Back in March, we noted that Warner Music Group had hired Jim Griffin, a music industry guy who has been pushing the concept of a "blanket license" for file sharing. The idea would be to get various ISPs to simply add an additional fee to everyone's internet access, have that money go into a pool that the recording industry would be responsible for paying out -- and then let people have free reign for file sharing. This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. It's basically a music tax -- allowing the record industry to be lazy. Someone else gets to go out and collect all this money and hand it over to the industry to distribute (or, actually, not distribute). It effectively sets the business model of the recording industry in stone, and harms better, more innovative business models by inserting the recording industry (and not the musicians) into a role where they don't belong.

We hadn't heard much about this music tax lately, but apparently Griffin has been focused on getting universities to buy into the plan first. An anonymous reader passed on some details, saying that Columbia, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Washington, MIT, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, Cornell, Penn State, University of California at Berkeley and University of Virginia have expressed interest and talks are under way. A basic presentation that's being given to these universities is below (if you're reading via another site, click through to see it): There's obviously something appealing about ending the lawsuits and letting people file share freely. But, it's quite problematic to add an effective "tax" when none is necessary. Plenty of other business models, such as those we've outlined here and elsewhere can suffice to fund the creation of music. On top of that, giving the proceeds of this tax to the very industry that has so badly mismanaged musicians for so many years is a travesty -- sort of like bailing out the failed auto industry or banking industry. The presentation says that a nonprofit has been set up to handle the money, claiming that it's "to be clear we intend to operate with good intentions and not profit as a motive," but given the way the industry has acted in the past, that's difficult to take at face value. Also, this isn't really a license. It's a "covenant not to sue" -- meaning that lawsuits could still result.

Of course, while the introduction frames this as a "voluntary" blanket licensing program, the presentation also mentions that they'll need some way to get all ISPs and universities to buy into the plan, or they'll have to work out a way to "avoid massive leakage." So, basically, it's not voluntary at all. It's either join, or get saddled with significant limitations. In other words: all ISPs and universities need to agree to pay a huge tax to the very industry that hasn't been able to adapt, and then trust them to distribute the funds fairly.

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antispam_ben writes "The President of Italy, which will have the Presidency of the G8 starting January 1, says he wants to use the future position of Italy to 'Regulate the Internet.' Italy's President Berlusconi appears to be a cantankerous character, prompting riots when Italy last had the G8 presidency in 2001. This will no doubt be a serious effort, but knowing the fundamental design of the Internet involves routing around damage, the efforts could be more amusing than threatening." Update — 12/5 at 00:04 by SS: Reader fondacio noted that Silvio Berlusconi is Italy's Prime Minister, not its President. He is Italy's G8 representative, and Italy will hold the presidency in 2009.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I hope you are sitting down when you hit "play." Joi Ito, the host of today's special Boing Boing tv episode from Tokyo, explains what you're about to witness:

This year, the Digital Garage New Context Conference and Ellen Levy's Silicon Valley Connect worked together on a program for visitors from Silicon Valley to Tokyo. Silicon Valley Connect is a program that Ellen runs which brings executives and visionaries from Silicon Valley to various parts of the world. This year, we organized a group to visit Japan.

As part of the "cultural program" we decided to take a tour of Akihabara, the mecca of all things otaku, anime and electronic in Japan. I asked a very special friend, Danny Choo, son of the famous shoe designer Jimmy Choo, to lead the tour. I call Danny "The Prince of Akihabara". He is one of the world's experts on Japan's otaku culture and has one of the most popular English language websites about Japan.

One of his favorite things is to dress up as a storm trooper and spread his love and happiness in Akihabara. He is often accompanied by his side-kick Darth Vader, played by Hector Garcia who also has a super-popular blog about Japan. (Danny on CNN talking about this hobby of his.)

When I talked to Xeni Jardin about this, we decided that this might make a good Boing Boing TV episode... and I think we were right.

Thanks to everyone who participated and helped.

Participants from Silicon Valley included Ellen Levy (LinkedIn), Ken Glidewell, Loic Le Meur (Seesmic), Geraldine Le Meur (Le Web), bunnie Huang (Chumby), Jean-Marie Hullot (Fotonauts), Matt Flannery (Kiva), Julie Hanna Farris (SocialText) and Chamath Palihapitiya (Facebook).

Update: Danny "Prince of Akihabara" Choo has blogged his thoughts about the stormtroopin' hijinx on dannychoo.com. He has a wonderful photo gallery from the tour here.

We've covered a lot of different robocritters from the BEAM taxonomy in MAKE and here on Make: Blog: rollers, walkers, spinners, pummers, poppers, crawlers. But one we haven't, and I hardly ever see in the wild, is the robot ball/min-ball. Solarbotics even used to sell a Mini-Ball kit many moons ago (PDF here). I love this gigantic robo-hamster ball spotted on YouTube. I post this in honor of our very own John Edgar Park who did the hamster physics for the new Disney film Bolt.

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The helpless cries and LCD spasms of a very bent GB under the modulating influence of LoFi Ninja's keyboard rhythm section. That synched screen-streakery is a thing in and of itself! - LoFi Ninja - Circuit bent Gameboy

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ink writes "Sun released JavaFX 1.0 today, in a bid to take on Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight technologies. It is Sun's first Java release to include standardized, cross-platform audio and video playback code (in the form of On2 licensed codecs). The lack of a Linux or Solaris release is a notable absence. The development kit currently consists of the base run-time, a NetBeans/Eclipse plug-in and a set of artifact exporters for Adobe CS 3&4." An anonymous reader adds a link to several tutorials accompanying the new release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study claims that talking on your cell phone while driving is more dangerous than talking to passengers while driving. It comes from the same group of researchers at the University of Utah that's been pumping out similar studies for years, like the one that said a 20-year-old driver instantly assumes the reaction speed of a 70-year-old when they start talking on the phone, and that talking while driving impairs a driver more than drunk driving, or the one blaming slow traffic on people talking while driving. The thrust of the research -- or at least how it always gets spun -- is as ammo for more laws to ban talking on the phone while driving, which, as always, miss the point. Again, this latest study focuses on a single distraction, and leads people to believe that banning it will immediately make roads safer. But aren't there lots of things that are more "dangerous" or distracting to do while driving than talking to passengers, but aren't the continual focus for new legislation? Trying to ban stupidity or unsafe driving, distraction by distraction, will be pretty difficult, not to mention ineffective.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Cyberhwk writes "I have a system with Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit) installed on it, and it has 4GB of RAM. However when I've been watching system performance, my system seems to divide the work between the physical RAM and the virtual memory, so I have 2GB of data in the virtual memory and another 2GB in the physical memory. Is there a reason why my system should even be using the virtual memory anymore? I would think the computer would run better if it based everything off of RAM instead of virtual memory. Any thoughts on this matter or could you explain why the system is acting this way?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phil Clandillon saw a recent post about sparebots, and was moved to show his own work.

Asked about his technique to make the animation, he responded with great detail and technical clarity:

It was a very DIY operation. I've been doing these interactive flyers for around 6 years in my spare time for Sancho Panza, who are a house music sound system / promoter (most famous for their annual stage at Notting Hill Carnival) over here in London, UK. I typically make the flyers over the course of one or two evenings so that quality can be a bit variable, but the dancing electronic parts man turned out well. In 2006 the theme for the year's flyers was that Matt and Jim from Sancho would send me a piece of music, and I would base the flyer on it. The February tune was "Over and Over" by Hot Chip which is a repetitive electro-pop number. I had the idea for the dancing man made from components based on this.

The process of realising it went something like this:

I dug around in the drawers at home for all the electronics bits I could find (also a work colleague at the time helped out by donating some more vintage bits, such as those used for the head and legs) and made up the character on a piece of bread board.

I then need to photograph him in the various "frames" in order to create the animation. The biggest challenge was mounting the camera so it pointed down at the breadboard and so it didn't move around between shots. Also lighting was a problem as the character need to be reasonably evenly lit so he wouldn't throw shadows.

I used a combination of an open frame from a filing rack (think a cube with no sides), and a plywood wine rack with a seven inch reggae record stuck over one of the holes. The type of seven inch with the middle taken out turned out to be exactly the right size to poke the camera lens through. I used two pillowcases and three desk lamps to make a rudimentary light tent. I then moved the character gradually through his dance moves, taking a photo at each step. One problem was that pressing the camera's shutter button caused the camera to move, putting the animation out of alignment, so I used the camera's self timer instead, resetting it for each shot.

I then made the final adjustments to the characters position by layering up the frames in Photoshop, before animating the result in Flash.

I have a website but it's a bit out of date at the mo (shoemaker's shoes and all that) - you can see more e-flyers in my archive. Interestingly the artwork for the website is also created from electronics. I had a friend who can solder better than me help me make up an LED logo of the tag I used to spray when doing graffitti as a kid. I then took it out on the street in London and photographed it in a variety of locations. These photos went on to form the backdrop for the website (my gf is standing out of shot holding a 9V battery on the end of two wires!).

Phil and colleague Steve Milbourne also recently did this Excel spreadsheet ASCII music video for AC/DC from a few weeks ago.

We're a digital creative team and we're very inspired by the maker scene, so a lot of our ideas involve getting our hands dirty with hardware and software. We're also daily readers of the Make: Blog!

Thanks Phil. Keep up the great work!

How are you changing the way you look at the things in your life? When you look at a pile of junk, what do you imagine? What do you make when nobody is looking? Pass along your ideas in the comments, and add photos to the Make Flickr pool!

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photo by julia Krash

The bit-blissful sights and sounds get going tonight and continue through Sunday @ The Tank, NYC -

Archaic game and home computer hardware is recast into the unlikely role of musical instrument and motion graphics workstation in the BLIP FESTIVAL 2008, a four-day event showcasing nearly 40 musicians and visual artists occupying the international low-res cutting edge. The Blip Festival takes place DECEMBER 4—7, 2008 at The Bell House, and is presented by Manhattan art organization THE TANK and NYC artist collective 8BITPEOPLES.

