Here are the top 10 most-viewed TED Talk videos from June 2006 to May 2008)

Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight

Jeff Han's touchscreen foreshadows the iPhone and more

David Gallo shows underwater astonishments

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth

Arthur Benjamin does "mathemagic"

Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen

Tony Robbins asks why we do what we do

Al Gore on averting a climate crisis

Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks

You can also watch the Top 10 TED talks highlights video.

Today on Boing Boing tv -- a sneak preview of Heavy Load: A Film About Happiness, a new documentary about a UK punk band whose members include people who have developmental disabilities.

'70s punk star Wreckless Eric describes them as "a triumph of dysfunctionalness," and even Kylie Minogue (they've covered a hit song of hers) has become a fan.

The band says their mission is...

...to demonstrate that disability rocks. There are few genres left in music that have yet to be defined. Heavy Load have unwittingly created a brand new one.

The band is also behind a campaign called "Stay Up Late" which advocates for the right of cognitively disabled people to be allowed to go out, supervised, to live music shows and -- well, stay out late enough to actually see and hear the show. Again, from the band:

We play gigs all over the country and we have noticed that something strange happens at 9.00pm – people start to go home. Heavy Load are fed up with people with learning disabilities leaving club nights and gigs early because their staff finish their shifts at 10pm. This means they are missing out.

If this happens to you: You need to talk about this with your friends, support workers, family and advocates. Our ‘Stay Up Late’ campaign is to make managers and staff know that we want them to plan ahead and talk to us about what we want to do...

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and BBtv podcast subscription info.

The full-length documentary premieres on the US cable network IFC on June 23rd, 9PM ET/10PM PT, and again on 24th June. (Special thanks to BB's Mark Frauenfelder, and to the film's director, Jerry Rothwell)

Jess Bachman creates very large posters that graphically display exactly where American tax dollars go. When you're dealing with sets of information this massive and abstract, presenting that data in a way someone can make their way through without feeling overwhelmed is a big design challenge, and Jess nailed it.

I first blogged these posters in 2006, and he recently wrote in to let us know there's a new 2009 edition out. If you'd like to order a poster, Jess kindly offers a buy-one-get-one-free special for BB readers: "enter BOING when you have two posters in the cart and it takes the price of one off."

I'd say "whee, great!," but then I got all sad looking at where that 33ish% of my income goes -- a lot of war our kids can't eat, for starters. Then, I read the rest of Jess' email. I'm reprinting it here with permission. We don't receive stories like this every day here at Boing Boing, and when we do, they're very meaningful to us. Thank you, Jess.

Snip:

Many moons ago, actually 795 moons ago, you blogged about a poster called Death and Taxes which visualized the federal budget. Your post is here. I never thanked you for that, which is shameful, considering how much you have changed my life.

You see I created that poster in 2004 on a lark, never intending publicity or financial gain. You picked up on it two years later and the people loved it. I sold a bunch of prints and realized how important this information is, and how uninformed we are as citizens about our taxes. The boingboing post prompted me to create another poster for the year 2007.

That was such a big hit that I was able to quit my job working as an industrial sewing machine operator. As a full time (well, almost full time) budget poster maker, I was able to develop the 2008 version of the poster along with the website TheBudgetGraph.com which has had over 1/2 million visits. Sales from the poster now support me and my family, and I have sold thousands of posters to schools and concerned citizens, even 40 members of congress. I have been in magazines, art galleries, and national television. Last month I was on the Martha Stewart Show to talk about the poster and taxes, it was surreal.

So really, Xeni, it thanks to you, that I've taken this venture as far as I have.

The 2009 version is worlds apart from the 2006 version which may still linger in your neurons. There is so much more in the six square feet of paper this time. Over 500 line items of federal budget awesomeness. Increased accuracy and aesthetics as well. I am really trying to educate the populace on their investment in the government. Especially since the actual numbers differ so much from the rhetoric. Renewable energy spending cut 27% next year! This is important information, and responsible citizens need to know it. It's my experiment in DIY government over-site.

