Rebecca from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "The U.S. government is still blocking the release of information about a secret intellectual property trade agreement with broad implications for privacy and innovation around the world, despite the Obama administration's promises to run a more open government. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) could establish far-reaching customs regulations over Internet traffic in the guise of anti-counterfeiting measures, but no one knows for sure the state of this pact, as the government is hiding the details. EFF is calling on the feds to change their minds, and will keep fighting this in court."

EFF and Public Knowledge filed suit in September of 2008, demanding that background documents on ACTA be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Initially, USTR released 159 pages of information about ACTA and withheld more than 1300 additional pages, claiming they implicate national security or reveal the USTR's "deliberative process." After reconsidering the release under the Obama administration's new transparency policies, the USTR disclosed the additional pages last week, most of which contain no substantive information.

However, one of the documents implies that treaty negotiators are zeroing in on Internet regulation. A discussion of the challenges for the pact includes "the speed and ease of digital reproductions" and "the growing importance of the Internet as a means of distribution."

Other publicly available information shows that the treaty could establish far-reaching customs regulations over Internet traffic in the guise of anti-counterfeiting measures. Additionally, multi-national IP industry companies have publicly requested that ISPs be required to engage in filtering of their customers' Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material, force mandatory disclosure of personal information about alleged copyright infringers, and adopt "Three Strikes" policies requiring ISPs to automatically terminate customers' Internet access upon a repeat allegation of copyright infringement.

Government Still Blocking Information on Secret IP Enforcement Treaty

This probably isn't much of a surprise given Radiohead's well-publicized experiment with letting fans "pay what you want" for its last album, but the band's manager has now said that he thinks file sharing should be legal (sent in by Ruby), noting:

"We believe file-sharing by peer-to-peer should be legalised. The sharing of music where it is not for profit is a great thing for culture and music."

Compare that to, say, Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2, who has been going on and on about how pretty much everyone other than the music industry (i.e., users, ISPs, Apple, software companies) is to blame for file sharing, and they should all be kicked off the internet if they don't pay up.

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Artist Nicholas Galanin has created a wonderful collection of sculptures made from books, featuring reliefs of faces and traditional Tlingit forms.

What Have We Become? (Thanks, Nicholas!)

Walkthrough video of Steve Lambert's funny and beaustifully-executed sign-based show in Los Angeles. Steve Lambert solo exhibition (Via Make)

Hugh Pickens writes "More than a thousand pages of material about Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), are still being withheld, despite the Obama administration's promises to run a more open government. The EFF and Public Knowledge filed suit in September of 2008, demanding that background documents on ACTA be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). "We are very disappointed with the USTR's decision to continue to withhold these documents The president promised an open and transparent administration," said EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel. Publicly available information about the treaty shows it could establish far-reaching customs regulations over Internet traffic in the guise of anti-counterfeiting measures. Additionally, multi-national IP industry companies have publicly requested that ISPs be required to engage in filtering of their customers' Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material, force mandatory disclosure of personal information about alleged copyright infringers, and adopt 'Three Strikes' policies requiring ISPs to automatically terminate customers' Internet access upon a repeat allegation of copyright infringement. 'What we've seen tends to confirm that the substance of ACTA remains a grave concern,' said Public Knowledge Staff Attorney Sherwin Siy. 'The agreement increasingly looks like an attempt by Hollywood and the content industries to perform an end-run around national legislatures and public international forums to advance an aggressive, radical change in the way that copyright and trademark laws are enforced.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ceswiedler writes "Aurelien Jarno has just uploaded a fork of glibc called eglibc, which is targeted at embedded systems and is source- and binary-compatible with glibc. It has a few nice improvements over glibc, but the primary motivation seems to be that it's a 'more friendly upstream project' than glibc. Glibc's maintainer, Ulrich Drepper, has had a contentious relationship with Debian's project leadership; in 2007 the Debian Project Leader sent an email criticizing Drepper for refusing to fix a bug on glibc on the ARM architecture because in Drepper's words it was 'for the sole benefit of this embedded crap.'"

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We've had plenty of stories lately explaining why trying to charge for news online is not a very good idea, but Duane alerts us to Cecil Adams from the famed "The Straight Dope" and his take on the matter, after someone suggested that all newspapers should band together and start charging for online comment. Cecil's response is so good that it's hard to know just which parts to quote. Since it covers a lot of similar ground to what we've covered in the past, we'll focus on the part that discusses TSD's own experiment with charging for its message boards. It's especially interesting because TSD's experiment "worked" in that they brought in a fair amount of money... but Cecil still thinks it's a bad idea, and explains why TSD dropped the subscription:

Impressive numbers notwithstanding, for years we couldn't figure out a way to make the SDMB generate a dime. Finally at a meeting one day, Mike Lenehan, my first editor, said, "We could charge!" My immediate thought was: I should have beaned this guy with an eraser instead of that brick. However, lacking an alternative plan, we tried it. To everyone's surprise, it worked. Several thousand people paid good money for the privilege of posting, and paid again when their subscriptions ran out. (The great majority of our visitors are non-posting lurkers, in case you're wondering about the numerical disparity; merely reading the board has always been free.) For years we pulled in a tidy sum of cash each month.

But here's the thing. It was a tidy but non-growing sum of cash. What's more, the previously steady increase in visitors flattened out. Tiring of convent life, we decided to rejoin the real world and discontinued subscriptions last August, shrewdly timing this to coincide with the current economic collapse. (Being the world's smart human is one thing; having a head for business is something else.) Visitor growth immediately resumed its upward climb.

In short, subscriptions are self-limiting. But that's only half the story. The other half is this: Your content -- that term is always going to grate -- is your own best advertisement. The Straight Dope, again, is a good example. (The Straight Dope is a good example of a lot of things.) My online archive, consisting of the totality of human knowledge distilled into convenient 800-word chunks, has always been available for free -- currently more than 2,800 columns. We make no effort to promote this, and why should we? Whenever people Google the questions that really bug them, inevitably we pop up. As a result -- I'm looking at quantcast now -- we drew 845,700 visitors last month. Chicagotribune.com pulled in 2.7 million, which, granted, is more. However, the Trib is part of a multibillion-dollar corporation that employs thousands (well, it used to be thousands; what it is after all the layoffs I hesitate to say). TSD employs a few steadfast disciples and me. Lesson: If you're producing a quality editorial product, put it out there gratis. You want the world to know.

This is why I'm still skeptical of the usual suspects trotted out as big "success stories." Let's see how it works in the long run. If you lock up your content -- even if it generates some revenue today -- you're cutting yourself off from the conversation, and making it that much more difficult to grow and be in position to reap the rewards of greater traffic in the future.

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Thanks to researchers at Cranfield University, you don't have to feel bad when you plow into a group of pedestrians who are crossing the street too slowly. They have designed an external airbag that mounts to your hood at the base of the windshield. Research shows that this is the area where a pedestrian's head is most likely to hit in an accident. "Test results indicate that the system works extremely well. When fitted to a demonstrator vehicle not originally designed with pedestrian protection in mind, the results were well inside all current legal criteria for pedestrian protection currently in force in Europe," Roger Hardy of the university's Cranfield Impact Centre said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Singularity Hub writes "Robots can climb stairs, and they are doing it everywhere you look. 'No big deal' you say, but it really is a big deal. Five to ten years ago, almost nobody was doing it. Now grad students are doing it all by themselves for thesis projects. Check out our review of robots navigating stairs, which includes some awesome videos."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rob K636 posted this awesome 3D print job of a combination lock he's working on to the MAKE Flickr pool.

Combination lock

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We're seeing this all too often these days, but 20th Century Fox is the latest company to force videos offline over copyright infringement claims on something they officially endorsed. In this case, it involved a mashup contest promotion, where Burger King and 20th Century Fox created a promotion asking people to create their own mashups of Seth MacFarlane's online animated series Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. So that's just what people did... and now at least one has had his account suspended due to copyright infringement claims from... 20th Century Fox. In this case, it was also a guy who had a vast history of using YouTube and all his videos are gone, with YouTube telling him he has no option to have his account reinstated. That'll really get people excited about participating in future contests.

