darthcamaro writes "For nearly three years, Oracle has had its own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, claiming the two versions are essentially the same thing. But are they really? As it turns out, there are a few things on which Oracle and Red Hat do not see eye-to-eye, including file systems and virtualization. The article quotes Wim Coekaerts, Oracle's director of Linux engineering, saying, 'A lot of people think Oracle is doing Enterprise Linux as just basically a rip off of Red Hat but that's not what this is about. ... This is about a support program, and wanting to offer quality Linux OS support to customers that need it. The Linux distribution part is there just to make sure people can get a freely available Linux operating system that is fully supported.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's common to point to "buggy whip" makers as an example of a business that was eventually (mostly) destroyed by a new technology -- though, to be fair, the buggy whip makers were secondary victims. It was the horse-carriage industry that was knocked out by automobiles. The buggy whips were a second order casualty. The same thing may now be happening with newsprint paper makers. While newspapers are struggling left and right, one of the major newsprint suppliers is now struggling to avoid bankruptcy as well.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Just read this opinion piece that says that Chrome is much faster than Firefox and that Firefox "lost the plot" and is going in the wrong direction and pretty soon Firefox will die, having been killed by Chrome.

I use Firefox, I've tried Chrome, and it looks nice, but I can't switch to it because:

1. It isn't available for the Mac, and while I do use Windows, my primary environment is Mac.

2. It doesn't run Firefox plug-ins. There are a few must-have plug-ins that I can't live without.

3. Probably it's missing other features I depend on in Firefox but I haven't spent enough time running it to find out.

Okay now to "lost the plot" -- what is Firefox doing? I can't quite figure it out. They do a lot of releases, every time I get a new one it takes me to a page where it says it's the safest way to browse the web. Safety is important, I had forgotten how important until I had a machine get infected a short while back. But what else? I've noticed the latest version of Firefox is pretty crashy. That's not good.

The last thing I want to do is to use Google's browser, I already depend too heavily on them. So there's a lot of resistance here to switching from Firefox.

And I know, as a software developer, that apps start slowing down when they implement all the features they need to be competitive. It's conceivable that the great performance of Chrome is due to the fact that it hasn't matched Firefox in features.

On the other hand, Firefox hasn't shipped a feature that I care about in a long time.

However, neither has Chrome. It's an amazingly boring app for something reconceived from the bottom-up, as they claim it is. Not even one user-facing great new feature? How long has it been since any browser shipped a feature that made a difference to users? Not just safety, which is important as I said, but something fun and empowering??

I think we're at a point where everyone has lost the plot. We're so concerned with malware and who's killing who, we forgot to move forward in interesting and fun ways. Or am I missing something.

PS: When I write about Firefox, this guy who works on it, always flames. Just an observation.

As the US is now pushing for stronger data retention laws to aid law enforcement, it looks like some parts of Europe (who have been on the data retention bandwagon for much longer) are starting to push back in the other direction. A German court has ruled that blanket data protection rules are a privacy violation for individuals (thanks Claes!):

The court is of the opinion that data retention violates the fundamental right to privacy. It is not necessary in a democratic society. The individual does not provoke the interference but can be intimidated by the risks of abuse and the feeling of being under surveillance [...] The directive [on data retention] does not respect the principle of proportionality guaranteed in Article 8 ECHR, which is why it is invalid.' "

Now is there any chance politicians in the US will recognize this... or will it take a massive privacy breach due to unnecessary data retention laws before politicians wake up to the privacy issue?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Free Software Foundation has requested permission to file an amicus curiae brief in an RIAA case, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, defending the defendant's Due Process defense to the RIAA's claim for statutory damages. In the brief [PDF], FSF cites some of the leading authorities for the defense, including the 2003 decision of the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Parker v. Time Warner, which held that excessive statutory damages are subject to the same due process test applicable to punitive damage awards by juries. Additionally, the brief cites three 3 district court decisions, including UMG v. Lindor, and 2 law review articles — all of which deal specifically with Copyright Act statutory damages applicable to infringement of an MP3 file — to like effect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT's CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) is using iRobot Create systems to experiment with robotic vegetable gardeners who can tend plants teleoperatively and can deliver just the right amount of what a plant needs based on sensors attached to the plant. When the fruit is ripe, the robots can even harvest it.

[Is it just me, or do you get shades of Huey, Dewey and Louie from Silent Running?]

Precision Agriculture: Sustainable Farming in the Age of Robotics

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

There's still a ton of buzz going on around Clay Shirky's wonderful discussion on business models and changing markets that we discussed earlier in the week. If you haven't read Shirky's post yet, do yourself a favor and read it. It applies to so many industries beyond just journalism. Unfortunately, as we saw in our own comments here, there are still some folks who are having difficulty understanding the key points to Shirky's argument: that business models evolve, but during the upheaval, it's rarely clear how that evolution will shake out.

A few people have sent in journalist Tom Watson's response to Shirky, and it's somewhat surprising. It's as if we read two different things -- even though the links are to the same Shirky writeup. I read Shirky's analysis as a huge burst of optimism. It's a "hey, things are crazy now, but check out what's coming next." Watson read it as an obituary for journalism, apparently assuming that Shirky's tone was to say that journalism is over. He reads Shirky's explanation of why bad newspaper business models failed (they all tried to recreate the old inefficient market) to mean that nothing will succeed. It's as if he skipped over most of Shirky's analysis.

Then, there's venerable TV newsman Charlie Gibson, who apparently was asked about Shirky's analysis (without it being clear if he'd read it) and responded that Shirky is "full of crap." He then proceeded to go back and try to re-inflate every discarded and failed idea in newspaper business models, falsely claiming the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is "gone" (it lives on online) and blaming "young people" for reading the news for free online as well as Google for bringing about the downfall of newspapers.

When asked what to do, he fell back on the idea of charging for news -- but never answered any of the important questions such a plan needs to address. Instead, he just seemed to think that the only way to pay for news is if the consumers each pay for it.

Remember, this is Charlie Gibson. The anchor of ABC World News Tonight. On ABC. Which is free. To consumers. It's supported by advertising. But, according to Charlie Gibson... that's impossible. I guess it's his viewers' fault for watching him for free or something... You want to know why people are turning to alternative sources? Perhaps it's because they're smart enough to realize that when Charlie Gibson -- whose face and voice beams into millions of peoples' homes for free every night -- says that people who get their news for free are destroying an industry, perhaps there are better sources from which to get their news.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

After all of the uproar surrounding some of the Obama administration's recent decisions, trade officials have promised a thorough review of the USTR policies regarding transparency. In an effort to ensure that the review includes all possible angles, the USTR is urging groups to make other proposals as well. "KEI is very impressed with the USTR decision to undertake a review of USTR transparency efforts. They are taking this much further than simply reviewing policies on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), or recent controversies over the secrecy surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations. The review offers the possibility of more transformative changes, including pro-active measures to enhance transparency, covering all aspects of USTR operations, including multilateral, plurilateral, regional, bilateral and unilateral trade policies and negotiations. We are also grateful that USTR is offering to have a continuing dialogue on this issues. KEI will offer additional suggestions on transparency to USTR, and we encourage others to do so also."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With all this whining about how the death of newspapers will somehow lead to the "end" of investigative reporting, it has to be asked why newspaper reporters never seem to tire of rewriting industry press releases full of bogus numbers as factual? If newspaper reporters are really so great at investigative reporting -- shouldn't they be questioning the bogus stats? We've seen this for years in reports on "piracy" stats, which are almost always calculated by industry lobbyists who have every incentive in the world to blow the numbers out of proportion. Looking at the details, it's not at all difficult for anyone to realize that the stats are completely bogus -- but, for some reason, these lobbyists can always find press willing to restate the numbers as fact, and that often leads to a nice virtuous circle, whereby industry lobbyists and politicians can then point to the news report to support their bogus piracy numbers.

The latest gullible reporter? Tony Wong of the Toronto Star, who has written an article that probably could have been written every year for the last decade about the awful threat of piracy to the satellite TV industry. What's amusing is that it really does look just like an article years ago, even quoting bogus 2001 "piracy" stats and then just saying "that number is likely far higher today." But the reporter does nothing to verify this at all. He then goes on to talk about how the satellite TV companies are "fighting back," with a "tough new encryption system." I remember reading nearly identical stories from a decade ago, about some great new encryption scheme that would wipe out satellite TV piracy. Yet here we are in 2009, rather than 1999, reading the exact same article. Isn't it the reporters' job to ask questions about both the bogus basis for the numbers and the fact that the industry has been trotting out the same "fighting back! stronger encryption!" story for over a decade? No wonder newspapers are collapsing.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Wired is reporting that ecologists think the internet could act as an early ecological warning system based on data mining human interactions. While much of this work has been based on systems like Google Flu Trends, the system will remain largely theoretical for the near future. "The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

meatheadmike writes to tell us that a recent Canadian court case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association by isoHunt Web Technologies, Inc, could drastically change the web landscape in Canada. "The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is if a site such as isoHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of movies such as Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? 'It's a huge can of worms," said David Fewer, acting director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa. 'I am surprised that this litigation has gone under the radar as much as it has. I do think this is the most important copyright litigation going on right now.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It used to be quite common for web sites to bury linking policies in their terms of use, asserting that people needed permission to link to them, and could only do so in certain ways. Most people have figured out that's pretty ridiculous, but every once in a while, some lawyer who doesn't understand the internet at all puts together the TOS for a site, and includes some stupid "you have to ask before you link to us" policy. The link is one of the elements that makes the web what it is; it's sort of the point that people can use links to direct visitors to other places, enabling the spreading and sharing of all sorts of information. Linking is not copyright infringement, it's not a violation of a terms of service, it's not illegal -- it's a key part of the web. But somebody at the Financial Times, or its law firm, hasn't figured out that it's a good thing for people to link to one of their new sites, and has inserted a stupid linking policy into its TOS. Here's an idea: if they don't want people linking to the site, people should oblige them and not link to it. Want to try and control or limit how people send you traffic? Fine -- don't reap any of the benefits of inbound links, and take yourself out of Google and other search engines while you're at it.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Our pal Jérôme Demers, maker of the ingenious Beetlebot project we featured in MAKE, Volume 12, and more recently here, on How-To Tuesday, has a new project, building an "energy seed lamp," a sort of electronic plant that feeds on spent AA batteries.

Desktop energy seed lamp

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

alevy writes to mention that scientists at Fermilab have detected a new, completely untheorized particle. Seems like Fermi has been a hotbed of activity lately with the discovery of a new single top quark and narrowing the gap twice on the Higgs Boson particle. "The Y(4140) particle is the newest member of a family of particles of similar unusual characteristics observed in the last several years by experimenters at Fermilab's Tevatron as well as at KEK and the SLAC lab, which operates at Stanford through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. 'We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,' said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. 'This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here we have an update from Pete, a hockey loving MAKE Online loving, storage professional and his experiment to freeze a hard drive in his backyard ice rink for 100 days. This one has a couple of adventures, chainsaw, time lapse photography and the video of the big moment.

How would you recover Pete's family photos and financial records? What were your cabin fever projects this year? What are your kids doing for their science fair projects? Share your ideas in the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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

A few years ago, for reasons that are still unclear, restaurants that created web pages went wild for Flash and graphics. You'd go to a restaurant's website and be forced to watch some lame animation or other alleged art, and then have to endure even more of it just to find out what was on the menu. You still do, in many cases.

This customer-unfriendly system is made worse with mobile phones. I'm heading to North Carolina early next month to give a couple of talks and was looking for places to eat in Chapel Hill, one of the stops. Bad move (on an iPhone, anyway). I did a Google map search and got a link to a place that, when selected, produced this image:

Not terribly helpful. But aha -- when I expanded the page I noticed a link called "Menu":

  

This was promising, until I clicked that link and got this:

Maybe they'd have more customers if potential patrons could actually see what they have to offer.

Over the last few years, as the recording industry has finally started to at least come to terms with the idea that its market is changing, industry insiders keep looking for "a savior." That's a new tech-focused company that will somehow come up with the magic model that revitalizes the recording industry's revenue stream. You begin to notice a pattern with every one of these: the hype is never based on users flocking to the service. They're always based on a big PR campaign and quotes from recording industry insiders. In the early days, there was PressPlay and MusicNet. Then, there was the "new Napster" and Rhapsody. More recently, there's been SnoCap, TotalMusic, Qtrax and plenty of others. They get buzz, with the stories reporting how the industry is "supporting" these innovative new startups. But they never seem to go anywhere. The latest is SpiralFrog, which got some buzz for being "ad supported" music, which has never made much sense to us. It's now shutting down, just as pretty much all of the other "saviors" have done.

