Tomorrow I'm going to release the EC2 for Poets howto, and a podcast roadmap. In the meantime, here's a review by Michael Fidler.

I did it! In addition, I'm sending this from the new Firefox browser that you included. Thank you so much! I have wanted to do this for so long. When they first announced the service I visited Amazon, but there were so many choices that I didn't now where to start. This was such a rewarding first step. What comes next, Dave? Will there be more tutorials possible? Even if there isn't, this one might have been the nudge I needed to get started on my own. This was an extremely thoughtful thing of you to do. Give yourself a big hug for me (or a pat on the back). I think I'll mess around in here for a little while longer:-)

This is exactly what I hoped would happen. Big hugs, Dave

think_nix writes "The local.se is reporting that, for around 200,000 USD, tickets for eager space tourists looking for that outer space adventure will be purchasable from the Sweden's Ice Hotel in Kiruna. The flights are planned to be run by Virgin Galactic, also allowing flights to be taken from New Mexico. The article further states that already around 300 tickets have been purchased."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

think_nix writes "The local.se is reporting that, for around 200,000 USD, tickets for eager space tourists looking for that outer space adventure will be purchasable from the Sweden's Ice Hotel in Kiruna. The flights are planned to be run by Virgin Galactic, also allowing flights to be taken from New Mexico. The article further states that already around 300 tickets have been purchased."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

think_nix writes "The local.se is reporting that, for around 200,000 USD, tickets for eager space tourists looking for that outer space adventure will be purchasable from the Sweden's Ice Hotel in Kiruna. The flights are planned to be run by Virgin Galactic, also allowing flights to be taken from New Mexico. The article further states that already around 300 tickets have been purchased."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Atlanta-based artist Brian Dettmer creates marvelous sculptures by performing surgery on books. He has a show opening April 3 at Chicago's Packer Schopf Gallery. The gallery kindly sent a few sneak peeks at the new work. Click the images to see them larger. (Thanks, Dominic Paul Moore!)

Two mall-shopping girls discuss the meaning of life in Charlie White’s cartoon OMG BFF LOL. More here and here.

I've posted previously about the fantastic sound artist Simon James, creator of the otherworldly audio accompanying Ken Hollings's Welcome To Mars radio series (and book) and also the sound designer for Ian Helliwell's audio history of electronic music, Tone Generation. Simon just emailed me about his latest musical project, The Simonsound, and provided a link to one of their tracks, Bakers Dozen. It's fantastic. Simon writes:

We make 50's and 60's space music, library/mood music and a hint of psych. We just released our first single which is a switched on/moog cover of Jimmy Castor Bunch's 'Its Just Begun'. The original has legendary status due to its popularity with the hip hop b-boy crowd who dug its heavy drums and breakdowns. Our version is heavily inspired by the Switched On craze of the late 60's/70's which saw a whole host of silly Moog cover albums - most of them pretty poor apart from the odd album by Dick Hyman.

We have an album on the way all of which is recorded using tape and old analog gear...

And of course there is the free 60 minute mix 'The Simonsound Transmission' available from our website. It features music from pioneering electronic composer Fred Judd, Canadian pop-psych group The Sugar Shoppe and British jazz artist Bob Downes amongst further library mood music, spaced out rock and electronics.

The Simonsound "Bakers Dozen"

A few years back, it emerged that US Senator Ted Stevens had been given an iPod by his daughter, and it had changed the way he saw the RIAA and the measures for which it lobbied. It's always seemed to me that once politicians -- at least those not beholden to the entertainment industry -- experienced the stupidity and frustration of the locks and controls that groups like the RIAA and MPAA put on content and want backed up by law, they'd realize they were little more than attempts to frustrate consumers and prop up outmoded business models. Maybe the UK is prepared for a similar political inflection point: its Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was recently given a gift of 25 DVDs of classic American movies by US President Barack Obama. When Brown sat down to watch one of them, he found he couldn't -- because Obama had given him Region 1 DVDs, unplayable in Brown's Region 2 DVD player. The pointless DRM didn't stop any piracy, it prevented an absolutely reasonable use of legitimately purchased content. Maybe this experience will help the British government understand how many of the entertainment industry's efforts to strengthen intellectual property controls do little more than irritate legitimate consumers in the name of supporting failing business models.

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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Beezlebub33 writes "A new petition has been filed under the GSNO (Generic Names Supporting Organization) of ICANN to create a new constituency the CyberSafety Constituency. Existing constituencies include 'Commercial and Business,' 'gTLD,' 'Registrars,' 'Non-commercial,' etc. The new proposed one on CyberSafety is in the 'interest of balancing free speech and anonymity with the values of protection and safety in developing Internet policy within ICANN.' If that doesn't raise red flags all by itself, consider that the person submitting it is Cheryl B. Preston. She's listed in the petition with the organization Brigham Young University, but she's part of CP80. She's suggested limiting content on port 80 to the 'right' things, and other stuff can go on other ports, so it can be appropriately filtered by the authorities. Guess who gets to decide what goes on which ports?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beezlebub33 writes "A new petition has been filed under the GSNO (Generic Names Supporting Organization) of ICANN to create a new constituency the CyberSafety Constituency. Existing constituencies include 'Commercial and Business,' 'gTLD,' 'Registrars,' 'Non-commercial,' etc. The new proposed one on CyberSafety is in the 'interest of balancing free speech and anonymity with the values of protection and safety in developing Internet policy within ICANN.' If that doesn't raise red flags all by itself, consider that the person submitting it is Cheryl B. Preston. She's listed in the petition with the organization Brigham Young University, but she's part of CP80. She's suggested limiting content on port 80 to the 'right' things, and other stuff can go on other ports, so it can be appropriately filtered by the authorities. Guess who gets to decide what goes on which ports?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beezlebub33 writes "A new petition has been filed under the GSNO (Generic Names Supporting Organization) of ICANN to create a new constituency the CyberSafety Constituency. Existing constituencies include 'Commercial and Business,' 'gTLD,' 'Registrars,' 'Non-commercial,' etc. The new proposed one on CyberSafety is in the 'interest of balancing free speech and anonymity with the values of protection and safety in developing Internet policy within ICANN.' If that doesn't raise red flags all by itself, consider that the person submitting it is Cheryl B. Preston. She's listed in the petition with the organization Brigham Young University, but she's part of CP80. She's suggested limiting content on port 80 to the 'right' things, and other stuff can go on other ports, so it can be appropriately filtered by the authorities. Guess who gets to decide what goes on which ports?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul at Old School Tattoo in Bellingham, Washington inked this tattoo, adding a bit of Salvador Dalí's "Elephants" to a Star Wars AT-AT Walker. BMEzine.com has the wearer's story.
Star Wars/Dalí tattoo (Thanks, COOP!)

The BBC reports on a cyber cafe outside Tokyo that has a dark room divided into tiny cubicles where 60 people "who rarely emerge" live. These folks are called cyber drifters and "they have just enough money to stay off the streets." It costs $500 a month to live in one of these "coffin-size booths," which have no natural light or fresh air. "In Tokyo it doesn't get any cheaper than that, or more claustrophobic." The owner of the cyber cafe is making a tidy sum off the rent: 60 X $500 = $30,000

Attorney General Eric Holder has now said that he's open to adjusting antitrust policy to help save newspapers. This is a bit startling, for a variety of reasons, some of which are good, and some are very bad. First, the entire point of antitrust legislation isn't about saving "industries," but about protecting consumers and the economy from harm. There are times when creative destruction is a good thing, and adjusting antitrust powers to protect an industry being destroyed would be bad. That said, I actually tend to agree that antitrust claims are invoked way too often, and usually in situations where there's really no monopolistic behavior or no real problem.

Specifically, what Holder seems to be referring to is whether or not newspapers should be able to own other media properties, such as TV or radio stations. The whole media ownership debate is silly. The rules against "media consolidation" were designed for an era when all your media came from a very small number of official sources. These days, thanks to the internet, people have significantly more media choices than they've ever had before, and more new ones seem to be springing up every single day. Worrying about media consolidation such as that is quite silly. So, if Holder is willing to dump those rules as being outdated and useless, that's great.

But that's not what he's actually saying. He's saying that he'd adjust the rules to save newspapers:

"I think it's important for this nation to maintain a healthy newspaper industry. So to the extent that we have to look at our enforcement policies and conform them to the realities that that industry faces, that's something that I'm going to be willing to do.... I think that we need to have a healthy, vibrant newspaper industry, and I don't mean just online."

Now that's a problem. He's singling out a specific product -- the newspaper -- rather than the actual benefit -- good journalism. In other words, he's saying that the government should be picking journalism winners (the newspaper over alternatives) rather than letting the market decide. To me, that's troubling. It also suggests that he could conceivably be open to even more ridiculous proposals, such as letting all of the top news properties collude. As AG, Holder shouldn't be looking to prop up specific businesses or products.

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newtley writes "TechDirt's Mike Masnick writes that the Warner Music Choruss licensing scheme amounts to a Bait-And-Switch operation. Not so, says Jim Griffin, the man charged to put it together. Masnick's story is 'factually incorrect in every respect,' he states. But Griffin 'refused to name a single factual mistake,' Masnick says, noting, 'He fails to address the key problems that we outlined: 1. Why is this program even needed when plenty of musicians are coming up with business models that work today and don't need a new mandatory license (er... 'covenant not to sue') plan? 2. Why do we need a new bureaucracy and won't that divert funds? 3. Will the industry continue to try to shut down file sharing sites? 4. Will the industry continue to push a 3 strikes plan?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

newtley writes "TechDirt's Mike Masnick writes that the Warner Music Choruss licensing scheme amounts to a Bait-And-Switch operation. Not so, says Jim Griffin, the man charged to put it together. Masnick's story is 'factually incorrect in every respect,' he states. But Griffin 'refused to name a single factual mistake,' Masnick says, noting, 'He fails to address the key problems that we outlined: 1. Why is this program even needed when plenty of musicians are coming up with business models that work today and don't need a new mandatory license (er... 'covenant not to sue') plan? 2. Why do we need a new bureaucracy and won't that divert funds? 3. Will the industry continue to try to shut down file sharing sites? 4. Will the industry continue to push a 3 strikes plan?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pardon us while we crow a bit. The Brit Insurance Design Awards we posted about earlier were actually handed out last night. We won in the Interactive category!

Thanks to everyone who helped make us worthy of note and award-winning, and in the realm of "interactivity," that would be all of you! This is for everyone who participates in the "maker movement" and who contributes their time, attention, ideas, and comments to this website and to all of Maker Media's endeavors.

Keep up the great work, and as always, feel free to make suggestions for how we can improve our offerings, become more responsive to our readership, etc.

