Chris sez, "Here's the latest issue of the journal Surveillance and Society, including an article that I wrote on the earliest use of film surveillance by British police, in 1935. Five minutes from the film itself is available through the Blip TV feed from that page, or through a link alongside the actual article. The other articles in the issue (notably Dietmar Kammerer's on the history of CCTV in Germany) are also worth a read, mind."

Table of Contents (Thanks, Chris!)

An anonymous reader writes "Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow depicts an unfortunate near-future for a handful of media industries being transformed or killed by the Internet. Predicting a large-scale transformation of the music, movie, book, and newspaper industry, Doctorow says, 'The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.' While the Internet has the potential to help the dying book industry, for example, Doctorow predicts the 'imminent collapse' of the American newspaper industry because advertisers are uninterested in spending money on the remaining offline readership, such as senior citizens, who prove less valuable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mr_Whoopass writes "I am the IT Administrator for a regional restaurant chain and as of late I am noticing more and more people sending me invitations to sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc. Mother always taught me to be a skeptic and knowing more than the average Joe about how information can be used in this digital era, I am reticent to say the least about posting such personal details such as my full name and where I work on the net for all to see. I have thus far managed to stay completely below the radar and a search on Google has nothing on my real persona. However now times are tough and I see sales dropping in the industry I work in as it is a discretionary spending market to be sure. I wonder if I should loosen up on the paranoia a bit and start networking with some of these folks in case of the all too common layoff scenario that seems to be happening lately. What do other folks here think about this? I am specifically interested in what people who work in IT think (since I know that just about every moron that has 'Vice President' or sits on the 'Executive Team' is already on LinkedIn and has no clue about why they should be trying to protect their identity)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And here's a lower-tech version...

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Joshua.Niland writes "Strange globs seen on the landing strut of the Phoenix Mars lander could be the first proof that modern Mars hosts liquid water. Images from the robotic craft show what appear to be liquid droplets growing, merging, and dripping on the lander's leg over the course of a Martian month. Just when is NASA going to fix that leaking roof on the backlot?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: USB Motion Detector. You can view the video here, grab the PDF here and subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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I'd say the chance, today, of some news organization trying the experiment outlined in today's earlier piece is virtually nil.

One commenter said yesterday: "What we need now are small ideas with obvious financial underpinnings that can grow organically to fill any unmet needs of customers."

To paraphrase, as the first passenger, in a bus careening down the steep mountainside, to observe that there's no driver, said: "We need small ideas to fix this problem." Yes, even big ideas are small given the dire circumstances. You won't get an argument from me. No sarcasm.

When they built the first Transcontinental Railroad, the guys heading east from California had a much harder job than the guys heading west from Omaha. Starting in Sacramento it went straight uphill, and didn't get any better when they got to the summit. So if approaching the new reality from the journalism side is so hard, maybe it's more approachable from our side. After all, what do we have to do, other than find a way to glue the experts together in a cohesive whole and give it authority. Not so easy -- that authority thing, but maybe it's easier than asking the professional news organizations to let their sources into their clubroom?

So what then? Well, turns there's a schematic for it, called Hypercamp, which is an awful name -- but it kind of stuck. It's the equivalent of a press room at a conference, with refreshments, excellent networking both technical and human, and accessible to both news reporters and news makers, without making too much of a fuss about which one you are (you're probably both). Two podia, one at either end of the room, rented by people with formal announcements to make, that's how the rent is paid. Otherwise everyone works for no one but themselves. I'd like to give this a try. Anyone in SF want to set one up? I'd be there from time to time, blogging and schmoozing.

There's another related idea, the Flash Conference -- a convention of experts brought together instantly to discuss some breaking news, to exchange ideas and perspectives, and disseminate them quickly while the story is still fresh. This is another approach that can begin before the news industry either: 1. Opens up. 2. Collapses. 3. Something else.

Can-do or no-can-do. There's not a lot of the latter in news these days -- no wonder the news is so depressing. Let's bring some of the former to the problem and see what happens. It's not like anyone gets out of this thing alive, you know.

Big hugs, Uncle Dave...

PS: I was talking with Nicco yesterday (Morra, his wife, had a baby six weeks ago, lovely little Asa, future football player, swimmer and President of the United States) and he tells me his class at KSG has to read this blog every day as part of their assignment. Excellent. So here's a project for you guys. Set one of these newsrooms up at Harvard. I'd come. I bet Berkman would help.

