Damien Cummings
35W and University Avenue

Best job: "Working for Northwestern Bell, back in '72. Lineman."

Worst job: "Day labor stuff. Minnesota Barrel, for instance. They're heavy, you gotta stack 'em three high and stuff. But it was a job. I did everything there is."

Last job: "Senior center in Cambridge, doing maintenance work on their facility. I'm a handyman."

Dream job: "I dunno. I really don't. I'm on veterans' disability. I was in Vietnam."

This willingness to punish wrongdoing even when it comes from big companies is a marked contrast with the anti-virus companies that had to be arm-twisted into releasing updates to their products to catch and remove the spyware and rootkits that Sony music was caught distributing on millions of music CDs.

It appears that at least some of the JavaScript- redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google's webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We'll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded. I'm leaving comments turned off on this post; there are no doubt plenty of other search engine optimization areas to discuss this.

The author of Cabel's Blog LOL prised the information out of various Best Buy cashiers, and has posted a codex so that we can intelligently discuss each store's success at peddling easy credit with its employees.

Shrink Percent: Ahh, shrink. You probably call it "stealing". And this store is doing pretty good with handling it. The shrink percentage is, presumably, the percentage of Best Buy merchandise that is simply prancing right out the door. A shrink percentage of .50% is, apparently, bad news — so this store is doing pretty well.

Shrink Payout: Keep shrink low, and the shrink payout increases! Well, I have no idea how this shrink payout ($469) is distributed to employees (anyone know?), but I'd wager it winds up being a few extra dollars in your paycheck every now and then.

Update: Nathan sez, "When I was working at Best buy the payout was done as a year-end bonus. After PI (that is, 'Physical Inventory') you would get a bonus check for what ever the Shrink payout was. $300 - $400 was the average for my store."

Update: Andrew sez, "Not sure exactly how different Best Buy is, however I can give you the rundown of how Futureshop (owned by Best Buy here in Canada) does it. Shrink is more than just loss to theft, it's also money lost to old products have prices dropped before they get sold (clearence, etc) and things being returned and marked down for sale as open box."

In Cuba, television is the most important communication medium and a national pastime. No matter that the TV sets themselves are outdated, pre-revolution relics imported from America or sets from Russia over fifteen years old; green-hued beasts jimmy-rigged with ancient computer parts and fantastically adorned like religious altars.

The ballot is drawn from the Locus Recommended Reading List, which is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with the best work published in the field this year. Link

Yoshiaki Kobayashi, 42, admitted to the allegations. "I was frustrated because my job was not going well. I wanted to vent my anger," he was quoted as telling investigators.

Update: Brian sez, "Don't forget the Spud Trooper!"

See also Katamari Damacy versus Indiana Jones (Thanks, P2!)

Update: Jamal sez, "This was done by an insane flash animator that goes by Xenon. This is where his animations are located, but before you watch any of them make sure your speakers are turned down to a safe volume because he likes to yell and make your ears bleed. My favorite is probably the first one on the page."

Just two years short of his 90th birthday, a ponytailed Lewis ran as the Green Party candidate against incumbent Gov. George Pataki. Lewis campaigned against draconian drug laws and the death penalty, while going to court in a losing battle to have his name appear on the ballot as "Grandpa Al Lewis."

He didn't defeat Pataki, but managed to collect more 52,000 votes.

"The last time I checked, the postal service has a very similar system to provide different options," said Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman. He pointed to services like certified mail with return receipts, "where you really do get assurance that if what you send is important to you, it will be delivered, and delivered in a way that is different from other mail."

Update: A reliable source sez, "One of Goodmail's competitors told me: 'Goodmail is sharing 80% of stamp revenue with AOL, and they gave AOL a big piece of the company in warrants to launch with them and kill their enhanced whitelist.'"

Update 2: Patrick sez, "Charles E. Stiles, an AOL postmaster says 'AOL has no plans of terminating the whitelist.'"

