IndianaKim writes "I have been asked if I can host or assist in hosting a highly inflammatory document that reflects poorly on a Police Department. I want to help, but I also do not want the headache and possible subjection to search warrants and/or illegal searches. The document is so inflammatory that it could interest the FBI and DoJ and cause them to investigate the government officials involved. I live in the same county, but not the same city, and therefore could be subject to a search (legal or not) by some of these government agencies. I have been asked to host it on a server outside of the US. At this time, I do not have the ability to do that, but I could set it up if I needed to. My question is: would you host it if you were asked? How would you go about protecting the document and yourself?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

High voltage hackers ArcAttack of Austin, Texas, are known to BB readers for their Singing Tesla Coils that they use to perform music. For example, here, a pair of coils delight us with an, er, energized rendition of the Doctor Who theme. Sadly, it's unlikely that most of us will get a chance to try our hand at conducting this Tesla orchestra so ArcAttack has enhanced their Web site with a simple yet fantastically fun Tesla Coil Emulator. My first number was the familiar tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What song would you like to hear the coils sing? From the ArcAttack site:

ArcAttack employs a unique DJ set up of their own creation (an HVDJ set up) to generate an 'electrifying' audio visual performance. The HVDJ pumps music through a PA System while two specially designed DRSSTC's (Dual-Resonant Solid State Tesla Coils) act as separate synchronized instruments.

These high tech machines produce an electrical arc similar to a continuous lightning bolt which put out a crisply distorted square wave sound reminiscent of the early days of synthesizers. The music consists of original highly dance-able electronic compositions that sometimes incorporates themes or dub of popular songs.

Joe DiPrima and Oliver Greaves are the masterminds behind the design and construction of the Tesla Coils while the music is developed by John DiPrima and Tony Smith.

Tesla Coil Emulator

Looking to extend the range and flexibility of his netbook, maker Larry Pesce from PaulDotCom modified his Asus EEE 4G Surf with an external RP-TNC antenna connector. His detailed instructions document the process of adding the connector and the last minute ingenuity that delivered a rather clean looking result.

Modding the Asus EEE 4G Surf for an external antenna

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Very Short List recommended this blog entry featuring Chicago street gang cards from the days of yore.

The We Are Supervision blog has a wild collection of the business cards that Chicago’s gangs printed up in the seventies and eighties and used to make friends and intimidate people.

You’ll see groups like the Stooge Bros. (whose members included Bubbles, Giggles, and Sweet Pea) and Thee Almighty Hells Devils (whose members included Sico, Satan, and Skull).

The above card looks like one that Luther ("Warriors, come out to play-ay-ay"), warlord of The Rogues, would have had.

Street gang calling cards from the 1970s and 1980s

I was quite surprised last week to find out that Google has changed its rules on trademarks and AdWords in many countries around the world. In the past, it had limited the use of trademarks both in the ads and (more importantly) as keyword triggers. In the US it had allowed trademarks as keyword triggers (in most cases), but in other countries, where the laws and the courts more heavily favored trademark holders, the company had been much more strict.

Now, I think Google is absolutely right to take this stance, as I don't see why it should be a problem at all to advertise on trademarked keywords, so long as the ads aren't confusing to the users. Trademark is not about ultimate control over the mark, but has always been designed for the sake of consumer protection, to avoid having someone buying Bob's Cola thinking it's Coca-Cola. It was never designed to give total control to one company and allow them to prevent anyone else from making use of the trademark. Yet, over the years, trademark law has drifted further and further from those origins, and today many people falsely believe that it's just like a patent or a copyright.

And, of course, even if you grant the (false) premise that trademarked terms shouldn't be used as keywords to trigger advertising, it's doubly ridiculous that Google should be liable. Google is just the platform provider, and if there needs to be any liability, then it should be on the advertiser, not Google itself.

So while I'm quite happy that Google is taking this stance, I'm really surprised (and somewhat confused) as to why it's doing so. It will almost certainly lead to a lot of expensive lawsuits around the globe -- and given how some other countries interpret trademark law these days, Google stands a decent chance of losing in some of those locations. Even in the US, the issue still comes up quite often... and, in fact, just as this change was being announced, a class action lawsuit was filed against the company in the US over the issue. Hopefully this case goes nowhere fast, because it seems to be repeating all the mistakes of earlier cases, misunderstanding the purpose of trademarks and falsely blaming Google rather than the actual advertisers. However, it's noteworthy in that it's the first class action suit of this nature, rather than just a single company. That means there will likely be more such suits on the way... and we'll start to see them internationally as well, thanks to the policy change.

In a NY Times article about both the change and the lawsuit, a representative from Google is quoted as saying:

"I think that there will be trademark owners that do not like this policy," said Terri Chen, senior trademark counsel at Google. "But trademark law allows for that. It is a pretty well-established principle in the offline world and in the online world."

Again, while I agree, I find Google's somewhat cavalier attitude towards the lawsuits that are certainly on the way surprising. It's not just that trademark owners won't like the policy. Many of them are going to sue -- and trademark law around the world (unfortunately) is not as "well-established" as Chen seems to make out. All in all, it seems a bit surprising that Google would go out of its way to attract new lawsuits. Could it be that the company is back to fighting certain lawsuits for principle? This was something the company had done years ago, but had largely abandoned of late. Or is there some other reason? Some might argue that it's a pure money grab, as this will allow more (and potentially more lucrative) advertising to run on the site, but the cost of lawsuits and the uncertainty of those lawsuits could be quite expensive.

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future.nerd tips news that Wolfram Alpha is set to be launched tonight at 8PM EST (00:00 GMT), and the entire process will be broadcast live, via webcast. Steven Wolfram said to PCPro, "We've been rather surprised that we haven't been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all. So we thought we would document our own experience. We can't guarantee that everything will go smoothly. We fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that it'll be interesting for people to join us as we work through these in real time." In a related blog post, he explains how Wolfram Alpha interacts with Mathematica.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several have sent word that a YouTube video of recently assassinated lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg has sent Guatemala into a tailspin. The video of Rosenberg claims that if you are watching, he has been murdered by President Alvaro Colom with help from presidential secretary Gustavo Alejos. "The video spread across the Internet after family members handed it out during Rosenberg's funeral on Monday. In the 18-minute tape, a seemingly calm Rosenberg, sitting behind a desk and microphone, alleges that Colom, the First Lady and two associates were involved in murder, corruption and money laundering. The group, he says, filtered public funds through a state-owned bank for personal gain and to finance drug traffickers. Rosenberg then claims that after Khalil Musa, a prominent businessman and bank board member, had learned of the Coloms' scheme, Musa and his daughter were shot to death in front of a shopping center in April. Rosenberg says the President signed off on the killings."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow does a nice job pointing out yet another ridiculous result of copyright law these days: criticism is considered fair use, but promoting the works as a fan is not in many cases. He talks about some of the situations (similar to many we've written about) of entertainment companies cracking down on fans who build tributes to the works that they love. This seems like the sort of thing that copyright law should encourage: having fans express their appreciation for works and sharing it with others? Yet, we don't. Instead, there are protections for critics. So you're in better position to do something with the work of someone else if you hate it, rather than if you love it. Doesn't that seem odd? And, on top of that, it raises a good question: should "fan use" be considered a type of "fair use"?

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pha7boy writes "The Cold War International History Project just released the 'Vassiliev Notebooks.' The notebooks are an important new source of information on Soviet intelligence operations in the United States from 1930 to 1950. Though the KGB's archive remains closed, former KGB officer turned journalist Alexander Vassiliev was given the unique opportunity to spend two years poring over materials from the KGB archive taking detailed notes — including extended verbatim quotes — on some of the KGB's most sensitive files. Though Vassiliev's access was not unfettered, the 1,115 pages of densely handwritten notes that he was able to take shed new and important light on such critical individuals and topics as Alger Hiss, the Rosenberg case, and 'Enormous,' the massive Soviet effort to gather intelligence on the Anglo-American atomic bomb project. Alexander Vassiliev has donated his original copies of the handwritten notebooks to the Library of Congress with no restriction on access. They are available to researchers in the Manuscript Division."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was just last week that we questioned why the FTC hadn't been able to track down the scammers behind the "this is the 2nd notice that the warranty on your car is about to expire" robocalls. Apparently, we were just a little anxious. On Thursday, the FTC filed complaints against two of the companies involved in the scam, noting that they were apparently placing 1.8 million calls per day, with no regard for the Do Not Call List. Apparently, the scam has already brought in $10 million from people who were duped, though the FTC is trying to get all that money back.

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(Photo: Anders Krusberg/The Martha Stewart Show)

On Monday, May 18, I'll be on The Martha Stewart show. I'm going to demonstrate bunch of different projects from the pages of MAKE, and I'll also show Martha how to build a vibrobot. Martha is one of my heroes, so it was a thrill to be on her show!

Above: Martha Stewart is enjoying a Maker-made cup of coffee. The coffee roaster on the left was designed by Larry Cotton and was featured in Make Vol 8. The hydraulic espresso tamper was designed and built by John Edgar Park and appears in Make Vol 12. And that's my espresso machine that I modded with a PID temperature control kit from espressoparts.com.

MAKE Editor Mark Frauenfelder on The Martha Stewart Show this Monday

Over on BBG, our Joel's spotted this visionary statement from one of our would-be masters of technology:

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period."

Quote: Sony Pictures CEO on the value of the internet

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

volume4 writes "A couple of days ago, the folks over at Ajaxian introduced the world to UIzard, an awesome creation by a Korean developer using YUI. There is actually a heck of a lot more about it, and the excitement about the app caused the UIzard website to go down. Most people could not interact with the app or learn more. A day or so later, the website was back but I could still not access the app. I went on a search to find the creator of UIzard to learn more about it, and finally, through Jinho.Jung on Flickr, I got ahold of his email address and hooked up with Ryu Sunt-tae to learn more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Geoff sez, "Games critic Jim Rossignol, from Rock Paper Shotgun and This Gaming Life, has guest-posted on BLDGBLOG about the design of 'evil lairs' in contemporary videogames - from World of Warcraft to System Shock to Shadow of the Colossus. It's a great post, actually - asking what evil is and why we insist on representing it in certain ways, architecturally."

...perhaps the most extraordinary and unearthly of evil videogame architectures are the wandering colossi of Shadow of the Colossus. Great, living structures, lonely behemoths, that stride magnificently across the game world. These sad, shaggy giants of stone and moss must be climbed and slain by the hero, often via use of the surrounding environment of ancient ruins and meticulously designed geological formations. Lairs within lairs.

Of course, monsters are presumably evil, but the reality of the colossi remains ambiguous for much of the game. When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies â€" horribly and permanently â€" when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is all you can do.

Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar.

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds (Thanks, Geoff!)

At the beginning of April I was lucky enough to go to New York City to help Mark Frauenfelder, editor-in-chief of MAKE, prepare for his appearance on The Martha Stewart Show!

The show was taped on April 1st, and will finally air this coming Monday, May 18. You can see a quick preview by clicking here, and then clicking on Monday's show at the top.

On an insider's note, being at the studio and taping the show was fun and exciting. The amount of lights, cameras, tools, and other accoutrements was mind-boggling. All the staff were friendly and helpful and very, very competent at what they do.

Even when some of our projects were lost for several hours in transit, everyone was calm, cool, and collected. I, on the other hand, started to run down 20+ blocks, from Midtown to Chelsea, desperately trying to figure out where we were going to find a cigar box, an old VCR, an electric screwdriver, and some lumber at 6 p.m. on a Monday in Manhattan.

Dress rehearsal with the producer and Mark Frauenfelder; the teleprompter proudly displays the MAKE name!