And yet... file sharing sites are thriving.

It all comes down to the same thing: you don't compete with free by being lame. And, all of these "saviors" have focused on paying the record labels first, and giving users a reason to use them second (or sometimes even further down the list). The record labels are desperate for new revenue, so when they make these agreements, they're so costly that it's impossible for any of these startups to make money -- and since they're bound by all sorts of restrictions, the services tend to not be very compelling anyway. That's a recipe for disaster. Perhaps before the press declares the next major label-backed music startup the "savior" for the industry, the reporters should take a look at the littered path of failures.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Have you ever not blogged something because it wouldn't be worth the trouble it caused? I have to admit, I do it very often. And about half the time it has to do with TechCrunch.

I feel bad about TechCrunch, since I helped it get started, but I don't have any regrets about it. In the beginning, it was great -- lots of information about new products. By helping it get started, I was helping the entrepreneurs. Not just a two-way win, but a win-win-win. I win because it develops my rep as someone who points to cool stuff. TechCrunch wins because it becomes well-known as a place to find new entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurs win, because people find out about what they're doing.

But somewhere along the line the people at TechCrunch started hating on me. It happens all too regularly, and it's getting worse. It's worth mentioning, because I don't dislike TechCrunch, quite the opposite, I'm proud of my small role in helping it get going.

I wrote this because I found myself saying to someone who, like the original TechCrunch, is writing fantastic stuff, well-worth pointing out, and I'm happy to do it. He just thanked me, and I said it wasn't necessary cause it was a win-win. And I added, just don't become a TechCrunch when you're rich and famous.

---

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

---

Today's episode of Boing Boing Video is a remixed series of snips from RiP: A Remix Manifesto, an "open source documentary" about copyright and remix culture. Yes, a remix of a remix of a remix! We're nothing if not meta around here.

The film includes copyfighters such as Lawrence Lessig, Girl Talk, Negativland, Gilberto Gil, The Mouse Liberation Front -- and Boing Boing's own Cory Doctorow.

RiP was some six years in the making, and filmmaker Brett Gaylor is in turn inviting you to contribute to the film by remixing and adding to the conversation. Info on screenings throughout the world here, and Brett invites all of Boingdom to...

Participate in REMIXING TIMES SQUARE at this link. Rotoscope, re-draw, photoshop/illustrate remix times square from a private space to the public domain The results are being compiled and will be screened at the Ann Arbor film festival March 28th! Try the web based video editor - all chapters of the film are available for remix.

The film screened at SXSW last week, and there's a lot of resulting press bubbling up this week. Here's a snip from Indiewire's review:

Brett Gaylor’s “RiP: A Remix Manifesto” studies the paradoxes of copyright law and its discontents, but mainly it’s a celebration of remix culture in the twenty-first century. Using music sampling artist Girl Talk as his primary case study, Gaylor explores the ways a new generation of artists have uncovered original methods for creating something new from the fabric of something old—and he slyly ties the trend to a consistent aspect of art history. Touching on infamous situations such as the recording industry’s sloppy lawsuits against music downloaders, he surveys a wide variety of discussions taking place in both legal and aesthetic circles.

Thanks to the National Film Board of Canada for their kind assistance with today's BBV episode -- their landing page for the RiP project is here.

UPDATE: The doc was picked up by a US distributor at SXSW, BSide, and they are arranging "open cource screenings" where people can request the film and get it for free. The URL to request a screening is ripremix.com.

Previously on Boing Boing:
* RiP: Remix Manifesto -- documentary about copyright and the information age
* Monochrom's love song for Lessig

---

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at portable storage devices that fall a little outside of the normal bell curve. The reviewed items include Buffalo's all-flash portable storage drive, Chaintech's flash SSD w/ an additional USB port, and LaCie's state-of-the-art RAID drive based on two 2.5" drives. LaCie's drive seemed to come out on top for usability and performance with the main downside being the $600 pricetag and lack of adequate backup software, but all had interesting advantages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're very excited that our guest this afternoon will be Forrest W. Mims III, the amateur scientist and electronics guru, who wrote the iconic Getting Started in Electronics and the Engineer's Mini-Notebook series for Radio Shack. Forrest also has a new column in MAKE, The Country Scientist, which premiered in Volume 17. Also, we'll be sharing our favorite tricks, tips, and tools for the week, and giving away prizes!

And don't forget, this is live, call-in radio. The show runs for 45 minutes. Call in during showtime (12-12:45pm PT) and ask questions. The number is: (646) 915-8698. We hope you'll join us!

Here's the show widget, so you can listen to the program right here starting at 12pm:

More:
Make: Talk episode 1 show notes and next episode
Make: Talk episode 2 show notes and next episode

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

We've seen some silly claims about Google Maps/Google Earth lately, and they just keep coming. The latest is that a privacy activist in the UK is going to issue a legal challenge against Google's Street View offering in the UK, claiming that the photos violate peoples' privacy. Note: these are all photos of people in public places. The UK government has apparently given the go-ahead for Street View in the UK, but this guy is going to challenge that ruling, claiming that Google needs to get prior consent from everyone in the photos before using them. He's not at all satisfied that Google allows the blurring of faces and the ability to take down photos you really dislike. It doesn't sound like this legal challenge will go very far. The guy isn't even sure what law he's going to accuse Google of breaking, and the lawyers quoted in the article seem quite skeptical that there's anything illegal about the Street View product.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Join Dale Dougherty, Gareth Branwyn, and me for the 3rd episode of Make: Talk, a live call in show at blogtalkradio.com. The call-in number is (646) 915-8698.

In this episode of Make magazine's Make: Talk, you'll meet our new "Country Scientist" columnist, Forrest M. Mims III. He's the author of the famous "Getting Started in Electronics" book published by Radio Shack, and was recently named one of the top 10 amateur scientists by Discover magazine. In addition, the editors of MAKE will present news from the world of making, as well as our favorite tricks, tips, and tools. Be sure to call in for prizes that we'll award during the program!

Make: Talk episode 3

BB pal Lissa Soep, research director at Youth Radio, recently contributed a short audio commentary to NPR's Day to Day about Facebook, nostalgia, and midlife monogamy. I found it to be a very thoughtful, personal, and provocative piece. Lissa's story has a happy ending, but I know of several relationships that were demolished by a Facebook blast-from-the-past. From Lissa's piece:

With so many people my age riding Facebook like a time-machine to our past lives and loves, you might expect the site would be breaking up marriages, or at least unleashing all sorts of digital infidelity. Some of that is happening.

But what I'm seeing among some fellow oldsters on Facebook is the opposite.We've got a new through-line to our former selves, and that's re-awakening a feeling of desire—and desirability—that might actually strengthen midlife monogamy.

Sure, it's dangerous. Once you've friended an ex, you get to glimpse all these evocative fragments. A photo of him in front of sand dunes, squinting into the sun. The revelation that her favorite quote is Nietzsche's "Without music, life would be a mistake." Here's this person maybe you fooled around with in your parents' bed, or pulled an all-nighter with to finish a take-home exam. Now you're flashing back to all that with a teething child upstairs and a mound of work and let's say you haven't had sex with your spouse in two weeks. The mix of nostalgia and surveillance is disorienting. But it can also create a digital spark longterm partners need. It can reconnect us with who we are by helping us remember who we once were… and who we wanted to be.

"Facebook And The Over-30 Crowd"

A woman in southern Maryland was airlifted to a hospital last weekend after being wounded by a saber saw with a sex toy attached to it. A consensual act led to the injury. The woman has since been released from the hospital. (If you're into this stuff, either as a participant or curious observer, you might also enjoy Timothy Archibald's photo book Sex Machines from Process Media.) From NBCWashington.com:

The man who called 911 about the incident admitted attaching the sex toy to the saw and then using the high-powered, homemade device on his partner, according to the St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office.

The saw cut through the plastic toy and wounded the woman, according to TheBayNet.com.

"Woman Injured in Power Tool Sex Toy Encounter"

AIG, now infamous for their executive bonuses, has decided that the $200 billion they received from the government is not nearly enough and is suing the government for the return of $306 million in tax payments. "A.I.G. is effectively suing its majority owner, the government, which has an 80 percent stake and has poured nearly $200 billion into the insurer in a bid to avert its collapse and avoid troubling the global financial markets. The company is in effect asking for even more money, in the form of tax refunds. The suit also suggests that A.I.G. is spending taxpayer money to pursue its case, something it is legally entitled to do. Its initial claim was denied by the Internal Revenue Service last year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trent Reznor sure has a way of releasing new experiments just before I'm about to give a presentation about him. He did it right before my MidemNet case study about his experiments, and now that I'm getting ready to an updated (and expanded!) version of the presentation at next week's Leadership Music Digital Summit, Reznor has launched a new website called NIN|JA 2009 in support of the new tour Nine Inch Nails is doing with Jane's Addiction (and Street Sweeper). The site has a streaming playlist from all three bands, along with the ability to download an entirely free EP of unreleased tracks (two from each band) in exchange for your email. And, not surprisingly, the page lets you get more info on the tour.

It's not particularly different than the release of The Slip, but shows that he's continued to combine these two factors of connecting with fans (often via free music) and immediately giving them a real reason to buy. Oh yeah -- and he still did it in a fun way for the fans. Last night, on Twitter, he alerted people that the site would be going live today, but then had fun with it this morning -- giving people a 3 minute countdown following by a bit of joking around, first backing it up to 5 minutes, saying someone had kicked the plug out of the wall, then geekily pretending to be a clueless Windows user:

• trent_reznor: So... anybody know what it means when your PC's screen goes all blue and wont do anything? Give me a sec here.
• trent_reznor: An exception has occured at 0028:C11B3ADC in VxD DiskTSD(03) 000016660. It may be possible to continue normally. ????
• trent_reznor: Come on, people - you know me better than that.

And with that, the site launched. Time to go update the presentation...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Today's the day -- if you've been wondering if you can set up a server in Amazon's cloud, the answer is Yes You Can.

Here's how: http://howto.opml.org/dave/ec2/

If you're wondering what it's all about, I've recorded a 22-minute podcast that explains. Even if you don't go through the howto, I recommend listening to the podcast.

There's something that everyone who cares about the net should know about the cloud. Lots of new ideas in the howto and the podcast.

Paolo Valdemarin, my friend in Italy, went through the EC2 howto, and it opened up a lot of ideas for him. Important stuff.

Macworld is reporting that Apple and AT&T are being sued, again, for the lack of delivery on their 3G network. This follows a long line of other lawsuits in San Jose, San Diego, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and New York "The lawsuit charges the companies with Negligence, Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation, Violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act and Other Similar State Statutes, and Breach of Contract. Dickerson is seeking to force Apple and AT&T to correct its labeling and advertising, as well as to recover compensatory, statutory and punitive damages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This Is Why You're Fat is a photoblog of foods you really shouldn't eat but are somehow irresistible, to someone anyway. Above, "Meat(in)loaf," "Bacon And Fudge Danish Breakfast Sandwich," and "Deep Fried Tootsie Roll on a Stick." (Thanks, Jill Miller!)

The Hitachi HM55B compass module from the Maker Shed is a dual-axis magnetic field sensor based on the Hitachi HM55B IC. It's a great little module for sensing direction on your next robotics project. You can use this sensor with most micro controllers, including the Arduino.

More about the Hitachi compass module

Related:

How-To Tuesday: Arduino 101 potentiometers and servos

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

Aohkigahara Forest west of Tokyo at the base of Mount Fuji is also known as the "suicide forest." According to Wikipedia, it's the second most popular suicide spot after San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. From CNN:

Japan's suicide rate, already one of the world's highest, has increased with the recent economic downturn. There were 2,645 suicides recorded in January 2009, a 15 percent increase from the 2,305 for January 2008, according to the Japanese government

Local authorities, saying they are the last resort to stop people from killing themselves in the forest, have posted security cameras at the entrances of the forest.

The goal, said Imasa Watanabe of the Yamanashi Prefectural Government is to track the people who walk into the forest. Watanabe fears more suicidal visitors will arrive in the coming weeks.

