Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

Kenneth Anger's creepy/funny homage to Mickey Mouse:

Iddo Genuth writes "Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and San Diego State University have observed an explosion of a star 50 times larger than the sun. In what they call a 'first observation of its kind' the scientists were able to notice that most of the star's mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a creation of a large black hole. While exploding stars, or 'supernovae,' aren't unprecedented, this star, which lay about 200 million light years away from earth and was million times brighter than the Sun, has exploded as a supernova at a much earlier date than the one predicted by astronomers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The subscription model is a tried-and-true stalwart of the business world, whether it's applied to something like magazines, Netflix, cable TV channels, or bacon. Now those of us in the US can join our European brethren in adding black socks to the list of subscription-delivered goods with the stateside launch of Blacksocks.com. Blacksocks will send you 3 pairs of black socks at intervals you determine: for instance, if you want 3 pair every 4 months, it'll cost you $89 for a year's "sockscription." Laugh if you will, but the company claims to have accumulated 40,000 subscribers since it launched in Europe 10 years ago. Who says innovation is dead?

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

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narramissic writes "In a paper set to be delivered at an upcoming security conference, University of Texas at Austin researchers showed how they were able to identify people who were on public social networks such as Twitter and Flickr by mapping out the connections surrounding their network of friends. From the ITworld article: 'Web site operators often share data about users with partners and advertisers after stripping it of any personally identifiable information such as names, addresses or birth dates. Arvind Narayanan and fellow researcher Vitaly Shmatikov found that by analyzing these 'anonymized' data sets, they could identify Flickr users who were also on Twitter about two-thirds of the time, depending on how much information they have to work with.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

Anti-capitalists today claimed responsibility for vandalising the home of disgraced former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin.

Several windows in the ex-RBS chief executive's luxury villa in Edinburgh were smashed and a Mercedes in the driveway damaged early this morning.

Sir Fred, who is at the centre of a huge row over his £16million pension, was said to be 'shaken' by the vandalism but was not thought to be at the house at the time.

A group calling themselves Bank Bosses Are Criminals later claimed responsibility and ominously warned the attack was only the start of a campaign against executives.

Daily Mail article: Anti-capitalists admit attacking Fred the Shred's home and warn other bankers: 'This is just the beginning'

UK subscriber John Honniball sent us a link to a piece on the BBC's site, with videos, about the recent Maker Faire Newcastle and the maker movement in general. I like the title: "We are all makers and hackers:"

And it is this urge to control that is among the most important parts of the maker movement, said Mr Frauenfelder.

"Western culture has forgotten that our hands have this full range of motion and ability to do things rather than just pressing game controller buttons and tap on a keyboard," he said.

"You gain a great sense of self-efficacy once you master things," he said. "It gives you confidence in other related areas and it builds upon itself.

"This is what we are evolved to do."

John Honniball himself is in the video piece, talking about his retro-computers (the Compukit UK101 from 1979). Way to go, John!

We are all makers and hackers

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audiovideodisco writes "Every year the Loebner Prize goes to the chatbot (and the corresponding human companion) that fares best on a Turing test administered by a panel of judges. Discover talked to Kevin Warwick, the professor who runs the competition, to get pointers on how one would go about detecting a bot. While there are some general approaches you can use, nothing is foolproof — and asking about Sarah Palin can be downright deceptive. One judge concluded an interlocutor was a bot because it didn't recognize Palin's name ... but it turned out the chatter was a French librarian who'd simply never heard of her." The chat transcripts show how difficult picking bot from non-bot is getting.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shane Richmond, who writes about technology and media for the Telegraph, recently handed over his blog to Martin Kretschmer and Horace Trubrudge for a debate about copyright extension (which is currently being discussed in the UK). Kretschmer is an intellectual property professor who is against copyright extension, while Trubrudge is the Assistant General Secretary of the British Musicians' Union, and (not surprisingly) favors copyright extension. You can read the back and forth as follows:

• Kretschmer: We must not inhibit digital creators :: Shane Richmond
• Trubrudge: I am here to fight the corner of the UK's musicians
• Kretschmer: Musicians should see themselves as part of a continuum of creative endeavour
• Trubrudge: It's time performers' moral rights were strengthened
• Kretschmer: Redistributing from the living to the dead
• Trubrudge: 'What have you got against Cliff Richard'?

Unfortunately, the debate is a bit haphazard and goes all over the place at times. Kretschmer, unfortunately, doesn't do a great job picking the key points for why copyright extension is bad and sticking to them (i.e., the fact that copyright is a deal struck between the public and the creator, and changing that deal at a later date steals from the public). Instead, he focuses on the fact that most of the money will go to the record labels and big name musicians -- which is a worthwhile point, but it leaves it open for Trubrudge to basically say, "so what?" Trubrudge's point is that even if the record labels and some big artists will benefit the most, other musicians will still benefit somewhat, and his job is merely to make sure that those artists benefit. He also pulls out the "moral rights" argument which is a total red herring.

It's too bad the debate went in that direction, as the question of copyright extension is a really important one -- especially considering that it breaks a contract that the public made with musicians on the terms under which that content was created. It also ignores how such extensions limit the ability of new artists to build on older works -- which is a key component to many newer artists creating their own unique works of art. As an example of this, I point (again) to James Boyle's excellent discussion on how Ray Charles invented soul music by effectively "ripping off" other musicians, and how others have then built on Charles' work. Stringent copyright protection at the time may have prevented soul music from ever coming about. There are plenty of similar examples as well -- but unfortunately the debate doesn't seem to touch on that aspect at all.

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An exhibitor at the Game Developers' Conference was selling these anatomical models (from anatomytools.com) for use as artist's reference -- they were very beautiful, and my photos came out great (if I do say so myself).

Anatomical models

CharlotteShma writes "Some old writer once said that in order to keep going, he needed to hear the scratch of the pen on the page. Some self-proclaimed keyboard aficionados would make the same argument for computer keyboards. Is it possible that the old "clicky" keyboards are making a comeback? Now that we've replaced the old buckling springs with rubber domes, our keyboards are only getting quieter and quieter. According to the people at Unicomp Inc., all keyboards made since the early 1990s are, frankly, no good. They still use and produce vintage IBM Model M keyboards in their small factory in Lexington, Kentucky. The IBM Model M keyboards are ugly, built like tanks, and, most importantly, with a spring under each key which clicks when you press it." Not sure what's ugly about them most other keyboards are ugly, when you shut your eyes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week there was quite an uproar in the UK over how Google's Street View offering was somehow a violation of privacy, despite the images being taken out in public. Also, Google was quite quick in removing any questionable images as soon as they were brought to Google's attention. Yet, in true Streisand Effect fashion, the uproar and the removals has only led to much more focus on those very images. Reader Steve Cook points out that, in fanning the flames of the so-called "privacy violation," The Daily Mail has reprinted a bunch of the "questionable" images which Google had already deleted. So, in creating a privacy uproar about it, now those images are more popular than they would have been if people had just left it alone.