I hope you like the new version. Cheers and many a thank you,

Jess

The San Francisco-based Billboard Liberation Front has been transforming the world of advertising since 1977. When Austrian art-pranksters and regular BBtv guests monochrom recently visited the United States to spread their Sculpture Mob dogma, a historic meeting with the elusive BLF took place. BBtv's hidden cameras captured everything.

And in part two of today's BBtv episode, Xeni travels with the BLF and monochrom to document their first-ever joint exploit to build "The Great Firewall of China" around one of the Google signs on the internet giant's Mountain View campus. Hijinks ensued; dogs, cops, and GOOG security guards pursued; TV news crews newsed.

The goal of their "unpaid advertising services"? To draw attention to Google's role in online censorship within China. As it happened, this particular day was the same day of a Google shareholder meeting, during which related proposals came up for vote.

Link to Billboard Liberation Front press release, and here's monochrom's side of the story, there are photos also. Here are previous BBtv episodes with monochrom.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

Adam Rice and Phillip Lamb were both unable to comment, so they sent me letters.

ADAM RICE:

I hope you're the right person to contact; if not, my apologies.

We need a better way for readers to tell us about technical problems. One of our suggested mechanisms is to have a front-page link to a form for reporting glitches, much like the link for submitting suggestions for stories. Until then, we'll all keep improvising.

The last couple of times I've tried to leave a comment on Boingboing, I've gotten the following error:

---
Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:
Text entered was wrong. Try again.
---

I admit this may be true in an epistemological sense, but in a formal sense, the text I entered was entirely innocuous.

Would you believe I've occasionally been getting that one too? I don't know why that error message turns up. I wish it weren't even in the system. It keeps giving readers the idea that we use automated content-based message filtering, and that something they've written has infracted the filters' rules.

Not so. The only content-based filters on Boing Boing are the people who edit it. If you get an error message saying "Text entered was wrong," it's the error message that's in error.

Back to Adam Rice:

The other interesting thing is that the dynamic.boingboing.net page where this appears shows me as logged out, although I am logged in from the main boingboing page, or gadgets.

I feel your pain. I had the same problem for a couple of days this week. David Harmon's reported it too.

My comments were not such pearls that the Internet cannot function without their presence, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention.

Well said, and thank you for bringing those problems to our attention.

Onward to:

PHILLIP LAMB:

Hi there - not sure if you're the right person to send this to, but I can't seem to find a tech email on BoingBoing's site. ... Hope I'm not inconveniencing you!

Not at all. We really do want to hear about technical problems.

I and other people have had trouble submitting comments lately, getting a "Text entered was wrong. Try again" error message.

It seems like the following is happening:

1. User logs in

2. User does logged-in user stuff, including commenting.

3. User goes to sleep, or hibernates, or eats a Polish Sausage or whatever.

4. User comes back to BoingBoing, bleary-eyed because it's 3am and when you gotta get your fix you gotta get your fix.

5. User's session has timed out (rut roh!) but due to either a caching bug or perhaps a session timeout bug, the comment form still shows up.

6. User submits a comment, but sadly it doesn't go through, and they see, "Text entered was wrong. Try again."

7. User wrecks their apartment with a frying pan.

8. User eventually logs back in and is able to comment normally.

We're sorry about your apartment--and, presumably, your frying pan.

This is my hypothesis, and I've tested it (somewhat) and it seems valid. Just letting ya know. I'll email this to whatever email address I can find for your admin, assuming I can find one.

Thanks! I'm pretty sure the Polish sausage is a local artifact. The rest, we'll have to have a look at.

What hardware and browser were you using? (Adam, same question.)

---

UPDATE: Semiotix comments:

I'm very disappointed to hear that the "Text entered was wrong" message is simply an indication of some sort of login error.