But no need for alarm; the projects were found and worked great on camera, Mark did a fantastic job describing and demoing the projects, and then for the finale, he and Martha made little vibrating robots out of a candy tin, a paperclip, and a motor from a Dollar Store fan. The audience seemed to like it, the staff liked it, and Martha kept one afterward, so I'm guessing she liked it!

Don't forget to watch or DVR Monday's Martha show! Yay, Mark!

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If you follow copyright issues, you're no doubt aware of Danger Mouse. He's the DJ who got quite a lot of attention a few years back for creating one of the very first mainstream mashups -- mixing the Beatle's The White Album with Jay-Z's The Black Album to create the rather unique The Grey Album. Of course, one of the main reasons why the album became so well known was because EMI sent cease-and-desist letters to everyone who posted copies of the album, and then to anyone who posted that they were going to participate in the "Grey Tuesday" protest. The whole thing seemed pretty silly. It's not as if anyone listening to The Grey Album would find it a substitute for either of the other albums.

Since then, of course, DJ Danger Mouse has gone on to even more mainstream success with his Gnarls Barkley project, a collaboration between Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green. However, it looks like DJ Danger Mouse has another album that he's been working on, in association with Mark Linkous (of Sparklehorse). Yet, due to ongoing legal troubles with EMI, he can't actually release the music. So he's come up with a rather creative solution. Found via Andrew Dubber, the news is that the next album will be released as album artwork with a blank recordable CD.

Yes, a blank CD-R.

There is no music on it. Because if there were music on it, it would get him in more trouble with EMI. Yet, if you have that blank CD and all the artwork, you certainly could (not that they're suggesting you do...) find that music elsewhere and burn it to the CD. The statement from Danger Mouse reads:

Danger Mouse's new project Dark Night Of The Soul consists of an album length piece of music by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and a host of guest vocalists, along with a collection of original David Lynch photography inspired by and based on the music.

The photographs, which provide a visual narrative for the music, are compiled in a limited edition, hand numbered 100+ page book which will now come with a blank, recordable CD-R. All copies will be clearly labeled: 'For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.'

Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the recorded music for Dark Night Of The Soul without fear of being sued by EMI.

Danger Mouse remains hugely proud of Dark Night Of The Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is.

In some ways, this is reminiscent of what the band Green Day did many years ago, offering up blank CDs with artwork for fans who had downloaded the music from unauthorized sources. Yet, in this case, it's even more interesting since there are no authorized sources at all for the music. It'll be fun to see how EMI reacts.

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Hugh Pickens writes "Patent 7,508,978, awarded to Google, shows how the company has already managed to scan more than 7 million books. Google's system uses two cameras and infrared light to automatically correct for the curvature of pages in a book. By constructing a 3D model of each page and then 'de-warping' it afterward, Google can present flat-looking pages online without having to slice books up or mash them onto a flatbed scanner. Stephen Shankland writes that the 'sophistication of the technology illustrates that would-be competitors who want to feature their own digitized libraries won't have a trivial time catching up to Google.' First, a book is placed on a flat surface, while above it, an infrared projector displays a special mazelike pattern onto the pages. Next, two infrared cameras photograph the infrared pattern from different perspectives. 'The images can be stereoscopically combined, using known stereoscopic techniques, to obtain a three-dimensional mapping of the pattern,' according to the patent. 'The pattern falls on the surface of (the) book, causing the three-dimensional mapping of the pattern to correspond to the three-dimensional surface of the page of the book.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s a big day. hCards and hReviews are already published in huge quantities all over the web ... but this is the biggest user-base so far to benefit from the consumption of microformats in an application.

#

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

The "Index of Freedom," maintained by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. By measuring across a wide variety of policies and activities, the study concluded that New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota are the most free, while my own New York is - by significant margin - the least (due in part, no doubt, to the famously draconian drug laws implemented during the Rockefeller era and still not repealed). (Then again, as we look at the Mercatus Center funding, another picture emerges.)

State Policy Index

(Download MP4, or watch on YouTube)

Today's Boing Boing Video episode is an ambient animated short by filmmaker Bob Jaroc and the band Plaid (Warp Records). Best enjoyed with stereophonic supersonic headphones, so you can appreciate the shift from one channel to another, while you watch thousands of starlings take flight in a burnt sunset sky.

Bob Jaroc explains how this lovely, evocative avian work took form:

They were real starlings, not digitally-generated. They were filmed over a few winters here in Brighton. I was lucky enough to have access to the then-abandoned and now destroyed West Pier, and got them down on tape as they were coming in to roost. I then extracted them from the background and edited them to the track, often going back and trying to capture a certain motion to go with a certain bit of audio.

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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)

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eldavojohn writes "The BBC has more details about something we last discussed in 2008 — the showdown of open source versus proprietary software in Africa. When discussing the issue of cost, the piece quotes Microsoft's chairman on the scene, Dr. Cheikh Modibo Diarra, who alludes that open source continually costs you money by saying 'You buy Microsoft software, and you buy it once and for all, the cost that we tell you is the total cost for ownership.' On the other end of the story is Ken Banks from Kiwanja.net who has spent 15 years developing open source applications in Africa. His logic is that 'Today we're seeing growing open-source programmer, developer communities in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries. Clearly, if you have this informal programming sector coming up, access to source code is almost critical if they are going to be able to take advantage of these new tools that are emerging.' Well, the battle rages on, hopefully the emerging African developers and users pick the tool(s) that suit their needs the best."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Gregg Horton used a Thingamakit along with a hacked karaoke machine to create a rather large area of theremin-esque sound control. Cool - at around 2m30s in it does start working quite nicely! Check out more of Greg's projects on the Groovy Pancakes blog.


In the Maker Shed:

Thing-a-ma KIT

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Apparently, down in Guatemala, there's an ongoing political scandal, involving murder, corruption and a big local bank. The whole thing sounds rather unpleasant. Earlier this week, a Guatemalan Twitter user, named Jean Anleu, suggested via Twitter that people should pull their money out of the bank, rather than support the corruption. This seems like a pretty standard Twitter message. Yet, in Guatemala, it resulted in the arrest of the guy for "intent to incite financial panic." Apparently, all within the same day, the guy was brought before a judge, had a trial, and was sentenced, with a large fine. Until he can pay off the fine, he's to remain in detention.

This sounds oddly familiar, of course. It was just a few months ago that South Korea arrested a blogger under similar charges, though (thankfully) that guy was acquitted. Except, in this case, it seems a bit more serious, especially when there appear to have been murders of those who were trying to fight the bank's corruption, and charges that those murders were done with government support.

But, what's interesting is that the news is spreading wide and fast that the government has arrested this Twitter user, turning international attention on the country and what it's doing with this guy. Boing Boing even points out that Central American news organizations are referring to "el efecto streisand" to describe how much attention this is generating. As the guy who coined the term "the Streisand Effect," in the first place, I have to admit some amount of pride in discovering that the term is being used in foreign headlines in other languages -- though I wish the actual details of this guy's arrest weren't so clearly an attempt to crack down on gov't criticism.

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This guy made his own version of the commercially-available Kitty Cot that we posted about before.

Cat Window Seat

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Several user have pointed out a recent request to technology companies from the Defense Information System Agency for ideas on how to build an e-mail defense system to catch spam. The solution would have to scan about 50 million inbound messages a day across some 700 unclassified network domains. "Defense currently scans e-mails for viruses and spam coming into systems serving the military services, commands or units. DISA wants to extend the protection to the interface between the Internet and its unclassified network, the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network. The agency also wants the ability to scan all outbound e-mails from the 5 million users. [...] DISA's request ties in with recommendations that the Defense Science Board issued in April that said Defense is more vulnerable to cyberattacks because of its decentralized networks and systems. The board envisioned a major role for DISA in developing the architecture for enterprise-wide systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize certain aspects of social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter, and it's no surprise at all that there's something of a growing backlash against some of the sites. But, what's amazing is the level of hyperbole that has come with criticism of both Facebook and Twitter over the past few months, most of it either flat-out wrong or, at the very least, uninformed:

• First, there was the totally ridiculous claim that Facebook would give you cancer. Of course, that's just what the press release said. The actual research said no such thing.
• Then there were the researchers who claimed that Facebook made girls depressed, but seemed unaware of the difference between correlation and causation.
• Then there was the claim that the only people who used Twitter were losers who had no self-identity (this from a clinical psychologist) or massively insecure (from a cognitive neuroscientist). There was no reasoning behind those claims. They just didn't like Twitter. The same thing, of course, could be said about email. Or the telephone. Or the telegraph. Or letters. How dare people wish to communicate with others! Insecure bastards!
• Next up was the pharmacology professor who claimed that Twitter and Facebook help infantilize our brains. Based on what evidence? Nothing more than a hunch and some incorrect assumptions. I'd argue that making stuff up is more likely to infantilize our brains than communicating with others.
• Then there was the study that got tons of press about how students who used Facebook got worse grades than those who didn't. The problem there? Bad research methodology. Some more comprehensive research showed the original findings were total bunk.
• And, now, the very latest, found via Mathew Ingram is some guy (who's name we won't even bother mentioning because he's simply trying to gain publicity to sell books on how to get noticed) claiming that Twitter causes brain damage. He had put out a press release claiming this (he's not a doctor or a scientist or anything -- just a "social media expert" who obviously shouldn't be hired for help with Twitter), but then pulled it down when someone who had a relative with brain damage complained. But he stuck by his complaints, none of which make much sense:

  Twitter is little more than a slick microblog service, really nothing more than Facebook's status update feature, which I happen to think is better designed.

  Er... no one said it was anything more than that. But it is actually quite different from Facebook's status update, mainly in the openness of Twitter. But that's fine. So he doesn't like it. Why does that mean it causes brain damage?

  I don't want to follow Domino's pizza on Twitter. Sometimes I just want the pizza, you know?

  I don't want to follow Domino's Pizza on Twitter either. So, you know what? I don't.

  And I think Twitter teaches younger users the wrong values -- namely, that WHAT you say matters far less than how many "followers" you have.

  Really? Then someone is using Twitter incorrectly. I never look at how many followers anyone has and I don't really care. All that matters to me in figuring out who I follow is if they have something interesting to say. In my experience, Twitter is exactly the opposite of what this guy claims. Perhaps his issue about numbers of users displays more about his own fears than Twitter.

  And it is making us dumber: news anchors airing dumb, abbreviated opinions of 15-year-olds. Who cares?

  Ah, yes, anecdotal stupidity. Well, it's just as easy to flip that around. Twitter is allowing those who never had a voice before to get heard. Will it be misused or used badly? Sure, at times. But does that condemn the whole system? No more than the fact that some folks use the telephone to say stupid things to one another means the telephone makes us stupid.

  Also, most of what I read on Twitter is social posturing, self-promotion, and nonsense -- a whole community of people trying to boost their "follower count" without building real relationships with friends or customers or anyone else.

  The problem seems to be this guy doesn't follow interesting people and doesn't seem to recognize the little button that makes it easy to unfollow anyone you dislike. Most of what I read on Twitter is insightful, interesting, relevant and fascinating. But that's because I try to follow insightful, interesting, relevant and fascinating people on Twitter. This guy should try that.

On the whole, though, it does seem a bit odd, looking at how incredibly hyperbolic and unsupported all of these claims are. Based on them, I could easily retort that "Criticizing Twitter And Facebook Makes You Stupid." But who would make widespread generalizations based on a few hand-picked pieces of data anyway?

