Dave Bullock (eecue) plugs his piece up at Wired on a cellphone modded into a portable blood tester. This could become a significant piece of medical technology. "A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter, and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria, and other illnesses. Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. These systems are slow, expensive and require dedicated labs to function. And soon they could be a thing of the past."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.”

Graham writes: "Unfortunately, he won’t get to talk. He died in a plane crash yesterday."

(Via Why, That's Delightful)

It occurred to me that one way to measure the worth of a blogger is how much intelligence do they add or subtract to or from the universe.

Sometimes it seems some bloggers just subtract, that when they post, others must negate the damage they do. One of their blog posts is an environmental disaster, like an oil spill or a nuclear accident.

Of course our presence in the vastness of the universe is infinitesmal, both in time and space, so either way it doesn't make much of a difference. But it's something to consider at the end of a year. How much value did you add to the intellect of the universe in the last 12 months -- and here's best wishes to doing even better next year.

DynaSoar writes "President-elect Obama's transition team has published for public comment a white paper entitled Space Solar Power (SSP) — A Solution for Energy Independence & Climate Change. The paper was prepared and submitted by the Space Frontier Foundation and other citizen space advocates, and calls for the new Administration to make development of Space Solar Power a national priority. The SSP white paper was among the first ten released by the Obama transition team. It is the first and only space-related white paper released by the team to date. With 145 comments thus far, it is already among the top five most-discussed of the 20-some white papers on Change.gov."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On June 29, I took a picture of the prices at a local gas station, thinking they were worth documenting for two reasons:

1. The prices were so shockingly high.

2. I thought they'd continue to go up.

In a blog post, I compared them to prices recorded by Google Maps street view of the same station.

Yesterday, returning from a lunch in Sausalito, I stopped at the same intersection and took another picture. Instead of going up dramatically, the price of gas had gone down, dramatically.



Just goes to show, try to predict the future, the future fcuks with you.

Update: One of the cool things about the rise in gas prices earlier this year is that it got a bunch of people to buy these small cars that you see all over Europe. Not just in Berkeley, I saw a bunch of them in NY too. Maybe we should make a deal with Ford and GM and the American people, we'll swap one for one, an old gas guzzling SUV for a modern new high-tech Smart. Could be one of the public works projects of the new New Deal.

Hugh Pickens writes "W. Mark Felt Sr., 95, associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal, better known as 'Deep Throat,' the most famous anonymous source in American history, died at his home in Santa Rosa, California. Felt secretly guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to pursue the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office buildings, and later of the Nixon administration's campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies. 'It's impossible to exaggerate how high the stakes were in Watergate,' wrote Felt in his 2006 book A G-Man's Life. 'We faced no simple burglary, but an assault on government institutions, an attack on the FBI's integrity, and unrelenting pressure to unravel one of the greatest political scandals in our nation's history.' No one knows exactly what prompted Felt to leak the information from the Watergate probe to the press. He was passed over for the post of FBI director after Hoover's death in 1972, a crushing career disappointment. 'People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward. The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn't that what the FBI is supposed to do?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tis the season for X Of The Year awards.

Time has Person Of The Year, I have Blogger Of The Year, and InformationWeek has CTO Of The Year, who they just announced is Werner Vogels of Amazon. I heartily endorse this choice.

Vogels has led us into the age of cloud computing, a buzzword for sure, but also a kind of software development that holds great promise. For me, it's the next step on a path that began with CompuServe in 1980, when I begged them to let me run software on their server, so I could do great things with their CB Radio environment. Of course they wouldn't. Now, Amazon not only lets me run software in their cloud, but the environment I run it is exactly the same environment that runs on my 7-inch netbook computer. That makes my inner software architect very very happy. You just need to write the app for one platform and voila, it's available at 40,000 feet on a jet flying at 600MPH from NY to SF, and who-knows-where (geographically) in Amazon's cloud. I actually logged onto my server from the jet using Remote Desktop Connection. I knew it would work, but I just had to try it to say I'd done it. It did work.