I've gotten the message several times, and, assuming that it was autogenerated in response to wrong ideas, have modified my beliefs (and comments) accordingly until I reached--so I thought--right text, and therefore right thinking.

Now you tell me that I haven't been engaged in a Socratic struggle for truth all this past week? That I changed my beliefs for no reason?! Well, thanks for nothing.

Kim Pallister says Brad Fortner, Ryerson University's technology director, has a couple excellent blog posts about a recent debacle in which Creative Labs has issued a cease-and-desist to a 'Daniel_K', an enthusiastic customer who has written and released drivers for Creative Labs, fixing features that were broken in their own drivers, and also supporting operating systems they didn't have drivers for. Clearly, improving Creative Labs products is something best left NOT DONE.

The blogosphere has responded to Creative's VP of Communications by 'crowdripping' him a new one! Post 1 | Post 2

Fred writes:

The movement to draft Lawrence Lessig has now picked up considerable steam and a blog has been launched to keep track. After the death of representative Lantos Lessig's district has an open seat in Congress and a special election will be held in early April.

Lessig is rumored to be considering the position and has registered the domain change-congress.com. California's 12th Congressional district is quite possibly the best place for the cyber-intellectual to run for office as it is the epicenter of US tech world and his views on technology, copyright, and corruption are likely to resonate with constituents.

But Lessig needs to know there will be members of his community that will support him if he decides to run, so now is the time to donate (funds will go to CC if Lessig doesn't end up running), buy some t-shirts and watch the videos. We're looking to get 1,000 people committed to volunteer or donate through ActBlue by the end of the week, so please sign up if you're interested in helping out.

All of us here at Boing Boing idolize David Byrne -- so reading this post today on his blog is, for us, like a rainbow unicorn delivering a giant vanilla cupcake with a million sprinkles of awesome on top.

Mr. Byrne wrote:

There’s free Wi-Fi at the Denver airport, which is a nice, sensible touch. But to my surprise, one of my habitual surfing sites has been blocked. I’m not totally shocked that alleged nudity might be blocked (if there is nudity on the Boing Boing site it’s pretty rare and likely to be arty or ironic), but I’m perplexed by the implication that all blogs and wiki sites are suspect!

Back in NYC however, Danielle explains that not all blogs and wikis are blocked, just those filtered by Secure Computing’s web censorware product called SmartFilter. According to Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin,

“[…]SmartFilter isn't very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity — even Michaelangelo's David appearing on a single page out of thousands — as a ‘nudity’ site, which means that customers who block ‘nudity’ can't get through." (see blog post here)

Turns out, Secure Computing and other similar companies have sold their products to government-controlled monopoly Internet providers in places like Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan to name a few, effectively blocking access to filtered sites — like Boing Boing — for entire countries. Xeni wrote an op-ed in the NY Times on the issue, which you can find here.

Link. (thanks, Danielle Spencer)

A newly launched project called White House Redux invites you to design a new home for the U.S. Presidency:

What if the White House, the ultimate architectural symbol of political power, were to be designed today? On occasion of the election of the 44th President of the United States of America, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenge you to design a new residence for the world's most powerful individual. The best ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos will be selected by some of the world's most distinguished designers and critics and featured in a month-long exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in July 2008 and published in Surface magazine. All three winners will be flown to New York to collect their prizes at the opening party.

Link. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Dan Ancona says,

A few preliminary pictures of an Obama rallying sign created by artist, designer and maker James Home, based on the image created by Shepard Fairey. Amazing BlinkM lighting technology courtesy of Mike Kuniavsky and ThingM Global Marketing.

This thing looks completely amazing in action. It basically works like a political tractor beam, pulling in the formerly hopeless, cynical and apathetic and parking them in the warm shuttle bay of hope and action. Something like that.

Here's a pic of it doing its thing.

Link. (thanks, WdGIII!)

Previously on BB: Shepard Fairey's Obama Poster.