Desperate Japanese head to 'suicide forest' (Thanks, Ed Szylko!)

Back at PMA we sat down with a handful of senior Olympus executives from Europe, the USA and Japan for our usual show briefing and, as promised, we dedicated a section of the meeting to an 'on the record' interview for publication here. Unfortunately, much of what we discussed can't be talked about just yet, and perhaps inevitably we failed to get through the huge list of questions generated by our active Olympus users community. Check out the interview after the link...

Back at PMA we sat down with a handful of senior Olympus executives from Europe, the USA and Japan for our usual show briefing and, as promised, we dedicated a section of the meeting to an 'on the record' interview for publication here. Unfortunately, much of what we discussed can't be talked about just yet, and perhaps inevitably we failed to get through the huge list of questions generated by our active Olympus users community. Check out the interview after the link...

While there have been plenty of conspiracy theories over the years concerning e-voting machines, none have been particularly compelling. The evidence looked like plenty of incompetence, with buggy machines that had huge security flaws that could be exploited -- but we hadn't heard of any cases of anyone actually being caught tampering with or trying to tamper with votes. That isn't to say it didn't happen. It's possible that it happened and the perpetrators weren't caught -- but it's a big leap from it "could" happen, to it "did" happen. So, most of our coverage here has been very much on the bugs and the flaws, rather than any of the conspiracy theories that floated around.

However, it appears that a group of Kentucky election officials, the circuit court judge and the county clerk, were arrested for changing votes in various elections between 2002 and 2006 on e-voting machines. The details suggest that there were two parts to the vote changing. First, there was traditional vote buying -- where they paid people to vote in a certain way. However, the second involved actually changing voters' votes on ES&S e-voting machines.

It didn't involve any hacking or direct security flaws -- but the elections officials made use of the confusing user interface and process of the e-voting machines to trick voters into leaving before their votes had been cast. That's because there's a "vote" button, that some people (silly them!) assumed meant they actually voted. Nope. It turns out that just gets you to a page to review your vote and then confirm it. However, these elections officials told people that once they hit vote they had voted -- and were then able to go in and change the actual votes.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "I hate my career of the past few years. For a long time I've wondered what I'd do after I broke even and could get into something new, and I keep coming back to computers. I'd like to get into software, since I always enjoyed coding. I have some background with C++ so I'm not starting entirely from scratch. My problem is my degrees and past employment have no practical application to the field. Where should I start? I have friends in both IT and software development who might be able to pull some strings and get me an interview or two for entry-level positions, but what can I do to make myself hireable in a short period of time? Is it possible to pick up enough of what I'd need within a couple months? If so, what and how?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A court ruling for the (dark) ages:

A condemned Texas inmate who removed his only eye and ate it in a bizarre outburst several months ago on death row is “crazy,” yet sane under state law, a judge wrote in an appellate court ruling today that rejected his appeals.

Andre Thomas raised 44 claims in his petition to the state’s highest criminal court, challenging his conviction and death sentence for the murder of his estranged wife’s 13-month-old daughter five years ago in Grayson County in North Texas.

An anonymous reader notes that a legislator in Texas has introduced a bill to require open document formats in all state government business. The bill is carefully worded such that only ODF could pass its test as "open." The story is covered by the Fort Worth Star Telegram, which is careful to be even-handed, giving Microsoft's spokesman equal time. A ZDNet's blogger notes that the bill, introduced by a Democrat in a state whose politics is dominated by Republicans, faces chances that "...fall somewhere east of slim and west of none."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you want to record what's going on inside a vehicle while it's moving, you've probably noticed the various difficulties regarding space and stabilization. Instructables user Pretty Idiot Productions shows us how to use s big sponge and some grippy rubber (the kind you put under your rug) to make a camera rig.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Reminder:
We are now accepting entries for the Maker Faire Bay Area, May 30 and 31 at the San Mateo County Expo Center. This year's focus is Re-Make America, inspired by President Obama's call for all of us to participate in remaking America. We're looking to showcase "the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things."

Key Points:
Entry Close Date: March 31, 2009. Space is limited, please submit your entry by the due date!

Entries submitted by March 12 should have been notified by March 19. Thanks to everyone who submitted a proposal.

We're now looking for the next wave of submissions and we'll be accepting new entries through the end of the month.

We're also specifically looking for makers with projects in the following categories:

- Sustainability
- Alternative Energy
- Clean Tech and Green Tech
- Community and Group Based Projects
- Lost Crafts
- Artisanal Food Makers
- Student Projects
- And more....

Submission form and more info here.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this!

Well, here's a fun one. Despite study after study after study after study after study, all showing that various text messaging and "txt speak" hasn't harmed kids reading or writing skills in the slightest (and, in fact, kids today read and write significantly more than in the past), how would you go about creating a moral panic around the idea that the internet is harming kids language skills?

It's easy.

1. Ignore all the evidence.
2. Send out a survey to parents asking them if they think the internet harms the ability of kids to write well
3. Report the results of that survey of what parents think without actually backing it up with facts or evidence.

Bingo. You're done. Forget push polling, this is push reporting. The reporting itself is designed to plant the idea that kids are having trouble writing well, due to the internet, despite a near total lack of supporting evidence (and plenty of evidence to the contrary).

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

WMGarrison writes "US Patent 7453593 claims command-line processing by a web server of SOAP requests, resulting in XML responses, from and to a remote client. The HTTP Common Gateway Interface (CGI) operates precisely as described in Claim 1. If you POST a SOAP document and return an XHTML response or a SOAP document, this infringes Claim 2, since both XHTML and SOAP are XML languages. This patent thus claims to own the processing of SOAP documents by CGI programs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member macetech demos his ChronoDot high precision real-time clock -

The ChronoDot is essentially a breakout board for the DS3231 temperature compensated real time clock. Even in varying temperatures, the DS3231 will maintain accuracy within one minute per year. In comparison, the popular DS1307 and similar devices can drift several minutes per month in varying temperatures, even if the external crystal and tuning capacitors are correctly selected. The ChronoDot has an integrated CR2016 battery on the bottom, which should last at least 8 years.

The temperature drift on standard RTC chips can come as an unwelcome surprise for projects which move between multiple environments. Assembled boards are available here.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

An anonymous reader writes "We've all seen processor benchmarks, but how do today's enthusiast CPUs look when you account for performance per dollar? Using a smorgasbord of charts, scatter plots, and performance tests, The Tech Report attempted to single out the highest-value offerings out of 16 popular Intel and AMD processors. The results might surprise you: AMD's 45nm Phenom IIs (both triple- and quad-core) prove to be strikingly competitive with Intel's Core 2 Quads. And, on the high end, Intel's $266 Core i7-920 turns out to be a compelling step up despite the higher costs of Core i7 platforms in general."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Smith has an interesting post discussing James Boyle's excellent book, The Public Domain, which we've been disucssing as well. In his post, though, Smith makes a really good point, comparing the extension of copyright to the banning of Wikipedia. Obviously, that sounds like hyperbole, but he's making a really good point that is often missed in these discussions.

You never see (or think about) what's lost when we create ever more stringent and draconian copyright laws.

Smith points to Boyle's thought experiments on how you would set up a network if given the choice, in 1990, between an open and a closed network. He notes, pretty accurately, that many people would likely freak out about the nature of the open network, recognizing all of the downsides, but rarely the potential upsides of such a network. Instead, they would focus on creating a "protected" network. Luckily, that's not what happened, but no thanks to careful planning. It was mostly an accident of history.

The second experiment would be about creating the best encyclopedia out there:

In a second thought experiment, imagine that it's five years ago and you are responsible for developing the most comprehensive and up-to-the-minute encyclopedia the world has ever seen. One strategy is to create a global company, employ the brightest people available, check every fact produced, and implement the most rigorous editorial controls. A second option is to "just create a website and let anybody put up anything". Again, we'd mostly have opted for the first strategy, and the world wouldn't have Wikipedia.

Once again, Wikipedia is more an accident of history. It was an experiment -- an offshoot of another project to see what would happen. It wasn't well planned out, but it worked.

The problem with copyright law, is that it tries to plan everything out. It focuses on preventing all sorts of potential "bad stuff," but never takes into account all the good stuff that would be allowed through such happy accidents. Strengthening copyright law may try (and likely fail) to prevent "bad stuff" from happening, but it also may cost us the next Wikipedia -- without anyone ever realizing it.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Houston 2600 sends along an Ars Technica writeup on the continuing downward trend in the traditional music business: NPD's annual survey found that 17 million CD customers dropped out last year. Among the good news is that streaming services such as Pandora are growing fast. "While overall music sales were up 10 percent in 2008, the year saw a drop not only in CD sales, but also in the number of customers actually purchasing music. But according to a new report, the act of listening to music is actually on the rise. ... NPD's annual Digital Music Study found that there were 17 million fewer CD customers in 2008 than in past years. CD sales have been dropping for quite some time, and while 1.5 billion songs were sold digitally last year, the number of Internet users paying for digital music only increased by 8 million in 2008."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark posted a helpful article describing how to get started with basic LCD text displays -

LCD displays come in many sizes most often named by the number of rows and then the length of the display line. For example a 1x16 LCD display will have one row of sixteen characters and a 4x20 LCD display will have four rows with twenty characters in each.

LCDs can have backlighting or be reflective (think calculator). In either case the programming that goes into working these displays is the same. LCDs with backlight normally use two pins to provide power to the backlighting.

Many are often surprised at how easy to work with and affordable it is to add a text readout to a project. Check out relevant pinouts, communications explanations, and more at Spikenzie Labs

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Rise to new heights with these custom built peg stilts.Thanks go to Molly Graber & Chris Merrick for the original article in CRAFT, Volume 08.
To download The DIY Stilts MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete DIY Stilts article in CRAFT, Volume 08 "DIY Stilts"
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Weekend Projects | Digg this!

Rise to new heights with these custom made peg stilts that let you see the world from above.
Thanks go to Molly Graber & Chris Merrick for the original article in CRAFT, Volume 08.
View the PDF of this project. and then subsribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in MAKE PDF | Digg this!

The indispensible jamie found a report out of Kentucky of exactly the kind of shenanigans that voting-transparency advocates have been warning about: a circuit court judge, a county clerk, and election officials are among eight people indicted for gaming elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. As described in the indictment (PDF), the election officials divvied up money intended to buy votes and then changed votes on the county's (popular, unverifiable) ES&S touch-screen voting systems, affecting the outcome of elections at the local, state, and federal levels.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Guatemalan police officer has been arrested in connection with the abduction and disappearance 25 years ago of a labor activist named Edgar Fernando García, during Guatemala's civil war -- a period in which extrajudicial executions, dissapearances, and torture by government agents were widespread. The arrest on March 5 of former police officer Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos is the result of an investigation of García's case by Guatemala's Human Rights Prosecutor, and all of this was made possible by using records recently discovered among the massive archives of the former National Police.

I reported about the tech forensics process at these archives for NPR a couple of years ago, and you can listen to that report here. We're talking about a giant, dingy, moldy, bat-infested hellhole that was once the site of a clandestine detention center and torture cells. The police dumped records here during the civil war years, and the whole mountain of rotting documents was accidentally discovered years after the war ended.

Using scanners, database systems, and teams of analysts and "digitalizadors," a large team of people working very, very hard in the years since have accomplished something incredible here. More about the recent arrest and what it means:

García was kidnapped by police agents in Guatemala City on February 18, 1984, during a wave of government repression targeting the left. He was never seen again. The policy of terror used by the Guatemalan security forces to intimidate and destroy perceived "subversives" during the country's 36-year civil conflict resulted in the disappearance of an estimated 45,000 civilians and the death of some 200,000, according to the Historical Clarification Commission in 1999.

Reports published today in Guatemala's Prensa Libre and EFE described the arrest of agent Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos, currently chief of police in Quezaltenango with 28 years of service in the former National Police and National Civil Police. Ramírez was charged with "illegal detention, kidnapping, forced disappearance, abuse of authority and failure of duty." According to Human Rights Prosecutor Sergio Morales, Ramírez was identified by human rights investigators from the recently uncovered records of the old Fourth Corps of the ex-National Police, which described how he and other agents secretly captured García and took him to an unknown location.

Kate Doyle, Director of the Archive's Guatemala Project, commented "The arrest of one of the alleged perpetrators of Fernando García's disappearance 25 years later underscores the critical importance of the archives of the Guatemalan police and military in achieving justice for the atrocities committed during the civil conflict. The government of Guatemala must do everything in its power to see that state records are made public for future human rights investigations if it truly supports accountability and justice for these crimes."