Now Werner had the vision to do all this, and more -- and to somehow get the huge organization that Amazon is to ship it with the vision intact. That's what CTOs do, their work is more prosaic than ideological, although ideology is important. The main thing the CTO does is get the organization to do important things. I don't know how he does it, it's a skill I don't have, but I'm in awe of it.

There's another thing to commend Vogels, he reads this blog. No joke, to me that's important, because we have a basis for communication. We've only met once, but he was instantly familiar because of the email exchanges we've had.

Now from time to time I shoot an idea over his way, something I'd like to see Amazon do in their cloud, and he never says one way or the other if they're going to do it, but sometimes the ideas do come out. Whether I was an impetus or not doesn't matter -- I'm happy when I get what I wanted.

A few months ago I suggested they implement the back-end of a Twitter-like service as part of the Amazon cloud. This was back when Twitter was having huge trouble keeping the service up. Now they're not having that problem, Twitter is much more reliable, but I think it's still a good idea, and I wonder if we even need Amazon to do it. It might be possible to build what I want using the services they already provide.

Let's give it a go. Viewed from the cloud perspective, my Twitter stream, the one I read, is a sequence of 140-character bits of text with several attributes. Easy to represent in SimpleDB or S3. Then the question is who has the right to insert something into that sequence? The answer is the people I follow. So there must be a way to represent that, again SimpleDB would have no trouble doing that. That list is publicly readable but only I can write to it. Now that's something I have to look into. Does SimpleDB offer permissions like that? I know S3 does. So maybe my follow list should just be stored in S3. It's very much like an RSS subscription list, and we have many years of experience working with those and a fairly consistently implemented standard. Obviously there's a user interface to Twitter, many of them, but that's not something I would ever expect Amazon to do, that's the province of the developers.

This is just an exercise. Not sure if it goes anywhere, but it may be something to get a conversation started.

I've also suggested to Evan at Laconi.ca that he offer an AMI on Amazon for an instant microblogging server.

But I guess my point, at the end of this rambler, is congrats and thanks to Werner and his team at Amazon for pushing the market in this direction. They're doing good work.

Scientists Hack Cellphone to Analyze Blood, Detect Disease, Help Developing Nations @ Wired...

A new MacGyver-esque cellphone hack could bring cheap, on-the-spot disease detection to even the most remote villages on the planet. Using only an LED, plastic light filter and some wires, scientists at UCLA have modded a cellphone into a portable blood tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria and other illnesses.

Blood tests today require either refrigerator-sized machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or a trained technician who manually identifies and counts cells under a microscope. These systems are slow, expensive and require dedicated labs to function. And soon they could be a thing of the past.

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bfwebster writes "A set of pharmaceutical process patents for 'evaluating and improving the safety of immunization schedules' (Classen v. Biogen et al.; see US Patents 6,420,139; 6,638,379; 5,728,385; 5,723,283) were held to be invalid due to unpatentability. The decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but was upheld with a terse citation to In re Bilski (which decision we discussed here). Here's the entire text of the appeals decision: 'In light of our decision in In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment that these claims are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 101. Dr. Classen's claims are neither "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" nor do they "transform a particular article into a different state or thing." Bilski, 545 F.3d at 954. Therefore we affirm.' It will be interesting to see what happens when these same standards start getting applied to software-related patents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we interviewed Douglas Krone, the CEO of new import tech toy store Gizmine; found an astonishing $250,000 wristwatch; and beheld a giant mechanical spider. John saw a spy cam-watch from Brando, an awesome Lego chess set, and—drool!—Moleskine iPod cases. There was also a floating DVD player, a Roomba from 1959, and a crazy 1980s ad with Zack! Lego Maniac!

TweakGuides is running a detailed examination of PC game piracy. The author begins with a look at the legal, moral, and monetary issues behind copyright infringement, and goes on to measure the scale of game piracy and how it affects developers and publishers. He also discusses some of the intended solutions to piracy. He provides examples of copy protection and DRM schemes that have perhaps done more harm than good, as well as less intrusive measures which are enjoying more success. The author criticizes the "culture of piracy" that has developed, saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century, and piracy has apparently somehow become a political struggle, a fight against greedy corporations and evil copy protection, and in some cases, I've even seen some people refer to the rise of piracy as a 'revolution.' What an absolute farce. ... Piracy is the result of human nature: when faced with the option of getting something for free or paying for it, and in the absence of any significant risks, you don't need complex economic studies to show you that most people will opt for the free route."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Photo via myhomeideas.com)

Mother Earth News has plans for building a built-in bed. I have yet to find a good set of plans for the famed Murphy bed; has anybody else?