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Legislation may by 2016 restrict the paint color options for California residents looking for a new car. Black and all dark hues are currently on the banned list. The California Air Resources Board says that the climate control systems of dark-colored cars need to work harder than their lighter siblings — especially after sitting in the sun for a few hours.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Death Metal writes "Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that's typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals. Line-of-sight on the laptop is needed, but it works through a glass window, they said. Using an infrared laser would prevent a victim from knowing they were being spied on." (This is the same team that was able to pick up the electromagnetic signals emitted by PS/2 keyboards.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The authors of the brand new iPhone Hacks have posted one of the coolest hacks from the book: using a Cypress PSoC to connect an external serial keyboard to the iPhone, without jailbreaking. The great thing about this hack is that it can be adapted for other serial devices, including TTL serial, and the authors show you how to do all this in Chapter 12 of the book. It's amazing stuff. I built the circuit myself to test it out when I was tech-editing the chapter, and it really blew me away:

A number of industrious individuals have achieved what to some is the holy grail of iPhone accessories: an iPhone keyboard. But most have done it in a very hard-to-repeat manner, and few have shared the methods they used.

Expanding on their audio port modem, PerceptDev engineers Zack Gainsforth and George Dean developed a hardware and software solution that allows infrared keyboards to be used for typing on the iPhone, using less than $20 of electronics.

Zack used a Cypress PSoC microcontroller to emulate a simple modem, and then expanded it to detect an infrared signal or read from a USB host controller, which converts this signal to FSK for transmission to an iPhone.

iPhone Keyboard - no Jailbreaking required, using 2.0 SDK. [Check out the coverage on ars technica, Gizmodo, Hack a Day, TUAW, and Wired]

iPhone Hacks by David Jurick, Adam Stolarz, Damien Stolarz

With iPhone Hacks, you can make your iPhone do all you'd expect of a smartphone -- and more. Learn tips and techniques to unleash little-known features, find and create innovative applications for both the iPhone and iPod touch, and unshackle these devices to run everything from network utilities to video game emulators. iPhone Hacks is exactly what you need to make the most of your iPhone.

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A little over a week ago, Make: television (with help from the Science Museum of Minnesota and Geek Squad) hosted the first-ever Make: Day. Heavily inspired by the many successful and amazing Maker Faires that MAKE magazine has hosted around the country world, Make: Day was a blast. And in case you missed the news, Make: Day was filled with robots, music, stuff for kids, and tons of other crazy and cool projects and inventions.

The principles that guide much of MAKE magazine and Make: television are right in line with the goals of events like Maker Faire and Make: Day-- to celebrate the ingenuity and inventiveness in our communities. We believe those same goals inspire all makers, which is why we've launched a spiffy new Outreach website, chock-full of free resources for anyone who's ever thought of spreading some maker vibes across their community.

Here you'll find out how to:

• Throw a Make: viewing party! You can watch an episode, and even invite local Makers, artists, or inventors to lead a discussion about the show.
• Hold a "Meet-and-Greet" with a local Maker, such as an inventor, engineer, artist, or other creative community member who can demonstrate a project and inspire others.
• Delve deeper into the technology of Make: by inviting an engineer or other technology professional to explain the science behind a project in the Project Pack.
• Use the Project Pack to instruct and inspire participation in creative activities.
• Hold a Mini-Maker Faire by inviting appropriate community partner groups and individuals who may wish to showcase their projects during the event.
• Host a competition at work to see who can build the best project from the Project Pack!

The Outreach site was designed for all of you educators, after-school program teachers, community engagement workers in our midst to get people of all ages thinking, creating, recycling, upcycling, and just making. And the tools are perfect for, basically, wherever people are gathered! Go check it out for yourself. Think of these resources as only the beginning - once you get started, you might not stop.

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Our pals at Mythbusters made a big bang in the the small town of Esparto, California. Their aim was to "knock the socks off" a mannequin with an explosion of ammonium nitrate. The boom blew out some residents' windows that Mythbusters replaced. One woman whose glass was shattered was delighted by the surprise. Others, not so much. From KCRA.com:

"Course all the neighbors ran out into the street. We didn't know what was going on," said Paul Williams, who heard the explosion...

Williams said the school and others in town should have been notified the blast was going to happen.

Chief Barry Burns, of Esparto Fire Department, had several firefighters on hand for the explosion. He said he made the decision not to notify anyone in town for safety sake.

"Mythbusters is supposed to be a really popular show. Everybody would have been out there. We would have had to cancel it because it would have been too dangerous," Burns said.

Mythbusters 'Big Bang' Shatters Windows (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Aaron Martin-Colby alerts us to an LA Times report saying that Apple's variable pricing for iTunes is set to launch on April 7th (a week later than initially planned). More interesting, however, are the reports that many music industry veterans are quite worried about this, and believe that Apple and the major record labels are making a big mistake in that it's going to piss off and annoy fans, just at a time when they should be embracing fans and giving them more of a reason to buy. The fear is that adding that extra $0.30 to many tracks will add in enough of a mental transaction cost ("is this song really worth that extra $0.30?") that it may harm sales. Some, like Ted Cohen (former EMI exec, who's now been pushing his former colleagues to finally enter the 21st century) worries that it's going to backfire in a big way:

"This will be a PR nightmare. It is for the music industry what the AIG bonuses are for the insurance industry."

And the manager of Nine Inch Nails noted something similar:

"Wouldn't it make sense to try to price it cheaper instead of squeezing the handful of people who are still willing to pay for music?"

Oddly, the LA Times article claims that the new pricing scheme is "true to supply-and-demand economics," but, as Gizmodo notes, that's not true at all. The supply is infinite. So if it were true to supply-and-demand economics, the price would be free. The actual price is based on an artificially limited supply and a made up demand.