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(Download this video: MP4)

So, what is it like to see industrial music legends Throbbing Gristle perform live?

"Next closest thing to an internal organ massage standing next to [SRL's] V1 pulsejet engine," said BB pal Karen Marcelo, after one of the dates on the band's 2009 reunion tour. "It was like my diaphragm resonated until my lungs became a subwoofer while words once from a man's mouth sprung from the same woman's mouth," twittered TG trufan T.Bias.

Before we shot the Boing Boing Video interview which is today's episode, above, Richard Metzger and I spoke to Throbbing Gristle's sound technician backstage, and asked what we should expect in the way of sub-bass frequencies -- rumored to be so powerful during performances that cameras can't hold a steady shot, and bowels sometimes can't hold their contents. Charlie Poulet, TG's sound tech, cracked up and flashed an evil grin.

"Oh, we got some frequencies," he laughed, "Yeah, we definitely got some frequencies ready for you people tonight."

Those "frequencies" are part of what make TG's music so transcendental and disturbing, and in the BB interview with Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, we explore their technical and creative underpinnings.

We learn about the hacked-together synth and sound modification machines built back in the early 1970s, like "Thee Gristleizer," shown below.

We hear TG members talk about the sort of mind-meld trance they all fall in to while performing, and we learn about the early days of recording work like "Hamburger Lady" to cassette tapes, then walking down to have a hamburger together at a corner sandwich shop down the street from their old studio in what was then a really shitty part of London.

Gen talks about her first time with Twitter, and we hear what it's like for the band once called "wreckers of civilization" to be celebrated, more than 30 years later, as living legends.

Information on TG's remaining 2009 tour dates here. Industrial Records just released a special limited edition framed vinyl LP to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the release of Throbbing Gristle's debut album, "The Second Annual Report" -- more info here. More recordings (digital and otherwise), t-shirts, and other merch are here.

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RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic, and to Target Video, who shot some of the archival clips shown in this episode).

Previously on Boing Boing: Throbbing Gristle: What A Day. (Boing Boing Video shoot notes)

destinyland writes "AI researcher Ben Goertzel peeks at the new Ray Kurzweil movie (Transcendent Man), and gives it 'two nano-enhanced cyberthumbs way, way up!' But in an exchange with Kurzweil after the screening, Goertzel debates the post-human future, asking whether individuality can survive in a machine-augmented brain. The documentary covers radical futurism, but also includes alternate viewpoints. 'Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?' asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis. His answer? 'Yeah.'" Note, the movie is about Kurzweil and futurism, not by Kurzweil. Update: 05/06 20:57 GMT by T : Note, Singularity Hub has a review up, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost 20 years ago, I moved into an apartment with electric heat. The landlord said that he would cut the rent during the winter months because it would be so expensive to keep the place going. When the electric bill arrived, I looked at all the fine print on it and noticed on the back of the bill a phone number offering help with energy efficiency. It turns out, it was for a program that did energy audits on houses and other buildings. The program was paid for out of a portion of the bill set aside for efficiency upgrades. The energy audit was free. My landlord agreed to have them come look at the house, signed some paperwork (in triplicate), and the fun began.

[Photo from Jayvirdy on Flickr]

The energy auditor came with a blower door. This was an adjustable canvas cover that fit over the door opening. It had a fan on it and some pressure gauges. We closed the windows and he turned it on. This device sucked the air out of the house, and we then went around feeling for drafts. Any moving air would be the result of a gap. The largest gap we found was about six feet long, where the header over the closet door had not been finished properly with sheet rock. He discovered lots of other ways to improve the efficiency of that apartment, and discovered that it was eligible for loads more energy savings upgrades.

A few weeks later, a crew came and blew insulation into the walls and attic. They drilled a whole bunch of holes after removing siding, and made some more in the knee walls and sloped ceilings. That house, an antique cape, was built by a blind veteran after the Civil War. It had no insulation, which was an important part of the reason why our electric bill was so incredibly high.

When the project was done, I had spent no money, nor had the landlord, but the apartment was much more comfortable and cost less to run. By increasing the energy efficiency of the house, it was a better place to live and was more gentle on the electrical grid. Eventually, the landlord lost the place to the bank in the economic downturn of the early 1990s, and we had to move on. The building was better for our having lived there because of the free energy audit. I have since had energy audits on each of the places I've lived in since. I wouldn't think of living in a place that I didn't know the energy status of. If audits are not available for free where you live, you can certainly do a DIY audit.

Upon moving into the next place, also an apartment, I promptly called for an energy audit, even though I didn't get the heat or electric bill. It seemed like a good thing to do, and it was free anyway. No problems for that landlord, who had his business downstairs and would benefit from our tighter apartment. The incentives were not as good for that project as the previous one. We did get some flow restrictors for the faucets, a couple of compact fluorescent light bulbs and a programmable thermostat for the heater.

The programmable thermostat is great, because it allows the house to turn itself up and down based on the rules I program into the timer. Basically, the house should be cool when we are away or asleep, and warm when we are home and awake. This makes the house more comfy when we want it that way and stingy with energy when we don't need the heat. Since we don't have central air, when the heating season is over, I just set the temperatures so that it doesn't go on for the summer months.


[Photo from Connors934 on Flickr]

These energy audits are great. They can cost nothing to the consumer. They help make our houses and apartments more comfortable by keeping the heat in during the winter and the heat out during the summer. A house that is not tight feels drafty. When you are heating the place, cold air works its way in and the furnace is, in part, heating the great outdoors. They can help give you a project list for how to make the house a more efficient consumer of energy of all forms, electric, natural gas, oil, wood heat, solar, or wind power.

In fact, having an energy audit is one of the most cost-effective things you can do to your home. The audit will turn up a lot of the ways that energy, and money, are leaking out of your house. If you are considering getting into an alternative energy system like solar or wind, or even your own basement electrolysis unit and fuel cell, then one of the most important first steps you can make is to decrease your energy usage. A lot of the steps are mind numbingly simple, like turning off the lights, or putting your devices on power strips so you can make sure they're really inert and not drawing trickles of juice when they appear to be off.

There are a lot of things that we can do to increase our energy efficiency. See more ideas after the jump...

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Editor's Note: This post is part of a series of posts sponsored by GE. GE had nothing to do with the content of the article and no control over Make: Online editorial. -Gareth Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

In the latest in an increasingly long line of misplaced attacks on Craigslist, South Carolina's Attorney General Henry McMaster is now threatening the company's principals with criminal charges because of how some folks have used the site. Someone should send McMaster a copy of section 230 of the CDA. You would think that a state Attorney General might... you know... know the law, before threatening to put people in jail. McMaster, of course, is running for governor of the state, so he likely sees this as a grandstanding opportunity -- just like he recently massively overhyped the risks of online predators. Someone else submitted the fact that McMaster also was so upset that a study that he (and most other state AGs) requested on the risks of online predators showed that the risks were greatly overstated that, rather than admit he was wrong, he withdrew from the workgroup studying the issue. This does not appear to be a fact-based individual. When presented with evidence, he simply says it can't be true.

In this case, he's accusing Craigslist of being involved with prostitution, even though plenty of other (smarter) law enforcement officials have recognized that Craigslist is actually a useful tool in fighting prostitution, rather than a problem. He also claims that Craigslist management may be criminally liable due to "sexually explicit" photos hosted on the site. Except... as the link above points out, as long as the content isn't "obscene" (and McMaster presents no evidence that it is), then it's perfectly legal, and protected by the First Amendment. The whole thing stinks of a politician grandstanding by displaying his own ignorance of both technology and the law... all while running for governor.