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miller60 writes "A Japanese company called Freebit has released ServersMan, an app that turns the iPhone into a web server. It debuted in Japan in February, has now been launched in the US, and is being touted as a 'Personal Data Center.' Freebit also has a video with additional information on server-enabling your iPhone. 'Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit's VPN software will engage the connection.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

miller60 writes "A Japanese company called Freebit has released ServersMan, an app that turns the iPhone into a web server. It debuted in Japan in February, has now been launched in the US, and is being touted as a 'Personal Data Center.' Freebit also has a video with additional information on server-enabling your iPhone. 'Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit's VPN software will engage the connection.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tim Lee points us to a somewhat (unintentionally) amusing article claiming that China has somehow developed a security "hardened" microprocessor and operation system that is effectively hackproof. Of course, there's no evidence of this presented whatsoever. And, it's somewhat difficult to believe that such a "security hardened" system could exist -- especially in a case where it's never actually been tested out in the real world against those who have incentive to hack it. So why does the reporter parrot these claims as if they're simple fact?

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fm6 writes "Bloomsbury Publishing, best known for the Harry Potter books, has announced a new series of science books that will be available for free online. Bloomsbury thinks they can make enough money off of hard-copy sales to turn a 'small profit.' The online version will be covered by a Creative Commons license which allows free non-commercial use. They've already had some success with the one book they've published this way, Larry Lessig's 'Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy.' The series, 'Science, Ethics and Innovation,' will be edited by Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Photo from Connors934 on Flickr]

A few weeks ago I was at Mass Maritime Academy and was impressed by their efforts to use and prove out solar powered lighting for their walkways.

The lights illuminate the northwest campus areas around the dormitories and dining hall. The lights, provided by SolarOne® and Hadco, are powered by photovoltaic (PV) panels, making them completely independent of the electric grid. With their own solar power source, the light posts can easily be installed wherever light is needed, without expensive investments in trenching, cabling and repaving. "We now have a beautifully lit walkway students are using extensively, day and night" said Capt. Allen Hansen, who championed the alternative energy project and is Vice President of Operations at the school. The new lights replace an old assortment of low pressure sodium fixtures and overbearing flood lights, the combination of which left the campus spotty, dark and poorly lit. Instead of adding safety, the old lighting created isolated pools of glare between dark areas. With no underground power conduits, the easily installed PV-powered lights were readily and economically placed along walkways and around the dormitories, which previously had no site lighting....The softer, whiter directional LED lamps provide exceptional clarity and visibility on areas that require light, without sending stray light into areas that are best left dark. The result is an enhanced night time setting, with marked reduction in light pollution and energy usage.

In the United States, we generate most of our electricity by burning coal to heat water and use the resulting steam to turn a turbine which generates electricity. There are other sources of fuel in our energy portfolio, but most of it still comes from coal, the most carbon-rich fuel on the palette. We get some of our energy from other fossil fuels like natural gas and oil as well, and it's likely that we will not be able to continue withdrawing from our energy bank forever. Some people believe that we have or about to reach a peak in oil production, meaning that we have taken the easy stuff out of the ground and are faced with the unpleasant and difficult task of chasing the last drop. Whatever your reasons for wanting to see us reduce our dependence on non-renewable foreign sources of energy, it makes a lot of sense for us makers to look at solar energy. Fortunately, the sun still shines on the ground, where its energy can be harvested, used and stored.

[Photo from Connors934 on Flickr]

The Vineyard Energy Project aims to reduce Martha's Vineyard's dependence on off-island power:

Solar Energy is a great way to get us started on the road to becoming a Renewable Energy Island and help us achieve greater energy independence. Generating power and making hot water on island homes and businesses reduces our contribution to Climate Change, particularly when combined with energy efficiency efforts. Energy generated locally is more efficient because there is less transmission loss.

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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

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Douglas Rushkoff - author of the book Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back - is a guest blogger.

I'm posting an excerpt from my upcoming book, Life Inc., every Monday morning until the book publishes on June 2. Two weeks ago, I published the introduction. Last week, I published the first half of Chapter One. Today, some excerpts that answer or at least address the questions and comments being raised here at BB. Next week is the final installment. I'll also be keeping the excerpts up as PDFs at LifeIncorporated.net.

from CHAPTER ONE
ONCE REMOVED: THE CORPORATE LIFE- FORM

...As a result, our physical, commercial, spiritual, and personal accomplishments came to be valued only insofar as they could serve the market. And while the market may be as good a model as any for human interaction, the corporate terrain did not represent a level playing field or a "free market" in which value might be created from anywhere. Remember--in spite of its individualistic mythology of open competition, the landscape of corporatism was first cultivated during the Renaissance, when local currencies were outlawed in favor of centralized money.

In the United States, in an assumption of centralized value creation that reached a crescendo under the Nixon administration, the Federal Reserve won the authority to create money by fiat, based on nothing but faith in its own corporate chutzpah.

The massive potential of computers and networking, technologies developed in many cases by engineers hoping to decentralize the very power structures funding their projects, was quickly recontextualized as a market opportunity--the beginning of a "long boom"--and appropriated as NASDAQ's stepchild. New rules for a new economy were invented, in which people's ability to access interactive technology for free or to create value independent of any corporation could be understood as the power of the network to leverage what were formerly "externalities." The dot- com boosters sought to reconcile the incompatibility of an abundant, decentralized media space with the legacy of a scarce, centralized monetary system.

Everything is "open source," except, of course, money itself.

Instead of serving to reconnect us, our technologies now serve to disconnect us further, reducing our contact to virtual prods and pokes. Meanwhile, corporations are finding online a path toward incarnation: Chase and Coca- Cola build avatars in online environments such as the Second Life "virtual world" that are as real as we are. Sometimes more so, especially as our life and status online dictate or even supersede our life and status in the former real world.
 

The institutions of last resort, be they religious or nonprofit, are themselves in the thrall of the marketing techniques employed on behalf of their corporate rivals. Instead of presenting alternatives to totalitarian corporatism, they conclude that "if you can't beat them, join them." Religions hire consultants to re-brand them in the image of MTV, while charities refashion themselves into for-profit corporations seeking "social- philanthropy" money as sexy to venture capitalists as an Internet IPO (initial public offering of shares). Even those who seek to overturn what they see as the corporate hegemony succumb to the logic of corporatism in their campaigns.

It's not just that the landscape is sloped toward corporate interests, but that our own beliefs and activities are directed by corporate logic. When those of us alive today have no memory of a world that functioned in any other way, how are we to think otherwise? Like kids with a radio dial that plays nothing but Top 40 songs, we have adapted to the music that we hear, and choose our favorite tunes and pop heroes from the available menagerie.

With no other choice available, we grow up partnering with corporations for our very identities. A kid's selection of sneaker brand says more about him than his creative- writing assignments do, and is approached with greater care. Our ability to actually do anything about, say, greenhouse- gas emissions is based entirely on the extent to which we can trust Toyota's claims about developing a car that cleans the air as it drives. Our feedback and participation are managed by customer service, empowering us as consumers by infantilizing us as human beings. This dependency augurs a regression on our part, and a transference of parental authority onto our corporations that recalls our ancestors' allegiance to emperors and high priests.

While some corporations may serve as our accepted public enemies, others quickly step in to embody our dissent. Ford's contention that it knew the one right car for every American was countered by GM's repackaging of its cars in personalized brands for each of us. As much as Microsoft frightens us by echoing the tactics of chartered monopolies, Apple and Google excite us by presenting the illusion of a bottom- up, people- centered alternative. We hate Nike and love Air-walk, hate Hummer and love Mini, hate Nabisco and love Hain, hate A&P and love Whole Foods. Or vice versa.

But we all love corporations.

from - CHAPTER SEVEN
FROM ECOLOGY TO ECONOMY
Big Business and the Disconnect from Value

...There are two economies--the real economy of groceries, day care, and paychecks, and the speculative economy of assets, commodities, and derivatives. What forecasters refer to as "the economy" today isn't the real one; it's almost entirely virtual. It's a speculative marketplace that has very little to do with getting real things to the people who need them, and much more to do with providing ways for passive investors to increase their capital. This economy of markets--first created to give the rising merchant class in the late Middle Ages a way to invest their winnings--is not based on work or even the injection of capital into new enterprises. It's based instead on "making markets" in things that are scarce--or, more accurately, things that can be made scarce, like land, food, coal, oil, and even money itself.

Because there's so much excess capital to invest, speculators make markets in pretty much anything that real people actually use, or can be made to use through lobbying and advertising. The problem is that when coal or corn isn't just fuel or food but also an asset class, the laws of supply and demand cease to be the principal forces determining their price.

When there's a lot of money and few places to invest it, anything considered a speculative asset becomes overpriced. And then real people can't afford the stuff they need. The oil spike of 2008, which contributed to the fall of ill- prepared American car companies, has ultimately been attributed not to the laws of supply and demand, but to the price manipulations of hedge- fund speculators. Real jobs were lost to movements in a purely speculative marketplace.

This is the reality of speculation in an economy defined by scarcity. Pollution is good, not bad, because it turns water from a plentiful resource into a scarce asset class. When sixty- eight million acres of corporate- leased U.S. oil fields are left untapped and filled tankers are parked offshore, energy futures stay high. Airlines that bet correctly on these oil futures stay in business; those that focus on service or safety, instead, end up acquisition targets at best--and pension calamities at worst. Such is the logic of the speculative economy.

As more assets fall under the control of the futures markets, speculators gain more influence over both government policy and public opinion. Between 2000 and 2007, trading in commodities markets in the United States more than sextupled. During that same period, the staff of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission overseeing those trades was cut more than 20 percent, with no corresponding increase in technological efficiency. Meanwhile, speculators have only gotten better at exploiting structural loopholes to engage in commodities trades beyond the sight of the few remaining regulators. Over-the- counter trading on the International Commodities Exchange in London is virtually untraceable, while massive and highly leveraged trades from one hedge fund to another are impossible to track until one or the other goes belly- up--and pleads to be bailed out with some form of taxpayer dollars. Government is essentially powerless to identify those who are manipulating commodities futures at consumers' expense, and even more powerless to prosecute them under current law even if they could. People, meanwhile, come to believe that oil or corn is more scarce than it is (or needs to be), and that they're in competition with the Chinese or the neighbors for what's left.

The speculative economy is related to the real economy, but more as a parasite than as a positive force. It is detached from the real needs of people, and even detached from the real commerce that goes on between humans. It is a form of meta- commerce, like a Las Vegas casino betting on the outcome of a political election. Only in this case, the bets change the costs of the real things people depend on.

As wealth is sucked out of real economies and shifted into the speculative economy, people's behavior and activities can't help but become more market- based and less social. We begin to act more in accordance with John Nash's selfish and calculating competitors, confirming and reinforcing our dog- eat- dog behaviors. The problem is, because it's actually against our nature to behave this way, we're not too good at it. We end up struggling against one another while getting fleeced by more skilled and structurally favored competition from distant and abstracted banks and corporations. Worse, we begin to feel as though any activity not in some way tied to the corporate sphere is not really happening.

Wal- Mart's success in extracting value from local communities, for example, is tied directly to the company's participation in speculative markets beyond the reach of small business, and its tremendous ability to centralize capital. We buy from Wal- Mart because Wal- Mart sells imported and long- distance products cheaper than the local tailor or pharmacist can. Not only does the company get better wholesale prices; its centrality and size lets it get its money cheaper. Meanwhile, because we are forced to use centralized currency instead of a more local means of exchange or barter (and we'll look at these possibilities later), each of our transactions with local merchants is passed through a multiplicity of distant banks and lenders.