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An IBM-Sun merger is a tantalyzing possibility; snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that an IBM/Sun merger could crown Big Blue king of enterprise software development. 'Acquiring Sun would make IBM the clear leader in Java, as it would become the caretaker of the open source reference implementation of the JRE,' which, along with GlassFish, would become entry-level gateways to IBM's WebSphere stack. Moreover, MySQL would give IBM's database division a significant entry-level hook, and NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM's front against Visual Studio. 'All in all, this move would solidify IBM's role as "the developer company,"' McAllister writes. 'In other words, if this merger goes through and you're an enterprise developer and you're not an IBM customer now, get ready — because you soon will be. Better bring your wallet.'" And blackbearnh writes with a short interview with Brian Aker (who came to Sun as MySQL's director of architecture, and is now the lead for MySQL fork Drizzle) about what life would be like under Big Blue's control.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maria Zacharopoulou commissioned Archivirus Architecture and Design to transform her Athens home into a "skatable habitat." The result is the stunning Ramp House. From AR Plus (snips of photos by Theo Vranas):

The architect wanted the ‘skateboarding’ element to be more than simply putting a mini ramp in the living room. Rather, the ramp, the bowl and all the interpretations of those terms would actually become the building elements for this space. It is intended to be a ‘ramp house’ and not a ‘house with a ramp’. Straight lines are curved and the flat surface becomes a ramp or a bowl. Basic house elements such as the fireplace and storage units are hidden inside the ramp forms.

The Ramp House (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

I love this log, spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, cut with an air intake and a chimney to create an outdoors self-contained heating unit.

All in one, disposable oven

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My Institute for the Future colleagues Jason Tester and Rachel Hatch have launched a new alternate reality game in collaboration with United Cerebral Palsy and AARP. Titled Ruby's Bequest, it's all about the future of caring in the United States. Ruby's Bequest takes place in the fictional 2011 community of Deepwell where folks are sharing their stories, solutions, and worries about how to best care for each other, in sickness and health. Participants have already contributed nearly 200 personal stories and advice about how we can work together to build better structures for caring, from elder care to health care systems to community involvement. Please check it out!

Set in the fictional town of Deepwell, Ruby’s Bequest begins with news of a sizeable bequest from Ruby Wood to strengthen the ecosystem of caring in the community. Charged with improving the town’s caring infrastructure the residents of Deepwell have created the online forum at www.rubysbequest.org to solicit the whole community and beyond to participate and achieve this mission. Participants are invited to share their own experiences on caring and care giving by logging on, creating a profile and contributing text, photos, videos, and other personal narrative. Subject matter provided in the fictional narrative will include things like “caring from a distance,” “tough conversations,” “making the system work (better!) and so on. These subjects are intended to spark further discussion and debate among the community at large about other aspects of caring.

“The caring infrastructure as we know it is changing fast. Federal and local services that we once relied upon—from adult day care to Medicare and Social Security—are quickly eroding,” said Jason Tester, IFTF researcher and lead developer of Ruby’s Bequest. “This means that more of the burden of caring will fall to individuals and communities in the near and long term. A key charter of the Institute is to encourage broader and deeper examination of our future now so that the public can help shape it and be better prepared to face it.”

Ruby's Bequest

alphadogg writes "Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company's applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. 'We can provide all Google services over IPv6,' said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a 'small, core team' spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ah, yet another tale of a British driver turning on his GPS unit and turning off his brain: a guy in Yorkshire left his car teetering over the edge of a cliff after blindly following his GPS down a narrow, steep path. The GPS said it was a road, and the driver seems to have let that override his common sense, as plenty of people are wont to do. Drivers often like to blame the technology for taking them down some treacherous path, but it's not as if the device simply suggested a suboptimal route, or drove the car itself. The infallibility some people see in technology is troubling, since they seem to see things like GPS units as perfectly acceptable replacements for their brains.

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

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Earlier this month, an expedition fertilized 300 square kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean with six metric tons of dissolved iron. This triggered a bloom of phytoplankton, which doubled their biomass within two weeks by taking in carbon dioxide from the seawater. The dead phytoplankton were then expected to sink to the ocean bed, dragging carbon along with them. Instead they experiment turned into an example of how the food chain works as the bloom was eaten by a swarm of hungry copepods. The huge swarm of copepods were in turn eaten by larger crustaceans called amphipods, which are often eaten by squid and whales. "I think we are seeing the last gasps of ocean iron fertilization as a carbon storage strategy," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. While the experiment failed to show ocean fertilization as a viable carbon storage strategy, it has pushed the old "My dog ate my homework" excuse to an unprecedented level.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ericatcw writes "Do you love the smooth, silky performance of a multi-core PC loaded to the gills with the fastest RAM? Take a look at Dell's new Precision T7500 desktop. According to Computerworld, the T7500 will come with 12 memory slots that can accommodate 16 GB of PC-106000 (1333 MHz) DDR3 RAM for a total of 192 GB. Dell's not the only one — Lenovo, Cisco (with blade servers reportedly up to 384 GB in memory) and Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel's new Nehalem architecture to enable unprecedented amounts of RAM. But beware! Despite the depressed DRAM market, loading up on memory could see the cost of RAM eclipse the cost of the rest of your PC by 20-fold or more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phil sent me a link to this cool project that uses a Wii Nunchuck to control an Open Heart kit. Check out the link for a lot more information about the build, including the source code. You can purchase the Open Heart kit in the Maker Shed.Thanks Phil!

Recently I ordered the kit for an OpenHeart: an LED panel in the shape of a heart that uses charlieplexing to minimize the number of I/Os required to address the LEDs. The instructions were great and I picked up some tips to make my soldering better. The author made it very easy, even providing a flash-based programmer that lets you define your animation sequence and writes the code for you, so for animations all you need to do is cut-and-paste the code into the Arduino IDE and download it.

More about the Open Heart kit controlled by a Wii Nunchuck

Related:

How-to Tuesday: Valentines LED display

In the Maker Shed:

In the Maker Shed: The Open Heart kit

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It's quite common for schools to struggle with how and what to teach kids when it comes to technology, often trying to balance newfangled topics like computer skills with the tried-and-true classics like history. But a new version of England's primary-school curriculum would make the teaching of certain historical topics, like the Victorian period and World War II, non-compulsory, but dictate that kids should "leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication." It's easy to see this story leading to knee-jerk reactions from people decrying how kids aren't learning what's important, and spending their time playing computer games, and so on. But the reactions in The Guardian's article seem, for the most part, pretty measured. While mentioning Twitter makes for a tasty headline, the real thrust of the new curriculum seems not to be to teach kids particular platforms like Twitter or blogs, but rather to build their technological understanding, and allows schools some flexibility in how they do so. That would follow some earlier UK government reports, which found the schools doing the best job of teaching IT skills were those that spread computer skills across multiple topics, rather than segregating them into specific IT courses. By integrating technology into the entire curriculum, just as technology is integrated across multiple aspects of modern life, it would seem that young students will be best prepared for future success.