Highlighting the chipmusic phenomenon and its related disciplines, the festival aims to showcase emerging creative niches involving the use of legacy video game & home computer hardware as modern artistic instrumentation. Devices such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy and others are repurposed into the service of original, low-res, high-impact electronic music and visuals — sidestepping game culture and instead exploring the technology's untapped potential and distinctive intrinsic character.

When: Friday, December 5, 6-8p
Where: 149 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
2008 Blip Festival

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Love the little adventure dudes on the ends of these teabags, custom designed for a posh cafe in Istanbul.

Activitea... (see what I did there)

Do you have a Nintendo Wii? Comic artist James Kochalka teamed up with Boing Boing Offworld to create a free series of Mii Monsters to customize games like Wii Sports and Wii Play. I'd love to see a slew of Kochalka's weirdos on the sidelines of Wii Sports. Seen here is Kzorx. Learn how to adopt the Monsters over at Boing Boing Offworld.
Introducing James Kochalka's Monster Mii

A site about restoring an old Lombard Industries Centaur folding motor scooter to pristine condition.

Although I have never actually seen one before, I have been looking for a Lombard Industries Centaur folding motor scooter for about ten years. Designed for use by private pilots and boaters, this neat little unit will run 35mph using a Clinton engine, and folds up to a large suitcase-sized package that weighs about 50 lbs. This particular scooter was in a friend's garage - he had bought it from another TRAACA club member, but decided he didn't want to mess with it.

Lombard Industries Centaur folding motor scooter (Thanks, John K.!)

Anonymous says: "It's an old watch, asploded into a necklace. How was this not on BB already? Plus it costs close to a G, so all of the commentors will flip the hell out. Hooray!" Victorian Watch Cock Necklace

Craig Yoe says:

My new book that I edited and designed, The Best of Sexology collects the wackiest and most unintentionally funny articles from America's first sex magazine, Sexology, The Illustrated Magazine of Sex Science. "Homosexual Chickens", "Adolph Hitler's Sex Life", "Sex and Satan", "Twin Beds or Single?", "Sexual Tattooing", "When Midgets Marry" are just a few of the subjects covered...or should I say uncovered?

The publisher of "Sexology", started in 1933, was Hugo Gernsbach, who published the first pulps of science fiction (the term originated in his pubs) and the science fiction award The Hugo is named after him. Gernsback used his science fiction writers and artists (like Frank Paul) to produce Sexology. There's a peek at the book here and I'll be on Fix TV's Red Eye show Fri. nite/Sat. morn at 2:00 a.m. to talk about it.

The Best of Sexology: Kinky and Kooky Excerpts from America's First Sex Magazine

Khuffie writes "It seems that the upcoming version of Opera 10, of which the first Alpha has recently been released, has already passed the Acid 3 test with a 100/100. The only other rendering engine to have a complete score is WebKit, which can be seen in Google Chrome's nightly build. Opera 10 Alpha 1 will also finally include auto-updates, inline spell checking, and also sees some improvements to its built-in mail client, including much-requested rich text composition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seen here is a 2700-year-old stash of marijuana, found in a Gobi Desert grave near Turpan, China. Ethan Russo, a visiting professor at the Chinese Acadmy of Scineces, and his colleagues report the discovery in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany (abstract). From Discovery News:

The size of seeds mixed in with the leaves, along with their color and other characteristics, indicate the marijuana came from a cultivated strain. Before the burial, someone had carefully picked out all of the male plant parts, which are less psychoactive, so Russo and his team believe there is little doubt as to why the cannabis was grown.

What is in question, however, is how the marijuana was administered, since no pipes or other objects associated with smoking were found in the grave.

"Perhaps it was ingested orally," Russo said. "It might also have been fumigated, as the Scythian tribes to the north did subsequently."

Oldest Marijuana Stash Found (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Sparkfun posted another handy tutorial, this one covers how to use a relay to switch wall power via one little ol' 5-volt microcontroller. A very helpful ability to add to your palette, which of course requires the obligatory "mains supply" caution statement - Don't Touch! I very much look forward to resetting my cable modem via AVR, how bout you? - Controlling Big, Mean, Devices

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I'm long overdue on some promised posts concerning the patent system and the harm it does for the healthcare field, but it's going to have to wait a little while longer. In the meantime, it's good to see that more people (including those in a position to do something about it) are noticing this as well. While we often feel that the EU goes overboard in declaring monopolies or anti-competitive behavior, it's finally realizing the one area where monopolies really do tend to be a problem: patents. The European Commission has released a report detailing how pharmaceutical companies regularly abuse the patent process for anti-competitive purposes, rather than to promote and ensure progress. It's unlikely that much will come of this now, but it's good to see people starting to recognize that the patent system can often be more of a problem than a solution.

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I was in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado last week. While taking a walk in the neighborhood with my family, we saw this unusual house. The stone cottage used to be in the center of the lot. The owners moved it to the front of the property and built a connected addition that nearly fills the lot.

Meg sez, "I just found a copy of one of my favorite used-book finds ever, 1912's Hygiene for the Worker, on the Internet Archive. It's wonderful in so many ways. The illustrations are simultaneously delightful and creepy, the language is charmingly outdated, and the lessons in the book attempt to create a race of scrubbed-clean, milk-drinking super employees who spend their vacations at home 'laying up a greater store of health and energy than the young people who come back tired and weary from having too good a time at the mountains and other regular summer resorts.'"

Hair. Most boys and girls, ordinarily, do not value or pay sufficient attention to the little things that go to make up a good appearance.

Take the hair, for instance. If you want to make a good impression, don't apply for a position with your scalp and hair so unclean as to be offensive.

It has now become the rule, in certain large offices, to draw the line against the girls and young women whose hair is fantastically arranged in the extreme of style. Elaborate head dressings suggest to the employer a certain vanity, self-consciousness, and frivolity that render a girl unable to put her mind seriously upon her work.

Clothing. Here also should be mentioned the impro- priety of wearing, during business, clothing that seems suitable only for evening or home use. The type of waist known as the lingerie is one that the business girl should not wear in the office. It is neither sensible nor dignified. Nor is it an economy, for on account of its sheerness it requires greater care and expense in laundering ; hence, it is seldom washed as frequently as it should be. There is nothing more distasteful to the average business man than unclean finery.

Boys and girls both are inclined to run to extremes of style in their dress, usually preferring garments that are of the most up-to-date cut and shape to those of more modest appear- ance, which are generally found to be made better and of more enduring materials. This is equally true of hats and shoes. An employer will probably notice whether you are wearing elaborately cut and high-heeled shoes, run down, unbrushed, and with broken laces, or whether your feet are shod in sensible, well-fitting shoes, kept clean and neat.

Hygiene for the worker ([c1912]) (Thanks, Meg!)

psmears writes "Describing a judgment that is likely to rein in the scope of the UK DNA database, where at present the DNA of those arrested by the police is kept permanently (even if the people concerned are never convicted, or even charged), the BBC reports that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that keeping such people's DNA in the database 'could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society.'" Reader megla adds a link to the full text of the judgement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years ago I held an event each year to raise money for the Child's Play Charity that puts videogames into the hands of kids staying at children's hospitals. We called it, in proper rock style, Fünde Razor. We're now in our fourth year, and thanks to help from friends in the industry — Kotaku, Game|Life, Rock Gamer, Gizmodo, not to mention tons of game and gadget manufacturers — we've raised thousands of dollars that we give over in its entirety to Child's Play. We've even moved beyond our original New York event to add a Denver and San Francisco event, all next Wednesday evening. (Location and times over on FundeRazor.com. [There's a similar event on Tuesday in Chicago.]) Prizes will vary a little bit from event to event (a lot of what we bring in are review items and such that all we bloggers have in our closets) but here's a partial list of what you can expect to win in the raffle or as door prizes at all three cities' events. It really is a blast. If you make it to the NYC event, come tell me hi! And if you can't make it out to any of the nights (or even if you can), please consider donating to Child's Play anyway. They're amazing. All the prizes that you could maybe possible win but if not you can still drink beer and play Rock Band [Offworld!]

Today in Defective By Design's 35 Days Against DRM campaign, the story of a loyal Prince fan who got kicked in the teeth by the DRM on the music Prince sold from his website: "Mike McCarty sends in his horror story of being a Prince fan, as a reminder of some of the tricks that have been pulled on music fans in this DRM age. Mike says, 'Luckily I only purchased one of MANY DRM-laden album from Prince's now defunct New Power Generation website, Xpectation. It came in the DRM-encumbered Windows Media format, but this was before I was ever aware of the horrors of DRM. Ironically, I EXPECTED the files to work pretty much forever, maybe not forever but at least a few good years. However, I guess the joke was on me as I misplaced the files on an external hard-drive a year or so ago and recently located them only to find out there's absolutely nothing I can do with them.'"

35 Days Against DRM -- Day 7: Prince: Friends without benefits. (Thanks, Peter!)

Inspired by the way razor clams dig into the seafloor sediment, MIT researchers have built a robotic anchor for autonomous water vehicles. About the size of a cigarette lighter, the prototype RoboClam imitates the way the real clam's "foot" works its way into the sand. Learn more at the MIT site and don't miss the video of a real razor clam in action. From MIT News:

"Our original goal was to develop a lightweight anchor that you could set then easily unset, something that's not possible with conventional devices," said Anette "Peko" Hosoi, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering whose collaborators on the work are Amos Winter, a graduate student in her lab, and engineers at Bluefin Robotics Corp.

Such devices could be useful, for example, as tethers for small robotic submarines that are routinely repositioned to monitor variables such as currents and temperature. Further, a device that can burrow into the seabed and be directed to a specific location could also be useful as a detonator for buried underwater mines.

RoboClam

In the last three years, we've adopted three stray cats. With that many cats in the house, the litter box is in almost constant use. If we don't stay on top of cleaning it, the smell gets overpowering. And even though we use an igloo-style litter box with a stair-step tunnel entrance, the cats have figured out a way to kick copious amounts of litter onto the floor. They seem to consider it a feline duty to scatter the filthy particles around.