All of the advantages and efficiencies of local commerce are neutralized when we are required to use long- distance, antitransactional currency for local exchange between people. We must earn the currency from one corporation that has borrowed from the central bank in order to pay another corporation for a product it has purchased from yet another. We don't have an easy way to get the very same product from the guy down the street who knows how to make it better and get it to us ultimately more efficiently than the factory in Asia.

But the notion of purchasing things with some kind of local currency system, bartering for them with members of our local community, or--worst of all--accepting favors in exchange for other ones feels messy and confusing to us. Besides, Wal- Mart is a big company with lots of insurance and presumably some deep pockets we could sue if something goes wrong. When favors replace dollars, who is responsible for what? Too many of us would rather hire a professional rug cleaner, nanny, or taxi than borrow a steamer from a neighbor (what if we break it?), do a babysitting exchange (do we really like them?), or join a carpool (every day? Ugh). Social obligations are less defined than financial ones.

Our successive disconnects from place and people are what make this final disconnection from value so complete and difficult to combat. We have lost our identification with place as anything but a measure of assets, and we have surrendered our identification with others to an obsession with ourselves against everybody else. Without access or even inclination to social or civic alternatives, we turn to the speculative market to fulfill needs that could have been satisfied in other ways.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

I just raced through two novels - not because I had to finish them quickly, but because they moved so quickly.

The first, by my best friend from college Walter Kirn, is an entertaining but (for me, anyway) nightmarish reminiscence on trying to make it through Princeton called Lost in the Meritocracy, based on this essay Kirn wrote for The Atlantic. Not the academics, but the culture itself. What self-conscious public school kids like Walter and me learned at Princeton was that there really super wealthy people who control a heck of a lot of the world, and that they have institutions like Princeton to help their kids find one another and then inherit their daddies' places. Yes, I know most of you already know that - but we didn't. It was a more innocent era, and these kind of things came as big, adolescent, crises of disillusionment that required ample self-medication. And Kirn's writing, if you haven't gotten to experience it before, is the most effortlessly engaging literary literature being written today.

The second is a book by novelist Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the acclaimed Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, then went ahead and won a MacArthur genius grant which made the rest of us really jealous. It's hard to be too jealous, though, because Jonathan is a totally sweet guy and he actually is the sort of genius writer for whom such prizes were created. And, most of all, he used the time and money to create his first true work of genius, Chronic City, which - like Kirn's novel - deconstructs the hyper-competitive social landscape of eastern urbanites in a fair but viciously accurate near-future parody of manners and hermeneutics.

Death Metal suggests we peruse a piece up at Wired on how the Obama administration's draft guidelines for stem cell research could invalidate hundreds of cell lines. "Under the Obama administration's proposed rules for funding embryonic stem cell research, hundreds of existing cell lines could be ineligible, even those that qualified under President Bush. The guidelines were written by the National Institutes of Health and are currently in draft form and expected to be finalized in July. But in their current state, they restrict funding to stem cell lines produced according to new rules that are only now being established. Few existing cell lines will meet those requirements. 'The so-called Presidential lines aren't suitable for actual medical application,' said Patrick Taylor, deputy counsel at Children's Hospital Boston, who criticized the NIH guidelines in a paper published Thursday in Cell Stem Cell. 'But we're talking about many, many more lines. The new lines were created with extensive ethical oversight. They're at stake here.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

Although I begged them (and they agreed at the time) to change their name from Personal Democracy Forum to Participatory Democracy Forum, the name remains the same. But the purpose remains the same, too, so I'm glad I got invited to participate in the Forum's conference again this year in New York City on June 29 and 30.

The one thing that has changed, however, was my ability to negotiate a short-term discount of $100 for BoingBoing readers who want to go, by using the discount code "boingboingpdf". That's only going to work for the next 24 hours, but that's better than nothing. (They are pretty good about finding roles for interns, too, so try for that if the entry fee is still too high.)

On the brightest side, this year's confirmed participants include Danah Boyd, Clay Shirky, Frank Rich, Dan Gillmor, Jack Dorsey, Dave Troy, Baratune Thurston, Ana Marie Cox, Vivek Kundra, Amanda Rose, Tara Hunt, Nate Silver, Craig Newmark, Gina Bianchini, Beth Noveck, Jeff Jarvis, Scott Simon, Michael Wesch, Joe Rospars, David Weinberger, and Mark Pesce. And unlike a lot of conferences, these folks actually participate in the whole thing.

(Micah Sifry of PDF informs me that they tried to change the name to Participatory Democracy, but couldn't find an unused url for it.)

Lots of people have pointed out that one of the massive downsides of an eBook device like the Kindle is that you don't actually own the books you bought. Unlike a real book, you can't share it with a friend, resell it or donate it to the local library. And, in some cases, you can lose access to books you thought you "owned," based on the whims of employees at Amazon deciding you somehow abused their system. One of the big controversies over the Kindle was the TTS feature, which the Authors Guild claimed (without a shred of legal evidence) violated its rights. The Authors Guild had no claim here. It doesn't violate performance rights, because reading aloud isn't a performance. It doesn't violate copyright, because there's no fixed copy made -- and if it did violate copyright, so would reading a book aloud. Yet, for no clear reason, Amazon caved in and agreed to take away this feature.

Mark alerts us to the news that, as of May 13th, Amazon began remotely disabling the feature for certain eBooks, including many popular titles. In other words, Amazon remotely took away a feature that you used to have. That doesn't happen with a physical book. Random House doesn't get to say "oh, wait, we're now taking away the ability to dog ear pages." I love the concept of eBooks, but it's quite troubling that you don't actually get ownership of the eBooks you're buying -- and that Amazon can, at its own discretion, suddenly take away valuable features from books you had already purchased.

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Just Posted! We've had a Panasonic GH1 to play with for a couple of weeks and - since it's going to be a while until we can publish a full review - we thought we'd produce a quick gallery of stills and a handful of HD quality movies to give you an idea of what the camera (and the new 14-140mm zoom lens) are capable of.

Scott Lockwood writes "Below Average Dave, a Dr. Demento style parody artist, has been shut down by the ASCAP. This collective, acting as badly as the RIAA, is now attempting to ignore the 2 Live Crew Supreme Court decision that parodies are new derivative works. Just like the RIAA, ASCAP seems intent on misrepresents the law. If you know anyone who can help BA Dave in his plight, please contact him." This artist doesn't have the resources to fight the ASCAP, even though the law is pretty clearly on his side. Anyone at the EFF or the ACLU interested?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kyriacos notes that Microsoft will be adding memcpy() to its list of function calls banned under its secure development lifecycle. This reader asks, "I was wondering how advanced C/C++ programmers view this move. Do you find this having a negative impact on the flexibility of the language, and do you think it will restrict the creativity of the programmer?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just Posted! We've just added a quick gallery of shots taken with one of the more interesting compact digital cameras launched recently, the CMOS-sensored Ricoh CX-1. Click through to see how well this compact superzoom camera performs in our preview gallery.

Recently on Offworld, Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol used the occasion of Eidos Montreal taking the reigns of the Thief franchise to take a deeper look back at the legacy of the game and the legacy of the people who made it, and the remarkably high bar Eidos will have to reach. We also looked at upcoming games: a nine minute walkthrough of BioShock 2, the coming storm of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima's next game, a next-gen Breakout-meets-shooter for PS3, the tiny planets and big chaos of Max Blastronaut, as well as more Noby Noby Boy culinary treats, and Rag Doll Kung Fu's PS3 remake gone free for a week. More artful things: what happens when you tear videogame code like modern artist Lucio Fontana slashed his canvases, 8-bit game iconography meets ancient Andean textile art, the sexiest Space Invaders psych-pop ever created, Metal Gear meets Mary Blair, and swimming in a low-bit pixel pool. And other odds and ends: a new Space In-vader shirt, a shirt to make you a Sackboy, a glitch-pop chiptune afterparty, Fable and Mario 64 in paper, and Super Smash Bros. meets Team Fortress 2.

Yesterday I asked who are your tech heroes. Please read the description for what I mean as a hero. Now today I'd like to ask a slightly different question.

I want to know about people who are active in technology who also blog whose integrity you trust.

I'm not looking for journalists who have a blog who write about technology, so even though I admire Marshall Kirkpatrick or Om Malik (only two examples, there are many more) they're not who I'm looking for.

I'm looking for people who might be thought of as sources for reporters who have gone direct.

This is not an idle question -- it's for a project I'm working on with a few other people. My job is to find some of these sources, people of integrity who write publicly about what they believe. The area I've been assigned to cover is tech.

Instructables user bigtreehouse writes:

The goal was to make a light box for my students to use that didn't cost me an arm and a leg. Went to the second-hand store and found a florescent light... ($4.99 with 50% off) then noticed a suitcase/briefcase ($3.99 with 50% off). I got them both and started thinking of ways to put them together.

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techno-vampire writes with word that a long-accepted model of deep ocean currents is inaccurate. Deep Sea New has a summary of the research, to be published in Nature. The Woods Hole press release has more details. "A 50 year old model of global thermohaline circulation that predicts a deep Atlantic counter current below the Gulf Stream is now formally called into question by an armada of subsurface RAFOS floats drifting 700 - 1500m deep. Nearly 80% of the RAFOS floats escaped the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC), drifting into the open ocean. This confirms suspicions that have been around since the 1990's, and likely plays havoc with global models of climate change."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's widely known that internal staff are the biggest threat to IT security, but what about your computer repairman? After a hard drive was stolen from Real Living Action Realty in Pennsylvania, the company called Kevin Andrew Lutes, who had done repair work for them in the past, to fix the machine. He told them he could retrieve the files, but the owner later called the computer manufacturer and learned that it's impossible to do this... without the hard drive. Oh, and the police learned that Lutes' car -- computer repair sticker and all -- was spotted outside the office on the night of the break-in. When he returned a few days later with the stolen hard drive back inside the computer and tried to charge the company $2000 for the "repair," Lutes was arrested and charged with theft. You'd think that with potential access to the machine, he could have done something a little more subtle or sinister, but, lucky for the company, their repairman turned out to be a pretty dumb criminal. Someone should let him know that basing a business model on artificial scarcity is a bad idea...

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

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I read this morning that the NY Times will decide by the end of June how to generate more revenue from its online presence.

The two choices, they say, are: 1. Metering and 2. Membership. Metering is complicated, but boils down to a new rule -- you can use the site for free for a while, then you have to pay. Membership is like NPR membership. They ask for donations, if you like the service, you give them money. You might get a coffee mug or tote bag.

My opinion: They shouldn't do #1, it would screw everything up, and they might as well try #2, it will raise some money, but not enough, not until they inspire people with new ideas. (Make note, this inspiration is hugely important, I'm going to show you how to get it.)

I do think I know how this will shake out, but I don't have time this morning to explain in detail why. You'll find plenty of pieces in the archive of scripting.com that back these ideas up. I can't prove that they'll work, but I'm pretty sure they will. But they will require the Times to give up one of its sacred tenets. And that won't go down easy. But I believe the quality and integrity of the product will soar as a result. But change is hard.

First some premises:

1. People want more news, faster.

2. The news industry has been cutting back.

3. Even so, news still happens.

4. Believe it or not, the tech industry doesn't know how to deliver news on the Internet. (Caveat: It's getting there.)

5. This creates a vacuum that is being filled by what some call "User Generated Content." I don't like that term. Instead, I call it "Sources Go Direct." Same idea, but with more respect and emphasis on quality. Sure, some of the stuff you read online is crap, but some of it is the quality stuff we crave.

Now what is the Times? Here's what I think it is.

It's a somewhat tarnished brand that equates in people's minds to "The Best in Journalism." It's not the printing press, the trucks, or even the editors and reporters. It is the logo and the tradition, the history. Whatever the Times does, it must not diminish the value of the brand, it must enhance it. The challenge is to tap into the enormous potential of the Internet as a news creation and delivery system.

