(Image: "Karakorum Highway, Xinjiang" by flickr user pmorgan.) For folks struggling to understand the current explosion of ethnic unrest in what the government of China officially refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, this Far East Economic Review essay by Calla Weimer may be helpful reading. Snip:

What makes Xinjiang so volatile is a simmering resentment by the native Uighur people against repression by the Han majority. Uighurs in many respects are denied the opportunity to live the life they desire. They are inhibited in the practice of their Islamic faith. They are limited in their access to economic opportunity. And, not unlike their Han Chinese counterparts, they are denied basic freedoms of expression and assembly.

China's ethnic-minority problems are deeply rooted, and resolving them will require change of a systemic nature. China is not a society that embraces pluralism. Difference is seen as a threat and little quarter is given to alternative points of view or ways of life. The government controls many aspects of people's lives and livelihoods, and local officials have a great deal of power within that context, power that is subject to abuse whether toward Han or toward minorities. But minorities suffer more under a system where prejudices can weigh on official behavior. This in turn brews resentment among those systematically victimized. An acrimonious dynamic builds and festers. This can happen with minority groups anywhere, but in China there is more scope for those who have power to abuse it. And there is no voice for those who have grievances.

All Eyes on Xinjiang (FEER, via @rmack)

itwbennett writes "A large number of Chinese parents are finding their teenagers to be exhibiting such psychological symptoms as depression, antisocial behavior, and slipping grades. The cause: Internet addiction. World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike rank beside Chinese role-playing games as those that hook the most patients, says Tao Ran, the founder of a youth rehabilitation center on a Beijing army base. Online chat programs more often hook girls, who make up a handful of Tao's current 70 patients. The teens are subjected to a 'strict regimen of military drills, martial arts training, lectures and sessions with psychiatrists.' And, most importantly: no Internet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From a photo-essay "narrated" by chef Eric Ripert with delicious little details about what goes on behind the scenes at the world-famous, Michelin 3-star NYC restaurant Le Bernadin:

When serving crab, it is very important to get out each tiny piece of shell that might have been left behind and that is a difficult job. To make the task easier, we inspect the crabmeat under a black light. The shells glow under this light and they are easy to pick out.

Behind the Scenes at Le Bernardin (aveceric.com, via @blam)

The deeper and deeper you look into the pharmaceutical market and the way those firms use patents, the worse and worse it looks. There's little evidence that pharmaceutical companies really need the kind of exclusivity that patents provide, but it's become so established an idea, that some actually believe that pharma would disappear without patents. However, the truth is quite different. The chemistry industry -- the precursor to the pharma industry -- actually fought against patents in the early days, knowing that robust competition was what drove innovation and profits. Patents only allowed the leaders to stomp out competition and limit the overall market, increasing their own profits, but slowing innovation and product development.

Thus it should come as no surprise at all that a new report has found that pharmaceutical companies are regularly abusing patents for anti-competitive purposes (thanks Rob Hyndman for the link):

Pharmaceutical companies are manipulating the intellectual property rights system and are "actively trying to delay the entry of generic medicines onto their markets," a top EU official said of an EU inquiry into the pharmaceutical sector released Wednesday. As a result, there has been a decline in the number of innovative medicines getting to the market, it says.

In other words, contrary to the popular myth, patents are actually being used to hold back innovation in the healthcare market.

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oberondarksoul writes "Every now and then, you hear about a new port of Mozilla to one of the lesser-used platforms. Recently, a new version of Mozilla has been released for Mac OS 9 — an operating system no longer sold or supported, and with no new hardware available to buy. Dubbed Classilla, it aims to provide 'a modern web browser running again on classic Macs, and the currently-released build seems to work well on my old PowerBook 1400 — despite being a little memory-hungry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user merijnvw made this cryptex, and shows you how as well.

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dp619 writes "Mono, a framework based on Microsoft technology, has become more popular for Linux desktop applications than Java, but recent changes could strengthen Java's hand, SD Times is reporting. The story also touches on the failure of Linux distros to keep pace with Eclipse."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When we talk about understanding how to embrace the economics of infinite goods, one of the key points I've tried to make is that every product is a bundle of scarce and infinite goods. That's a point that some people have a lot of trouble with at times, insisting that some people who create infinite goods have no scarcities to sell... and, conversely, that those who make scarce goods, sometimes have no infinite goods to give away with them. While it may be a bit more complicated to separate out the scarce and infinite goods, it doesn't mean they don't exist.

Parker writes in to point out a fascinating example. Apparently a group of fiction writers are experimenting with selling physical goods on eBay with fictional stories given away "free" in the description. The project is called Significant Objects, and involves a bunch of fiction writers purchasing random trinkets, and then coming up with a neat story to go with them. The post at io9 notes that some stories seem better than others at increasing the auction bids, but points out that: "If Rosenfeld's success is any indication, these authors may actually get paid more for short fiction on eBay than they would at most publications."

Again, some will incorrectly claim that we're saying that fiction writers should start selling crap on eBay, but that's not it at all. This is just one (fun) example of many of content creators smartly using infinite goods (the stories) to make a scarce good (the trinket) more valuable, and putting in place a business model to profit from it. Once again, we learn that creativity knows no bounds, not just in creating content, but in playing around with new business models.

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Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future.

As my son gets ready to move out of the house to go to college, I've been thinking about another Russian writer who captures universal human themes that resonate over a hundred years later: Anton Checkhov. His story "Dushechka" or, in English translation, "The Darling," has many layers of meaning. Indeed, the Russian word Dushechka originates from the Russian word "dusha" or soul, and thus the title alone has multiple meanings -- soul mate, someone who is all soul, or has a great soul. I'm not going to do Dushechka justice in this post so please forgive me, dear Russian literature fanatics.

The heroine of "The Darling" is a young woman, Olenka, who becomes passionate about whatever her loved ones are involved in. First she marries a theater owner and all she talks about is theater. She speaks with contempt of the public, of its indifference to the arts, of its boorishness and insensitivity. She weeps at unfavorable revues and argues with editors. When her husband dies, she marries a timber merchant. Suddenly, lumber is the most fascinating subject on earth as far as Olenka is concerned. She manages her husband's business affairs and dreams of boards, planks, beams, and joists. When the second husband dies, Olenka takes up with a veterinary surgeon. Her acquaintances find out about this simply because she suddenly becomes overwhelmingly concerned with the sanitary conditions of animals: "The health of domestic animals ought to be as well attended to as the health of human beings." And so it goes.

It is hard to be a parent and completely avoid turning into a Dushechka just a bit, particularly in this day and age of high parental involvement. Whether we like it or not, we become engaged in our kids' passions and pursuits, and often absorb them as our own. That brings me to baseball and bluegrass.

For years after coming to the US, I had absolutely no interest in baseball. In fact, I didn't get it at all -- there just wasn't enough action on the field as far as I was concerned. Once, someone invited me to a party in the box at San Francisco's Candlestick Park where many people watched the game on a TV screen. My reaction? "This would be great if you could only switch to a different channel." I was convinced that you had to be born in America to understand and appreciate baseball. This all changed when Greg, my son, joined his first T--ball team. I grew to love baseball as he moved from T-ball to Little League. We are now proud San Francisco Giants season ticket holders. My husband told me he knew I was fully on board when he heard me say after a pitch, "That was a mean slider!"

Similarly, I found myself falling in love with the most American of music genre -- bluegrass. This happened when the building housing the music room in my son's school had to close for repairs, and the kids could not use their favorite electric instruments to play rock music. Instead, John Fuller, music teacher and bluegrass musician, brought out acoustic instruments outside--mandolin, guitars, upright base--and Greg, a 5th grader at the time, suddenly discovered bluegrass. Within a few months, he and his buddies had a bluegrass band and were playing at festivals and farmers' markets. And I, who was raised on Bach and The Beatles, suddenly found myself camping out at various bluegrass festivals, hanging out with bluegrass musicians, and learning to love Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, among others.

As Greg gets ready to leave for college, the cautionary image of "Dushechka" looms big on my mind. I am going to a lot of ballgames and listening to a lot of bluegrass musicians, probably more than ever before. Am I trying to ensure that my adopted passions continue as Greg moves out, and that I don't turn into a Dushechka? If that is the case, thank you Chekhov for a cautionary tale.