Howard Rheingold points us to an event taking place this weekend in Los Angeles, "24/7: A DIY Video Summit." He explains:

The event is an effort to bring together the various academic, technology, and creative communities that have a stake in the evolution of the amateur and DIY video space. Specifically, the effort is to get the grassroots and public interest perspective into play in the definition of the future of the Internet video space. Our speakers include Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, John Seely Brown, me, and Yochai Benkler. In fact, I will moderate a panel on Saturday with all those others. I think it's the first time we've all been on a stage together, and I want to make it a very action-oriented call to arms rather than yet another panel discussion.

This event is the first of its kind in that it brings together curators and representatives from key DIY video communities - live action remix, anime music videos, videoblogging, machinima, youth media, activist media, political remix, video blogging, and independent arts video. Although these communities often have their own dedicated events, there are rarely conversations that bring together these different groups, much less one that also includes conversations with industry executives from the tech world, academics, and policy makers. The event will have screenings of DIY videos, an academic track, and hands on workshops.

Link. Even if you can't attend in person, they'll no doubt produce many interesting ideas to be shared online. (Special thanks, Mimi Ito!)

The Chinese government's censorship of a wide array of non-political websites has generated a popular backlash, according to this NYT item:

For a vast majority of Internet users, censorship still does not appear to be much of a factor. The most popular Web applications here are games and messaging services, and the most visited Internet sites focus on everyday subjects like entertainment news and sports. Many, in fact, seem only vaguely aware that China’s Internet universe is carefully pruned, and even among those who know, a majority hardly seems to care.

But growing numbers of others are becoming increasingly resentful of restrictions on a wide range of Web sites, including Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace (sometimes), Blogspot and many other sites that the public sees as sources of harmless diversion or information. The mounting resentment has inspired a wave of increasingly determined social resistance of a kind that is uncommon in China.

This resistance is taking many forms, from lawsuits by Internet users against government-owned service providers, claiming that the blocking of sites is illegal, to a growing network of software writers who develop code aimed at overcoming the restrictions. An Internet-based word-of-mouth campaign has taken shape, in which bloggers and Web page owners post articles to spread awareness of the Great Firewall, or share links to programs that will help evade it.

Link.

OpenCongress's David Moore sez,

As Congress returns tomorrow to start a new session, the open-source OpenCongress.org is excited to announce a *major* update that puts every bill and vote at your fingertips. It's never been easier to track what's happening with your government.

Now on OpenCongress, you can build a personal profile of bills and people you're tracking, network with other users near and far, comment and vote on bills, and much more.

These brand-new "My OpenCongress" features place powerful tools for political participation in the hands of every user, using peer-to-peer communication to share the best information about Congress.

OpenCongress is a free, open-source, not-for-profit, and non-partisan public resource with a mission to encourage civic engagement and enable people to track what's really happening in Congress. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

More info about these new features, as well as pointers for some of the ways in which bloggers and issue-based groups can use them to keep their communities in touch with the latest from Congress, can be found on today's blog announcement linked above.

Link (Thanks, David!)

Josh sez, "The folks at BMC (Black Mustang Club) automotive forum wanted to put together a calendar featuring members' cars, and print it through CafePress. Photos were submitted, the layout was set, and... CafePress notifies the site admin that pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can't be reproduced without permission. So even though Ford has a lineup of enthusiasts who want to show off their Ford cars, the company is bent on alienating them. 'Them' being some of the most loyal owners and future buyers that they have. Or rather, that they had, because many have decided that they will not be doing business with Ford again if this matter isn't resolved."

I got some more info from the folks at cafepress and according to them, a law firm representing Ford contacted them saying that our calendar pics (and our club's event logos - anything with one of our cars in it) infringes on Ford's trademarks which include the use of images of THEIR vehicles. Also, Ford claims that all the images, logos and designs OUR graphics team made for the BMC events using Danni are theirs as well. Funny, I thought Danni's title had my name on it ... and I thought you guys owned your cars ... and, well ... I'm not even going to get into how wrong and unfair I feel this whole thing is as I'd be typing for hours, but I wholeheartedly echo everything you guys have been saying all afternoon. I'm not letting this go un-addressed and I'll keep you guys posted as I get to work on this.