Build one of these, put it somewhere semi-private in your home, and rent it to a community-minded friend (or random Craigslister) to decrease your energy footprint by increasing your denominator for home energy use. It's up to you whether you make "help on projects" a condition of the rental:)

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I like my current job writes "Having worked full-time in IT for the past 12 years, I would really like to work less and focus on other goals and priorities in my life. I asked my current employer and was shot down. It seems like everyone I know in IT works full-time except for entry-level help desk staff. Striking out on my own seems to be the only way to control the ball and chain around my ankle. However, my experience with independent consulting is a 'feast or famine' situation, with work coming all at once, thus making part-time impossible, or the other extreme (which is even more likely). Is part-time work a pipe dream in IT? Maybe a career in toilet cleaning is calling me."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the great things about Maker Faire is the opportunity to meet clever people and their fascinating projects. Often you have a conversation with a person who is highly skilled in an area you have never really considered before. This was the case when I met up with Jerry Etheridge of the North Texas Battle Group.

The idea behind the battles is that each ship is a 1:144 scale model of ships built prior to 1945. The hulls are made of balsa sheet, and each ship is armed with a CO2 powered gun firing ball bearings at each other. You fire onto the other ship until somebody gets wet. Since they run in fresh water, they don't worry too much about motors and other electronics getting damaged. When you sink, somebody rows out and grabs your superstructure and recovers the vessel, you patch up your holes, and go out to battle again.

The North Texas Battle Group has a wealth of information on their site. You may find that there is a group doing similar work near you. There seems to be a decent collection of battle ship videos on Youtube.

Has somebody sunk your battleship? Have you built, battled or seen a battle in miniature? How can you use your students' and your maker skills to help understand other subjects like history, science, language, math or art and music? Add your ideas to the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.

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Sportsqs points out a story at Coding Horror which begins: "Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary here in the US. You probably have several of these programmer guys or gals on staff. I can't speak to how much your servers may cost, or how many of them you may need. Or, maybe you don't need any — perhaps all your code executes on your users' hardware, which is an entirely different scenario. Obviously, situations vary. But even the most rudimentary math will tell you that it'd take a massive hardware outlay to equal the yearly costs of even a modest five person programming team."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a report on Wired.com, the RIAA spokesman claimed that the RIAA has not filed any new lawsuits 'for months,' and according to the Wall Street Journal report discussed here yesterday, the RIAA stopped filing mass lawsuits 'early this fall.' Knowing that the RIAA has a problem with telling the truth, I did a little investigating, and found out that the RIAA had, in fact, commenced a wave of lawsuits just last week. Why would anyone believe anything their spokesperson says? This is an organization that has a tendency to mispeak a lot, if you know what I mean, even when under oath." CNet has a copy of the RIAA's new form letter that it will ask ISPs to pass on to alleged copyright-infringing users. It says, in part, "This letter does not constitute a waiver of our members' rights to recover or claim relief for damages incurred by this illegal activity, nor does it waive the right to bring legal action against the user at issue for engaging in music theft."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rheotaxis writes "A circuit judge in Arkansas will not order the state to reveal where its computers were used to edit Wikipedia articles about former governor Mike Huckabee while he was running for President. Two Associated Press journalists used WikiScanner to track the edits to IP addresses used by the state. Writer Jon Gambrell and News Editor Kelly P. Kissel filed a suit in October 2007 asking the state to reveal which state offices used the IP addresses, because state rules don't allow using computer resources for political purposes. The director of the Arkansas Department of Information Systems, Claire Bailey, claimed in court that releasing this information would allow hackers to target these state offices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch suggests a new possible scenario for your online identity. Google and Facebook may soon be the only companies controlling the way most of you are going to identify yourself on the Web. Photo credit: James F Clay Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect are two new and competing services which provide you with the ability to login into your favorite social network, as well as to access an increasing number of your preferred content publication and distribution services: from YouTube to Delicious and more. The key new thing here, is that by adopting one of these online identification systems you can log into all of these web-based services by using always the same credentials. For example: popular site TechCrunch has already started using both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect to allow its readers to login into the site social community by using their own Facebook and Google credentials. Similarly, the commenting system Disqus has also been thinking about integrating these two same services by the end of the year. But is this really a cool thing, from all standpoints? As George Siemens points out in this Media Literacy digest issue, Facebook and Google already own the majority of the digital content you share on the Web. Your e-mail, photos, music, contacts, are all mostly stored on their servers. Given this situation, how smart is it to allow these two companies to be able to also start monitoring all of your moves and actions online? Should they be the ones to control your access to your social network, blog comments, and to everything else you do online? This, along with other hot technology issues and new interesting media and education-related resources, makes up for another rich media literacy digest, showcasing the deep and disruptive changes new media technologies are bringing into your lives, and the good questions you should ask yourself before fully embracing them. Here all the details: Intro by Robin Good

