For many years, people who understand these things have pointed out that an IP address alone does not accurately identify who was doing any sort of file sharing. In many cases, it doesn't even accurately identify who was paying for the connection being used. Yet, the industry has often relied on IP addresses as definitive proof of file sharing. Only recently have courts begun to recognize how that's a problem. So it's nice to see that an Italian court is now recognizing that IP addresses alone are not enough to identify a file sharer, and even throwing out cases that don't have much more in the way of evidence. Still, in most of the various cases, it's never really about getting people to court. The industry prefers to scare people with a letter implying it has the evidence, and then getting people to pay up a "settlement fee" before they can defend themselves, because that's a lot cheaper than going to court.

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hoytak writes "An expert in electoral fraud, professor Walter Melbane, has released a detailed analysis (PDF) of available data in Iran's controversial election (summary here). While he did not find significant indications of fraud, he does note that all the deviations from the predicted model are in Ahmadinejad's favor: 'In general, combining the 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that a substantial core of the 2009 results reflected natural political process... [These] stand in contrast to the unusual pattern in which all of the notable discrepancies between the support Ahmadinejad actually received and the support the model predicts are always negative. This pattern needs to be explained before one can have confidence that natural election processes were not supplemented with artificial manipulations.'" In related news, EsonLinji notes reports in the Seattle PI and other sources that the US State Department has asked Twitter to delay system maintenance to prevent cutting off Iranians who have been relying on the service during the post-election crisis. And if you would like to help ease the communication crunch, reader RCulpepper tips a blog post detailing how to set up a proxy server for users with Iranian IP addresses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today was Fashion theme day at Boing Boing Gadgets. We had a series of posts about technology and fashion, plus more: *Instructions on how to make a vibrating cell phone finger puppet; *The do's and don'ts of gadget accessorizing; *A tutorial on how to do cosplay the right way; *A night out with the Vivienne Tam digital clutch; *A Scottevest with an insane amount of gadget pockets; *A social networking shoe; *A review of the bluetooth headset that Heidi Klum wears; *A touch-sensitive hoodie that lights up and plays tunes; *A report on senators pondering the fairness of AT&T being the only carrier to sell the iPhone; *Homeless people with cell phones; and why it's stupid to try to guess what cell phones will look like in 10 years.

snydeq writes "While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun duke it out with proprietary technologies for implementing multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to eat these vendors' lunches, offering Web experiences based on an industry standard. In fact, one expressed goal of the standard is to move the Web away from proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX. 'It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform [the Web] was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been,' says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee. But whether HTML 5 and its Canvas technology will displace proprietary plug-ins 'really depends on what developers do,' says Firefox technical lead Vlad Vukicevic. It also depends on Microsoft, the only company involved in the HTML 5 effort that is both a browser developer and an RIA tool developer. 'That's a big elephant in the room for them because you can imagine the Silverlight team [whose] whole existence is to add [this] functionality in. [But] if Internet Explorer puts it already in there, why do we have Silverlight?' asks Mozilla's Dion Almaer." The RIA guys are quoted as saying they're not worried, because HTML 5 + CSS 3 is 10 years out. Are they just whistling in the dark?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photos: Lisa Katayama

My friend Jenny's mom works at a sewing factory in the Mission district of San Francisco. Every day, she and a dozen or so Chinese ladies make stacks of dresses for Macy's that sell for hundreds of dollars each, on the second floor of a building right across from hipster bars and nightclubs. Their revenue: $2-3 per dress.

But this month, after nearly 30 years in operation, one of the businesses in her building is shutting down due to declining revenues. Most of the women who work there will be filing for unemployment soon--they don't speak any English, are uneducated, and only know how to sew.

Several hours after they vacated the factory a week ago today, I dropped by the building to take these photos with Jenny, who told me stories of a childhood filled with pretend train rides in giant clothing hampers and the time her mom sewed her some emergency clothes after she peed in her pants because she was scared of the dirty toilet.

The final version of the UK government's Digital Britain report, its blueprint for updating the country's tech-related laws and infrastructure, has been released today, and it doesn't look like it holds too many surprises. Like the interim report that was released earlier this year, it's full of a lot of vague language, and as the UK's opposition party points out, seems most interested in propping up failing old-media business models. Two aspects of the report are grabbing the most attention. First, the government will start a 50p (about 80 cents) monthly tax on landline phones in order to build out broadband networks in rural and other unserved areas. Second, and more controversially, the report says the UK's communications regulator must cut file-sharing by 70%, and calls for ISPs to help accomplish this by keeping tabs on their users, sending them notification letters when they download infringing material, and giving up their details to content companies (with a court order) so they can be sued. It stops short of creating a rights agency run by the copyright cartel, as had been rumored, and while it doesn't endorse the use of a three-strikes policy, it does say that regulators will have the power to force ISPs to use other technical means (such as throttling connections, traffic shaping, and even blocking certain sites, services and protocols) to try and stop persistent infringers.

The report pays a lot of lip service to the fact that content businesses need to update their business models to the changing digital environment, but it really does very little to help facilitate this, instead preferring to make stopping piracy the central focus. The government seems to have fully bought into the entertainment industry's propaganda -- that it can't do anything until piracy stops, that it can't move forward as long as there's file-sharing. The reality isn't that the industry can't move forward, but rather that it won't. And, after all, if the government is willing to get involved and offer the industry special protection to prop up its ailing business models, why should it?

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

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Father's Day is Sunday, June 21, 2009. Started by Sonora Dodd to honor her father who raised five children alone after the Civil War, President Coolidge supported the idea, Lyndon signed a proclamation, and in 1972 it was official.

The MAKE team has put together some ideas for gifts to make, buy, and give this Father's Day. Got a story about a dad in your life? Post it up in the comments. Click through to read our huge guide!

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Matt Cottam, CEO of Tellart has posted his thesis from his degree work (Masters of Arts in Interaction Design) at the Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University. The thesis explains his "process of sketching and swatchmaking (prototyping) with both digital and analog tools, using both electronic and organic materials":

This hands-on journey in search of "heirloom electronics" uncovers several possible relationships between the digital, material and natural through a series of working sketch models. Through these sketches and swatches I have sought to explore a harmonious intersection between tradition and technology, and between natural materials, high craft and digital functionality. I have consistent evidence that the emotional value of handling wood as an interface brought delight to people, and I believe that these studies suggest many possibilities for product, material use and manufacturing techniques.

A link to the PDF is available at: Wooden logic: In search of heirloom electronics

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Ultrasparky says this Sex Pistols poster that Christie's will auction on June 23rd with an estimated value of $2,000 - $3,000 is phony.

You know how you can tell? Typeface analysis. And the gratuitous use of Comic Sans isn't the only clue.

(Looks like they yanked it already.)

Sex Pistols Poster Poseurs (Thanks, Mister Jalopy!)

ancientribe writes "At Black Hat USA next month, researchers will demonstrate a way to use modern browsers to more easily build darknets — underground private Internet communities where users can share content and ideas securely and anonymously. HP's Billy Hoffman and Matt Wood have created Veiled, a proof-of-concept darknet that only requires participants have an HTML 5-based browser to join. No special software or configuration is necessary, unlike with darknets such as Tor. Veiled is basically a 'zero footprint' network, in which groups can rapidly form and disappear without a trace. The researchers admit darknets are attractive to bad guys, too, but they say they think these more easily set-up and dismantled nets will be more popular for mainstream (and legit) users." In somewhat related news, reader cheesethegreat informs us that version 0.7.5 of FreeNet has hit the tubes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott Morse sent me a copy THE ANCIENT BOOK OF SEX AND SCI­ENCE, but I've been too busy scooping my brain off the floor for the last 45 minutes to write about it.

This collection of mid-century styled paintings and other works of art by four obscenely talented Pixar animation designers -- Nate Wragg, Scott Morse, Lou Romano, and Don Shank -- hearkens back to the days of the Golden science books (Like Biology, Mathematics, and Chemistry Experiments), and the How and Why Wonder Books, but the theme this time is sex and robots, sex and aliens, and sex and math. (It's not really explicit -- most of the images are G-rated, and a couple are PG-13.)

Their previous art book, THE ANCIENT BOOK OF MYTH AND WAR, is sold out, and I'm sure this one will sell out even more quickly.

THE ANCIENT BOOK OF SEX AND SCI­ENCE

It my seem like I'm pushing on this one a bit, but it's because I am honestly surprised that the NY Times got this one so badly wrong, and that they've been so slow to do anything about it. I actually think the NY Times is an excellent overall newspaper, and I'm as surprised as anyone that they'd muck up a story so much -- especially as its editors are hyping how good their "fact checking" is and how every day people just can't compare.

It started on Friday, when we noted that the NY Times was reporting that The Pirate Bay had lost its appeal in court. The only problem? It hadn't. Not even close. It may eventually lose the appeal, but that decision won't come for some time. It's true that other sources (including The Hollywood Reporter article that the NY Times reporter relied on) also got the story slightly screwed up, but that's no excuse for the NY Times to repeat blatantly incorrect information. The error appears to be caused by the confusion about the difference between a district (lower) court and the appeals (higher) court. The appeal is over whether or not the district court judge in the case was biased. So, as a part of that appeal, the district court told the appeals court that, no, its judge was not biased. This is to be expected. Did anyone think that the district court wouldn't defend its judge?

However, many people simply got confused, and when they read that a Stockholm district court said (in the appeals court) that the judge wasn't biased, they assumed that it was a court ruling, not just testimony/a filing from one of the participants. Still, you would think with a story that's received so much attention that the NY Times would check with someone first to make sure such a ruling actually came down.