Article in Wallpaper about the Awards.
Brit Insurance Design Awards

More:

MAKE wins - Brit Insurance Interactive Design of the Year Award

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The House of Reps has a solution to those crazy AIG bonuses: a new tax that will claw back 90 percent of the income of anyone paid more than $250,000 by any firm that got more than $5 billion in bailout money.

The House measure would apply a 90% tax on bonuses given to employees who earn more than $250,000 at any firm that received more than $5 billion in bailout money.

A Senate proposal would would impose a 35% excise tax on companies paying bonuses and a 35% tax on employees receiving them. It would apply to all companies that received federal bailout funds.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate Majority Leader, said he doesn't think it will be much of a problem to resolve the differences between the House and Senate. They are hoping to move on the Senate bill next week.

U.S. House OKs bill for new tax on AIG bonuses

mellowdonkey writes "Last year's CanSecWest hacking contest winner, Charlie Miller, does it again this year in the 2009 Pwn2Own contest. Charlie was the first to compromise Safari this year to win a brand spankin new Macbook. Nils, the other winner, was able to use three separate zero day exploits to whack IE8, Firefox, and Safari as well. Full detail and pictures are available from the sponsor, TippingPoint, who acquired all of the exploits through their Zero Day Initiative program."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mellowdonkey writes "Last year's CanSecWest hacking contest winner, Charlie Miller, does it again this year in the 2009 Pwn2Own contest. Charlie was the first to compromise Safari this year to win a brand spankin new Macbook. Nils, the other winner, was able to use three separate zero day exploits to whack IE8, Firefox, and Safari as well. Full detail and pictures are available from the sponsor, TippingPoint, who acquired all of the exploits through their Zero Day Initiative program."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Doug Lichtman is a well known intellectual property law professor who is a fairly big supporter of the copyright system. He's reached out to us, because of a podcast he recently recorded discussing the Joel Tenenbaum lawsuit. To be honest, I'd pretty much stopped covering anything to do with that lawsuit, because over the last couple of months, it's turned into something of a circus side-show, with both sides running around and making decisions as if they've never actually been in a court of law before. Even the judge has been making mistakes.

However, Lichtman specifically was hoping for the perspective of folks around here on the podcast, because (as he noted in his email), most of his listeners tend to be strongly pro-copyright, and he was hoping to at least find out what those of us less sure of the benefits of copyright think. To be honest, after listening to the podcast twice, it may be a bit too down in the legal weeds for many readers here -- though, if you really are interested in the legal specifics, have a listen. The first part involves Lichtman talking to Charles Nesson himself about the case, followed by three "legal experts" and then a guy from the RIAA who seems to honestly believe that the RIAA's lawsuit strategy was a success because it taught more people that file sharing was illegal. This is wrong on many different levels, since it clearly didn't impact user behavior, and has created other problems, such as the false belief in some that all file sharing is illegal (even of authorized content) and has framed the RIAA as being anti-consumer, making it that much harder for the major record labels to eventually make the shift in business models that are necessary to succeed these days.

The overall "conclusion" that Lichtman comes to is that Nesson and Tenenbaum are likely to lose the case, as precedent suggests that courts will likely find the statutory damages in the copyright act to be within the range of being constitutional. I actually agree that this is the likely outcome, though I find it, and the reasoning behind it, quite troubling. I also hope that, when (if) the case really goes to trial, Nesson has worked up a better argument than he gave on the podcast. While he does raise some good points, a lot of it feels like he only has a superficial understanding of both what's happening and the law itself. When really pressed on legal issues by Lichtman, he resorted to an emotional argument ("it's just a kid clicking on links!") which hardly is legally compelling.

However, in listening to the "experts," it sounds like it would be possible to make a more compelling case against the statutory rates by pointing out some rather simple facts: file sharing, in and of itself, creates no damage for artists -- and thus, the statutory rates have nothing to do with being a "remedy," but have everything to do with being punitive, which would make it a criminal issue, rather than a civil one.

Now, I can hear the copyright supporters (including Lichtman) shouting that it's ridiculous to claim that file sharing creates no damages for the artists -- but that's not what I said. I said, file sharing in and of itself creates no damage. And that's easily proven: just point to the increasingly large number of artists who have embraced file sharing on purpose and who have found that it's helped them earn more money. Then, what you realize is that file sharing combined with a bad business model may create damages, but those damages may be alleviated by putting in place a better business model (again, pointing to evidence of artists who have done exactly that). At that point, the "damages" have gone away. The fault is almost entirely on the part of the artist who picked a bad business model, and then did nothing to alleviate the problem when it became clear that the market was going in a different direction.

In that case, there's no actual evidence of damages, and it's difficult to see the constitutionality of charging someone $750, let alone $150,000, when there's no actual evidence of damages -- and the only actual "damage" may have been caused by the artist themselves by picking a bad business model.

Part of my problem with all of these discussions is that copyright supporters seem to automatically assume that file sharing must be bad -- but there's plenty of evidence to counter that, with artists' wide embrace of it (successfully in many cases) being exhibit A. If file sharing was really so damaging, there would be no such examples. But we see more and more every day. So it's not file sharing that's the problem. The real problem is a bad business model combined with file sharing. And it's rather ridiculous to fine Joel Tenenbaum (or anyone) because some record labels and musicians chose a bad business model.

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Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are: 1. The user is greeted by a large pie chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions. 2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov 3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state). Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment. I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches, 2 of which were generic ones: one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are: 1. The user is greeted by a large pic chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions. 2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov 3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state). Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment. I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches 2 of which were generic ones, one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Dennis took this photo of a Mayan skull with jade tooth decorations.

From TYWKIWDBI:

At the height of Mayan civilization, body modification included a variety of alterations of the teeth.

...

Holes in the teeth were created by spinning a drill with a bow (as in firestarting), and using powdered quartz as an abrasive.

Scott from Apartment Therapy sez,

Apartment Therapy New York received a DMCA take-down notice from the NY Times demanding removal of a long list of blog posts containing images from the Times (in posts about relevant Times articles).

We love the Times and write about them (and link to them) frequently. We are shocked & disappointed their first contact with concerns about our use of their images (in posts about their stories!) was a threatening letter & DMCA takedown notice to our ISP who have warned us they will disable our servers if we don't comply with the NY Times request.

Pop quiz: You're a troubled media dinosaur struggling to find your way on the Web. What steps can you take to actively discourage people from linking to you, thus reducing your pageviews and revenue?

DMCA Take Down Notice: The NYTimes Goes to War & Wants to Shut us Down (Thanks, Scott!)

This is such a cool idea. It's a custom bracelet of a soundwave rendered in 3D. The bracelet is "designed" by the waveform of the message it encodes. And they're a steal of a deal at $18.

The bracelets are part of the Sound Advice Project, a teen anti-drug abuse initiative, geared at getting parents to talk to their kids. The idea is that, as a parent, you record some message to your child ("Drugs are bad, m'kay") and he or she carries that message with them at all times. Not sure that giving a 3D model of a soundwave is really the most direct way of talking to your kids, but it sure gets points for creativity and conceptual chutzpah.

It doesn't say anything on the site (that I could find) about recording messages/making bracelets that aren't teen/drug-related.

The Sound Advice Project [Boing Boing Gadgets]

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David Pogue interviewed electric car entrepreneur Shai Agassi about his plans to create electric cars with removal batteries so that drivers can simply drive up to filling stations and get their old battery swapped for a new one in less time than it takes to fill a regular car's tank with gas.

Video above, and Pogue has the full transcript of the interview on his NYT blog.

DP: So what will you guys make? What will you do?

SA: We sell miles, the way that AT&T sells you minutes. They buy bandwidth and they translate into minutes. We buy batteries and clean electrons–we only buy electrons that come from renewable sources–and we translate that into miles.

DP: What are we talking about here? What’s the infrastructure you’re building?

SA: We have two pieces of infrastructure. 1) Charge spots. And they will be everywhere, like parking meters, only instead of taking money from you when you park, they give you electrons. And they will be at home, they’ll be at work, they’ll be at downtown and retail centers. As if you have a magic contract with Chevron or Exxon that every time you stop your car and go away, they fill it up.

Now, that gives us the ability to drive most of our drives, sort of a 100-mile radius. And that’s most of the drives we do. But we also take care of the exceptional drive. You want to go from Boston to New York. And so on the way, we have what we call switch stations: lanes inside gas stations. You go into the switch station, your depleted battery comes out, a full battery comes in, and you keep driving. It takes you about two, three minutes–less than filling with gasoline–and you can keep on going.

(Thanks, Daniel!)

A while back, we noted that some professors at my school, Georgetown, were joining the trend of banning laptops in classrooms, pointing out that it was probably a futile attempt to force students to pay attention -- distracted, disinterested students have been and always will be a fact of life. However, one professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder has decided to actually educate her students about why using laptops in classes is a bad choice. Diane Sieber noted which students used laptops the most and, after their test, informed them that they had done 11 percent worse than analog-only students. The number of laptop users dropped and their scores went up. While Professor Sieber could have just as easily banned laptops, by treating her students like capable adults, she has produced a win-win.

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

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Ropati writes "I bank with capitalone.com. Recently I went to log in to my credit card account, and my browser reported that the site certificate didn't match the web site I was on. [Expletive.] I'm wondering if I am getting a poisoned DNS URL. I have to log in and do my banking, so I accept the mismatched certificate. The banking site is complete, my transactions are listed but that doesn't mean there isn't a man in the middle attack here. I am still curious how much I have exposed my banking assets." Read on for more, and offer advice on how to interpret what sounds like a flaky response from the bank.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ropati writes "I bank with capitalone.com. Recently I went to log in to my credit card account, and my browser reported that the site certificate didn't match the web site I was on. [Expletive.] I'm wondering if I am getting a poisoned DNS URL. I have to log in and do my banking, so I accept the mismatched certificate. The banking site is complete, my transactions are listed but that doesn't mean there isn't a man in the middle attack here. I am still curious how much I have exposed my banking assets." Read on for more, and offer advice on how to interpret what sounds like a flaky response from the bank.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike B sez, "For my 7-year-old son's school lunch birthday party, my Japanese wife made faux sushi using Rice Crispy treats, Swedish Fish, Fruit Rollups and licorice. And of course she packed it all in a proper faux lacquer (plastic) sushi box. It was a big hit with my son's classmates."

Birthday treats for school (Thanks, Mike!)