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends by George Siemens

Facebook vs. Google

Earlier this year, the short term future of the internet included a four company race:

• Yahoo,
• Facebook,
• Microsoft,
• and Google.

Since that time, Yahoo has managed to successfully exclude itself. They are now best seen as an acquisition opportunity. Microsoft is still trying to figure out how it can apply a similar lock to the internet that it has (had?) on the desktop. They’re current philosophy is “innovation through blatant duplication” - revealed by the Zune and a rumoured Zune phone. Microsoft’s internet strategy is confused at best, retaining too much of the desktop model. They are trying to innovate, and given their financial resources and market presence, they shouldn’t be ruled out. Which leaves Google and Facebook as the two prominent companies fighting to define the future of the internet. Google is stable and consistent, reporting continued growth in their share of the search market and regular innovations (with odd, slightly embarrassing missteps such as Lively). It appears that Facebook has all the momentum right now. Facebook is where Google was five years ago - innovative, redefining the game, and operating on a different set of premises from its competitors. Most companies launching widely disliked platforms such as Beacon would be punished by loss of users. Not Facebook. They keep growing - Facebook is challenging Google for the amount of time visitors spend with the service.

Balance Between Individual and Group-genius

Science and art have been historically defined by individual genius. In the 50’s, individual invention gave way to group / institutional invention (i.e. Bell Labs). Now it appears that loosely connected networks of specialized expertise (such as pharmaceutical networks or the network that was formed to research SARS at the height of the crisis in 2003) are providing answers to the most challenging questions of our era. At the heart of the transition from individual to institution to network innovation is obviously the role of the individual. Is Einstein the last genius takes a look at the value of individual vs. group based activities:

“”Successful research groups are those that grow and evolve on their own over time,” he says. “For example, an individual comes up with a good idea, gets funding, and new group begins to form around that good idea. This creates a framework where many smaller groups contribute to the whole.”"

Grades: Evaluation Without Context

Malcolm Gladwell is busy promoting his new book about the systemic (sometimes circumstantial) causes for success - Outliers. He carries this focus into an article: Most likely to succeed:

“There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.”

There are many angles to consider in the article as Gladwell runs a parallel discussion of teacher success and quarterback success. I found the discussion of the limitations of tradition metrics most valuable (p. 5). We simply do not know who will be a good teacher by the ways we currently measure. Grades are essentially evaluation without context. The process of ‘becoming’ a teacher (or carpenter, plumber, or doctor) requires activities - and evaluation - to be situated in a real context.

Let’s Talk Systemic Change

In recent presentations / discussions, I’ve been making the point that grassroots level approaches to reform in education are being hampered by systemic barriers. The structure of systems of education impedes future innovation. What is required, of course, is a reformulation of educational institutions. As is often the case, we are not entirely without examples. Consider Cisco’s pursuit to redefine itself to better compete in a networked world:

“Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos — not to mention a new financial incentive system — encourage executives to work together like never before. Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto… ”Without changing the structure of your organization,” Chambers told the analysts in September, “I would argue that [innovation] will not work.”"

