subsidize the speech of the other, or that empowers Washington bureaucrats to decide
how much money each side has to run its campaigns. That’s the awful connotation that
typically comes with the term “publicly funded elections,” and it’s not what I mean here.
Instead, through a system that incentivizes candidates to raise campaign funds from all of
us, in small dollar chunks, and that effectively spreads its influence to all of us.
Here’s just one example: Imagine a system that rebated the first $50 of tax revenue
paid by each of us, in the form of a voucher—call it a “democracy voucher.”39 Voters
could allocate that voucher (or any part of it) to any candidate for Congress who agrees to
fund his or her campaign only with “democracy vouchers” and contributions from citizens of up to $100 per election. Vouchers not used would get returned to the political party of the voter—or, if the voter is an independent or chooses differently, to some other
democracy-supporting fund. At $50 per voter, this system would put at least $7 billion
into elections each year, more than three times the total raised in congressional elections
in 2010.
Call this the Grant and Franklin Project. As a system, it would easily and adequately
fund congressional elections. But it would be us, not the you-pick-your-fraction-of-the-
top-1-percent of Americans, who would be funding these elections. And, sure, the money
to fund this system would be “the public’s”—in the sense that the Treasury would write
the checks to back the democracy vouchers. But as with everything in the Treasury, the
Treasury got this bit of the “public” from us first. This system just rebates what the people have given the government, in a form that allows the People to make Congress responsive to them.
One Way Forward
By Cory Doctorow at 6:17 am Tuesday, Feb 21
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Combine the spike in commodity metal prices with advances in geriatric medicine and the increased trend to cremation and what do you get? A thriving trade in artificial joint harvesting and recycling. A Dutch company called OrthoMetals recycles 250 tons of scrap from cremated bodies -- cofounder Ruud Verberne notes that it takes five hips to make one kilo of metal, which fetches €12 on the scrap market.
Clark Boyd and Rob Hugh-Jones from PRI write on the BBC:
The company works by collecting the metal implants for nothing, sorting them and then selling them - taking care to see that they are melted down, rather than reused.
After deducting costs, 70-75% of the proceeds are returned to the crematoria, for spending on charitable projects.
"In the UK for example," he says. "We ask for letters from charities that have received money from the organisation we work with in the UK and we see that the amount we transferred to them has been given to charity. This is a kind of controlling system that we have..."
...Mr Verberne has no metal implants himself, but he points out his business partner's wife, who is helping sort out bits of metal at the recycling plant.
"She has two titanium hips", he says. "And she was once asked: "Isn't it strange that you know that one day your hips will run along this conveyor belt?'"
"She said, 'No, it's just a part of life. You're going to die, and I know that reusing metals is a very good thing, so it is no problem at all.'"
She added "'My mother's hip was on here too!'"
Melting down hips and knees: The afterlife of implants
By Cory Doctorow at 8:12 pm Monday, Feb 20
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From the Raymond Scott blog, "Exactly 75 years ago today, Raymond Scott recorded his iconic hit tune, 'Powerhouse.' On the same date, following 8 months of rehearsals with his Quintette at CBS, he also recorded 'Twilight In Turkey,' 'Minuet In Jazz,' and 'The Toy Trumpet' — not bad for a day's work. He didn't realize it at the time, but these compositions would jump-start his stellar career, and accidentally inspire cartoon antics for future generations. To celebrate the milestone, check-out this collection of 75 YouTube clips of Scott's classic 'Powerhouse,' here and see details about our year-long 75th anniversary events schedule here.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:07 pm Monday, Feb 20
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John Herman sez, "I am producing 'An Evening of Apocalyptic Theatre' in Portsmouth, NH. Nine plays, nine visions of the end -- including new works by Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction author James Patrick Kelly and best selling author of The Great Typo Hunt, Jeff Deck. A couple argues in a bomb shelter over a dog puzzle. A man gets an unexpected visit from Intergalactic Salvage. CERN scientists experience the romance of multi-verses. PLUS: Not only is the money raised going to three local charities, but I will also shave my head halfway through the show’s run to raise money for St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a group that funds childhood cancer research grants"
An Evening of Apocalyptic Theatre
(Thanks, John!)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:06 pm Monday, Feb 20
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Under a new deal signed by the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto, the act of emailing a link will be classed as equivalent to photocopying, and each student and faculty member will cost the universities $27.50/year for this right that the law gives them for free, along with a collection of other blanket licenses of varying legitimacy. In order to enforce these licenses, all faculty email will be subject to surveillance.
“Toronto’s and Western Ontario’s actions are inexplicable,” said James L. Turk, CAUT executive director. “They have buckled under to Access Copyright’s outrageous and unjustified demands at a time when courts have extended rights to use copyrighted material, better alternatives are becoming available to the services Access offers and just before the passage of new federal copyright legislation that provides additional protections for the educational sector”.
Turk also pointed out that the Supreme Court is set to clarify the educational use of copyrighted works in the coming months, clarifications that could undercut Access’s bargaining position. In contrast to Western Ontario and Toronto, many institutions have opted out of agreements with Access Copyright or are fighting its demands at the Copyright Board of Canada.
“These two universities threw in the towel on the copyright battle prematurely,” said Turk. “We call on other post-secondary institutions not to follow Toronto’s and Western Ontario’s example of capitulating to Access Copyright. It‘s time to stand up for the right to fair and reasonable access to copyrighted works for educational purposes”.