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eldavojohn writes "The Best American Comics of 2008 was a book I purchased on impulse. Not being a graphic novel or even political cartoon fan, I read the introduction at a bookstore (which was, itself, a comic strip) and decided to give it a try. I expected to find humor. What I found was not only humor but sadness, anxiety, insight, happiness, remorse and a gamut of human emotions. I expected black ink on white paper. What I found was water color, wood cuts, cubism and even a comic about the start of cubism. In short, I was pleasantly surprised to find the Americana here that I had previously relegated only to historical novels." Read on for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IndioMan writes "In this article, learn about the new PHP V6 features in detail. Learn how it is easier to use, more secure, and more suitable for internationalization. New PHP V6 features include improved support for Unicode, clean-up of several functions, improved extensions, engine additions, changes to OO functions, and PHP additions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MJackson writes "UK cable operator Virgin Media has announced the first real-world customer pilots of up to 200Mbps broadband services using DOCSIS3 technology from Cisco, which could make it one of the fastest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the world. Following successful lab trials, the 6 month long pilot started last week in Ashford, Kent (England), and will ultimately employ 100 customers in the testing process. The pilot will, among other things, test future online consumer applications, including High Definition Internet TV (HD IPTV) and the ability to deliver applications and support for home IT needs through its network. By comparison J:Com in Japan supplies broadband at up to 160Mbps and Cablevision in the US supplies broadband at up to 101Mbps. Like Virgin Media, both companies use DOCSIS3 technology for broadband over cable networks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's amazing what sort of laws politicians will come up with when they overreact to something that new technology allows, without bothering to understand the issue. It appears some California state politicians are upset about the fact that people are uploading photos and videos to social networking sites, and those photos may reveal something the subject of the photo wouldn't like. So, they want to require any site that allows uploads of images or videos to be required to take down that content on request of a subject in that content. Yes, even if the photo or video were taken in public.

In looking over text of the bill (warning: pdf), it looks like the original idea was worse: that social networking sites would be required to prevent anyone from copying an image off of a website. It looks like someone explained to the bill's sponsor how that's impossible. However, even though the bill claims that it's aimed at photos of people who had an expectation of privacy, that doesn't appear to be anywhere in the actual text. Instead, sites would be required to take down content on the request of anyone in the image. Sites would also be responsible for verifying that the takedown request came from the person actually in the photo, though there's no mechanism to determine how. It's also not clear how to deal with photos that involve multiple people.

But, honestly, what's most unclear... is why such a law is needed in the first place? It seems like a major hassle for no good reason whatsoever -- especially in an era where taking photos and sharing them has become the norm for many people.

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Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery has a star-studded group show opening this Friday, May 8. Titled "Lush Life," the exhibition features Glenn Barr, Joe Sorren, Chris Berens, Travis Louie, Kukula, Femke Hiemstra, Brian Despain, and many other great painters. Top, Barr's "Summer"; Below left, Travis Louie's "Miss Cynthia." The whole show is viewable online too. From the show description:

While many galleries in the "underground"/Pop Surrealism art scene have increasing turned towards street art, Roq la Rue has decided to instead focus on the more formal, Symbolist -inspired painters in the genre. "Lush Life" brings together painters in both the alt-art world as well as contemporary art scene, who all work within a guideline of tight technical craftsmanship as well the use of opulent and decadent imagery to convey higher inner truths and emotions. This take on "Neo-Symbolism" is different from it's predecessor in that while it still mines the unconscious for a sense of mythic gravitas, it incorporates American culture's pervasive pop culture-flavored and cartoony aesthetic.

Lush Life preview

My 3-year-old loves watching the YouTube video at the top of Blink-182's Travis Barker with his marching snare drum. Yesterday, I found a funny video response to that clip in which a teenage band geek demonstrates that Barker's marching snare playing isn't particularly impressive. I like the mocking eyeroll/hand-motion he does several times in the video.

An anonymous reader tips news that Micro Focus is in the process of buying Borland Software for $75 million. They also picked up Compuware's application testing and automated software quality business. Quoting ZDNet: "The boards of both companies agreed to the deal, which is expected to complete around mid-2009. ... In 2008, Texas-based Borland made a pre-tax loss of $204m, almost four times the size of the previous year's loss. It had revenues of $172m, part of a consistent downward trend since at least 2004. ... Borland was one of the oldest software companies in the PC software business, having been founded in 1981. Its most successful era was in the late 1980s via massive sales of Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application, and development tool Turbo Pascal, which challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amy Stewart's new book, Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities, has a fantastic cover. The book seems terrific, too!

A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. In Wicked Plants, Stewart takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature’s most appalling creations. It’s an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend. You’ll learn which plants to avoid (like exploding shrubs), which plants make themselves exceedingly unwelcome (like the vine that ate the South), and which ones have been killing for centuries (like the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother).

Menacing botanical illustrations and splendidly ghastly drawings create a fascinating portrait of the evildoers that may be lurking in your own backyard. Drawing on history, medicine, science, and legend, this compendium of bloodcurdling botany will entertain, alarm, and enlighten even the most intrepid gardeners and nature lovers.

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities

theodp writes with news that details for the Kindle DX are now available. "Specs-wise, the big changes are a larger 9.7-inch screen that rotates to landscape display, a PDF reader, and more storage space. The Kindle DX carries a $489 price tag (compared to the $359 Kindle 2)." Engadget has a series of pictures from Jeff Bezos' presentation, and the Amazon product information page has further details and a video. According to the press release, Amazon has worked out a deal with The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post to "offer the Kindle DX at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This Grizzly Bear Chair is very odd and, of course, very sad. It was a gift from a hunter named Seth Kinman to US president Andrew Johnson in 1865. I could dig it if it was fake. Even more if it was faux Sasquatch.
(Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Previously:
• "Weirdy-beardy frontiersman who gave Lincoln a mule-skull fiddle and turned a bear into a chair"

Paintalicious has a gallery of artist Thomas Allen's book photography. Allen cuts the figures from vintage paperbacks and folds them up and out of the cover to create dioramas.

Using salacious pulp art drawing’s of the ’40s and ’50s that covered books such as ” I Married a Dead Man” and ” Marihuana Girl’, Allen constructs one set of pictures up close while obscuring another, and in the process creates a different context.

Thomas Allen’s Book Art Photography (Via Very Short List)

Panasonic has announced recommended prices and availability for the Lumix DMC-GH1 Micro Four Thirds camera. The camera as a kit with the Lumix G VARIO HD 14-140mm/F4.0-5.8 ASPH/O.I.S. lens will sell for a suggested retail price of $1499.95 in the US. Panasonic Germany reports a recommended price of €1550 though it doesn't specify that includes the lens. It will be made available in both markets from June 2009. The US will only receive the camera in black, while different European countries will have varying options that can include red or and interesting Champagne gold color.

Last year, the lawsuit against Lori Drew got plenty of attention. It involved the sad story of a girl, Megan Meier, who ended up killing herself after a "friend" she met on MySpace ended their friendship in a rather rude fashion. It later turned out that the "friend" wasn't a real person, but a made up individual, created by a former friend of the girl, that girl's mother (Lori) and an employee of Lori created the person (they claim) as a way of finding out what Meghan was saying about Lori's daughter. The whole story is quite sad, obviously, and suggests incredibly poor judgment on Lori's part. However, was it illegal? The initial analysis was not at all. However, prosecutors then twisted computer hacking laws to charge her, and she was eventually found guilty of misdemeanor computer hacking for creating a fake person on MySpace. This ruling was troubling for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it's now quite easy to make anyone a criminal via terms of service. Also, the fact that it actually is likely to put more kids at risk.

That particular case was distorted by a few issues, involving the fact that Lori was an adult while Meghan was a child. If the MySpace friend "Josh" had been a real teen, would the same outrage have happened? I had a friend in high school kill himself after his girlfriend dumped him. Should she have been charged with a crime?

However, with emotional cases, come bad legal precedents and bad laws. Missouri (where this happened) already rushed through an "online harassment" law, and now it looks like we may get the federal equivalent. Rep. Linda Sanchez has introduced a cyberbullying law (named after Meier) that could put people in jail for up to two years for online communications "with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person... to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior."

Yes, this effectively makes online trolling a crime. It's difficult to see how this gets past even the most basic First Amendment review, but that won't stop politicians from grandstanding over it.

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Liam sent me a link to this interesting Twitter library for the Make Controller. Tom Slejko wrote the code and it's really well documented. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but it's on my list of things to do. If any of our readers get a chance to try it out, let us know how it works out. Thanks!

Speaking of Twitter? Are you following us @Make yet? Remember, we're giving away a lot of great prizes, including a Maker's Notebook each day! Check out all the details here.