Who Owns My Thoughts?

It’s been a year or so (I think) since mybloglog introduced the concept of having our identity (and network) trail behind us as we visited different websites. A site that set up mybloglog would allow visitors to connect with each other beyond simply comments. Not much happened with the concept after the launch. A few blogs added the widget, but I haven’t seen significant adoption. Of course, as Google has learned from Facebook, relationships are more important than content in determining loyalty and commitment to a site or service. While I can happily post on my site, the real value for readers is in the connections they form with other people. Google has to date monetized content with services like adwords. But what do you do to monetize relationships? How do you get people to use your service as a source for forming relationships? Facebook answers with Facebook Connect and Google responds with Friend Connect (their marketing department wasn’t involved in the “let’s give this thing a creative name” discussion). What does this mean? Do all of our comments belong to Facebook? or Google? I’m personally less concerned with these companies owning my content than I am with their knowledge of my relationships / connections. Facebook in particular is very good at mining data based on relatedness (oh, look, many of George’s friends list these topics of interest…or this political orientation…or religion). Both Facebook and Google desire to know us, not just our content. That’s what doesn’t sit well with me. Oops, gotta go login to Google mail…then off to check my Facebook account.

Classroom Response Systems

Classroom response systems are now common in many universities and colleges. CRS’ are used for faculty to poll students - asking questions related to course content and, based on responses, re-teach key points or clarify misconceptions. While it sounds simple, writing questions that reveal misconceptions students have about curriculum is difficult. CRS are usually fairly affordable for students (except when they lose their clickers). I always wondered why we were building separate systems for response when many students already have mobile phones. Why not just use phones and texting for feedback? I read about an MIT initiative on something like this… and at least one university has started using iPhones for a response system. The important thing here is that the system works on any phone / device.

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on December 19th 2008 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About the author To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".

Photo credits: Facebook vs. Google - PaulPaladi Balance Between Individual and Group-genius - Herbert Kratky Grades: Evaluation Without Context - Graça Victoria Let's Talk Systemic Change - Tri Vo Who Owns My Thoughts? - Dunca Daniel and madmaxer Classroom Response Systems - Chris Modarelli

RockDoctor writes "A report is circulating that in the run-up to the selection of prize-winners for 2006 and 2008, some members of the Nobel jury accepted an expenses-paid trip (or trips) to China to 'explain the selection process.' That's not, in itself, an incriminating event ('Is there something that we're doing incorrectly, or not doing?' is a valid question), and if there was dishonorable intent, it doesn't seem to have worked too well (the last Chinese Nobel Laureate was in 1957). There does seem to be embarrassment about falling into an obvious conflict-of-interest mantrap." PhysOrg mentions that a corruption prosecutor is also looking into a Nobel-related sponsorship from a pharmaceutical company that was linked to one of the winners for this year's Medicine prize.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The holidays are quickly approaching, but it's not too late to give a year subscription to MAKE or a gift certificate to the Maker Shed store. We all know how makers love robots, so why not make a papercraft robot to personally deliver the gift of making?

A quick search for "papercraft robot" will turn up a number of results, but I found a huge stash of really great ones on a Japanese site that I'm completely unable to read. The site is linked below. If you don't read Japanese, just follow anything that looks like a link until you find a PDF.

If you want to do something custom, you can find a model shape that you like and Photoshop a different skin onto it. Otherwise, just print it out on heavy weight paper and get to work with scissors and glue. I ended up using the one above without alteration, and I finished it by giving him a MAKE package to deliver. You can resize and cut this illustration from one of the free downloadable MAKE gift cards.

Only the robot needs to know that you waited until the last minute to do your gift shopping. The second law ensures that your secret will be kept safe.