Copyright agreement with Western and Toronto a bad and unwarranted deal
(via O'Reilly Radar)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:56 pm Monday, Feb 20
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Lauren, proprietor of the LAMP zine, got frustrated after arguing with a homophobe on Facebook, so she whipped (!) up a parody of a fundamentalist tract called GOD HATES CHECKERED WHIPTAIL LIZARDS, detailing all the ways in which the parthenogenetic, pseudocoupling titular lizards were a perversion of God's will. Someone phonecammed the tract and posted it to Reddit, and 2.3 million views later, it was Internet history. Lauren was good enough to post a printable PDF on a Tumblr sites for others who'd like to spread the gospel.
GOD HATES CHECKERED WHIPTAIL LIZARDS
By Cory Doctorow at 12:06 pm Monday, Feb 20
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"Circuit Skull" is a prizewinning piece by Graham Rudge from the Yukon School of Visual Arts, entered in a Bank of Montreal competition.
1res Œuvres! Concours invitation destiné aux étudiants en arts visuels,
(via Street Anatomy)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:03 am Monday, Feb 20
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On Instructables, CaseyBorders's recipe for making stained glass 20-sided dice. A bit tricky to carry these around in your grandad's old Crown Royal bag, but otherwise, they make some pretty smashing (ahem) RPG accessories.
Now we need to cut 20 triangles out of our sheet of stained glass that match the template that we created. The easiest way to do that is to cut a stip of glass the same height as the triangles we cut in the jig. In the example pictures we used a strip that was 1.5" wide because our triangles ended up being 1.5" tall. Place the strip flush across the bottom of your cutting board and set your angle guide to 60 degrees. Follow your angle guide with your scorer so you end up with a 60 degree angle cut off the end of your glass strip. Depending on the kind of glass you bought you might simply need to flip it over to get the other side of the triangle, but the glass in the demo pictures is textured on the back, so we can only cut on the front, so we need to change our cutting guide to 60 degrees the other way. However you end up doing it, make sure that you are making your cuts and angle adjustments as precisely as you can, because if the triangles are not correctly shaped they will not make a good-looking d20.
Once you have 20 good pieces we can etch the numbers on them. Place each triangle in one of the holes of the cardboard template on the laser cutter's cutting surface. Now you can use the same file that we used to make the template but be sure to set your laser to etch only! We don't want to cut around the holes again!
Making a Stained-Glass d20
(via Neatorama)
The US Trade Representative claims that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, closed-door copyright treaty being negotiated in even greater secrecy than the notorious ACTA, is "transparent."
Actually, he says it has "unprecedented" transparency, because an advisory group is allowed to see it under nondisclosure, and they're not lobbyists at all. Except they are. And except that the norm for copyright treaties used to be UN treaties, negotiated in full public view, not closed-door arm-twisting marathons where the US Trade Rep and a bunch of industry goons threaten foreign nations into signing onto agreements that even the US Congress couldn't pass into law.
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 6:18 am Monday, Feb 20
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"I'm Not the Road" is the second album from NYC-based indie band Whisperado. I've been listening to it pretty steadily since it came out a couple weeks ago, with immense and ever-growing pleasure. Whisperado have a kind of rootsy, country feel, and the lyrics and vocals are somewhere in the sweet spot between Ry Cooder and Jimmy Buffet, with a lot of humor and a little pathos. As ever, I'm most fond of the uptempo numbers, like the Bo-Diddley-beat "Insatiable Sally," a kind of hymn to bad TV; and "Teenage Popstar Girl," which reminds me of the more countrified Violent Femmes tunes. But the whole album's a treat, and it's available from CDBaby as a disc or an MP3 download.
I'm Not the Road
By Cory Doctorow at 5:18 am Monday, Feb 20
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Dominic Ludlam writes, "Promise.TV has launched the world's first Promiscuous TV recorder! Working on the UK's Freeview platform, it records every programme on every TV and radio channel and stores them for a whole week.
And for all Boing Boing readers who visit the site, we have a daily draw running this week to get a new Promise recorder half price!"
This was originally commissioned as an internal BBC project, and the Ludlams and their partners have been productizing it ever since. It really does what it says on the tin: records the whole Freeview multiplex for a week at a time, which means that you don't have to program your PVR with the shows you like: you always have the last week's TV on tap (this'd be especially cool for when scandalous material is broadcast from Parliament -- if you find out about it after the fact you can go back and check). The Promise.tv folks have worked out several ingenious ways of navigating all this stored material as well.
I've written about this before, and I'm awfully glad to see it finally come to market.
The Promise Home is a recorder that connects four additional televisions in other rooms around the home.
All connected TVs can play any of the stored or saved programmes independently, and in they can also share bookmarks. This lets you start watching a programme in one room, set a bookmark and carry on watching from the same point in another room.
Promise.TV
(Thanks, Dom!)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:00 am Monday, Feb 20
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The Science Fiction Writers of America have announced the nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards, which are voted by the community of professional sf/f writers (in contrast to the Hugo awards, which are voted by readers). It's a very strong ballot, and includes two of my favorite books of 2011: Jo Walton's astounding Among Others, and Delia Sherman's brilliant YA novel The Freedom Maze.
Novel
Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)
Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)
God's War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)
The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Novella
"Kiss Me Twice," Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2011)
"Silently and Very Fast," Catherynne M. Valente (WFSA Press; Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2011)
"The Ice Owl," Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November/December 2011)
"The Man Who Bridged the Mist," Kij Johnson (Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011)
"The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary," Ken Liu (Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing)
"With Unclean Hands," Adam-Troy Castro (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2011)
Read the rest
Games creator Adrian Hon has a parodical
modest proposal in the
Telegraph: eternal copyright.
— Cory