The Portable Chekhov (Amazon)

nerdyH writes "An architect of the Moblin Project has announced that Moblin 2.0 for netbooks and nettops is the first Linux distribution to run the X server as the logged-in user, rather than SUID'd to root. The fix to this decades-old security liability comes thanks to 'NRX' (No-root X) technology reportedly developed by Intel, Red Hat, and others in the X community, and the Moblin-sponsored 'Secure X' project. Besides making Linux netbooks a lot more snoop-proof, it seems like this could lead to an X-hosting renaissance of sorts, since you wouldn't be risking the whole system just to open up a specific user's account to remote X servers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pretty much every other person who's ever read the site has sent this one in today, so I figure it's worth writing up. We've talked for a long time about how unknown/up-and-coming artists can embrace new business models to be more successful these days. In fact, five or six years ago the only artists who were doing these kinds of experiments were the up-and-coming ones. And when we did that, people complained that "well, sure, this works for the unknowns, because they have nothing to lose, but it's not a real business model." And then, in the last couple of years, with folks like Trent Reznor and some other well known artists embracing new models, suddenly the refrain changed: "well, sure, this works for them because they already have a huge following... but it'll never work for everyone else." What was silly was that they were both effectively doing the same thing: better connecting with fans, and offering them something of scarce value to buy. In my more recent presentations, I've been careful to show how artists big, medium and small are all successfully embracing new models based on this formula: Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model
And those who are embracing it are finding that it works and works incredibly well in many cases. Yet, still people want to insist that it can't work. In fact, Reznor himself heard this when he mentioned that the Beastie Boys new offering (built on the Topspin platform) was "how you sell music today." In response, the second wave of naysayers listed above came out to complain, so Reznor decided to respond by explaining how new artists get noticed, build a following and build a business model these days. And the formula is basically: connect with fans and give them a reason to buy... and use free music to do both of those things. He does note, that if you want to be a superstar, you probably need to sign with a label, but doing so will mean giving up pretty much everything: control, profits, ownership. However, if you just want to be a success...

* Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters....

* Parter with a TopSpin or similar or build your own website, but what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan...

* The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site and garner good will in the process (plus build your database)....

* Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace - it's dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don't autoplay). Constantly update your site with content - pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any - Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

* If you don't know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don't get it - find someone who does to do this for you. If you are waiting around for the phone to ring or that A & R guy to show up at your gig - good luck, you're going to be waiting a while.

Great stuff, as usual, and certainly reinforces the point: it's certainly hard work, but it is doable. If you're unknown, use this process to get known. Once you're known, you can start to implement all different elements of the business model, using the music to make scarce goods much more valuable and start earning that way. Great advice for artists big, medium and small...

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BobB-nw writes with this excerpt from Network World: "The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, scheduled to distribute $4.7 billion in broadband deployment grants over the next 15 months, will count on volunteers to review grant applications. The NTIA, in a document released this week, asks for people to apply to become volunteer reviewers of the broadband grants. The NTIA's broadband grant program is part of $7.2 billion that the US Congress approved for broadband in a huge economic stimulus package approved earlier this year. ... It's 'a little scary' that volunteers will have the power to accept and reject broadband applications, said Craig Settles, an analyst and president of consulting firm Successful.com. Volunteers may have limited expertise, or they may have biases that aren't evident to the NTIA, he said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On the heels of our Toolbox column on knives and multitools comes news of a new tool in the Leatherman family, the Knifeless Fuse. The tool is marketed for "knife-prohibitive situations" and has everything you'd expect on a similar multitool (needlenose/regular pliers, two wire cutters, wire stripper, small/large/Phillips screwdrivers, scissors, file, can/bottle opener, 8? ruler) except for a blade. But as Steven Leckart says on BB Gadgets: "...The thing's still potentially-lethal and probably won't get through TSA. So really, I don't get it." We don't either.

Leatherman Fuse [via Toolmonger]

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Fred sez, "Image search on Google has just become a bit easier and a little less scary: Google officially launched the ability to filter search results using Creative Commons licenses inside their Image Search tool. Searches are also capable of returning content under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or images that are in the public domain."

Advanced image search page (Thanks, Fred!)

"

Mike sez, "In his closing talk from last month's Reboot conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling guesses at what it will be like to live through the next ten years: 'It is neither progress nor conservatism because there's nothing left to conserve and no direction in which to progress. So what you get is transition. Transition to nowhere.'"

Bruce Sterling - reboot 11 closing talk (Thanks, Mike!)

Courtesy of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Celia sends us "an annotated copy of the Kindle contract. Based on my decidedly non-lawyerish interpretation of this contract and the annotations, I think it says that Amazon now owns everything it wants to own, and you're out of luck if you don't like that."

Publishing contracts are generally kind of bogus to begin with, but this is a real pinnacle of bogosity.

Neither party may assign any of its rights or obligations under this Agreement, whether by operation of law or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the other, except that (i) Amazon may assign any of its rights and obligations under this Agreement without consent and (ii) you may assign all of you [sic: your] rights and obligations under this Agreement to any corporation or other entity domiciled in the United States without consent in connection with the sale of all or substantially all of the assets of a Title; provided that you shall give Amazon written notice of any such assignment no later than ten (10) business days following such assignment. Subject to the foregoing limitation, this Agreement will be binding upon, inure to the benefit of and be enforceable by the parties and their respective successors and assigns.

Amazon can sell this contract - indeed, the whole Digital Books business - to anybody it wants, and your contract rides along with the sale. We revert to the essential necessity for you to be able to terminate this Agreement any time you want under the blue highlighted language in Section 9.

Amazon Kindle Contract Review and Annotation (Thanks, Celia!)

Andrew Sullivan has rounded up all the documented major, easily verified lies of Sarah Palin. It's an impressive list, a kind of "portrait of the candidate as a frootbat."

Palin lied when she said the dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire state trooper Mike Wooten; in fact, the Branchflower Report concluded that she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.

Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor.

Palin lied when she denied that Wasilla's police chief and librarian had been fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day.

Palin lied when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not endangered; in fact, email correspondence between those scientists showed the opposite.

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin: A Round-Up (via Making Light)

Matt_dk writes "For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a new space vehicle will begin stacking on a mobile launch platform (MLP) at Kennedy Space Center. The Ares I-X aft skirt, which was mated to a solid fuel segment in the Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility at KSC, rolled over to the 528-foot-tall Vehicle Assembly Building today, where it will be lifted and placed on the MLP in High Bay 3. On that platform, workers will secure the aft booster and continue adding segments of the first stage rocket, the upper stage simulators, the crew module mockup and the launch abort system simulator, taking the vehicle to a height of 327 feet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Bernstein in a rambling quote-filled piece has one of the nicest descriptions of yours truly. "Dave Winer could be rough if you got athwart his hawse, but he was generally a nice guy who always seemed to want to get a lot of bright people around a big table with plenty of food."

Maybe I'm not the most hated person on the Internet after all?

Re Barger's list playing a central role in the origins of blogging, not sure I accept that the most important thing was a list of blogs, or even a network of them. People who think the task of blogging is to pull people together miss, imho, the important thing about blogging -- that it separates people and gives each individual a place to express themselves, not subject to veto. In that way it is different from a mail list. Blogs emphasize the individual over the group.

The argument continues to this day. People who say Twitter is a conversational medium would agree with those who say Barger was the founder. I see Twitter as a publishing environment, a place to push links, a notification system. Oddly, I think Barger with his linkblog approach (which was the same as the early Scripting News or the News Page of the 24 Hours project) would agree.

Bernstein says many wise things in his post. I thought this one stood out.

"If you wish to shed light on a debate, reply to a weblog post on your own weblog."

Amen.

Design News has an article and slide show piece on electric dragsters. The car pictured here is Mike Willmon's electric Pinto, the Crazyhorse. The infamous Pinto gas tank (and the back seat) has been replaced with 848 lbs of lead-acid battery. The car is powered by two nine-inch diameter brush DC motors, coupled back-to-back. The Crazyhorse uses the Cafe Electric Zilla motor controller, which allows you to slam huge amounts of current (up to 2,000 amps!) into the motors to blast the car off the line like any respectable fuel-based dragster. Last year, the Crazyhorse did a quarter-mile in 12.47 seconds.

Drag Racing Goes Electric

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Jeff Nolan points us to the news that Washington DC's police chief is denouncing users of an iPhone app to monitor speed traps/speed cameras/red light cameras as being "cowardly." Apparently, real men prefer ignorance about where the police are hiding to give them tickets for driving a couple miles per hour over the speed limit. The app actually sounds pretty useful, alerting users if they're near one of the cameras or a known speed trap. The creator of the software makes the most salient point:

"If police come against us, it's going to make them look like they are only [after] revenue"

Indeed. Shouldn't the police be happy that a software product is helping people slow down or avoid running red lights? How could that possibly be seen as a bad thing... or "cowardly"?