The temple of Maa Tarini in Orissa, India, receives the coconuts from faithful volunteers from distant parts of the nation. Bus drivers relay the coconuts from vehicle to vehicle, dumping them in collection points at state lines. The surfeit of coconuts around the Maa Tarini has spawned a local coconut candy industry.

Hold a coconut in your hand on a highway in Orissa and the next bus will surely stop to pick it up to take it to the temple in Ghatgaon in Keonjhar district.

The drivers' faith in the goddess Maa Tarini is complete - it is common to find the space behind their seats stacked with coconuts.

Even if the bus is on a different route, the driver will make sure to drop the coconuts in a collection box en route or pass them on to a bus headed for Ghatgaon.

"If I refuse to carry coconuts to the goddess, I may face various odds on my way," says Arun Sahoo, a bus driver.

[Internet] data led directly to a suspect in a school bombing threat; it has also been used by the authorities to track child pornographers and computer intruders, and has become a tool in civil cases on matters from trade secrets to music piracy. In St. Louis, records of a suspect's online searches for maps proved his undoing in a serial-killing case that had gone unsolved for a decade.

In short, just as technology is prompting Internet companies to collect more information and keep it longer than before, prosecutors and civil lawyers are more readily using that information. When it comes to e-mail and Internet service records, "the average citizen would be shocked to find out how adept your average law enforcement officer is at finding information," said Paul Ohm, who recently left the Justice Department's computer crime and intellectual property section.

The issue has come to the fore because of a Justice Department request to four major Internet companies for data about their users' search queries. While America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft complied with the request, Google is resisting it. That case does not involve information that can be linked to individuals, but it has cast new light on what privacy, if any, Internet users can expect for the data trail they leave online.

The answer, in many cases, is clouded by ambiguities in the law that governs electronic communication like telephone calls and e-mail.

There's no good reason that you should be forced to buy the movies on your shelf again as low-resolution, single-player thumbnails. After all, if you want to play your CDs on your portable player, you just rip them -- buying the movies you own all over again is strictly for suckers and people with a whole lot more disposable income than me.

# Convert movie DVDs to play on mobile video equipment like the Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, iAudio X5, Creative Labs ZEN Vision, etc
# Convert movie DVDs to other file formats like DivX, XviD, AVI, MP4, etc.
# Utilises a high quality picture conversion engine
# Supports multi-angle movie DVDs
# Video Preview shows an overview of all selectable DVD titles
# Target size freely adjustable

Update: Brandon sez, "Some people are having audio issues with CloneDVD Mobile and some DVDs. It seems the SlySoft people aren't about to fix it in the near future, possibly because they don't know how, or it requires stepping over the multi-angled scenes the software explicitly says it supports."

Back in December, I blogged about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's open letter to SunnComm, the makers of the MediaMax spyware that was automatically installed if you tried to play some Sony music CDs in your computer.

EFF presented a series of demands to SunnComm regarding steps it should take to undo the harm it had wrought on Sony customers. SunnComm has complied with EFF's demands:

SunnComm says it will ensure that future versions of MediaMax will not install when the user declines the end user license agreement (EULA) that appears when a CD is first inserted in a computer CD or DVD drive. SunnComm has also agreed to include uninstallers in all versions of MediaMax software, to submit all future versions to an independent security-testing firm for review, and to release to the public the results of the independent security testing. SunnComm and EFF are discussing how to ensure that legitimate security researchers who have been, are, or will be working to identify security problems with MediaMax will not be accused of copyright violations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

In January, SunnComm published a complete list of all music CDs that employ the MediaMax technology and sent a letter to the independent labels using MediaMax with information about a security vulnerability in MediaMax version 5. Music label Sony BMG has separately committed to addressing security concerns arising from CDs using MediaMax.

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

Update: Thanks to everyone who pointed out that Boogie Woogie Bakery Boy was from the precursor to Food Rocks -- Kitchen Kabaret.