Some Awesome Papercraft Robots
MAKE Gift Subscription
Maker Shed Gift Certificate
Downloadable MAKE Cards

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ericatcw writes "With many users now used to having multiple monitors at home or work, you had to figure someone would try to offer a 'desktop replacement' laptop that offered the same. Lenovo is the first. Its new W700ds laptop will offer a 10.6 inch LCD screen in addition to the 17-inch primary display. The W700ds also sports a quad-core Intel Core 2 CPU, up to almost 1 TB of storage, and an Nvidia Quadro mobile chip with up to 128 cores. A Lenovo exec called this souped-up version of the normally buttoned-down-for-business ThinkPads the 'nitro-burning drag racer of ThinkPads.' There is even a Wacom digitizer pad and pen for graphic artists, who are expected to be the target market, along with photographers and other creative types who are willing to trade shoulder-aching bulk (11 pounds) and price (minimum of $3,600) for productivity enhancements." At the other end of the laptop size spectrum, Dell recently announced plans to launch a rival to the MacBook Air. Called "Adamo," it is supposedly "thinner than the MacBook Air," though further details will have to wait for the Computer Electronics Show in early January.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Landon Fuller put together a secret message passing system that exploits a feature of DNS servers. It's based on a hack first conceived by Dan Kaminsky, which allows you to set a single bit of data by caching a wildcard zone on a cache server:

In each DNS query, 7 bits are reserved for a number of flags, one of which is the Recursion Desired (RD) flag. If set to 0, the queried DNS server will not attempt to recurse -- it will only provide answers from its cache.

Combine this with a wildcard zone and it's possible to signal bits (RD on), and read them (RD off). To set a bit to 1 the sender issues a query with the RD bit on. The wildcard zone resolves all requests, including this query. The receiver then issues a query for the same hostname, with the RD bit off. If the bit is 1, the query will return a valid record. If the bit is 0, no record will be returned.

To send the message, the sender and receiver agree on a DNS server and a big list of secret words. A unique hostname is generated for each word in the list, each of which is used to set one bit of data in a remote DNS server. The receiver can come along at a later date and extract the message from the dead drop by querying those same names. It's a pretty inefficient way to transfer data, but who ever said secret spy messages needed to be efficient?

You can download Landon's program from his site. If you want to play with it, I'd recommend either just testing it with a short message or two, or using your own server. As you can imagine, it's a bit of a resource hog, since it requires a full lookup just to communicate a single bit.

The DNS Dead Drop
Attacking Distributed Systems: The DNS Case Study (PDF)

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I'm off on my family holiday and won't be back until 2009, so I wanted to drop one last post in the queue for the wild and wooly 2008 -- a year that was busy and wonderful and that ended a little scarily. We moved continents and had a baby; I wrote two books and published three; went on a book tour and spent a month in Asia researching the next book; and to top it all off, got married three times on two continents (to the same woman!).

It's been a fantastic year, thanks to you folks. It's been an especially great year for me, writing-wise. The UK edition of Little Brother, my first young adult novel, is selling briskly, and the US edition is doing spectacularly, having just gone on to an eighth hardcover printing (the hardcover's selling so well that my publisher's delayed the paperback for a year!). The book's made just about everyone's best-of lists for 2008: the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, School Library Journal, Amazon Editors' Picks, Amazon top teen books, Richie's Picks, Book Sense, VOYA, TeenReads, Texas Library Association, io9 -- not to mention a whopping haul of awards and award-nominations: Emperor Norton Award, ALA's YALSA Award, Cybils Award, Prometheus Award, Ontario Library Association White Pine Award, the ALA Printz Award and the Nebula Award! My agents are doing some serious talking with a film studio (though nothing's ever final until it's signed and delivered), and there are more overseas publishers signing up every month to do their own editions.

Best of all is all the fan-stuff -- videos, art, readings, translations, adaptations... All the stuff that takes advantage of the Creative Commons license to remake Little Brother to better suit the readers (and man, do I get awesome email from readers, from security researchers at Microsoft to activist students in rural schools). And of course, I was floored by the generosity of the donors who sent hundreds of copies of the book to libraries, schools, halfway houses, and shelters as a way of saying thanks for the CC license.