TheDopp writes "The United Nations hosted the cast and crew of Battlestar Galactica Tuesday evening in New York. Clips of the show were shown as discussion points during the event, touching on the morality of Suicide Bombers in war, Abortion and the use of torture on enemies of the state. At one point during the event an attendee mentions 'the "Old Man" launched into a passionate speech about casting off the idea of race as a cultural determinant, and said we were one race, the human race. His voice echoed throughout the chamber growing louder until — I kid you not — he was yelling, "So Say We All," and the crowd answered right back. Hell, even I yelled it, I was in the fraking United Nations with Adama, the gods themselves could not have stopped this moment.' The full video of the event is located on the UN website."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TheDopp writes "The United Nations hosted the cast and crew of Battlestar Galactica Tuesday evening in New York. Clips of the show were shown as discussion points during the event, touching on the morality of Suicide Bombers in war, Abortion and the use of torture on enemies of the state. At one point during the event an attendee mentions 'the "Old Man" launched into a passionate speech about casting off the idea of race as a cultural determinant, and said we were one race, the human race. His voice echoed throughout the chamber growing louder until — I kid you not — he was yelling, "So Say We All," and the crowd answered right back. Hell, even I yelled it, I was in the fraking United Nations with Adama, the gods themselves could not have stopped this moment.' The full video of the event is located on the UN website."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Can't find your bubble/spirit level? No prob. Just download this software and install it on your Wii and use your Wiimote as a level.

Leveltool

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Yesterday, we wrote a highly critical post concerning the details around Choruss, the recording industry's latest plan to get universities or ISPs to hand over a chunk of money in exchange for "covenants not to sue." On a private email list (which has been forwarded to me by a few members of that list), Mr. Griffin responded by claiming that my "report is factually incorrect in every respect."

I certainly hope that's true!

The points I've raised are that the industry will continue suing file sharing networks, that they'll still pursue three-strikes policies, and that Choruss will be expensive, diverting a chunk of money away from other legitimate business models, which many musicians have been establishing successfully, by adding yet another middleman. Is he saying all of these assertions are false?

Actually, Griffin doesn't address or refute any of these points at all. With respect to the last one, he actually confirms it, by claiming that Choruss will be costly to run.

The only "factual" point he disputes is a rather minor one: concerning whether the program would also cover publishers and songwriters rather than just the labels. He insists that it will, noting that Warner Music owns one of the largest publishers. That's true, but hardly eases the worries. It just suggests, again, that this is a plan for Warner and its subsidiaries, rather than for building a better system for all stakeholders. And he doesn't explain how the system can cover the necessary rights at the price points being discussed. In fact, by noting how costly the program is to run, and how it will lose money at first, it certainly sounds like he's saying "this program will start out cheap, but then we'll jack up the fees."

He claims that Choruss "cannot credibly be claimed to be a money grab -- the costs will exceed the fees," but that's highly misleading on several accounts. First, as noted, it confirms just how expensive the program will be. Second, if it's a pure money loser, than why would anyone be involved with it at all? Obviously the idea, and the whole reason why Warner Music is backing it, is that it expects this to be a money maker, eventually. Claiming that it's costly simply confirms my original point, that inserting yet another costly middleman is the last thing that we need in the process. And this just suggests that any early pricing is, once again... bait and switch. The eventual prices will have to be increased once people are locked in.

That seems to confirm my initial complaints, rather than show how they're "factually incorrect."

Mr. Griffin, (on a private email list), again tries to refute the claim that they haven't included the stakeholders in the process, by noting:

"the calendar is a clear refutation: The coming week has Choruss at SXSW, a music conference in Nashville and the music educator's conference in Boston. We've done appearances and podcasts with Educause, dozens of public meetings at colleges and a keynote at Digital Music Forum."

Yes, after coming up with the plan in back rooms, without input from the actual stakeholders, Griffin has started going out and presenting the plan to others. But there's been no open discussion with those of us worried about the inevitable consequences of his plan. There's been no explanation of why this is actually needed. There's been no attempt to actually respond to the numerous questions that we've raised about the plan and no attempt to bring the actual users into the discussion:

• Why do we even need such a plan when plenty of musicians are showing that they can craft business models on the open market that work?
• How does adding yet another middleman make the music market any more efficient?
• Will the recording industry promise to stop trying to shut down file sharing systems if this program gets adopted?
• Will the recording industry promise to stop pushing for 3 strikes if this program gets adopted?
• How will the program prevent the gaming opportunities, where artists set up scripts to constantly reload/download their songs?
• Why should music be separated out and subsidized while other industries have to come up with their own business models?
• Why should those who don't listen to much music and aren't interested in giving their money to the recording industry be required to participate if their university or ISP decides to make them?

Finally, Mr. Griffin takes a personal swipe at me, saying that no "responsible professional" would write what I've been writing. I've the highest respect for Mr. Griffin, who I do believe is very capable and very smart -- and most certainly has the best of intentions with Choruss. But it's a bad plan and he seems unwilling to address the many, many questions raised about it, other than to brush anyone who disagrees with him aside, and focus on talking to friendlier audiences. If he wants to brush me off as not a "responsible professional," that's fine. I'm willing to let anyone judge me on my work, not on what Griffin says about me. But the very least he could do is actually address the points that I've raised.

To date, his form of "discussion" has been to have Warner Music PR send me a statement saying that it's "premature" to issue any criticism of his plan. That's not discussion and that's not addressing the many, many questions raised by his plan.

But, there's some good news. That "music conference in Nashville" where he'll be presenting about Choruss next week is the Leadership Music Digital Summit... which I happen to be keynoting. So, I'd love to sit down with Griffin and see if he'll actually answer some of these questions, rather than continue brushing us off as being "factually incorrect in every respect," without actually addressing the fundamental questions raised.

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Verizon told George Vaccaro that bandwidth charges in Canada were .002 cents per kilobyte, but billed him at .002 dollars, or 100 times as much as he was quoted.

But Verizon customer service insists there's no difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents. Here's the recording of the call. George was incredibly patient with the Verizon customer service supervisor, who just couldn't understand the many examples George gave him to explain the difference between .002 cents and .002 dollars.

VerizonMath (Thanks, Jim!)

The Resident Evil series has been a pillar of the survivor-horror genre for over a decade, with over 40 million copies sold and several books and movies to show for it. Resident Evil 4 was one of the most highly acclaimed games of 2005, and the lengthy development period given to its successor shows how important it was to Capcom to maintain that level of quality. More than that, the gameplay changes made to Resident Evil 5 make it clear that they're not simply trying to replicate success, but to really establish what they want the series to be. For better or for worse, the series is being pushed toward a bit more action, and the co-op element is almost a necessity. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Resident Evil series has been a pillar of the survivor-horror genre for over a decade, with over 40 million copies sold and several books and movies to show for it. Resident Evil 4 was one of the most highly acclaimed games of 2005, and the lengthy development period given to its successor shows how important it was to Capcom to maintain that level of quality. More than that, the gameplay changes made to Resident Evil 5 make it clear that they're not simply trying to replicate success, but to really establish what they want the series to be. For better or for worse, the series is being pushed toward a bit more action, and the co-op element is almost a necessity. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The last piece on journalism got a lot of reads, but more importantly, unveiled some areas where I need to repeat things I've been saying for a long time. It's my fault -- I get into the habit of being misunderstood, and I expect it will always be so. But two things happen: 1. The world changes and 2. I get better at explaining.

Apparently I am one of the very few who think we're in the middle of the reboot of journalism, not at the start. It's not in the future, it's been happening for a long time. But as all things one is in the middle of, it can hard to see that it exists. Ask the fish to describe water -- he'll say there is no such thing. Ask a mammal to describe air or ask someone who is living through a transformation of journalism to explain, they can't. This is no one's fault, it's just human nature. The closer you are to something, the harder it is to see.

Talking with Jay Rosen on Tuesday, in a conversation we didn't record, he said we don't know the shape of the new journalism, and I agreed -- but that's the only thing we don't know. We know very well the components, the same sources that the old journalism was built on, with one major difference -- they now go direct.

This is what we've been working on in the blogging space for 15 years. I wrote about billions of websites in 1995. And before that, desktop publishing and laser printers made it possible to print newsletters in 1986, 23 years ago. All that time, every time a former source started publishing on their own, the process of new journalism took a step forward.

I warned the news industry about this, starting at the latest in 2000, in a piece I wrote in Amsterdam, asking them to open the doors to the people. Later, in 2002, I urged the NY Times, who I was working with on RSS, to give blogs, under the NYT banner, to anyone who was quoted in a NYT piece. They could have, but didn't, take steps to move forward on new journalism. In my experience, if you participate in the movement that undermines your way of doing business, you have some say in how it evolves. If this were the transport industry, it's as if I were recommending that the NY Central railroad make an investment in Trans World Airlines. Or that UPS invest in FedEx. I still don't think it's too late, but the time is very short, it seems.

There are so many examples of sources that go direct. Jay has been sending me links. I see them everywhere; I stopped looking a long time ago, when blogging seemed to be on solid ground. At Cal on Monday, I talked about judges, attorneys, jurors, defendents and plaintiffs blogging, and was laughed at by the pros, but Scott found a judge that is blogging. (And a judge blogging is the most extreme example, I know it.)

In 2003, when I went to Harvard to bring blogging to a major university, the profs I talked to gave me the blank stare, as if wondering why I would be pitching them on publishing independently. None of them took me up on the offer, because Harvard profs had no trouble getting published. But there are lots of them who blog now, every one an expert, the kind of person news organizations quote. Now they're going direct, wholesale, and realtime with their observations. This is as it should be, and to the hand-wringers who think we're losing something in the transition to the new journalism, it's the other way around -- our horizons are expanding, the bottlenecks aren't just widening, they're being blown up. The new world is much better than the old one.

Jay's comment about not knowing the shape of the new journalism got me thinking, as well as a topic we glossed over in last Sunday's podcast, the question of Twitter as an environment for journalism. My claim is they have screwed it up, by gifting some reporters with huge flow while leaving others out. No environment for journalism can do that, without immediately spawning competition. That's how confused the business people of journalism are, because near as I can tell, they are ceding the whole opportunity to a little tech company in SF that has a very weird idea how news works. They think it exists to promote their product. That is far too narrow a definition. Twitter is very important now, but not that important long-term. Twitter is part of the answer to Jay's question about the shape of the new journalism. It might be the backbone, the top level; or the back room, the back channel, the virtual newsroom. Or it might be both.

In math, when you have to prove a hard theorum, first you try to prove elements of the theory, that if true, would prove the whole thing. In software, you may not know what the final user interface looks like, but you know some layers to it, so in either case you can start work right away. In 1994 we didn't know what the new journalism would look like, and we still don't, but we knew some essential elements, perhaps the essential element -- that sources go direct. It's the thing the Internet does to all intermediaries, it disses them. It happened to travel agents, realtors, classified ads, all kinds of shopping, and it has happened to news too.