When: 6pm on Valentine’s Day (February 14th)
Where: San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza (at Market and Embarcadero)

1) Tell everyone you know about PILLOW FIGHT!!!
2) Wait for the Ferry Building clock to strike 6:00pm
3) Don’t hit anyone with out a pillow (unless they want it)
4) Don’t hit anyone with a camera

Update: Here's Laura Cantrell's C&W/NYC subway map version of this -- thanks, Jeff!

# Switch on phone A and place it on the table such that the antenna (the pokey thing at the top) is about half an inch from the egg (you may need to experiment to get the relative heights correct - paperbacks are good if you have any - if not you may be able to get some wood off cuts from your local hardware shop).

# Switch on phone B and ring phone A then place phone B on the table in a similar but complementary position to Phone A.

# Answer phone A - you should be able to do this without removing it from the table. If not, don't panic, just return the phone to where you originally placed on the table.

# Phone A will now be talking to Phone B whilst Phone B will be talking to Phone A.

# Cooking time: This very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.

Update: Esther sez, "Cell phones communicate with the cell tower, not each other. The egg shouldn't be between the phones, it should be between the phone(s) and the tower for this to even have a snowballs chance in hell of working. Furthermore, a cell phone only spits out 2W of power for *very* short intervals. As a matter of fact, cell phones try really hard to minimize their output power to A) conserve battery life and B) play nice with the other phones on the network. You don't want a phone close to the tower blasting all the other phone signals into oblivion."

Update 2: As many have pointed out, Esther's explanation misses the fact that cell-phone antennas aren't directional.

I've long drooled for his 1954 art book, As I See, but even a beat up copy runs $200. From the dust jacket:

"The artist has divided the book into four sections: 'Neurotica' is a series depicting frustration, timidity, alcoholism, et. al; 'Machinalia' is of machines which take on human forms out of their essence, as in a weird, grotesque dream. 'Diablerie' interprets the fiendish, often ludicrous instruments of modern warfare; the final group, 'Escapades,' ranges widely on our culture and human vanities."

(LAPD Chief William J.) Bratton hailed the dart as "the big new idea" and said that if the pilot program was successful, Los Angeles' seemingly daily TV fix of police chases could be a thing of the past.

"Instead of us pushing them doing 70 or 80 miles an hour … this device allows us not to have to pursue after the car," Bratton said. "It allows us to start vectoring where the car is. Even if they bail out of the car, we'll have pretty much instantaneously information where they are."

When it is time for their training, monkeys come to live at the Monkey College in Boston. During their time at the College, monkeys are taught a wide variety of helping tasks and behaviors they will use to assist their human partners. Professional staff members dedicated to teaching and caring for the monkeys conduct the daily education program.

Monkeys learn how to help people with simple everyday activities such as opening and setting up a drink of water, providing food, picking up a dropped or out-of-reach object, or turning the pages of a book. Monkeys use their small, dexterous hands to do many kinds of specialized tasks.

A laser pointer directed by mouth control enables a quadriplegic or movement-impaired person to communicate his or her specific needs.

Positive reinforcement including verbal praise, affection, and food rewards is the essential tool used to support a monkey’s education and task performance. If a task is not performed as requested, the monkey is not punished but is given more time to practice the task. Most monkeys learn the basic task set within 18-24 months.

Matthew Rettenmund at BoyCulture blog sez,

This Madonna short, which looks from its condition to have been filmed sometime between the Civil and the First World War, reminds me of Kenneth Anger movies and also thatMadgeeat dubious old porn loop purporting to be Marilyn Monroe recycling a Coke bottle with her vagina. Nothing X-rated happens, though Madonna looks bitchin' in a bikini, suggestively eats and spits out a raw egg (foreshadowing the bukakke craze of the 2000s) and allows a friend to eat the fried egg off of her washboard abs. Yes, she was Madonna even back then.