On Monday, however, some of our readers noted that the NY Times had "updated" or "corrected" its story. However, the really amazing thing? Even after realizing that it got the story wrong, it still hasn't gotten the story right. Instead, they changed the first sentence from: "A Swedish court has denied the appeal of four men convicted of violating copyright law.... " into "A Swedish court has said that the judge who presided over the case of four men convicted of violating copyright law for their involvement in the Pirate Bay, an Internet file-sharing service, was not biased against them."

Okay, that's closer but still wrong. First, the NY Times left the headline as is, saying "Appeal Is Denied in Pirate Bay Case." Then, the current first sentence doesn't make any distinction at all between what the lower court said as a participant in the higher court case and what the higher court will ultimately pronounce as a ruling. In fact, given the headline, nearly everyone would still read that first sentence to say that the court has issued a ruling denying bias. The NY Times also added this correction line that would likely confuse most people, saying: "An earlier version of this report stated that the men's appeal had been denied." But reading the article, it still sounds like the appeal has been denied. Is it that difficult for a big journalistic endeavor like the NY Times to fact check a story? Even when told that the story is wrong, and then going and "correcting" it, they got the story wrong.

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The fiendish, ingenious Ukranian steampunk fetish-mask makers Bob Basset had just put up a new model, with integrated goggles, that I'm inordinately fond of.

Leather Steampunk mask and glasses. ??????? ???????? ????? - ????.

krou writes "Science Daily is reporting that a microbe, Herminiimonas glaciei, buried some 3 km under glacial ice in Greenland, and believed to have been frozen for some 120,000 years, has been brought back to life (abstract). The microbe, some ten to fifty times smaller than E. coli, was brought back over several months by slowly incubating it at gradually increasing temperatures. After 11.5 months, the microbe began to replicate. Scientists believe that it could help us understand how life may exist on other planets. Dr. Jennifer Loveland-Curtze, who headed up the team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University, said: 'These extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats. ... [S]tudying these bacteria can provide insights into how cells can survive and even grow under extremely harsh conditions, such as temperatures down to -56C, little oxygen, low nutrients, high pressure and limited space.' She also added that it 'isn't a pathogen and is not harmful to humans, but it can pass through a 0.2 micron filter, which is the filter pore size commonly used in sterilization of fluids in laboratories and hospitals. If there are other ultra-small bacteria that are pathogens, then they could be present in solutions presumed to be sterile. In a clear solution very tiny cells might grow but not create the density sufficient to make the solution cloudy.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fermion writes "The Register is reporting that Palm has sent a note to the Pre Dev Wiki asking it to stop discussing tethering. Palm is worried that its US carrier partner, Sprint, is none too eager to have users tether the game-changing tetherable smart phone. While the communication was informal, not legal, the development forum is evidently eager to avoid any possibility of lawsuits, so has rapidly agreed. Perhaps, like the iPhone, the Pre is going have a vigorous underground. What is interesting is that the Pre, like the iPhone (allegedly), can be tethered outside of the US; but even those customers are being denied apparently lawful information to satisfy the US exclusive agents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soccer Skull by Eugenio Merino, via Street Anatomy.

More:

Pill head / Numb skull

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For years, there have been various accusations that JK Rowling "stole" the characters or ideas for her series of Harry Potter books. The claim that got the most attention was Nancy Stouffer's book "The Legend Of RAH And The Muggles" which not only uses the word "muggles" (used in Rowling's work as well) but also has a character named Larry Potter (who has some resemblance to Harry's character). But, of course, that wasn't all. Last year, we wrote about a 1986 movie called Troll that also had a character named "Harry Potter." But apparently, that's not enough. The latest is that Rowling's publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, has been sued again for plagiarism over the Potter books, this time by the estate of Adrian Jacobs. It seems that Jacobs once wrote a book about a boy wizard called Willy The Wizard that has some distant similarities to some stuff that happens in the Potter books.

The whole thing is pretty silly, of course. The publisher is vehemently denying any copying, and it seems unlikely that any copying did actually happen. However even if you did grant the premise and say that Rowling was "inspired" by some other book, so what? Did it really change the economics of the original book? If anything, this latest claim is just a clear money grab, designed to give new attention to a long-ignored book. No one could claim with a straight face that Rowling's work took away any value from the other book.

Of course, the side note to all of this is how aggressive Rowling has been about trying to "protect" her own copyright on the Potter books. Last year, author Orson Scott Card tore apart Rowling for her aggressive enforcement of copyright, while noting some amusing "similarities" between his own classic, Ender's Game, and the Harry Potter series -- pointing out that lots of people have similar ideas or are inspired by others -- and trying to shut them down is a mistake.

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Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

When Neil Armstrong first took that one small step onto the moon, he left behind more than just a footprint. Among the many items still sitting in the Bay of Tranquility are;

Neil Armstrong's boots, a gold replica of an olive branch, tongs, four armrests, urine collection assemblies, a hammer, an insulating blanket, and... four defecation collection devices. Yes, Neil Armstrong's poop is moldering on the moon.

While bags of frozen astronaut poop may sound unimportant, even a little gross, some "extreme heritage" conservationists are very concerned about their protection--as well as the other detritus left behind by humanity's first moonwalkers. For now, Tranquility Base is still tranquil (there is no wind or rain up there to damage things), but preservationists worry that private space enterprises will one day endanger the Apollo landing site, as well as other important landmarks on the moon. From the Lunar Legacy Site:

"Unfortunately, at the present time both NASA and the Federal Government are not willing to pursue preserving these properties on the moon...The Apollo 11 Lunar Landing Site is not simply a significant site for Americans, it was a significant event for all of humanity. The steps on the moon were a step for mankind. Over 600 million people watched the moon landing. The site belongs to the world."

Full list of items left at the Apollo 11 landing sites, at the Lunar Legacy Site.
Great New Scientist piece on preserving Tranquility Base, Space Archeology Wiki, and LA Times Article on space heritage.

snydeq writes "Enterprise licensing for Windows 7 could cause major headaches and add more cost to the Windows 7 migration effort, InfoWorld reports. Under the proposed license, businesses that purchase PCs with Windows 7 pre-installed within six months of the Oct. 23 launch date will be able to downgrade those systems to XP, and later upgrade back to Windows 7 when ready to migrate users. PCs bought after April 22, 2010, however, can only be downgraded to Vista — no help for XP-based organizations, which would be wise to wait 12 to 18 months before adopting Windows 7, so that they can test hardware and software compatibility and ensure their vendors' Windows 7 support meets their needs. XP shops that chose not to install Vista will have to either rush their migration process or spend extra to enroll in Microsoft's Software Assurance program, which allows them to install any OS version — for about $90 per year per PC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jake Cress is a gifted cabinetmaker in Fincastle, Virginia. Besides traditional pieces in the Chippendale vein, he makes whimsical "animated furniture," several pieces of which can be viewed on his site. But my personal favorite by far has to be "Oops," the embarrassed claw-foot chair that has dropped its ball, and wants to sneak it back before anybody notices.

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Here's an odd one. Apparently a French news site that focuses on file sharing/BitTorrent/P2P news has been ordered by a court to report on the convictions of file sharers in France. It's not entirely clear under what laws, but perhaps it's a "fairness doctrine" type of thing. Apparently, the big entertainment companies took the site to court over its failure to report on the convictions. The site is more well known for pushing back against things like three strikes laws or the typical propaganda from the industry -- so the industry pushed it to also publish news of the convictions. What's weird is that these "conviction reports" include lots of personal information on those who were convicted, including names, addresses, and birth dates. I'm somewhat surprised the site didn't try to put these convictions into a bit more "context" to show how silly or unreasonable they might be -- but perhaps the court order forbids that.

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Nguyen Van Chau, head of Ho Chi Minh City's Health Department, has revealed that many sick passengers who flew to Ho Chi Minh City used fever reducers to fool temperature scanners at the airport. The government has confirmed 26 people infected with H1N1 flu, 23 of whom came by air after traveling in the United States or Australia. State media reports that the discovery of these scanner cheaters led to the detection of several infected cases later.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KentuckyFC writes "Scientists have found a way to join buckyballs together so that they form buckywires. The wires form when buckyballs are dissolved in an aromatic hydrocarbon called 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene. The solvent links the balls together to make wires shaped like a string of pearls, which then precipitate out. This relatively simple procedure opens the door to industrial-scale manufacture. Buckywires ought to be efficient light harvesters because of their great surface area and the way they can conduct photon-liberated electrons. But perhaps the area of greatest interest is drug delivery. The researchers suggest that buckywires ought to be safer than carbon nanotubes because the production method is entirely metal-free. This contrasts with the production of nanotubes, which are formed in a reaction catalyzed by metallic nanoparticles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our friends at Xtracycle have extended their maker special. They lent us some of their Radish bikes during Maker Faire, and they were major eye-catchers. The FreeRadical is a nifty add-on to extend the end of your bike, making more room to haul stuff and passengers. Once you've got your bike's backseat all set up, use their DIY tutorial vids to trick it out even further, like this DIY kickstand mod.

More:

Xtracycle Radish deal for Makers

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China's changed its mind: PCs sold in China won't have vulnerability-riddled spyware pre-installed on them:

Caving to public pressure, China on Tuesday said that use of its controversial "Green Dam Youth Escort" software is not required, though all PCs sold on the mainland will come with it pre-installed.