As with everything new, to see it you have to jump out of your skin and look at the situation from the new body, not the old one. Imagine what news would look like once the limits of the past are erased by the technology of the new. It's been knowable for many years, but some didn't want to look. But if you looked, as millions did, if you weren't one of the gatekeepers; rather you were one of the people they gates were meant to keep out -- there was no problem seeing how it would shape up. Now we're there, we're not at the beginning, we're already far along.

PS: Brent Simmons remembers InternetWorld in 1997 when we met a guy who thought there would be at most 10 websites in 2000. I don't remember his name either.

It's difficult to believe that anyone could look at the disastrous five years of the RIAA suing fans and think, "hey, we should do that too!" However, that appears to be exactly what some German book publishers have decided. Michael Scott points us to the news that the head of the German book publishers' assocation has announced plans to "sue thousands" and talked about how file sharing systems were the equivalent of organized crime. He's also demanding that ISPs implement a three strikes plan. Apparently, he hasn't discovered that file sharing of books, when done right, can help boost demand for book sales.

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ddfall writes "H-Online has a follow-up on the Ext4 file system — Last week's news about data loss with the Linux Ext4 file system is explained and new solutions have been provided by Ted Ts'o to allow Ext4 to behave more like Ext3."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ddfall writes "H-Online has a follow-up on the Ext4 file system — Last week's news about data loss with the Linux Ext4 file system is explained and new solutions have been provided by Ted Ts'o to allow Ext4 to behave more like Ext3."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eukariote writes "A paper and exploit code detailing a privilege escalation attack on Intel CPUs has just been published. The vulnerability, uncovered by security researchers Joanna Rutkowska (of Blue Pill fame), Rafal Wojtczuk, and, independently, Loic Duflot, makes use of Intel's System Management Mode (SMM). Quote: "The attack allows for privilege escalation from Ring 0 to the SMM on many recent motherboards with Intel CPUs. Rafal implemented a working exploit with code execution in SMM." The implications of this exploit are severe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eukariote writes "A paper and exploit code detailing a privilege escalation attack on Intel CPUs has just been published. The vulnerability, uncovered by security researchers Joanna Rutkowska (of Blue Pill fame), Rafal Wojtczuk, and, independently, Loic Duflot, makes use of Intel's System Management Mode (SMM). Quote: "The attack allows for privilege escalation from Ring 0 to the SMM on many recent motherboards with Intel CPUs. Rafal implemented a working exploit with code execution in SMM." The implications of this exploit are severe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The response to our survey request last week was really great! Thanks to everyone who already filled it out! The Maker Shed survey and contest will end this Sunday, March 22nd. This is your last chance to enter the drawing for 1 of 5 Maker's Notebooks.

Here is the information about the survey from last week:

We want to learn more about you. Yes, you! So if you have 5 minutes, and like the idea of contest, take a look at this survey. You could win 1 of 5 Maker's Notebooks that we are giving away, at random, to people who take the Maker Shed survey. We ask for your email information at the conclusion of this survey for one reason: to allow you to enter yourself in a random drawing for gifts. Providing your email is strictly optional. Other than that, we do not ask any personally identifiable information, nor will we sell, rent or share your email address to third parties.

Want to make us really happy? If you win one of the Maker's Notebooks be sure to mod it up a bit and send us a link. We love to post about customized Maker's Notebooks.

Take the Maker Shed survey!

In the Maker Shed:

 

Pick up The Maker's Notebook ($19.99) for all your big ideas, diagrams, patterns, etc. Exclusive to the Maker Shed: Sticker sheets and a band closure to customize your book.

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The UK released its "Digital Britain" report a couple of months ago, and it was derided not just because it was very vague, but also because it caved to the interests of the recording industry. The extent to which that's the case is slightly staggering. The British government has now released some details on part of the plan that would create a "Digital Rights Agency" -- a government-backed industry body to tackle file-sharing. The government says that the group wouldn't have any enforcement power, but that it could be "backed up by legislation." That sounds an awful lot like giving the copyright cartel the ability to set the rules on what people can do online, which will certainly only benefit them, and not the public -- just in case you wondered whose "rights" a Digital Rights Agency would seek to protect. The justification for such an approach is pretty appalling. The report says that consumers' attitudes towards content has changed, and that they're not willing to accept limitations on how and where they access it. Smart businesses would see this as an opportunity to change their business model and create new products and services that fit consumers' changing attitudes. But instead, the likes of the recording industry go looking to government to get a legal stick with which to beat customers to fit their outmoded business models.

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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Dave Allen writes "Despite Nintendo publicly claiming no direct competition with the iPhone or iPod Touch with its new DSi console, reports have been leaked about the Big N actively encouraging developers to begin work on small form gaming and non-gaming applications for the DSi's download service. This is the first step toward Nintendo putting together a direct App Store rival, and could be the marketing hook it's been desperately searching for to convince gamers to upgrade their DS." It seems only fair that since the iPhone is now a gaming platform that the DS becomes a PDA. And if the only difference between them is a 3G wireless connection, the rivalry can only get more fierce.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.

Time for some radical thinking in journalism business models, right? OK, try this thought experiment (wait a second while I put on a flame-retardant suit):

What would happen if some top English language journalism organizations simply merged and started charging for their breaking news and commentary about policy, economics and and other national/international topics. That is, what if they were to combine for critical mass and keep most of their journalism off the public Internet for a few days after publication but then make the archives freely available?

Before you spit out your coffee (or whatever) in rage and/or laughter and/or derision, let me happily concede that this approach would raise all kinds of questions -- about elitism, fundamental business issues, the Internet’s linking culture and more. But it's already sparked a great offline conversation. And who knows, it might even work (though as you'll see below, some colleagues have pointed out good reasons why it might not).

The word “might” is the key one. We’re in the midst of an important discussion of how we’re going to pay for quality journalism as the 20th Century business models unravel. Unfortunately, people keep looking for magic potions that will solve the entire problem, failing to recognize that this is not a binary issue but rather a nuanced collection of changes.

No single business model will emerge — or so we should hope, because if that happens we’ll be racing back to new kinds of market inefficiencies that stem from non-diverse ecosystems. We need a thousand experiments, most of which will fail but, we hope, more than a few that will work.

That’s why even though I find the recent revival of a discredited idea -- see Time Magazine’s recent piece on micro-payments for news -- more than a bit tedious, I’m not sorry we’re having it. Note that I share the skeptics’ views of this approach, though I think at least one related project/idea deserves a much closer look: Doc Searls’ VRM/PayChoice , which is all about a new kind of payment system that has genuine possibilities (more below from Doc on this).

So, in a semi-over-the-top mode, let’s sign up the following organizations:

• New York Times
• Wall Street Journal
• Washington Post
• Financial Times
• Economist
• Atlantic Monthly
• Washington Monthly
• New Yorker

Call the new company, oh, NewJournCo. Then set a price for the journalism. (Note: I own a small amount of NYT stock, which is nearly worthless at this point.)

I don’t know the combined annual newsroom cost of these organizations, but I’d be surprised if it was even $750 million. Let’s go wild and call it $1 billion, so we can pay for lawyers, Web developers, accountants and a bunch of other folks who’d need to be part of the operation.

I'll now switch into the combined mode of devil's advocate and defender of this thought experiment. Several of the questions that follow came from Jay Rosen, whose excellent brain I picked on this notion:

Q: How did you come up with your membership list? What rules did you use for who gets included and who does not?

A: No rules except their ability to do excellent journalism — it’s a first cut. I’m sure there are some organizations that don’t belong on the list, and others that do. I'd add National Public Radio and the Guardian if the ownership/nonprofit issues could be resolved, for example. And maybe the McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Q: Why should I pay for what I am getting now for free?

A: Because it wouldn’t be immediately available anymore except for pay, and — assuming these organizations take their online operations into the much more conversational world that is central to the future of journalism -- the overall cost might be worth what you we in return. If not, then not.

Q: What kind of money are you talking about?

A: Well, 2 million subscribers at $10 a week ($520 a year) would do it would bring in a bit over $1 billion a year. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal together have almost that many subscribers by themselves, paying nearly that much already in the case of the Journal’s paper edition (though significantly less for the online-only subscription) and a significant percentage of that amount for the Times.

Q: Would these Web editions have advertising?

A: Hopefully not for the pay-wall news coverage, if the customers were going to be spending this kind of money. Ads would be counterproductive, to the extent that they were annoying. Advertising would surely be a key source of revenue for the archives, however. And ad revenue in the publications' print editions, while all but certain to disappear eventually, i serious money in at least the near future.

Q: Cartel, anyone? Has anyone asked the Justice Department Antitrust Division what it thinks of this?

A: Who knows? According to Reuters, the attorney general said today that he was "open to adjusting antitrust policy" for newspapers. And former lawyer for the Antitrust Division indicated that a merger of this kind might have a chance of passing muster.

Q: Wouldn’t this arrangement tempt these combined organizations to cut back on their spending for journalism so they could make more money?

A: As if this isn't the current condition of the industry? Investors are greedy and consider a lot of actual journalism to be a waste of money, especially when ad revenues are heading south. But if NewJournCo did lousy journalism it wouldn’t get people to pay. This model would require them to do better journalism than they're doing now, I would wager. And I'd hope that a precondition of any antitrust approval would be assurances of more, not less, journalism.

Q: Wouldn’t this be bad for everyone else who does journalism? Are you calling for a single dominant news organization and nothing else?

A: Absolutely not. This merger wouldn’t necessarily be great for competitors in the arenas where these folks specialize. But competing journalists, singly or in groups, could offer ad-supported and paid alternatives of their own. I can think of dozens of other organizations and individuals whose work I’d continue to follow in general political and business news. The Associated Press is owned by the newspaper industry. Isn’t that more of a cartel than this?

Q: What about local newspapers and local news in general? How does this help local coverage?

A: It doesn’t. They’re pretty much screwed if they don’t make other, bigger changes, and soon.

Q: What about indexing and display by search engines?

A: This could be complicated. I’d suggest that, as now, some individual articles, picked by editors, would be freely available via Google News and other search methods from the moment they were published. Most would not be available immediately.

Q: So the articles would never be seen by Google et al?

A: To the contrary: NewJournCo would would do what the New York Times and Guardian are already doing: putting the archives online with perma-links on every article, because there’s enormous long-term value in being a high-ranking link when someone does a search on a specific topic. As Doc Searls and others (including me) have argued (see below), “Sell the news and give away the olds.” (It’s not really a giveaway if you can monetize it, by the way.)

Q: You’ve named ultra-traditional media companies that have betrayed all kinds of journalistic flaws over the years, and at least some of which plainly don’t understand the digital future at all. Why are they the ones you want to save?