Previously:
BLOGUE, by Owen Thomas (apologies to Madonna)

Reader comment: Tobias says,

Sly Ciccone - The Immaculate Concoction is the best Madonna mashup to be heard anywhere for years - with album art + bittorrent + individual file downloads (coral cached). Hit my bandwidth baby! Link

Boing Boing reader peytonchi says,

xeni, my efforts to avoid seeing any pictures of the face transplant patient have failed thanks to david. can we get a unicorn chaser to wash away the haunting image of a face that doesn't quite fit?

Link, and here's an even larger size you can use as a desktop image, for whenever life shoves unpleasant things at your eyes: 1500x1125. That jpeg is big, big, big, almost as big as my love for unicorns!

Previous Unicorn Chasers on Boing Boing: Link

Miss Dinoire remains reluctant to visit shopping centres and other busy places. But under the close supervision of a team of psychiatrists, she is gaining the confidence to return to society...

She says she is in a positive mood – though she is chain-smoking again – and is making plans to study computers and accounting at college, with a view to opening a baby-clothes shop...

Another of her surgeons, Bernard Devauchelle, said: "Her facial expressiveness is slowly returning and she is talking quite clearly, but has some problems with the letters P and B, which require the lips.

"She certainly does not look like the living dead. She's eating and drinking without dribbling.

"Psychologically, she has totally accepted her new face. Her return to smoking is not the best thing. But that's what she wants to do – we can't stop her."

There is still a risk that Miss Dinoire's body will reject the new face and for the rest of her life she will have to take preventative drugs, which cause an increased risk of cancer and kidney disease.

No doubt about it. Cooking in the back yard would be more fun if you could have your whole kitchen out there with you. As a matter of fact, so would camping adventures. That's why many homeowners and campers are choosing the Ultimate BBQ Kitchen from Cook Industries.

Beginners may take up to two minutes to unfold the kitchen, while the more experienced will set it up in under a minute. It's just that easy to have your 90,000 BTU propane stove, grill and griddle, microwave oven, mini-fridge and yes, even the kitchen sink.

This week's edition of the show includes a number of items I think BoingBoing readers will dig. Among them:

* Joseph Braude joins us for an interview about his piece in this month's The New Republic on internet growth in Iran, and the boom in Persian language blogs around the world. Stanford researchers say Farsi is now the third most common language for blogs (Link, thanks Paul).

* On the eve of Tuesday's State of The Union address, Slate political correspondent John Dickerson talks with us about his recent Slate piece which traces the history of this annual media spectacle.

* Why are there so many car chases in LA, and why do we love watching them on TV? Tad Friend took a look at that for the New Yorker, and he told us about some wacky moments in the back of police cars going 100+mph on LA freeways, in the course of researching that story.

The odds that we actually hear it depend on many factors most of which are out of our control but we're going to give it a go nonetheless and the worst that could happen is that we'll have had a nice walk. Assuming SuitSat closely approximates the orbit of the ISS, it's going to get up to 69 degrees in our smoggy sky that morning, and be in signal range for just under 10 minutes.

The math: You can calculate ISS orbits here, SuitSat stuff is here, More suitsat stuff here. And finally, how to listen to satellites with a walkie talkie is here.

Nell Boyce filed a really cool story for NPR News about SuitSat earlier this week, with a sneak preview of what you'll hear if you tune in. Snip:

[Frank Bauer, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland] says [SuitSat] won't be floppy because the astronauts have worked hard to make sure that it looks like a human: "They've put a lot of stuff inside it, like trash ... because they want to get rid of that, too." Even with all that stuffing, SuitSat won't look exactly like a lost astronaut. "People are thinking of the arms flailing around and everything. Well, they're tied, so they're right in front of the suit," says Bauer. "Sort of like you tie a turkey at Thanksgiving, to hold the stuffing in."

Still, the sight of the suit floating away is going to be an arresting image, one that's eerily reminiscent of all those classic scenes from science fiction movies where the astronaut goes hurtling into the black, endless abyss. And it will happen just days after the anniversaries of two shuttle disasters.

Bauer says that he and his colleagues talked about whether the sight was going to be too disturbing for the public. They decided it was worth it: "Isn't it kind of cool to allow us, in a very benign way, to let people see science fiction become science fact?"