More about the Make Controller Tweeter library and the Make Controller 2.0 & Interface Board kit

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This handsome Bigfoot statue will be available in July from Entertainment Earth. It's 18-inches tall, plastic (polystone), and sells for $29.99.
Bigfoot Statue

coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission and Distributed Computing Industry Association locked horns over a proposed law that would govern how peer-to-peer networking technology would be used and regulated. Before the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, the Federal Trade Commission expressed its doubts about companies protecting sensitive consumer information (PDF) or sensitive data over P2P internet file-sharing networks. It doesn't help the P2P cause that the technology continues to pop up in bad practices. Recently a company that monitors peer-to-peer networks said it found classified information about the systems used onboard the president's helicopter in a shared folder on a computer in Iran, after a file containing the data was accidentally leaked on a peer-to-peer network last summer. Meanwhile the DCIA said any laws would likely be ineffective and stifle the business opportunities P2P can generate." An article on CNet points out that the wording of the bill would make it apply to just about everything related to communications on the internet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An 82-year-old man from Goslar, Germany called police to complain about noisy neighbors playing the same song over and over again. From the Associated Press:

Upon further investigation, police found the musical greeting card on his windowsill, where occasional breezes opened the card just enough to play an irritating tune.

"Elderly man mistakes card for noisy neighbors"

(An Oxysternon conspicillatum, a kind of scarab beetle. Photo by D. EMlen and J. M. Rowland)

Douglas Emlen, a professor of biology at the University of Montana, is one of the foremost authorities on dung beetles. Terry Gross interviewed him earlier this week on Fresh Air, and it's a terrific, fascinating interview. Emlen's passion and curiosity about dung beetle anatomy and behavior shine through.

Underneath the cow patties in the pasture — and the monkey dung in the jungle — there is a miniature world of sex and violence.

Here, ornately decorated beetles armed with horns fight for survival and sexual dominance. Douglas Emlen, a professor of biology at the University of Montana, studies them.

Emlen is an expert on the evolution and development of bizarre or extreme shapes in insects, and he is particularly interested in insect weaponry.

Much of his work takes place in a lab, but he has also had some wild adventures collecting different families of dung beetles from around the world.

The Fascinating World Of The Dung Beetle

Peter Edwards of Casper Electronics brings us this thick, rich, 15-knobbed synth box known as the Drone Lab -

This is the new Casperelectronics Drone Lab. The Drone Lab is an analog sound module specially designed for making dense, rich drones.
This is a video of three going at once.
For more info including ordering info and schematics (build your own!) go to:
http://casperelectronics.com/finished...
You can also download a higher quality version of the full 12 minute audio recording from this video at the above address.

Each unit has:

• 4 oscillators. 2 can be pitch modulated by dividers. 2 can be volume modulated by dividers.
  
• 1 resonant low pass filter
  
• 2 band pass filters
  
• 1 fuzz circuit
  
• 1 pulse generator LFO
  
• -2 adjustable pulse dividers for making rhythmic sequences.

Peter cites the MFOS Weird Sound Generator as inspiration for his design and thoughtfully provided hand-drawn schematics for the making. Aah yes, sweet sweet schematics.

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An anonymous reader writes "Evidence has been growing that Apple is developing a new gaming console. Now, there are some possible details about how a combined media/game console might work, based on patent applications filed by Apple in late 2007 and early 2008. Here is some what we can look for: having your personal music integrated into a title, a 'natural' gesture multitouch interface, and a single online store that sells games, media, and video."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arizona has been one of the bigger supporters of traffic cameras over the years, though there's been quite a bit of backlash there in recent months. It reached quite a level last month with the news that a speed camera operator was shot and killed. Reader Milodon points us to the news that even the police in Phoenix are getting quite upset at speed cameras because they're getting caught by them while on the way to respond to emergencies. Yes, even when the police are responding to an emergency in a police car, lights flashing and everything, they can still get a citation if they're caught speeding by a speed camera. The police department policy is that officers can get cited for being "out of policy" which is 15 mph over the speed limit.

Now, there is a reasonable argument to be made that police speeding can be a danger to others as well -- which is what those who support the policy say. But, you could make an argument that circumstances should determine what's safe in responding to an emergency, rather than a hard and fast policy. Still, even if you agree that police shouldn't speed, it's hard not to see some irony in police getting citations from speed cameras.

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Steve Lambert has a solo show up now at Charlie James Gallery in LA, until June 6: Everything You Want, Right Now! Steve's work is generally about advertising, and this show is no exception. Using inspiration from LA and NY signage, he made illuminated signs that say something deeper than where you can find a decent taco; they're advertisements for and against consumer culture. The show is flashy, awesome, and poignant.

More:

• My Neighborhood - Steve Lambert on CRAFT
• You don't need it
  
• Stained glass video subway ad covers
  

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Connie Culp was shot in the face by her husband five years ago. Five months ago, doctors grafted the face of a dead woman on to her shattered face, and the operation worked. Ms. Culp is now the first face transplant recipient in America.

Culp said she wanted to help foster acceptance of those who have suffered burns and other disfiguring injuries.

"When somebody has a disfigurement and don't look as pretty as you do, don't judge them, because you never know what happened to them," she said. "Don't judge people who don't look the same as you do. Because you never know. One day it might be all taken away."

It's a role she has already practiced, said Dr. Kathy Coffman, the clinic psychiatrist.

Once while shopping, "she heard a little kid say, 'You said there were no real monsters, Mommy, and there's one right there,' " Coffman said. Culp stopped and said, "I'm not a monster. I'm a person who was shot," and pulled out her driver's license to show the child what she used to look like, the psychiatrist said.

Here is what Culp looked like before she was shot. As our former guestblogger Maggie Koerth-Baker pointed out on Twitter just now -- the thing I keep coming back to as I read these stories about Ms. Culp is that the man who shot her in the face got only seven years in jail for this crime. Huh? The man who did this to his wife could be out on the street again in as little as two years?

Face-transplant patient reveals herself (Associated Press; image courtesy Associated Press)

Recently on Offworld new guest blogger Simon Parkin kicked off his new column, which looks at new blockbuster games from an Offworld perspective, by investigating X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and what it means to base a game on "a character that lacks the crucial tool in any action game hero's arsenal: a gun." We also saw Ashley Wood -- the comic artist behind the PSP's Metal Gear Solid digital comic -- teaming up with Chess with Friends iPhone studio (and former Age of Empires/Halo Wars devs) Newtoy to create a new game based on Wood's graphic novel series World War Robot. And: Namco shows off their DIY spirit with Noby Noby Boy sushi rolls, Rockstar creates official Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars papercraft, DS favorite Henry Hatsworth unveils their latest late-night TV campaign for guaranteed Villain Enhancement, and we look straight through game consoles with X-ray spex. Finally, the day's 'one shot's: NerdDad's PlayStation controller strikes a chord with every new father, Blade Runner in Crysis, and Andy 'komadesign' Miller (the illustrator behind the upcoming Indie Rock Coloring Book [!]) shows off his fantastic work for Sony with the PSP ad above.

Yesterday, I blogged about a new for-profit 'net censorship evasion tool called Psiphon. A member of the anonymity development community reached out with concerns. I'm blogging them here in the interest of presenting the full range of views on this subject from people in the community.

I see that Boing Boing is discussing Psiphon. This greatly concerns me because of their lack of transparency and accountability. Psiphon imply (but refuse to state explicitly) that they are in the anonymity business, yet they do not even have a publicly stated privacy policy. They are vague about their security claims and, even assuming good faith, have not disclosed any useful information on their security model and implementation.

Aside from the fact that they are, as a for-profit company handling personal information, required under Canadian law to disclose their privacy policy, this lack of transparency leaves me with serious concerns about their motivations and competence. This is especially troubling when one considers that their entire product is essentially a centrally administered proxy run with software unknown to the users. What do they store? What do they claim? How can we verify? Nothing? Something? Everything?