(...)Although there has been no information about his capture since he disappeared in 1984, Fernando García's name appeared in the notorious "Military Logbook," an army intelligence document listing dozens of people disappeared by security forces in the mid-1980s and released publicly by the National Security Archive in 2000. The logbook indicated that García and other young students, professors and labor leaders were the subjects of intensive police surveillance in the weeks leading up to their capture and disappearance.

Read more here at the project's website.

Photos in this post were snapshots I took at the Guatemalan police archives in 2007.

(Thank you, Jorge Villagran of PRAHPN - PDH - Guatemala, and all who suggested this).

Just Posted: our review of the AF-S DX Nikkor 35mm F1.8 G. Nikon caught everyone a little off-guard with the introduction of exactly the sort of cheap, fast standard prime lens for APS-C that most people had given up asking for. We've subjected it to our extensive tests to see whether it deserves a place in every Nikon-owning enthusiast's bag or if the attraction ends at the price tag.

Just Posted: our review of the AF-S DX Nikkor 35mm F1.8 G. Nikon caught everyone a little off-guard with the introduction of exactly the sort of cheap, fast standard prime lens for APS-C that most people had given up asking for. We've subjected it to our extensive tests to see whether it deserves a place in every Nikon-owning enthusiast's bag or if the attraction ends at the price tag.

On an NYU aid and development studies blog, this video of NYU Professor Leonard Wantchekon talking about a cultural challenge to development in the country where he grew up, Benin. As regular BB readers are probably sick of me mentioning in blog posts by now, I spent the last few weeks traveling and shooting video in that West African country.

So, in this clip from "What Would the Poor Say: Debates in Aid Evaluation," a recent conference held by NYU's Development Research Institute, Wantchekon talks about the lack of interpersonal trust within a community as a major challenge to economic development.

Communities in Benin where he has seen this phenomenon manifest most, he says, are the same communities where the highest amount of slave exportation took place from the 1600s to the 1900s -- villages and towns in the southern part of the country, where the huge slave ports once stood, and where massive numbers of (basically) war captives were sold into bondage. Wantchekon documents all of this in a research paper he co-authored with Nathan Nunn.

I realize the point in this video is to help aid workers think about how to quantify, define, and deal with this factor in development programs in Africa. But as I watched, I kept thinking about what this means in my own personal community back here in the US (and around the internet). How I and my friends and colleagues are, in many ways, really "banking" on that trust with each other to come up with creative ways to survive the economic crisis.

Video: "If You Don't Trust People You Know, It's Over."

You should also watch another clip by Wantchekon at this conference about the "Real Costs of Funerals in Benin." Might sound tedious and weird but it's (at least to me) fascinating. According to Wantchekon, some 30% of the monthly income of many middle-class families in Benin is spent on funerals!

(NYU Aid Watch blog, Thanks, Hugo von Tilborg!)

snahgle writes "Mathematicians John Conway (inventor of the Game of Life) and Simon Kochen of Princeton University have proven that if human experimenters demonstrate 'free will' in choosing what measurements to take on a particle, then the axioms of quantum mechanics require that the free will property be available to the particles measured, or to the universe as a whole. Conway is giving a series of lectures on the 'Free Will Theorem' and its ramifications over the next month at Princeton. A followup article strengthening the theory (PDF) was published last month in Notices of the AMS." Update: 03/19 14:20 GMT by KD : jamie points out that we discussed this theorem last year, before the paper had been published.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snahgle writes "Mathematicians John Conway (inventor of the Game of Life) and Simon Kochen of Princeton University have proven that if human experimenters demonstrate 'free will' in choosing what measurements to take on a particle, then the axioms of quantum mechanics require that the free will property be available to the particles measured, or to the universe as a whole. Conway is giving a series of lectures on the 'Free Will Theorem' and its ramifications over the next month at Princeton. A followup article strengthening the theory (PDF) was published last month in Notices of the AMS." Update: 03/19 14:20 GMT by KD : jamie points out that we discussed this theorem last year, before the paper had been published.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Digital artist Jer Thorp writes:

Holding a smoke alarm, battery installed, is somewhat like holding an unwound jack-in-the-box. While you know that it shouldn't go off, there's still a nagging suspicion that it might. I get a similar feeling when I check news websites in the morning - somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspect that the world might have caught on fire while I was asleep. So, it made at least some degree of sense to me to build a NewsAlarm - a device that sounds an alarm when specific new stories are detected 'off the wire'.

He hooked a smoke alarm to a simple set of Classes in Processing which connect to the New York Times NewsWire API. He can set it up to be on the lookout for certain words/phrases that trigger the alarm when they appear over the wire. Cool. Annoying.

NewsAlarm - wiring in to the NYT NewsWire API

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

Last year, we wrote about how it seemed like a mistake to us that the government in Montenegro had decided to block access to Facebook on government computers. While many disagreed in the comments, Facebook and other social networking sites are quickly becoming useful tools of communication (for some, it's their primary tool for communication). Blocking access is missing the point, and preventing a useful tool from being utilized, just because some might abuse it.

It turns out that the US government actually is doing the same thing... even as it's supposedly encouraging an era of social networking inspired "transparency" and an embrace of "Government 2.0." The NY Times notes the bureaucratic mess of government officials trying to make use of this enabling technology including this stunning quote:

"We have a Facebook page," said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. "But we don't allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre."

Meanwhile, Wired is highlighting a similar story. Apparently, the US military has been blocking access to YouTube, but set up a special alternative just for troops, called TroopTube. And, yet... it started blocking that site as well. It may just be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, but it seems so common in government that it's really rather ridiculous. These tools, while they may be prone to misuse and time-wasting, are also becoming key ways that people communicate. For a supposedly more open and transparent government, allowing access is a necessity. Deal with the abuses separately, rather than making an outright ban.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

CWmike writes "GPS device maker TomTom has shot back at Microsoft with a claim of patent infringement, after the software giant raised concerns in the Linux community with a recent lawsuit against TomTom. In a suit filed earlier this week, TomTom alleges that Microsoft infringes on four patents in mapping software Microsoft Streets and Trips. TomTom is asking for triple damages for willful infringement, since it says it had notified Microsoft about its alleged infringement. Microsoft said it was reviewing TomTom's filing and that it remains committed to a licensing solution and has been for more than a year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "GPS device maker TomTom has shot back at Microsoft with a claim of patent infringement, after the software giant raised concerns in the Linux community with a recent lawsuit against TomTom. In a suit filed earlier this week, TomTom alleges that Microsoft infringes on four patents in mapping software Microsoft Streets and Trips. TomTom is asking for triple damages for willful infringement, since it says it had notified Microsoft about its alleged infringement. Microsoft said it was reviewing TomTom's filing and that it remains committed to a licensing solution and has been for more than a year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've always had a suspicion that staring at a bright monitor all day and night might have some not-so-fantastic effects on a person's sleep cycle and general well-being. My friend Kyle, probably in consideration of my infamous problem with staying up too late on the computer and oversleeping in the morning, sent me a link to an application called F.lux, which may help to address this problem.

During the day, computer screens look good--they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.

F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

In the preferences, you specify the type of ambient lighting (fluorescent, halogen, etc.) and your location. F.lux then adjusts the brightness and temperature of the display throughout the day to be appropriate for the particular time. If you preview the difference, it looks noticeable. In use, though, the change happens so gradually that you don't really notice the colors are shifting.

There is an installer for Windows, OS X and Linux. I've been using the OS X version this evening on my iMac and it's been noticeably easier on my eyes. If I was planning on working all evening, I'd probably want to disable it, because I think I'm actually getting tired - and that's a good thing.

F.lux

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

What is the Web 2.0 paradox? It is the living paradox of a society which while it learns and applies fundamental new rules of behaviour and communication thanks to rapid growth of the Internet in many business sectors, it fails yet to have enough moral maturity to consistently carry over such realizations and discoveries into the world of education and learning. Photo credit: Markus Angermeier Despite many of us have perfectly clear what Web 2.0 is about (participating, sharing, being humble and listening, requesting feedback to learn from our mistakes) when we go home to our kids, we just forget all about it and in the act of sending them to school we really send them back to the Middle Ages. Why is it so difficult for us to bridge what we have clearly realized in the media, television, radio and advertising markets to the world of education? Why do we see so little effort in injecting inside our schools some of the attitudes, approaches and skills we put to use in our work? I've tried to make sense of why we are in such a paradoxical situation and I realize that while business and direct revenues impact and push rapid changes in the world of business, it takes much longer time to achieve the same changes in a field that provides no direct or immediate revenue to us. Especially when the changes that our business world has discovered would strongly undermine the present educational status quo, eliminating lots of existing costs and infrastructures, as well as the market value of many exams and certifications, deeply revolutionizing the world of work and professional guilds as we know it today. Under these conditions, and with little hope that we can rapidly change our educational system, we should ask ourselves: Is teaching equal to learning? During a live session with Vance Stevens and other participants at the EVO 2009 Multiliteracies event, I shared some of my thoughts on what actual learning is for me and also which stuff future generations need to know to be prepared in a world where's no more space for good grades or pre-determined questions. Inspired by many books and great readings ranging from Ivan Illich to Seymourt Papert and from Stephen Downes to George Siemens and Jay Cross, here is my own remixed vision for where our educational systems fail and for what we really need to know, that is not yet inside the official school syllabus. In Part 2 tomorrow, I provide some real-life examples where I explore the real skills that learners should possess to face the disruptive changes in our society. Abilities that aren't taught at school. Here Part 1:

The Paradox Of Web 2.0 - Part 1: Is Teaching Equal to Learning?

by Robin Good

Robin's Speech - Audio

Duration: 23' - The audio is edited to play Robin alone. Full audio (65') available here.
Full English Text Transcription

The Web 2.0 Paradox

I'm Robin Good, and my contention, what I'm here for today, is challenging a little bit our way to often assume the beliefs about learning and the way it should be, and maybe also look a little bit more tangibly at what the ideal type of learning or a future type of learning can, or should, or must be for us to be happy about the results or what we are going to produce in our efforts to change and improve all of this. This is really the focus. I'm arguing, contending, that we are in a so-called 2.0 paradox. That's how I call it. Many of you have learned about the issue of 2.0, Web 2.0, collaborating, participating, sharing, syndicating, mashing up, mixing, listening to the others... All of these are concepts that since a few years we've been reading, and breathing, and writing, and exploring in many different ways, to the point where the advertising, the marketing fields, television, and other media have actually in many cases, already fully embraced many of this. Software development, for example, is now done in a complete different way. Many of the web 2.0 companies are doing it in a way which it wasn't done before: it's immediately open, it likes to expose its own buzz, it likes to receive feedback and criticism from the audience in a continuous process, it keeps no secrets, it allows those that are going to be the customers to suggest new ideas and not just mistakes. All of this learning, from these explorations we've done in the ways we can communicate, collaborate together, are permeating, are increasingly part of this front-end, these edge areas in which we work, in which many of us work. Advertising, marketing, television, and so on. Certainly these are not areas in which everybody works, but they're in front of us everyday. The paradox of this is that those same people, those same individuals that have fully embraced, and that promote and evangelize about these ideas and use them in their professional work, when they turn back, and go home, and look at their kids, they have no shame in not realizing or acknowledging the huge discrepancy that there is between these ideas that we have already been implementing in daily life, and the privileged universe in which we are forcing our future generations to go into, with the supposed idea that we are going to prepare them better to manage this continuous change, the innovation, and all of these new approaches, and we send them in a world that is completely secluded from actual reality and in which none of these principles is made real for them to test.

Is Teaching Equal to Learning?

That's not an easy shift to make and we keep just define ourselves in the situation by realizing that we don't want to tear down schools, that we don't want to revolutionize the institution. It's taking so much effort for us to build and they have been there for quite some time. Some of us have been born and most of us just with this universe of education in place, and so the system appears by default to be a necessity in the way it is. But, maybe if we go and question, and look really at the essence of it, we can see not only that maybe the system has created a monster that we should at least acknowledge, but that we don't need to tear it down, to change the situation from what it is to what we would like it to be. If we are looking at teaching and learning, first of all, and you guys are very much into this and this may be quite some obvious reasoning, but these are the reasoning that we should bring in front of those that most resist or are most alien to these ideas. So let's bring in front of them the question of: Is teaching really equal to learning? Because every time we think normally in our everyday life about learning that we need to have some kind of classroom or teacher that is going to help us learn those things. That is basically the idea we get every single day, is the default thing we think about. Is that really so? We should ask.