Like it or not, and quite a few Times reporters don't like it -- much of the value in the Times is captured by its sources. The reporters, when they're doing their best work, are facilitating the flow of ideas and information from sources to readers. And don't miss that the flow works the other way too, from readers back to sources. The newspapers have been complaining wildly about this, they say the bloggers get their ideas from news people. And who do you think the news people get their ideas from? And the truth is that a lot of the bloggers they don't like are also sources.

To understand how news works, you need to visualize a flow diagram that includes all the elements of the news process. All the people, not just the reporters and editors. That's where the growth is going to come from.

So basically the Times must evolve, just a little, to see their sources not just as quotes, but also as reporters with a beat -- their expertise. There's still enough shine in the Times rep that people could be enticed to write for the Times, for a fraction of what a reporter makes. Not for free, they must share in whatever revenue the Times gets from their work. But the Times is entitled to a cut, we want the Times to get a cut, because we want this system to go forward. Remember when I said inspiration was going to be key to it, this is how you build it. By showing people how you are going to lead us to the future. So far, I hate to say it, but the news industry has been a huge stick in the mud when it comes to the future. Just getting rid of the drag would be enough to get us to open our wallets, a bit. But imagine if the news industry decided that news was exciting again! That would do a lot to inspire people.

Basically, we're not going to let you fail if we love what you're doing.

And conversely, we're not going to rush to your aid if you're holding us back.

Now I have to get back to work writing some software for this new world.

PS: One more thing. Of course reporters reading this are going to ask "What about me?" Well, you have to find a job that pays a salary and provides the benefits you need. Today there are some jobs for reporters. What skills do you have that a news org might need in a world where sources go direct?

eldavojohn writes "Ars has a summary of the curious events surrounding the death of broadband over power lines (BPL). We've discussed BPL's trials and advances here many times. The Federal Communications Commission's go-ahead was halted last year by a federal court, after a suit by the American Radio Relay League over claims of unacceptable radio interference from BPL. The DC Court of Appeals judge noted, 'There is little doubt that the [FCC] deliberately attempted to exclude from the record evidence adverse to its position.' The ARRL's FOIA request to obtain non-redacted documents finally bore fruit under the Obama administrations more open FOIA guidelines. The ARRL's preliminary analysis of the released documents point out a few critical areas where the FCC redacted data that is clearly adverse to the claims of BPL proponents. By rights, this ought to lay BPL to rest once and for all." A story at Broadband Reports notes that BPL is dying on its own, as most of the vendors who had been testing it "have since moved on to promote smart electrical grid functionality."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Finding the right approach for gender-specific marketing can be really tricky, said Andrea Learned, a marketing expert and author of Don't Think Pink — What Really Makes Women Buy. So when Dell recently took the wraps off a new Web site called Della, geared toward women, featuring tech 'tips' that recommended calorie counting, finding recipes, and watching cooking videos as ways for women to get the most from a laptop, a backlash erupted online, as both women and men described the Web site as 'ridiculous' and 'gimmicky.' Della's heavy emphasis on colors, computer accessories, dieting tips, and even the inclusion of a video about vintage shopping 'seems condescending to women consumers,' says Learned. Instead, Dell should have emphasized function and figured out ways to sell the netbooks that weren't clichéd and reliant on gender stereotypes. 'Some brands go too far with the girlie stuff,' Learned says. 'Della's marketing strategy sounds like it's advertising a purse. There's a level of consumer sophistication they're missing.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, we've found it absolutely ridiculous that the movie studios have required that anyone attending early preview screenings remove and deposit their mobile phones in some (often unguarded) box. The entire policy has never made much sense. First of all, a mobile phone is unlikely to have a decent enough camera or enough memory to actually video tape a movie. Second... who cares? This is all part of studios stupidly overreacting to the idea that their movies might leak online before the official release date. Yet, as we've seen there's almost no evidence to support the idea that the availability of the movie online has any negative impact on box office proceeds. So, for the uncomprehendingly small chance that someone at a screening is able to record the movie with his or her phone and get it online, and that version of the film somehow destroys box office proceeds... Hollywood has decided it makes sense to treat everyone (including movie critics) who attend preview screenings as if they're criminals.

It's even being taken to more ridiculous levels now. Valleywag points out that Time Warner entertainment critic was stopped from watching a Warner Bros. (yes, owned by Time Warner...) screening, because he refused to give up his iPhone. Yes, the same iPhone that does not have a video recording function. Perhaps they were afraid he'd be playing games through the screening? Or maybe Twittering away a live commentary?

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Make some crazy sounds from a teensy-tiny musical instrument.
Thanks go to Brian McNamara for the original article in MAKE, Volume 15.
To download The Mooftronic Mini Synth MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete Mooftronic Mini Synth article in MAKE, Volume 15.
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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Make some crazy sounds from a teensy-tiny musical instrument.
Thanks go to Brian McNamara for the original article in MAKE, Volume 15.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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Elektroschock writes "For 4 years MEP Marco Cappato tried to get access to the EU Council's 2005 open source migration study because he is a member of a responsible IT oversight committee in the European Parliament. His repeated requests for access were denied. Now they have finally been answered because the Council's study has escaped into the wild (PDF in French and English). Here is a quick look. It is embarrassing! Gartner, when asked if there were any mature public Linux installations in Europe, claimed that there were none. Michael Silver said, 'I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments.' Gartner spread patent and TCO FUD. Also, the European Patent Office participated in the project, although it is not an EU institution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member jmsaltzman coded some extra functionality into a basic momentary pushbutton -

To get more functionality out of a single button and to add a "hidden" mode, I extended button debouncing logic to allow for click as well as press+hold. The green LED toggles when the button is clicked, and the red LED toggles on press and hold. In this example, the hold time is 2 sec.

Of course this technique comes in very handy when your project is running low on available pins. Arduino compatible code is available in the comments of his blog entry.

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From Hack N Mod:

We've seen some projects featuring how to draw with light using your camera's exposure settings, but nothing compares to this. This group goes by the name of Light Art Performance Photography and they use lasers, LEDs, illuminated body suits, sparklers and just about anything else which emits light to construct these incredible works of art.

Mindblowing LED, Light and Laser Photography

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Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Matan sez, "We made a film about mass collaboration through the Web and how it is reshaping the future of government. "Us Now" features Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott and lots of other clever people. And we made it look pretty too! Better still, it's up for FREE online streaming!"

Us Now (Thanks, Matan!)

thefickler writes "Reading about Peter Wayner and his problems with book piracy, reminded me of another writer Thomas Crampton, who has the opposite problem — a lot of his work has been wiped from the Internet. Thomas Crampton has worked for the New York Times (NYT) and the International Herald Tribune (IHT) for about a decade, but when the websites of the two newspapers were merged two months ago, a lot of Crampton's work disappeared into the ether. Links to the old stories are simply hitting generic pages. Crampton wrote a letter to Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the NYT, pleading for his work to be put back online. The hilarious part: according to one analysis, the NYT is throwing away at least $100,000 for every month that the links remain broken."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stef sez, The British Chiropractic Association is using the libel laws to try and silence Simon Singh's discussion of some of the more, uh, unusual claims they make for Chiropractic treatments (such as curing Colic and Asthma). They've sued Simon for libel for describing such claims as 'bogus', and in a preliminary hearing a judge has chosen a somewhat odd, harder to defend, definition of the word, even though Simon clarified his precise meaning in the very same article. Dave Gorman has a good summary, and there's a lot more detail at Jack of Kent."

Two Things (Part B) (Thanks, Stef!)

Take-Two Interactive has now sued 3D Realms over the cancellation of Duke Nukem Forever . Take-Two did not provide continuous funding for the game, but they did pay $12 million for the publishing rights to the game. A Bloomberg report quotes Take-Two's complaint as saying that 3D Realms "continually delayed the completion date" and "repeatedly assured Take-Two and the video-gaming community that it was diligently working toward competing development of the PC Version" of the game. (The complaint refers to 3D Realms as part of Apogee Software, Ltd., not to be confused with Apogee Software, LLC, the publisher behind the still-forthcoming Duke Nukem Trilogy.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world of Twitter got its collective knickers in a twist earlier this week when the company made a change to the settings of its service. The particular change was pretty small, but seemed to disproportionately effect "power users" and early adopters, so, of course, the uproar over it was pretty intense, and Twitter changed the change. The details of the change aren't all that important, but like with the response to Facebook's recent TOS change, it's dragged out some rather interesting opinions. A personal favorite of mine is the response to the backlash that since users aren't paying anything for these services, they have no right to complain. Apparently users should "pay up" so they have the right "to voice [their] displeasure as a customer rather than as a user" -- and this coming from a guy who writes a blog about open-source software. It's one thing for a business to ignore complaints that don't come from customers or potential customers, but in the case of free services, to imply that users' opinions don't count because they're not ponying up any cash is fairly ridiculous. Most free services rely on their users to create revenue in other ways, such as by providing traffic to monetize; alienation of users that results in a downturn in traffic, and in turn, ad revenue, has exactly the same effect as losing paying customers' repeat business. The distinction between "customer" and "user" is, in many cases, becoming increasingly irrelevant. And never mind that in many instances, such as with Twitter and Facebook, it's impossible for users to become paying customers. It's hard to imagine that either company thinks it's okay to ignore its users simply because they don't pay.

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 most recent statistical data by duplicated content analysis engine Attributor indicates that nearly half of the web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 percent of the original text of articles. For prestigious and long-established news organization like AP, this is a completely new battleground and understanding how to counter such new issues has rapidly become of critical strategic importance. Photo credit: David Humphrey What is the most effective path towards revenue growth for major online publishers in the face of such obstacles? Charging for the news like Murdoch advises? Many such large publishing companies are still trying to find answers to that question. Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, but is not always successful and it often brings back negative PR consequences. With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world's attention span has permanently embraced this "Content Nation" as a source of information that they trust. Why not leveraging their ubiquitous presence and their reporting and content production abilities? What are the possible roads to online sustainability for major online news publishers? Content business and news media expert John Blossom, analyzes the Associated Press story and the possible paths that could help AP and similar organizations to ride (and not fight) in the new online information ecosystem. Here his analysis:

Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members?

by John Blossom
There's been a whirlwind of announcements, commentary and downright bad blood beginning to steam up around the Associated Press' moves to position news content from its own reporters and its member organizations more effectively in the online environment. The latest developments in the war for news organization survival were kicked off by the AP board's announcement that it would be moving aggressively to identify and to challenge web site publishers that were using unlicensed AP content illegally.

Where Associated Press Is Headed

The "why" of this move, largely ignored by media reports, is contained in the rest of the announcement: AP is introducing a new schedule of lower fees for its member news organizations that will make it easier for them to participate in AP distribution and news use. Faced with having to respond to the revenue crunches experienced by most news organizations this year, AP has no choice but to ensure that their online revenue streams from organizations consuming AP content can be captured as effectively as possible. From the perspective of public relations, any constructive aspects of the latest AP moves appear to have been lost in a sea of furor rising up from bloggers, Twitters and other online voices. TechCrunch viewed AP's moves as being akin to the RIAA's moves to prosecute consumers for downloading relatively meager quantities of music on to their PCs - legal moves that have backfired in many ways both from a legal and public relations perspective for the music publishing industry. TechCrunch also highlighted a cease-and-desist order sent by AP to a web site using AP-posted video from YouTube in an embedded video player. Of course YouTube videos are made for embedding in other web sites, and the site that happened to be using it was that of WTNQ-FM, already an AP affiliate member. Google CEO Eric Schmidt commented in the wake of these PR fiascos by AP, that it's a good idea not to "piss off your customers"- especially those who are doing their very best to abide by fair use policies for the reuse of copyrighted content. AP could certainly take some lessons from Google's efforts to get publishers to swallow some of their own bitter pills with much kinder and gentler approaches to public and professional-level communications.