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

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CWmike writes "As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix's 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles. So now that we're more than 30 years into the era of the personal computer, Computerworld writers and editors, like all technology aficionados, find ourselves with lots of memories and reactions to the OSes of yesteryear (pics galore). We have said goodbye to some of them with regret. (So long, AmigaOS!) Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!) Some, we threw out with great force. (Don't let the door hit you on the way out, MS-DOS 4.0!) Today we honor a handful of the most memorable operating systems and interfaces that have graced our desktops over the years. Plus: We take a look back at 40 years since Unix was introduced."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gabe Delahaye at Videogum points to this gem, and says, "I copied out the lyrics so that they're easier for you to cut and paste into your Livejournal."

While chatting, first greet happily / Use polite words in a cordial way / During the game always be open, honest and do the right thing / Be careful on the keyboard / I know who did it (be careful) / I know I am the internet guardian angel / I will be the first to protect / I want to be the first to protect / Though faces are unknown, it's a warm neighborhood / Precious Internet friend / Precious Internet friend (friend!) / Netiquette!

Kids Sing A Made Up Song About Netiquette The Darndest Things

Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Late last year, a bunch of movie studios sued Australian ISP iiNet (which already has a reputation for standing up for its users) for not waving a magic wand and stopping any unauthorized file sharing that occurred among its customers. iiNet responded by pointing out the obvious: if the studios feel they've been wronged, they should take it up with the police, not iiNet. In fact, they said they pass such complaints directly to the police:

They send us a list of IP addresses and say 'this IP address was involved in a breach on this date'. We look at that say 'well what do you want us to do with this? We can't release the person's details to you on the basis of an allegation and we can't go and kick the customer off on the basis of an allegation from someone else'. So we say 'you are alleging the person has broken the law; we're passing it to the police. Let them deal with it'.

The case is moving forward now, and iiNet has kicked things off by suggesting that users sharing files on a one-to-one basis via BitTorrent don't seem to be violating Australian copyright law. Specifically, iiNet seems to be saying that using BitTorrent doesn't violate copyright because a one-to-one trade isn't distributing the content publicly (a version of the "making available" debate still going on in the US in some circles) and also pointing out that since BitTorrent breaks files up into so many small pieces, no individual user appears to be distributing enough to be considered copyright infringement.

While the argument does, in fact, make plenty of sense -- I wonder if it will actually fly in court. The entertainment industry has convinced so many people that any sort of unauthorized use of content is "piracy" that an emotional argument may prevail. In fact, the movie studios already seem to be going for the emotional argument expressing shock that iiNet can claim that its customers aren't violating copyright law.

The case will be an interesting one to follow -- though, you know if iiNet prevails, lobbyists will move quite quickly to push the Australian government to change copyright law to clarify the issue. Just watch: if it happens, there will be a rash of stories about how Australia "has to" do this to "comply with international treaties." It's how these things work.

To be honest, I'm surprised iiNet is taking such an extreme position. It seems like sticking with the "we're just the neutral service provider" response would have a higher likelihood of success.

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Island Dog sends news that shortly after Valve showed off their new anti-piracy methods in Steamworks, Microsoft and Stardock were quick to demonstrate their new, similar technologies as well. All three companies are bending over backwards to say that this is not traditional DRM. Stardock (the company behind the Gamer's Bill of Rights) calls their system Game Object Obfuscation (Goo), "a tool that allows developers to encapsulate their game executable into a container that includes the original executable plus Impulse Reactor, Stardock's virtual platform, into a single encrypted file. When a player runs the game for the first time, the Goo'd program lets the user enter in their email address and serial number which associates their game to that person as opposed to a piece of hardware like most activation systems do. Once validated, the game never needs to connect to the Internet again." Microsoft's update to Games for Windows Live has similar protections. "You can sign in and play your game on as many systems as possible, but you have to have a license attached to your account. Of course, this only works for online games."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger is Boing Boing's current guest blogger Soon, I'll be taping an interview with Charles Hugh Smith and posting it here at Boing Boing. In the meantime, Charles has posted Chapter 2 of his new (free) e-book, "Survival+" at his Of Two Minds blog, which I encourage you all to visit daily. Many of you reading this are starting to wonder what society will look like: in a few months, a year from now, five years from now and Charles Hugh Smith is an indispensable thinker and tour guide for what we should be preparing for. I believe that he's one of the sharpest, smartest --and sanest-- writers around today, and I enjoy batting ideas around with him corresponding over email, some of which makes it into his more informal columns. I'm pleased and grateful to have a forum here at Boing Boing where I can help promote his work. Some recent Charles Hugh Smith essays: Survival+ Chapter 1 The Dematerialization of America The Return of Big Government and the (de facto) Welfare State Has Capitalism Failed? The Road to National Insolvency What's Obvious III: Some Transformations Will Be Positive End of An Era: What's Not Coming Back Of Two Minds: An Interview with Charles Hugh Smith

"On" by Aram Bartholl

Installation/Video 2009

Mixed media: Candle, resistance wire, copper wire, switch, 12V power transformer

Dimensions: 20 x 5 x 5 cm

Video 10 min, 1080i HD

Via FAT.

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An anonymous reader sent in a video clip showing Sun experimenting with shoving a data center through a simulated 6.7 Earthquake. Everything stays running, but some power cords came out and some screws worked loose. It's still kind of neat to see a bunch of racks shake like a polaroid.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

c zen

candle
colourlovers
childhood
circus
charm school
corrections

previously on web zen
b zen

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

Ivan covered this found coffee-table with a pushpin Super Mario mosaic (protected by plexiglass) and painted and decorated the legs to match. Apparently pushpin mosaics are unexpectedly hard on the thumbs.

Super Mario Coffee Table (Thanks, Ivan!)

Glyn sez, "The EU's Telecoms Package is back for its second reading. The French are attempting to push through their 'three strikes and you're out' approach again, the UK are attempting to get rid of net neutrality and get rid of peoples right to privacy. The ITRE/IMCO committee are meeting on the 31 March 2009 to dicuss these and other alarming amendments. The Open Rights Group have more details:"

One of the most controversial issues is that of the three-strikes strongly and continuously pushed by France in the EU Council. Although most of the dispositions introducing the graduate response system were rejected in first reading of the Telecom Package, there are still some alarming ones persisting. France is trying hard to get rid of Amendment 138 which seeks to protect users' rights against the three-strikes sanctions and which, until now, has stopped the EU from applying the three-strikes policy. Also, some new amendments reintroduce the notion of lawful content, which will impose the obligation on ISPs to monitor content going through their networks.

The UK government is pushing for the "wikipedia amendments" (so-called because one of them has been created by cutting and pasting a text out of the wikipedia) in order to allow ISPs to make limited content offers. The UK amendments eliminate the text that gives users rights to access and distribute content, services and applications, replacing it with a text that says "there should be transparency of conditions under which services are provided, including information on the conditions to and/or use of applications and services, and of any traffic management policies ."...