FormOfActionBanana writes "The security firm Fortify Software has undertaken an automated code review of the NIST SHA-3 round 1 contestants (previously Slashdotted) reference implementations. After a followup audit, the team is now reporting summary results. According to the blog entry, 'This just emphasizes what we already knew about C, even the most careful, security conscious developer messes up memory management.' Of particular interest, Professor Ron Rivest's (the "R" in RSA) MD6 team has already corrected a buffer overflow pointed out by the Fortify review. Bruce Schneier's Skein, also previously Slashdotted, came through defect-free."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A couple of day ago I wrote about how I foolishly and unwittingly signed up for freecreditreport.com's $14.95 monthly credit monitoring service.

One of the commenters, Creeto, pointed to this funny video song by Dan Louisell, who wrote: "What really happens when you use freecreditreport.com? This was for a contest to either cover one of the songs from the commercials or write your own jingle. Being that this isn't very flattering to the website, I bet I won't win. :)"

V!NCENT writes with an excerpt from a new publication by Microsoft: "As web sites evolved into dynamic web applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments with resources shared among mutually distrusting web site principals. Nevertheless, no existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals. In this paper, we introduce Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Gazelle's Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals." Here's the full research paper (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday's piece ended with: "At least the Times is using the right word these days -- open -- but not in the way that matters. They're willing to give away what we, in tech, have been giving away for a decade. Obviously that's not a disrupter. They need to give away what they have -- authority. The trick is to find a way to give it away without destroying it. If they can do it, then we will have cracked the nut, scale, massively more news, deeper coverage, and with it -- shifted economics."

And that's where we pick it up today.

Here's how you take the first step toward the open newsroom.

Pick a story that you're covering on an ongoing basis, something important enough that you've assigned one or more reporters to it full-time. Have them continue to do what they're doing, we're going to add to that coverage, in an experiment to learn how the newspaper of the future might work.

Now pick two or three experts on the same subject, and invite them into the newsroom. They will not be paid. No benefits. They agree to the same rules governing the integrity of your reporters. For a period of four weeks, they report to the newsroom, the physical one, not a virtual one, every day, and are part of your news team. They file stories every day, just as the reporters do, and they go through the same copy-edit process your reporters' stories go through, however they get final approval on the articles. The words that appear in the publication are their words, the ideas are their ideas. Their job is the same as the reporters' job -- to report the news. To explain what happened.

I don't know what will happen. It could be no one volunteers, then we either give up or formulate a different proposal. I don't know if their coverage will be as good as the reporters. The goal is to find out! Maybe it will be better.

Now, to be clear -- I'm not talking about recruiting idiots or people whose opinions are (in your opinion) worthless. I'm talking about respected experts, the kinds of people your reporters call to get a perspective on the news the people they quote. Instead of having them talk to the readers through the reporter, I want them to go directly. Their writing should be as readable as the reporters' so I would choose experts who express themselves well.

Anticipating another objection, yes the op-ed page already has some people like this, but not enough. I want people who might look at the news organizations as part of the story with a critical eye, something virtually no reporter does. I want to break as many of the rules of the news business without breaking the one sacred rule, that people report what they see, that they not deliberately mislead, or speak from their interest without disclosure.

Let's see if some creative news organization figures out a way to bring the sources into the newsroom.

MojoKid writes "Earlier this month, Ultra-Wideband mainstay TZero closed its doors, leaving the once hopeful format in limbo. One of the few UWB supporters still hanging around is Staccato Communications, and not surprisingly, its CEO is stepping up to address the overall situation and assure the general public that the wireless format it supports is far from dead. In a long-winded note from the desk of Marty Colombatto, he frankly states that 'to conclude that "UWB is dead" is a gross misinterpretation of recent events and ignores the lessons of relevant history.' Potentially the most interesting tidbit is that UWB is supposedly getting a 'makeover' this year. Marty even goes so far as to say that new developments in 2009 are sure to breathe new life into the technology.'" Update 2/22 at 17:41 by SS: Reader coldmist pointed out a related Ars Technica piece looking into the state of wireless HD video, which contains some interesting information about UWB.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Adobe claims that its Flash platform reaches '99% of internet viewers,' but a closer look at those statistics suggests it's not exactly all-encompassing. Adobe puts Flash player penetration at 947 million users out of a total 956 million internet-connected devices, but the total number of PCs is based on a forecast made two years ago. What's more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people — around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total. Is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was another fun week in the Maker Shed. We managed to sneak in a few builds even though we spend the early part of the week at the 2009 NYC Toy Fair. Next week I am going to continue my How-To Tuesday series on programming the Arduino [part1, part2] and we will feature more new products in the Maker Shed.