I'm sorry, but at this point we will not be producing the 2008 BMC Calendar, featuring our 2007 Members of the Month, solely due to Ford Motor Company's claim that THEY own all rights to the photos YOU take of YOUR car. I hope to resolve this soon, and be able to provide the calendar and other BMC merchandise that you guys want and deserve! This thread will remain open for you to comment however you wish, and I'll update it as needed.

Link

The latest volume of the magazine Index on Censorship focuses on issues related to free speech online. I'm among the contributors. Here's a snip from the issue overview:

The Internet was supposed to spell the end of censorship – instead governments now have unprecedented possibilities for controlling what we do and what we read. But this is a revolution in free expression that can’t be stopped. Index examines the explosion in communication, the rise in new forms of censorship (and the ways to get round them) and the impact on social attitudes.

I wrote about what I've learned about internet filtering technology from my experience co-editing BoingBoing, which is routinely blocked by various censorware applications for all sorts of silly, inaccurate reasons. Nearly every day (certainly every week) we receive a perplexed message from a would-be reader asking "why is BoingBoing blocked from [library/airport/hotel/whatever place name] in [location name somewhere in the world]?"

Subscribe to the Index in print here. Longer list of other contributors to this issue, and their chosen topics, after the jump. This is a fine publication, and a fine bunch of writers from around the world sharing important ideas and testimonies -- what a shame the contents are not freely available online.

Hollywood writers and Silicon Valley geeks are teaming up to create startups like Virtual Artists modelled on the original United Artists, in which artists own and operate the studio:

Some writers are now taking matters into their own hands, using their downtime to meet with venture backers, other writers and technologists.

"We should show the studios some gratitude for getting us together," said "Rain Man" coauthor Ron Bass, a member of the WGA's negotiating committee and an investor and director of Virtual Artists. "This is not just an Internet play, but the beginning of what the future is going to look like."

About 20 entertainment and software writers are investing an average of $10,000 for a chunk of Virtual Artists. Co-founded by Aaron Mendelsohn, a screenwriter who created "Air Bud," Virtual Artists plans to fund projects as varied as shorts and feature-length movies. Its other investors include star television writer Tom Fontana of "Homicide" and "Oz"; "Hotel Rwanda" co-writer and director Terry George; "Chicken Run" screenplay author Karey Kirkpatrick; and John Logan, writer of "Sweeney Todd" and "The Aviator." Susannah Grant, who wrote "Erin Brockovich," and Warren Leight, who runs the TV show "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," also have agreed to invest.

Link to LA Times story, Link to Virtual Artists, Inc (Thanks, Henri!)

See also: Striking writers talk of launching web startups

Søren Ragsdale has been traveling through Asia and sharing some interesting video and photos with friends. He also happens to be one of the folks behind waterboarding.org. He writes:

While we were in Cambodia this winter I visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng is one of the few places where you can see a real actual waterboard in the room where it was used to torture prisoners. I've created a 'waterboardingdotorg' Flickr account and put a link up here.

Nice to know America has something in common with the Khmer Rouge -- something that isn't torture, of course. Among the photos in that set, this chilling shot of a poster on the wall of the Khmer Rouge's chief of staff, now covered with graffitti -- and this sign reprimanding less-than-reverent visitors; "no laughing allowed."

Previously:

* What Waterboarding Feels Like
* Senator Kit Bond: Waterboarding is "like swimming"
* Waterboarding.org

The TSA's Traveler Redress Website was created by a no-bid crony contractor, leaked giant amount of personal information from hundreds of travellers (who had already been screwed over by the agency and were writing in for justice) and exposed them to identity theft. The House Oversight Committee concluded that the TSA totally, absolutely screwed up.