Put On Your Investigator's Hat

My point is: if we look at the way we look, we learn things in our everyday life, if you look at the work of the many luminaries, opinion leaders out there, what they're telling us is that learning takes place really not so much in the classroom, in the school, where lots of what we learn is how to have fun while the teacher doesn't see, how to socialize with the others sex for the first time in our lives, how to do homework faster than anybody else so we have more free time, how to find out what's going to be inside the next exam, so that we can answer to all the questions right. That is really what we get to be trained for inside the school. All these things, things that don't appear to be the actual content, but things that are on the side of the things that we learn, while the things we really learn in our lives, are learned in a little different way. So, if you put on your investigator hat on your head, and you look really at how learning takes place in everyday life, you're going to discover things you know very well, but you just don't stop looking at.

What Do We Know After School?

Let me take some examples: we say that we know this and we know that, and that a school is very important because you get to know lots of things that are useful later in your life, but after school, of the knowledge we get there, how much we can really put to use or is effective in our ability to move through the fast changes that are happening, to learn the new technologies, to understand which news are good and which ones are not, to detect propaganda from actual information... If we were to be sent back in time, say 200-300 years, could we say that we could play God on Earth? We're coming from the 21st century, we know lots of stuff. We know about electricity, television, radio, satellite, space travel, and so if we went back in time could we just play God inside the civilization where we landed by telling them how to invent and create the locomotive, the train, or the airplane? Could anyone of us do that? Could anyone of us tell them how to bring electricity to their civilization? Have we actually learned any of this stuff that we can put it to use to them? The moment you start thinking that way, though it may appear a little bit stretched, you see that the tools we have at hand, that remain with us are not so much immediately usable.

A Trip to Space

Let me bring another example for you: If you think of going back, being put on a spaceship that goes to a faraway planet, you're on this space ship yourself and you got three or four months of travel in space, and in this spaceship you are there alone with your own two kids. You have a son and a daughter, two wonderful kids, but the story is that you have to drop these kids on this distant planet three months, six months from now, and there is an alien civilization, probably higher intelligence, but you are just going to land them there and you'll have to go away. This is what has been decided for you, and you have no choice. You're just taking them there to this final destination. Now, if you had these last six months with your kids, what are the type of things you would be teaching them before leaving them in such a situation. They don't need to know the seven kings of Rome to be able to moving in this outer space. Will they need some mathematical formulas, will they need to be able to communicate to other people? In the most effective way though they don't know the language? What are the critical things we really need to know in such a situation, because if we can detect and identify those properly, then I think we're going to look really at the type of things we need to learn in real life and that we supposedly they should be learning also in schools.

How Do We Really Learn?

We are really questioning more fundamentally the overall approach... Making groups or having assignments when the teacher has been pre-selected for me by somebody else on the basis of some certifications he's got by passing some exams, or the kind we've been talking above, or where my peers in that group are people who have been selected only on the basis by their age or the district in which they live, I think it makes very little sense to me. I think that if we're looking and questioning the overall teaching system approach, we should also be mentioning the fact that all of what we've preached in 2.0 world, that is: bottom-up, participation, contribution, sharing, no dogmatic one-way view, but multiple, multi-faceted approaches, multi-dimensional look at things, just like in journalism is studied, are all critical for learning appropriately. So we should have: First of all, an understanding that is not closing people in one place, that is not pre-selecting a teacher for them, but it should be me selecting who I'd want to learn from, and we have all the technologies and the resources to do this which we didn't have 20 years ago, but now we do have them. I think they should be allowed to learn with people that are as passionate as me about the topic that I want to learn. Why should I be forced to learn a pre-designed curriculum of items when I can be free, while advised and supported by people who have more experience, in going after the things that I'm really interested? If I can follow my passions, I should be able to follow those, with the people that are mostly interested in that stuff. If I keep having to go to school, and be closed in a room with people who share with me only their age and their geographic residential area, that's not going to work very much. Why should I work with people only of my age? Who says that I cannot learn while sitting with people of different ages, experiences, novices and experts?

Did Someone Teach You How to Drive...

As we look at those fundamental aspects, then we can see how much discrepancy and how much of a confusion in the eyes of the average person on the street there is about teaching and learning, because if learning is equal to teaching, and teaching is what happens in the school, there's no way to get out of that loop easily. Once you confront them with the fact that when they first learned how to drive their car, there wasn't somebody there telling them they have to lift slowly the friction pedal, or to keep this other foot out the way because you are going to use only the right one to accelerate and then stop, there was no other way for you to really learn that thing than seat down on the driver's seat and try it out, and make some serious mistakes. But that's not what happens in school. In school one is supposed to be able to be taught, shown on the blackboard, and if you make a mistake, you get a bad grade. You don't get an encouragement because you've made a mistake, you have explored new grounds, you are trying new things and the things don't work out, normally. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but let's look at the overall reality, let's look at the school were my and your kids are going. That is what I see. In reality we do not learn with somebody telling us every single move.

...Speak a Foreign Language...

Take for example language learning. You want to sell me that I've learned the languages I know because I went to classes, that I learned English as a foreign language. Forget it! I learned language first because I was a DJ and I had lots of vinyl records containing sheets with thealbum lyrics, and I loved to learn how to sing every single song I liked. And so by learning to sing I learned the pronunciation, and I had to learn the words and what they meant to not look stupid, that my first girlfriend would ask me: "Why are you singing the way you are singing this one?" Then because I travelled, and I went to other countries. And when I was hungry, I had to say something meaningful for them to feed me and to give me a dead and everything. I've put myself in uncomfortable situations, where I had to change to make new things, but there wasn't somebody there always telling me: "the grammar is this, one comes before two", and so on. That can help structure, make sense of things, but many times this structure is given BEFORE you're able to use it while it should be given most of the time afterwards.

...Swim...

I first want to play, get into the game, get my hands dirty, and then you tell me the grammar, because I want to know how to write better, I want to show off myself better now that I know how to use this tool with this language. Again, teaching top-down, one-way structure, doesn't work and we have this in front of us everyday. The same thing when we learn how to swim. Was there somebody telling you: "now move this left arm a little bit in the front?" Yes, they did try, but you have to go into the water to try, just like you had to do with your video games.

...Play a Video Game?

How many times did you have to die inside a game or get smashed against a wall with your car to really learn how to drive? Millions of times for me, and many times.... in fact I just gave up because the encouragement from my partner wasn't good enough, but if we were in an ideal world, they should have encouraged me because I was learning through my mistakes what it didn't work, and there was just not enough fun, because my partners were too good and too much ahead of me to make me learn.
But making mistakes, is the way to learn, and I'll tell you what... in all of these situations where we actually learn stuff that stays with us for years, and years, what we do is not just make mistakes, this is not my key point; it's a number of things that we do that are completely different from what we do in school, in the supposed institutional environment that makes our learning so valuable.

1. First of all, in most of the situations WE ARE with some peers, that we like, that are passionate, interested in the same stuff.
2. Secondly, we go ask, when we learn a game we go find on Google a way to go through the game, to learn it faster, to find the shortcut keys, to find out if there's a cheatsheet, whatever. We go to people who have a lot of experience, like my friends before and ask: "How do we do that?", "How do you turn in the curve like this or like that?". We ask in the moment we need it, and we're so much craving for that knowledge that once they tell us we put it to use right away, and we master it.

That's not what takes place in the classroom. We don't do any of those things, and we always do them in an order that is unlike the typical order, in which we will learn so fast, and so fully in real life. So one of the key things for the paradigm shift to take place is to bring all of these stuff in the face of everyone else.

End of Part 1
In Part 2 tomorrow, I provide some real-life examples where I explore the real skills that learners should possess to face the disruptive changes in our society. Abilities that aren't taught at school.

Robin Good Summarizes the Web 2.0 Paradox

Robin Good on the Paradox of 2.0 - Le Web 2008 from Erno Hannink on Vimeo. Duration: 2':35"

Originally recorded by Vance Stevens for Vance's GeekSpeek on February 26, 2009 as "The paradox of 2.0, an EDUPUNK perspective".

What is the Web 2.0 paradox? It is the living paradox of a society which while it learns and applies fundamental new rules of behaviour and communication thanks to rapid growth of the Internet in many business sectors, it fails yet to have enough moral maturity to consistently carry over such realizations and discoveries into the world of education and learning. Photo credit: Markus Angermeier Despite many of us have perfectly clear what Web 2.0 is about (participating, sharing, being humble and listening, requesting feedback to learn from our mistakes) when we go home to our kids, we just forget all about it and in the act of sending them to school we really send them back to the Middle Ages. Why is it so difficult for us to bridge what we have clearly realized in the media, television, radio and advertising markets to the world of education? Why do we see so little effort in injecting inside our schools some of the attitudes, approaches and skills we put to use in our work? I've tried to make sense of why we are in such a paradoxical situation and I realize that while business and direct revenues impact and push rapid changes in the world of business, it takes much longer time to achieve the same changes in a field that provides no direct or immediate revenue to us. Especially when the changes that our business world has discovered would strongly undermine the present educational status quo, eliminating lots of existing costs and infrastructures, as well as the market value of many exams and certifications, deeply revolutionizing the world of work and professional guilds as we know it today. Under these conditions, and with little hope that we can rapidly change our educational system, what is the best way to prepare your children to effectively prepare them for a future we know so little about? During a live session with Vance Stevens and other participants at the EVO 2009 Multiliteracies event, I shared some of my thoughts on what actual learning is for me and also which stuff future generations need to know to be prepared in a world where's no more space for good grades or pre-determined questions. Inspired by many books and great readings ranging from Ivan Illich to Seymourt Papert and from Stephen Downes to George Siemens and Jay Cross, here is my own remixed vision for where our educational systems fail and for what we really need to know, that is not yet inside the official school syllabus. In Part 2 tomorrow, I provide some real-life examples where I explore the real skills that learners should possess to face the disruptive changes in our society. Abilities that aren't taught at school. Here Part 1:

The Paradox Of Web 2.0: What You Really Need To Teach Your Kids

by Robin Good

Robin's Speech - Audio

Duration: 23' - The audio is edited to play Robin alone. Full audio (65') available here.
Full English Text Transcription

The Web 2.0 Paradox

I'm Robin Good, and my contention, what I'm here for today, is challenging a little bit our way to often assume the beliefs about learning and the way it should be, and maybe also look a little bit more tangibly at what the ideal type of learning or a future type of learning can, or should, or must be for us to be happy about the results or what we are going to produce in our efforts to change and improve all of this. This is really the focus. I'm arguing, contending, that we are in a so-called 2.0 paradox. That's how I call it. Many of you have learned about the issue of 2.0, Web 2.0, collaborating, participating, sharing, syndicating, mashing up, mixing, listening to the others... All of these are concepts that since a few years we've been reading, and breathing, and writing, and exploring in many different ways, to the point where the advertising, the marketing fields, television, and other media have actually in many cases, already fully embraced many of this. Software development, for example, is now done in a complete different way. Many of the web 2.0 companies are doing it in a way which it wasn't done before: it's immediately open, it likes to expose its own buzz, it likes to receive feedback and criticism from the audience in a continuous process, it keeps no secrets, it allows those that are going to be the customers to suggest new ideas and not just mistakes. All of this learning, from these explorations we've done in the ways we can communicate, collaborate together, are permeating, are increasingly part of this front-end, these edge areas in which we work, in which many of us work. Advertising, marketing, television, and so on. Certainly these are not areas in which everybody works, but they're in front of us everyday. The paradox of this is that those same people, those same individuals that have fully embraced, and that promote and evangelize about these ideas and use them in their professional work, when they turn back, and go home, and look at their kids, they have no shame in not realizing or acknowledging the huge discrepancy that there is between these ideas that we have already been implementing in daily life, and the privileged universe in which we are forcing our future generations to go into, with the supposed idea that we are going to prepare them better to manage this continuous change, the innovation, and all of these new approaches, and we send them in a world that is completely secluded from actual reality and in which none of these principles is made real for them to test.

Is Teaching Equal to Learning?