I can't stand it any longer. I'm going to toilet train the cats, using the 9-step program outlined in this book, Kick Litter, by Perre DiCarlo.

The training method is so simple that it is explained in two pages. The rest of the book consists of photos of the author's cats and cutesy captions of what the cats "think" about the method. The book's cover jacket is an instructional poster you can remove and unfold, and contains everything you need to know to try this method.

I'll give it a try. If I'm successful, I'll shoot a video of my cats in action.

Kick Litter: Nine-Step Program for Recovering Litter Addicts

OMG. I love these Photoshopped portraits of the original Enterprise crew as Victorians!

Victorian / Steampunk Star Trek Wallpapers

More:

• Steam-Wars LEGO contest
• R2-S2 (R2 Steam Too) - The steam powered R2-D2

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OMG. I love these Photoshopped portraits of the original Enterprise crew as Victorians!

Victorian / Steampunk Star Trek Wallpapers

More:

• Steam-Wars LEGO contest
• R2-S2 (R2 Steam Too) - The steam powered R2-D2

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Josh Kopel made this determined little critter at the Dorkbot Seattle evil toy workshop. Check out his flickr set for more weird mashups. (Alas, my Furby expired on the operating table.)

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Josh Kopel made this determined little critter at the Dorkbot Seattle evil toy workshop. Check out his flickr set for more weird mashups. (Alas, my Furby expired on the operating table.)

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This photo of a tortoise was taken around 1900 on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean. The tortoise, named Jonathan, still lives there today. He may be the world's oldest living animal. From The Telegraph:

A spokesman for the island's tourist board said Jonathan is owned by the St Helena government and lives in the specially built plantation on the governor's land.

He said: "Jonathan is the sole survivor of three tortoises that arrived on St Helena Island in 1882.

"He was already mature when he arrived and was at least 50-years-old.

"Therefore his minimum age is 176-years-old. He is the oldest inhabitant on St Helena and is claimed to be the oldest living tortoise in the world.

"World's oldest living animal discovered after he is pictured in 1900 photograph"

UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner is a pioneer in the study of an emotion known as "elevation," characterized by a "a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat." (Not be confused with heartburn.) Triggering that emotion in the lab is challenging. His research group's latest approach though is to play their subjects Barack Obama's victory speech. (My IFTF colleague Jason Tester has dubbed the impact of Obama on people's brains "neurobama.") Slate has a great profile of "elevation" research, including the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis. I also look forward to reading Keltner's forthcoming book on the subject of "elevation," titled Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (which is not an Obama biography). From Slate:

Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in "positive psychology"—what makes us feel good and why. University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration...."

We come to elevation, Haidt writes, through observing others—their strength of character, virtue, or "moral beauty." Elevation evokes in us "a desire to become a better person, or to lead a better life."

"Obama in Your Heart" (Slate), Buy "Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life" (Amazon), Buy "The Happiness Hypothesis" (Amazon)

A bunch of people have sent in this story about UK Intellectual Property Minister, David Lammy claiming that by the 2012 Olympics, London will be a "fake-free zone" as he begins to crackdown on counterfeit DVD sellers. Not surprisingly, this move involved a variety of public and private parties, including the Motion Picture Association, UK Film Council, UK Intellectual Property Office, Federation Against Copyright Theft, London Councils, Trading Standards and the London police. Of course, the whole thing seems sort of yawn inducing. For a few years now, there have been stories noting that internet file sharing has been putting the counterfeit street sellers out of business. And, over the course of the next four years, you have to imagine that pace is only going to accelerate. So, congrats, David Lammy, for spending taxpayer money on stomping out something that was naturally dying out anyway.

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KingofGnG writes "AV-Comparatives, the Austrian team of experts dedicated to antivirus tests acknowledged as a reference point in the field, has published the second part of the mid-year comparative, an ideal addendum to the one already releasedlast September. This time the aim is to evaluate the antimalware tools' effectiveness against unknown threats, in a test scenario meant to prove the heuristic part and the generic markers of the on-demand scanning engines." The best in show (of 16 anti-malware packages evaluated), Avira AntiVir was able to find 71% of the unkown malware it was exposed to in the first week, dropping to 67% after the fourth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EMS Labs has released PDF-documentation and some new programming libraries for their Meggy Jr RGB handheld game development platform. The Programmable Guide is really well-done, clear and concise. Even I can almost figure it out. The code libraries (The Meggy Jr Library) provide a software interface to the Meggy Jr hardware and macros and functions (The Meggy Jr Simplified Library) that float on top of that. The Meggy Jr Simplified Library allows you to get started quickly without having to deal too much with understanding Display Memory or the nuts and bolts of communicating with the hardware. It also simplifies some of the excesses of the Arduino environment, so in the words of Windell: "you can just use the darned thing."

Programming Meggy Jr RGB

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EMS Labs has released PDF-documentation and some new programming libraries for their Meggy Jr RGB handheld game development platform. The Programmable Guide is really well-done, clear and concise. Even I can almost figure it out. The code libraries (The Meggy Jr Library) provide a software interface to the Meggy Jr hardware and macros and functions (The Meggy Jr Simplified Library) that float on top of that. The Meggy Jr Simplified Library allows you to get started quickly without having to deal too much with understanding Display Memory or the nuts and bolts of communicating with the hardware. It also simplifies some of the excesses of the Arduino environment, so in the words of Windell: "you can just use the darned thing."

Programming Meggy Jr RGB

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "We have recently learned that another law school legal aid clinic has joined the fight against the RIAA. Student attorneys from the Consumer and Commercial Law Clinic of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire, working under law school faculty supervision, are representing a lady targeted by the RIAA in UMG Recording v. Roy in New Hampshire. The case is scheduled for trial next Fall. That makes at least 4 law schools providing anti-RIAA defense services: University of Maine, University of San Francisco, Franklin Pierce, and, most recently, Harvard. Hopefully many more will follow. One commentator theorizes that this news 'will ... encourage[e] professors and students at other law schools to take on hitherto defenseless people being pilloried by the corporate music industry.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The MPAA has been pushing the FCC to allow it to basically add a kind of DRM to broadcasts. As it stands, the FCC blocks broadcasters from using "selectable output control" (SOC) to stop people from recording shows broadcast on television. They do this realizing that recording for the purposes of time or place shifting is perfectly legal, and allowing broadcasters to block consumer rights would be tremendously undesirable.

The movie studios, however, are trying to figure out yet another way to get money, and they want to rejigger release windows for movies. The way they're done now, movies are released to theaters, then special locations (airplanes, hotels), then DVD, then cable and finally network TV. What the studios would like to do is charge cable companies a lot of money to show movies on cable after they're in theaters but before they're released on DVD. Their (misguided) fear is that, if they show them on TV, people will record them and make them available via file sharing sites, killing off the DVD business. This is wrong on many levels, especially since high quality versions of the movies are almost always available on file sharing networks long before they are released on DVD, anyway. So, blocking the ability to record the movies on your DVR (which is what loosening SOC restrictions would do) wouldn't actually do anything to stop piracy -- but would piss off an awful lot of DVR owners out there, who want to know why they can't record the latest movies on TV.

The MPAA has been saying a lot of funny things in trying to defend its position, claiming that this form of DRM is necessary to let the studios release the movies early. That's simply wrong. There is nothing stopping the studios from releasing the movies in this manner right now. It's just their own misguided fear of people doing what they're legally allowed to do (record stuff on their TV) that's stopping them.

Yet, now, as a bunch of you have sent in, it seems the MPAA is going even further in this "up is down, black is white" argument in favor of being able to use SOC. It's claiming that it's the movie studios who are being pro-innovation here, and it's the consumer electronics companies (and consumers) who are anti-innovation:

"At its core, the position of CEA is that technology should be frozen in time, and any new services that require advanced technology should be banned," the MPAA told Adelstein on November 25. "This position is quite astonishing, coming from an organization that in the past has advocated in favor of technological innovation."

This is a neat bit of intellectual judo. Take your opponents (accurate) argument, and claim that it's actually your argument. The MPAA is lying, of course. They don't need SOC to innovate and release movies however they want. And, the CEA is quite pro-innovation, in letting consumers actually make use of their rights to record content. It's quite a statement for the MPAA to claim that taking away consumer rights is innovation. But, I guess that's what you get from a dying organization fighting for its life.

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lkcl writes "The GitTorrent Protocol (GTP) is a protocol for collaborative git repository distribution across the Internet. Git promises to be a distributed software management tool, where a repository can be distributed. Yet, the mechanisms used to date to actually 'distribute,' such as ssh, are very much still centralized. GitTorrent makes Git truly distributed. The initial plans are for reducing mirror loading, however the full plans include totally distributed development: no central mirrors whatsoever. PGP signing (an existing feature of git) and other web-of-trust-based mechanisms will take over from protocols on ports (e.g. ssh) as the access control 'clearing house.' The implications of a truly distributed revision control system are truly staggering: unrestricted software freedom. The playing field is leveled in so many ways, as 'The Web Site' no longer becomes the central choke-point of control. Coming just in time for that all-encompassing Free Software revolution hinted at by The Rebellion Against Vista, this article will explain more fully some of the implications that make this quiet and technically brilliant project, GitTorrent, so important to Software Freedom, from both technical and political perspectives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Mandiberg's created a beautiful and beautifully simple way to be seen biking at night:

I wrapped up my bike in retroreflective vinyl. Retroreflective vinyl is like a big scotchlite sticker; scotchlite is that super-reflective stuff that is on running shoes, jackets, and night safety equipment.

Here's a video of the process and result:

And, an opportunity to make your own:

Everyone I show it to wants to wrap theirs SO on December 13 at the Eyebeam Holiday Hackshop we are wrapping Bright Bikes.