China's turnaround comes as public outcry over the Green Dam Web filtering software struck a nerve both inside and outside China. Last week, the Chinese government mandated that as of July 1, all PCs sold in the country must have the Green Dam software to block pornographic and violent Web sites. The public fought back, claiming the software could also block users from viewing political content and censor other content. Some opponents also contend that the software can create security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers

China Caves, Says Green Dam Software Is Optional (via /.)

Man, this play called "MONETIZING EMMA," just premiered in NYC's 440 Studios (440 Lafayette Street at Astor Place) sounds like some wicked, trenchant stuff:

The year is 2013 and boutique investment bank Thackeray Walsh is arranging the first-ever securitization of smart teenagers.

Nothing like the insanely convoluted securities that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008-2009, this bond is backed by something far more valuable than sub-prime mortgages or toxic assets.

It's backed by an A-list pool of adolescents pledging their future earnings. They get money now in return for a share of their subsequent income.

Emma Dorfman's one of the chosen elite. A shy 15-year-old who most days shuttles between bullies at school, a pushy mom and a fantasy life inspired by Jane Austen, she's not exactly sure she wants to be "monetized." But Thackeray Walsh has special plans for her and Emma may be forced to trade her split reality for something doubly scary...and far more adult.

MONETIZING EMMA Plays 6/17-26 As Part Of Plant Connections Theatre Festivity

Monetizing Emma (Thanks, Dot!)

Cats tripping on kush-grade catnip. (Via Arbroath)

Several readers including erlehmann and tmk wrote to inform us about the dawning of Internet censorship in Germany under the usual guise of protecting the children. "This week, the two big political parties ruling Germany in a coalition held the final talks on their proposed Internet censorship scheme. DNS queries for sites on a list will be given fake answers that lead to a page with a stop sign. The list itself is maintained by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt). A protest movement has formed over the course of the last several months, and over 130K citizens have signed a petition protesting the law. Despite this, and despite criticism from all sides, the two parties sped up the process for the law to be signed on Thursday, June 18, 2009."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed the difference between "invention" (doing something new) and "innovation" (finding a new successful market) before, and it's resulted in some long and occasionally contentious discussions. Fred Wilson put up a post recently where he looked at a series of product "success" stories, and tried to figure out what was the key to success. In each one, he noted that the product enabled people to do stuff in a different way -- but one of the key findings, was that they all had something else in common: being drop dead simple, leading to much greater adoption. As Fred notes:

It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology. You have to be the first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.

This is a key point -- and it seems so key that I'm often confused how people can claim that being first is somehow more important -- so important that we should bar those who have that vision and are able to take a product to a market in a much better way. How can anyone claim that it's a better solution when the people with the vision to make a product more useful and more valuable such that the market will actually use it, should be blocked from doing that?

At the same time, we see all the time how people mock the "followers." As you look down Fred's list -- including products like the iPhone, Facebook, the Wii, the FlipCam, Blogger, Pandora and Twitter -- when each started to become popular, there were naysayers who insisted they were nothing special and no different than "x" that came before them. And, in many ways, those people had a point that these offerings weren't necessarily new as products, but the implementation was new. For whatever reason, each of those offerings were easier/better/simpler to understand in a way that made the market more willing to adopt them, such that they all have become more useful and more valuable to those who use them. Yes, there are still those who bitch and moan that they're "no different" and who don't understand the value. I'm sure we'll see some of them in the comments here. Yet, what these people miss out on is the fact that this isn't a race about being first -- and it's not about how useful it is to just you, the naysayer. It's about what makes the wider market sit up, take notice and find the real value.

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An anonymous reader writes "Recently it was revealed that our company measures IT performance by the time it takes to close trouble tickets. I consider IT's primary goal to be as transparent to the user as possible, thus this metric was rather troubling to me. Shouldn't we be focused on reducing calls, rather than simply closing them quickly? My question is: How is your IT performance measured, and how do you think it should be measured?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

Speaking of giant holes in the ground, let me pass along one more that happens to be one of today's featured places on the Atlas Obscura home page. The Mirny diamond mine in Siberia is the biggest man-made ditch in the world:

The largest man-made hole in the world is a diamond mine located on the outskirts of Mirny, a small town in eastern Siberia. Begun in 1955, the pit is now 525 meters deep and 1.25 kilometers across. The massive 20-foot tall rock-hauling trucks that service the mine travel along a road that spirals down from the lip of the hole to its basin. Round-trip travel time: two hours. Airspace above the mine is off-limits to helicopters, after "a few accidents when they were 'sucked in' by downward air flow..."

The artist known as Invader is having a solo show called TOP 10, and this video will give you a good idea of what to expect. Via Wooster Collective.

TOP 10

new works by Invader

Jonathan LeVine Gallery

Jun 27 thru Jul 25, 2009

NYC

More:

• RUBIKCUBISM - Space Invader Art!
  
• Space Invader's Rubik Bad Men II
  

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The Moscow art-group War (Voina) is known for stunts like taking over a police station (they titled the performance "Humiliation of Copper in His Own House") and letting loose feral cats into expensive Moscow restaurants. Recently they held a show at the Central Art House in Crimean Region that turned into a police raid.

Marina Galperina of Russia! magazine writes:

When famed Russian curator Andrei Erofeev invited Viona to take part in his "Lettrism" exhibition, he was already familiar with their antics and political provocations. Erofeyev granted the group's request for a whole room and complete freedom.

Erofeev, however, was not expecting a 115 square-foot banner photograph of group sex with the slogan "Fuck for Your Heir the Bear Cub!" (the bear cub - medvejonok - being Medvedev, naturally.)

This and other photographic and video transcripts of their x-rated February 2008 action at the Timiriazev Biological Museum comprised just a portion of Voina's incendiary exhibition. When the director of the Central Art House, Bichkov, arrived at the scene, he became hilariously infuriated (his last name does, after all, mean "little bull"). He raged ferociously at curator Erofeyev to dismantle Voina's display.

A series of compromises were attempted, like the paraphrasing of signage "I Fuck the Bear Cub" (for some reason "cock" is less offensive than "fuck" in Russian). Bichkov still called the cops, urging for Voina's arrest and permanent blacklisting. At first, Erofeev discouraged the cops by pretending to angrily scold the art group, but several Bichkov's threats later, a second, heavier-armed police wave arrived and the destruction of Voina's entire exhibit began.

Art show fracas in Russia (Photos NSFW)

Recently on Offworld, we saw the latest best proof of concept mobile augmented reality game -- ARhrrrr -- (that's the name, not an interjection), a camera phone game from Savannah/Georgia Tech that lets you use green and orange Skittles as proximity mines to help fend off a zombie invasion. We also saw that French guerrilla artist Invader -- best known for his 8-bit tile mosaic space invaders tucked on buildings around nearly every major city -- will soon be invading New York City, and found another games-inspired gallery exhibit with Koshi Kawachi's reflections on the death of Mario (above). We also saw a Sesame Street Fighter T-shirt that's as great as it sounds, dug around the infamously lavish late 90s defunct digs of Dallas's Ion Storm, got a double dose of Bit.Trip with a behind the scenes look at the game and a franchise crossover with WiiWare's Super Meat Boy, and watched a video wrap of chiptune showcase DUTYCYCLE.

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA is preparing to launch the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which will fly a Centaur rocket booster into the moon, triggering a six-mile-high explosion that scientists hope will confirm whether water is frozen in the perpetual darkness of craters near the moon's south pole. If the spacecraft launches on schedule at 12:51 p.m. Wednesday, it will hit the moon in the early morning hours of October 8 after an 86-day Lunar Gravity-Assist, Lunar Return Orbit that will allow the spacecraft time to complete its two-month commissioning phase and conduct nearly a month of science data collection of polar crater measurements before colliding with the moon just 10 minutes behind the Centaur." (Continues, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ulrich sez, "My father blogged for the first time on my site, writing up a 3,000 year old murder case. In short, some archaeologist found some skulls surrounding a neolithic henge in southern Germany and found some good evidence that they children were murdered. The local museum has a new exhibit on the discovery as well as some speculation on why the Bronze age settlers might have killed the children."

The murder was brutal--and it took place over 3,000 years ago. Archaeologists first found the skulls in the 1920s when they excavated a Neolithic settlement called "Wasserburg". At the time, the Neolithic settlement was a relatively bustling place. The people kept horses that they used to pull wagons and sleds, and even had a metal workshop that was able to cast bronze artifacts.

The scientists found six skulls equally spaced on the outside of the palisade fence surrounding the settlement. Only the skulls of the victims were found. Five of the skulls were children three to sixteen years old. The sixth skull was from a 50 year old woman.

Using forensic tools, scientists have shown that the children died 900 years BC and some of them may have been related. The scientists have also reconstructed their skulls, speculating that the boy was killed with a blunt club. The girl was most likely killed with a sharp metallic instrument like a sword or a lance. Small copper particles were detected in her skull.

A 3,000-Year Old Cold Case: Who Killed The Children In Bad Buchau? (Thanks, Ulrich!)

A few months ago, we responded to an ill-informed opinion piece in the UK's Independent by Stephen Garrett, who runs a TV production house. In his essay, Garrett trotted out all the old falsehoods about how file sharing is the same as theft and that ISPs absolutely need to stop file sharing or the entertainment industry will die. On top of that, he relied on the tired old argument that file sharing "costs jobs" and those jobs are "needed" in these economic times. That's ridiculously laughable, of course. Inefficient industries and inefficient jobs (such as those supported by gov't monopolies) are exactly what's not needed these days. However, it appears that Garrett has not gotten the message (or, would simply beg for a gov't handout, rather than adjust his business model to match with the economic times).