That's not an easy shift to make and we keep just define ourselves in the situation by realizing that we don't want to tear down schools, that we don't want to revolutionize the institution. It's taking so much effort for us to build and they have been there for quite some time. Some of us have been born and most of us just with this universe of education in place, and so the system appears by default to be a necessity in the way it is. But, maybe if we go and question, and look really at the essence of it, we can see not only that maybe the system has created a monster that we should at least acknowledge, but that we don't need to tear it down, to change the situation from what it is to what we would like it to be. If we are looking at teaching and learning, first of all, and you guys are very much into this and this may be quite some obvious reasoning, but these are the reasoning that we should bring in front of those that most resist or are most alien to these ideas. So let's bring in front of them the question of: Is teaching really equal to learning? Because every time we think normally in our everyday life about learning that we need to have some kind of classroom or teacher that is going to help us learn those things. That is basically the idea we get every single day, is the default thing we think about. Is that really so? We should ask.

Put On Your Investigator's Hat

My point is: if we look at the way we look, we learn things in our everyday life, if you look at the work of the many luminaries, opinion leaders out there, what they're telling us is that learning takes place really not so much in the classroom, in the school, where lots of what we learn is how to have fun while the teacher doesn't see, how to socialize with the others sex for the first time in our lives, how to do homework faster than anybody else so we have more free time, how to find out what's going to be inside the next exam, so that we can answer to all the questions right. That is really what we get to be trained for inside the school. All these things, things that don't appear to be the actual content, but things that are on the side of the things that we learn, while the things we really learn in our lives, are learned in a little different way. So, if you put on your investigator hat on your head, and you look really at how learning takes place in everyday life, you're going to discover things you know very well, but you just don't stop looking at.

What Do We Know After School?

Let me take some examples: we say that we know this and we know that, and that a school is very important because you get to know lots of things that are useful later in your life, but after school, of the knowledge we get there, how much we can really put to use or is effective in our ability to move through the fast changes that are happening, to learn the new technologies, to understand which news are good and which ones are not, to detect propaganda from actual information... If we were to be sent back in time, say 200-300 years, could we say that we could play God on Earth? We're coming from the 21st century, we know lots of stuff. We know about electricity, television, radio, satellite, space travel, and so if we went back in time could we just play God inside the civilization where we landed by telling them how to invent and create the locomotive, the train, or the airplane? Could anyone of us do that? Could anyone of us tell them how to bring electricity to their civilization? Have we actually learned any of this stuff that we can put it to use to them? The moment you start thinking that way, though it may appear a little bit stretched, you see that the tools we have at hand, that remain with us are not so much immediately usable.

A Trip to Space

Let me bring another example for you: If you think of going back, being put on a spaceship that goes to a faraway planet, you're on this space ship yourself and you got three or four months of travel in space, and in this spaceship you are there alone with your own two kids. You have a son and a daughter, two wonderful kids, but the story is that you have to drop these kids on this distant planet three months, six months from now, and there is an alien civilization, probably higher intelligence, but you are just going to land them there and you'll have to go away. This is what has been decided for you, and you have no choice. You're just taking them there to this final destination. Now, if you had these last six months with your kids, what are the type of things you would be teaching them before leaving them in such a situation. They don't need to know the seven kings of Rome to be able to moving in this outer space. Will they need some mathematical formulas, will they need to be able to communicate to other people? In the most effective way though they don't know the language? What are the critical things we really need to know in such a situation, because if we can detect and identify those properly, then I think we're going to look really at the type of things we need to learn in real life and that we supposedly they should be learning also in schools.

How Do We Really Learn?

We are really questioning more fundamentally the overall approach... Making groups or having assignments when the teacher has been pre-selected for me by somebody else on the basis of some certifications he's got by passing some exams, or the kind we've been talking above, or where my peers in that group are people who have been selected only on the basis by their age or the district in which they live, I think it makes very little sense to me. I think that if we're looking and questioning the overall teaching system approach, we should also be mentioning the fact that all of what we've preached in 2.0 world, that is: bottom-up, participation, contribution, sharing, no dogmatic one-way view, but multiple, multi-faceted approaches, multi-dimensional look at things, just like in journalism is studied, are all critical for learning appropriately. So we should have: First of all, an understanding that is not closing people in one place, that is not pre-selecting a teacher for them, but it should be me selecting who I'd want to learn from, and we have all the technologies and the resources to do this which we didn't have 20 years ago, but now we do have them. I think they should be allowed to learn with people that are as passionate as me about the topic that I want to learn. Why should I be forced to learn a pre-designed curriculum of items when I can be free, while advised and supported by people who have more experience, in going after the things that I'm really interested? If I can follow my passions, I should be able to follow those, with the people that are mostly interested in that stuff. If I keep having to go to school, and be closed in a room with people who share with me only their age and their geographic residential area, that's not going to work very much. Why should I work with people only of my age? Who says that I cannot learn while sitting with people of different ages, experiences, novices and experts?

Did Someone Teach You How to Drive...

As we look at those fundamental aspects, then we can see how much discrepancy and how much of a confusion in the eyes of the average person on the street there is about teaching and learning, because if learning is equal to teaching, and teaching is what happens in the school, there's no way to get out of that loop easily. Once you confront them with the fact that when they first learned how to drive their car, there wasn't somebody there telling them they have to lift slowly the friction pedal, or to keep this other foot out the way because you are going to use only the right one to accelerate and then stop, there was no other way for you to really learn that thing than seat down on the driver's seat and try it out, and make some serious mistakes. But that's not what happens in school. In school one is supposed to be able to be taught, shown on the blackboard, and if you make a mistake, you get a bad grade. You don't get an encouragement because you've made a mistake, you have explored new grounds, you are trying new things and the things don't work out, normally. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but let's look at the overall reality, let's look at the school were my and your kids are going. That is what I see. In reality we do not learn with somebody telling us every single move.

...Speak a Foreign Language...

Take for example language learning. You want to sell me that I've learned the languages I know because I went to classes, that I learned English as a foreign language. Forget it! I learned language first because I was a DJ and I had lots of vinyl records containing sheets with thealbum lyrics, and I loved to learn how to sing every single song I liked. And so by learning to sing I learned the pronunciation, and I had to learn the words and what they meant to not look stupid, that my first girlfriend would ask me: "Why are you singing the way you are singing this one?" Then because I travelled, and I went to other countries. And when I was hungry, I had to say something meaningful for them to feed me and to give me a dead and everything. I've put myself in uncomfortable situations, where I had to change to make new things, but there wasn't somebody there always telling me: "the grammar is this, one comes before two", and so on. That can help structure, make sense of things, but many times this structure is given BEFORE you're able to use it while it should be given most of the time afterwards.

...Swim...

I first want to play, get into the game, get my hands dirty, and then you tell me the grammar, because I want to know how to write better, I want to show off myself better now that I know how to use this tool with this language. Again, teaching top-down, one-way structure, doesn't work and we have this in front of us everyday. The same thing when we learn how to swim. Was there somebody telling you: "now move this left arm a little bit in the front?" Yes, they did try, but you have to go into the water to try, just like you had to do with your video games.

...Play a Video Game?

How many times did you have to die inside a game or get smashed against a wall with your car to really learn how to drive? Millions of times for me, and many times.... in fact I just gave up because the encouragement from my partner wasn't good enough, but if we were in an ideal world, they should have encouraged me because I was learning through my mistakes what it didn't work, and there was just not enough fun, because my partners were too good and too much ahead of me to make me learn.
But making mistakes, is the way to learn, and I'll tell you what... in all of these situations where we actually learn stuff that stays with us for years, and years, what we do is not just make mistakes, this is not my key point; it's a number of things that we do that are completely different from what we do in school, in the supposed institutional environment that makes our learning so valuable.

1. First of all, in most of the situations WE ARE with some peers, that we like, that are passionate, interested in the same stuff.
2. Secondly, we go ask, when we learn a game we go find on Google a way to go through the game, to learn it faster, to find the shortcut keys, to find out if there's a cheatsheet, whatever. We go to people who have a lot of experience, like my friends before and ask: "How do we do that?", "How do you turn in the curve like this or like that?". We ask in the moment we need it, and we're so much craving for that knowledge that once they tell us we put it to use right away, and we master it.

That's not what takes place in the classroom. We don't do any of those things, and we always do them in an order that is unlike the typical order, in which we will learn so fast, and so fully in real life. So one of the key things for the paradigm shift to take place is to bring all of these stuff in the face of everyone else.

End of Part 1
In Part 2 tomorrow, I provide some real-life examples where I explore the real skills that learners should possess to face the disruptive changes in our society. Abilities that aren't taught at school.

Robin Good Summarizes the Web 2.0 Paradox

Robin Good on the Paradox of 2.0 - Le Web 2008 from Erno Hannink on Vimeo. Duration: 2':35"

Originally recorded by Vance Stevens for Vance's GeekSpeek on February 26, 2009 as "The paradox of 2.0, an EDUPUNK perspective".

And here we have yet another case where the copyright holder is certainly within its rights, but that hardly means that its decision made any business sense at all. Michael_S alerts us to the news that some fans of the TV show Battlestar Galactica tried to set up a showing of the finale in a movie theater in Toronto as a charity event. They spoke to someone at NBC Universal, who basically agreed to look the other way and let the event happen... but then the lawyers found out and they shut the event down, because how dare the biggest fans of one of your biggest shows all get together to celebrate the show and raise money for charity at the same time. Yes, it is absolutely within NBC Universal's legal right to block such a public performance, but it makes the company look like a massive, charity-hating bully, for no good reason (and, before someone says it, the need to enforce applies to trademarks, not copyright). It wouldn't have been hard for NBC Universal to set up a simple license to allow the showing to happen, but when you live in a world where lawyers and control are more important than actual business sense, this is what you get.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

pnorth writes "A defunct payment gateway has exposed as many as 19,000 credit card numbers of US and UK consumers in a major worldwide breach. The data, held in Google cache, includes credit card numbers, CVVs, expiry dates, names and addresses. The credit card numbers are for accounts held with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Solo, Switch, Delta and Maestro/Cirrus. Within the address bars of the cached pages are URLs of e-commerce sites that have become victims of the breach. They include clothing, science, health, sports and photo imaging stores. The cause appears to be a known issue with the Google search engine, in which the pages of defunct web sites containing sensitive directories remain cached and available to anyone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

pnorth writes "A defunct payment gateway has exposed as many as 19,000 credit card numbers of US and UK consumers in a major worldwide breach. The data, held in Google cache, includes credit card numbers, CVVs, expiry dates, names and addresses. The credit card numbers are for accounts held with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Solo, Switch, Delta and Maestro/Cirrus. Within the address bars of the cached pages are URLs of e-commerce sites that have become victims of the breach. They include clothing, science, health, sports and photo imaging stores. The cause appears to be a known issue with the Google search engine, in which the pages of defunct web sites containing sensitive directories remain cached and available to anyone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Gakken SX-150 Analog Synthesizer Kit from the Maker shed is a really fun kit to build, mod, and hack. The first time I tried one out was at Maker Faire in 2008 and I was really impressed by the sound this little synth kit was able to produce.

Features:

• Size: 4.5" x 6"
  
• Controls for LFO, pitch envelope, frequency cutoff, resonance, and attack/decay
  
• Slide controller (pen type electrode)
  
• Output and external input 1/8" jacks
  
• Small built-in speaker
  
• Runs on 4 AA batteries (not included)
  

More about the Gakken SX-150 Analog Synthesizer Kit

Collin did an excellent video review of this cool little synth a while back on the blog. Check out the custom "pick" buttons he added to the stock kit.

More about Collin's review of the Gakken analog synth kit

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Tim already covered some of the problems with Utah's repeated attempts to ban (or greatly limit) keyword advertising on trademarked terms. However, there were two separate disturbing issues related to this, both brought up by Eric Goldman, that seemed worth discussing. Both involve two of the legislators who voted on the bill. The first, Rep. S. Clark, voted against the bill, but for flabbergasting reasons. You see, it wasn't that he disliked the idea that companies would be blocked from advertising on competitive keywords, it was because he wanted to pin all the liability on Google:

"We should be going after the Googles that are creating this problem. They're the villains." .... "If we're going to use the strength and resources of the state to go after businesses, then we ought to go after the business that is causing the harm. ... We ought to go after the Googles with the state's resources and reputation."