Check it out: http://theredproject.com/brightbike/

We have materials and space for 30 bikes. Bring your washed bike (and chain), and turn it into a Bright Bike. We will have black, white, red, blue and yellow, and maybe a surprise color. You can wrap the whole bike, or put stripes/bands on it, or just cover your most visible parts (the seat stays in the back, and the fork in the front.)

Signup is at the Eyebeam Bookstore, the day of the hackshop, and or you could stop by before. First come first served. We will have slots and material for 30 bikes. Running in two shifts, from 1-230 and 230-4. At 4pm we will go for a dusk ride to document our critically-reflective-mass.

And if you are not NYC based, DIY. I will be in LA the last week of Feb and first week of March, and I can run workshops then. I will be in SFO the last week of April. Or you could just order the materials and do it yourself! http://www.beacongraphics.com/supplies/3M/3m-580.html

The cost will be $30 for 6 feet of vinyl (that is at cost). If you are going for a partial wrapping, you can get 2 feet for $10. What a deal!

Wheelin' and Dealin' for bicycle safety.

DONT FORGET TO WASH YOUR BIKE and chain!!!

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KrispyDroid writes "The world's second Google Android phone has been unveiled — by an Australian-based electronics company called Kogan. It will ship worldwide on Jan 29. It looks like a surprisingly nice form factor, not unlike a Blackberry Bold. The phones will be sold without a contract at low prices — $A299 ($US192)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few months ago, we pointed to Joe Mullin's excellent article detailing how various patent attorneys were finding a lucrative side business in registering or buying their own patents and suing companies themselves. It's just that much more lucrative. Mullin is back, describing two Silicon Valley patent attorneys, Dominic Kotab and Kevin Zilka, who have been registering or buying a bunch of patents, and have been quite active in both setting up multiple shell companies, and suing many different defendants. And, despite the fact that they're both based in San Jose, right down the street from many of the firms they've sued, all of the lawsuits are being filed in Texas, of course. This includes a lawsuit against Adobe, whose headquarters are a mere four blocks from the offices of Kotab and Zilka. Adobe asked for the case to be transferred to California... and the request was rejected.

They've sued pretty much all of the big name tech companies, including Microsoft (five different times, on five different patents), Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, AT&T, AOL and many, many others. The most recent is a lawsuit against Google for apparently violating this patent, which the lawyers claim Google is violating with its new Chrome browser.

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The Instructables book has a nice little write up in the NYTimes! Penelope Green writes-

The duct tape roses I made over Thanksgiving were fetching (until they were gummed by the cat), but post-turkey lethargy prevented me from digging into the meatiest projects in “The Best of Instructables” (Make: Books; $34.99). One example: the concrete light bulb wall hook, described as “an excellent excuse for driving a lag bolt into your wall” by its inventor, Ray Alderman. He and it are emblematic of the instructables universe, a blogging community of do-it-yourself-ers, robot-makers, food hackers and techno-geeks who share their crafty ways at Make magazine and Instructables (makezine.com and instructables.com), sometimes selling the finished products on etsy.com, the online bazaar for handmade things.

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snydeq writes "Researchers have discovered a new type of malware that collects passwords for banking sites but targets only Firefox. The malware, dubbed 'Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.A,' sits in Firefox's add-ons folder, registering itself as 'Greasemonkey,' the well-known collection of scripts that add functionality to Web pages rendered by Firefox. The malware uses JavaScript to identify more than 100 financial and money transfer Web sites, including PayPal, collecting logins and passwords, which it forwards to a server in Russia. Trojan infection can occur via drive-by download or download duping."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photography courtesy of Chemical Heritage Foundation (top left, bottom right); by Dustin Fenstermacher (top right, bottom left). Why old chemistry sets were better — and how to make your own today by Keith Hammond.

It's true: chemistry sets today don’t measure up to the classic kits that once scorched Formica kitchen tables across the nation. But you can still find respectable kits if you know where to look. More importantly, anyone can make their own flaming, fuming, booming DIY chemistry set as good as those from the golden age — or better.

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Plat'Home, makers of the awesome OpenBlockS MicroServer, had kind words (and an update for readers of the book!) for our Small Form Factor PCs book (by Matthew Weaver and Duane Wessels):

The explanations are detailed and hands-on. Even though it's filled to the brim with shell commands and console output the text is informative and easy to read. There is even a guide how to solder a cable to power the unit from a USB port (no, this is not covered by our warranty).

As the guide was written in 2006, it mentiones that all documentation is only available in Japanese. Even though the author claims it was fun to figure it all out, we want to make your life a little easier.
You don't have to worry about Japanese anymore, everything you need is available in English now: firmware, manuals, FAQ and support.

We're glad that the authors discovered our MicroServer and we wholeheartedly recommend this book. If you have a hacking streak and need a small firewall box to carry everywhere, this is for you!

Plat'Home MicroServer in O'Reilly hardware hacks book

Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs - (also available as PDF)
Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs is the only book available that shows you how to build small-form-factor PCs -- from kits and from scratch -- that are more interesting and more personalized than what a full-sized PC can give you. Included in the book are projects for building personal video recorders, versatile wireless access points, digital audio jukeboxes, portable firewalls, and much more. This book shows you how to build eight different systems, from the shoebox-sized Shuttle system down to the stick-of-gum-sized gumstix.

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rgraham writes "From the article on Growler, "Apple apparently believes that somebody else is behind Psystar, which might help to explain why a major law firm would take on what seems like a fly-by-night's case; also why Psystar has been so bold in continuing to sell its products. I knew this thing felt funny. As Alice in Wonderland might put it, 'It gets interestinger and interestinger.'""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first two volumes of Ed Piskor's comic-book historical hacker drama, Wizzywig. Wizzywig is the story of Kevin "Boingthump" Phenicle, a fictional hacker who's part Mitnick, part Poulsen, and part mythological. Boingthump is a preternaturally bright, badly socialized kid who discovers a facility for technology that's egged on by his only pal, "Winston Smith," a would-be Abbie Hoffman who is obsessed with the potential to use Boingthump's discoveries to monkeywrench the machine.

But soon enough, their roles are reversed, as Kevin's relentless pursuit of knowledge and power scares Winston so much that he tries (without success) to put the brakes on Boingthump's crazy ride through the phone system and the nascent Internet. The story blends fiction and fact, dropping in a Blue Box-selling Jobs and Wozniak (Boingthump picks the trunk-lock on their car and steals a Blue Box) and Cap'n Crunch, along with plenty of fictional BBS scenesters and grumpy computer-store owners. The backgrounds are filled with nostalgia PCs -- Atari 400s, Apple ///s -- and old Bellcore manuals.

The illustration and storytelling style reminds me a lot of Harvey Pekar (with whom he's collaborated on American Splendor), jumping backwards and forwards in time, switching points of view, going inside and outside of the characters' heads. The first two volumes are PHREAK and HACKER, with two more (FUGITIVE and INMATE) planned. Piskor prints and sells the comics himself (the books are quite handsome) and he's got extensive free previews online. At $15 each, with all the money going straight into the creator's pocket, what's not to like?

Wizzywig volume 1: PHREAK, WIZZYWIG VOLUME#2: HACKER

Consumerist points us to a story about how The Daily News newspaper in New York was able to quickly forge some documents and get the deed to the Empire State Building handed over, no questions asked. Apparently, there's really no verification process at all. As the paper points out, while most folks probably would notice this with the ESB, for plenty of other buildings it's an effective scam for someone who wants to take out a bogus mortgage (and then disappear). You would think, in this day and age, there would be a somewhat more involved process and checks before simply handing over the deeds on any building, let alone a landmark like the Empire State Building.

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krou writes "The Big Picture blog is running a Hubble Space Telescope imagery Advent Calendar, where for the 25 days (it started on the 1st of December), a new photo will be revealed from the Hubble Space Telescope."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a section of freeway near my house that goes through the wetlands on the edge of a lake. There's a lot of wildlife there that you can see as you're passing; turtles and ducks, and sometimes huge herons. It feels really magical to see the herons - they're so majestic and I'm always amazed they can live right next to all that traffic. Gerry Wykes writes one of my favorite nature blogs, Naturespeak. He recently posted this incredible video of a heron stalking carp in Lake Erie. If you look at the heron's legs, you'll see they barely disturb the water.

The final "carpe" is achieved with a lightening speed extension of the long neck. The moment is so fast that it is hard to see - you see the before and the immediately after, but not the in-between. My shot freezes one of these plunges at the moment the water blanket was lifted and the heron's head sliced under the surface. It is difficult to appreciate the shear patience and stalking skill that led up to this point.

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I am prone to fits of lust over really, really beautiful books, and no one gets me lustier faster than Sunday Press, publishers of the gigantic, marvellous "Little Nemo: Splendid Sundays" collections. These books collect the Sunday Little Nemo comics of Winsor McCay, a surrealist watercolor genius whose weekly strips were lush, gigantic paintings that took us through the dreamscape of Little Nemo, a charming and enigmatic boy living in turn-of-the-century America. And now there's a second volume: "Little Nemo in Slumberland, Many More Splendid Sundays."

I grew up seeing the Little Nemo strips reproduced in "large-format" hardcovers, typically 8.5x11, and I confess that I didn't really get what the fuss was about. The strips were small and smudgy, the type spidery and illegible. Then I saw the first Sunday Press collection, "So Many Splendid Sundays," and I experienced enlightenment. Publisher Peter Maresca has scanned, cleaned up and reproduced his favorite Nemo pages, at full size, 21" by 16", and at that size, Nemo is a completely different experience.

First of all, you can't read a book this big the way that you normally would. I couldn't read it at my desk chair -- even in my reading chair I barely fit (as you can see from these photos). The only way to really read these books is lying on your stomach on the carpet, the book open, chin propped on your hands, and you are, once again, 10 years old, reading the funnies on a lazy Sunday.
This second volume is every bit as charming and magic as the first. Mostly, of course, it's made of Nemo strips (120 of them!), but there are a handful of sweet little essays describing McCay's relationship to Coney Island (it was his muse) and to William Randolph Hearst, his publisher (and nemesis). There's also a Dinosaur Gertie flip book for you to cut and assemble, the perfect aperitif for your lazy Sunday with the funnies.