Steven Hoy points out that the Financial Times is the latest UK paper to give Garrett space to put forth his opinions on the subject, and so we get yet another misguided rant about how the gov't and ISPs need to protect his own inability to craft a better business model.

Piracy (think Johnny Depp) and file-sharing sound harmless enough. But as it involves the widespread appropriation of intellectual property without payment, file-sharing is better described as file-nicking. It is theft. Hundreds of millions of pounds are haemorrhaging out of the film and TV industries, just in the UK. Jobs are being lost and companies will fold. This is not in contention.

Actually, it is very much in contention. It's almost pointless to reiterate this point, but if you can't understand the difference between someone making a copy and someone taking away a good, it's difficult to see how you should be given responsibility over running a business. It may be infringing, but it is not "theft." There is no "loss." Nothing is "missing." The only problem is a business model issue -- that is that you, Stephen Garrett, failed to give people a good enough reason to buy something. That's your fault, and your fault alone.

If any jobs are being lost, it's because you failed to manage your business properly, recognize the new market that technology has created, and learn to embrace it in a profitable manner. Others are doing so. You whine and ask the gov't for a handout.

In this parallel universe, consumer rights have acquired the status of a fascistic mantra. What the consumer wants, the consumer gets, even if he does not want to pay for it. Everyone has, to some extent, colluded in this fantasy, blocking out the advertisements while consuming -- for "free" -- newspapers, films, television shows and music on legitimate websites. Now, and this has happened very quickly, consumers assume they have a right to these things. Free, and forever. Unfortunately this fantasy is unsustainable.

Why is it unsustainable? It is, in fact, no different than any marketplace where competition exists. Let's say, for example, that you're a pizza maker, and it costs you $5 to make a pie, which you then sell for $10. Not a bad business. Now, a competitor comes along, and figures out how to make pizza pies for $3, and start selling his (which are just as good as yours) for $5. Now, you're in trouble. What do you do? Normally, you figure out how to compete, or you go out of business. You don't go crying to the gov't about how you're going to lose jobs if the gov't doesn't stop others from making the cheaper pizza. You come up with a better pizza or a more efficient way of making the pizza and you compete and get people to buy your pizza.

Economically speaking, this is the identical situation, because all that matters to a business is the margin. The fact that new technology has made it possible for your content to have a marginal cost of $0 is the same thing as someone figuring out how to make a pizza and price it at your marginal cost. It's just competition, and the answer is that you learn to compete, not that you blame the more efficient system or anyone who enables it.

All of these cost money to produce; in the case of TV dramas such as Spooks that my company produces, a huge amount. At the point when these creative products enter cyberspace, they are only partly paid for. Producers are dependent on revenues from DVDs and international sales, which piracy hits.

Of course all of these things cost money to produce. No one has said otherwise. But that's why you put in place a better business model that offers something unique that they can't get elsewhere for free. You use those unique scarcities to make a profit and recoup your fixed costs. That's just business. No gov't protectionism needed.

Piracy happens on the internet. The greater the bandwidth, the easier piracy is. We in the creative industries have asked (nicely) that the internet service providers should help tackle piracy by responding in a graduated way to customers of theirs identified as offering or downloading pirated material. The sequence would be along the lines of a warning letter, a "squeezing" of bandwidth, a further cut in bandwidth and then the ultimate sanction: a limitation of service.

I read that logic to be the same as "automobiles happen on roads, the nicer the roads, the more automobiles we have. We in the horse carriage industries have asked (nicely) that the road builders should help tackle automobile dangers by responding in a graduated way to drivers identified as speeding at rates beyond what a horse carriage can run. The sequence would be along the lines of a warning letter, a fine for speeding, a further ban from driving on roads, and then the ultimate sanction: a limitation on driving altogether."

Stopping progress because you're unable to adapt is no excuse.

Having the right to use the internet to access entertainment brings with it the responsibility not to act in a way that endangers every future film, TV show and music track. In particular, the UK government needs to use Tuesday's Digital Britain report to compel ISPs to work with us on a graduated system of penalties for file-sharers. Doing nothing bolsters the notion that nothing has value. The logical outcome is that, within our lifetimes, there will be nothing of value left.

No, Mr. Garrett. What you are asking for is for the internet to change to adapt to the way you liked to run your business. But that's not how the world works. Your unwillingness (or, perhaps, inability) to change is your problem, not the internet's. The internet was designed as a communications medium. You are trying to force it into being a broadcast medium, because that's the only business model you know, and you're unwilling (or unable) to learn how to create a business model on a communications platform. The only ones who should be "sanctioned" or face penalties is you, for your own inability to compete.

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Ramon sez, "In Germany internet censorship will be introduced. The bill did not pass yet, but the ruling parties have agreed to do so. Over 130.000 people in Germany have signed a petition to protect the freedom of speech and information, but we have not been heard. Read details about the consequences, arguments and counter measures here."

The Minister for Family Affairs Ursula von der Leyen kicked off and lead the discussions within the German Federal Government to block Internet sites in order to fight child pornography. The general idea is to build a censorship architecture enabling the government to block content containing child pornography. The Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) is to administer the lists of sites to be blocked and the internet providers obliged to erect the secret censorship architecture for the government.

A strong and still growing network opposing these ideas quickly formed within the German internet community. The protest has not been limited to hackers and digital activist but rather a mainstreamed effort widely supported by bloggers and twitter-users. The HashTag used by the protesters is #zensursula - a German mesh up of the Ministers name and the word censorship equivalent to #censursula.

As part of the public's protest an official e-Petition directed at the German parliament was launched. Within three days 50,000 persons signed the petition - - the number required for the petition titled „No indexing and blocking of Internet sites" to be heard by the parliament. The running time of an e-Petition in Germany is 6 weeks - within this time over 130,000 people signed making this e-Petition the most signed and most successful ever.

The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany (Thanks, Ramon!)

destinyland writes "A fertility service in L.A. and New York screens embryos for breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, and 70 other diseases — and lets couples pick the sex of their babies. But when their pre-implantation diagnostic services began including the baby's eye and hair color, even the Pope objected — and the Great Designer Baby Controversy began. '[W]e cannot escape the fact that science is moving forward,' the fertility service explained — before capitulating to pressure to eliminate the eye and hair color screenings."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I see these switches every time I go to the thrift store; I'm glad now there's something useful to do with them! Randy converted his to a DIY audio switch.

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Danny O'Brien's got a doozy of a lazyweb idea: "Here's a way to mash-up two of the most talked-about Internet issues today. Opera launched their web-server-in-a-browser, Opera Unite, today. Iranian protestors are looking for proxies to get around Iran's blocking. So why not write a Opera Unite service that acts as a simple, quick-and-dirty proxy for Iranians? Danny O'Brien lays down the challenge."

Instead of a real http proxy (like Psiphon), the best implementation would simply let you append a URL to your Unite URL and get a website back, like "http://foo.bar.operaunite.com/www.cnn.com/". That would get rid of handing over your cookies to an unknown third-party; it'd probably also discourage people using the service for private communications (no https, in Unite -- it'd be great if Opera fixed that!).

Maybe I'd also stick in a geoip check to make sure the incoming requests are coming from a known Iranian IP block, just so users could feel worthy that they're just catering to Iranians (you could pull them out of this free geolocation database). That way we wouldn't be creating a permanent global clunky, insecure proxy network -- or at least not until Iran recovers and starts its own phishing services.

I know I'm not a good enough JS programmer to pull this off, but the Unite JavaScript API certainly appears to permit cross-domain XMLHttp calls, and you can catch generic HTTP requests using opera.io.webserver.addEventListener('_request',somehandler,false);, so it is theoretically possible (and here I hand wave to the implementation Gods).

wanted: spartacus, an opera unite web proxy for iran (Thanks, Danny!)

LionMage writes "Much has been made previously of how China's Green Dam software must be installed on all new PCs in China, and of more recent revelations that the software may create exploitable security vulnerabilities or even provide the Chinese government with a ready-made botnet to use for potentially nefarious purposes. (One of those prior articles even discusses how Green Dam incorporates blacklists from CyberSitter.) Now the BBC is reporting that Solid Oak's CyberSitter software may have had more than just a compiled blacklist lifted from it. Solid Oak is claiming that actual pieces of their code somehow wound up in Green Dam. From PC Magazine's article: 'Solid Oak Software, the developer of CyberSitter, claims that the look and feel of the GUI used by Green Dam mimics the style of CyberSitter. But more damning, chief executive Brian Milburn said, was the fact that the Green Dam code uses DLLs identified with the CyberSitter name, and even makes calls back to Solid Oak's servers for updates.'" Relatedly, reader Spurious Logic writes that Green Dam won't be mandatory after all, according to an unnamed official with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Science fiction writer Dave Laderoute sez,

If you live in Ontario, or want to (quickly!) send some books to a good cause, the Lieutenant Governor of the province is doing his annual drive for new books for kids living in remote First Nations communities. These are generally small, isolated communities located deep in the northern boreal wilderness. Most have a population under 1000 and are accessible only by aircraft. Kids in these communities often have access to only old books in bad condition, so our province's Lieutenant Governor launched this annual effort several years ago to refresh community libraries with up-to-date titles.

The deadline, June 21, is only a few days away, unfortunately. If someone from outside Ontario REALLY wants to help out, feel free to get hold of me directly at dglad@sff.net and you can make arrangements to send a book or two to me, and I'll get it into the donation stream. But for those of you who live in Ontario, or nearby (I'm lookin' at you, folks in northern New York, Michigan, Minnesota, etc.!) this is a great chance to get some new reading material into the hands of kids who really, really need it.