To sign up for their service, one either has to know Psiphon or know someone who uses Psiphon; this necessarily requires a knowledge of relationships on their part. For many users, I suspect this is a minor risk that seems remote until one again considers that this is a for-profit company. Do they promise to do anything with any of this data? Do they plan to store it forever? Do they promise to destroy it if they're ever offered money for their company? What happens if they are simply offered money for the data? Wouldn't it be better to avoid that temptation entirely by not requiring or keeping any of that data?

(More after the jump).

From a technical standpoint, I notice they claim to believe in Open Source software and the collaborative security it can deliver, yet the software on their website is the same outdated version as it was last year. This software is probably unrelated to the proxy service they are promoting, but it is difficult to know as they seem to keep these details secret.

This speaks nothing of the fact that a massive system to proxy information is a very tempting target for law enforcement or criminals. Which law enforcement and which criminals will be targeting Psiphon's massive data collection operation?

With so much secret sauce, I'd really caution anyone to consider the economic interests at play and I'd also advise users to decide carefully if they want to leave it up to Psiphon to make such important choices for them.

I wouldn't choose to use Psiphon and I sincerely hope others make a similar choice.

Previously: New Web Censor Evasion Toolkit Launches: Psiphon

I love this Hello Kitty bubblegum tin housing a Minty Boost. There's even extra space to carry two additional AA batteries, for even more boost. And notice the Maker's Notebook as the backdrop. The builder named it the Minou Boost, after her cat.

Minou boost

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Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his idea for mass adoption of anti-virus software: "If the US government did more to encourage people to keep their computers secure — by buying TV ads to publicize free private-sector anti-virus programs, or subsidizing the purchase of anti-virus software — we'd all be better off, on average. That's not just idealistic nanny-statism, but something you can argue mathematically, to the point where even some libertarians would agree." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Viviane Reding, Information Society Commissioner of the European Union, is calling for the United States to hand over control of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). She said that the organization running ICANN needs be free of control by a single nation, and rather controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations. ICANN, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, was created in 1998 to oversee a number of Internet related tasks. Reding said, 'In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. )

Fascinating video from C-Span of the Senate Hearings on healthcare reform. Senator Max Baucus tries to quell a stream of protesters. As Personal Democracy Forum's Micah Sifry, who alerted me to this video explains, "At about 1:45 Baucus is laughing, calling for the police, as a half-dozen peaceful and very articulate citizens speak out, one by one, demanding a seat at the table (where 15 witnesses wait to testify, not one representing the single-payer option)."

We discussed recently how entertainment industry lobbyists have been pushing this story about how P2P software needs to be regulated to prevent gov't data from leaking, incorrectly blaming the software for user error. So, of course, it's no surprise that legislation has been introduced that tries to force any P2P software used for transferring files from one computer to another to include a big warning and require the user to give "informed consent" when installing the software and every time it's used. Yes, every time it's used. This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Has it occurred to anyone crafting such a bill that when you pop up such a notice and require "consent" every single time software is used, most people will just ignore it? But, more importantly, as Declan McCullagh points out, the wording of the bill suggests that this "notice and consent" solution would apply to lots and lots of products, including browsers, FTP clients and backup software. Tons of software these days involves transferring files between two computers. This is, of course, symptomatic of legislation being written and introduced by people who don't understand the technology. They think that software to transfer files is limited to things like LimeWire or BitTorrent, not recognizing that it's a core part of the internet itself.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Inspired by the beehive locator we recently covered here, Gabriel decided to build a bee box of his own. He even enhanced the design a bit with magnetic door latches. No mention of the device's success in the field as of yet but it looks quite able.


More:

Bee boxes explained

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narramissic writes "Microsoft has identified 12 application types that won't be accepted at the MarketPlace for Mobile store. Among them: VoIP apps, programs that are larger than 10MB, and programs that change the default browser on a device. Overly restrictive? Maybe. But perhaps the clear set of rules (PDF) will prevent confusion similar to what's been encountered over Apple's policy for approving or rejecting applications from the App Store."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Multimodal Brain Orchestra performs by way of brainwave controlled sound synthesis -

Two of the performers were given a task to watch a screen in front of them, with flashing rows and columns of letters, and told to look for a particular letter.

When expectation is fulfilled, 300 thousandths of a second later, a signal known as the P300 appears in the EEG.

[…]

Two more performers were given boxes with four lights flashing at different frequencies. The SSVEP is a brain signal that comes about when visual stimulus in the retina at a given frequency causes the brain to synchronize, so that frequency appears in the EEG.

Given a cue from the conductor, the performers switch their attention from one flashing frequency to another.

One of them affects the volume of a given sound - known to influence the level of arousal in the circumplex model - and the other affects a certain modulation of that sound, which is known to influence the valence, how positive or negative the arousal is emotionally.

Led by both "emotional" and traditional conductors, the group recently held their first performance at the Science Beyond Fiction conference in Prague. Read more about the project over at BBC News.

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The folks at iFixit are still looking for repair tech volunteers to help out at their "Fix the World!" repair area at Maker Faire. Specifically, they need volunteers who enjoy tinkering with:

• cars
• electronics
• Macs
• bicycles
• appliances

If you are a subject-matter expert and would enjoy spending a weekend helping others solve their tech problems, please volunteer!

For their help, volunteers will receive free admission to the Faire as well as the Meet the Makers event.

Interested in volunteering? Send an email to Eric@iFixit.com with your availability, area of expertise, and your contact information. More information available at iFixit.

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Hugh Pickens writes "The BBC reports that recent tests in China indicate a monthly injection of testosterone, which works by temporarily blocking sperm production, could be as effective at preventing pregnancies as the female pill or condoms. In trials in China only one man in 100 fathered a child while on the injections, and six months after stopping the injections the mens' sperm counts returned to normal. The lead researcher said that if further tests proved successful, the treatment could become widely available in five years' time. Previous attempts to develop an effective and convenient male contraceptive have encountered problems over reliability and side effects, such as mood swings and a lowered sex drive. However, despite the injection having no serious side effects, almost a third of the 1,045 men in the two-and-a-half year study did not complete the trials; no reason was given for this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has laid out his reasons for why he believes the IPO market is about to come back. It's a worthwhile read if you're interested in the startup ecosystem. While I tend to agree with Fred on many different things, on this one I'm not at all convinced. I do agree that there are a growing number of companies who in the past would have gone public about now, but are held back by the near total lack of willingness to risk running the IPO gauntlet. The one thing that we agree on is that investors are going to start looking to put money into new investments sometime soon (there's way too much money being flooded into the market, and it needs to go somewhere). I'm just not convinced it will go into the traditional IPO market. I think it would be good if the IPO market opened up somewhat, but a flood wouldn't be good. It would create another bubble scenario. My guess (at this point) is that the money will go into something unexpected -- perhaps even new financial instruments. However, I'm curious: where do people think all the money that's being dumped into the economy will flow? What's the next bubble going to be?

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Over at NerdKits, Humberto shows how to build a piezoelectric-based sound meter fed to an LED display, using their USB NerdKit. By using the piezoelectric buzzer that comes in the kit as a microphone, and adding a transistor and a few other components, you can create a sound meter and send its output to an LED array, an LCD screen, or other display. They used an LED display version at the recent MIT Battle of the Bands to graphically display the sound volume in the room.

Piezoelectric Sound Meter

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US Army chaplains in Afghanistan have called on American soldiers to spread the word of Jesus to Afghanistan. They're distributing Bibles printed in local languages, too -- though the Army subsequently confiscated a bunch of the Bibles and reprimanded some of the soldiers involved.

In one recorded sermon, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of the U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling Soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him".

"The special forces guys -- they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down," he says.

"Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

GIs Told to Bring Afghans to Jesus (Thanks, Bill!)

Jeri Ellsworth created this remarkable Commodore-64-emulated-NES-in-a-handbag -- she's also the hacker who reverse-engineered the Commodore 64 and came up with the C64-on-a-chip design.