The Quest for New Revenues

The question is, though, what is really the most effective path towards revenue growth for AP at this time - and are they handling the rollout of new strategies in a way that will help those new revenue streams to materialize? From the looks of things, AP is still struggling to find answers to that question. Certainly pursuing legal enforcement against blatant content pirates is one possible route, and it's not without its merits. Data published by Attributor indicates that nearly half of the web sites taking content from major publishers are copying more than 90 percent of the original text of articles. Knocking out parasite web sites that copy unattributed content strictly for the purpose of sucking up ad revenues that would go otherwise to the original publishers would do the bottom lines of all online publishers a great favor. It's a shame that AP's initial efforts along this vein have resulted in embarrassing misfires - it's an important goal that should not be sidelined by a mishandling of the policies built on top of the underlying copy detection technologies. But the larger concern is whether AP is really "getting" how to make money in the online publishing environment. The AP board announcement included a statement indicating AP's intent to build a search portal that would feature only content from "authoritative" news sources. While this is a constructive goal of sorts, we've had such search engines for years already. The Topix search engine focuses primarily on traditional media sources, and, for that matter, Yahoo! News and other major portal news services have focused on aggregating and searching mainstream news even longer. Both are good efforts in their own ways, but they're not floating the boat for most online news publishing revenues and they're not growing in any significant way. Why would yet another search portal wind up being the solution to news publishers' concerns?

Get Valuable Content and Make Money From It

The future that AP needs to embrace can be summed up in a fairly simple phrase: get news content that people really want to read to where it can make money. In broad concept that's pretty much what AP's mission has been all along, but in insisting that that mission cannot be expanded or altered significantly in light of how news is created today is holding back both AP and its member organizations from surviving and thriving in online news markets. Media organizations need to become better at aggregating sources of news more agnostically: if someone is streaming live video via Qik from their mobile phone at the site of a plane crash, then AP should be the natural source to which news organizations would turn to find such content as breaking news, not "i-reports". The idea of "authoritative" news need not always be synonymous with editorial and news-gathering methods that grew up in the era of printing presses. With today's publishing technologies editorial values can be implemented in many ways that can expedite the most compelling information getting to the right audiences at the right time. This recognition that its own members need better agnostic aggregation of news sources is key to AP supporting the economic performance of those news organizations. Thomson Reuters CEO noted recently at a conference, "Why does The New York Times need to have 600-700 journalists? Why not 30 journalists with 30 apprentices?" In other words, if the economics of news have shifted permanently, why try to justify subsidizing jobs that need to move elsewhere in the news economy simply because you want only specific people in specific organizations producing news a specific way? With billions of people around the world equipped with real-time news publishing tools, including increasingly successful independent journalists, the world's attention span has permanently embraced this "Content Nation" as a source of information that they trust.

The Strategy to Survive

That's a fact that will simply never go away. Trying to make it go away is about at pointless as anyone who tried to sift the tea thrown overboard in Boston Harbor back in 1775. Even if you could do it, who would want to drink it? Instead of arguing with people who are both consumers and sources of news, AP needs to take a deep breath and think about how they can power the profits of today's news organizations using whatever content - news, metadata, links, video, anything - will help them to make money. In some instances this may mean new members and approaches to membership, in other instances it may mean playing a very different role with existing members and in how they participate in its editorial efforts. This can be a hard thing for any organization with a venerated history as rich as AP's to do, and I know that they are trying their best to move in that direction. But if they were able to leave the confines of the Rockefeller Center behind to set up shop in dot-com West Side digs, one would hope that AP could help to carry both its traditions of excellence and of innovation to new levels of performance in the news industry that take it in directions that others have yet to dare to imagine. The time to dream a new dream at AP has come. I do hope that they start to envision it and to realize that dream aggressively some time soon, both for their own sake and for the sake of their members.

Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on April 9th 2009 as "Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members?"

About the author John Blossom's is the author of "Content Nation", a great book about the new media publishing revolution taking place. His career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.

Photo credits: Sorting Out the AP Moves: What Will Really Work for Its Members? - Matthew Jones Where Associated Press Is Headed - Vasyl Yakobchuk The Quest for New Revenues - Rafael Angel Irusta Machin Get Valuable Content and Make Money From It - Marc Dietrich The Strategy to Survive - Daniel Gilbey

A new Scouting program teaches children to fight immigrants, Arab terrorists:

"United States Border Patrol! Put your hands up!" screams one in a voice cracking with adolescent determination as the suspect is subdued...

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence -- an intense ratcheting up of one of the group's longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters...

Their hearts pounding, Explorers moved down alleys where there were hidden paper targets of people pointing guns, and made split-second decisions about when to shoot. In rescuing hostages from a bus taken over by terrorists, a baby-faced young girl screamed, "Separate your feet!" as she moved to handcuff her suspect.

In a competition in Arizona that he did not oversee, Deputy Lowenthal said, one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. "If we're looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like," he said, "then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don't know, would you call that politically incorrect?"

Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More

(Image: Todd Krainin for The New York Times)

Yesterday, I posted a link to my new column on self-serve commercial licensing, a "commercial commons" idea that would allow makers to commercially exploit your trademarks and copyrights in return for a fixed percentage of the money they earn off those products. I've gotten a ton of email about this, and there's an interesting thread of people with ideas for a logo to put on products licensed under self-serve. The logo above comes from the excellent Skennedy.

Here's another interesting proposal from Grant Robertson:

I don't know if you have a logo in mind for this license but how about this one:

*=$

It is very simple and can be typed on a regular keyboard. The asterics represents a gear which represents making things. It simply says, "If you make stuff from my work then you have to send me money." It could be made fancier with nice graphics for printing or posting on a web site. But by basing the fancy logo on something that can be easily typed on a keyboard, it will make it easier for people to discuss and adopt.

Perhaps it could be modified to indicate how much a crafter should pay:

*=15%

means, "If you make stuff from my work you have to pay me 15%."

I like the * as gear and * as wildcard crossover!

Do you have any good ideas for logos and license text? Hit the comments.

photoenthusiast writes "Penn State researchers launched a new online photo-rating system, code named Acquine (Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine), for automatically determining the aesthetic value of a photo. Users can upload their own photographs for an instant Acquine rating, a score from zero to 100. The system learns to associate extracted visual characteristics with the way humans rate photos based on a lot of previously-rated photographs. It is designed for color natural photographic pictures. Technical publications reveal how Acquine works."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A reader writes, "The person who owned the domain CrackHo.com set it up to redirect to Sarah Palin's website on the Alaska state site. No one used the site, but apparently someone got upset: Palin's lawyers sent a cease & desist, claiming that it was misuse of the Alaskan seal and copyright infringement. Note, that CrackHo didn't copy anything or use any of the content. It was just a simple redirect to the Alaska website."

CrackHo.com: Sarah Palin's New Legal Foe

David sez, "My fiancee built these blinds out of old card catalog cards rescued from Columbia University."

Card Catalog Card Blinds (Thanks, David!)

A new study by University of British Columbia researchers, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that daydreaming is an extremely active, cognitively complex mental state:

"Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness," says lead author, Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. "But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream - much more active than when we focus on routine tasks."...

Until now, the brain's "default network" - which is linked to easy, routine mental activity and includes the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), the posterior cingulate cortex and the temporoparietal junction - was the only part of the brain thought to be active when our minds wander.

However, the study finds that the brain's "executive network" - associated with high-level, complex problem-solving and including the lateral PFC and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex - also becomes activated when we daydream.

Brain's Problem-solving Function At Work When We Daydream (via /.)

It's been funny watching newspaper execs and journalists go on and on and on about how important it is to "save journalism" and then come up with plans that will likely hasten the demise of newspapers -- such as micropayments. We've discussed in great detail why micropayments are unlikely to work (they've pretty much failed everywhere they've been tried with news content), but Kevin points us to an argument that shows why micropayments would likely be a terrible thing for journalists as well. When you have a direct association between revenue and a particular article, then suddenly it becomes possible to determine quite specifically how much people are willing to pay for a certain journalist's articles. Thus, management now has incentive to reward journalists who get more people to pay -- meaning those journalists have every incentive in the world to try to come up with stories that will make people pay, which might not be "good journalism."

Of course, some will (and have) pointed out that there's already some of this done, with tracking of advertising revenue on certain articles, but this would be even more direct -- and the key point is that it leads to trying to maximize the experience of a single article, rather than the entire experience:

An article is worth far more than the number of direct sales it generates. Even more importantly, thinking of each article in isolation shortchanges the value of the publishing enterprise as a whole. There are many things that make the New York Times better than the Podunk Daily, but "readable articles per day" is the least of them. (Which means that in addition to being bad for consumers and journalists, by destroying brand value micropayments would also hurt publishers. The trifecta!)

In fact, in this hour of crisis, newspapers should be moving in the exact opposite direction to generate revenue -- focusing not on specific articles, but rather on delivering valuable experiences to their readers, whether that takes the form of articles, databases, multimedia, user-generated content, or whatever else will serve the audience's needs. It is the entirety of that experience that will deliver goodwill and revenue opportunities down the road.

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The XGS PIC 16-Bit Development System is the ultimate fusion of art and science. Developed to be a very competitive entry/midrange development kit for Microchip's new 16-Bit PIC24 processor with 256K FLASH, 16K SRAM, and running at over 40 MIPs. The kit was designed with the philosophy that you don't want to waste time trying to figure things out. This kit takes you step by step, saving you time, so you can learn quickly and have fun doing it!

In the Maker Shed: XGS PIC 16-Bit Development System

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Canon has released a service notice for its EOS-1D Mark III and EOS-1Ds Mark III DSLRs. It addresses the issue of ring-shaped spots appearing in the images of some cameras - caused by lubricant from the mirror box getting onto the Low Pass Filter. Owners of affected cameras can contact Canon's customer support centre for for a free cleaning of the mirror box.

All around the world, cops and rent-a-cops are vigorously enforcing nonexistent anti-terrorist bans on photography in public places. If you're worried about being busted under an imaginary law, why not download these templates and print yourself an imaginary "Photography license" from the DHS? Who knows if it's legal to carry one of these -- probably about as legal as taking away your camera and erasing your memory card for snapping a pic on the subway.

In the event you're stopped by overzealous law enforcement or security officials attempting to enforce fictitious laws, I've designed these fictitious and official-looking Photographer's Licenses. If you have Adobe Illustrator, you can download the EPS vector art file and print your own. You'll need a photo of yourself, and OCR (or a similar font) to fill in your personal information.

Muni Don't Take My Kodachrome (via JWZ)

Here's a sweet little flashtoy (click through to see it in motion) that illustrates the optical illusion behind a curveball: "In baseball, a curveball creates a physical effect and a perceptual puzzle. The physical effect (the curve) arises because the ball's rotation leads to a deflection in the ball's path. The perceptual puzzle arises because the deflection is actually gradual but is often perceived as an abrupt change in direction (the break). Our illusions suggest that the perceived "break" may be caused by the transition from the central visual system to the peripheral visual system. Like a curveball, the spinning disks in the illusions appear to abruptly change direction when an observer switches from foveal to peripheral viewing."