For Cory's benefit, I know where my brand-new hardcopy of "Little Brother" is going. I'm quite happy to live with my digital copy and get the dead-tree version into the hands of a young Aboriginal kid.

Book Drive for Aboriginal Youth (Thanks, Dave!)

We all know Carl Linnaeus as the father of taxonomy, but how did he keep all that taxonomic information organized? Turns out he invented index cards:

Speaking at the annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester, UK on Saturday 4 July, Mueller-Wille will reveal his preliminary findings of research on Linnaeus' manuscripts held June 16 at the Linnaean Society of London...

Towards the end of his career, in the mid-1760s, Linnaeus took this further, inventing a paper tool that has since become very common: index cards. While stored in some fixed, conventional order, often alphabetically, index cards could be retrieved and shuffled around at will to update and compare information at any time.

Carl Linnaeus Invented The Index Card

Technology … the electronic frontier.

These are the voltages of Arduino microcontroller.

It's 54 I/O pins … to explore new circuitry, to bring forth new devices and experimentation.

To totally make tons of LEDs blink.

WOOooosh - PEW! PEW! - BZzZTtT!

*ahem*

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We've already discussed how silly the Performance Rights Act is -- and how it's basically an attempt by the record labels to get their own bailout courtesy of radio stations. There are all sorts of problems with it, and Jess Walker does an amazing job explaining just how ridiculous the Performance Rights Act is. In doing so, he highlights one point that is quite a common trick in the RIAA's bag of tricks, but which doesn't get enough attention: how it changes the story to flip things around to its advantage over and over and over again. Case in point: the RIAA is arguing that it needs to get royalties to performers for radio air play to "even out" the situation, since radio is the "only" platform where performers don't get royalties. For example, they point to internet radio and satellite radio, where artist do get paid.

So, the RIAA claims, this is unfair... after all, why should they get paid for all of those, but not radio?

Except, the RIAA conveniently wants us all to forget history. That's because it was the RIAA who argued that satellite radio, internet radio and other forms of broadcasting were different from terrestrial radio, and therefore required different royalty structures. In other words, the only reason why this "unfair" dichotomy exists in the first place is because the RIAA lobbied for it by claiming that satellite radio and internet radio were different.

Now it wants everyone to forget that and pretend that it's some weird "anomaly" that terrestrial radio doesn't include performance royalties? Don't buy it. This is the sort of thing the industry has pulled off for years -- pushing one country to extend copyright laws, and then moving to other countries and working up a lobbyist campaign about how that country isn't keeping up with other, more reasonable countries, concerning copyright laws. Have you noticed what's happening in Canada these days? That's a direct example of this sort of thing.

Walker also takes on other points to show how silly and dangerous the Performance Rights Act would be. It benefits no one but the record labels. It harms radio stations. It harms independent musicians. It harms big musicians as well (since most of the money doesn't go to them, but to the record labels). Who does it help? The RIAA, of course:

And for what? Imagine, as a thought experiment, that this bill were passed and, simultaneously, payola were made fully legal. Does anyone doubt that more money would flow toward the radio stations than away? Radio remains the primary means by which the music industry promotes its product. By pushing for this fee, the labels are essentially asking their advertisers to pay them for the service of selling their stuff.

Ah, you say, but what about the independent artists who don't get big promotional pushes from the major music labels? Surely they'd benefit from a new revenue stream? Actually, they'll be even worse off. The economic mission of most commercial radio stations is to deliver audiences to the sponsors whose spots are aired between tunes. So programmers have a built-in preference for music whose mass appeal has already been proven. If you increase the cost of playing a record, that just intensifies the incentive: The more you pay to play a song, the more conservative you'll be about which songs you play. The marginal cost of playing each track is the same, but the commercial payoff is greater for established artists.

Generally speaking, the more it costs to run a station, the more risk-averse it will be. That's one reason low-power and Web outlets are more experimental: They don't have as much money on the line. But those stations--the ones that go out of their way to play diverse and unfamiliar material--are precisely the ones that have the hardest time paying the song tax. The proposed law acknowledges the problem by introducing a sliding scale, with the least profitable outfits paying $500 a year. But while that may be chump change for a big broadcaster, it's a pretty big piece of the operating budget for a low-power, volunteer-run community or student station.

Nor is it the only cost the law will impose. "The record labels are completely out of touch as to how college radio stations operate," Warren Kozireski, president of College Broadcasters Inc., recently complained on his organization's website. "The extensive record keeping requirements that will be required by the Copyright Royalty Board alone will add hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to the true cost of a performance fee." It's relatively easy to do that book-keeping if you have a narrow playlist and rarely deviate from it, as is the case with most large commercial radio stations. But if you have a library of thousands of albums and 45s, many of which were never reissued on CD, and if you allow your DJs to choose which ones they play--or even to bring in still more music from their personal collections of rare soul or jazz or bluegrass or electronica obscurities--then tracking the data suddenly becomes a full-time job.

Worse yet: Though the rhetoric around the proposal focuses on the benefits to musicians, much of the money won't make it to the artists in the first place. In part that reflects the fact that the fees go not just to the performers but to the copyright owner, which frequently means the record company. But it also reflects the corruption in the industry, which legislation like this has probably abetted.

As we've seen time and time again, if the RIAA supports it, it's not good for consumers. It's not good for musicians. It's not good for anyone but a small selection of record labels. Hopefully, Congress recognizes this for the pure money grab it is and shuts it down.

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This vid's been making the rounds, featuring an unusual method for controlling old school games - theremin. Yup, theremin. From the video's desciption -

The sound from the theremin is split into its frequency and amplitude components in real time, which are then mapped to values in a linear scale representing the X and Y axis. Pitch becomes horizontal control, and Volume becomes vertical control.
The X and Y scales are then cut up into different zones. In this case, Left; Right and dead zones for the horizontal, and a single trigger and dead zone for the vertical.

The trigger zones are then mapped onto a virtual joystick hooked into an emulator.

The end result is a fairly usable input control for playing games like mario. The bars give the much needed visual feedback as to how "in tune" you are, so you have a better feel of where the trigger points are.

Very strange to see such a nicey-nice theremin perform dead-simple functionality, but fun is fun, right? If it were me, I'd get that thing hooked up to a PS2 dual-shock asap!

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You know what it's like, you're out on the town, doing something cool, and you have an urge to tweet about it for your tweeps on Twitter, but the only device you've brought out with you is your Commodore 64. Now there's BREADBOX64, a Twitter client for the C64.

With BREADBOX64 you can post status messages and view your friends timeline. The timeline refreshes every two minutes. After starting you provide your twitter username and password separated by a colon. After pressing enter, the timeline is retrieved and shown. At the bottom of the screen there is an input field for you to type aq status message. Pressing enter will post that message to twitter.

You can run BREADBOX64 on a C64 emulator. I use VICE, because that one supports networking. However, you can better test it on a real system if you have the hardware ready at hand. If so, copy the D64 to a real disk, put it in your 1541 and go ahead!

BREADBOX64, a twitter client for the C64. (via Waxy)

sherl0k writes "Opera 10.0, dubbed Opera Unite, has been released. Built into the Web browser is a full-fledged Web server, complete with nifty little gadgets such as a 'fridge' that people can post notes onto, a chat room, a widget to stream your music library anywhere, and a built-in file-sharing mechanism. It also scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test." Readers fudreporter and TLS point to The Register's report on the new release and a 5-minute video demo, respectively. Update: 06/16 15:18 GMT by T : Roar Lauritzsen of Opera Software writes to point out that "release" isn't quite the right word here; though you can download it, version 10.0 is still in beta, and the version with Unite is a labs (experimental) release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm asking a number of BB friends to contribute guest posts here on the situation in Iran. Next New Networks founder Tim Shey was flying from NYC to LA yesterday, and had an interesting personal story -- he kindly obliged my request to write it up for BB. Tim says:

Like a lot of other Virgin America passengers lately I joined the Mile High WiFi club today, and spent the first hour or so of the flight being marginally productive -- staying in touch with the office via IM and email, catching up on some writing and planning, that sort of thing -- but pretty much ending every conversation or message I had with anyone with "and I'm doing this from A MILE IN THE AIR!" For someone who still remembers the earliest days of dialup, and hasn't completely mastered his animal terror at the sensation of flying at 500mph in a metal tube 32,000 feet above the ground, especially every time a patch of turbulence hits, the idea that we can get fast, stable, $15 Wifi to work on a jet plane seems like technology that's getting close to magic.

But as I starting scanning Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, again for the novelty of doing it in the air, I started seeing postings from friends about the Iranian protests that CNN had also been covering since Obama's AMA speech had ended. First, a Twitter post from Brett Bullington, reblogging a post from John Perry Barlow that you could search Twitter within 15 miles of Iran. I got glued to the stream of messages there, and then hit this vein of extraordinary photos posted on Twitpic by @Iranpishi, especially this one, which I immediately posted to my blog, again amazed that I could follow all this from a plane. Just a few years ago, we got onto a plane and shut the doors, and we could land on a different planet than the one we took off from, depending on what had happened in our world in those eight hours; and just eight months ago, I spent election night flying on a plane across country, feeling cut off from the web and the rest of the world as our plane watched Obama win the presidency and change the world on our little in-seat screens (Daisy Whitney also happened to be on the flight, and wrote this TV Week column about it). This time, though, plugged in and reblogging photos coming out of Tehran and seeing people on the ground then reblogging my posts, I felt like a participant.