The week started out with a quick video build of the Aurorarium by Gakken. It's a really easy to build kit that puts on an interesting light show.

Create your own aurora-like effects with this awesome device. Leave the cone on and enjoy the soft changing lights, or fill the tray with water and see the amazing aurora lights on your wall or ceiling. Instructions are in Japanese but features highly detailed assembly pictures, sorry no English translation at this time. Easy to build.

In the Maker Shed: Gakken's Aurorarium

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Max Wallack is a kid who thinks big. When he saw the Trash to Treasure design contest at By Kids For Kids, he knew he could come up with an idea. Since he was really young, he's been active in designing and developing solutions. "If you have the ability to help people, then you have the responsibility to help people" was a phrase I heard him say several times during our day.

He has been inspired to help people from a young age when his family's car got lost in and he saw homeless people living on the urban streets.

I have wanted to invent something to help the homeless ever since a visit to Chicago six years ago, when my family was bringing me to an awards ceremony for a contest and we got lost. It was the first time I saw homeless people.

The contest was sponsored by the Intel Foundation which provided Max a $10,000 prize to encourage youth innovation. One of the prizes for winning the contest was that he got to spend time working with the professional designers and fabricators at Continuum an industrial design consultancy firm with offices around the world. We got together in the Boston office. They have worked with the PBS tv show Design Squad, and host Nate Ball came by to check on Max's progress and see the workspace. The shoot was part of the organizations' effort to recognize Engineers Week. I was lucky to have the opportunity to spend the day with Max and the crew, and have included links below to photos taken during the shoot.

At Continuum, they specialize in bringing out the ideas of people and organizations. Sometimes, their clients don't know exactly what they need or what to expect. The staff of creative types, engineers and craftsmen are skilled at testing lots of ideas and helping select the best way to solve the problem.

Max's original idea was developed as a scale model with the materials he had on hand. Plastic grocery bags from the kitchen cabinet and coat hangers from his closet were the trash that came together to make a structure influenced by the building styles of Mongolian yurts. Working with the crew from Continuum, he was able to use and develop techniques to build a full size model of his dome. The resulting dome is based on the work of R. Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic dome, but they came up with a relatively new technique of making each panel a cell, rather than using the often used hub and spoke design. For the sheathing material, they used thick plastic sealed at the edges with a heat strip. The center of the panels is filled with packing peanuts, making for a very well insulated structure.

Image from Connors934 on Flickr
During the day, Max met with Beth Johnson, an Envisioner, where they talked about some of the issues affecting homeless people. They worked with Maslow's hierarchy, a way of identifying the most important issues facing the homeless and working up a plan to meet them. Max's plan included ways for the "Home Dome" to include aspects of employment, speed of build and the structure that homeless people and people displaced by disasters can build and deploy effectively and quickly.

Nate Ball, the host of Design Squad, came in to greet Max on camera. They exchanged ideas about the design and how it could help solve the problems of homelessness. During the build, Nate helped put the design in context so that the full story could be captured by the film crew from WGBH.

Image from Connors934 on Flickr

In a previous visit to Continuum, Max worked on a scale model of his design, a geodesic dome, where the top panel is hoisted and the surrounding panels fall into place. They used the model of the Home Dome for reference as part of their Design Process. Throughout the day, there were many decisions to be made, and Max was surrounded by clever and knowledgeable people helping feed him the information he needed to make educated choices.