Then, there's Rep. Jennifer "Jen" Seelig, who voted for the bill. But, that shouldn't be surprising. You see, even though she's an elected official in the state legislator, she's also still employed as a registered lobbyist for 1-800 Contacts, the company that has been pushing the bill. Apparently that sort of conflict of interest isn't seen as a problem in Utah.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

One of the interesting things about the end of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's print edition, which Mike noted on Monday, is how much more flexibility the PI will have to adjust to changing economic conditions now that it's an online-only publication. I don't think it's generally appreciated how constraining the newspaper format is. Readers expect a daily paper to be a certain size every day, and to arrive on their doorstep at a certain time every morning. Meeting those requirements involves a ton of infrastructure and personnel: typesetters, printing presses, delivery trucks, paper carriers, and so forth. To meet these infrastructure requirements, a paper has to have a minimum circulation, which in turn requires covering a wide geographical area. All of which means that as a daily paper's circulation falls below a certain threshold, it can lead to a death spiral where cost-cutting leads to lower quality, which leads to circulation declines and more cost-cutting. Of course, some papers manage to survive with much smaller circulations than the PI, but these tend to be either weekly papers (which tend to have a very different business model) or papers serving smaller towns where they have a de facto monopoly on local news.

These economic constraints, in turn, greatly constrain what journalists can do. They have a strict deadline every evening, and there are strict limits on the word count they can publish. Because newspapers have to target a large, general audience with limited space, reporters are often discouraged from covering niche topics where they have the greatest interest or expertise. Moreover, because many newspaper readers rely on the paper as their primary source of news, people expect their newspaper to cover a broad spectrum of topics: national and international news, movie reviews, a business section, a comics page, a sports page, and so forth. Which means that reporters frequently get dispatched to cover topics they don't understand very well and that don't especially interest them. The content they produce on these assignments is certainly valuable, but it's probably not as valuable as the content they'd produce if they were given more freedom to pursue the subjects they were most passionate about.

The web is very different. Servers and bandwidth are practically free compared with printing presses and delivery trucks, so news organizations of virtually any size—from a lone blogger to hundreds of people—can thrive if they can attract an audience. And thanks to aggregation technologies such as RSS and Google News, readers don't expect or even want every news organization to cover every topic. Here at Techdirt, we don't try to cover sports, the weather, foreign affairs, or lots of other topics because we know there are other outlets that can cover those topics better than we could. Instead, we focus on the topics we know the most about—technology and business—and cover them in a way that (we hope) can't be found anywhere else. In the news business, as in any other industry, greater specialization tends to lead to higher quality and productivity.

Moving online will give the PI vastly more flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions and focus on those areas where they can create the most value. The PI says they'll have about 20 people producing content for the new web-based outlet. That's a lot fewer than the print paper employed, but it's enough to produce a lot of valuable content. And now that they're freed of the costs and constraints of newsprint, and the expectation to cover every topic under the sun, it'll be a lot easier to experiment and find a sustainable business model.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Hot damn! The 2009 Hugo Awards ballot is live and it's a doozy, and not just because I'm on it twice (Best Novel: Little Brother and Best Novella: True Names, with Ben Rosenbaum). No, it's better than that -- the entire ballot is just killer, especially my competition in the Best Novel category (hell, three quarters of the authors were invited to my wedding, and I'd have been delighted to have the remaining one in attendance). A million thanks to all of you who nominated both works!

I can't wait to see who wins (and no matter who wins, I can't wait for the annual Hugo Losers party, which is bound to be a hell of a thing and a half). I'm going to the WorldCon for the awards, of course -- my tux is hanging in its dry-cleaning bag awaiting its annual airing.

And hey, look at that, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who edited Little Brother, is also up for Best Editor!

Best Novel
* Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
* The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK) — Free download
* Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
* Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)

Best Novella
* “The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
* “The Political Prisoner” by Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008) – Read Online
* “The Tear” by Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
* “True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum & Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2) — Free download
* “Truth” by Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)

Best Novelette
* “Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Jan 2008) — Read Online
* “The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2) — Read Online
* “Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
* “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s Feb 2008) — Read Online
* “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008) — Read Online

Best Short Story
* “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Jul 2008) — Read Online
* “Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick (Baen’s Universe Oct 2008)
* “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two)
* “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
* “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)

Another thing about this ballot -- it's the copyfightingest ballots in my memory, filled with writers and editors who advocate for sharing, fanfic, and looser copyrights.

Hugos 2009

The tent-city in Sacramento, the capital of California, is so big and entrenched that the city is debating installing plumbing and other amenities. Meanwhile Sacramento's vacancy rate is higher than the national average: "10.4 percent of rental housing units are vacant and 4.8 percent of owned units are vacant."

The primitive settlement sits in the shadow of the state capitol and is home to about 300 people who have no toilets or running water, creating unsanitary conditions that advocacy groups worry could promote diseases like cholera. With the downturn in the economy and more working-class people losing their jobs and their homes, the tent city is expanding.

The mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, said in an interview that he wants to create a permanent tent city for the homeless, although he is not sure where it should be. He said he recognized that doing so would be difficult politically. But he said a permanent site could bring sanitation services and regulations like a ban on drugs and alcohol.

Sacramento and Its Riverside Tent City (via Warren Ellis)

(Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Wired Science has a good summary of the first federal State of the Birds report, arguably the most successful citizen science project to day, in which individuals from around the US reported local observations to produce a detailed census of bird populations in the nation.

The first federal State of the Birds report was released Thursday, marking the beginning of an unprecedented collaboration between government researchers and conservation groups — and the underlying data comes from you.

"The data that goes into this report is by and large not collected by a few tin-head scientists or conservation organizations, but by millions of individuals," said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. "We can begin to put together spectacularly massive databases that show us, in great detail with fine-grained scope, what the trends are."

The trends identified by the report are generally known. Hundreds of bird species are threatened by habitat loss, pollution and climate change. But in other ways, the report is novel. "It's a break from the one-institution, or handful-of-institution, approach," said Cornell University ornithologist Andrew Farnsworth. "This kind of partnership hasn't happened before."

Citizen Science Is for the Birds

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: Alien Nation, aliens among us.

Alien Nation 8

The DEA's Office of Forensic Sciences publishes a monthly newsletter called the Microgram Bulletin, which features news and photos about unusual drugs and drug smuggling techniques.

I like reading the newsletter for two reasons: first, it's filled with examples of human ingenuity (the August, 2008 issue has photos of fake kidney bean made to smuggle heroin). Second, it's mind-boggling to see the weird drugs that people like to take: Butanediol? Nandralone? Boldenone? Trifluoromethylphenylpiperazine? Sceletium tortuosum? N,N-dimethylamphetamine? Testosterone cypionate? Bromo-Benzodifuranyl-Isopropylamine Hydrochloride? I've never heard of thse. Apparently, the world is filled with connoisseurs of esoteric inebrients!

The December 2008 edition of the newsletter has photos of colorful ecstasy mimic tablets (above) along with photos of cocaine being smuggled in an "ukelele" (sic), which doesn't seem to be a ukulele.

The Portland Metro Forensic Laboratory of the Oregon State Police recently received 18 vibrantly colored tablets of five different types, all suspected Ecstasy. The exhibits were seized in Portland by the Portland Police Department, incidental to a stop for a traffic violation and subsequent consent search. The tablets were mixed together; there were six round orange tablets imprinted with an Interstate 5 shield logo (total net mass 1.7 grams), four green tablets, shaped and imprinted to resemble a “Transformer” (total net mass 1.1 grams), four round purple tablets imprinted with an JL Audio logo (total net mass 1.2 grams), three pink tablets, shaped and imprinted to resemble the head of Bart Simpson (total net mass 0.8 grams), and one round blue tablet imprinted with the Superman logo (total net mass 0.2 grams). The Transformer and Bart Simpson tablets were very detailed and well-pressed, and more resembled candies or children’s chewable vitamins as opposed to typical Ecstasy tablets. Analysis by color tests (Marquis and nitroprusside), GC/MS, and UV, however, indicated not MDMA but rather a 1 :1 mixture of benzylpiperazine (BZP) and trifluoromethylphenylpiperazine (TFMPP) for the orange, green, purple and blue tablets, and a 1 : 2 mixture of BZP and TFMPP for the pink tablets. The piperazines were not formally quantitated, but were present in a moderate to high loading based on the TIC and UV. The laboratory has received numerous Ecstasy mimic tablets containing this piperazine mixture over the past year, but never before in these unusual tablet shapes. Since this initial submission, the laboratory received an exhibit containing another 30 of the green Transformer-shaped and imprinted tablets, also containing the 1 : 1 mixture of BZP and TFMPP.

Microgram Bulletin, Dec 2008

Connecticut's Vote Working Families is offering bus-tours of the luxurious mansions of the AIG execs who are in line to receive gigantic, taxpayer-funded bonuses:

We're all mad at AIG. Their executives bear a large share of the responsibility for bringing the economy to it's knees, and now the same folks are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses -- at our expense. Join us for a field trip to bring them the message.

AIG Exec Homes Bus Tour (Thanks, Slavin!)

Farhad sez, "Here's a story from The Economist about a study that shows you can guess a guy's credit risk by his face. Researchers asked Mechanical Turkers to look at pictures of loan applicants on the peer-to-peer lending site Prosper.com. The Mechanical Turkers rated whether the faces looked trustworthy. The ratings, it turned out, correlated with the loan applicants' credit histories:"

The researchers looked at 6,821 loan applications, 733 of which were successful. Their first finding was that the assessments of trustworthiness, and of likelihood to repay a loan, that were made by Mechanical Turk workers did indeed correlate with potential borrowers’ credit ratings based on their credit history. That continued to be so when the other variables, from beauty to race to obesity, were controlled for statistically. Shifty physiognomy, it seems, is independent of these things.

That shiftiness was also recognised by those whose money was actually at stake. People flagged as untrustworthy by the Mechanical Turks were less likely than others to be offered a loan at all. To have the same chance of getting one as those deemed most trustworthy they were required to pay an interest rate that was, on average, 1.82 percentage points higher, even when the effects of historical creditworthiness were statistically eliminated.

I wonder if you an predict the likelihood that a banker will destroy the global economy by looking at his face?

About face (Thanks, Farhad!)

jeroen8 writes "A Dutch guy was able to build his own solar panel in his garage using materials that were a third as expensive as the mass produced solar panels currently available on the European market. He bought his solar cells on eBay and used them to create his own panel. His output price is only 1.20 Euro per Watt Peak (Wp). This makes you wonder if we are paying too much for mass-produced solar panels, which should, in theory, be a lot less expensive than something you create in your garage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jeroen8 writes "A Dutch guy was able to build his own solar panel in his garage which is three times less expensive than mass produced solar panels currently available on European market. He bought his solar cells on eBay and created his own solar panel. His cost price is only 1.20 Euro per Watt Peak (Wp). This makes you wonder if we are not paying too much for mass-produced solar panels, which should in theory be a lot less expensive than something you create in your garage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're launching a new column here on Make: Online called Ask MAKE. The idea is pretty simple: you write in questions, and we answer them! It can be about anything from electronics to recycling to questions about the magazine or Make: Online. Ask us anything about everything we usually cover in print and online. And you can ask us in whatever medium you'd like, too. Email me at becky@makezine.com, send us an @ reply or DM on Twitter, submit a page on your site highlighting the problem, record a video, send a carrier pigeon, whatever floats your boat. We'll answer your questions right here, every Thursday. Oh, and if you have a craft-related question, check out our sister column on Craftzine, Ask CRAFT.

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

A new study from the UK says that parents underestimate by half the amount of time their kids spend online, while 81% of those parents surveyed said they had a good idea of what their kids look at online, but just 31% of kids agreed. All this happens in spite of more than half of British parents saying they put filters or other sorts of controls on the PCs their kids use, suggesting that -- surprise, surprise -- those controls aren't particularly effective. Furthermore, the survey would seem to indicate that what's lacking here aren't technological controls on kids' online behavior, but rather a lot of parental attention. Trying to outsource parental responsibility to some technological solution isn't going to work -- but the responsibility shouldn't be to fully or accurately monitor kids' online behavior (which is largely impossible anyway), it should be to educate kids to protect themselves and behave responsibly on the internet.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Two professors have taken the time to go through all of the various research over the years that has tried to connect violent video games to actual violence, and discovered many problems with it. They found that research that concludes some sort of connection between the two seems to not use any recognized measure of aggression (allowing for substantial fudging), and that the media attention seems to lead more researchers to study the subject and (perhaps subconsciously) push them towards sensationalizing their findings. Hurray for technopanics. Among the findings:

• In the last 10 years, video games studies have been overwhelmingly popular compared to studies on other media.
• Less than half of studies (41%) used well validated aggression measures.
• Poorly standardized and unreliable measures of aggression tended to produce the highest effects, possibly because their unstandardized format allows researchers to pick and choose from a range of possible outcomes.
• The closer aggression measures got to actual violent behavior, the weaker the effects seen.
• Experimental studies produced much higher effects than correlational or longitudinal studies. As experimental studies were most likely to use aggression measures of poor quality, this may be the reason why.
• There was no evidence that video games produce higher effects than other media, despite their interactive nature.
• Overall, effects were negligible, and we conclude that media violence generally has little demonstrable effect on aggressive behavior.