As all this was happening, I looked a seat up ahead of me, and saw a young woman also tuned to the footage on CNN, and signing up on her laptop for a citizen journalist account on iReport. I then watched her tabbing through a number of Farsi-language news sites and her Facebook stream, where she was IM-ing and reposting news stories about the protests from her friends in English and Farsi. I leaned over, gave her a card with my email, and asked if she might be willing to forward anything to me so I could share the links. She looked at me and asked, "do you want the real stories of what's going on, or just what some of the news outlets are telling you?" I replied that I supposed I wanted the real story, not knowing what she'd share, and within a minute, we'd become friends on Facebook, and a stream of stories and links were filling my inbox.

The first was an open letter to the world from a group called Iranian Artists in Exile, and I'm posting the full text and video of here. It's a political letter, and should be read critically as such -- but I haven't seen this posted many places elsewhere besides The Washington Times, and that's what this day has been all about -- technology connecting people around the world, and getting us access to voices and perspectives to us we might not have heard otherwise.

Related: this Facebook link inciting people to DDOS pro-Ahmedinejad sites.

We've just got back from shooting a quick gallery of movies using the new Olympus Pen E-P1, so if you want to see for yourself how the 720p videos look then check out the gallery of 14 clips after the link.

Kudos to Ray Manzarek for signing up to this!

Parody singer "Weird Al" Yankovic poked fun at Segway riders three years ago with his rap song "White and Nerdy," and his latest single "Craigslist" skewers the people who can be found swapping wares and scoring dates on the classifieds ads site. (While there's a verse about the popular "missed connections" feature on Craigslist, there isn't otherwise mention of the current prostitution controversy that the site's been dealing with.)

The video and song are a professed homage to the Doors, and though it isn't a takeoff on a specific song, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek was enlisted to play on the track. "Craigslist" is available for sale as a single now and will appear on an album that comes out next year.

Weird Al takes on Craigslist, the Doors

BBCWatcher writes "Despite Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent statement that his company will continue Sun's hardware business, it won't be with Sun processors (and associated engineering jobs). The New York Times reports that Sun has canceled its long-delayed Rock processor, the next generation SPARC CPU. Instead, the Times says Sun/Oracle will have to rely on Fujitsu for SPARCs (and Intel otherwise). Unfortunately Fujitsu is decreasing its R&D budget and unprofitable at present. Sun's cancellation of Rock comes just after Intel announced yet another delay for Tukwila, the next generation Itanium, now pushed to 2010. HP is the sole major Itanium vendor. Primary beneficiaries of this CPU turmoil: IBM and Intel's Nehalem X86 CPU business."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I recognize that it's still fashionable to bash Twitter as being a useless toy for people with too much free time (despite many, many examples of how useful it is for those who use it properly). Yet, for anyone paying attention this past weekend, Twitter has emerged as an amazingly powerful communications tool as to what's happening in Iran, where there are massive protests, riots, rallies and attacks following the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iran Twazzup page has had a tremendous wealth of information from inside and outside Iran -- the sort of information that we wouldn't know about otherwise. It's an amazing view into the country that simply wasn't possible in the past. I remember in the runup to the war in Iraq, there were a few Iraqi bloggers you could follow to get a sense of what was going on in the country, but nothing like the massive ability of thousands of people to easily get the word out on what they're seeing on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere. It's really quite impressive, and I'm hard pressed to see how anyone could look at what's coming out of Iran via Twitter, and then claiming that Twitter isn't a useful or different communication tool.

With all that going on, it's fascinating to see that Twitter and its data center partner, NTT, have actually chosen to delay some critical updates, knowing that cutting off communications from Iran just as so many people are relying on it would be a disaster. While this does highlight a separate problem -- about the fact that as Twitter becomes a critical communication channel for some, the fact that it is a "single point of failure" is worrisome. It's definitely something that will need to be addressed at some point.

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Oh the NYT. They do such a great job with the news, but they do such a terrible job of running the business.

In the last few days while CNN et al completely dropped the ball on the Iran story, they were right there, on top of it. Great stuff.

Everyone else in the news business missed the Twitter SUL story, but the Times nailed it. I was so happy I can't tell you.

But in the meantime they're cutting the pay of Boston Globe reporters, and have no idea how or if their business will operate next year or the year after.

All this at a time when their product is in high demand. People love news, and we love the way the NYT does the news. So why is there a problem?

Oddly enough, I know, and I can tell you.

Get your coffee, have a seat, let me tell you a story...

Three years ago I got a Blackberry and fell in love. I was riding all over the place on the BART system and I could take the news with me. It didn't take me five minutes to realize it was the perfect River of News device, so I adapted my NYT and BBC rivers to work in their browser.

Unlike most developers I have the phone number of the CEO of the NY Times Digital, so I rang him up and told him how wonderful the Times was on my Blackberry and please please let's tell the world about it. After all he had an incredible communication system for doing exactly that. I wanted to fly to NY to show it off, but he said we should have a phone conference first. I thought this was a bad idea, but I did it. I shouldn't have.

I have no idea who was at the meeting, but the first thing they did was tell me about their upcoming mobile version of the Times that they had spent millions developing. Right off the bat I knew it had to be terrible. The only way to spend that much money on a mobile news site is to put all kinds of hurdles between the reader and the news. I said I had a totally simple way to do it that I had developed in a couple of days, by myself. (I lied, it actually took about an hour.) Then they asked what I wanted. I knew we were headed off a cliff. I said that isn't important, they pressed, I said yes -- I probably did want to be paid for my work. That was the end of the meeting. They were off the phone in less than a minute. I'm sure their version of the story will be different. But the net result was indisputable. They waited over three years before they had a reasonable way to deliver news to mobile users.

Yes I know they have millions of people reading their mobile site. But I'm talking about something else. I'm talking about the backbone of news delivery, and today that's indisputably Twitter. The stupid thing about our meeting, the lose-lose about it, is that right then and there we were on the edge of inventing it. And because I didn't get on a plane (my mistake) and because they had so much invested in doing it the wrong way (their mistake) we didn't do it.

So the first-level problem for the Times is they now are authors for Twitter, doing great work, and not being paid for it. Once again, they're going to be complaining, soon, that the tech industry is pocketing the profits while they do the work. (They'll be wrong, a lot of other people are working for free too.) The higher-level problem is they aren't competing. They're just sitting there. Spending money in obvious and wasteful Dilbert-like ways, and letting the small nimble competiton run circles around them.

I would, if I were them, ask their Twitter users (and they have quite a few) what was so wonderful about Twitter as it covered the Iran story. Ask them to explain the role the NYT played in it, and if it was generally appreciated (they were great, and in general it wasn't appreciated). And then, and this is the key question, ask them how it could have been better.

There's still an opportunity to create the news system of the future. But only if you're very smart about it.

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

Spotty (now hopefully fixed) server aside, it's been fun watching new entries pour into the Atlas Obscura from people we've never met. I want to share a place that recently caught my eye, posted the other day by a user named Dave. It's a massive underground coal fire that's been smoldering beneath the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania ever since 1962:

The town sits on top of a rich vein of coal, and the fire has defied every attempt to extinguish it. National awareness of Centralia's unending environmental catastrophe came in 1981 when a 12-year-old boy fell into a 150-foot hole that suddenly appeared in his back yard. Most residents were relocated in 1984, and in 1992 the entire town was condemned. Most buildings were torn down, creating the Centralia that can still be seen today: a network of streets running through empty fields and, increasingly, new growth forest. As of 2007, Centralia had nine residents.

Then Dylan told me about a similar, and even more dramatic, subterranean fire that's been burning for almost as long under the Karakum desert of Turkmenistan (pictured above). Locals call it the "Gates of Hell":

The hole is the outcome not of nature but of an industrial accident. In 1971 a Soviet drilling rig accidentally punched into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and the entire drilling rig to fall in. Having punctured a pocket of gas, poisonous fumes began leaking from the hole at an alarming rate. To head off a potential environmental catastrophe, the Soviets set the hole alight. The crater hasn't stopped burning since.

Turns out, these sorts of mine fires can stay lit for a very long time. One burned in the city of Zwickau, Germany from 1476 to 1860. Another coal fire in Germany, at a place called Brennender Berg (Burning Mountain), has been smoking continually since 1688!

Al writes "Two researchers have found a way to run unauthorized code on an iPhone remotely. This is different than 'jailbreaking,' which requires physical access to the device. Normally applications have to be signed cryptographically by Apple in order to run. But Charles Miller of Independent Security Evaluators and Vincenzo Iozzo from the University of Milan found more than one instance in which Apple failed to prevent unauthorized data from executing. This means that a program can be loaded into memory as a non-executable block of data, after which the attacker can essentially flip a programmatic switch and make the data executable. The trick is significant, say Miller and Iozzo, because it provides a way to do something on a device after making use of a remote exploit. Details will be presented next month at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas." The attack was developed on version 2.0 of the iPhone software, and the researchers don't know if it will work when 3.0 is released.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thirteen is a lucky number when it comes to revolutions!

We've got a new website for the podcast and a new feed.

Go get it! (And it's in the scripting.com feed, too, as always.)

Brian sez, "I did a series of small (4" x 3") canvases depicting Lego zombies. I thought you guys might dig it."

Small Lego Zombie Canvases (Thanks, Brian!)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

MAKE subscriber Marcus created a neato embroidered badge for Arduiniacs out there. These stylin' little symbols of skill are available from Little Bird Electronics - no prior Arduino proficiency testing required.

Hey, I think this merit badge thing might be catching on eh? It would seem a bit of a roundup is in order -

Nerd merit badges

Soft circuit merit badge merits itself

Machine Project merit badges

What? no blogging badge? :(

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Happy Bloomsday! Here's a rare reading of James Joyce performing his own work; as John Naughton notes, "When I first heard it I was astonished to find that he had a broad Irish-country accent. I had always imagined him speaking as a 'Dub' -- i.e. with the accent of most of the street characters in Ulysses."