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An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has finally launched its DNS Redirector service in trial markets (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington state), and has submitted a working draft of the technology to the IETF for review. Comcast customers can opt-out from the service by providing their account username and cable modem MAC address. Customers in trial areas using 'old' Comcast DNS servers, or non-Comcast DNS servers, should not be affected by this. This deployment comes after many previous ISPs, like DSLExtreme, were forced to pull the plug on such efforts as a result of customer disapproval/retaliation. Some may remember when VeriSign tried this back in 2003, where it also failed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael_Curator writes "Executives at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.-owned papers (including current Tory spokesman Andy Coulson) allowed reporters to hack into phone conversations of celebrities and then paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover it up. How did famously technologically-challenged reporters manage the feat without BT catching on? Voicemail." The New York Times says a preliminary investigation's been ordered, but the BBC's coverage indicates that a large-scale inquiry is unlikely.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of my favorite painters, Brooklyn artist Stella Im Hultberg, has a solo show of new work opening Friday, July 10, at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles. Along with work on paper, canvas, and wood panel, she's also showing a series of small painted wood figures. Seen here, "Penumbra" (oil on canvas, 12" x 14"). The works in the exhibition, titled Memento Mori, are also viewable online. Memento Mori

Are you a young maker or know one? There is still a month to submit projects to The Digital Open, an online expo for open technology projects created by people aged 17 and under from around the world. The Digital Open is a project of the Institute for the Future in partnership with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing. The deadline for submissions is August 15 but if you enter your project (even if it's not finalized) by July 24, you may win one of five Flip Ultra Camcorders. Grand prizes in the Digital Open include laptops running OpenSolaris and other fun gear. Entries will be judged by Eric Wilhelm of Instructables, Dale Dougherty of MAKE, Kati London of Area/Code, Graham Hill of Treehugger, Linda Rogers of Sun, Nick Bilton of the New York Times, Lawrence Lessig, our own Xeni Jardin, and many other interesting folks. The Digital Open

Twitter only gives you 140-characters, of course, but what do you do if you're an old-school company that's been around for ages and is used to legalizing everything? Apparently, you create a 3,379-word terms of use for your Twitter account. Boing Boing points us to Wal-Mart's Twitter Terms of Use, which is really impressive if only in that if it were Twittered in 140-character increments it would take about 165 separate tweets. But, honestly, I can't figure out who this Terms of Use is directed at. It can't be those who read the various Twitter feeds from Wal-Mart employees, since most of them will never even come to this page at all (they're just following on Twitter, not on Wal-Mart's site). It's unlikely that it's for the Wal-Mart employees directly, as one assumes they don't need a public Terms of Use. So what's its purpose?

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We've printed up a new version of the popular Charge Tee. This time around, it's a rusted battery on a Navy Blue, 100% cotton shirt from American Apparel. It's also the first item in our newly relaunched shop.simplebits.com.

The fine folks at AcmePrints have been printing SimpleBits tees for us for years, and they're now handling the order fulfillment as well. This will allow us to concentrate on more important stuff, like offering more designs, rather than packing and shipping shirts (even though we enjoyed that).

The shop itself runs on the excellent bigcartel, a simple, hosted shopping cart for independent merchants. We love it, and Meagan was even singing its praises while doing the CSS customization, which all means good things.

Stay tuned for more of the original Charge Tees, and some other new designs as we grow the shop a bit more.

A 29-year old worker died today when he fell into a giant vat of hot chocolate at a New Jersey factory. Hope someone at the scene had the presence of mind to question the oompah-loompahs.

A spokesman for the local prosecutor's office said the man appeared to have died instantly from a blow to his head by a paddle mixing the chocolate. His colleagues at the factory tried to shut down the mixer, but were too late. Local journalists met some of the workers in the car park, covered in chocolate and seemingly in dismay.

BBC report here (Thanks, Antinous)

Love-him-or-hate-him comix artist Johnny Ryan just issued four new hand-screened prints in editions of 100. My favorite is Johnny's take on The Exorcist. The print is 11.5" x 16", six color, and just $30.
Johnny Ryan prints

barbarai writes "ABC News' Rick Klein reports: 'For those concerned about stimulus spending, the General Services Administration sends word tonight that $18 million in additional funds are being spent to redesign the Recovery.gov Web site. "Recovery.gov 2.0 will use innovative and interactive technologies to help taxpayers see where their dollars are being spent," James A. Williams, commissioner of GSA's Federal Acquisition Service, says in a press release announcing the contract awarded to Maryland-based Smartronix Inc. according to the ABC news blog.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers made progress enabling a computer to teach itself British Sign Language by analyzing video footage. The scientists from the University of Oxford and University of Leeds first programmed a machine vision algorithm so the computer could identify the shapes of hands in the video. From New Scientist:

Once the team were confident the computer could identify different signs in this way, they exposed it to around 10 hours of TV footage that was both signed and subtitled. They tasked the software with learning the signs for a mixture of 210 nouns and adjectives that appeared multiple times during the footage.

The program did so by analysing the signs that accompanied each of those words whenever it appeared in the subtitles. Where it was not obvious which part of a signing sequence relates to the given keyword, the system compared multiple occurrences of a word to pinpoint the correct sign.

Starting without any knowledge of the signs for those 210 words, the software correctly learnt 136 of them, or 65 per cent, says Everingham. "Some words have different signs depending on the context – for example, cutting a tree has a different sign to cutting a rose." he says, so this is a high success rate given the complexity of the task.

"Computer learns sign language by watching TV"

This Saturday, let a robot serve your booze at NYC Resistor's Barbot party. Barbot, the bartender robot knows how to make a variety of mixed drinks. Like all great hacks, sometimes it gets its drink mixing protocol confused. Last time, my gin and tonic was 4 parts gin 1 part tonic.

Date: Saturday July 11th, 2009
Time: 9pm-2am
Where: 397 Bridge St, Floor 5, Brooklyn
Cover: $20 gets you as many drinks as you'd like made by a robot

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An old friend of mine, photographer Billy Baque, once told me of a rumor about gardeners in the early 20th century reusing unwanted glass plate negatives to build greenhouses. This idea--a sunlit glass room full of growing plants, dappled with the accidental shadows of unwanted memories--is to me almost too beautiful to explain.

So I tried to track it down in the tubes, and discovered that the story is apocryphal, likely originating in the tale of American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, who is rightly famous for being one of the first journalists to bring images of the true horror of modern warfare into the homes of the taxpayers who fund it. During reconstruction, however, Brady's graphic images of "the late unpleasantness" were decidedly unwelcome--so much so, the story goes, that he eventually sold the negatives to gardeners who needed cheap glass for their greenhouses.

I have found no online evidence of the existence of any such period greenhouses. However, in the summer of 2003, collage artist and assistant professor Michael Oatman, together with a class of architecture students at Rensselaer Polytechnic, undertook the construction of the greenhouse shown above. It incorporates about 2500 glass negatives culled from a database of more than 15,000 criminal mug shots from the turn of the 20th century. I have no word on the fate of the work, titled "Conservatory," so I can't say if it's still possible to view it. If anyone knows, do please drop me a comment below.

More:

• Greenhouse from old windows
• How-To: Greenhouse from old carport
• Plastic bottle greenhouse
• Greenhouse hoop bender

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Our pals at Adafruit Industries have launched a new series of kits that include a full color comic book/zine. The first volume of Citizen Engineer is all about SIM card hacking and has the parts to build your own SIM card reader/writer. Citizen Engineer (via MAKE:)

ACD Systems has released a beta version of its ACDSee Pro 3 image browsing software. It features an improved interface, more online publishing tools and advanced image processing options allowing both non-destructive and pixel-level editing on most file formats. It is now available for beta testing, with a full version to follow in Autumn 2009.

A few years back, we idly wondered if it could possibly be copyright infringement to embed a YouTube video on your own site. It would be a very difficult argument, since an embed code is really no different than a link. The content itself is hosted by YouTube and was uploaded by some other party. Yet, we figured eventually someone would make a claim along those lines... and wouldn't you know it would be ASCAP?

ASCAP must be really hard up for cash these days, because it's going down the PRS route of trying to claim that just about anything now counts as a public performance. Just a few weeks ago, came the news that your mobile phone ringing in public is a public performance. It's also been telling composers/song writers to hold back on allowing their songs in video games like Rock Band/Guitar Hero on the assumption they should get more money for it (not realizing that getting songs in those games has been shown to raise the profile of the artists allowing them to make a lot more money).