The break of the curveball (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

GameSetWatch takes a look at the issues involved in creating an MMO that does not split its users among many different servers. They suggest that running a single "shard" is the next step in the evolution of MMOs, since it better allows player choices to have a meaningful impact on the game world; supporting different outcomes across multiple shards is a technical nightmare. They estimate, from the hip, that the cost to develop the technology required to support a massive amount of players (i.e. far more than EVE Online) on a single server to be roughly $100 million. Another recommendation is the strong reliance on procedural and user-generated content creation to fill a necessarily enormous game world.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visa is testing a new type of credit card that's got additional security measures built in as a means of cutting down on "card not present" (CNP) fraud -- the fraudulent sales rung up using stolen credit-card numbers and the security codes that are normally printed on the cards. Visa's new cards have a small screen on the back that displays a six-digit code when the cardholder enters a PIN on the card's keypad, making it sound like Visa has basically built in a tiny version of something akin to the SecurID, a popular two-factor authentication device for corporate computer networks. The devices generate an additional one-time password using an algorithm synced with the system on the other end; the user enters this password when they attempt to log on, or in Visa's case, make a CNP transaction. If the passwords match, the transaction goes ahead. It sounds like a good way to cut down on CNP fraud, but is it just a way to try and gloss over the massive data leaks that see millions of credit-card numbers lost out into the world? It almost seems that if these new anti-fraud cards make it to market, the party line will be "the data leaks don't matter anymore" -- but criminals will still be able to obtain credit-card numbers and make fake cards with the stolen info (for card-present fraud). It might make criminals' lives a little more difficult, but it won't make credit-card fraud impossible. Raising the level of security on credit cards is, without question, a good thing. But unless it involves doing more to stop massive data leaks, it's not enough.

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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Update on the case of Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, aka "jeanfer" (shown handcuffed, above), the Guatemalan Twitter user arrested for a tweet related to the assassination of a whistleblower attorney who sought to expose corruption in a state-run bank (background).

* Today, Anleu was raided, arrested, sent before a judge, and sentenced. That's all in one day. Anleu's single, 96-character tweet resulted in a judge ordering detention and a $6,500 fine for inciting financial panic, which is a punishable offense in Guatemala. Until he can pay that sum -- more than most Guatemalans earn in a year -- he will be held at a detention center. He is sentenced to be held under house arrest after the fine is paid. I do not yet have copies of the sentencing documents, so I don't know for how long.

* Here is Juan Anleu's blog. He is a 37-year-old I.T. guy in Guatemala City who loves books and "geek stuff."

* VIDEO: Above, a Guatemalan newscast which implies that military police in Guatemala are seeking to arrest a second Twitter user who posted tweets about the Rodrigo Rosenberg murder, and the resulting crisis shaking Guatemala's political and financial systems.

* TIME has a story up about the Rosenberg assassination scandal that was the subject of Anleu's "criminal tweets." Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices also has a blog post up.

* News organizations in Central America are referring to "el efecto Streisand" in their accounts of the Twitter reaction to the Rosenberg case and @jeanfer's arrest. Here's what that means.

* Twitter traffic on the Rosenberg case, and on @jeanfer's arrest, is exploding. And with it, panic. A number of users are re-tweeting rumors that military police are hunting down other Twitterers, or that other arrests have already happened. Others are literally posting rallying cries, such as "Twitteros! Unidos! Jamas serán vencidos!" ("Twitterers! United! Never again will we be defeated!"). One such slogan in the banner at left (via).

* Some report that street vendors in Guatemala are selling DVD copies of Rosenberg's "pre-death tape" in which he accuses the Guatemalan president for his impending murder. Tonight, there is unconfirmed word (now reported on Guatevision) that one or more of the street vendors selling those DVDS have also been arrested for "inciting panic."

* Additional frequent retweets include observations like this one from @strgt: "If a tweet is enough to condemn someone for a crime, an 18 minute [YouTube] video should be enough to condemn [Guatemalan president Álvaro] Colom for ASSASINATION." Another wrote, "The death of attorney Rosenberg has returned [Guatemala] to life." Others have proposed "google-bombing" the Banrural website, or rallying to make #escandalogt a "trending topic" on the social network. Still others caution fellow Guatemalan Twitterers to watch what they tweet, presuming police are monitoring.

* Anleu's internet supporters are petitioning for charges to be dropped, and collecting funds via Paypal to pay his fine and legal fees. Details posted in the comments thread for this post. Anleu's supporters are also uploading TV reports about his case to YouTube, and dissecting inaccuracies in those reports with comment overlays. Guatemalan TV news organizations appear ill-informed about Twitter. One report I watched implied that he was a crazy provocateur who waged a mass email campaign of "financial terrorism." Not so. Mr. Anleu was arrested for having tweeted a single, 96-character thought.

* Libertopolis again live-streamed street protests today. This time, the protesters were out to support the arrested Twitterer.

* The "International Commission Against Impunity" in Guatemala has issued a list of persons who must not be allowed to leave Guatemala, pending investigation of Rosenberg's assasination.

* Someone has created a phony Banrural Twitter account.

* PHOTOS: At top, Jean Anleu as he is handcuffed and taken into jail. Below: Anleu's mother observing his sentencing today. Both images courtesy of Flickr user Surizar (cc), more in this photo set. Here is a more upbeat photo of Anleu, as he is met by Twitter friends at jail.

Last month, we wrote about how the recording industry was able to pressure the operator of a BitTorrent search engine into pleading guilty despite not actually having broken the law. The site in question didn't host any infringing files, but merely linked to a variety of files. Previous lawsuits had shown that, in Spain, merely linking is not infringement. But with the cost of a huge court case, the operator found it cheaper to just settle. Emboldened by this, it appears the industry is going after other sites as well, despite the earlier court rulings finding such sites legal. TorrentFreak notes that in one case, against the search engine Agujero.com, the local recording industry reps demanded an immediate injunction against the site, without even allowing the site's operators to give its side. Luckily, the judge did not fall for this, and after a hearing in which both sides presented their position, is allowing the site to continue operating while the trial continues, noting that shutting down the site: "might cause irreparable prejudice to the defendant." It's good to see another reasonable ruling, though troubling that the recording industry tried to push for an immediate injunction.

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… well it's certainly some sort of touch-sensitive plantlife with audio feedback. The above seen glimpses were recorded at the Theremin Sensors Orchestra workshop in Munich where capacitive sensors are used with non-traditional objects and later incorporated into group performance. [via Create Digital Music]

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el americano writes "Flight Simulator community website Avsim has experienced a total data loss after both of their online servers were hacked. The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, explained why 13 years of community developed terrains, skins, and mods will not be restored from backups: 'Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to becky@makezine.com or drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

YMCA summer camp director Don Jennings writes in:

Summer camp runs on signals - bells, bugles, claxons, etc. And though the old-timers grumble, the days of folks pulling a rope, blowing a horn or turning a crank are mostly gone. Camp signals have gone digital, and therein lies the challenge.

Our current system for playing bugle calls is Rube Goldbergian in the extreme. I won't even attempt to describe it except to say it involves an answering machine tape, a PA system, bullhorns, and an entire software suite of home management software. All of this to run 20 seconds of bugle, 8 times each day. It's an embarassment of Byzantine seat-of-the-pants hackery that only works part of the time.

In my 50% geek heart I know there must be an elegant, inexpensive way to play digital bugle calls at specific times of the day, for discrete durations. There just *has* to be. And so my appeal to your readers.

Can you or your communities offer any advice? A solution would garner the enthusiastic gratitude of dozens of summer camp communities.

The camp runs on Windows XP, and a solution would have to be comfortable on that platform. Do you have any ideas?

There are tons of automation programs out there. Mac OS X has Automator which works with AppleScript, you can make cron jobs on a Linux server, but I'm going to suggest you use Windows Task Scheduler for your situation. It's free, already on your camp's Windows XP machines, and should be relatively easy to set up. That said, I'm sure there are free utilities out there you could download to do this as well, but I'm not a frequent enough Windows user to be able to suggest any. If any readers know of something that would work , please post it in the comments!

My main squeeze, Alex Schlegel, helped me figure this one out for you. You can program the Task Scheduler to play a sound file however often you want throughout the day, every day, using Windows Media Player (the older version, mplayer2.exe, because the newer wmplayer.exe doesn't respond to the /close command line argument). You can schedule a task to, at regular intervals, open the media player, play the sound, then close. This does not have to be a dedicated machine, but you'll have the sound hooked up to the PA system, so whatever computer you use should have its user interface sounds (system notifications, etc.) turned off.

You can use any one of the Windows Task Manager tutorials available online to get yourself acquainted with the program, but since you're 50% geek I'm sure you can play it by ear. Access it through your control panel, and create a new task. Select that you want it to occur daily, with a start time when you want the first call to happen. Then hit "Advanced" to repeat the task throughout the day, with a finish time when the last sound will happen. Alex took a few screenshots to help out.

Once you create a new task, it will open a wizard that will make you pick a program to run from a list (at this point it doesn't really matter what program you pick, but to be on the safe side you might browse to "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe"), and select how often you want it to occur (once per day in your case), but on the last page there's a checkbox that says "Open advanced properties for this task when i click Finish." This will open the screen that allows you to input the command line text to play the audio file:

"C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\mplayer2.exe" /play /close C:\Windows\Media\tada.wav

Replace the path to "tada.wav" with whatever bugle sound you want (a 20 second mp3, for example). If you want the sound to play at non-regular intervals, you'll have to create a task for each bell throughout the day. Once you get it up and running, though, you should hardly have to touch it.

The photo at the top is the "time for thought" area at the summer camp I attended as a child (Windham Tolland 4H in Pomfret, CT), taken by my camp buddy Natalie Carter.

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UPDATE: More on this story here, posted May 14, 10pm PT.

Amid protests in the streets and on social networks calling for Guatemala's president to step down after the assasination of a whistleblower attorney, Guatemalan police have arrested a Twitter user for "inciting panic" through tweets. In the capital city today, police raided his home and confiscated his computer.

Above, the tweet for which Guatemalan I.T worker Jean Anleu ("jeanfer"), was arrested.

Quick background follows. The Guatemalan bank Banrural is at the center of the country's current political crisis: the recently assassinated attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg represented a finance expert, Khalil Musa, who was said to have refused to participate in corrupt transactions involving that bank. Musa was assassinated in March. After continuing to make statements about alleged government complicity in that murder, and in the financial crimes Musa protested, Rosenberg was himself shot to death this past Sunday. Days before his murder, Rosenberg recorded a video saying he believed he would soon be assassinated by forces acting at the orders of Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom. After his death, the video spread virally on YouTube, sparking widespread protests on and offline.

Today, Twitter user "Jeanfer" was arrested for suggesting in a tweet that people who had money deposited in Banrural should remove those funds, and by doing so, break the control that "corrupt people" have over the state-controlled financial institution.

Below, my clumsily translated snip from a report in the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre about the arrest, which as far as I know is the first time anyone in Guatemala, or Central America, period, has been detained over something they posted to Twitter:

The police today detained Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, an information technology worker, for having incited financial panic on the social network Twitter, after having written this Tuesday a comment on Twitter which called for a united force to take funds out of [the Guatemalan bank] Banrural, as a result of the information transmitted in a video recorded by the attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg before his assassination.

Jean Anleu Fernández, known on the microblogging social networking website Twitter as "Jeanfer," was arrested today during a police raid of his residence in zona 8 of Guatemala City, in which the police took his computers at the order of the Guatemalan government's public ministry division in charge of banks.

The head of the banking system, Genaro Pacheco, told reporters that Mr. Anleu admitted that he made this comment about Banrural on Twitter.