Little Nemo in Slumberland, Many More Splendid Sundays on Amazon, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Many More Splendid Sundays, Sunday Press publishing, Sample pages

Stef sez, "During the BBC's flagship morning radio news show, The Today programme, there's a religious segment called 'Thought for the Day.' Its rotating presenters are multi-faith, but humanists, agnostics and atheists or followers of specialist faiths such as the Cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, are barred. Platitudes.org.uk provides a daily parody of the broadcast piece and the site explains itself, thusly:

The BBC's department of Religion & More Religion, recognises that only those who commune with their invisible magic friend can possibly have any morality. Atheists, agnostics, humanists and other amoral non-believers are therefore excluded from the pure and godly Platitude of the Day, broadcast Monday to Saturday at 07.45 (but obviously not Sundays). For your further edification and spiritual improvement, we therefore present these concise, bite-size summaries of the wisdom of their presenters.

Platitude of the Day (Thanks, Stef!)

turnkeylinux writes "Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. called off their joint advertising agreement just three hours before the Department of Justice planned to file antitrust charges to block the pact, according to the lawyer who would have been lead counsel for the government. "We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day," says Litvack, who rejoins Hogan & Hartson today. "We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of day. Three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ongoing lawsuit between Apple and "MacOS on non-Apple machines" company Psystar has taken an interesting turn. Groklaw notes that in its latest filing, Apple adds a dash of conspiracy, noting that some mysterious "other persons" are behind Psystar, and it intends to figure out who they are:

On information and belief, persons other than Psystar are involved in Psystar's unlawful and improper activities described in this Amended Complaint. The true names or capacities, whether individual, corporate, or otherwise, of these persons are unknown to Apple. Consequently they are referred to herein as John Does 1 through 10 (collectively the "John Doe Defendants"). On information and belief, the John Doe Defendants are various individuals and/or corporations who have infringed Apple's intellectual property rights, breached or induced the breach of Apple's license agreements and violated state and common law unfair competition laws. Apple will seek leave to amend this complaint to show the unknown John Doe Defendants' true names and capacities when they are ascertained.

There's some speculation that this is a bit of a fishing expedition by Apple to uncover the names of various hackers who have been making it possible to run the Apple OS on generic machinery.

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From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Spikenzie Labs' impressive Button64 project offers a whole lotta input for Arduino/etc -

Decoding a button press is done with the help of a MCP23S17 port expander from Microchip. This chip has 16 general purpose I/O pins (GPIOs). Eight I/Os are used for the columns and other eight for the rows, forming a 64 button matrix. The columns (port B of the MCP23S17) are set-up as outputs and the rows (port A) inputs.

One of the great features of this project is that there are no diodes! Unlike many button matrices, it’s just the buttons and the MCP23S17.

Great aesthetics for such a useful device. It'd likely be a great interface for Arduino-Bingo ;)
Thoroughly detailed description of how it all come together in software/hardware over there - Project 64 / 64 Buttons

More:

1.5 hours of wiring …

Arduino Duemilanove

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?The "Solar Paper Latern" is made from 36 miniature solar panels with each connected up to an electroluminescent diode. The resulting light can remain on indefinitely, as long as the panels are near a spot of strong sun exposure.

Solar Paper Lantern by Damien 0'Sullivan @ Saint Etienne Design Triennial

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An anonymous reader writes "Thirty minutes of footage from Frank Miller's forthcoming The Spirit were shown to journalists in London yesterday. The description paints a picture of a highly stylized movie, somewhere between Sin City and Crimewave ..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Thirty minutes of footage from Frank Miller's forthcoming The Spirit were shown to journalists in London yesterday. The description paints a picture of a highly stylized movie, somewhere between Sin City and Crimewave...."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meet Dan! He's our associate publisher at MAKE and Magazine.org just did an interview with him -

Dan Woods is Associate Publisher for O'Reilly Media's Maker Media Division, which includes MAKE: Magazine, makezine.com,book publishing unit MAKE: Books, e-tail site MakerShed.com, and Maker Faire, a live event targeting armchair MacGyvers and Ben Franklins. Before taking on that post almost five years ago, Woods served with the Sebastopol, California-based O’Reilly Media’s book unit for nearly two years.

Dan is one of those behind the scenes folks you'd don't on the site that often who works hard everyday making what we do at MAKE possible.

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"Drawing Machine" is a robotic device that uses the physicality of sound vibrations to influence a pen rotating on a robotic arm. Check out the video to see this thing in action.

via AITDW

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licorna writes "The 3.0 version of Python (also known as Python3k and Python3000) just got released few hours ago. It's the first ever intentionally backwards-incompatible Python release."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The MAKE/CDM/Etsy sonic fun-derland event returns - this time @ our new location, Third Ward in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY! Kicking off the new monthly schedule, the first meet-up will be Thursday, Dec. 11th. Peter of CDM gives details -

Bonus – Make Your Own Beep-It Optical Theremin. For the cost of parts (about $10), Mike Una is giving a workshop – no experience required, and you’ll leave with your own Beep-It. (Space is limited!)

Double Bonus – You! We’re looking for hardware and software projects to share.

Not in New York? Stay tuned – we’ll have some ways to join up live online with both the CDM community and the Etsy community.

If you are in New York:

Directions to the Space

Party: 7-10p, 12/11 (snacks/drinks + lots of sounds for everyone, from non-musicians to hardcore musical hackers!)

Make Your Own Beep-It Workshop: 7:30-8:30p (arrive promptly!)

Here’s what the event is about, as described by, well, me:

Part party, part mixer, part Science Fair, and part performance, this is an informal chance for geeksters and the geek-curious to come together, relax, and discover new sounds. The evening is a gathering of inventors of circuit-bent toys, custom software and patches, interactive digital & visual instruments, custom electronics, electricity-powered noisemakers, DIY robots and new acoustic instruments. And it’s open to everyone from hard-core hackers & newcomers to music lovers who want to learn about the DIY music scene.

And here’s a big bonus: if you liked Michael Una’s Beep-It DIY optical Theremin, as debuted here, you can make your own for the low, low price of parts: about ten bucks.

Michael Una will demonstrate his optical theremin synthesizer Beep-it and conduct a workshop wherein attendees will build their own optical theremin. The basics of analog synthesis will be discussed. No skill level is required- all tools and parts will be provided by the participation fee.

Pay for your parts by Wednesday 12/10, and reserve your spot at the workshop, at EventBrite:
http://beepit.eventbrite.com/

Logo design by the amazing creator of the CDM logos and endless musical posters, Nat aka onetonnemusic.

See you next week, in New York or online!

We welcome people showing up with gear and creations at the last minute – bring cables, an extension cord, and (if you’ve got it) small speakers / headphones / PA (though we’ll do our best to provide some sound). But it does help to know who’s coming if you want to give us some advance warning, and we can help publicize your work in advance.

Head over to Create Digital Music to fill out the project submission form. I'm quite psyched for this - it's been a while since the last event and this one looks to be fully awesome!

More:

Beep-It optical theremin

Handmade Music Night photos

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You may recall, just about a year ago, there was suddenly a bunch of news over the possibility of Canada introducing its own version of the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). To the surprise of both the entertainment industry (who helped craft the law) and the politicians who were pushing it, the opposition to this law was incredibly successful in getting its message out. Starting with calls on various blogs and Facebook groups, kicked off by law professor Michael Geist, the issue became a big one throughout the media. The politicians who promised the entertainment industry that they would pass this law tried to delay the introduction, assuming that the opposition, while loud, was thin and would fade away. They were wrong. The issue continued to get attention, and when the law was finally introduced, the opposition, across the board, was widespread and strong. It wasn't just a fringe issue among "internet activists." It was something that people from all over the economy saw as a fundamental issue worth fighting for.

But why?

For years, copyright (and wider intellectual property) law has been considered to be sort of inside baseball, something that only lawyers and the entertainment industry cared about. But that's been changing. There are a variety of reasons for why this happened and why copyright is considered a key issue for so many people in so many parts of the economy. Michael Geist has now put together a film that tries to examine that question. After first discussing how the issue became such a big deal, Geist interviews a number of Canadian copyfighters to get a sense of why copyright is an issue worth fighting about: Not surprisingly, Geist has also made the movie available in a variety of different formats so people can do what they want with it, including remixing or re-editing it. There's the full version (seen above), an annotated version, a version for subtitling, or you can download the full movie via BitTorrent at either Mininova or Vuze. Unless, of course, you live somewhere where they claim that BitTorrent is evil and must be blocked.

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Democracy Now! interviews Matthew Alexander, author of How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. Alexander is a former US military interrogator who deplores the use of torture in interrogation as ineffective at extracting intelligence -- and he argues that it's very effective at outraging potential enemies and turning them into murderous extremists.

Yeah, you know, torture, it’s so narrowly or broadly defined depending on who you’re talking to these days. I would say torture, to me, is just unethical behavior. And you can do things that are legal, within the rules, that are unethical. And so, I just know, me, by my gut feeling, based on the principles that I was raised on, you know, that my parents gave to me, that there’s things I’ll never do, because I know it feels wrong and it is wrong. And so, you know, others felt comfortable either pushing all the way up to the limits and doing things that were unethical, but were legal, or breaking the rules. I felt that was not something I was ever going to do and I wasn’t going to allow my team to do.

I think what’s more important at this point is we know that torture has cost us American lives. We know that it’s ineffective. And we know that it’s wrong, and it’s damaged our image. I think, you know, for me as a military officer, my job isn’t to identify broken wheels, it’s to fix them. And so, the approach that I took and that I talk about in the book is, how do we move forward? You know, we’re given this choice of either terrorist attacks or torture. But maybe there’s a third way. Maybe there’s a better way to do interrogations that has nothing to do with torture. And in the book, I describe the process of coming up with these new ways and how my team, together, we were able to come up with the new methods.