Also a very dangerous amendment to the ePrivacy directive is introduced by the UK, allowing the telecommunications industry to collect a potentially unlimited amount of users' sensitive and confidential communications data including telephone and e-mail contacts, geographic position of mobile phones and websites visited on the Internet.

Click through to find out more about what you can do.

Telecom Package in second reading - dangerous amendments? (Thanks, Glyn!)

Tinla put together a Ruben's Tube sound-to-flame visualizer on the cheap netting some nice results.

The basic idea is that you have a length of pipe with hole drilled along the top. The ends are sealed, at one end there is a speaker and at the other end there is a gas source. Once the pipe is flooded with gas you light the vapour flowing out of the hole, crank some tunes into the speaker and stand back. The speaker creates waves of sound pressure through the length of the tube, and these variations in pressure cause the flow of gas through each hole to vary... resulting in a visualisation of the sound wave painted in flames.

Of course, pinching pennies while working with pyrotechnics is generally a very bad idea - medical bills cost a heckuva lot more than proper equipment! Ahem … that being said, check out the project page for more details.

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A former Miss Britain who posed for Playboy is suing UK mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse after one of its employees copied some "very intimate" pictures from her phone and tried to sell them to some newspapers. The woman, Danielle Lloyd, left her phone at the shop so employees could transfer data from it onto a new phone, and is seeking 50,000 pounds in damages for her stupidity the employee's actions. It's slightly ironic that the woman would be upset about the photos getting out, seeing as she once had a flourishing "glamour model" (Britspeak for soft porn) career, but the episode goes to show how easily privacy can be undermined these days. There's a presumption of privacy when people take a picture on their phone, or put something online on their private or semi-private space; but as we capture and share more and more of our lives, the presumption that the content we capture will remain private should probably diminish.

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

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One of my highlights from the Game Developers' Conference for me was the "Oh No Banjo" exhibit, showing off student work from the Rochester Institute of Technology's "Alternative Controllers Seminar." The students gutted a guitar game-controller and built a very credible banjo using its buttons and electronics, then wrote custom software and musical arrangements for it (apparently the Scruggs people rightsholders wouldn't let them use "Duelling Banjos," even for a noncommercial, student project). I played it for a while and found it very fun -- I totally rocked the banjo for MC Chris's "Fett's Vette."

Final Reports and Pictures from the Alternative Controllers Seminar

My photos

Thelasko writes "In an effort to knock Buster's socks off, the Mythbusters accidentally created an explosion so large it shattered windows in a small town over a mile from the blast site. The Mythbusters had the broken windows replaced the very same day. The Esparto, California fire chief says that several firefighters were on hand for the blast, but he didn't notify residents because, 'Mythbusters is supposed to be a really popular show. Everybody would have been out there. We would have had to cancel it because it would have been too dangerous.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thelasko writes "In an effort to knock Buster's socks off, the Mythbusters accidentally created an explosion so large it shattered windows in a small town over a mile from the blast site. The Mythbusters had the broken windows replaced the very same day. The Esparto, California fire chief says that several firefighters were on hand for the blast, but he didn't notify residents because, "Mythbusters is supposed to be a really popular show. Everybody would have been out there. We would have had to cancel it because it would have been too dangerous.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brando's latest dubious-but-promising gadget is a cigarette-pack-sized, battery powered LCD projector shaped like a retro 8mm film projector camera. No idea if the image quality or light intensity are any good, but the concept's lovely. I don't know that I'd risk $219 on it, though.

Retro Cuboid Tiny Handheld Projector

Yesterday's remix challenge -- to mock the ridiculous new "anti-terrorism" posters the London police have put up that tell you to spy on your neighbors -- was a smashing success. I've collected the 25 or so that came in to date below (sorry if I missed one or two -- I did it all by hand!) -- click through to see them all and prepare to laugh and weep and laugh and weep.

Some of my Dorkbot DC cohort put on an event each year that should quicken the hearts of cogheads everyhere: Robot Fest, held at the National Electronics Museum in Linthicum, MD. Lithium-where? Linthicum, Linthicum Heights, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Now in its 9th year, the Fest offers hands-on workshops, demonstrations, displays of robots from TV and film, and lots of bots and bot builders to inspire and inform.

Robot Fest 2009

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theatrecade was one of a few folks to note that Google Labs has added the five-second rule to email. Once upon a time this rule only applied to delicious foodstuffs dropped on the floor, but at long last you can change your mind on that email to your boss or ex. We shall see peace in our lifetimes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theatrecade was one of a few folks to note that Google Labs has added the five second rule to email. Once upon a time this rule only applied to delicious food stuffs dropped on the floor, but at long last you can change your mind on that email to your boss or ex. We shall see peace in our lifetimes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently, Sebastian of the Little-Scale blog has been conducting some interesting experiments in sound synthesis with Max/MSP. The above is the output of a patch designed to playback all 4-bit 32 sample waveform conceivable -

There are 16 ^ 32 possibilities. The patch plays 100 different waveforms for every second, at a constant frequency of 440 Hz. At this rate it will take 1,079,028,307,100,000,000,000,000,000 centuries to complete.

He also wrote a noise-generator patch based on the LFSR pseudorandom number algorithm - numbers R fun!

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Sprig toys are lovely, heavy-duty and made from reclaimed plastic and wood in a shop in Colorado. The toys are kinetic and drive their internal motion from their wheels, not batteries.

Out in the backyard lives a magical world called Sprig Hollow.

Our friends Bee and Butterfly, the architects of Sprig Hollow, specifically designed all the farm vehicles for maximum utility in water, sand and garden environments. All of the vehicles at Sprig Hollow come equipped with detachable tools and water-resistant materials in order to sustain play and expand possibilities. The playful, cartoon-like designs of our chunky vehicles, characters and play sets make them irresistible to preschoolers, and parents love the eco-friendly, kid-powered construction. So jump into a place where imaginations blossom as preschoolers and their grown-ups play and learn in the fresh air! Recommended for ages 3 and up.

Sprig Toys Sprig Toys manufacturer's site (via Babygadget)

A cotton swab may be the most wanted criminal in Europe. For years, cops across southeastern Europe have hunted an cop-killing eastern European woman whose DNA turned up at 17 crime scenes. The crimes were wildly diverse, geographically separated, and had no visible pattern.

You see where this is going, right? It's now believed that the DNA was introduced to the forensic swabs at the factory, and that cops have been hunting someone who probably sticks q-tips in baggies all day and has never committed a crime.