A: Yes, they have tremendous flaws. But they also boast some of the best reporting around. If this worked, they could focus on improving their journalism -- widening their scope of coverage, in fact -- and participating more fully in the digital world. Which is ultimately the point: to preserve and, hopefully, expand some of the journalism that at least some of us believe is important, and create journalism for this century that takes proper advantage of the available tools.

Q: What happens to blogging about and linking to their articles in this scenario?

A: Iin the short run, linking to these organizations’ work would drop except for the few things they posted each day for free. In the long run, with open archives, NewJournCo would accrue a huge amount of “Google Juice” and other search engine notice, because the quality of the work would deserve it. But if the option is less of their journalism (the kind they do well), then I’ll accept this tradeoff.

Q: Does this entity continue its members’ current policy of reducing outbound links out and making a huge percentage of their links internal to their own content?

A: No, I’d hope we could get some kind of quid pro quo (antitrust bargain?) that included, at the very least: a) vastly more transparency in how they do their journalism; b) a commitment to the Web’s linking culture, ensuring that they point to the material that they use to do their own reporting, not to mention the reporting they didn’t do; c) in general, a more conversational approach with the people who read, watch and listen to what they produce. If NewJournCo's managers didn't understand that they should do this, no matter what, then I think the enterprise would ultimately fail anyway.

Q: Again, why should we even support this crowd, most of which consistently failed us and plainly has little concern for what we think? Their idea of public service seems like David Broder urging bi-partisanship. Is this what we need to sustain?

A: What we need to sustain is, to cite just several examples, the relentless questioning of the government propaganda that McClatchy did in the run-up to the Iraq War; the New York Times’ exposure of the Bush administration’s flouting of the law (and Congress’ bended-knee acceptance of that illegality) in warrantless surveillance of the American people; NPR’s brilliant explainer of the housing bubble; and so much more.

Q: Why wouldn’t we see that kind of journalism even if they all went out of business?

A: We would, to some degree. But it’s more difficult than you may think to assemble these kinds of organizations, and to apply the kinds of resources it takes to produce reports of breadth and often depth. There’s no assurance that this system would work, but maybe it’s worth a try.

Q: What guarantees that this could never work?

A: Ego and fear. The CEOs and boards of these enterprises almost certainly wouldn't do anything like this, no matter how logical it might be. All industries are populated with bosses who wouldn't want to lose their jobs and/or power, and this goes triple for declining or failing industries.

Naturally, when I circulated an early version of this to some Berkman Center colleagues, they pushed back, hard. Here are some (lightly edited) comments:

Ethan Zuckerman said:

I think two major outcomes would result:

- A small but fairly successful movement would pirate content successfully and make it accessible to the truly determined.
- The vast majority of readers wouldn’t care and would read more free media.

I suspect the first is true because it’s been virtually impossible to prevent digital content from being redistributed without putting massive DRM on it. If copying and pasting is permissable, I’d expect to see blogs spring up that do little more than repurpose new content from the cabal and add ads to it. This happens all the time with RSS syndication - obviously, it’s possible to send cease and desist letters, but it’s a temporary solution at best. Those blogs don’t get very much traffic now, making it somewhat unsatisfying to send those C&Ds, but if the NYTimes is no longer accessible online, some small group of people is likely to seek out that content via less expensive means.

(I can imagine people doing this for less-than-offensive reasons, BTW. If I subscribe to a cartel paper and blog about its Africa coverage - as I do - and I can no longer point the majority of my readers to the source material so they can read my analysis, I’m likely to link to an unlocked copy. Dave Winer built a tool that allowed people to link to the unlocked NYTimes back in paywall days for the reasons I’m citing here. I can imagine this situation changing somewhat if bloggers are paid a referral for sending new subscribers, but I doubt it will stop the problem of people trying to create a parallel newsfeed…)

The second problem is a larger one, in my opinion. I’m not convinced that there’s as much demand for smart, well-reasoned, serious reporting as we’d hope. I think it’s worth entertaining the possibility that there’s a small, elite group that already subscribes to the Economist, focuses on international and serious political issues, discusses and blogs about these things, that would be sure to pay for the content… if libertarian, free content sensibilities don’t get in the way.

There’s a larger group of people who read the NYTimes now because they can, because it’s free and because other people link to it. If it ceased to be accessible, they’re likely to get their news via Google or Yahoo, which will now be aggregating wire stories published in smaller newspapers. Their information environment will be much poorer, but I’m not convinced that they’ll be willing to address that situation.

The worry for me is this - I fear that an elite, Economist-style media may be the only way to finance media as ad and subscription models fall apart. But we run the risk that we end up with a badly bifurcated discussion, with a small group arguing about one set of issues with one set of data and a larger group talking about what they’re able to get via free means. This obviously happens right now, but at least it’s possible to cross the camps and check what the other side is saying. What happens when Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners that the NYTimes is saying something, and few if any listeners are willing to pay to see whether he’s even reporting correctly on what the Times said?

I understand the forces that are leading newspapers to consider models like this. But I think we’d be vastly better off with media financed either through some form of taxation ala BBC or via philanthropic largess - both of which are guaranteed to introduce biases and conflicts - than to accept a model in which most people won’t have access to the best media. I’m not convinced that there’s enough demand for people to scale the paywall, and I worry that the techniques to let media filter from behind the paywall into mainstream conversation are poorly developed and ineffective.

As usual, Ethan raises critical issues, though his Likely Outcome 1 troubles me less than Outcome 2. Some thoughts:

The workarounds would undoubtedly spring up, and they'd carve away a certain amount of traffic from the "official" site. But the kinds of people who would pay $10 a month for this aggregation are probably the kinds of people who'd pay anyway even if they could get some individual stories free, because 32 or 33 cents a day is trivial compared to the convenience they'd get.

If NewJournCo was smart about it, the entity would have just enough tolerance of workarounds to see them as promotion, at least to some degree. They might bring about more paying customers.

Ethan's second issue, as he notes, is the bigger one. I don't agree with him that there's not a sufficient market for "smart, well-reasoned, serious reporting" to support this entity.

I do agree that the elitism issue, the risk of a bifurcated conversation, is worrisome. But I'd ask two questions of my own. First, what if the economic crunch causes these organizations individually to cut back on their journalism, as it's already done to some degree (though not to the same degree as less prominent news orgs)?

Second, why would this necessarily lead to a situation in which the bulk of the population didn't know the truth of what Rush Limbaugh was alleging? For one thing, the NY Times (in his example) could easily post what it had actually said as a response, assuming his assertion took place during the three-day (or however long) paywall period. And after that time, the full story would be available for anyone to see. I don't see how the discussion remains all that bifurcated.

I'm not talking about a model where "most people don't have access to the best media," but rather one where they have second-hand access for a brief period and first-hand access thereafter. To me this is far preferable to government financing, which raises enormous risks of different kinds that I'm not willing to take.

Doc Searls thinks my semi-modest proposal is coming at a real problem from an inapt direction:

I pay to get the Wall Street Journal’s paper edition, and more on top of that for their online edition. I am also a non-paying “member” of many papers’ websites. Based on loads of icky experience, I believe that both the paywall and the subwall (the subscriber wall) are huge value-subtracts for the papers and their readers. I hate both walls, and I’m the kind of guy who *likes* to support these institutions.

I see nothing, in all of mainstream journalism, that tells me that any major publication wants to make it easy for me to read their work. The current fashion is to run every story in tiny type (a default with blogs now too), to clutter the crap out of the index page, and to split every article into many pieces to make sure the reader’s eyes get dragged across as much advertising as possible.

I know one journalist, a reporter for a large old paper, who has sent me many emails of woe recounting fights with “designers” of awful websites and CMSes (content management systems) straight from the lowest rings of hell. It’s gonna be hard to get these leopards to change their spots. In fact, I think the only way to get them to change is by showing them the money they’re leaving on the table.
I think you’re trying to herd horses escaped from many barns back into one big one. Or, to leverage the agricultural metaphor, into one big silo. I don’t think it would work. In fact, I don’t think *any* scarcity play will work. I also agree with the other stuff Ethan said along those same lines in his response.

You’re still coming from the right place with this, which is recognizing that journalistic goods are worth more than nothing, even though that’s what publishers and broadcasters are currently charging for them (at least online), and what people are paying as well.

I don’t think the answer to this problem can come from inside the industry. I think it has to come from the outside — from the customers’ side. That’s the angle we’re taking with ProjectVRM, in particular with PayChoice, currently described as a buy-side system “by which readers, listeners and viewers can quickly and easily pay for the goods they use - on their own terms, and not just those of suppliers’ arcane systems.”

Take a look at what we’re doing with PayChoice, Media logging, r-button and Listen Log. Links:

<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/PayChoice>

<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Media_Logging>

<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/R-button>

<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Listen_Log>

The first Listen Log is called ListenLog, and it is being developed right now for the Public Radio Tuner, a product of PRX and friends:

<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/ListenLog>

Here’s the tuner:

<http://www.publicradiotuner.com/>

More than 700,000 of these things have been downloaded from iTunes so far. It’s usually among the top free downloads (it was #2 most of last week). Among actually useful third party applications for the iPhone, it may already be #1 overall. And it’s only been around since January.

The ListenLog will be open source, like much of the other work with the tuner. Some of its methods, features and technology pieces should be applicable to newspapers, magazines, podcasts and other journalistic products (at least in the forms that appear online). Why not log, and then pay for, what we read on our hand-helds as well as what we listen to or watch? In fact I expect to see development moving in that direction, because we have an active and growing community of programmers and technologists, most of them volunteers, working on this thing already.

I highly recommend that everybody read Kevin Kelly’s “Better than Free.” He begins by saying “The internet is a copy machine,” and unpacks a number of points implied by that claim. He even takes JZ’s adjective, “generative,” and treats it as a noun, listing eight “generatives.”

About one of those, “patronage,” Kevin writes, “It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators.” This desire to reward creators is what we call MLOTT: Money Left On The Table. And it’s what we’re addressing specifically with PayChoice and the rest of the stuff I described above.

Forgive me if I seem to be getting carried away, but I’m excited about what we’re doing, and its prospects for journalism. It’s a snowball that’s starting to roll downhill. I’d rather bet on that than on any big rock an old industry has to push uphill.

As noted above, I love what Doc is doing. It's pathbreaking, important work that I hope has a prominent place in our future.

I hope, as well, that it's one of many models we try. We need as many experiments in business models as in journalism-creation models.

OK, enough from us, if you've gotten this far. Your turn now...