US Interrogator in Iraq Says Torture Policy Has Led to Deaths of Thousands of American Soldiers, How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq on Amazon (Thanks, Denver Jewelry Guy!)

HOW TO - Make a plush "irradiated sirloin"... Microcontroller night light illuminates meaty issues By Rebecca Stern -

Faced with an assignment to make a plush night light, I thought, “Why light?” and brainstormed reasons for a stuffed toy to light up. In a glowworm toy, for instance, the light mimics nature. I’d been reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and this got me thinking about the chain of refrigeration, labor, and irradiation involved in American beef production. So I thought, glowing irradiated meat! I know that irradiated meat doesn’t glow, and neither does toxic waste unless it’s in a cartoon, but plush toys typically represent cartoon characters anyway, so it made sense: Plush Irradiated Sirloin.

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?"O'Clock" by Nadine Grenier, a student at ESAD Strasbourg in France, is a kinetic installation made from 300 analog clocks set in sequence to display this sentence every 12 hours when their hands come into alignment: "le temps passe, et chaque fois qu'il y a du temps passe, il y a quelque chose qui s'efface." The quote is from Jules Romains, a French poet, which roughly translates in "Time passes, and every time the time passes, there is something that fades".

"O'Clock" via Today and Tomorrow

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This is an amazing collection of textbooks that will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about electronics and electricity. OK, maybe not everything, but they are FREE! You can even download all the volumes, including source code, in a single click.

More about Lessons In Electric Circuits: Free textbooks about electronics

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Salim sez, "Studley was an 1800s organ and piano maker, as well as a carpenter and mason, who worked for the Smith Organ Co. He built this amazing tool-chest which packs in just about every device and instrument an organ tuner might need on location."' Studley Toolchest, ideal for the inventor or scientist (Thanks, Salim!)

Want to know more about MasterNewMedia? In this monthly web traffic and demographics report, we showcase all of the most relevant data, trends and indicators for the number of visitors, page views and reader profiles collected across many of the major online traffic and trend tracking services. The web traffic statistics for the past month of November, show no strong changes in terms of visitors and page views for MasterNewMedia.org. Overall a soft decline trend in traffic can be seen across a number of popular blog sites, and this in turn might have been caused by Google recent adjustments to his ranking algorithms. On the advertising and revenues front, Google AdSense seem to be showing an overall lowering of the rates paid by advertisers across the board, bringing down overall revenues for most web publishers. Revenue increases can still be made by working on linking campaigns and building a greater social following, but the key mover for higher earnings with Google is all about becoming visible and directly relevant to specific advertisers. By working to optimize your Ad Placement Targeting options, your site can become very visible to AdWords advertisers looking for specific keyword focused pages and topic sections. This in turn means the opportunity to sell advertising also on a CPM basis, as well as a tangible impact on your Google earnings. Traffic-wise MasterNewMedia is looking forward to further expand its language editions offering and I am actively selecting editor / partner candidates not only for its existing Portuguese/Brazilian and Russian sites, but also for a Dutch, German and French edition of MasterNewMedia. If you know someone who could fit this bill, wanting to translate in his native language our daily feature while sharing with me the Google-generated revenues of each specific languaged edition site, please do send her my way. In this monthly MasterNewMedia traffic report, you can find all of the key indicators and statistics relative to the number of our total traffic numbers for November. Even more interestingly, especially for potential advertisers is the demographics section of this report, in which we bring together different stats and indicators from a number of different web services. The result is a comprehensive and quite truthful identikit of the typical MasterNewMedia reader profile, helping us learn more about our audience and our specific reader profile as well as providing a sign of transparency and credibility to potential sponsors and advertisers. What other stats or trends would you like to see published in this monthly report? What other indicators or numbers would be useful to provide to interested readers and potential sponsors to help them even more understand our focus and existing reach? Let me know what you would like to see by utilizing the comments area at the end of the report. Here all of the MasterNewMedia traffic and demographics data for the month of November 2008:

MasterNewMedia Web Traffic and Audience Metrics: November 2008

Unique Visitors and Page Views

• Total Visits on MasterNewMedia: 534,861
• Total Page Views on MasterNewMedia: 758,822

MasterNewMedia International Editions - Breakdown

• MasterNewMedia International - English Version:
  • Unique visitors: 256,244
  • Page Views: 358,341


• MasterNewMedia Italian Version:
  • Unique visitors: 133,128
  • Page Views: 198,785


• MasterNewMedia Latino Version:
  • Unique visitors: 116,301
  • Page Views: 164,937


• MasterNewMedia Brazilian Version:
  • Unique visitors: 29,188
  • Page Views: 36,759

Source data: Google Analytics
Alexa measures the number of pages viewed by site visitors. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the visitors to the site. Source data: Alexa

Ad Impressions and Clicks

Source data: Google AdSense

Demographics and Technographics

Audience Age

Audience Sex

Audience Education

Audience HouseHold Source data: Google AdPlanner

Audience Business Activity

Audience Ethnicities Source data: Quantcast

Traffic by Platform Source data: Woopra - data relative to a smaller sample than total audience

Traffic by Browser Source data: Woopra - data relative to a smaller sample than total audience

Traffic by Browser/OS Source data: Google Analytics

Connection Speed Source data: Google Analytics

Traffic Frequency Source data: Quantcast

Traffic Sources

Source data: Google Analytics

Most Viewed Content

Top 10 articles of MasterNewMedia International - English Version - November 2008

1. Best Online Collaboration Tools 2008 - The Collaborative Map
2. Media Centers: Alternative, Open-Source, Cross-Platform Solutions - A FLOSS Comparison
3. HD Video Sharing: Best Solutions To Publish High Definition Videos - Sharewood Guide
4. Browser Compatibility Testing: Cross-Platform Cross-Browser Multiple Resolutions Compatibility Testing Tools - Sharewood Guide
5. The Social Media Optimization Manifesto: Key Social Marketing Principles To Increase The Visibility Of Your Web Site
6. From News Publishing To Newsmastering: Learn, Understand And Experiment How To Create Your Own Newsradars - Sharewood Guide
7. Improve Web Pages Load Times: Practical Advice On How To Speed Up Your Site - The Pingdom Report
8. Customer Relationship Management: How To Build Solid Trust Between Companies And Customers
9. Content Monetization: Fighting Unlicensed Content Republication Via Distribution Networks And Ad Sharing
10. MasterNewMedia Joins The Federated Media Advertising Network: John Battelle Video

Source data: Google Analytics

Video Audience

1. Video Views on YouTube: 2,645,778
2. Video Views on Qik: 1,116,730

Authority

Google PageRank Here below the MasterNewMedia PageRank calculated with PR Checker: PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. If you want learn more about PageRank here are some relevant articles:

• Guide To Understanding Google PageRank
• Google PageRank Explained, Defined, Best Reference Resources
• Future PageRank Helps Reputation And Trustworthiness Shine Over Artificially Inflated Search Results: Google TrustRank

Alexa Rank The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). Source data: Alexa
Technorati Authority Source data: Technorati

Link Popularity

Google Inbound Links

• MasterNewMedia English: 2.520
• MasterNewMedia Italian: 1.230
• MasterNewMedia Latino: 250
• MasterNewMedia Brazilian: 155

Source data: Google

Yahoo! Inbound Links

• MasterNewMedia English: 130,251
• MasterNewMedia Italian: 33,282
• MasterNewMedia Latino: 7,486

Source data: Yahoo!

Social Popularity

Social News And Social Networks

• Bookmarks at Delicious: 1.138
• Pages posted on Digg: 133
• Pages posted on Reddit: 20
• References from Yahoo! Answers: 111
• Comments on StumbleUpon: 8
• Inbound links from Wikipedia: 32

Source data: Quarkbase

Twitter Source data: TwitterCounter

Citations, Mentions and Trackbacks

Source data: Technorati Source data: BlogPulse

MasterNewMedia RSS Feed Stats

Source data: FeedAnalysis

When not specified differently the data shown refers exclusively to MasterNewMedia International edition and not the additional language editions in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Edited and prepared by Max Badolati for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 4th 2008 as "MasterNewMedia Web Traffic and Audience Metrics: November 2008".

We've discussed a few times how the distributors of Japanese anime have often had something of a love-hate affair with "fansubbers" -- fans who take the original videos in Japan and subtitle them in foreign languages for fans in other countries. A few years ago, we noted that rather than set loose the legal hounds on fansubbers, many anime companies embraced the fansubbers and used them to learn where there were strong potential market openings for foreign distribution. It was like free market research. On top of that, many realized that the fansubs helped increase demand for the authorized product. Unfortunately, not all anime distributors have seen things the same way, but many have.

Matt writes in to tell us about the case of the Dattebayo fansub group, which has been doing rapid, high quality releases of certain popular anime titles. The company behind the anime has never bothered them. Rather than try to shut them down, the US licensee of the series has decided to put up its own free subtitled versions, knowing that if it tries to put significant restrictions on them, it will never work. The group is actually charging people for a week, right after the shows air in Japan (rather than the typical long wait), but then will offer it free. In response, the fansub group is going to stop creating their own versions, noting they only did so in order to watch the videos in a reasonable time frame. Once again, despite what some in the entertainment industry claim, we're seeing that you absolutely can compete with so-called "pirates."

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Do you like designer lighting, but can't afford the $11,700 price tag? Yeah, me too! This instructable shows you how to remake a really cool designer pendant light for under $56. Cool.

The original light uses cloth wire which I was able to find in white, then dyed red. I was unsure about using the wire so used the Ikea lights instead. I would love to hear from anyone that has ideas on how to make this design more eco-friendly. While these bulbs are only 60W each I think it can be made better. Smaller bulbs take away from the size and design. I was thinking of running small led lights inside the bulb once the element burns out...some how. Retail cost: $11,700, Instructable cost: $55.93

More about making a DIY: Designer light

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Atompunk: a new Dutch movement dedicated to the appreciation of atomic-age aesthetics. They're having an exhibition in Amsterdam next September:

About Atompunk the cultural period 1945-1965,

Atompunk is a strictly pre-digital period, but it includes mid-century Modernism, the "Atomic Age," the "Space Age," and, especially, lots of Communism and communism paranoia in the USA. Communist analog atompunk is an ultimate lost world.