They sure do a bang up job at stopping you from bringing water through the checkpoint though.

That's gotta count for something.

* TSA awarded the website contract without competition. TSA gave a small, Virginia-based contractor called Desyne Web Services a no-bid contract to design and operate the redress website. According to an internal TSA investigation, the "Statement of Work" for the contract was "written such that Desyne Web was the only vendor that could meet program requirements."

* The TSA official in charge of the project was a former employee of the contractor. The TSA official who was the "Technical Lead" on the website project and acted as the point of contact with the contractor had an apparent conflict of interest. He was a former employee of Desyne Web Services and regularly socialized with Desyne's owner.

* TSA did not detect the website's security weaknesses for months. The redress website was launched on October 6, 2006, and was not taken down until after February 13, 2007, when an internet blogger exposed the security vulnerabilities. During this period, TSA Administrator Hawley testified before Congress that the agency had assured "the privacy of users and the security of the system" before its launch. Thousands of individuals used the insecure website, including at least 247 travelers who submitted large amounts of personal information through an insecure webpage.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

Update: If you want to read the world's greatest "TSA have lied and cheated and lied and cheated" rant, check out our Teresa's post in the comment thread on the five year old whom the TSA thinks is a terr'ist.

My pal Elizabeth Bear -- award-winning sf writer and all-round swell cat -- has just launched an exciting new publishing project with a gang of pals:

Shadow Unit is, more or less, the website for a serial drama in internet form. Or possibly it's a fan site for a TV show that doesn't exist.

Over the next couple of months, the site will be updated on a weekly or biweekly basis with new information, vignettes, character sketches, character bios, a community message board, and other exciting things.

And starting in mid-February, there will be a series of novellas and novellettes, and one complete novel. Approximately one story every two weeks for sixteen weeks (though we are still tweaking the schedule), comprising the first season (of hopefully many) of a television show that doesn't exist.

Some of the content will be free. Some will be by subscription. (Subscriptions will be extremely reasonable.) There will be DVD extras, deleted scenes, background information, character-based digressions, and I dunno what all else.

The staff writers (as of today) are Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Sarah Monette, and myself. The Brilliant Web Ghoul and Fabulous Artist is Amanda Downum. The Technical Supergeek is Stephen Shipman.

Link to announcement, Link to Shadow Unit) (Thanks, Bear!)

Researchers at the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) gave an Alzheimer's patient an injection of a compound called perispinal etanercept and noticed a "dramatic and unprecedented therapeutic effect" within minutes of the injection.

“It is unprecedented that we can see cognitive and behavioral improvement in a patient with established dementia within minutes of therapeutic intervention,” said [Sue Griffin, Ph.D., director of research at the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS)]. “It is imperative that the medical and scientific communities immediately undertake to further investigate and characterize the physiologic mechanisms involved. This gives all of us in Alzheimer’s research a tremendous new clue about new avenues of research, which is so exciting and so needed in the field of Alzheimer’s. Even though this report predominantly discusses a single patient, it is of significant scientific interest because of the potential insight it may give into the processes involved in the brain dysfunction of Alzheimer’s.”

Link (Via Look at This)

Olly F writes, "This is sad stuff. A remote, unelected bureaucracy in Brussels dictates that city councils can't provide free wi-fi. By cities, I mean all those in 27 countries. The EU is not on the citizen's side. This is only the latest example."

A plan to provide free wireless broadband throughout Dublin has been abandoned.

Dublin City Council has decided the plan would be contrary to EU law on state aid, as well as not financially possible. The project is estimated to cost €27m.

Link (Thanks, Olly!)

Steve Easterbrook, the CEO of McDonald's UK, says that video games cause obesity -- not his nutritionally void, heavily sweetened, processed junk that's voraciously marketed to kids:

But he made special mention of the popularity of games – and said they have reduced the amount of time young people spend outdoors "burning off energy"...

"Then there's a lifestyle element: there's fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they'd have been burning off energy outside."