Jeri's nifty Nintendo/C64 purse (via Neatorama)

Tracking and monitoring your incoming links can provide you with great and valuable insight into which sites, social media and other web traffic sources are sending you the best and most qualified visitors for your web site. But how do you go about analyzing those incoming links in an effective way? Which one of those traffic sources is better? Social media, search engines, organic links on other sites and blogs? Photo credit: hypermania To evaluate the effective traffic potential of most of the typical web traffic sources, Pavel Israelsky, a young web publisher from Israel, has taken the time to systematically analyze the main traffic sources sending people to his site, including forums, blogs, web directories, instant messengers, social media sites and even emails. The goal for Israel was the one of understanding which one of these traffic sources brings in more traffic and consequently which should be the traffic source on which to spend the greatest amount of energies. Though these results do not represent general trends and data applicable to all types of sites or blogs, the story of how this analysis was setup and run can help those with less experience in tracking online data in getting a glimpse of how you can actually go about collecting such data and make that information help you understand better how and where to focus to increase your web traffic. Can you get relatively more traffic from Twitter or from your signature at the end of your emails? Here all the details:

The Great Traffic Experiment

by Pavel Israelsky
Who wouldn't want to increase the incoming traffic to his website by knowing which traffic source to focus on? How can we evaluate the potential of all traffic sources we use on a daily basis? With the recent development of social networking and the various media tools, the number of traffic sources has increased dramatically. As a result, tracking of traffic to our websites became a tougher task. For the last two months I've been conducting an experiment (quite secretive), intended to evaluate the potential of all the standard sources of traffic in the Internet, which I use regularly. Forums, blogs, social networks, web directories, instant messaging software applications, Twitter and even Gmail (patience, all will become clear shortly). It is true that there are quite a lot of great statistical applications supplying the goods, such as Google Analytics, but still, at the end of the day, me and many others go to sleep with many unanswered questions and wonders. Questions like:

• How many got into my website through my Gmail signature?
• How many clicked on the link in my blog in my Facebook profile?
• Did anyone click the link of my website in my Skype status line?
• Does anyone click on my URLs in articles talkbacks? Etc.

Preliminary Preparations: Mapping Sources and Setting Up Tracking Links

This kind of questions has always bothered me and I came to the conclusion that I just have to check it out. So I decided to conduct an experiment which includes the following steps:

1. Map all the sources at which I am active,
2. Group the sources (blogs, forums etc.),
3. Create a designated link to count clicks for each group and lastly,
4. pPace the designated link in any of the source sites (usually the link was "Websites Promotion Blog" and not the URL address).

For example: Facebook, TheMarker Café (popular social network in Israel) and LinkedIn are part of the "social networking" group, so I dedicated a designated link to these three sites. There are two reasons why I decided to track only the sources I use on a regular basis:

1. In the other sources I do not have a profile so there are no outbound links to my blog.
2. I wanted to evaluate the potential of the sources I use based on my browsing habits so I can learn how much energy I should invest in them (if at all).

In order to create tracking links I chose a URL shrinking service, which supplies me with detailed statistics of the number of clicks on any link I create through it. So I created an account in the popular service cli.gs and began with creating designated inbound links for every traffic source group. Below you can find all the tracking links I created:

• Social networks: cli.gs/social-askpavel
• Blogs: cli.gs/blogs-askpavel
• Discussion groups and forums: cli.gs/forums-askpavel
• Instant messages: cli.gs/instant-askpavel
• E-mail service: cli.gs/email-askpavel
• Twitter: cli.gs/twitter-askpavel

You can check and see that each such URL leads to my blog's home page.

The Course of the Traffic Experiment: Dividing the Links into Groups and Collecting Data

So there are designated links, groups and sources - now all that is left to do is integrate them. Here is a reference to every group of sources including the final results based on readings made over a period of two months.

Group 1: Social Networks

Designated link: http://cli.gs/social-askpavel
Traffic sources (these links lead to my profile pages): Facebook, Linkedin, TheMarker Cafe
The position of the link in every source: In the three sources the link appears first and foremost in the profile page in the field "personal site". In addition, it appeared in my Facebook's SEO Group and my other SEO Group in LinkedIn.
Location in Facebook:
Location in LinkedIn:
Location in TheMarker Café (it's under "expanded about page in my blog:"):
Conditions for exposure: The exposure to a link is directly dependent on the number of activities I do at each of the sites (If I am inactive no one will be exposed to it), number of friends, my involvement in the network and the number of searches leading to my profile. During the experiment, in order to maintain the objectivity of the results and to ensure they truly reflect the potential of each group, I did not act in an extraordinary way. The activities I did (which made people become exposed to the link) are:

• Talkbacks in the relevant discussions,
• adding new friends,
• sending messages to existing friends,
• uploading pictures and videos,
• updating my status line and comment to my friends status changes,
• joining communities and groups which interest me,
• use of several social applications etc.

All the activities can be grouped under "Internet Personal Branding".
My social parameters in this channel (influencing on the level of exposure): Unfortunately I cannot measure the number of searches leading to my profile, or the number of activities I have done in each network. The only estimate is the number of friends in every network:

• 605 friends in Facebook (217 friends in the SEO group in Facebook),
• 190 in LinkedIn (11 friends in the SEO group in LinkedIn) and
• 186 friends in TheMarker Café.

The overall number of participants coming from this group: 55

Group 2: Comments in Blogs

Designated link: http://cli.gs/blogs-askpavel
Traffic sources: I read a lot of blogs (Israeli and foreign) on a regular basis. The very partial list can be found at Websites Promotion Recommended Resources I have written before. Additional blogs I read can be found here, a collection of the world's top 25 most recommended blogs about SEO.
The link's location in each source: In the "Full name" field in the talkbacks themselves
Conditions for exposure: The people exposed to the comment link are the blog's editor and the other readers of the same post. The exposure is dependent on the number of comments I make and the number of readers exposed to those comments. In addition, it could be said there is a direct connection between the traffic of the blog in which I am commenting and the traffic I will get from the link inside the comment. Hence the recommendation to try to comment in those blogs popular in the area you are interested in.
My social parameters in this channel (influencing on the level of exposure): During the term of the experiment (2 months) I commented 40 times in about 20 different blogs.
The overall number of participants coming from this group: 46

Group 3: Discussion Groups and Forums

Designated link: http://cli.gs/blogs-askpavel
Traffic sources: K Forum (K Forum is an Israeli popular SEO forum), Tapuz SEO Community (Tapuz is a popular Israeli forum-based community), Commercial Internet Community (In TheMarker Café).
The link's location in each source: In the signature at the end of the comments. In some of them there is just an URL and not a clickable link so this source contributes less to the overall number of clicks of the designated link (people usually are too lazy to copy a link into their browser and prefer something clickable).
In K forum:
In TheMarker Café forum:
Conditions for exposure: Only those reading my comment in the body of the discussion were exposed to the link. In addition, the forum's reputation and popularity are important factors - the more popular it is, the more traffic goes through it and so there is a greater chance people will click on the link in the signature.
My social parameters in this channel (influencing on the level of exposure): In forum K I commented in 35 different threads (1-3 times in average per thread), in the commercial forum I reacted to 5 threads (1-3 times in average per thread) and in the Tapuz community I commented in one thread once.
The overall number of participants coming from this group: 79

Group 4: Instant Messages

Designated link: http://cli.gs/blogs-askpavel
Traffic sources: All the various instant messaging applications and services - ICQ, Skype, MSN messenger, Google Talk.
The link's location in each source: In each application there's that status line where you can write whatever you want, sort of "status". The link on Google Talk (the link looks pretty much the same in the other instant messaging applications):
Conditions for exposure: The exposure depends on 2 factors: The number of people in my friends list with which I talk on a regular basis and the frequency of the correspondence. The more a person corresponds the longer the "stage time" of the link in the status line becomes (for the person with which we correspond at the moment). In addition, the more friends a person has on his friends list, the bigger is his link's exposure even if he is not corresponding at that minute (since when he is online all his friends see his status line).
My social parameters in this channel (influencing on the level of exposure): 126 friends on Google Talk and 53 on Skype (out of which 5% are inactive).
The overall number of participants coming from this group: 40