Image fromconnors934 on Flickr

The build was done with the trained assistance of Rich Ciccarelli, Shop Manager at Continuum. Rich had worked out many techniques, and helped show Max how to build the design using a reasonable collection of hand tools. In a previous session, they had worked out the geometry, and had made up some jigs for cutting the plastic and bending the aluminum tubes. The jig idea was great, because it allowed for the manufacture of two important elements. Pins in the corners gave them a fulcrum to bend the heated aluminum tubes around, resulting in consistently shaped forms. The outer shape of the jigs themselves gave a cutting edge so they could make lots and lots panels cut from plastic sheeting. What little waste there was ended up in the recycling bin.

Once the tubes were formed into shapes, ends of the tubing drilled out and the panels were cut Max and Rich used a heat sealer to fuse the edges of the plastic together, making a custom plastic bag. The metal shapes were inserted into the bags, and fastened with a pin to hold them together.

Throughout the day, Max was the talent of the video, often being filmed by Jeff on camera and Mario on sound from WGBH. The video will run after Design Squad, which has a one minute segment on various aspects of engineering and design. Often they use segments like the one being filmed on this day and some similar shorts can be found on the ProFiles section of the Design Squad site. A preliminary version of the video has been posted on Youtube.

Image from Image from Connors934 on Flickr

As the day wound down, the dome came together. When it was complete, representatives from By Kids For Kids, WGBH and Rob Richardson from the Intel Foundation presented Max with a gigantic check for $10,000. After a few more photos, for the press, and video of the completion, Max and crew moved the Home Dome outside into the cold February air for some additional testing.

All in all, it was a great day of making. Max got to work on his design in a whole bunch of useful ways. Through the assistance of Continuum, he was able to fit his idea into the context of the current needs of the homeless people of our society. He developed alternative solutions using techniques and tools to solve the problems that came up during the build. Max got to be the star of a video, and then they gave him a huge check for a huge amount of money (though he was pretty tight lipped about just how he was going to spend it). All of the people around us were very supportive of Max in his learning process, and the questions that he was asked in the filming all seemed to be intended to glean his ideas, rather than to plant adult viewpoints. It will be great to see what kinds of neat things Max develops as he grows up.

How are the kids in your life solving the problems of our society? What are your kids Making to raise awareness of the needs of the less fortunate in your community? Are there opportunities like those that Max pursued that can help recognize creative and thoughtful kids? Add your thoughts in the comments, and please contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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jonniee writes "D is a programming language created by Walter Bright of C++ fame. D's focus is on combining the power and high performance of C/C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. And now he's ported it to the Macintosh. Quoting: '[Building a runtime library] exposed a lot of conditional compilation issues that had no case for OSX. I found that Linux has a bunch of API functions that are missing in OSX, like getline and getdelim, so some of the library functionality had to revert to more generic code for OSX. I had to be careful, because although many system macros had the same functionality and spelling, they had different expansions. Getting these wrong would cause some mysterious behavior, indeed.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DesScorp writes "The AP reports that the Obama administration has picked up where the Bush administration left off on the missing White House email issue by trying to have a lawsuit dismissed that would have kept investigating whether or not email was still missing. Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President expressed disappointment with the Obama administration's actions. Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government. The Justice Department 'apparently never got the message' from Obama, Blanton said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

McGruber writes "Northrup-Grumman's Govtrip.com website has been shut down following a security breach, according to a report by 'Security Fix' blogger Brian Krebs. Being a federal employee and frequent work traveler, I am (was?) a Govtrip user. My agency required me to use Govtrip to book all of my trips, including my airfare, car rentals, and hotel reservations, so Northrup-Grumman's Govtrip databases contain my frequent flier numbers, Avis & Budget car rental numbers and frequent hotel guest (Choice Privileges, Marriott Rewards, Priority Club, etc.) numbers. Northrup-Grumman also stored all of my trip itineraries, including destinations, dates & modes of travel and the particular vendors (airline, hotel, rental car brand, etc.) used on a particular trip. Also stored on the website were my work travel credit-card (it has a $15,000 charge limit), personal checking account where my travel reimbursements were deposited, my home address, and emergency contacts ... just imagine what an accomplished social engineer can do with that combination of information!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, I had lunch with my friend, Hugh Spencer, a writer and designer of museum and public educational exhibitions. He told me an amazing story about his son and games, and I asked him to write it up for Boing Boing:

This is a picture of my amazing youngest son Evan. He's 13, he's holding a game controller and looking at a glowing screen and he's doing what he does a lot of -- diving into digital realms of adventure.