It now turns out that the several-hundred-men task force might have really been chasing a phantom. Alarmed by the apparent randomness of the crimes, involving both highly professional work and seemingly amateur break-ins, they started checking for contaminations in the labwork. The likeliest suspect now are the cotton swabs used to collect evidence at the crime scene. All the swabs used in the forensics works were sourced from the same supplier, a company in northern Germany that employs several eastern-European women that would fit the profile. Even more incriminating, the state of Bavaria lies right in the center of the crimes’ locations, without ever finding matching DNA in crimes on its territory. Guess what: they get their cotton swabs from a different supplier.

By the way: contaminated cotton swabs aren”t as trivial to avoid as one might think. It’s relatively easy to sterilize cotton to prevent infections. Forensics however require a complete destruction or removal of any DNA contamination, which is apparently a lot harder.

The Heilbronn DNA Mixup (Thanks, Oliver!)

brumgrunt writes "Last year, Marvel said that R-rated comic book superhero movies weren't in its future plans. Now, in the light of Watchmen's box office performance, Warner Bros is going the same way, meaning high-profile comic book superhero films will be restricted to the PG-13 rating at most. But is this a bad thing, and should we fear the end of the R-rated superhero movie?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

brumgrunt writes "Last year, Marvel said that R-rated comic book superhero movies weren't in its future plans. Now, in the light of Watchmen's box office performance, Warner Bros is going the same way, meaning high-profile comic book superhero films will be restricted to the PG-13 rating at most. But is this a bad thing, and should we fear the end of the R-rated superhero movie?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don't know anything about this public cigarette lighter shaped like blackened lungs, but I assume they were part of an anti-smoking campaign, somewhere.

Light Up Your Lungs

Blockbuster announced back in November that it would begin offering pay-per-view movie downloads, but its plan had a couple of major pitfalls: it required consumers to buy a proprietary box to be able to buy the downloads, and it didn't offer a very wide selection. It's cracked one of those, sort of, by making its OnDemand service available to TiVo users, who will now be able to access it alongside rival services from Netflix and CinemaNow. It's heartening to see that Blockbuster has realized the standalone box strategy isn't viable, even if others haven't figured it out. The lesson is pretty clear: if you're going to come out with a streaming service, you're going to fail if you force users to buy a proprietary box, and your only chance to succeed is by making it available on as many platforms as possible. That's not a guarantee, mind you, as there are still plenty of ways to screw things up, or to have things screwed up for you by movie studios.

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

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The folks at Voltaic, purveyors of fine sun-powered products, are looking for a few good DIY solar projects to show on their website. They're offering a deal: send them details of a project you're developing, be willing to show the results on the site, and they'll sell you the components at wholesale. Nice.

See their DIY Solar page for more info...

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British local councils have a new weapon in their arsenal of devices that collectively and indiscriminately punish teenagers simply for being young. The new tool is a pink overhead light designed to exaggerate acne, with the intention of making children so unhappy and insecure about their appearances that they go somewhere else (mind you, these councils are almost certainly also allocating funds to helping teenagers cope with low self-esteem and avoid the problems associated with it, such as depression and vulnerability of recruitment into violent activity).

Other weapons in the arsenal against youth include the "Mosquito" -- an annoying high-pitched tone that adults can't hear, that shopkeepers and councils have deployed against teens and kids (and, of course, any babies that happen to be in the area), and "anti-kid steps" that are supposed to prevent the menace of kids staying in one place, talking to one another.

Anti-teenager “pink lights to show up acne” (Thanks, Dan!)

(Image: BBC)

Hye Yeon Nam shares this demo of a music controller made for mouths -

The Tongue Music system is an experimental instrument using the tongue, rather than the hand, to generate sounds. There is one person performing in front of projector, which displays an abstract video image consisting of hundreds of dots. The performer controls the mouse with his tongue to simultaneously manipulate the video images (the color and size of dots are changed along with music), the piano sound, as well as the presence or absence of a beat.

Interesting idea, but it's a bit unclear how the control is operating. I suppose I was expecting audio that reflected this actual movement of the tongue, with all it's characteristic jerkiness and such. Whatever the technique may be - it makes for some cool headgear. [via Synthtopia]

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MojoKid writes "Netflix isn't the only company that sees that streaming is the future of movie rental distribution. Blockbuster, which always seems to be playing catch-up with Netflix, will start making its on-demand rental and purchase content available on TiVo DVRs. Blockbuster OnDemand has only been available as a streaming service on Windows PCs or streaming to TVs via the 2Wire MediaPoint device. Meanwhile, Netflix streaming is available on far more platforms, such as on Windows and Mac computers, TiVo, the Roku Digital Video Player, LG and Samsung Blu-ray players, the Xbox 360, as well as a number of video portal software applications, like Boxee and ZeeVee's Zinc. Blockbuster's partnership with TiVo is yet another indication of the coming revolution of on-demand media available to TVs — that is, if the revolution hasn't already started."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Rakesh Agrawal fashioned a garage door opener on his iPhone using some X10 gear and the X10 Commander app for iPhone.

Using my iPhone as a garage door opener

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Gmail added a filter import/export feature recently that allows you to save and load filter data from XML. The cool thing about this is that it allows you to create and manage a whole heap of filters in text format and then import them all at once. Matt Thommes explains the procedure:

Here is the XML structure for a new filter item:

<entry>
<title>Mail Filter</title>
<apps:property name='from' value='joe@site.com'/>
<apps:property name='label' value='Web'/>
</entry>

Here we are setting up a filter to capture incoming email from joe@site.com, and applying a label of "Web." Just like the Gmail process of setting up new filters, you can apply as many labels as you want, as well as other directives, such as sending directly to Trash:

<apps:property name='shouldTrash' value='true'/>

Check Matt's blog entry and the Gmail Labs discussion forum for more examples on how to use this.

Maintaining Gmail filters with XML
New in Labs: Filter import/export
Filter Import/Export Discussion Forum

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An industry analyst says that Blu-ray disc sales could help save the home-video business, which is hurting as sales of traditional DVDs drop off. This seems to be at odds with earlier stories, which said that Blu-ray sales were particularly bleak, and weren't prompting consumers to upgrade their libraries of standard DVDs. Blu-ray continually gets portrayed as some sort of quantum leap in DVD technology, but in reality, it doesn't look like it offers enough advantages over standard DVDs to tempt large numbers of consumers to buy in at its higher price. Innovative online services -- if the movie studios will allow them to emerge -- would seem to offer the industry a better chance at salvation, rather than yet another form of locked-down plastic disc at a higher price.