So, the latest? Apparently ASCAP has started sending collection letters to various websites that have embedded YouTube videos that contain music, claiming they need to pay up for a performance license. This is definitely a huge stretch legally, but when has that stopped ASCAP? Meanwhile, you may recall that YouTube was just ordered to pay millions to ASCAP -- which you would think would cover this sort of thing -- but not according to ASCAP. If that's true, then ASCAP would be getting double/triple/quadrupled/etc. paid for embedded videos, which certainly doesn't seem right (or legal).

And, once again, we're left with a situation where ASCAP -- which always positions itself as having the best interests of songwriters/composers/publishers in mind -- is actually causing significant harm for artists. By adding to the cost of having people promote those artists on their own websites, they're greatly diminishing the ability of people to get the word out about these artists.

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An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an article about how obscenity laws and the first amendment relate to modern games: "This question is a tough one, for the very good reason that no video game developer or publisher has ever been prosecuted for obscenity related to video games. As we have seen, if the medium of video games are held to the same standard as literature and film then, presumably, they can also be held to be obscene. One of the reasons for the lack of obscenity prosecution against video game developers and publishers is that the courts have limited obscenity to sexual content only. In fact, the courts have gone so far as to specifically reject calls to alter the definition of 'obscenity' to include violent content in video games. The other major reason is the vast majority of video games sold in the United States have only small amounts of sexual content thanks to the Electronic Software Rating Board."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I recommend doing this in a crowded, public place. Perhaps an airport or a police station. Ignore all who question you.

More:

• The posterity eradicator
• Life improvement devices
• MAKE fashion technology show photos

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eldavojohn writes "Dr. David McKinnon from Queensland University of Technology, has recently launched a site that turns your sets of 2D images into 3D bump maps by way of 8 years of his research. The catch is that you need to have between five and fifteen photos of your object and they must overlap at least 80 to 90 percent. So with a video of an object, one might be able to extract every nth frame and use this site to generate a 3D model. Doctor McKinnon said, 'The full version of this software would be great for realistic learning simulators and training software, where you want everything to look like the real thing. This technology could also be great for museums wishing to turn their display objects into 3D images that can be viewed online. We are even looking into making 3D models of cows to save farmers spending thousands of dollars transporting their cattle vast distances to auction sites, allowing for an eBay style auction website for cattle. Films, animations and computer games could also benefit, since 3D film making is taking over from the traditional 2D method of filmmaking. Another application is allowing people to create 3D models of their own face to use on their avatar in computer games or 3D social networking sites such as Second Life or Sony's Home.' Physorg has more details."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A game developer that's been tirelessly evolving what they hope to be the most all-encompassing soldier sim doesn't exactly sound like typical indie fare, argues columnist Jim Rossignol, but their indie-style ambition is there and is typified by their latest, Arma II. See as proof: the collection of videos Rossignol includes in his column, which may be some of the most spectacularly hyper-real Offworld has ever seen, with gratuitous 200 v. 200 plane low-flying dogfights, suicidal jet pilots, and tanks v. chicken battles. That indie spirit continues elsewhere as the creators of World of Goo and Henry Hatsworth return to their roots and re-launch the Experimental Gameplay Project with disco-dancing Robotron games (above) and surprisingly compelling generative evolutionary worm sims, with more new games to come every month. Elsewhere we saw, of course, the mind-blowing Portal in ASCII video, the upcoming European debut of chiptune showcase Blip Festival, watched German TV pair up a games design vet and a new champion of art gaming for a lengthy discussion, fan-made Chrono Trigger T-shirts, and upcoming shirts for indie favorite Cave Story. Finally we saw World of Warcraft-themed Peggle now downloadable as a free standalone game, and our usual 'one shots': Left 4 Dead via LittleBigPlanet, Hello Mario & Luigi, an awesome tribute to Monkey Island's Guybrush Threepwood, and Castle Crashers in Lego.

Upgrading their ATiny2313 breakout board business card, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories writes:

There are a couple of nice improvements for the new version. First, we made the board single sided to match our original ATmegaxx8 board-- this means that it's relatively easy to print out the layer separations and make your own at home, if you like to etch your own boards. We also changed around the configuration of the prototyping areas, making it so that you can now fit up to two DIP-8 packages, breadboard style, on the board.

As usual, it's open source with files included to make your own at home.

More:

Business card AVR breakout boards (for ATmetaXX8)

From the pages of MAKE:

Printed Circuit Boards. Step-by-step instructions for making your own PCBs at home. MAKE Volume 02 - Page 164. Check out this article now in the digital edition!

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Every time you think people understand that trying to suppress some kind of information only draws more attention to it, it happens again. The latest, as pointed out by Tim O'Reilly is that basketball star LeBron James had videos confiscated after he was dunked on by a college sophomore -- and because of that it's now being written up on various news sites and blogs. If he'd just let the video go out it may have amused a few people but no one would have thought any less of James, one of the best players ever to play the game. Instead, even more people are finding out about it and makes James look really insecure and controlling. In fact, the Rivals.com points out that because the video can't be seen, people will just assume it makes James look as bad as possible:

The Crawford dunk would have been a temporary embarrassment for LeBron. Let's say the video was put on YouTube. It blows up for a bit, dominates blogs for 36 hours, everyone has a good chuckle and then it's forgotten about.

But by censoring the tape, LeBron turns the dunk into a legend. On video, it's just a dunk. Without video, the jam can reach mythic proportions. Because nobody can see it, the story of the dunk will grow in stature with each telling. Today, it was a simple two-handed slam. In a few days, it will be a 360-degree windmill. By the time Crawford makes his Xavier debut in October, he will have jumped off LeBron's shoulders, flipped in the air, slammed the ball home with his left pinkie and then handed LeBron $3.99 for his dry cleaning.

One day, perhaps, people will learn...

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Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

(Self-portrait by Sarah May Scott)

At Mayday Productions, blogger Sarah Scott writes about life with a spinal cord injury. Her writing is searingly honest, brutally revealing, and wickedly self-aware.

The after is where it really gets grand, gets epic, gets to where one memoir could never be enough. Truly epic shit doesn't start to go down until the very moment you decide to start living again, to start crawling your way back into the light and out of the darkness. I know enough to know now I'll never fully leave the darkness completely, but the reprieves at this point seem to be enough to keep me going for now. sometimes. But no one wants to hear about the after, because it doesn't arc as much as it shakes and shudders in fits and spurts until eventually you recognize an ersatz normalcy has filled the void you left somewhere in all the fallout.

I interviewed her for Boing Boing about life in a wheelchair, if she considers herself a cyborg, and her plans on becoming a female Hardiman.

SB: Tell me your story.

SS: The story that everyone wants to know from the start is why I use a wheelchair. I was 29, one minute racing my road bike, and the next "tits up in a ditch" and a paraplegic. That was nearly four years ago. Prior to that, I was your basic hot mess, but that's a longer story than there is room for here. I will say that PTSD has figured in for a longer time than I ever realized until I was injured. For once in my life, and this always sounds crazy, but after everything I've been through I actually like who I am for the first time in my life, chair and all.

I am a small-town girl from State College, PA, though I spent some time in NYC and Philadelphia before returning after my accident. These days I live in a very rural area with my crazy mutts.

SB: Are you a cyborg?

SS: I am not a cyborg, but I am getting closer and closer to being a terminator. My back is already full of titanium, and I've got a radio-controlled device in my abdomen that feeds medication into my spinal canal. If the trials go well, I hope to get my chance at being the female Hardiman with the ReWalk system. You can start calling me Ripley when that happens.

In a sense, being in a chair is like being a cyborg/object to a lot of people, somehow not quite human. I think all women know what it is to feel like an object to a certain degree, but I found it to be much different when you're viewed as a asexual woman and a person of very vague use if any. It made me very early on understand that to survive I was going to have to change how my self-worth was measured.

SB: Why do you blog?

SS: I started blogging for a few reasons. I was desperately lonely and going through all these sort of insane experiences that no one could understand, and I was desperate to be able to explain them in such a way that people would be able to understand without reverting to all the chair stereotypes that I was just a bitter, mean, crazy person now. There were a lot of people in my life that didn't make the transition to be able to see me first and the chair second, and it was heartbreaking. I thought online I could control things in such a way that people would see me again. In the beginning, it was very much about control.

As things have evolved, I started to ease up on that obsessive level of control and start showing the darkness too. It turned out to be hugely therapeutic for me, and I hope that it humanized me for a lot of people as well. More than anything, I want people to see me as a person and not as an object of pity or otherwise. My story is really about grief and catastrophic change, and I think most people at one time or another in their lives can relate to that.

Something that wasn't diagnosed early on was that I had a Traumatic Brain Injury during the accident, and my brain works a lot differently now. I can't remember shit, repeat myself constantly, fuck up words, and these creative floodgates opened up and haven't closed since. I see the world so differently, which I think is a big reason why I became so insanely drawn to photography and writing. I write and take pictures because I have to, it gives meaning to my life even if I forget from time to time that I have any.