His latest favourite game is Call of Duty - which he plays on-line with his friends. Evan's wanting to play C of D was something of a challenge for us. It's rated T and he's only just a teenager and point and shoot first person games worry me some. Evan is relentlessly reasonable sometimes -- he outlined why he wanted to play the game and he was pretty upfront why he knew my "parent-sense" would start tingling. So I had to be reasonable too. I looked at the game. I've done a lot of research for military museums so I could tell that the content was accurate -- but there was lots of shooting and blowing things up. But there was a fair bit of that during World War II. So it was undeniable that Evan was experiencing history and there was this teamwork factor...

So we compromised. Well, sort of.

I asked Evan to google the Geneva Convention. Then he had to read it and then we had to discuss it. This we did. So the deal is that Evan has to fight according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. If his team-mates violate the Convention then play stops and Call of Duty goes away for a while.

We'll see how it goes, but Evan keeps his word. Especially about his games.

Geneva Conventions

The United Arab Emirates is considering legislation that would criminalize publication of anything that would "harm the economy." Already, the local press is pulling back from their coverage of the steep decline in Dubai property values and the rise in deportations, voluntary departure, and abandonment of unsaleable assets, such as cars.

Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis.

Last month, local newspapers reported that Dubai was canceling 1,500 work visas every day, citing unnamed government officials. Asked about the number, Humaid bin Dimas, a spokesman for Dubai’s Labor Ministry, said he would not confirm or deny it and refused to comment further. Some say the true figure is much higher.

“At the moment there is a readiness to believe the worst,” said Simon Williams, HSBC bank’s chief economist in Dubai. “And the limits on data make it difficult to counter the rumors.”

Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down

Don't worry if you show up for your domestic UK EasyJet flight without the mandatory photo ID the airline now requires; the helpful check-in clerks will direct you to the nearby train station where they'll make you up a free photo-card to go with a rail-pass, should you ever decide to buy one. Ah, security.

"They suggested I go to the railway station within the terminal, buy a season ticket and with it get a photocard, which they'd then accept as ID," Wilson said. "In fact, it was even easier and didn't cost a penny. Southern Rail gave me a photocard and sent me upstairs to the public photo booth. I asked if I needed to come back to the ticket office with the photos; they said, no, I should just fill in the card myself then seal down the plastic covering."

Photo ID - how about this one I made earlier?

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Homeforged tools [above, bottom-left]

• Hacked phone charger does the trick [above, top-right]

• Tempurature-sensing Munny [above, top-left]

• Early (giant) iPod prototype? [above, bottom-right]

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Jacqui Smith, the surveillance-crazed Home Secretary of the UK, has been caught making extremely dubious expense claims for her government-paid "second residence" in London -- caught by neighbours who ratted her out for what they perceive as a kind of "benefits fraud" on a grand scale. Ironically, Smith's Home Office has put an enormous amount of energy into inveigling Britons to fink out their neighbours for the cheaper, smaller-scale benefits fraud and potential terrorist, launching tiplines for people who think their neighbours have too many mobile phones (a sure sign of terrorism!), and running ads that say "We're closing in with hidden cameras. We're closing in with every means at our disposal."

Live by the snitch, die by the snitch.

If you want to rat out your neighbours, allow the home secretary to enumerate the ways. Do you know someone who claims more from the state than they're entitled to? Who is "picking the pockets of law-abiding taxpayers"? Not politicians over-egging their allowances, obviously, but "benefit thieves". If so, call 0800 854 440 now. "We're closing in with hidden cameras. We're closing in with every means at our disposal."

Do they own more than one mobile phone? Then call 0800 789 321. "Terrorists need communication. They often collect and use many pay-as-you-go mobile phones, as well as swapping Sim cards and handsets."

No mobile phones? What about if they're "hanging around"? Or, as the Home Office-funded radio advertisement puts it: "How can you tell if they're a normal everyday person or a terrorist? The answer is that you don't have to. If you call the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321, the specialist officers you speak to will analyse the information. They'll decide if and how to follow it up. You don't have to be sure. If you suspect it, report it."

It's such a lovely turn of phrase, that. If you suspect it, report it. Don't wait for evidence. Or question your own prejudices. If someone's not a "normal everyday person" exactly like you, then they could well be a member of al-Qaida. What flawless logic that is.