Link (via Raph Koster)

Ted Adams -- the publisher of IDW comics -- named his little son "Sam Adams," a good, solid patriotic name. It's also a name on the TSA's no-fly list, and the five-year-old has spent his young life being harassed by airport security goons who think he's a terrorist.

Saw the article you posted on Boing Boing about the five year old on the no-fly list. My son, also five, is on that same list and it's a nightmare. Every time we fly with him, we can't use the computer terminals to check in and the attendant has to call some never named government agency to make sure he's not a terrorist. Some attendants joke it off but some are insanely serious about it. His seat always goes unassigned (even if it was assigned when the reservation is made) which always causes problems.

I've tried everything that anyone has suggested. There's a TSA form that you can fill out for this situation, which I did, but they won't tell you if they've removed your name. We got him a passport -- that didn't work. We've tried booking the tickets with his full name (including middle name), that didn't work. We tried booking the ticket under Master Samuel Adams, with still no luck.

Yeah, and if you think that's funny, imagine this kid's life when he's an adult and Every goddamned flight he takes involves an extra hour of hassle, a search, no assigned seats, being turned away, being humiliated, being harassed... There's a special circle of hell that's being prepared for the domestic fear-mongers who've helped the terrorists make Americans so very afraid. Link (Thanks, Ted!)

Miro -- the free and open Internet TV program that lets everyone participate in making and watching video -- has just posted a fantastic update. Version 1.1 includes a new BitTorrent engine that delivers dramatic improvements in download speeds.

Miro combines BitTorrent (a downloading system that gets faster as more people download the same file) with the open VLC video player (which lets you watch every video format without worrying about which program you're using) and RSS technology, so that you can subscribe to any of thousands of channels and get the new videos when they're published. Miro comes from the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation, who also make Broadcast Machine, a tool that lets anyone publish channels for their own video.

Miro is also hiring hackers and fundraisers, so here's your chance to help keep the world safe for open video. Link

(Disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation)

Bruce Schneier has a wonderful essay up on Wired explaining why he runs an open wireless network at home -- and how that fits in with security. I've run open wireless networks since the late 1990s (in five cities in three countries) and I've never encountered the problems that everyone says are inevitable -- network contention, crap from my ISP, busts for the child-porn my neighbors are downloading from my network.

Instead, I've provided network access to innumerable people -- people like me: I can't count the number of times I've had my ass saved by an open wireless network at the right moment (e.g., in good time to help me look up directions, a phone number, or flight details). I figure the more open wireless I provide to the world, the more people I'll turn on to providing their own open wireless access, and the more open WiFi I'm likely to find.

To me, it's basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea. But to some observers, it's both wrong and dangerous...

I remain unconvinced of this threat, though. The RIAA has conducted about 26,000 lawsuits, and there are more than 15 million music downloaders. Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research said it best: "If you're a file sharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid."

I'm also unmoved by those who say I'm putting my own data at risk, because hackers might park in front of my house, log on to my open network and eavesdrop on my internet traffic or break into my computers. This is true, but my computers are much more at risk when I use them on wireless networks in airports, coffee shops and other public places. If I configure my computer to be secure regardless of the network it's on, then it simply doesn't matter. And if my computer isn't secure on a public network, securing my own network isn't going to reduce my risk very much.

Link

Browsing the web from Guatemala is always an adventure. Works okay when there's electricity, which hasn't been very steady while I've been down here over the last few weeks (there have been some big blackouts here related to a sketchy power grid, and unusually intense windstorms). What sucks worse than the lights dimming, or DSL or sat bombing out? Constant Google cockblocking. I keep getting these dumb-ass messages that say I'm spyware. Google demands a captcha input (en Ingles), and even after I comply, I'm blocked (now en Espanol). Other pals who are native chapines, or who live in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, are saying over IM that this is super super common for them down here, and friends in Ghana get this all the time, too. Gah. Sorry my ass!