Mr. Anleu Fernández wrote on Tuesday May 12, at approximately 2pm, a commentary ("post") in which he expressed, "The first action people should take is to remove cash from Banrural, and break the banks of corrupt people," along with the hashtag #escandalogt, which is known by Twitter users as a way of classifying posts related to the Rosenberg assasination case.

Inset photo: Twitter user "Jeanfer" being fingerprinted as police take him to jail in Guatemala City. Photo: Prensa Libre/ Carlos Sebastián

Discussion of Rosenberg's assassination, and related calls for an investigation and/or removal of Colom from power, continues undaunted on Twitter -- and is easily followed with the #escandalogt hashtag. As one might imagine, there is a great deal of outcry against @jeanfer's arrest today. One Twitterer said just now (translated from Spanish): "The capture of @jeanfer appears to me to be a smoke curtain to divert attention from the accusations against president Colom."

Below, screenshot of another form of online protest: en masse, Guatemalan Twitter users are re-tweeting the comment that led to @jeanfer's arrest.

The authors of iPhone Hacks will be having a webcast Friday, May 15, 2009 at 10am PDT.

Register here to participate in this live event.

This webcast will focus on the last two chapters of iPhone Hacks, involving hardware and software development. We'll focus on some of the hardware and software development you can do without having to go through the app store, for personal or jailbreak community release. You'll learn various ways to get hardware connected to the iPhone, without having to go through the 3.0 approval process. We'll include several specific hacks on how to connect keyboards and serial devices to the phone.

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The Skype app for the iPhone proved to be an instant hit, topping App Store download charts around the world, including Germany, where T-Mobile reminded its customers that using Skype, or any other VoIP app, could get them kicked off its network. The operator now says it's "looking at different ways of dealing with VoIP", perhaps including offering some special plan where users would have to pay some fee to use VoIP. It also says it's not actively blocking any voice apps, although when it begins selling the Nokia N97 smartphone later this year, the Skype application that's normally pre-installed on the device will be stripped out. T-Mobile's justification for removing the app is great: it's not because they don't want people undermining voice revenues by using Skype, but because "by not putting Skype on, subscribers could choose from a number of VoIP apps, and not be limited to just one." That's as opposed to having Skype pre-installed, and customers being able to download and install any other VoIP app alongside it. Only in the world of mobile operators does removing choices for customers actually increase customer choice.

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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1sockchuck writes "Rackspace said this week that it is managing more than 50,000 web servers, raising the question: who else has that many? Of companies that publicly discuss their server counts, there are only a handful that are near or above the 50,000 server mark, including 1&1 Internet, The Planet, and Akamai, as well as Rackspace. The larger totals are found among companies that don't discuss how many servers they're running. The leading suspects: Google, Microsoft, Amazon and eBay."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been receiving a series of different reports from different folks about a recent interview that new FTC boss, Jon Leibowitz, gave on CSPAN. Leibowitz has been in the FTC for a while, though, he's yet another former entertainment industry lobbyist in the administration (he was VP of Congressional Affairs for the MPAA from 2000 to 2004). So far, however, he seems to be taking quite reasonable positions on a variety of topics (though, some questionable views on other areas). Questioned about Google's dominance in the market (something that the FTC has been investigating for a while now), he pointed out that dominance is "the American way" and not necessarily an antitrust violation:

Google has certainly has a dominant position in search advertising. There's no doubt about that. From our perspective, just having a dominant position doesn't in any way violate the law. It's if you do something -- as the Justice Department in the 1990s alleged that Microsoft did -- to exclude competitors illegally, that's when it becomes a problem.

If you get to a dominant position or a monopoly position by virtue of your own acumen, that's really the American way.

Then there's broadband competition, where he definitely does appear to be concerned about the lack of competition and the lack of transparency from current broadband providers:

We believe consumers need to have notice and consent about what they're getting. It's very, very important that these providers tell consumers about the speed they're getting, and whether (ISPs) are making any types of management decisions in terms of the network that affect consumers....

In a perfect marketplace where you had more competitors, you wouldn't need the government necessarily to be terribly involved. Particularly in the consumer protection area, we have a big roll to play. Broadband is a deregulated product. That's good, we like deregulation generally. But when you have deregulation, you also have law enforcement to make sure people do the right thing.

And, then, there's the question of behavioral advertising, where he believes that opt-in, rather than opt-out, makes a lot of sense:

I think some of the more enlightened companies do do opt-in. I think a lot of them don't. I think the better practice is always opt in.

On the whole, then, he seems to not be too quick to bash companies for being successful, and seems to recognize that competition and transparency are important issues. Those are all good things. There are some fears however, that he's a bit quick on the trigger when it comes to regulating over that behavioral advertising issue, and doesn't seem to mind metered broadband, so long as customers know what they're getting.

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In MAKE Volume 16, we ran a Maker profile of Marque Cornblatt and his autonomous telepresence robot, Sparky 2. In Marque's own words, from the profile:

In the early 90s, I began building a wireless, rolling, remote control robot with a two-way video chat setup positioned at eye level, which enabled real-time, face-to-face communication. I found most of the materials dumpster diving or at garage sales: a motorized wheelchair, a few old video cameras, a wireless baby monitor, some R/C toys. Separately these were junk, but combined they became an interactive sculpture that allowed me to see, hear, chat, and move through a remote location with complete autonomy.

I could "become" my creation, temporarily merging my own identity into that of this machine/human hybrid. I named the robot SPARC-I, a rough acronym for Self-Portrait Artifact -- Roving Chassis, or Sparky for short.

I originally made Sparky to explore the boundaries of the body and how our identities change when filtered through technology, topics that have recently become hot in our age of online profiles and avatars. I've been upgrading Sparky ever since, as newer technologies have become available. Over the years the Sparky experience has developed into what I call Autonomous Telepresence, an experience combining remote sensing and locomotion, web video, social networking, and human interaction. It is interesting to watch Sparky "work the room" at an art opening or cocktail party. At first, people are drawn to the robot as a techno-spectacle. But it is remarkable how quickly people forget the machine and interact with the remote person, joking, flirting, or having long, deep conversations as if there were nothing unusual.

Being a maker first and a businessman second, Marque eventually decided to share Sparky 2 as an open source DIY project, based on the MAKE Controller. Marque's set of plans for Sparky 2, along with a step-by-step video are freely available on the project page and on Marque's site, Gomi Style, so you can build your own.

Marque has brought Sparky to all 3 previous Maker Faires we've hosted in the Bay Area, and this year, he is bringing Sparky Jr., a new version powered by Skype, Roomba, and Mac Mini:

Here's a great little teaser video Marque put together giving you some insight into Sparky Jr.:

There's also a Ning network for Sparky Jr. with the tagline, "DIY, open source, mobile telepresence for all." Mobile telepresence for the masses!

Read Marque's article in MAKE 16 (shared here in our Digital Edition), check out the Gomi Style site, join the Ning Sparky network, get your Maker Faire tickets (while you can still get advanced price tix before May 20th), and be sure to come say hi to Sparky Jr. at the Faire on May 30th and 31st!

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It's a simple lesson from Kindergarten: Share. You probably don't think of oil companies as being particularly good at this - except perhaps in the sense of sharing oil price hikes at the pumps - but it turns out they have another hidden sharing skill that they'd rather you didn't see. They share gas and pipelines, run by pipleline firms called "common carriers". Although not widely known, there is very little difference between the gas you buy at competing fuel stations in the US. The gas is a commodity product based on quality specs, and the differences are mostly marketing.

The privately-owned national gas/oil distribution infrastructure is quite formidable (offering a massive legacy advantage over any future fuels). There are pipelines that cross the country, refineries, trucks, equipment, tanks, catchments, reserves - all to deliver fuel to a growing economy (yes, growing...over the long-term at least).

But it would be prohibitively expensive to build such an infrastructure for EACH of the gas station brands. So instead of separate pipelines snaking the country, one each for Chevron, Shell, Texaco, Philips, etc...they share. Tanker ships deliver a standard grade of oil to refineries where it is refined to standard grades of fuel. And while the refineries may be owned by a specific oil company, the fuel they produce is put in common pipes to transport across the nation. Thus, the premium gas that Shell puts in the pipe in California could be taken out by Texaco in Nevada. Since it is a commodity product, it doesn't matter whose batch of fuel is taken out of the pipe, it only matters how much. This pipe is quite "dumb", but the network is shared, and the commodity that is transported is a standard package - sound familiar to any telco people?

The Fair Trade Commission in the US has stopped gas companies from making false advertising claims, and if the companies are selling the same gas, they can't claim it to be better. Thus claims like "More powerful" get replaced with the metaphorical, nonsensical "Put a tiger in your tank!" Is shared infrastructure and a standards-based product killing the gas companies? No. How do they compete if the product they sell is EXACTLY the same as their competition? What's the value of brand?

The answer lies in a small trick. The FTC won't allow them to say their gas is better if it's the same. But if they inject some small amount of "additive" just before selling the gas to customers (This additive can be anything...even a secret formula of 11 herbs and spices) that's all it takes to claim a different product. And with a different product, the gas companies can claim to have a "cleaner running" product, or "burns better" or whatever angle they want to promote with their brand. It works. They have been sharing pipes for decades, so maybe their case is instructive for telcos.

There IS money to be saved from sharing a single infrastructure. Especially when the product is standards-based. GSM, EDGE, 3G, HSPA, LTE are all pretty standard. As are Metro Ethernet, IP backhaul, etc. So I believe the carriers are on to a good idea in reducing their CapEx by sharing common network elements. Even more so because of the frequent 2G-3G-4G-... upgrades needed to compete. They can easily continue to differentiate by offering special "additives" to their product.

And while the gas companies' additives are mostly snake oil. The telecom "additives" are quite important, and can truly differentiate a mobile subscription over the raw bits inside the dumb pipe: Customer service, retail presence, data services, location platforms, fixed/mobile integration, easy-to-read bills, the iPhone, fave-5, rollover minutes...these are all very important parts of the service mix, and are true differentiators about which customers care. The things that subscribers don't care about might as well be shared. Amazon.com and buy.com both ship with UPS - do you care that they share the delivery mechanism?

Sol Trujillo, outgoing CEO at Australian cellco Telstra, is making the opposite gamble, detailed in a speech at MWC. He thinks the differentiator is the network infrastructure, and is piling money into it to be the first carrier to offer high-speed LTE technology, contrasting his approach to the common-carrier approach of Telfonica and Vodafone. While LTE is great, thinking that the network is a differentiator is wrong, and shortsighted. No customer has ever cared about the technology or the infrastructure. And while Telstra invests in a brief technology lead with LTE, their higher costs of upgrades may eventually make them technology laggards compared to competitors that share.

I can see it now: "Cleaner burning Vodafone Wireless", or "AT&T. Put an Apple in your tank!"

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

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Yesterday, KALW Public Radio's Crosscurrents interviewed Boing Boing Gadgets' Steven Leckart! The fun segment is available online. From the episode description:

Whether you have a gizmo attached to your ear while you're driving, or a doodad that scrambles an egg inside its shell, or a thingamajig that plots your trajectory on a digital map, gadgets are more and more a part of our lives. And some of the first people to get their eager hands on the newest new thing are the bloggers at Boing Boing Gadgets. KALW's Roman Mars went to the San Francisco home of Steven Leckart, a contributing editor of Boing Boing Gadgets, to find the latest doohicky he can't possibly live without.

Gadgets You Can't Live Without

So often creative-reuse and found-object art has a "junky" quality that's hard to escape because...well, you know, it's basically made from junk. I always applaud the effort to turn trash into treasure, but it's rarely done so well as in the case of these amazing sculptures from reclaimed tires. That the material is such an egregious disposal problem only makes them that much more awesometastic. Via Dude Craft.

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