Of course, that won't stop lawyers and politicians from grandstanding on the issue...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Environmentalist, artist, scientist, activist, and engineer are just a few of the hats that maker Natalie Jeremijenko wears, and she always seems to devise projects that blend her many talents seamlessly. Back in 2005, in MAKE Volume 02, we ran a profile of Natalie, where she aptly summed up: "I work on examining the cultural opportunities that technological innovations provide." She has performed studies in "social robotics," looking at how robots can interact with each other as well as with life forms, with an emphasis on environmental issues. For example, in the Netherlands, she experimented with a robotic goose that could record and play back sounds of other geese, as well as chase after and play with the geese, providing insight into how the birds communicate. We focused on her Feral Robotic Dogs project, hacking robotic toy dogs and transforming them from their "intended entertainment use to activists instruments for exploring (and contesting) local material conditions." Under her guidance, students from UCSD hacked their toy dogs to sniff out toxic substances at the Mission Bay Landfill:

These days, Natalie directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at New York University. The clinic "develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change." Folks can make appointments at the clinic, but instead of talking about internal biology, patients discuss their environmental concerns, and instead of leaving with a prescription for pharmaceuticals, they leave with a prescription for action, plus referrals to organizations and projects they can participate in. Natalie's list of projects is extensive and includes Fwish, a grid of robotics buoys that monitor water quality, sense fish presence and visualize information through colored LEDs:

An ongoing exhibit at Mass MoCA, another project, TreeLogic, is an inverted avenue of six sugar maple trees growing upside down, suspended 30 feet in the air:

And a product in the works is the GreenAwning, a positionable solar array:

This is just the tip of the iceberg. To boot, she is also a visiting professor at Royal College of Art in London and an artist not-in-residence at the Institute for the Future. To find out more about Natalie and her projects, check out the xDesign site. To pick up your back issue of MAKE Volume 02, head on over to the Maker Shed.

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

mask.of.sanity writes "Australia's secretive Internet filter blacklist held by its communications watchdog has been leaked, revealing the government has understated the amount of banned Web pages by more than 1000. Multiple legitimate businesses and Web sites have been banned including two bus companies, online poker sites, multiple Wikipedia entries, Google and Yahoo group pages, a dental surgery and a tour operator. Andrew Twaits, CEO of Betfair, a billion-dollar business blocked by the blacklist, was furious the government has potentially annexed tens of millions of dollars in revenue after the Betfair.com gambling site was blacklisted. The blacklists were reportedly leaked by a Web filter operator to wikileaks which has published the full list of banned URLs. Outraged privacy advocates say the government has effectively lied about the amount of URLs included in the blacklists, totalling more than 2300, and the type of content which it would ban. The leak follows a series attacks on the watchdog in which irate users successfully lobbied for web sites to be banned, only to be threatened with an $11,000 fine for publishing the link contained in the PR response. It was also revealed the watchdog can ban Web sites at a whim, with no accountability."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mask.of.sanity writes "Australia's secretive Internet filter blacklist held by its communications watchdog has been leaked, revealing the government has understated the amount of banned Web pages by more than 1000. Multiple legitimate businesses and Web sites have been banned including two bus companies, online poker sites, multiple Wikipedia entries, Google and Yahoo group pages, a dental surgery and a tour operator. Betfair, a billion-dollar business blocked by the blacklist, CEO Andrew Twaits was furious the government has potentially annexed tens of millions of dollars in revenue after its Betfair.com gambling site was blacklisted. The blacklists were reportedly leaked by a Web filter operator to wikileaks which has published the full list of banned URLs. Outraged privacy advocates say the government has effectively lied about the amount of URLs included in the blacklists, totalling more than 2300, and the type of content which it would ban. The leak follows a series attacks on the watchdog in which irate users successfully lobbied for web sites to be banned, only to be threatened with an $11,000 fine for publishing the link contained in the PR response. It was also revealed the watchdog can ban Web sites at a whim, with no accountability."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What is it with newspapers suing each other these days, rather than actually focusing on adding value? Eric Goldman alerts us to the news that the Scranton Times sued the competing Wilkes-Barre newspaper over "copied" obituaries. There are numerous problems with the lawsuit, not the least of which is that funeral homes often write the obituaries themselves (meaning the newspaper might not have any copyright claim to them in the first place) and distribute them to multiple papers (meaning they probably weren't even copied directly, but came from the same third party source). Luckily, the court has thrown out most (though not all) of the charges, including another attempt to revive the troubling "hot new" concept. It's good to see the court shoot that particular argument down quickly. In the meantime, Scranton Times: seriously? Is there really nothing better to be doing with your time and money than suing another paper for having the same obituaries?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

SF Weekly's 4,333 word exposition about Yelp delves into many of the recent foibles of the not-yet-profitable community site. Since its inception in 2004, Yelp has played a key part in imbuing every-day consumers with the powers of professional critics. Now, with consumer reviews posted and shared online, instead of disappearing into the black hole of the customer feedback box, businesses shudder with fear at the potential of a bad review on Yelp. Sure, any business that regularly provides bad service would eventually succumb to the collective ire of community displeasure, but anecdotally, Yelp seems to amplify this effect. Although consumer reviews have been around for ages on sites like Amazon and CNET, Yelp's focus on local businesses expose a vulnerability not really seen in, say, the consumer electronics or book industry. An evening's dining choice is relatively fickle compared to a decision to buy a plasma tv, and one can see how that decision could be easily derailed by one strategically placed negative review. That said, as consumers become more savvy to sites like Yelp, their tolerance for a bad review or two should hopefully build. Or, as seen in the recent case of a San Francisco pizzera, businesses could learn to embrace their bad reviews.

Here's a thought. Whenever I visit a new city, I ask my friends for their recommendations, not reviews, of restaurants in the area. While it might be amusing to hear them rant about how awful such-and-such place was, ranting really does little good when trying to pick a place to eat out of the vast array of options that a typical city has to offer. Instead, maybe it's time for Yelp to put on the rose-colored glasses and offer an alternative view of the world: one where only recommendations exist. This is the approach taken by eats.it, a restaurant recommendation site that currently only serves San Diego. With no bad reviews to complain about, the complaint that a merchant doesn't get enough recommendations sounds much more like sour grapes. Furthermore, advertising on a page that features only recommendations of their establishment is a much more palatable proposition. Is the consumer less served by this rosy-eyed view of the world? Perhaps, but it would not be hard to see which establishments received less recommendations than others. Maybe mothers everywhere knew the answer all along when they advised: "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all."

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

---

		Dice.com is the #1 site for tech jobs. Search thousands of positions from top employers, get expert advice and talk with tech pros. Start your job search now.
		www.Dice.com

The Seeeduino Catalyst Pack from the Maker Shed includes a Seeeduino Arduino clone, various inputs and sensors, visual and audible outputs, flexible structure enhancements and extensive power options. Great for beginners to advanced users, and with the specially manufactured components and structures in this pack, it makes it easy to build your own customized shield.

More about the Seeeduino Catalyst Pack

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight into exile. With this anniversary, there have been renewed calls for Tibetan autonomy throughout the world, and a correspondingly harsh response by China's military within Tibet. In the UK Times, this profile of a Tibetan exile based in Canada named Thubten Samdup, who heads an online outreach program that seeks to counter anti-Tibetan sentiment in Chinese language message boards and chat rooms. Snip:

In a simple office overlooking the Himalayan foothills of India a young Tibetan man sits at a computer, trying to succeed where the Dalai Lama has failed for 50 years — by talking to the Chinese. Every day, Sonam and ten other Tibetans — all fluent in Mandarin — surf social networking sites in search of Chinese people to talk to about their homeland. It can be painstaking work.

“Hi, want to chat?” Sonam, 32, asks one man from Beijing. “You male or female?” comes the reply. “Male.” “Not interested.” Like this one, many of the millions of Chinese in chat rooms are searching for love. Most do not want to talk politics. Some become abusive when they realise they are talking to Tibetan exiles.

Sonam contacts about fifty or so people every day and says that half are willing to chat and five or six want to talk in depth. He now has 200 “old friends” to whom he sends information on the Dalai Lama to circumvent China’s “Great Firewall”, which blocks websites about the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. “We don’t say this is right or wrong, or that the Chinese Government should be overthrown,” Sonam told The Times. “We just give people an alternative source of information.”

The aim of the project is bold: to change attitudes towards Tibet among ordinary Chinese in the hope that they will gradually shape Beijing’s policies. Sonam and his colleagues can talk to only a tiny fraction of China’s 300 million netizens — who are notoriously nationalistic. Arguably it offers better prospects, and more immediate results, than the failed negotiations between China and the Dalai Lama, who fled to India 50 years ago yesterday.

Wily Tibetan messengers outfox censors of 'Great Firewall' of China (UK Times -- did they really have to use the adjective "wily?" / Thanks, Oxblood)

Here's the website for the foundation headed by Mr. Samdup.

Related news: fishy reports of pink suitcases packed with TNT in Lhasa (later said to have been detonated by robots), military occupation of Lhasa during the anniversary of the 2008 riots; "How China Invaded California and Took Over Our Legislature", and an article published in Xinhua demanding that the Dalai Lama apologize to China (funny how that logic works).

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, a trumpet controller for Guitar Hero.

Guitar hero trumpet mod

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

BB pal Ian Holmes points us to a fantastically intense electronica mix by Chavy Boys of London. Ian writes:

As a hardcore/punk fan, you might like the following XLR8R podcast...

It's garage/house, but with the choppy, anarchic sampler energy of early rave, and some of the aggression of punk bands like The Exploited.

"Everybody in the club, if you hate someone right now, you need to turn to them and punch them in the fucking face!"

Chavy Boys of London podcast

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called on Chinese public security officials to release two Tibetan journalists imprisoned last month, or charge them with an offense. Above, a screengrab from a Tibetan language website maintained by one of the jailed Tibetans. Snip:

The public security bureau in Gannan, an area in the south of Gansu designated a Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, arrested Kunchok Tsephel Gopey Tsang on February 26, according to overseas Tibetan rights groups. Kunchok Tsephel, an online writer, runs the Tibetan cultural issues Web site Chomei, according to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

Kate Saunders, UK communications director for the International Campaign for Tibet, told CPJ by telephone from New Delhi that she learned of Kunchok Tsephel's arrest from two sources. She has spent the past two weeks in Dharamsala and Kathmandu.

In an unrelated case, officials from the same bureau rearrested formerly imprisoned filmmaker Jigme Gyatso, according to the Tibetan Center and Saunders. The exact date of the arrest is not clear, but it is believed to have occurred around March 10, the 50th anniversary of the failed Tibetan uprising.

Jigme Gyatso, a Buddhist monk, had been held from March to October 2008 before being freed on probation, Saunders said.

Two Tibetans arrested amid ongoing media restrictions (CPJ)

A lot of people have been submitting the news that Wikileaks has obtained and published the secret black-list of websites to be banned under Australia's proposed Internet censoring exercise. The list of more than 2300 websites is about half child pornography and half "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."

As Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explains, by making these lists secret and threatening to fine disclosure of the list at $11,000 per day, the democracy of Australia is "invariably corrupted." There is no due process to to add sites to the list, or to remove them, and as previous leaked lists show, even censorship systems set up to block legitimately illegal sites end up being abused. As web censorship scholar Derek Bambauer has written, an Internet censorship regime should be judged on openness, transparency, narrowness and accountability, but by keeping the list secret and threatening those who would allow democratic deliberation about its contents, Australia's web censors undermine the political process of a democracy.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story