SB: What do people not understand?

SS: Most people forget that I'm a very ordinary person living under extraordinary circumstances, and that I'm also incredibly shy to the point of near social phobia in some cases. The things that make healing the most difficult is all the shit I carried with me before the accident, things that become unavoidable after being catastrophically injured. I don't think I'll ever stop grieving, but I do know that everyday it gets a little less painful. 

SB: If we could open you up and look inside, what would we find?

SS: Under all the armor, I'm someone who's been trying to survive one way or another my whole life, but never had a map or a guide to know how. My hope is that you'd find a lot of resilience and hopefully some beauty along with it. I like to think that I'm finally becoming on the outside the person who was hiding in there all along, but for many reasons wasn't able to be. I'm really, really hoping there's a photographer in there, but only time will tell.

Sarah's blog, Tumblr, Flickr, Twitter, Etsy, and service dog training blog.

destinyland writes "Vint Cerf performed an hour-long Q&A at NASA for their 'Singularity University' (which is partially funded by Google ). A question about Twitter led Cerf to imagine even more useful micro-applications using the wireless internet and cell phones, including real-time health data and checking your location against a map of known biohazards and disease outbreaks. 'These systems have applications which I think we will discover over time,' Cerf says, adding 'For me, the exciting thing to just anticipate, are the new ideas for using these instruments.' Also speaking were Ray Kurzweil and nanotechnology expert Ray Merkle. (Read an interview with SU co-founder Peter Diamandis in the new issue of H+ magazine)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Josh Kopel, of Dorkbot Seattle, wrote in to tell us about the latest db event, called Frayed Wire. The event is a collaboration with the Youngstown Cultural Center and 911 Media Arts Center, a one-day conference, unconference, and workshop series. Check out their amazing roster of speakers and workshop presenters. Looks like a lot of fun. The event is $50 for the day.

Frayed Wire

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Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that more than 40 percent of all smartphone owners and 80 percent of iPhone users use their mobile devices to get turn-by-turn directions driving down sales of traditional standalone GPS units from companies like TomTom, Garmin and Magellan. During the first quarter, TomTom said it shipped 29 percent fewer GPS units compared with the period in 2008 while Garmin's unit sales fell 13 percent from the previous year. While smartphones are susceptible to interruptions from incoming phone calls and using the mapping features for a long time can chew through battery power, the list of the smartphone's shortcomings is dwindling as some of the latest navigation applications offer voice navigation and take advantage of the phone's always-connected state to offer real-time traffic updates, directions to contacts in the phone's address book and more. 'I've not stopped using a GPS because I never bought one in the first place — they are expensive and inconvenient,' says Steve Weller. 'Now with the iPhone, I will actually use GPS — and the 10 other functions it replaces.' The traditional GPS device companies are trying to adapt, seeking to expand their reach into the smartphone market. TomTom recently announced that it would introduce a portable navigation application for the iPhone that would feature turn-by-turn directions and audio prompts. 'The simplicity of having one device and not needing to pull the Garmin out of my glove compartment is enough,' says Andrew DiMarcangelo. 'I want to get into my car and do as few things as possible.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charlie Stross has just wrapped up a 12-part, 25,000-word autobiography explaining how he came to find himself writing some of the weirdest, freshest, wildest post-cyberpunk fiction in the field.

I was stressed out for most of two years. I'm an alpha-type personality to begin with, but this wasn't funny. I was writing fiction (and articles for Computer Shopper) as a therapeutic distraction. Around the middle of 1998, I figured that the novel I'd written in 1995-96 Singularity Sky was about ready, and mailed it off in the direction of Tor in New York, where it sat on a certain editorial director's desk for the next eighteen months. I wrote and sold a couple of short stories, and began work on a project which I was workshopping with some other local writers; a strange humorous horror novel/spy thriller about a hapless geek who's fallen into a government department for dealing with ... look, you probably know where this is going, right?. This was strictly a weekend activity, to distract me from the weekday stress cycle: compartmentalising my life helped me deal with Datacash. But it probably didn't help enough.

For most of the end of 1998 and the first half of 1999, the uttermost bane of my life was an ecommerce subsidiary of Bank Paribas called KLELine. They were offering a credit card solution over SSL, which had certain attractions for some of our customers, being (a) French, and (b) able to do some funky and useful things, or so they said. The trouble from my point of view was ... well, they weren't terribly clear on open source, for starters, or on public APIs, which was somewhat more serious. And when I got in deeper, I discovered some horrifying shortcuts in their API. Like, oh, once a credit card transaction hit their servers they'd process it, but the acknowledgement might well disappear into the bit bucket if the poor-quality leased line between London and Paris chose that particular moment to crap out. And the exchange rate for the transaction in question would be pulled out of a hat in accordance with the phase of the moon or something, and a subsequent refund or cancellation request wouldn't go through at the same exchange rate if there was a currency fluctuation.

How I got here in the end: my non-tech autobiography (Thanks, Charlie!)

mightysquirrel writes "It's been a year since Bill Gates left Microsoft in his official capacity. At the time many speculated his departure would spark a significant shift in Redmond. But how much has really changed during Microsoft's first year without Gates?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harvard Law Professor, and former Bush White House lawyer, Jack Goldsmith has an opinion piece today in the NYT about cyber-security. In it, he makes a number of obvious (though admittedly often overlooked) points about the need for better education and information sharing, but then asserts that those, untried, methods will not be enough. Instead, he argues, "The government must be given wider latitude than in the past to monitor private networks and respond to the most serious computer threats." For a lawyer who saw first-hand (and even wrote a book about) the excesses of the Bush administration, this is a reckless claim. The repeatedly documented violations of civil liberties by the NSA and other government agencies (not to mention their private sector compatriots) through widespread network surveillance did not serve to protect and defend US critical infrastructure. In fact, by adding legitimacy to network monitoring, scholars like Goldsmith and respected countries like the USA make it easier for less savorable regimes to justify their digital surveillance and crackdowns. While China's "Green Dam" censorship software was justified on child-safety grounds, the next iteration of liberty limiting code could very well be to stop "cyber-terrorism" or some other amorphous, ill-defined concept.

A far more level-headed approach to cyber-security is taken by Evgeny Morozov in his recent essay in the Boston Review, which points out that "[m]uch of the data are gathered by ultra-secretive government agencies—which need to justify their own existence—and cyber-security companies—which derive commercial benefits from popular anxiety. Journalists do not help. Gloomy scenarios and speculations about cyber-Armaggedon draw attention, even if they are relatively short on facts." While Goldsmith is certainly not promoting increased government intervention out of self-interest, it is not good enough to pay lip-service to privacy and network openness. Decision-makers need to recognize that certain policies and rhetoric will inevitably have dangerous, unproductive unintended consequences.

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

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Mark from the BBC sez, "Hello, we've got a fabulous short comic strip about Victorian genius and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was drawn by ace animator Sydney Padua. It's so good I thought it deserved a much bigger audience."

Tech Lab: Sydney Padua (Thanks, Mark!)

Rick Kleffel sez, "I've recently posted an interview with China Miéville about his new book, The City & The City -- certainly one of the most unusual books you could read this year. He talks about the challenges of working in two genres -- the fantastic and the hard-boiled mystery genre -- in one novel."

A 2009 Interview with China Miéville

MP3 Link

(Thanks, Rick!)

nk497 writes "Google has announced the hardware partners for the Chrome OS — so we can expect to see netbooks running the operating system next year from the likes of Asus, Acer, and HP, as well as Toshiba. Dell didn't seem to make the list, at least yet. Google also said it had teamed up with Adobe, which could mean Google is looking to include the Acrobat.com web-based software suite in some way."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peter Semmelhack, Founder and CEO of Bug Labs, sent us the following piece on creating an open source movement in health care technology. We thought it was interesting and something MAKE readers might want to chew over and chime in on. - Gareth

---

This is my first attempt at putting into words what I've been contemplating for several weeks, so you'll have to forgive me if it seems a bit rough around the edges. But I've learned that when an idea bangs around in my head long enough, it's usually a good idea to share it with others and either start a larger discussion or euthanize it. So here it is. Tell me what you think.

I believe we need an open source movement dedicated to health care. In essence, I want to rally the same fanatical zeal that has helped build some of the best, most complex software systems (LAMP, etc) ever devised to help address some of the world's thorniest health care problems. I understand that's a very easy thing to say and enormously complicated to actually do, but I'll try to provide a simple example of how I think we could start. After all, open source as we know it today did not start with Linux.