What a perfect revenge on the arch snooper

Alan Feng's lecture on the theory of war as conducted in Starcraft is part Sun Tzu, part Von Clausewitz, part Leibniz: "This course will go in-depth in the theory of how war is conducted within the confines of the game Starcraft. There will be lecture on various aspects of the game, from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted. Calculus and Differential Equations are highly recommended for full understanding of the course."

Introduction to Starcraft and Competitive Gaming (Thanks, Buffalo Danger!)

Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

• Woodcarving from David Esterly
  
• Embroidered knee MRI Slice
  
• Checkin In: The Leethally Crafty Lee Meredith
  
• HOW TO - Make a Giant Squid Cake
  

Also, here's the first installment of the new weekly column Ask CRAFT:

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Fans of the Boxee media player were bummed last week to hear that Hulu support would be removed. From the Boxee blog:

two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.

Thankfully, an XMBC media player hacker put together a workaround, and Kevin at Lifehacker did a nice job of documenting the steps needed to get everything working again under Boxee. There have been reports that a few videos don't play correctly, but on the whole it's working for people most of the time. Hopefully it will function as a standby until Hulu's content providers come to their senses.

How to Reinstall a Working Hulu in Boxee

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JCWDenton writes "The Met Police got a short sharp rap over the knuckles yesterday, as the Office of the Information Commissioner questioned what looks very much like a blanket policy to force CCTV onto public houses in certain parts of London. The story begins with a letter to the Guardian last week, from Nick Gibson. He is currently renovating Islington pub The Drapers Arms, after its previous owners allowed it to go insolvent and then disappeared. In his letter, he argues that if he had merely taken over an existing licence, the police could not have imposed any additional conditions. However, because this was now a new licence, the police were able to make specific requests, including one particular request in respect of installing CCTV."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patrick Costello, the travelling open-source banjo instructor, sez, "A visually impaired banjo player in the Netherlands contacted me the other day asking for help. He wanted a way to use banjo tab with his Braille display. Tab, or tabulature, is different from music notation in that tab gives the user specific mechanical instructions -- literally, 'put your fingers here'. With a folk banjo style like frailing students usually learn the mechanics of playing long before they dive into music theory so access to tab is a big deal for beginners. With some input from Ruud I was able to come up with a simple system that he would make sense in Braille. I posted information on the new tab system on my web site, and musicians from all over have started to transpose frailing banjo songs and exercises into this new format."

Braille-Friendly Banjo TAB (Thanks, Patrick!)

This squeaky cabinet door sounds so much like Chewbacca's plaintive wail that I'm left wondering if it isn't the source of the original foley effect.

Guys Cabinet Door Sounds Exactly like Chewbacca! (via Neatorama)

Barlaam writes "A bug by router vendor A (omitting a range check from a critical field in the configuration interface) tickled a bug from router vendor B (dropping BGP sessions when processing some ASPATH attributes with length very close to 256), causing a ripple effect that caused widespread global routing instability last week. The flaw lay dormant until one of vendor A's systems was deployed in an autonomous system whose ASN, modulo 256, was greater than 250. At that point, the Internet was one typo away from disaster. Other router vendors, who were not affected by the bug, happily propagated the trigger message to every vulnerable system on the planet in about 30 seconds. Few people appreciate how fragile and unsecured the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure really is — this is just the latest example." Vendor A, in this case, is a Latvian router vendor called MikroTik.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

i want candy
name that candy bar
nunu chocolates
deep fried creme egg
lollipop cat (shown above)
mexican sugar skulls
battenberg simulator
cake wrecks
tangerine sherbet
liz wolfe

previously on web zen
candy zen

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

An anonymous reader writes "A tiny startup that was threatened by a massive law firm over nothing more than a humble hyperlink has been forced to settle and change its linking policies, handing Goliath the win in this gratuitous trademark case. Under the agreement, real estate startup BlockShopper can no longer include hyperlinks anywhere on its website to Jones Day, a massive Chicago law firm, except explicitly on URL text. Essentially, jonesday.com is okay, but not blah blah blah." I wonder if the owners of jonesdaysucks.com feel the same way.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Danny Choo is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Danny resides in Tokyo, and blogs about life in Japan and Japanese subculture - he also works part time for the empire.