Who the hell knows what'll happen in 2009? It's definitely the most uncertain new year I can remember. One thing I'm sure of, though, is that whatever happens, we'll all figure it out together, that the Internet will make it possible for us to bug-in and help each other here at home, rather than heading for a defensive position in the hills. Crappy economies are often the home of wonderful Bohemias. Two recessions ago, I dropped out of school to become a computer programmer. In the last one, I quit the company I'd co-founded and went to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now that I'm a parent -- and now that I'm a little older -- I feel the risk a lot more keenly than I did then. But I just keep on remembering that we live in the best time in the history of the world to have a worst time: the time when collective action is cheaper and easier than ever, the time when more information and better access to tools, ideas and communities are at our fingertips than they've ever been.

Have a fantastic holiday. Remind the people who matter to you of that fact. Ring in the new year with a big grin, and I'll see you all in 2009.

eldavojohn writes "Wired has a short piece on NYC's new street light project. I don't think we need to belabor the many benefits that LEDs hold over traditional light bulbs, but the finishing touches are being addressed, and they will hopefully be put into place sometime next year. This design won a competition back in 2004, and OVI has been whittling down the prototypes. At $1.175 million, this sounds like a pretty cheap deal considering the DOE forked over $21 million to 13 R&D projects along the same lines."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, after giving it much thought, I decided to give out an award that I called, unoriginally, Blogger of the Year. I felt entitled to do so because I am a blogger, like millions of other people.

Why should I, of all the people who blog, give an award once a year to someone who, imho, exemplifies what's great about blogging? Because I can. And of course so can you. That's the point of blogging. Nothing makes my blog better than any else's. It's what I put here, my ideas, my beliefs, my desires, my foibles and foils -- oh never mind. The point is you can give out an award too.

But this is my Blogger of the Year award.

I'm not ready to announce who it is this year, but I've more or less made my decision. I called last year's BOTY to see if she approved my choice, and she did. Not that that's a requirement, it isn't, but I would have been surprised if she had disagreed. And while both people exemplify what makes blogging tick, what makes it worthwhile, the people couldn't be more different.

Last year's BOTY is a woman, this year's is a man.

Last year's BOTY is a tiny little person who eats vegan and spreads the joy of body acceptance. This year's BOTY is not small, and eats greasy food (as do I) and smokes!

Last year's BOTY is cute, this year's BOTY well, I don't think anyone thinks he's cute, except perhaps his wife, and even there I wonder. And I'm pretty sure even he doesn't think he's cute. (So you know it's not Adam Curry.)

Last year's BOTY often goes naked in public as a form of social, artistic and political expression. As far as I know this year's BOTY is always fully clothed in public.

Both people rub others the wrong way, get people to say "Who does he or she think he or she is?" I have a funny feeling all BOTYs will have this property.

Another thing both BOTYs have in common is they were both at BloggerCon I. Haha. Now there's a good clue.

I don't know when I'm going to announce the choice, but I love a good tease, so you gotta figure I'm going to stretch this one out, play it for all its worth. Sorry!!

"curly"

Banning Facebook at the office still doesn't make much sense to us, but even if we granted the (incorrect) premise that Facebook should be banned for being non-work related, it's still odd to see the country of Montenegro's reasoning for banning Facebook in all government offices. They're claiming that it's to avoid taking down their own network. Usually, you take down your network from traffic heading in not out. And, it's not like visiting Facebook takes up that much traffic. In the meantime, at least some other governments have realized that Facebook can be a useful way to talk to citizens. Hell, even terrorists now like Facebook. Perhaps governments should think twice about banning it.

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The WSJ has a column talking about some changes sites like YouTube and MySpace are making to make it easier to flag abusive content. The sites are reacting to the growing storm about cyberbullying, and are perhaps attempting to head off legislation that could inflict onerous regulations on them. The column focuses on the speed with which sites -- often hampered by sheer volume, as well as the number of unfounded reports -- can react to the flags and take down offending content. But should removing content that depicts or constitutes bullying or harassment be the ultimate goal? Like other reporting systems, it's a little hard to tell if these will actually do anything to get to the root of the problem: the bullying itself. Treating cyberbullying as separate and distinct from bullying or other abusive behavior that happens offline just masks the underlying issue. Without addressing that, the real problems for the victims will continue, regardless of whether their tormentors' activities get displayed online or not.