(Photo by Dan4th via Flickr)

Attention makers in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph, New Hamburg, Baden, Elmira, Ayr and anywhere in between: MAKE twitter follower Michael wants to know if you're in the area an interested in starting up a hacker space:

I'm not only envisioning a shared space where geeks and artists alike would be able to work on their own projects in a shared space (loaded with tools). I'm also seeing a community where people would teach each other, experiment, stretch their boundaries, collaborate on great works of art, and be encouraged to take the results of their work back out to the communities where they live. Such a space could attract and bring together people interested in computers, electronics, woodworking, metalwork, clay, glass, cooking and crafts of all kinds.

Head on over to his site to get it going.

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Mike sez, "Last month's visit to Washington DC saw the usual exchange of diplomatic gifts - Gordon Brown gave President Obama a pen holder carver from the timbers of a ship involved in the fight against slavery. In exchange, he was given a box set of 25 classic American movies. On DVD. According to the Telegraph, the leader of a government committed to stronger IP laws sat down recently to watch his new present and... ...they're Region 1 DVDs. Would it be terribly wrong to tell Gordon Brown how to break CSS?"

A Downing Street spokesman said he was "confident" that any gift Obama gave Brown would have been "well thought through," but referred me to the White House for assistance on the "technical aspects".

A White House spokesman sniggered when I put the story to him and he was still looking into the matter when my deadline came last night.

Gordon Brown is frustrated by 'Psycho' in No 10

CWmike writes "Internet Explorer 8 has shipped in its final version and is ready to take on its rivals. Preston Gralla reviewed it and says the latest version of Microsoft's browser leapfrogs its closest competition, Firefox 3, for basic browsing and productivity features — it has better tab handling, a niftier search bar, a more useful address bar, and new tools that deliver information directly from other Web pages and services. IE8 has also been tweaked for security and includes a so-called 'porn mode,' new anti-malware protection, and better ways to protect your privacy. The most noticeable new features? Accelerators and Web Slices. Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page. Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8. There's one big problem for many, though. No add-ins, and there doesn't appear to be such an ecosystem on the horizon. So if you're a fan of add-ins and customizing the browser itself, writes Gralla, Firefox is superior. But for the actual browsing experience, IE8 has the upper hand — for now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "Internet Explorer 8 has shipped in its final version and is ready to take on its rivals. Preston Gralla review it and says the latest version of Microsoft's browser leapfrogs its closest competition, Firefox 3, for basic browsing and productivity features — it has better tab handling, a niftier search bar, a more useful address bar, and new tools that deliver information directly from other Web pages and services. IE8 has also been tweaked for security and includes a so-called 'porn mode," new anti-malware protection, and better ways to protect your privacy. The most noticeable new features? Accelerators and Web Slices. Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page. Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8. One big problem for many, though. No add-ins, and there doesn't appear to be such an ecosystem on the horizon. So if you're a fan of add-ins and customizing the browser itself, writes Gralla, Firefox is superior. But for the actual browsing experience, IE8 has the upper hand — for now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Boston Globe's "Images from the Recession" page features pictures from around the world showing the stark reality of the econopocalypse. Here's a storage yard filled with disused newspaper boxes and racks in San Francisco.

Update: Looks like I (and the Boston Globe) got this one wrong! From Nonprophetone in the comments, "San Francisco banned all individual news racks a few years ago and just got around to replacing them. That photo has nothing to do with the economy."

Scenes from the recession (Thanks, Jeff!)

(Image: AP Photo/Noah Berger)

The Wall Street Journal is running an editorial by L. Gordon Crovitz, discussing the ongoing legal battle between Shepard Fairey and the Associated Press over Fairey's iconic poster of Barack Obama that was used during the campaign: The editorial admits that the legal issues aren't entirely clear, but definitely seems to lean towards the AP's side of the story, including making a rather odd assertion that this case is different than cases of people using snippets of songs on YouTube because "there's no opportunity to license snippets of songs and no harm done" to musicians whose music is used on YouTube. Now, I actually agree that there's really no harm done by music on YouTube, but I would imagine that some of the musicians engaged in ongoing legal battles against YouTube might disagree with Crovitz -- and he's not using the argument in the way we would. He's saying that music on YouTube is a different story compared to the AP and the original photographer who "make their livings selling their work." That may be true, but as I hope Crovitz knows, just because you make a living selling your work, it doesn't mean that fair use doesn't apply.

Also troubling is the false implication from Crovitz that since the AP and Garcia make their livings selling their work, this poster somehow diminishes that ability. I can't see how anyone could make that claim. In both cases, it would seem to have only increased the ability of both the AP and Garcia to make money, rather than decreased it. This particular photo wasn't exactly a huge money maker for the AP or Garcia -- and now it (and they!) are getting a ton of attention because of it.

But, perhaps most troubling may be the quotes Crovitz uses in support of his argument from the photographer, Garcia. As we noted way back when Garcia was first identified by someone else as the photographer, he didn't mind at all and even seemed flattered:

"I know artists like to look at things; they see things and they make stuff. It's a really cool piece of work.... I wouldn't mind getting a signed litho or something from the artist to put up on my wall."

But, when Crovitz spoke to him, he seems to have changed his tune:

"When I found out, I was disappointed in the fact that someone was able to go onto the Internet and take something that doesn't belong to them and then use it. That part of this whole story is crucial for people to understand: that simply because it's on the Internet doesn't mean it's free for the taking, and just because you can take it doesn't mean it belongs to you."

It's really too bad if Garcia has changed his tune. It was really great, for once, to see someone flattered that their work inspired someone to do something great with it, rather than becoming litigious.

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sp3cialk79 writes "Researchers from Philips Electronics plan to describe a jacket they have lined with vibration motors to study the effects of touch on a movie viewer's emotional response to what the characters are experiencing. 'People don't realize how sensitive we are to touch, although it is the first sense that fetuses develop in the womb,' says Paul Lemmens, a Philips senior scientist who will be presenting research done using the jacket at the IEEE-sponsored 2009 World Haptics Conference in Salt Lake City. The jacket contains 64 independently controlled actuators distributed across the arms and torso. The actuators are arrayed in 16 groups of four and linked along a serial bus; each group shares a microprocessor. The actuators draw so little current that the jacket could operate for an hour on its two AA batteries even if the system was continuously driving 20 of the motors simultaneously."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Feast eyes upon General Electric's retro-beautifully animated film explaining the fundamentals of electricity. From the quite excellent Prellinger Collection of the Internet Archive. I had a hunch that electrons were cute and fun-loving, but I never imagined opposing charges being so darn burly!

Come to think of it, I knew this little guy looked familiar -

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miller60 writes "Are you ready for the 100-degree data center? Rackable Systems has introduced a new enclosure that it says can run high-density racks safely in environments as hot as 104 degrees (40 degrees C), offering customers the option of saving energy in their data center. Most data centers operate in a range between 68 and 74 degrees. Raising the thermostat can lower the power bill, allowing data centers to use less power for cooling. But higher temperatures can be less forgiving in the event of a cooling failure, and not likely to be welcomed by employees working in the data center."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Buried in the Terms of Use of a very interesting and potentially valuable site called Newssift, a just-launched service from the Financial Times that uses semantic-web ideas to help sort through the news:

You may be granted a limited, nonexclusive right to create a hyperlink to Newssift.com Web provided (i) you give FT Search Inc. notice of such link by writing to privacyofficer@newssift.com, (ii) FT Search Inc. confirms in writing that you may establish the link, (iii) you do not remove or obscure the copyright notice or other notices on Newssift.com Web, (iv) such link does not portray Newssift.com Web or any of its products, software, content or services in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise defamatory manner, and (v) you immediately discontinue providing a link to Newssift.com Web if so requested by FT Search Inc. You may not use an Newssift.com logo or other proprietary graphic or trademark of Newssift.com to link to the Newssift.com Web without the express written permission of FT Search Inc.

...

Except as expressly approved by FT Search Inc. in writing, you agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes, any portion, or use of, or access to, Newssift.com Web.

Just curious: Who got permission for these links?

And since the Web is a giant copying machine, which means that the Newssift results are copied onto my computer screen, am I not exploiting the service "for commercial purposes" if I learn something that serves my own business purposes, e.g. buying shares in a company based on a story they've, um, linked to?

Newssift has a lot to recommend it, but this stuff -- all too common these days -- is ridiculous. The FT lawyers are doing their best to stomp on their own bosses.

Arduino Blog reports on Mikael Moerup's Gobetwino software - a basic proxy between Windows programs and Arduino boards (though it works with other serial-capable devices as well). Using the included command templates, one can write their own sketch capable of doing the following -

• Start a program on the PC. Start a program, and wait until it finishes, and tell Arduino it finished.
  
• Send data to any windows program from Arduino, like it was typed on the keyboard.
  
• Send email, optionally with an attached file.
  
• Download a file from the internet.
  
• Read a file and return data to Arduino.
  
• Log data from Arduino to a file, with an optional timestamp.
  
• Periodically check a POP3 mailbox for incoming mails and send commands from the mail to Arduino.
  
• Get the time from the PC.
  
• Get the date from the PC.
  
• Ping a host or IP address.
  
• Copy a file on the PC.

With combinations of these commands you can do things like:

• Start any program on your PC, either directly or via an associated file type.
  
• Start Excel, send data from Arduino directly into the Excel sheet, save the sheet and email it, without touching your PC.
  
• Send e-mails to a POP3 mailbox and have Arduino react to the contents of the emails.
  
• Log data directly to a CSV file on the PC, so the data can be used in spreadsheets or databases.
  
• Download a file from the internet and have Arduino ask for a specific line of data from the file.
  

The software is free and includes a manual and example sketches, source to come. Head over to the site to give it a go.

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It's really been great over the past year or so to see more and more bands adopting business models that involve tiered "premium" options that add real value for fans -- the key to creating a real reason to buy, as discussed in my MidemNet presentation a couple months ago. We've seen all different variations on the tiered theme from Trent Reznor to Kristin Hersh to Jill Sobule to John Wesley Harding and many others. Personally, I still think that the most creative of the bunch is Josh Freese's tiers that go from just fun to ridiculous (one option lets you keep his car -- after you drop him off at home).

One of the companies that's doing a good job helping some musicians make this model work is TopSpin, who we've discussed before. In fact, TopSpin has helped Reznor and Freese with their offerings (as well as the Beastie Boys, who recently launched something similar, as well). With TopSpin's platform coming out of beta this week, the company has released some data on its success so far, and it's impressive -- especially for those of you who keep insisting that fans these days just want music for free and are unwilling to pay for anything.