Right now, if you have someone in your life with Type 1 diabetes, I bet it's safe to say that you'd want notification (email, txt msg, IM, etc.) if he or she experienced a life threatening low or high blood sugar level. You'd especially want to know if they experienced one of these events and then fell down. It's also a safe bet that you know getting this type of alert is virtually impossible today. There isn't a device or gadget you can go buy that provides it. Building a wireless glucometer with an integrated accelerometer would not be too hard technically. In fact, I know a few people who could hack it together in a week.

The same could be said about a device that helps monitor the breathing of kids with juvenile asthma, or the whereabouts of someone suffering from Alzheimer's. I could go on, but you get the point. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of specific (and specifically precise) tools that could be developed to help everyone lead healthier lives, and help communities take care of one another. If you look at all the active communities devoted to open source software - games, music, programming languages, etc. - I'd like to hope that it's not too far a stretch to believe we can inspire the same energy and passion around improving the health and well-being of others. Think of the benefits associated with groups worldwide sharing their discoveries, methods and processes to achieve better results. This is not new territory. It happens everyday right now with FOSS communities.

One of the biggest hurtles is economics. Building these types of systems are expensive. But maybe there is a way address it. There are approximately 1M children suffering from juvenile diabetes in the US (29,000 new occurrences each year). If the community could design, build, and certify an open source prototype device that could potentially reduce mortality by even 5% per year, you would have a huge impact. Potentially, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundationa (JDRF) could sponsor its manufacture and sell it/give it to any/all sufferers. Assuming a reasonable price for making 1M devices (say $90 --> $90M to equip every child with a device, though, of course that wouldn't be necessary) it would be within easy reach of any number of foundations and/or government programs. Or sell it at a profit with the proceeds going back to JDRF. Communities have worked this way in the past. Why not apply it here?

This is just one example. I'm sure there are better ones. But the point is, you could make the same case for virtually any health issue. The key to living longer, healthier lives, and lowering the costs of providing care is via better information. Getting better information is what good tools are designed to do. I'm arguing that we should explode the creation of these tools. But rather than rely solely on the world of business to lead the charge, why not organize and energize communities of hackers to create the technical foundations for a health care revolution unlike anything we've seen before? It can't be any more complicated than hacking a Linux kernel ;)

P.S. For a list of some of the activity going on now around health care and open source, check here

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Kyle Brady, a computer science student, sends us, "a critique of a major IEEE article by Lawrence G. Roberts where he automatically assumes P2P traffic is illegal, unwanted, and should be filtered - then develops the technology to do so."

Consider, for a moment, the issue most often cited for "traffic shaping", the practice of filtering a users traffic based on the type and source: legality of content. While there is an abundance of content with questionable copyright origins based on the current interpretations of the DMCA (in America), there is also a sea of legal content being acquired by the same means: Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and a number of other musical artists have experimented with a freely available online distribution method, in addition to countless young movie producers that are only interested in their content being available and seen.

How can network monitoring practices differentiate between "legal" and "illegal" P2P traffic? Filtering by content source, such as a band's official website vs. IsoHunt, is impractical - the content available via the official source is likely licensed for free distribution and sharing by other means. Filtering by traffic size, as in number of bytes transferred, is a gray area at best - setting an arbitrary size for acceptable P2P traffic, or any type of traffic, creates artificial pricing levels, not to mention potentially endorsing the acquisition of questionably sourced content. There is really only one option left, and it is what most ISPs choose in such cases: filter by traffic type.

I've never understood the ISP/admin approach to P2P that says, "We've provided you with a pipe so you can access the Internet, but stop accessing the Internet so much!" If users want P2P, then P2P is what makes paying for an ISP valuable, so why would ISPs want to reduce its availability? That's like a phone company that discovers that teenagers use phones to send a lot of texts to one another, overwhelming their capacity (based on assumptions about how much text users will want to send) who then throttles text-sending rather than changing their assumptions about use-patterns.

Incorrect Base Assumptions About Network Management (Thanks, Kyle!)

British journalists working for Murdoch papers have been on a crime spree, hiring private eyes to illegally hack into the voicemail and data of thousands of people, including " tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills"; Murdoch has paid out over £1M so far to hush it up. The head of the Conservative party's communications is a former Murdoch exec who from the time that much of this crime was committed by his staffers.

Senior editors are among those implicated. This activity occurred before the mobile phone hacking, at a time when Coulson was deputy and the editor was Rebekah Wade, now due to become chief executive of News International. The extent of their personal knowledge, if any, is not clear: the News of the World has always insisted that it would not break the law and would use subterfuge only if essential in the public interest.

Faced with this evidence, News International changed their position, started offering huge cash payments to settle the case out of court, and finally paid out £700,000 in legal costs and damages on the condition that Taylor signed a gagging clause to prevent him speaking about the case. The payment is believed to have included more than £400,000 in damages. News Group then persuaded the court to seal the file on Taylor's case to prevent all public access, even though it contained prima facie evidence of criminal activity.

As civil liberties campaigner Dr Ian Brown notes:

There are two particularly troubling aspects to this story. The Metropolitan Police, Crown Prosecution Service and Information Commissioner's Office all had prima facie evidence of these crimes, but have declined to take action against News Group. And, mobile phone companies continue to allow access to messages using voicemail PINs set to defaults that are apparently known throughout the media. Perhaps in future:

1. Law enforcement agencies will take action against those discovered to be breaking the law, whether or not they work for powerful newspaper groups?

2. Mobile phone companies will not leave their customers' communications wide open to abuse?

3. Government agencies and companies will think a little more carefully before building up large collections of sensitive personal data that will inevitably be sold to the highest bidder?

Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims

Itsumishi sez, "Remember that absurd Internet Filtering Scheme Stephen Conroy and the Australian Government has been continuing to push onto the Australian population? Well GetUp the amazing organisation that has been involved in a lot of great campaigns in Australia has created a very hilarious advertisement they're hoping to get onto every Qantas flight in the country while for next sitting in Parliament. The idea is that most politicians will be flying at some time during this time and they'll be a captive audience. Anyway, the ad is brilliant and they need donations to get it on air, please help!"

Censor this? (Thanks, Itsumishi!)

suraj.sun writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh. 'This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or "fabric", can collect images just like a camera but without a lens,' said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters. MIT suggested that the technology, if developed further, could give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh. 'This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or "fabric", can collect images just like a camera but without a lens,' said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters. MIT suggested that the technology, if developed further, could give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I wish the video was embeddable, as this has to be seen to be believed: the alarm-clock is attached to a pneumatic gas-lift under a bed that picks it up and bounces it up and down like a lowrider car:

Built by reader "Kevin" for a contest, this computer-controlled alarm clock is touted as the world's largest. To be more specific, he "mounted a large air cylinder to the head of [his] bed and a valve, controlled by a computer, which [he programmed] to wake [him] up in the morning." Continue reading to see it in action."

World's Biggest Alarm Clock Shakes You Out of Bed, is Computer-Controlled (via /.)

AD sez, "Girls Guild is an ancient secret society complete with a mythological back-story set in Atlantis, secret code and handshake, nemesis, and (perhaps) soon-to-be-ubiquitous symbol -- but with a twist: all of the secrets, iconography and legends are available for retooling, embellishment and propagation under a Creative Commons license."

This looks like fun, notwithstanding that Girls Guild appears to be so ancient as to have predated the apostrophe.

Introducing Girls Guild (Thanks, A. D. Ammann!)

As those involved in public policy issues know all too well, much of what happens in DC is driven (or at least heavily influenced) by lobbyists. But, for the most part, the lobbyists stay out of the spotlight, allowing politicians to present their positions for them. But the lobbyists themselves are never far away -- it's just that the press always has the cameras facing the politicians, and the lobbyists go undetected. That's why it's great to see that NPR actually has tried turning the cameras around (found via Jerry Brito). At a hearing on healthcare reform, NPR photographers turned around and photographed those in the audience, and then placed the photo online, asking viewers to identify the lobbyists in attendance. Brito points out that it's not clear that enough people who would know actually have looked at the photo, but it's still a nice idea.

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Vimeo poster Steve Bulhoes writes:

This is a project I worked on with Marc-André Baril while I was at Moment Factory. They created an interactive wall for the tourist information office, La Vitrine in Montreal.

The installation includes tracking devices and low-resolution LED displays and is capable of showing many different visualizations based on the presence and movement of people.

Visitors can interact with the installation every night from 7 PM to 11 PM. La Vitrine, 145, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Montréal

La Vitrine - Montreal [Thanks, Katie Wilson!]