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

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snydeq writes "Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year, roughly equivalent to the impact of 4 million cars, according to report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. All told, U.S. organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year. The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clive Thompson tries to bust apart the commonly held wisdom that it should take 40 hours to complete a video game. He points to a recently well-received game that many reviewers dinged for the fact that it could be completed in three hours. They seemed to like pretty much everything about the game... other than that it was "too short." The standard, apparently (I had no idea) is that a video game should take approximately 40 hours to finish. But Thompson points out how silly that is. For many games, they just start to feel repetitive or stretched out. If you can do everything that needs to be done in just three hours -- why not do it. My guess is that many of the complaints just come from what people think they're "buying" with the game, and that includes "time spent on the game." So a game that seems short feels like "less value" even if that's not necessarily the case. Still, as Thompson points out, the game he's talking about, The Maw is much cheaper than the average 40-hour game anyway, so he's not clear why people are complaining. To be honest, I was unaware of the 40-hour standard, and am a bit surprised that it's apparently so standardized. I'd always just assumed that different games had different time-lengths (if they were "finishable" at all).

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pregnantfridge writes "In the ongoing conflict between PRS for Music and YouTube over the takedown of all music related content in the UK, PRS for Music have created a new site, fairplayforcreators.com , exposing the views of the music writers impacted by the YouTube decision. I am not certain if these views have been editorially compromised but by reading a few pages, its clear to me that Music writers represented by PRS for Music are largely clueless about what the Internet and YouTube means to the music industry. Kind of explains why the music industry is in as much decline — and also why so much litigation takes place on the music writers behalf."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My friend Janet Klein made an instructional video to teach you how to play "Tonight You Belong To Me" on the ukulele.

Rather than simply wringing his hands about how the decline of the newspaper means that no one will report local news, Reason's Jesse Walker actually gives some thought to where local news coverage might come from in a post-newspaper world. He focuses on people and institutions that can provide hyper-local news: not just about a state or metropolitan area, but of a particular town or even a specific neighborhood. For example, most communities already have one or more local gadflies who regularly attend city council and school board meetings and are often the first to notice funny business by government officials. Traditionally, if a gadfly spotted something he thought the public should know about, he had to convince a reporter to cover his scoop. Now there's no filter: the gadfly can post the story to his blog. That won't necessarily mean that a lot of people will read his post, but it at least gives him the opportunity to be noticed by others online. Jesse notes that local activists, government insiders, and community organizations are also candidates to do much of the work that has traditionally been done by local reporters.

The striking thing about this list is how diverse it is. In the traditional, vertically-indicated news business, a single institution oversees the entire news "supply chain," from the reporter attending the local city council meeting to the paper boy who delivers the finished newspaper to readers. The technological and economic constraints of newsprint meant that the whole process had to be done by full-time employees and carefully coordinated by a single, monolithic organization. But the Internet makes possible a much more decentralized model, in which lots of different people, most of them volunteers, participate in the process of gathering and filtering the news. Rather than a handful of professional reporters writing stories and an even smaller number of professional editors deciding which ones get printed, we're moving toward a world that Clay Shirky calls publish, then filter: anyone can write any story they want, and the stories that get the most attention are determined after publication by decentralized, community-driven processes like Digg, del.icio.us, and the blogosphere.

Decentralized news-gathering processes can incorporate small contributions from a huge number of people who aren't primarily in the news business. You don't need to be a professional reporter to write a blog post every couple of weeks about your local city council meeting. Nor do you need to be a professional editor to mark your favorite items in Google Reader. Yet if millions of people each contribute small amounts of time to this kind of decentralized information-gathering, they can collectively do much of the work that used to be done by professional reporters and editors.

Unfortunately, this process is hard to explain to people who don't have extensive experience with the Internet's infrastructure for decentralized information-gathering. Decentralized processes are counter-intuitive. Having a single institution promise to cover "all the news that's fit to print" seems more reliable than having a bunch of random bloggers cover the news in an uncoordinated fashion. The problem is that, in reality, newspapers are neither as comprehensive nor as reliable as they like to pretend. Just as a few dozen professionals at Britannica couldn't produce an encyclopedia that was anywhere near as comprehensive as the amateur-driven Wikipedia, so a few thousand newspaper reporters can't possibly to cover the news as thoroughly as millions of Internet-empowered individuals can. This isn't to disparage the reporters and editors, who tend to be smart and dedicated. It's just that they're vastly outnumbered. As Jesse Walker points out, any news gathering strategy that doesn't incorporate the contributions of amateurs is going to be left in the dust by those that do.

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

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Sean Ragan made this trash bag holder using PVC pipe, ENT conduit, and come ball chain clips to hold the bag in place. Beats the SkyMall version any day!

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Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

It's sure gonna be a long, hot FUN summer...

G20 Meltdown

Class War G20 issue

Summit police fear attacks on hotels used by the G20 leaders

G20 to be most expensive police operation in British history

Storm the Banks

Britain at risk of serious social unrest, report warns

G20 Protests Twitter Feed

UK IndyMedia

Mahalo G20 Protests round-up (frequently updated)

matt4077 writes "For eight years, several hundred police officers across multiple European countries have been chasing a phantom woman whose DNA had been found in almost 20 crimes (including two murders) across central Europe. It now turns out that contaminated cotton swabs might be responsible for this highly unusual investigation. After being puzzled by the apparent randomness of the crimes, investigators noticed that all cotton swabs had been sourced from the same company. They also noted that the DNA was never found in crimes in Bavaria, a German state located at the center of the crimes' locations. It turns out that Bavaria buys its swabs from a different supplier."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

matt4077 writes "For eight years, several hundred police officers across several European countries have been chasing a phantom woman whose DNA had been found in almost 20 crimes (including two murders) across central Europe. It now turns out that contaminated cotton swabs might be responsible for this highly unusual investigation. After being puzzled by the apparent randomness of the crimes, investigator noticed that all cotton swabs had been sourced from the same company. They also noted that the DNA was never found in crimes in Bavaria, a German state located at the center of the crimes' locations. It turns out that Bavaria buys its swabs from a different supplier."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eileen sez, "For Lovelace Day, I chatted with geek-grrl guru and virtual-worlds visionary Linda Stone, who tells how she introduced Apple-like compassion to Microsoft's rough-and-ready corporate culture. Wish I'd been there to see that!"

Linda's one of my favorite people of all time -- what a great appreciation of a deserving subject!

I brought in interesting speakers when I was in Microsoft Research, and then started the Visiting Speaker Series in 2000, which is still around today. I brought in thought leaders and critics like Eric Raymond, Larry Lessig, and David Farber, to talk and meet with people. I brought in Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, and John Lasseter. These are people who inspire all of us, who open our minds and stimulate our thinking. The series gave employees access to these people and their ideas, and that proved to be a very powerful way of keeping dialog flowing. Many other companies have now instituted their own series, and Kim Ricketts, a bookseller in Seattle who supported my efforts at Microsoft when she was at the University Bookstore, has now created a business around organizing and hosting book signings and author tours in corporations. While I worked for Ballmer, I managed and significantly improved Microsoft’s relationship with the World Economic Forum. At conferences, in the Valley, in NYC and elsewhere, I was visible and accessible, so that people could talk to me and I would be aware, as much as possible, of problems as they arose and before they became serious. I also helped nurture dialogs on important topics like open source, and followed up on them. I wanted to encourage a general curiosity in the Microsoft community, and to encourage Microsoft employees to develop relationships with the larger community outside of the company.