• Its campaigns have certainly helped bands grow their audience and improved ways to connect with fans. One of its first major projects was the release of David Byrne's latest album, and it increased his email list by 37%.
• The various projects have shown that people are quite willing to pay if they're provided with real value and given a real (rather than artificial) reason to buy. The average transaction price is $22 -- significantly more than what people are paying for "just the music" and even more than what an average CD costs.
• Perhaps the most appealing stat: on a recent project 84% of the orders were premium offers above the lowest tier. People will pay more for being given real value, rather than just being forced to pay for the music.

This is great news. Unfortunately, TopSpin is still rather limited right now to bigger name artists (they pick and choose who they work with). I think the world is open for another player to come in and disrupt the market by making such systems available for anyone. Also, in the various projects that TopSpin has run so far, I still think the pricing is a little off (Reznor's was the exception, and he only used TopSpin's backend, rather than its whole program). Also, it seems pretty rare for artists using TopSpin to offer a free option, which limits opportunity greatly (and drives folks to file sharing, rather than opening up a better relationship with those fans, and maybe gaining an email contact and the ability to create sales later). This is (I hope?) an issue from the musicians' side, rather than TopSpin's.

It's also worth noting that the company has also announced a program with Berklee College of Music to teach courses to musicians in how to leverage TopSpin for better business models. Hopefully at least some of that class will include an explanation of how using free as a part of your business model can extend it even further.

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Barence writes "On the day that Microsoft launches Internet Explorer 8, Google has unveiled a new site that showcases the Javascript performance of its Chrome browser. Called Chrome Experiments, the site includes 19 extraordinary animated games and widgets that push the browser to its limits. One experiment, called Browser Ball allows you to "throw" a bouncing ball from one browser window to the next. Google Gravity, on the other hand, collapses the normal Google homepage into a pile at the bottom of the screen. However, you can still enter search terms into the box and watch the results drop from the top of the browser window."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Introducing: The N-Prize. The what? "The N-Prize is a challenge to launch an impossibly small satellite into orbit on a ludicrously small budget, for a pitifully small cash prize."

First proposed on Halfbakery, the site for cooking up crazy ideas, the N-Prize has now become a serious endeavor.

The prize, of £9,999.99 sterling cash, will be awarded to the team that can successfully deliver a tiny satellite (with a mass of between 9.99 and 19.99 grams) into orbit for nine orbits. The cost of the ship itself (not including ground support or R&D) cannot exceed £999 (about US$1500).

Anyone who knows anything about rocketry and space knows how nearly impossible it is to insert something into orbit, on the amateur level, for this kind of money. But that's not stopping folks from trying. The site currently lists 15 teams planning on competing.

Here's an interview with N-Prize founder, Dr. Paul Dear.

N-Prize

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Make subscriber Matti sends us his recipe for an unusual looping interface -

I found this old blender from a flea market and noticed that the names of the different blending modes are very similar to the terminology used in DJing. So I decided to turn this kitchen appliance into a DJ mixer.

The audio tracks are triggered by inserting different fruits into the blender. The buttons on the front panel control the mixing modes and you also have two different types of transformer switches for cutting the sound in and out.

[…]

How does it work?

• Arduino for brains
  
• RFID reader
  
• Different kinds of fruits made out of felt
  
• RFID tags inside the fruits
  
• Max/MSP for converting the serial data to MIDI
  
• Ableton Live for playback
  
• Mad skills to pay the bills

Excellent appliance reuse(and samples as well). Eurythmics + Beastie Boys = two great tastes that go great together. Further details and info to be found on Original Hamsters.

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Glyn Moody writes "There's been a spate of celebrations of Linux's 15th birthday recently. What they're really marking is the 15th anniversary of version 1.0. But do version numbers matter for free software? The 'release early, release often' approach means there's generally little difference between version 0.99.14z, say, and version 1.0. In fact, drawing attention to such anniversaries is misguided, because it gives the impression that free software is created in the same way as traditional proprietary code, working towards a predetermined end-point according to a top-down plan. So how should we be choosing and celebrating free software's past achievements?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By way of Boing Boing and Treehugger comes this wonderful take on the famous British "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters from WWII and the more recent, less positive, versions such as "Now Panic and Freak Out" and "Panic and Run Away."

This is more our cup of tea. I love the crescent wrench crown.

Don't keep calm and carry on.

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Here's a craft project I could get into: turning all of those old 3.5" floppy disks into turntables on greeting cards. Good way to wrap the ubiquitous iTunes Gift Card.

Making a moving turntable greeting card from a floppy disk

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I caught this photo of a rocking bike, taken by Flickr user PavelM, over on Bike Hacks. It appears to be from last year's design event in Prague called Designblok.

This is so much more relevant than a rocking horse, and I'd be in my garage making one for my kids if I knew how to weld.

Does anyone know more about who made this?

Rocking Bike

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eviltangerine writes "Twitter user stroughtonsmith was dickering around with the carrier bundle files for his developer version of the iPhone 3.0 OS and enabled the USB tethering options. Apparently he has even been able to use his laptop to access the internet over the USB tether. MacRumors comments that while Apple has announced the availability of tethering, it hasn't hashed out the details with the mobile carriers (probably so they can charge more in fees). No word on connection speed, but here are some pictures of his phone while tethering."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We caught up with a team of executives from Panasonic Japan at PMA for a chat about the new GH1 and their plans for the DSC market. As part of our meeting Mr Ichiro Kitao, General Manager of the DSC Product Planning Group agreed to answer some of our questions - and some of those posed by our forum members - in an 'on the record' interview. Check it out after the link...

We caught up with a team of executives from Panasonic Japan at PMA for a chat about the new GH1 and their plans for the DSC market. As part of our meeting Mr Ichiro Kitao, General Manager of the DSC Product Planning Group agreed to answer some of our questions - and some of those posed by our forum members - in an 'on the record' interview. Check it out after the link...

It's no secret that Sirius XM's business has been hurting. Its recent brush with bankruptcy merely highlighted the huge obstacles the company faced from the beginning: massive capital outlay on satellite infrastructure, and huge spending to attract subscribers. But one key issue for the company that many people didn't foresee was the rise in popularity of internet radio, podcasts, and portable music players. Included in that group was Martine Rothblatt, Sirius' founder, who now says competition from those media, spurred on by growth in mobile networks, have doomed satellite radio (via Paid Content). Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin, of course, disagrees, saying the company has enough unique content to succeed. But what happens when streaming services become even more pervasive, more portable, and available to a wider audience? Sirius XM's exclusivity to certain types of content in locales like automobiles will slip, and being tied to its proprietary hardware and subscription model could become a liability. The company is growing its efforts in this area, such as with its recently announced iPhone app, but more fully embracing online radio would seem to be a brighter strategy.

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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Michael Geist points to two new polls released by Angus Reid Strategies, which show that Canadians are overwhelmingly against the idea of ISP levies. It should come as no surprise that 79% of people surveyed about the possible Canadian content levy on new media said it would be an "unnecessary and/or inappropriate fee that would end up being passed along to consumers." In another survey on file sharing, 45% of people said that downloading music free of charge was just "what people should be able to do on the Internet," while only 3% believed that downloaders are "criminals who should be punished by law." 27% said that it's something people shouldn't be doing, but that "it's not a big deal." 73% of people thought that a music tax was "unnecessary and/or inappropriate" (which ought to disappoint a few Canadian creator groups calling for this sort of thing...).

The survey also found that those who download music are "often the most voracious music enthusiasts," more likely to buy a CD in the next month (41% vs. 34% of non-file sharers) and more likely to have attended a concert in the past year (65% vs. 52%), which should, again, not surprise many people around here. This is just another bit of evidence that "piracy" is not a problem and, instead of pushing for ISPs to collect levies or act as copyright cops, musicians should focus on connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy. Though, somehow, I don't expect the whining to stop anytime soon...

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

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thefickler writes "Shell has decided to end its investment in wind, solar and hydro projects because the company does not believe they are financially sound investments. Instead Shell is going to focus on carbon sequestration technologies and biofuels. Not surprisingly, and perhaps unfairly, bloggers have been quick to savage the company: "Between Shell's decisions to stop its clean energy investments and to increase its debt load to pay for dividends, the company is solidifying an image of corporate greed over corporate responsibility." Is Shell short sighted, or is it just a company trying to make its way in an uncertain world?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thefickler writes "Shell has decided to end its investment in wind, solar and hydro projects because the company does not believe they are financially sound investments. Instead Shell is going to focus on carbon sequestration technologies and biofuels. Not surprisingly, and perhaps unfairly, bloggers have been quick to savage the company: "Between Shell's decisions to stop its clean energy investments and to increase its debt load to pay for dividends, the company is solidifying an image of corporate greed over corporate responsibility." Is Shell short sighted, or is it just a company trying to makes its way in an uncertain world?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For many years, there have been stories of various shady online electronics (especially camera) retailers (many of whom are based in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn). The main scam is to offer super cheap prices on cameras to get you "in the door" (either online or in person), and then focus on trying to sell you all sorts of massively over-priced add-ons and warranties. If you turn them down, they suddenly "discover" that the original product you ordered is out-of-stock. At times, over the years, various authorities have cracked down on such resellers, though they often pop right back up under a different name.

Still, folks who know the business were well aware of such shady companies and often knew to avoid them... but it's a bit different to find out that some large brand name retailers appear to be doing the same. Laptop Magazine is reporting on a series of whistle-blowing employees at Office Depot, detailing how they pulled off similar scams. The typical "oh, that's out of stock" trick is apparently quite common, but it even gets more advanced, with some employees creating photoshopped price signs, in order to "hide" the price of an expensive warranty add-on in the "list price" for a computer. These practices are quite illegal, and it looks like the report might trigger some FTC interest, especially given the multiple reports, suggesting that this isn't just a few rogue employees.

It does make you wonder what Office Depot was thinking. The obvious answer is: "anything for a sale," but that doesn't tell the whole story. Sooner or later, companies that do this sort of thing are going to get caught -- and when that happens (beyond the fines), the damage to a company's reputation can be massive and debilitating. It just seems like the cost of being outed is so high, it's ridiculous that any company would encourage such behavior.

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Wikileaks has published the secret list of sites blocked by Australia's state-sponsored parental filter -- a list that the government plans to expand to the entire Australian Internet, making it the basis for a new Great Firewall of Australia. The list is compiled in secret and is not readily inspected or appealed, and the officials who maintain it have secretly expanded its mandate so that "half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist."

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, dug up the blacklist after ACMA added several Wikileaks pages to the list following the site's publication of the Danish blacklist.

He said secret censorship systems were "invariably corrupted", pointing to the Thailand censorship list, which was originally billed as a mechanism to prevent child pornography but contained more than 1200 sites classified as criticising the royal family.

"In January the Thai system was used to censor Australia reportage about the imprisoned Australian writer Harry Nicolaides," he said.