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Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

I'm not sure what this video about, but I'm pretty sure it has to do with astrophysics. "Docking," by Mato Atom, who describes himself as a "hobby astronomer without a telescope." (Thanks, Matt!)

Nat sez, "Spinster battlaxe Skud passed me this 1968 minute from the Director of the Trade Commissioner of Australia explaining why women are ineligible for postings. It's a jawdropalicious blast from the sexist past":

Even conceding these points, a woman could not stay young and attractive for ever, and later on could well become a problem.

(vii) A spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years. A man usually mellows.

Nat continues, "Bearing in mind this sage advice, I've already begun to regretfully decline my daughter's requests for education and social opportunities, explaining to her that "she could not be regarded as a long-term investment in the same sense as we regard" her brother."

Minute to the Director, Trade Commissioner Service (Australia) (Thanks, Nat!)

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

A little "Blade Runner," a little "Metropolis," a little "Coneheads," things got science-fiction-inspired on the Jean Paul Gaultier runway yesterday during the Fall 2009 Paris couture shows. (Image credit: Left and right: Monica Feudi; center: Simone Manzo)

A few months ago, we were talking about the growing value of "passed links" or "earned links." These are links that to things that others passed on to you, via email or social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. As more people have been using these services, the value of such links have grown as traffic generators. And yet, some have just realized that Amazon doesn't reward affiliates for using such links. It's not difficult to understand how this came about, but it certainly seems like the type of thing that the company should reconsider. Basically, Amazon's original affiliate program was so that you could send people to Amazon from your own site. In order to become an affiliate your site had to be approved. But if you're just passing around links, then that has little or nothing to do with your site, and thus Amazon doesn't pay such referral fees. I would imagine that Amazon is also quite worried about potential fraud.

But given the growing popularity of things like Twitter and Facebook, it seems like Amazon might want to reconsider this policy, and recognize that if someone promotes a book via these services, they're equally as deserving of the affiliate referral fee than if they had simply posted the link on their own site.

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I really like the idea of using an inexpensive micro-controller for this project. There are commercial solar tracking devices, but those are a lot more expensive and aren't nearly as satisfying as making your own. Check out the web site for a lot more information.

This is just the first part of my overall project idea which I will keep posting about as I progress further. I was able to power up my 65? HD TV, cable box and Wii with the solar panel I am using by adding my scooter battery and an invertor. So I want to pursue some of this idea but make something that is more effecient. I am going to start keeping a better track of our energy bill each month, and see if I can bring it down. I wont be able to go of the grid just yet, but I think it will be interesting to experiment with.

More about Arduino Solar Tracking

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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An anonymous reader writes "I develop games as a hobby. I've experimented with games on almost every platform available. For me, the gameplay is the most influential factor of a game, with history and graphics dividing second place. But, for some reason, it's not the technical beauty of the graphics that appeal to me. I have played Crysis, and I've played Pokémon games. The graphics of the Pokémon games entertain me as much as the graphics of Crysis. I think both are beautiful. So, why is the current generation of games giving so much importance to the realism in graphic games? I think it is sufficient for a game to have objects that are recognizable. For example, while the water in some games may not look as good as in Crysis, I can still tell it's water. What are your opinions on the current direction of game graphics? Do you prefer easy-to-render 3D scenes that leave space for beautiful effects, like with Radiosity, or more complex 3D scenes that try to be realistic?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Moran writes in the BBC News Magazine that Sat-Nav clearly suits an era in which 'map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.' Sat-Nav 'speaks to our contemporary anxieties and preoccupations about the road,' writes Moran. 'More roads and better cars mean we can travel further, and so the risk of getting lost is all the greater.' But do real men use sat-nav? Moran says that men seem to recoil from being given digital instructions by a woman, and read the satnav woman's pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like 'make a legal U-turn' and 'recalculating the route', as stubborn or bossy. Still we don't quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go. 'Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections,' writes Moran. 'Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've noted in the past some of the massive problems with various collections societies around the world. These groups are often given something of a monopoly over collecting music royalties, and even though they present themselves as being non-profits designed to help artists, the truth is usually something far different. Beyond abusing their position, their real goal is often not to help all artists, but a small subset at the top. This is what copyright law has pretty much always done. By setting up artificial barriers and monopoly rents, it allows a very few at the top to benefit at a grossly disproportionate level, and it's the rest of the creators who are harmed by this (i.e., if those monopoly rents mean that I need to pay much more than the true market rate to support some top pop star, I'm much less likely to spend money on an up and coming indie musician). The whole recording industry has been built around a few megastars, and it should be no surprise that the industry has used copyright law and collections societies in support of that.

Wolfgang Senges is digging into how this works in Germany, where some are finally questioning GEMA's actions. In delving into how GEMA works, Senges notes that its entire structure is specifically designed to really only give a small percentage of top artists a say in how GEMA operates. Everyone else just gets dragged along for the ride. Is it any wonder, then, that its policies are mostly designed to help those big artists, rather than others?

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(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

This NYC Subway cuff by Tiffany Burnette would be a reasonable remake for a beginning metalsmith using a toner-transfer etch process (or a laser cutter) and a bracelet mandrel. Via Core77.

More:

Moleskine map preserves your street cred

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Udpate: United Airlines has responded. Bottom line: YouTube complaint videos appear to work.

Instead of a complaint letter, the band "Sons of Maxwell" have posted a music video aimed at United Airlines over the destruction of one of their guitars on a trip last year:

[We] were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didnt deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world.

United Breaks Guitars (YouTube, via Graham Linehan)

Oh, this is righteous and terrific news. Remember Jean Anleu, the mild-mannered, book-loving, code-writing geek who was jailed in May by the Guatemalan government over a single tweet he posted during that country's political crisis?

He's a free guy now. The case against him was thrown out today by a Guatemalan appeals court. He has been absolved of all charges.

Prensa Libre has a comprehensive article in Spanish here, and this link takes you to Spanish-language audio of the proceedings today. Friends are still collecting funds to cover @jeanfer's sizeable legal bills. If you care to donate, you can do so to his friend Manolo's PayPal account (manolo@manoloweb.net, yes I have vetted it, and yes it's real).

As you may know, over in the UK, the music collection society PRS has been in rather contentious negotiations with various online services over streaming rates. Due to these fights, services like Pandora have shut down in the UK, and YouTube has pulled major label music videos. A couple months ago, PRS tried to compromise by announcing lower rates, which the press hailed as the record labels finally recognizing that their old monopoly rent royalty rates were no longer sustainable. Except... not everyone got the message. Even though these lower rates have been rejected as too high by the various online music streaming services, apparently EMI is arguing in the opposite direction, refusing to license its catalog at the lower rates.

It's difficult to see what EMI gets out of being stubborn here. It's clear that streaming services won't even accept these rates. All EMI is doing is pissing off artists on the label who can't figure out why their fans can't hear their music, making it harder for them, as musicians, to build up the necessary popularity to put in place any number of smart business models (you know, the models that EMI seems incapable of helping them implement).

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Matt_dk sends in a Spacefellowship article: "The ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration, David Southwood, met NASA's Associate Administrator for Science, Ed Weiler, in Plymouth, UK, to establish a way for a progressive programme for exploration of the Red Planet. The outcome of the bilateral meeting was an agreement to create a Mars Exploration Joint Initiative (MEJI) that will provide a framework for the two agencies to define and implement their scientific, programmatic and technological goals at Mars."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Only lawyers, EULA collectors and legal obsessives will find this funny, but it cracked me up: care to access the 140-character pearls of wisdom streaming forth from Wal-Mart's Twitter account? Well, first you have to agree to the 3,379-word Terms of Use agreement that comes with it. I know, I know, a lot of big corporate entities on social networking sites likely put forth equally verbose TOUs, but -- a "Twitter Discussion Policy"? Awesome overkill. It all starts here. (via @zephoria)

Some incredible artwork from Meridith Pingree.

My artwork physically tracks human behavior and traffic patterns using quasi-scientific, homespun, reactive sculptures. I use sensors to pick up on people's energy and movement throughout a space. My work exists as amplifications of this subtle energy, creating unconventional, complex portraits of people and spaces. For example: kinetic links of a centipede-like creature respond individually to create a live mutating curve. Robotic, rainbow colored gel pens selectively record human traffic patterns. Personalities captured by subtle head movements are frozen in rapid-prototyped sculptures.