Sovjet styling, underground cinema, Googie architectuur, Space and Sputnik, moonlanding, superhero-comi, art & radioactivity, the rise of the US military/industrial complex & the fall-out of Tsjernobyl

Here Comes "Atompunk." And It's Dutch. So there

Update: Michael Reeve sends in this reminder of the Victoria & Albert Museum's Cold War Weekend starting tomorrow in London!

Lumenary7204 writes "According to the Register, Apple recently received US Patent Application No. 20080291629 for a "liquid-cooled portable computer." The filing describes a system where a "pump ... coupled to the heat pipe is configured to circulate the liquid coolant through the heat pipe." All claims of obviousness aside (after all, PC enthusiasts have been using liquid and phase-change cooling for years), the existence of the patent application seems to indicate that laptop manufacturers are in agreement with physicists and engineers who say we are running up against the practical limits of air-cooling such compact pieces of equipment."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SSRN-Music and the Market: Song and Stock Volatility by Philip Maymin... via Waxy & Kedrosky.... Philip writes-

I compare the annual average beat variance of the songs in the US Billboard Top 100 since its inception in 1958 through 2007 to the standard deviation of returns of the S&P 500 for the same year and find that they are significantly negatively correlated. With the recent high stock volatility, people should now prefer less volatile music. Furthermore, the beat variance appears able to predict future market volatility, producing 2.5 volatility points of profit per year on average.

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Video technology sure has come a long way in the past 30 years. In the early days the first video recorders used by TV production crews were large quad decks about the size of refrigerator lying on its back and recorded video onto 2-inch wide videotape. Now you can easily find camcorders that fit in your pocket and even shoot high-definition video. This holiday season millions of people will give and receive some form of video, whether it's a LCD TV, video game system, camcorder or other device. Why not consider giving the gift of video in the form of a fun and practical project that can be found in the pages of Make Magazine? Here is just a sampling of some of the video related gifts and resources you can find in the pages of Make and the Maker Shed. Happy Video Holidays!

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Nick Lally made this simple noise box using an Arduino and just a few other parts. The website doesn't have the schematics, but the source code is well documented and it's easy to figure out what he used and where. Make sure to check out the audio clip on the site, it sounds really cool.

More about Arduino powered noise box

In the Maker Shed:


Bare Bones Arduino Board Kit (Unassembled)

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Photograph by Jeff Lieberman

Want robots to be musical, creative, and expressive? Better brush up on your engineering. Musician/ roboticists Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman constructed a web-connected "robotic mechanical orchestra" that plays a marimba by firing rubber balls out of a cannon, strikes traditional percussion instruments, and also rubs mechanical fingers along wine glasses. The machine, Absolut Quartet, uses artificial intelligence to creatively riff on melodies composed remotely by users on the web.

"At the core, the machine is just motors, metal, and software," say the MI T alums. "However, the design of these elements gives the whole machine a 'personality' and this is what allows a creative dialog to exist between the machine and the online user."

Of course, that dialog can't just work once -- it has to work over and over again. The guys wanted the technology to "disappear," leaving a purely creative experience. But that meant making 3,000 custom parts and 10,000 stock parts work in harmony.

And then there are the 500,000 custom rubber balls firing a 4-meter arc onto the keys.

"For any reasonable maintenance, this can only fail roughly 1 in 10,000 times," the duo explains. They tried four fundamentally different shooting mechanisms before they found one that worked -- springs and a rotating arm.

They then consulted an engineer to settle on magical, maintenance-solving ingredients such as polyethylene glycol dimethacrylate, which they used to make the suede fingers resonant. But they also needed the skills of a professional glass harpist so they could get 35 tuned wine glasses.

"Being both musicians and roboticists, we have always been interested in combinations of the two," say Paluska and Lieberman. In the finished work, centuries-old percussion and glass armonicas meet modern industrial robotics. Musician/inventor Benjamin Franklin, who built the first glass armonica, would have been proud.

>> Absolut Quartet: absolut.com/absolutmachines

>> The Build: bea.st/sight/absolut

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 14, page 18 - Peter Kirn.

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Repton writes "Thanks to the Second Amendment, even the elderly have the right to keep and bear arms. The problem is that many of the guns out there are a bit unwieldy for an older person to handle. However, the inventors of the Palm Pistol are planning to change all that with a weapon that is ideal for both the elderly and the physically disabled. In a statement submitted to Medgadget, the manufacturer, Constitution Arms, has revealed the following: 'We thought you might be interested to learn that the FDA has completed its "Device/Not a Device" determination and concluded the handgun will be listed as a Class I Medical Device.' Physicians will be able to prescribe the Palm Pistol for qualified patients who may seek reimbursement through Medicare or private health insurance companies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this 47-minute video, Paul Grignon lays out the workings of the fractional reserve system, explaining how banks are able to create money and then collect interest on it. He's highly critical of the system (which I have a hard time getting my head around), and he makes a good case for the idea that the deck is stacked against everyone except bankers.

Money As Debt (Thanks, Chris!)

The American Gaming Association, the casino industry's biggest trade group, is struggling to reach a consensus on internet betting, as its members take up divergent viewpoints. Some casino companies support federal regulation for it, while others want states to be able to regulate it (though maybe not Kentucky); others, of course, want to see the blanket ban continue, fearful of anything that might let new competitors in to the market. The AGA's latest approach appears to be to support legislation to study whether to legalize online betting -- which, we're pretty sure, sounds about as wishy-washy as could be.

The facts surrounding online gambling in the US are already pretty clear: previous legislative efforts may have reduced online gambling, but they've also driven American bettors to largely unregulated services and forced them to use some other often-shady services to fund their activities -- since US banks are given the responsibility to stop gambling sites' funding. The result is that gamblers keep up the same activity they were doing before, but are now exposed to more danger and risk, while US authorities are missing out on the chance to collect some taxes. This still seems pretty irresponsible, since gaming regulators in mature markets would argue that driving consumers into unregulated territory where they're not protected by laws and rules governing casinos isn't a great idea.

Meanwhile, the AGA's waffling isn't a surprise, since many of its members hate to see new competition in any form. But existing casino operators are, arguably, better placed than anyone to compete in new, highly regulated markets that don't require huge capital outlays on the scale of expensive new properties. Also, it's hard to understand how more competition for gambling dollars could hurt consumers, when competition might actually deliver them a number of significant benefits, particularly over gray-market services of questionable legality.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Love these little retro science fiction buttons from Reprodepot! Twelve bucks gets you six.

Science Fiction Button Set (via Making Light)

From the VECONA Fashion Show in Brugge -- an octopus dress for all your tentacle fetish needs.

VECONA Fashion Show BACKSTAGE: Cabaret Gothique Brugge Nov 2008 (via JWZ)

IEEE Spectrum is running a feature about the progress of game AI, and how it's helping to drive AI development in general. They explore several of the current avenues of research and look at potential solutions to some of the common problems. "The trade-off between blind searching and employing specialized knowledge is a central topic in AI research. In video games, searching can be problematic because there are often vast sets of possible game states to consider and not much time and memory available to make the required calculations. One way to get around these hurdles is to work not on the actual game at hand but on a much-simplified version. Abstractions of this kind often make it practical to search far ahead through the many possible game states while assessing each of them according to some straightforward formula. If that can be done, a computer-operated character will appear as intelligent as a chess-playing program--although the bot's seemingly deft actions will, in fact, be guided by simple brute-force calculations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this 47-minute video, Paul Grignon lays out the workings of the fractional reserve system, explaining how banks are able to create money and then collect interest on it. He's highly critical of the system (which I have a hard time getting my head around), and he makes a good case for the idea that the deck is stacked against everyone except bankers.

Money As Debt (Thanks, Chris!)

Creative Commons is running a study on what "non-commercial" means to different people -- creators, remixers, corporations, webmasters, and so on. Many of us give out our works under Creative Commons "non-commercial" licenses (I do!), but there's a lot of disagreement about where the boundary between commercial and non-commercial lies. Your contribution to the survey will help Creative Commons refine this border and come up with something that we can all point to when a disagreement arises.

As previously announced, Creative Commons is studying how people understand the term “noncommercial use”. At this stage of research, we are reaching out to the Creative Commons community and to anyone else interested in public copyright licenses – would you please take a few minutes to participate in our study by responding to this questionnaire? Your response will be anonymous – we won’t collect any personal information that could reveal your identity.

Because we want to reach as many people as possible, this is an open access poll, meaning the survey is open to anyone who chooses to respond. We hope you will help us publicize the poll by reposting this announcement and forwarding this link to others you think might be interested. The questionnaire will remain online through December 7 or until we are overwhelmed with responses — so please let us hear from you soon!

Non-Commercial study questionnaire

Creative Commons is running a study on what "non-commercial" means to different people -- creators, remixers, corporations, webmasters, and so on. Many of us give out our works under Creative Commons "non-commercial" licenses (I do!), but there's a lot of disagreement about where the boundary between commercial and non-commercial lies. Your contribution to the survey will help Creative Commons refine this border and come up with something that we can all point to when a disagreement arises.

As previously announced, Creative Commons is studying how people understand the term “noncommercial use”. At this stage of research, we are reaching out to the Creative Commons community and to anyone else interested in public copyright licenses – would you please take a few minutes to participate in our study by responding to this questionnaire? Your response will be anonymous – we won’t collect any personal information that could reveal your identity.

Because we want to reach as many people as possible, this is an open access poll, meaning the survey is open to anyone who chooses to respond. We hope you will help us publicize the poll by reposting this announcement and forwarding this link to others you think might be interested. The questionnaire will remain online through December 7 or until we are overwhelmed with responses — so please let us hear from you soon!