"The Australian democracy must not be permitted to sleep with this loaded gun. This week saw Australia joining China and the United Arab Emirates as the only countries censoring Wikileaks."

Leaked Australian blacklist reveals banned sites

ACMA list on Wikileaks (down as of 0618h GMT 19 MAR 09)

Mirrors of ACMA list

Google has filed a submission with the New Zealand government in response to the new law there, which compels ISPs to terminate your Internet connection if you're accused of copyright infringement three times. In its submission, Google discusses its experience with "notice and takedown," which allows people to censor web-pages merely by asserting that they infringe copyright -- and they note that this process is routinely abused -- check out the numbers they proffer:

In its submission, Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.

This doesn't surprise me: what did the world's governments expect when they allowed the entertainment industry to talk them into notice-and-takedown? If you create a free, easy, largely consequence-free means for censoring the Internet, that it wouldn't be abused?

Google submission hammers section 92A (via /.)

A microcredit co-op bank has sprung up in Northern California, using money pooled from hardware hackers to fund other open source hardware hacking projects. They've found 70 lenders,

Two open source hardware enthusiasts, Justin Huynh and Matt Stack, have started the Open Source Hardware Bank to fund hardware projects such as the microcontroller board pictured above.

The fledgling bank is funding only open source hardware projects using capital raised from other hardware geeks. It's like a community of Facebook friends borrowing and lending among themselves — a peer-to-peer bank.

"This speaks to the rise of the do-it-yourselfer, someone who is not just a consumer but also a producer, inventor and investor," says Huynh. "But someone also ought to be thinking about the money problem when it comes to open source hardware and we are doing just that."

So, this is a major plot element of my science fiction novel Makers, coming from Tor next October: microcredit-funded open source hardware hackers laboring in dead malls (the first third of the book was syndicated on Salon as "Themepunks"). It's always a little weird when sf starts to leak into reality.

Open Source Hardware Hackers Start P2P Bank

Liquidware Antipasto: site for Open Source Hardware Bank

Paulo Nenflidio is a visiting artist at the Arizona State University Art Museum for another two weeks, where he's collaborating with community members on new works in the space. He makes really lovely sculptures that use sound in interesting ways. Two of my favorites of his are the Teclado Sísmico, a spider that uses user-activated hammer drills on the ends of its legs, and the Heavy Metal Music Box, modeled after coin-operated street-side classical music boxes.

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This workshop looks like it will be a really interesting combination of electronics and activism, soldering and information privacy. Build your own rfid sniffer from Marc Boon's kit. If you're in or around Amsterdam, I hope you can attend one of the two additional workshops they've scheduled since the first one has filled up, April 10 and May 22. The parts all look surface-mount, but are spaced relatively widely leaving room for new solderers' wiggly tips. Somehow this tidy circuit looks so... European.

RFID Sniffer Workshop

April 10 and May 22

Mediamatic

Vijzelstraat 68 1017 HL Amsterdam

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Here's part two of Stanford's Robert Sapolsky incredibly fascinating and illuminating lecture on primate sexuality (I posted part one last week). Sapolsky is a great lecturer: funny and engaging, and his material will make you rethink your relationship with your bits. Required viewing for anyone who has ever been horny, or who ever plans to be.

Prof. Robert Sapolsky on the Neurobiology of Primate Sexuality: Part 2 (Thanks, Avi!)

Here's a short National Geo piece on Abu Talib overseeing the 13 chickens at the Taqwa Community Garden in the Bronx:

In 19th-century Manhattan, hogs roamed the streets and cattle grazed in public parks. Today, chickens are the urban livestock of choice, and not just in New York. City dwellers across the U.S. are adding hens to their yards and gardens, garnering fresh eggs, fertilizer, and community ties, with localities debating and updating their ordinances accordingly.

Urban Chickens (Thanks, Marilyn!)

(Photo: Ira Block)

Diebold is pretty well known for being in two separate, though similar, businesses: ATMs and e-voting machines. Its e-voting machines have always had a terrible reputation, with security flaws and bugs galore (the company recently has tried to hide from all the negative publicity by renaming the e-voting division as Premier Election Solutions). However, many people kept asking how the company could get so many things so wrong when it came to e-voting, but still get its ATMs working properly. Of course, as has been noted in the past, the way ATMs work is quite different, and mistakes are likely to be spotted quickly.

However, it's now coming out that Diebold's ATMs also have security problems. Slashdot alerts us to the news that Diebold has issued a patch after discovering that some scammers have been able to install "card sniffing" software on a variety of Diebold ATMs allowing the scammers to get all your card details. Is that Premier Banking Solutions I hear knocking?

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pnorth writes "Editors at Wikipedia have removed a link to a blacklisted web site that sat uncontested for over 24 hours in the main body of the Australian regulator's own Wikipedia entry. The link, which directs readers to a site containing graphic imagery of aborted foetuses, was inserted into ACMA's Wikipedia entry by a campaigner against Internet filtering to determine whether Australia's communications regulator had a double-standard when it came to censoring web content. The very same link motivated the regulator to serve Aussie broadband forum Whirlpool's hosting company with a 'link deletion notice' and the threat of an $11,000 fine. Last night, the link became the subject of "warring" between several Wikipedia administrators in the lead up to it's removal, with administrators saying they didn't want to be used to prove a point."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times takes a look at the changing role of foreign correspondents in the Internet age. A generation ago, journalists who covered foreign countries could send reports back home without worrying about how their coverage would be perceived by the natives. This may have allowed more candid reporting, but it also meant coverage was less accurate because reporters never got feedback from the people they were covering. Now all that has changed. On the Internet, Indian readers can read the New York Times as easily as the Times of India. When reporters make mistakes, they get instant feedback from the subjects of their stories.

One question the story doesn't specifically discuss is whether there's a need for foreign correspondents, at all, in the Internet age. In the 20th century, newspapers needed foreign correspondents because the process of gathering and transmitting news across oceans was expensive and cumbersome. Having a foreign bureau gave a newspaper a competitive advantage because it allowed it to get fresher and more complete international news than its competitors. Now, of course, transmitting information around the world is incredibly cheap and easy. My local newspaper is no longer the only—or even the best—source of information about world events. Those who understand the language can get their news directly from foreign media outlets. And for the rest of us there are a ton of people who translate, filter, and interpret the news coming out of foreign countries for domestic consumption. Given these realities, it's not obvious how much value is added by having American newspapers send reporters to the far-flung corners of the globe.

Of course, there are still tremendous advantages to having people who can explain foreign events and put them in context for American readers. I can read India's newspapers, but I'm not going to pick on all the nuances of the coverage. But there are lots of ways to provide this kind of context and analysis. For example, there are undoubtedly smart Indian journalists who went to college in the United States and then returned to India. Such journalists are going to possess a much deeper understanding of Indian culture than an American journalist could. Conversely, there may be American expats living in India (perhaps with day jobs other than journalism), who could provide an American perspective on Indian news. Most importantly, there are lots of people here in the United States, who can read Indian news sources and then write about developments there, from an American perspective. These include Indian immigrants and Americans who have spent time in India, in the past.

One of the things people frequently cite as evidence of the dire state of the news industry is the fact that newspapers are closing their foreign bureaus and laying off their foreign correspondents. Maybe this is a sign that journalism, as a profession, is in trouble. But another interpretation is that we've just found more efficient ways to get news about foreign events. American readers will continue to demand coverage of overseas events. But 21st century news organizations are likely to discover that shipping American journalists overseas is not the most efficient way to meet that demand.

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

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Love weird sounds and curious about circuit bending? Check out this blast from the past: MAKE Volume 04's Circuit Bending project by Cristiana Yambo and Sabastian Boaz. This 12-page how-to shows you how to modify a Casio keyboard (they used the SK-5):

And make this "unstoppably flexible sound organ and sonic effects generator" setup, ready to crank out some Franken-beats (above the keyboard on the right is the patch bay box and on the left is external controller port):

The best part is that you can take what you learn in this project and bend just about any battery-powered audio toy or musical instrument. This cool illustration (full-sized in Digital Edition link below) shows how you can play open circuits to test out what sounds your device is capable of making:

Check out the full article in our Digital Edition and for more, pick up a copy of MAKE Volume 04 in the Maker Shed and learn how to make a cigar box guitar, a mint-tin amp, use your Game Boy as a musical instrument, start VJing, and more. Long live bleeps!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

2008 saw the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization handle more cybersquatting cases than ever before -- 2,329. Michael Geist makes the case that things aren't as bad on this front as they might seem, but the head of WIPO says the issue will only get worse as ICANN prepares to throw open the top-level domain system, which will undoubtedly lead to even more disputes. For instance, something like ".apple" will certainly be a magnet for disputes. Who should get to claim it? Apple Computer, Apple Corps, a trade group of apple farmers, or somebody else with a legitimate tie to the word apple? ICANN's plans to throw things open on the TLD front could be better than it getting to determine which TLDs people can use, but it certainly looks like it's going to come at the cost of a ridiculous amount of arguments over who gets to own specific TLDs. It's easy to say that ICANN and WIPO should try to get out ahead of the issue, and for what it's worth, the WIPO exec says they're working to create "pre- and post-delegation procedures". But it's hard to imagine that they're going to be able to really do much to limit the number of disputes when the new TLDs open up, given how many parties could have legitimate claims to the same ones.

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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nandemoari writes "When educational technology specialist Kevin Andreyo recently read a report on people search engines, he decided to conduct a little 'people search' on himself. Andreyo did not expect to find much — so, imagine the surprise when he uncovered the user name and password to his Comcast Internet account, put out there for the entire online world to see. In addition to his personal information, Andreyo also discovered a list that exposed the user names and passwords of (what he believed) to be 8,000 other Comcast customers. Andreyo immediately contacted both Comcast and the FBI, hoping to find the ones responsible for divulging such personal information to the public. While the list is no longer available online, analysts fear that the document still lives on in various cache and online history services."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many civil libertarians were hopeful that the Obama administration would be a lot more reasonable on certain issues, like warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of Americans. So far, that hasn't really been the case. The new administration has already sided with the old on the legality of warrantless wiretapping, and is now saying that it shouldn't need a warrant to demand location records from mobile phone providers. This certainly seems like the sort of private info that, under the 4th Amendment, would require a warrant, but not according to the administration(s). It feels that mobile phone providers should freely hand over records of what mobile phone tower any phone was connected to, even without the administration bothering to get a warrant (i.e., whenever and for whomever it wants to keep tabs on). This is tremendously problematic if you believe in the basic principles of the 4th Amendment. The EFF and the ACLU have asked a court to stop this practice, and it's rather disappointing that the administration is pushing in the other direction.

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