Group 5: E-Mail Service

Designated link: http://cli.gs/blogs-askpavel
Traffic sources: This item focuses only on the e-mail service I use - Gmail.
The link's location in each source: At the end of the e-mails I sent (in my signature).
Conditions for exposure: In principle, every person who receives an e-mail from me should be exposed to the link. This, of course, depends on how long the e-mail is (who has the energy to scroll the whole way through?) and the size and color of the font of the signature (Gmail left me very little choice), but my basic assumption is that anyone who got an e-mail from me saw the link. The click on it depends on my relationship with that person, if we do not know one another there is a high chance this person will click and if we correspond on a regular basis, the chance is that he will not.
My social parameters in this channel (influencing on the level of exposure): In the last couple of months I have sent an average number of 11 e-mails per day and a total of 684 e-mails. Out of which, 45 e-mails were sent to new people (people I approached for the first time).
The overall number of participants coming from this group: 33

Group 6: Twitter

Designated link: http://cli.gs/blogs-askpavel
Traffic sources: Twitter. Not enough?
The link's location in each source: The bio field in the personal profile.
Conditions for exposure: Twitter is a powerful tool deserving a post of its own and this is why I decided to create for it a category of its own. The exposure of your profile depends on the number of people following you, the number of tweets, the number of searches leading to your profile and the number of retweets you get. The rule valid here is very common to all social networks - the more popular you are, the more people will be exposed to your profile.
My social parameters in this channel (influencing on the level of exposure): 171 people following me and during the period of the experiment I sent only 16 tweets (because of the low number, it does not reflect the normal usage and the power you can extract out of the tool).
The overall number of participants coming from this group: 37

Here is a final concentration of the figures:

• Social networks: 55
• Blog comments: 64
• Discussion groups and forums: 79
• Instant messages: 40
• E-mail service: 33
• Twitter: 37

Results and Conclusions of the Experiment

I have learned a lot from this experiment, both about me as a user and about the potential of external links from the different sources. In addition, a lot can be understood from the statistics about the users habits in every channel (where do people click more on links etc.). It is worth mentioning that these findings are subjective and depend on any person's habits. Nevertheless, a few insights would fit all.
Here are the experiment's findings (not in any order):

1. Although I wasn't a hardcore user of Twitter (and it's a shame I wasn't), the number of hits I got from there is more than those coming from e-mails.
2. Homework to myself (urgent): "Start investing in Twitter!"
3. Second chore for homework (less urgent): "Start commenting in popular blogs!"
4. The forums yielded the most entries and the least came from the e-mails.
5. At the beginning I created designated links that did not include my blog name in the URL, but they hardly got clicked upon. During the experiment I did decide to include my blog name, because it gives the reader a hint where the link leads to.
6. Although I send a lot of e-mails, relatively very few people clicked on the link in the signature.
7. Although I am pretty active user in social networks and do not tend to comment a lot in blogs, I got more entries from the blog comments.

What are your favorite traffic sources? So I conducted an experiment and I learned a lot about the traffic I get into my blog, but that only reflects my case. What about you? What are your favorite sources? Where do you think it would be worthwhile to invest your time to attract maximum visitors?


This post was translated from Hebrew using OneHourTranslation Translation Service.

Originally written by Pavel Israelsky for MasterNewMedia and first published on May 6th, 2009 as "Why Tracking External Links Can Help You Improve Website Traffic".

About the author Pavel Israelsky (follow him on Twitter: @askpavel) is an Israeli Search-Engine-Optimization (SEO) consultant and blogger. He is writing in Hebrew about SEO techniques in his blog AskPavel.

Photo credits: Preliminary Preparations: Mapping Sources and Setting Up Tracking Links - Helder Almeida Group 1: Social Networks - Eric Isselée Group 2: Comments in Blogs - Khaled Benseguenia Group 3: Discussion Groups and Forums - zzzzz Group 4: Instant Messages - Konstantinos Kokkinis Group 5: E-Mail Service - juliengron Group 6: Twitter - mipan Results and Conclusions of the Experiment - artzone

Topspin CEO Ian Rogers has a great post detailing how (contrary to his own beliefs) Twitter appears to be quickly becoming a very powerful channel for promoting music and playing into music business models. He gives two examples of how Twitter provided a huge push in driving sales of products for the bands Jimmy Eat World and Arcade Fire. However, his concluding paragraph is the key:

What to conclude from all this? That Twitter is the marketing machinery of the future? Naw. This isn't about "the next big thing". It's about how little we know about how marketing will work and how transactions (not just purchases, but any kind of value exchange) will be earned (and I do mean earned) in the future. Success is highly variable. Execution matters (as James said). Unexpected events can make an impact. People are powerful marketers.

This is actually really important. It's why you want to enable others to help promote for you however they're most comfortable promoting your works. Yet, over the past decade, what we've seen is how the music industry has tried, at almost every turn, to limit how people promote music to others, and to funnel fans into a very limited set of options for how to interact with the music. If you want to capture the biggest possible bang for the buck, you have to step back and let the community figure out the best way to help promote your works, rather than assuming you can dictate it.

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This instructable shows you how to build an adjustable 12-volt power supply that would make a great addition to your electronics workbench. Having an adjustable power supply is really important when tinkering with electronics. This looks like a fairly simple build with unlimited uses.

This is an Instructable that tells you how to make an adjustable voltage regulator, which has endless applications. It can be used to test your LED's and other low voltage loads, and there is another terminal for higher voltage applications.

More about making a DIY 12-volt adjustable power supply

Related:
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In the Maker Shed: Plug-in Bread-Board Power Supply

In the Maker Shed:

Plug-in Bread-Board Power Supply

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blacklily8 writes "Gamasutra has published "The History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Zs." Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals, Rogue has continued to excite gamers and programmers worldwide, and has been ported, enhanced, and forked now for over two decades. What is it about Wichman and Toy's old UNIX RPG that has sent so many gamers to their deaths in the Dungeons of Doom, desperately seeking the fabled Amulet of Yendor? This article covers the history of the game, including the Epyx failure to make a ton of cash selling it in 1983. It also goes into rogue-like culture and development."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With all the recent talk of metered broadband, there are some questions raised: such as how will the usage actually be metered? As that report notes, broadband providers should not be allowed to meter the broadband themselves, because that represents an obvious conflict of interest -- and when it comes to things like electricity and gas pumps, regulations require third party inspectors or equipment to make sure that the meters are accurate and not subject to tampering by the company. So wouldn't broadband require the same thing?

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mr100percent writes "Apple rejected the iPhone aggregator app Newspapers because of a topless photo in one of the app's subscribed-to papers. In the rejection message, Apple noted that Parental Controls have been announced for iPhone OS 3.0, adding that it 'would be appropriate to resubmit your application for review once this feature is available.' Rumor sites are speculating that Apple will relax their content restrictions once the 3.0 update puts parental controls in place. This may mean that apps like NIN will be allowed in the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Check out this cool interview with wearable technology guru and Botanicalls co-creator Kate Hartman by Dave Caputo. Via Fashioning Technology.

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Apparently, the Federal Gov't has been using an ID fraud law that was passed a few years ago not to go after just those copying the identity of others for the sake of fraud, but illegal immigrants using fake IDs. The two scenarios are entirely different, but the Feds were quick to use the law against the illegal immigrants, as it was an easier tool to use than to go through the standard process of dealing with illegal immigrants. Now, no matter what you think of illegal immigrants and how they should be dealt with, we should all be concerned when the government is stretching the intention of a law beyond its clearly stated purpose... and the Supreme Court seems to agree. It's now told the government that it clearly went beyond the boundaries of the law in using it against immigrants. The court points out that the law is pretty clear that the person charged under the law must knowingly take the identity of someone else, but totally made up IDs don't appear covered by the law at all, because the law isn't intended for fake IDs... it's intended to deal with those defrauding others by taking their identity.

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Several readers including Pop69 inform us that the US Trustee's office has asked to convert SCO's Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chapter 7 — a.k.a. liquidation. Groklaw has the text of the filing: "...not only is there no reasonable chance of 'rehabilitation' in these cases, the Debtors have tried — and failed — to liquidate their business in chapter 11."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clive Young's Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind the Camera is a loving, exhaustive history of the fan-film, going all the way back to the grifters who conned small-town America into paying to get their kids into fake Little Rascals movies to the YouTube era, and everything in between.