James Joyce MP3

James Joyce MP3 (mirror)

(via Memex 1.1)

(Image: Revolutionary Joyce Better Contrast.jpg, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

From the Twitter blog:

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

Down Time Rescheduled

At the E3 Expo a few weeks ago, Electronic Arts showcased an upcoming game, Dante's Inferno, to awkward protests from a group of concerned Christians going under the name, "Salvationists Against Virtual and Eternal Damnation." They had signs like "Trade in your PlayStation for a PrayStation," "Cheat codes won't save your soul," and "Hell is not a game," as well as a 1996-esque website complete with animated GIFs and multi-colored all-caps text. The protest was covered by the LA Times, the San Jose Mercury News and many gaming blogs. That sort of controversy might make the game more appealing to some... except, EA admitted that the protest was entirely staged by the viral marketing firm that they hired (though, it didn't fool everyone).

As the popular gaming blog Joystiq puts it, there's got to be a better way to promote the game. A faux controversy might seem like a clever idea, until people realize it's just a publicity stunt. Plus, it doesn't seem very smart to alienate Christians when you could be selling them the game instead (as Thomas Peters from AmericanPapist.com writes, "getting to play Dante as he slashes his way through hell? It sure beats Tetris."). Electronic Arts recently landed in some hot water for another clever viral marketing idea, which involved shipping brass knuckles with the Godfather II press kit, despite mere possession being a first-degree misdemeanor in some states to which they were shipped. They get points for creativity, but they might want to think twice before acting on some of these ideas...

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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Fitzrovia Radio Hour is a radio-drama performance troupe in the UK who do over-the-top, steampunky stories that pay homage to the golden age of British radio plays. I saw them perform live at one of the White Mischief steampunk nights at the Scala near King's Cross, and they were superb -- full costume, great period-appropriate foley gadgets, and wonderful performances. They've got a podcast, too!

Your favourite gang from Radioland present three thrilling tales of imperial endeavour on frontiers near, far and final!

'Leinigen and the Monkey Men of Vijayanagar' An urgent telegram leads our hero to the jungles of British India and the lost city of Vijayanagar, which has been overrun by monkeys. Local legend has it that deep in the city's ruins, something sinister lurks...

'Survival of the Fittest' The leading financiers and businessmen of 1912 gather for a weekend of hunting at the Dartmoor estate of Colonel Charlie De Wynn. But it soon becomes apparent that their prey will not be pheasants or foxes...

'The Madman in the Moon' In the futuristic world of 1996, the good ship Jeremy Bentham is bravely pushing forward Britain's understanding of space science! But does the presence of a madman on Moon Station 1 mean the whole earth is in jeopardy?

Sponsored by Rathbone's Pick-Me-Up Tablets - remedies for the tired, the anxious and the busy!

Fitzrovia Radio Hour (Thanks, Toby!)

Yishay sez, "The road to hell is paved with the best intentions (including mine). Learn how to actually help the protesters and not the gov't in Iran."

The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through Twitter.

1. Do NOT publicise proxy IP's over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.

2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.

3. Keep you bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don't retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.

4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become 'Iranians' it becomes much harder to find them.

5. Don't blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don't publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don't signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind...

#iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners (Thanks, Yishay!)

The E-P1 has undoubtedly created quite a stir as the first genuinely compact interchangeable-lens digital camera, but what does Olympus have up its sleeve for Micro Four Thirds in the future? We caught up with Akira Watanabe, product planning manager of Olympus's SLR division at the E-P1 launch event in Berlin, and asked him about the company's plans for the system.

Pavol Hvizdos just posted a Slovak fan-translation of my book Little Brother -- Maly brat. Man, I love the cool stuff Creative Commons licenses lets people do with my books!

Cory Doctorow: Maly brat

Uncle Wilco from Shedblog sez, "Punks Not Dad have launched their video for the Shed Week Song - 'In me Shed' and if you like punk and sheds, then it's the video of the year for you."

Offical song for Shed Week Video & Live Show for Shed Week (Thanks, Uncle Wilco!)

sopssa writes "Bing has set up a separate domain just for porn images and videos. '[The] general manager of Microsoft Bing said in a blog post that potentially explicit images and video content now will be coming from one separate domain — explicit.bing.net. 'This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content regardless of what the SafeSearch settings might be.' When Bing was first launched, there was some online chatter about explicit images popping up when videos were 'previewed' in the search results. This means the thumbnails and videos are served from that domain, allowing easy filter of them in corporate and school networks. Users still normally use www.bing.com. Instead of heavily filtering the results, this is quite a good move."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Mini Monster kit from the Maker Shed makes an adorable hand-sewn monster that's one of a kind. Good for all skill levels. The kit uses the tutorial from Craft:06 and will yield one mini monster about 4" tall.

More about our Mini Monster Kit

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Just about a year ago, we pointed out that Bell Canada was facing scrutiny for its decision to force traffic shaping on all of its resellers, often without letting them know... and yet, at nearly the same time, it launched its own crappy online video store. The whole thing seemed odd. First, Bell claimed it needed to shape traffic to deal with congestion... but then it had no problem launching its own video store that would have no traffic shaping. That certainly seems like anticompetitive behavior. Yet, as we pointed out at the time, it was difficult to believe that the Bell online video store would get any usage at all. It had an extremely limited selection, high prices and buggy Microsoft DRM. What a bargain?

Apparently, it took all of a year for Bell Canada to realize that it wasn't getting any use whatsoever, and Joe McEnaney points out that Bell Canada has quietly shut down the site... though, it's still throttling traffic from resellers. Maybe, next time, instead of trying to limit competitors and offer something crappy, Bell could spend its resources investing in bandwidth. That would have made everyone a lot happier.

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clemenstimpler sends a link to Groklaw, which has been following the proceedings dealing with the conversion of SCO's bankruptcy to to Chapter 7 (i.e., liquidating the company). SCO has announced a prospective buyer. "...SCO has suggested it has a buyer. That doesn't mean it will avoid Chapter 7 of course, nor does it mean that the bankruptcy court will OK the suggested sale. But it likely does mean more delay, which is what this is likely all about. SCO very much wants to wait until the appeals court rules in SCO v. Novell. ... Hearing set for July 16 with backup for July 27. SCO has already moved to make it July 27. combo hearing on convert and sale. Frankly, it would not totally amaze me if the three entities that filed motions to convert were to appeal this. If not, SCO got its desired delay."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer. .

Recovering from our experience being Boinged (Sysadmin, save me!) I thought I would share a wondrous site found in a less than exotic location...

The story begins in 1941 at an army depot in Seneca County, NY when some soldiers noticed a couple white deer roaming inside their 24-square-mile fenced-off base. Realizing that something strange (and wonderful) was afoot, the General ordered the soldiers to protect the white deer. While the soldiers continued to hunt brown deer inside the confines of the reserve, the white ones were allowed to breed. With predators were kept at bay by a giant fence, and pressure put on the brown deer by hunting, the white deer population was able to explode. (These blanched deer are not albinos, as you might assume, but rather possess two copies of another rare recessive gene for whiteness.) There are now 200 of them roaming the grounds, the largest herd of white deer anywhere in the world.

Today the base is no longer active, but the deer are looked after by a not-for-profit organization--Seneca White Deer Inc--devoted to managing the herd. They are currently fighting plans by developers to reduce the area to a fourth of its current size.

Seneca White Deer Website

Alys sez, "The Australian communications regulator is going to fine those who link to sites that are listed on their blacklist. It threatened an online forum with an $11,000/day fine over a link posted to an anti-abortion website that was on the blacklist. To add insult to injury, several pages of Wikileaks have also ended up on their blacklist, due to their posting of the Danish list of banned websites."

Electronic Frontiers Australia said the leak of the Danish blacklist and ACMA's subsequent attempts to block people from viewing it showed how easy it would be for ACMA's own blacklist - which is secret - to be leaked onto the web once it is handed to ISPs for filtering.

"We note that, not only do these incidents show that the ACMA censors are more than willing to interpret their broad guidelines to include a discussion forum and document repository, it is demonstrably inevitable that the Government's own list is bound to be exposed itself at some point in the future," EFA said.

"The Government would serve the country well by sparing themselves, and us, this embarrassment."

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, in its regular report on enemies of internet freedom, placed Australia on its "watch list" of countries imposing anti-democratic internet restrictions that could open the way for abuses of power and control of information.

Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day

Mother Jones's "Bollywood for Beginners" special features clips from ten must-see Bollywood movies along with commentary. A fine way to spend an hour or two in a clicktrance...

3) Sholay (1975): They call this a Curry Western. Take one part John Wayne, two parts bromance, stir in the subaltern heros of the 1970s and the star power of Amitabh Bachchan, and you have Sholay, the most watched Bollywood movie of all time.

Synopsis: Jay (Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) are a couple of small-time crooks whose cunning and moral uprightness win them a special place in the heart of Thakur Baldev Singh, a local lawman who wants revenge against a gangster so mean, his name is still synonomys with evil.

Bonus: It's a tie, between Bollywood's most evil villian, Gabar Singh, and the loveable buddiness of Jay and Veeru, who were bromancing thirty years before it was an MTV show.

Video: Bollywood for Beginners (via Beyond the Beyond)

Robbie Cooper's "Immersion: Porn" builds on his earlier work making video-recordings of gamers playing their favorite games; only this time, it's people talking about their relationship to pornography intercut with amazing, intimate footage of their faces as they watch the porn they enjoy.