Non-Commercial study questionnaire

Artzilla.org is a new website about fun, artistic, and experimental Mozilla (mostly Firefox) add-ons. Participating artists include Theo Watson, Aram Bartholl, Evan Roth, Dragan Espenschied, Timo Klok, Jamie Wilkinson, Danja Vasiliev and Tobi Leingruber. I bet Pirates of the Amazon will be there, too, a Firefox add-on that "inserts a "download 4 free" button on Amazon, which links to corresponding Piratebay BitTorrents." Read more about the event on the fffffatlab site.

Artzilla.org Launch Party and Browser Hacks Exhibition
Saturday, December 13
Worm, Achterhaven 148, Rotterdam

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Back in October, we heard about yet another peering dispute concerning internet backbone connections, reminding us that these sorts of battles seem to happen like clockwork reminding everyone that the internet is basically held together with handshake agreements.

The details on the Cogent/Sprint fight quickly became muddy, as both sides spun great stories for the media, each blaming each other. Sprint claimed that it wasn't actually a peering dispute at all, as Cogent wasn't a "peer" since it had agreed to pay a fee to connect (typical peering arrangements involve no payments -- just two networks agreeing to connect). Cogent claimed that Sprint was going against an agreement, and the whole thing blew up in the media. Cogent played the media card first, blaming Sprint, and it worked: Sprint came out looking like the bad guy, and quickly reconnected the network.

Now, Forbes has put together a great detailed look at what actually happened. Apparently, Cogent had asked Sprint for a peering agreement many years ago, but Sprint refused -- fearing that Cogent would send a lot more traffic than Sprint, making it an unfair deal. After back and forth haggling, the two companies agreed to a trial, where Cogent would pay Sprint nearly half a million dollars to test out a connection. If Cogent did not send significantly more traffic, then the two would establish a peering relationship. And, Cogent claims, it lived up to its end of the bargain. The amount of traffic was about equal. Sprint, however, claimed that Cogent still didn't meet the terms of the agreement, but for a totally different reason: complaining that Cogent didn't send enough traffic. This seems pretty questionable, as the supposed fear was that Cogent would send too much. That's why Cogent claims Sprint never intended to set up a real peering arrangement in the first place.

The end result was a standoff, where Sprint just started billing Cogent, as per the terms of the contract if the test period was a failure. Cogent then ignored the bills, pointing out that the test wasn't a failure, and by the terms of the contract, the two had a peering arrangement where it owed no money. After arguing about it in court, Sprint went a step further and disconnected the links, which ended up backfiring. The whole thing is not yet resolved, but apparently the two sides are talking, and say they're intent on working out a reasonable deal. No matter what, as Forbes notes, it's an interesting look into the behind-the-scenes agreements that keep the internet running.

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strikeleader writes "TechCrunch has an article from an interview with General Kevin Chilton, US STRATCOM commander and the head of all military cyber warfare. Who protects us? 'Basically no one. At most, a number of loose confederations of computer scientists and engineers who seek to devise better protocols and practices — unincorporated groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the North American Network Operators Group. But the fact remains that no one really owns security online, which leads to gated communities with firewalls — a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HE Zhao wrote in to tell us about an open source Wii peripheral drum-kit project he's been working on:

I have recently developed Wii Drum High, a software integrates Wiimote, Nunchuk and Wii Balance Board to stimulate a complete drum set. Different gestures and joystick buttons result in correspondent drum sounds. I recorded some videos of real drummer playing with it, and it worked out pretty good.

The software, released under the GPL, is written in C# using Brian Peek's WiimoteLib API. Using the Visual C# Express development environment and WiimoteLib, you can make your own PC apps that use the Wiimote or Balance Board for input. Zhao's source is a good example to look at if you decide to head down this path, as is Peek's WiimoteLib guide on the coding4fun blog.

Wii Drum High - Wii peripheral drum kit
WiimoteLib API for .Net
Brian Peek's Wiimotelib development guide

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Oh, man, this is sad and unexpected news: 16-year veteran CNN reporter and anchor Miles O'Brien will be departing CNN, as the network closes its sci/space/enviromental/tech news division. Snip from mediabistro:

O'Brien's departure comes as the network dismantles its science, space, environment and technology unit in Atlanta. That includes O'Brien as well as six producers. O'Brien has been CNN's chief technology and environment correspondent since being replaced as anchor of American Morning in April 2007.

The network's environmental coverage will continue through the Planet in Peril franchise, which is part of the Anderson Cooper-hosted show AC360. The LA Times has an item about these changes, too. I won't go through a laundry list of the departing names here, but I've had the pleasure of meeting and/or briefly working with a number of them as a guest on various CNN shows. They're talented, dedicated, rare professionals.

Miles is truly one of the greats. I can't think of a single broadcast journalist as knowledgeable on space, aeronautics, and other tech topics. I am so sorry to hear this news.

Update: The screengrab above from Miles O'Brien's twitter feed. (Thanks, Matt West)

Here's an interesting article on Nanowerk about coating cotton yarn in carbon nanotubes (CNT) to make it conductive. While still a ways off from DIY use, this is an intriguing step forward for wearables! Looks like they could learn a thing or two about making a sewable LED, though. (Thanks, Sean!)

From the Maker Shed:

Lilypad E-Sewing Kit

The LilyPad e-sewing kit contains the bits to sew LEDs into any piece of clothing. Add turn signals to a jacket, accentuate a t-shirt, or light-up your favorite pair of jeans with this simple to use kit. This kit contains the very basics to the LilyPad system. It's a great entry-level kit for people who want to experiment with wearable electronics. Consider adding the LilyPad Pro Kit to extend control and use of the LilyPad system.

Features:

• 5 LilyPad Bright White LEDs
• 3 LilyPad Button Boards
  
• 2 Coin Cell Batteries 20mm
  
• 1 Coin Cell Holder
• 1 Spool 4Ply Conductive Thread

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Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we loved the Logitech Mice That Weren't, hailed The Sharper Image's comeback, and wondered whether its "Inventor's Lab" would stop it becoming just another brand-for-hire. Uncut currency wrapping paper made Christmas morning a felony, a new iPhone app made it easier to log into free WiFi hotspots, and a Spectrum ZX81 was ressurected as an Ubuntu PC. Oobject listed ten fascinating toolboxes, Joel cooked in the Kitchen of 1943's Future while wearing Too Late watches, and we learned that If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wood-working tools. John, meanwhile, experienced Sonic Nausea — no, not yet another hedghog game. Rob reviewed Antec's Skeleton PC case There was an Animal screen cleaner for your dirty display, classic Andy Rooney going ape over computers, and LEGO Pirates, ahoy! Netbooks are the hacker's friend, birds live in Bird House CCTV Cameras, and Cameraphones became your weapon in the coming price-match wars. There was a Vintage PC hardware gallery, a A drinking straw made from straw, and an Eee Box with HDMI and a swankier video chip. You want a shuriken magnets. Nighttime video was shot with Canon's 5D mkII, Cats rode Roombas, and an inflatable outdoor projection screen was made to accompany inflatable pools and inflatable barbecues.

It was pretty clear back in September, when the Justice Department hired well-known antitrust litigator Sandy Litvack, that it had decided that it was going to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google, even if there were serious questions about what harm its ad deal with Yahoo would actually cause. Despite plenty of negotiation and totally rewriting the deal, the Justice Department was set on opposing it, leading Google to give up.

Now, that litigator, Sandy Litvack has admitted that the Justice Department was three hours away from filing its antitrust suit, which he was "looking forward to" and he's apparently disappointed he didn't get to go to court over it. That seems troublesome. If the purpose of antitrust activity is to protect consumers, then its litigators should be pretty happy that it avoided a (taxpayer-funded) legal battle.

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chrb writes "The Association of Space Explorers, a non-profit group of people who have completed at least one Earth orbit in space, has presented a report to the United Nations titled Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response. The UN will now meet in February to discuss the issue and try to define a global political framework for dealing with asteroid-based threats to the Earth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Network World has a great opinion piece about the fact that no one gets fired for banning instant messaging at work, noting how security policies often over-protect at the risk of harming potential efficiencies. This has been true for years. When telephones first became common, some companies banned anyone from having a telephone on their desk. In later years, it was true of desktop computers, internet connections, certain applications and specific websites. Lately, there's been an effort to ban social networks. In each case, the reasoning is pretty clear. Security professionals want to lock things down, and the easiest way to do that is to simply ban stuff. It's not their job to see if the applications are actually useful or could provide real ROI to a company. So the real question is how can companies avoid being overly aggressive in banning applications or websites, while still avoiding opening themselves up to too much risk?

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Machine for Making Toy Torpedoes

Machine for Sawing Shingles

Life-Preserving State-Room for Navigable Vessels

Lathe for Turning Shafting

Machine for Cutting Diamonds

The Rothschild Petersen Patent Model Museum, in Cazenovia, NY, houses an incredible collection of nearly 4,000 patent models. What's a patent model? Between 1790 and 1880 inventors had to submit working models along their patent filing. Like many Makers, I'm crazy about tiny functioning models of mechanical things, and would love to go see these in person someday. Maybe I can convince the producers to shoot some video there for season two of Make: television...

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Just Married. Joi blogs:

Mizuka and I just got married. We went to the Inbamura town hall, filed our papers and visited the local Shinto shrine, Munakata Shrine. It's the second marriage for both of us so we decided to keep it pretty minimal. The only non-minimal thing was setting up and taking shots of ourselves...

Peace Corps Online writes "Vascular surgeon David Nott performed a life-saving amputation on a boy in DR Congo following instructions sent my text message from a colleague in London. The boy's left arm had been ripped off and was badly infected and gangrenous, there were just 6in (15cm) of the boy's arm remaining, much of the surrounding muscle had died and there was little skin to fold over the wound. "He had about two or three days to live when I saw him," Nott said. Nott, volunteering in with the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, knew he needed to perform a forequarter amputation requiring removal of the collar bone and shoulder blade and contacted Professor Meirion Thomas at London's Royal Marsden Hospital, who had performed the operation before. 'I texted him and he texted back step by step instructions on how to do it,' Nott said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.