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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Trevor DeRiza writes "Today, Valve and EA revealed that this week's earlier rumors were true: Spore (and other EA games) are coming to Steam. As of today, Spore, Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack, Warhammer Online, Mass Effect, Need for Speed: Undercover, and FIFA Manager 2009 are all available for download on Steam. In the coming weeks, EA will add Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Red Alert 3. On the official Steam forums, when asked whether or not Spore would contain the dreaded SecuROM DRM that contributed to it being the most pirated game of 2008, a moderator replied, 'It does not have third party DRM.' EA has also finally launched a 'de-authorization tool' to free up limited installation slots." Several readers have written to point out other news about Steam today: they've begun selling games priced in local currency for European customers. The only problem? Their conversion rate seems to be $1 per €1, somewhat less favorable than the current exchange rate, which is roughly $1.40 per €1.

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Back in October, we were disappointed by a UK court ruling that effectively told the UK's Patent Office that it had to stop rejecting software patents outright, and instead consider software patentable if it met certain criteria. Given the widespread evidence that software patents have done plenty of harm, and almost nothing to help the software industry, this is generally disappointing. However, it looks like the UK patent office may be trying to do its best to ignore the implications of the court ruling. A few readers have sent in the news that the patent office has released some guidelines that effectively say the patent office will continue to use the same guidelines its used in the past, which reject patents for pretty much all pure software. Good for them.

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Today, on my In Bed podcast, I interview Wendy Chapkis, author of Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine.

Wendy and her co-author Richard Webb conducted extensive interviews with members of WAMM (The Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana) - the patient collective that exemplifies the "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" ethos when it comes to pot medicine.

In this excerpt, Wendy talks a bit about how boring ole' cannabis became demon "mari-juana," in D.E.A. history.

Listen to an excerpt

Read an introduction to Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine (PDF).

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

Machine Project Electron Wranglers- Synthesizer workshop from machine project on Vimeo.

Looking for something MAKE-ish to do in Los Angeles? My friend and hero Mark Allen will be teaching an Introduction to Soldering / Build Your Own Synth Workshop on December 20th from 3pm - 5pm at Machine Project (the awesomest place in LA). $50 covers the class and materials ($40 for Machine Project members), and you'll end up with your own working primitive synthesizer at the end. Mark is an excellent teacher, so you're sure to learn a lot, too.

Registration info here

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imamac writes with this excerpt from news out of Carleton University: "Atif Shamim, an electronics PhD student at Carleton University, has built a prototype that extends the battery life of portable gadgets such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, by getting rid of all the wires used to connect the electronic circuits with the antenna. ... The invention involves a packaging technique to connect the antenna with the circuits via a wireless connection between a micro-antenna embedded within the circuits on the chip. 'This has not been tried before — that the circuits are connected to the antenna wirelessly. They've been connected through wires and a bunch of other components. That's where the power gets lost,' Mr. Shamim said." The story's headline claims the breakthrough can extend battery life by up to 12 times, but that seems to be a misinterpretation of Shamim's claim that his method reduces the power required to operate the antenna by a factor of about 12; 3.3 mW down from 38 mW. The research paper (PDF) is available at the Microwave Journal. imamac adds, "Unlike many of the breakthroughs we read about here and elsewhere, this seems like it has a very high probability of market acceptance and actual implementation."

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Lifehacker has figured out which DIY projects people viewed most on their site over the last year. Here's video of my favorite:

And here's the full top 10:

• DIY Invisible Floating Bookshelf


• DIY Camera Stabilizer On-the-Cheap


• Backyard Shed Turned Home Office


• Set Up Cheap Ambient Lighting with Rope Lights


• Build Your Own Wire Photo Wall


• Build a Home Theater PC for Less than $200


• Microwave an Instant Chocolate Cake in a Coffee Mug


• Drink Delicious Water with a Reverse Osmosis Filter


• Turn Your Broken Laptop into an Arcade Cocktail Cabinet


• Increase Your Privacy with $16 DIY Window Frosting

Check out the article for links to the above, their all-time most-popular DIY projects, and to find out what a "listicle" is!

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