Video: Robbie Cooper: Sex, Sighs & Videotape

Immersion: Porn By Robbie Cooper | Video

(via Kottke)

Andy Kessler's latest opinion piece is in Forbes, where he basically makes the point many of us have been making for years: piracy happens; so get over it, focus on new business models and stop thinking lawsuits will save you. There isn't necessarily much new in the article for folks around here, but it is nice to see more of these sorts of articles hitting the mainstream press, where maybe the message will start to sink in: copyright infringement is a business model problem not a legal problem. Once you realize that, your whole perspective changes.

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Want to retrofit your 12V bi-pin halogen lamp with LEDs? Look at this tutorial by Instructables user jmengel.

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After a carefully constructed teaser campaign Olympus has officially launched the E-P1, its first Micro Four Thirds camera and the worst kept secret in the photography industry, thanks to a deluge of leaked information ahead of launch. It's a compact mirrorless interchangeable lens camera that mimics the styling of the company's Pen range that was popular in the 1960s and 70s. The camera is built around an image-stabilized 12 megapixel sensor and incorporates a 3.0" LCD. The E-P1 is available with a 14-42mm kit lens that retracts into its barrel when not in use, much like the lens of a compact camera. Check out the news story, lots of images and our full hands-on preview after the link.

ectotherm writes "The nice people behind the recorded phone messages stating 'By now you should have received your written note regarding your vehicle warranty expiring...' — the ones who instantly hang up when you ask for the name of the company — have been busted. Fox News did a little background digging on the four people charged." Don't know about you, but I received three or four postcards in the mail from these scammers, as well as uncountable robocalls. The FTC says they cleared $10M since 2007.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the broadband providers often talk up the need to break network neutrality in order to avoid "congestion" problems, most people have recognized that's just a smokescreen. The congestion issues are not an issue at all. Broadband costs have been going down, consistently, and most network engineers admit that with basic upgrades (nothing out of the ordinary), there's no bandwidth crunch to worry about. The real reason why broadband providers are interested in breaking network neutrality is because many of them want to get into the content business -- and they don't want to compete on even ground.

Case in point? BT. The British telco is starting to heavily throttle all video -- especially the BBC's online video player. This is the same BT, by the way, that just two years ago was saying there was no need to traffic shape or break net neutrality, and that it could handle all traffic issues with basic upgrades. So what happened? Well, it appears BT didn't like the competition from online video providers, so it decided to pretend it needed to do this for congestion purposes.

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"By the end of the 20th century and the millennium (1997), a new ecological and interactive art expression came into being which, combining elements and materials whose colors are 100% natural, exalts nature... Rock Art."

This is how Mario Balderas (Mexico) presents the beautiful and original art work he creates.

I am talking mainly of terracotta pots fired at high temperatures, with different kinds of cacti or crassulas and original designs made with sand, clay, earth, and semi-precious stones - the colors of which are all 100% natural - sealed with natural, transparent, and permeable resin. Besides the materials mentioned before, river stones, seeds, seashells, wood, and other materials are used as well.

These are semi-precious stones hand-ground with a hammer and sifted. All colors are natural.

Why Rock Art? It could be mixed up with what we commonly know as rock art - prehistoric drawings found on rocks or caves. But, in the case of these pots, the name is used in the sense that they are made with materials that have existed on this Earth perhaps for thousands of years, like sedimentary metamorphic stones which Mario collects in places that go from Valsequillo to the fossil desert of Tehuacan. Likewise, as in prehistoric times, the designs are an expression of the surroundings, of nature, and an example of how materials of all types found in nature are used to make a handicraft of infinite creative possibilities. It is a sensory work, of sensitivity more than technique.

The idea of making these pots emerged from Mario's interest and liking for cacti, which he acquires in specialized nurseries in Tlaxcalancingo and Tenango de las Flores, in the Sierra Norte of Puebla, near Huauchinango. (It is important to emphasize that, as a sign of respect towards our planet and nature, all the cacti that Mario uses are grown in nurseries and bought; not one of them is plundered.) Designing came later, little by little and as the result of a trial-error process, since Mario never studied anything that had to do with design, drawing or painting (he's a psychologist). It was an ability that he discovered having and that he developed and perfected with time, because "practice makes perfect".

Making these pots - or the gardens or the stones or the pictures - is a complete step-by-step process that goes from traveling to the places where the materials are, getting the pots made, sanding them down, painting them, planting the cactus, making and sealing the design, and finally selling them.

Pots with planted cactus and prepared "bed" drying in the sun to make the design on top afterwards.

Mario also builds these carriers to transport the pots.

This work has become Mario's life philosophy, a way of becoming aware and realizing his surroundings, of using his intellect, intuition, and common sense to make something that requires patience and all the creativity he's capable of, because each pot has a unique design that is not copied from anywhere or anybody else and is created one by one by the skillful hands of Mario, my father.

-Elena Balderas from Make: en Español

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moogsynth writes "Buried in section 329 of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (H.R. 2410), voted in recently, are measures to oppose any global climate change treaty that weakens the IP rights in the green tech of American companies. Peter Zura's patent blog notes that 'the vote comes in anticipation of the upcoming negotiations in December as part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. ... Previously, there was sufficient chatter in international circles on compulsory licenses, IP seizures, and the outright abolition of patents on low-carbon technology, that Congress felt it necessary to clarify the US's IP position up front.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This Altoids tin electric kalimba appeals to me as a highly portable but still simple musical instrument, and you can plug it into an amp, too! Learn to make your own thanks to Deansrds' tutorial.

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It appears that the Federal Treasury really is searching for cash under the cushions these days. Its latest idea? Claiming that mobile phones provided by employers are actually a "fringe benefit" that should be taxed. So even if your company pays for your mobile phone, you may owe the IRS taxes on it. The mobile operators are fighting this, but given the state of the economy, it shouldn't be much of a surprise if the IRS moves forward with this.

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Hey, microbrew-aficionado, fancy an astronaut-tube of beer?

The CarboPouch development allows craft draft beer brewers to fill on-site, a clean, ready-to- go Single45 or Single25 pouch with spout and cap. Storage and shelf-life requires refrigeration. Low-carbonated water and shelf-stable energy drinks can also be filled. The organoleptic film structure ensures no off flavor. The patented film structure is designed to handle the pouch "stretch" after filling and carbonation expansion. The automatic filling process is such that there is no headspace after filling. The three-side seal pouch has a smooth side comfort grip feature. The combination of these factors makes the CarboPouch a true economical innovation for distribution of craft draft beers to the consumer's home. Sports functions now have a package!

CarboPouch (via Dvice)

Want to make your own Tweet-a-Watt or Botanicall that posts data to a Twitter account for you to follow? In this class, we'll play with the Arduino Ethernet Shield and look at how to connect to remote servers. We'll build a simple project that will take button press data and post it to a Twitter account from the Arduino device using HTTP. We'll go over the basics of Ethernet, TCP/IP, and the HTTP protocol.

Twitter client Arduino workshop with Ben Combee

Bug Labs

598 Broadway, 4th floor

NYC

More:

• HOW TO - Make your own Tweet-a-Watt
  
• Hey kids, Tweet-a-Watt kits!
  
• Botanicalls Twitter: flora tweets
  

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Here's Tom Brokaw in 1994 talking about "something called the Internet," with guest appearances by Eric Schmidt (then at Sun) and Bill Gates. Bill tells Tom that "It's very hip to be on the Internet now." (Via Infectious Greed)

macs4all writes "Apple has finally addressed the Java vulnerability that nearly everyone else patched months ago. Available now for OS X 10.4 and 10.5, and through Apple's Software Update service, this update patches a flaw in the Java Virtual Machine that could potentially allow a malicious Java applet to execute arbitrary code on the machine. Apple had previously advised users to turn off Java temporarily in their Web browsers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Beginning next year, studios and other content holders will be required to give consumers the ability to make one copy of any Blu-ray Disc they buy," says the article (via Engadget). Sounds great -- movie studios and others finally realizing that people should be able to freely back up DVDs they legitimately purchase. The devil, of course, is in the details. While discs will have to support this "managed copy" feature, it will require new hardware, and there's no mandate that DVD player manufacturers include support for it at all. The copy, as you'd expect, is all DRM'ed up, and in order to make the copy, the Blu-ray player will have to connect to an "authorization server". This is the sort of model that's caused lots of problems in the past, when companies decide to pull the plug on the servers, rendering the feature useless. But the biggest potential problem with the feature is that movie studios and others will be free to charge whatever they wish for it. That means this really isn't a backup or a copy at all, it's simply the distribution means for the latest incarnation of the entertainment industry's favorite business model: getting people to pay for the same content over and over. That's why the studios want to block things like Real DVD -- not because they'll increase piracy, but because they cut off the only business model the studios can see for digital content.

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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Mr. Apol made a tabletop Tesla coil:

After studying and tinkering with different components for a year, I finally assembled my first Tesla coil. I chose a bipolar design inspired by one in THE BOY ELECTRICIAN by Alfred P. Morgan (first published 1913, reprinted by Lindsay Publications and available at http://www.lindsaybks.com/.) Unlike the more common upright coils, the bipolar coil has a horizontal secondary and primary, and the ends of the secondary coil terminate in vertical electrodes. As I wanted to build a small tabletop model, this appealed to me because the coil would not need an external ground connection. I also decided to build the coil in modular fashion, with easily separated spark gap assembly, tank capacitors, and power supply. This way I could experiment with different components and see what changing these parts did to the overall performance of the coil.

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