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Last year, we discussed whether or not Connected Nation broadband mapping group, was really just a big telco boondoggle designed to get gov't money and allow telcos to avoid really providing broadband data. For some reason, politicians are absolutely in love with Connected Nation, though. When I was in Washington DC recently, they talked about it like it was the solution to our country's broadband needs. That seems quite bizarre no matter how you look at it. First, it's just a "mapping" organization and it's run by the telcos themselves, allowing them to continue to fudge the data to make markets look a lot more competitive than they really are. And, yet, thanks to all the political love that goes out to Connected Nation, it looks like they're about to get hundreds of millions of dollars in broadband stimulus money.

Broadband Reports points us to Art Brodsky's "final warning" about Connected Nation, before we hand over tons of tax money to it, and it's not pretty. He notes the ridiculousness of politicians complaining that the gov't agency in charge of getting accurate maps has failed (solely because the telcos refuse to give them the data) and deciding the best "response" to this is to simply hand the whole project (and lots of money) over to the telcos who refused to give the data up in the first place:

The fruit is not the product of the state agency, however. Faison used his announcement to criticize e-NC: "Until now, we have not had a map showing street address availability of broadband. e-NC has generated maps based on information disclosed by the providers which are based on the average number of customers with broadband access in a wire center. Unfortunately, information provided in this fashion does not allow you to see where broadband is and where it is not, it does not allow you to see the holes in the Swiss cheese, and depending on the area the hole may be larger than the cheese."

Note the circular logic here. Faison and other members of his committee are criticizing e-NC for their maps, which were based on information supplied, or not, as it were, by the telecom industry. The state agency has been hampered by AT&T's unwillingness to supply broadband data and its insistence on a very restrictive non-disclosure agreement for information the company did supply.

Instead of pushing the industry to stop stonewalling e-NC, Faison and the others trashed e-NC's work and commended the work of – AT&T, the very company that hamstrung e-NC. Here is Faison’s praise for the industry: "In the face of legislation recommended by the Committee which would have required the providers to disclose precise information to the Legislature for our staff to generate a detailed map of availability, the providers have come together and collectively decided to provide the information through Connected Nation, to not only provide the "street address" map but also to make the map both accessible and interactive through the internet. Special recognition should be given to AT&T, Embarq, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, The Cable Association, the Telephone Co-op association, and Alltel for their work on this matter."

Brodsky goes on to show a Connected Nation map, and note how useless it is in actually giving granular data, and then compares it to another group's map, with much greater detail. I certainly agree that better data is important, but I have to admit I'm still somewhat confused as to what real problem we end up solving with mapping alone? Yes, it will give us more data to figure out just what the current situation is when it comes to broadband deployment, but that's got little to do with actually improving our broadband infrastructure.

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It's no mystery that warm weather and cold beer go mighty well together. Which brings me to our flashback for this week: the DIY Convertible Jockey Box by Carlo Longino from MAKE Volume 07. For those not in the know, a jockey box is a funny little cooler with a built-in beer tap on the outside. Inside, the cooler houses plumbing to draw beer from a keg and a metal coil or cooling plate to chill it. Warm beer in a keg becomes cold beer in your cup. Great, but ready-made versions run about $150 or more. This homebrew version is not only cheaper but more adaptable. Longino writes, "In jockey-box mode, the convertible cooler houses the heat-exchanger coil while the keg stays outside. In mini-keg mode, the entire keg goes inside the cooler, and you don't use the coil. Standard compressed-air coupler and plug fittings let you easily swap internal parts to change the cooler's beer operational mode."

Here is the entire project shared through our Digital Edition, so you can get the good times flowing.

We are sold out of all back issues of Volume 07, including The Next Year box set which includes it. Luckily, if you subscribe to MAKE, you get access to all 18 volumes on our Digital Edition.

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S-100 writes "SoundExchange has reached an agreement for royalty rates with a consortium of Internet radio broadcasters. The parties are ecstatic that the issue is finally resolved, and that the new rates are below the previous 'death to Internet radio' levels that had previously been imposed by the CARB. According to NewsFactor, Pandora founder Tim Westergren proclaims that 'the royalty crisis is over!', and other large broadcasters are equally pleased. One unheard-from group is less likely to be pleased: small Internet radio broadcasters. Buried in the details are a new minimum royalty payment: $25,000 per year. So say goodbye to all of the small Internet radio stations that you have been listening to, as they will no longer afford to operate legally."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm at a meeting of hyperlocal bloggers at Cal J-school.

People are going around the room introducing themselves. The stories are all interesting, the people are very good public speakers. Almost everyone here is doing, not talking about doing.



Really interesting story from Lydia Chavez, managing editor of misionlocal.org.

On the Watchismo blog, Mitch celebrates the launch of the Urwerk King Cobra CC1, a remake of the original "jumping hour" watch, explaining why he's so fascinated with these remarkable, largely extinct timepieces.

Time is usually - nearly always - displayed by a circular indication: one dial and two (or three) with the time displayed around a perpetual circle. However, this 360° representation of time goes against everything we learnt as we grew up drawing a straight line on a blank page and marking it Past, Present and Future. Why do we think of time as travelling in a straight line yet display it rotating around a circle? The answer is straightforward: mechanisms that continually rotate are much simpler to produce than those that trace a straight line then return to zero. In fact, the latter is so difficult that, until now, nobody has ever managed to develop a production wristwatch with true retrograde linear displays.

Urwerk King Cobra CC1 Reintrepretation of 1958 Patek Philippe Cobra Prototype Linear Retrograde Cylinder Jumping Hour Watch

The Pope's latest encyclical (a kind of churchy APA) decries "excessive zeal for ... intellectual property, especially in the field of health care."

Section 22 of the letter, entitled "Human Development in Our Time," laid out the Pope's vision of human development goals. It also highlighted the failings of the current system, citing rigid ideology, consumerist "superdevelopment", corruption, and "cultural models and social norms of behavior .... which hinder the process of development." Casting a strikingly pragmatic tone, the encyclical underscores the complexity of development issues, which "should prompt us to liberate ourselves from ideologies, which oversimplify reality in artifical ways, and ... lead us to examine objectively the full human dimension of the problems."

Pope Benedict XVI encyclical letter denounces excessive zeal for assertions of intellectual property rights in knowledge

We've noted that in Europe, IP addresses are considered private info, and I've pointed out that I don't think IP addresses, by themselves, should be considered private. I agree that combined with other identifying information an IP address can reveal info about you, but just the numbers alone are not private. And it appears a judge agrees, noting that IP addresses are not "personally identifiable" information (sent in by Dave Barnes). I'm actually surprised about this, because most people seem to disagree with me on IP addresses. However, this does raise a separate question: if courts say IP addresses are not personally identifiable, then that does that shoot a large hole in most of the RIAA cases which rely on IP addresses? After all, the judge in this ruling said:

"In order for 'personally identifiable information' to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer."

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Craig sez, "Looks like Vancouver is getting free speech areas just like the RNC! Yipee! It's so nice of them to set up these areas. I'm sure that even though they're optional, all us polite Canadian folks will be encouraged to full advantage of the designated areas."

Good to see the Olympics upholding its tradition of fostering international brotherhood through brutal authoritarian crackdowns, venal rent-seeking, and remorseless forced relocation of unsightly poor people.

The head of security for the 2010 Games, RCMP assistant commissioner Bud Mercer, told Vancouver city council on Tuesday, however, that protesters will not be required to limit their activities to the areas.

You're free to use them, if you like, but anywhere you participate in lawful protest is legal and lawful in Canada. It doesn't have to be in a free speech area," said Mercer.

2010 Olympic security plans include 'free speech areas' Some homeless to be moved out of security zones (Thanks, Craig!)

Mitch writes in with news of his latest Copper Robot podcast, "Robert Charles Wilson discusses his latest novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, which is the most fun novel you'll ever read about the collapse of Western civilization and the end of religious freedom and democracy in America. It's an adventure story about the son of pious snake-handling parents in a small town, who leaves home in the company of the nephew of the President of the United States, and goes off to war and New York. The novel has adventure and romance and comedy and sea voyages and rooftop foot-chases and leaping from building to building. It's great fun. I also talked to Wilson about his 24-year career, past books including Darwinia and Spin, his writing process and favorite tools, and how working for a Canadian civil rights education was great education for a writer."

Science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson (Thanks, Mitch!)

It's a good thing that Limor and Phil of adafruit industries only use their powers for good. Otherwise, we'd all be in trouble. The dynamic hacking duo has just released a new comic book version of their awesome Citizen Engineer video, episode 1, on SIM card hacking. They're printing the books on-demand at adafruit, limited edition, 32-page, full-color. It also comes with an adafruit SIM Reader Kit v1.0. Can't wait to get mine. I haven't fed my zine/ homebrewed comics habit in a while. Great job, guys!

SIM reader & Comic book - Citizen Engineer Volume 01

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