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Been living in Japan for about 10 years now and love it. I'm surrounded by culture that I've been passionate about since a wee lad and despite the recession that we're supposed to be in, business for my start up is booming - couldn't ask for more. Apart from the smoking, there used to (but not anymore) be something that used to get on my nut - the fun and games of looking for an apartment. Upfront costs The upfront costs of renting an apartment is honestly not amusing at all. First up there exists something called "gratuity fee" or Reikin. Since the dark ages, citizens have been paying the landlord a gratuity fee for letting them live in the landlords apartment. This gratuity fee can be up to 2.5 times the monthly rent and to make the situation even more amusing - you don't get this money back - none of it, Sweet FA, absolute squat. Then there is key money known as Shikikin. Key money can be up to 3 times the monthly rent and is used as a deposit which the landlord uses to clean up the place when you leave. S/he usually tries to use as much of it as possible so when you move out so its like "thanks for staying with us for the years, here is a slap in the face and get out of here you stinking rat." Apart from the gratuity fee and key money, one has to not only pay the landlord an average of 2 months rent upfront, one also has to pay the estate agent up to a months rent for introducing the place too. So an average case recap on the costs presuming that the monthly rent for a cozy apartment is 200,000 yen or roughly 2000 USD. Gratuity fee: 4000 USD Key money: 4000 USD Upfront rent: 4000 USD Estate agent fee: 2000 USD Initial cost: 14,000 USD No foreigners or pets (more after the jump)To make looking for apartments more fun, some foreigners in Japan (not all) go through the fun of the estate agent calling up the landlord in front of you - the conversation in my previous experiences have been...

Hi, My name is Taro from Eiburu Estate agents. We have a foreigner interested in your apartments, do you allow foreigners?

I've been turned down a few times this way and its a horrible feeling - especially just after arriving in Japan. After my first few experiences, I learned to ask the estate agent to call the landlord *before* we wasted time looking on and deciding on a place. Chintai Coopration is a site for folks seeking apartments online. The area that I highlighted in red in this screenshot is the "take note of" column and mostly contains "No foreigners or pets allowed." Also note that the page was last updated "2009/2/16." But I have heard views from the landlords point of view too. Many landlords are elderly folk who cant speak English and find it difficult to communicate by gestures alone. Some other landlords have had nightmares where foreigners run a mock and are not able to follow simple rules such as separating out their garbage into combustible/non-combustible which is a requirement. Photo above taken at an estate agent which says "Foreigners Welcome!" Guarantor The final slap in the face is the fact that one (including Japanese folks) needs whats known as a Guarantor or "Hoshonin." A guarantor has to sign something saying that s/he will take full responsibility in the event that you run a mock or burn down your apartment - and in most cases that person has to be Japanese... Buy a house I mentioned at the beginning that I don't go through this grief anymore because I bought my own house (and on Amazon associate earnings alone may I add ;-). I will probably start to go through the fun and games again when we look for offices later this year though. Resources Got a few resources for folks looking to live in Japan. -Got some useful terms one needs to know when looking for apartments in my Japanese Housing article. -Some photos of all the apartments that I've lived in Tokyo in my Tokyo Apartments article. Includes some vids of other apartments too. -And for folks looking to buy a house you can check out the Tokyo Property Purchase article which contains lingo on the restrictions in housing shape and size. -And for folks who like the thought of paying for a house from blogging then I got some tips (which I need to update more often) in my Userbility, Blogging and Affiliate Tips category. And a load of other living in Japan tips in the Japan category.

Matt_dk writes "The debris from a recent collision involving two communications satellites could pose a serious threat for future launches of spacecraft into a geostationary orbit, a Russian scientist said on Friday. Future launches will have to be adjusted with regard to the fact that the debris [from the collision] has spread over an 800-km area and will gather at a common orbit in 5-6 years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At work an amazing gallery @ Boston.com... Alan Taylor writes-

When the economy makes big news, many photographs of people at work come across the wires, usually to help illustrate a particular story or event. By collecting these disparate photos over the past few months, I found that a global portrait emerged of we humans producing things. People assembling, generating, and building items small and large, mundane and expensive, trivial and important. I hope you enjoy this look into some people's work lives around the world.

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