Young picks out several case-studies to explore in depth, including such old favorites as Hardware Wars, Robbins Barstow's Tarzan movie, Troops, and plenty others that you've encountered online (and several that you'll want to seek out after reading the book). On the way, he brings the obsessive personalities to life, giving us a peek into the kind of person who'll spend years painstakingly recreating the entirety of Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark. Plenty of these people grew up to be famous in their own right (including Tommy Ramone, who participating in a truly hairy early Spiderman fanfilm).

Homemade Hollywood delves into the technique, meaning, and creativity behind fan films, showing how imitation can be original, and how great creative people get their starts copying the things they love. Young also explores the love/hate relationship copyright holders (especially big studios) have with the fans who knock off their goods.

When Young hits his stride, this book is great, a long tale told of obsessives swinging from buildings in Spiderman suits, of melted Lego figures, of children recreating the flaming bar in Raiders of the Lost Ark by setting themselves and their basement on fire, and keeping the camera rolling the whole time.

That said, there were parts of this book where I found myself skimming over a little too much detail -- it's clear that Young's every bit as obsessive as the fanfilmers themselves. The production values here were also a little rough -- the text changes typeface at random intervals, and there are more typos than usual scattered through the text. And even though Young makes several mentions of fair use and defends a liberal copyright regime, he often repeats the fallacy that noncommercial use is fair use, and that commercial use is infringing (neither of these statements are necessarily true, and some of the most important fair use cases in history hinge on, for example, commercial use being fair, or noncommercial use being infringing).

But setting aside those quibbles, this book's a real treasure, an inspiration to amateur filmmakers everywhere.

Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind the Camera

With Wall Street firms crashing left and right, some tech startup investors thought there would be plenty of smart and available talent in NYC looking for work, who might be persuaded to join startups. Turns out that it hasn't worked that way. Laid off Wall St. quants seem to want to stay on Wall Street, and don't seem particularly interested in joining startups at a greatly reduced salary and a small chance for eventual stock option wealth. This actually might be for the best. It helps to really believe in what a startup is doing before committing to it -- and a lot (certainly not all) of the Wall St. folks are simply focused on making lots of money as quickly as possible. That doesn't always mix well in a tech startup.

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London's cops use their anti-terrorism powers to stop and search someone every three minutes, all day and all night. That's a lot of potential terrorists! I'm sure glad they've all been made to turn out their pockets and surrender their dignity. That'll show 'em! Stupid suicide bombers.

The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.

That compares to almost 72,000 anti-terror stop and searches carried out in the previous year.

Of all the stops last year, only 65 led to arrests for terror offences, a success rate of just 0.035%.

Note, they don't say that there were 65 convictions, or even 65 sustained charges, just 65 arrests. My guess is that the number of convictions in this case is approximately zero. Which would be a success rate of 0.000%.

Capital sees rise in terror stops

Search Engine -- the most popular podcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and some of the best tech news reporting in the world -- has been cancelled by the CBC. Again.

The good news? It's moved to TVOntario, the other public broadcaster in Ontario.

"I could have argued about how great our numbers are or how cheap the show is to produce or how important our subject matter is, but ultimately there was no way for me to do that without essentially making the case that some other show should get axed instead," explains Jesse Brown who notes the decision was purely a financial one for CBC.

Thankfully Brown met Miner while working on a story about Conservatives stealing TVO footage.

"When I found out that his podcast wasn't going to be renewed, we quickly moved to bring it over to TVO. It all came together amazingly quickly. Everybody here is a big fan of Search Engine, so it was clear right away we wanted to have it, we just weren't sure how quickly we could dot every i, cross every t," says Miner of the deal that came together in an astonishingly quick day and a half.

Search Engine restart (Thanks, Ben!)

The Sap Cap is a "self-defense" hat with a lump of heavy metal sewn into it so you can doff your hat to your assailant and then drive his nose into his brainpan. Remember, though: any hat you don't know how to use belongs to your opponent. Also, the commenters on the sell-page say it makes a crummy hat.

Sap Cap (via OhGizmo)

Typsie sez, "My buddy Frank's wife Dianna whipped up a Cthulhu ski mask for him to wear at a recent costume party, and we were all amazed at the sheer blinding awesomeness of it. It even has a mouth-hole so that you can be an Elder God and still kick back a brewski (as pictured). We're trying to convince her to make more and sell them on Etsy."

I'd wear one on the slopes!

Me and The Big Green C (Thanks, Typsie!)

Disneyland and Walt Disney World will no longer pay dedicated toplessness-checkers to examine the photos snapped of riders and displayed at the end of the ride. Not enough flashers these days, apparently.

Disney confirmed Tuesday that it has reassigned employees at Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure who watched for breast-baring riders because "actual inappropriate behaviors by guests are rare."

Disneyland spokeswoman Suzi Brown says the changes took effect Sunday at Splash Mountain, Tower of Terror, Space Mountain and California Screamin'.

Riders are photographed on the attractions and can then buy souvenir copies. Some have exposed their breasts in hopes that the picture would make it onto a photo preview screen at the ride's exit.

Disney Parks Stop Scans for Topless Riders (Thanks, Dan X!)

Self-fusing silicone "rescue" tape sounds like some powerfully useful stuff -- permanently bonds to itself in one minute, creating a 700psi-rated, acid/solvent/oil-resistant seal. As the Red Ferret sez, "just think of it as a reel of spare fanbelt."

Ever tried it? Post to the comments!

RESCUE TAPE Self-Fusing Silicone Tape ~ BLACK (via Red Ferret)

destinyland writes "A Colorado medical advocate says, 'The FDA contends that if one cultures stem cells at all...then it's a prescription drug,' in arguing that revolutionary new treatments could be delayed by 20 years — even using cells extracted from your own body. According to the FDA, even therapies that simply re-inject your body's adult stem cells could be prohibited without five years of clinical trials and millions of dollars of research. How useful are cultured stem cells? 'In animal models, they routinely cure diabetes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

destinyland writes "A Colorado medical advocate says, 'The FDA contends that if one cultures stem cells at all...then it's a prescription drug,' in arguing that revolutionary new treatments could be delayed by 20 years — even using cells extracted from your own body. According to the FDA, even therapies that simply re-inject your body's adult stem cells could be prohibited without five years of clinical trials and millions of dollars of research. How useful are cultured stem cells? 'In animal models, they routinely cure diabetes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been a big push lately to get the gov't to be a lot more open with its data, and both the new federal government CTO and CIO have spoken up about the importance of opening up more data. While it may take some time, we are starting to see things happen -- and happen quickly in some cases. Apparently, the Senate agreed (despite some reservations) to make the data from Senate votes available in an open XML format, and just a few days later that data is available. This is absolutely a good thing, but the real test will be seeing what people do with this and other open government data sources. It's nice to report on the government doing something right every once in a while....

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I've been having a lot of fun writing for CreditBloggers. My most recent entry is about Predictably Irrational author Dan Ariely's recent TED talk about his experiments to learn more about the psychology of cheating.

Ariely decided to conduct a series of experiments to understand cheating. He gave test subjects a math quiz with 20 problems, and promised to give a dollar for each correct answer. The problems weren't hard to solve, but Ariely imposed a five-minute time limit, making it impossible for anyone to complete the test. After five minutes, Ariely collected the test from the volunteers, scored them, and paid them for their correct answers. On average, volunters solved four questions correctly.

Next, he tempted people to cheat. He told a new group of test takers to score their own tests and tell Ariely how many questions they got correct. These volunteers reported, on average, that they solved seven questions. The interesting thing about this, says Ariely, was that the higher average wasn't because a few people cheated a lot; rather, it was because a lot of people cheated a little. Equally interesting was the fact that the amount of cheating didn't change when the reward for a correct question was increased or decreased; nor did it change when the chances of being caught cheating were increased or decreased.

Dan Ariely: Why people think it's OK to cheat a little bit

Here are my other posts:

•Consumer Sentiment on the Rise (for now)

•Afflicted with Allelomimesis -- Why People Behave as if They’re Broke When They’re Not

•Half-empty supermarket shelves act like consumer magnets

•Bringing Your Kids to the Supermarket is Hazardous to Your Wallet

•The Allure of the "Near-Miss"