Welcome to Ada Lovelace Day! :: An interview with Linda Stone (Thanks, Eileen!)

Slate's got an article on the upside -- to a city -- of having squatters move into empty buildings. The beautiful, gigantic Victorian brick office-building next to my flat in east London was recently squatted by what seem like nice enough people (except for that one Sunday morning they got drunk, stood on the roof, and had a shouted coversation with someone on the street below, right outside the bedroom window!). I tell myself that at least they're not junkies or arsonists -- and it's better than living on a street with no neighbors.

Squatting, or unlawfully occupying and making use of land that belongs to someone else, tends to emerge when poverty and homelessness intersect with absentee ownership. It was widespread on the frontier of the 19th-century West, where settlers who couldn't afford to purchase land at market prices often simply occupied land owned by Eastern speculators (as well as land owned by the federal government and by Native American tribes).

From the point of view of local officials, this was a win-win, of a sort. Far-away owners were more interested in free-riding on rising property values, and flipping their land, than in developing it productively. So they resisted paying property taxes or investing in infrastructure. As a result, governments in the West were happy to lend squatters a hand in their efforts to get property out of the speculators' hands. Local governments frequently made it easier for squatters to obtain title through the legal doctrine of adverse possession (sometimes colloquially called "squatters rights")—for example, by shortening the time period required for squatting to mature into ownership. Ultimately, even the federal government joined in. After years of using the Army to chase squatters off its lands, Congress decided to create a legal avenue for settlers without money to become landowners: the 1862 Homestead Act.

Homesteaders in the Hood (Thanks, Eduardo!)

Jim Harper makes a really good point as there's a growing clamor for regulators to step in and legislate around online privacy concerning things like behavioral targeting of advertisements. Before we rush into new laws, let's see if technology can solve the problems, such as Chris Soghoian's new tool to let users add a browser extension that let's them block out all targeted advertising cookies. That doesn't necessarily solve the issue with ISPs selling clickstream tracking, but it does suggest that technology may do a decent job protecting against some of these issues.

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With gardening season upon us, it's time to revisit the "Easy Backyard Graywater System" by Tim Drew from MAKE Volume 13. Everyone has to do laundry, so why not use your laundry water to get a lush garden. Better for the environment and better for your pocketbook. Basically, the prerequisites are that you have to have a proper recycling system and use biodegradable detergent (and not be washing diapers). Tim was retrofitting his basement and moved the laundry machines to the back carport, which was conveniently at a slightly higher elevation than their adjacent garden.

From the article:
"The basic design involves a 2"ABS standpipe that runs down from the washer and connects to a gently sloping horizontal pipe buried under a garden path. At the other end, the water splits and travels a bit farther in 2 directions, then flows out through perforated pots and bark chip mulch, and into the soil beneath some water-loving plants and trees."

Here's the left branch and irrigation terminal before Tim buried it:

The irrigation outlet with the cover off:

And Tim's lovely plants near the irrigation outlet:

Here's the full article in our Digital Edition so you can get started. Pick up Volume 13 in the Maker Shed for tons more projects, including the Boom Stick, Toy Music Sequencer, a Smart Structure, growing giant pumpkins, raising chickens, tons of magic tricks and props, a car camera mount, internal explosion engine, analog meter clock, and more.

Keep your eyes peeled for Volume 18, due out in mid-May, our DIY Energy issue!

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gardel writes "Google appears to have fixed a significant security hole in its two-week-old Voice calling service though some vulnerabilities remain. Until about 7pm PDT Tuesday, an unauthorized party could use a SIP device to spoof a phone number attached to a Google Voice account to call the Google Voice number, giviing the spoofer access to greetings and voicemail, and the ability to make outbound calls, including expensive international calls. Though spoofing via SIP is no longer possible, continued existence of some vulnerability was still apparent Tuesday night. Voxilla was able to set the caller ID of a PBX extension to a mobile number attached to Google Voice account and call in, using a business VoIP trunk, to gain access."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It looks like if anything is going to be able to effectively stop spam, it might be pressure on spammers' profit margins that makes spamming a less attractive line of work. But that still seems a ways off, as long as enough people continue to buy the stuff being sold in spam messages. Spammers know if they can reach a high enough volume, they'll find enough suckers to make it worthwhile. Scareware, too, is a volume business: a new report looked at a recent scam in which users were sent to booby-trapped web sites which said their computers had a virus. They were then directed to a site selling them some $50 "anti-virus" software. While a small percentage of people actually ponied up the cash, enough did to allow the scammers to pay more than $10,000 per day to the people who used SEO techniques on keyword typos to drive marks into the scam. It's easy to say that people shouldn't be so stupid and fall for the scams, but at the same time, perhaps a bigger issue lurks for the legitimate security software industry: if people can't distinguish between legitimate warnings from their products and scams, it could be a problem for them.

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

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Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

The new series of "Tim and Eric Awesome Show --great job!" has been, well, awesome, as this far out clip shows...

Thanks Tara McGinley!

I've been a bit critical for the Obama administration's lack of transparency and inclusion on certain issues -- or rather, their claims of being "transparent" and "inclusive" by simply asking their mailing list to "sell" the packages put together in backrooms. I was hoping for a much more participatory process whereby citizens actually could take part a bit earlier in the process. So, it's good to see a step in the right direction, as the White House has announced its Open For Questions initiatives (thanks to everyone who sent this in). The site lets people ask questions of the president, and lets people see and vote on each other's questions. The President will then answer a few of the "top" questions.

This is definitely a nice thing to add, but I'm hopeful that it ends up going further. At this point, it seems like nothing much more than a glorified suggestion/Q&A box. Rather than involving the community to tackle the questions raised, it simply gives them to the President to answer back. Real participation is about allowing the community to help out -- not just pass big questions up to the top. Obviously, it's still quite early in the administration, so hopefully we'll see more participatory tools on the way as well. This is definitely a good step -- and I don't mean to take away from it. But, I'm going to keep pushing for further participation and further transparency because I think it could be quite powerful and transformative.

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Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger

Gorgeous music video for "Epilepsy is Dancing" (<-- larger version) by the wonderful Antony and the Johnsons.