Previously on Boing Boing:
Old space-suit recycled as experimental satellite

Update, 3:22PM PT: Michael Perry says,

They just released it; Mission Control chatter is all in Russian, translated (mostly) by an American woman in voice-over; however, the cosmonauts switched to English right before they launched the empty space suit saying, "Goodbye, Mr. Smith," with a thick Russian accent. Cosmonaut humor!

Reader Comment: Anonymous says,

Here is a collection of images of the Prophet Mohammed dating back centuries, up to, including and beyond the present set of cartoons causing an uproar. Warning: some of the more recent images are generally offensive, not just to Islamic fundamentalists. Link

An FBI-led watchdog agency has opened an investigation into multiple complaints accusing NASA Inspector General Robert W. Cobb of failing to investigate safety violations and retaliating against whistle-blowers. Most of the complaints were filed by current and former employees of his own office.

Written complaints and supporting documents from at least 16 people have been given to investigators. They allege that Cobb, appointed by President Bush in 2002, suppressed investigations of wrongdoing within NASA, and abused and penalized his own investigators when they persisted in raising concerns.

The complaints are being reviewed by the Integrity Committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency. The complaints describe efforts by Cobb to shut down or ignore investigations on issues such as a malfunctioning self-destruct procedure during a space shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center, and the theft of an estimated $1.9 billion worth of data on rocket engines from NASA computers.

Link to "Eavesdropping 101: What Can the NSA Do?". Steinhard explains, "It looks at the probable connections that the NSA has made to the U.S. civilian communications infrastructure. The map shows how the NSA's "surveillance octopus" likely entangles the country. We believe it is the first effort to visually illustrate what is happening." More at www.nsawatch.org.

Declan wrote,

I think the ACLU's map is intended to be more fanciful than based on any confirmed participation by U.S. telecom or Internet companies. The closest we've come to actual confirmation was a paragraph buried in the middle of a Los Angeles Times article last month about AT&T, mirrored here and cited in the EFF suit. Am I missing something?

You are right-- in part. No one outside of the Government and the providers themselves can confirm which specific companies are cooperating with NSA's "program". Our map very intentionally does not point to at any specific company or companies. Although if any company would like to make a pledge not to cooperate with the NSA's warrantless and illegal communications spying, we would be happy to publicly applaud that pledge on the map and our other materials.

What the map shows are the various access and interception points that are likely involved in the NSA's surveillance.Many of those points have been described over the years in reports from well informed journalists like James Bamford and government reports like those prepared for the European Parliament. Several of the nations involved in what had been called the Echelon program have also admitted to its existence.

Previously on Boing Boing:
EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans

The Manhattan-based art historian John Richardson, a friend of Warhol’s, owns several paintings that Warhol gave to him as presents, but says he wouldn’t “dare submit these things to the board for fear of being told they’re not by Andy”. The Authentication Board’s judgments seem so capricious that you wonder if its work isn’t some kind of performance art, a deathbed prank bequeathed by Warhol to make a continuing mockery of the art establishment.

Richardson, in any case, queries the very concept of authenticity in relation to an artist who mass-produced art the way Warhol did — and who did it so shamelessly that he even named his studio The Factory. “He used to do these silk screens,” Richardson explains, “and assistants would come in at night and run off a few copies for themselves. But did that make them any less authentic than the ones they ran off for Andy during the day?”

Not only did Warhol mass- produce art, he often couldn’t be bothered to sign it. So friends stepped in; with surreal consequences. “I’ve heard that Sotheby’s will authenticate an ‘S&H Green Stamp’ poster if it has my forged Andy Warhol signature on it,” says Warhol’s friend, Sam Green. “If somebody else has forged the signature, then it’s not an Andy Warhol.”

Boing Boing reader Ben Shapiro says,

I stopped by FedEx.com this morning to ship some stuff and accidently clicked to indicate that I'm from Afghanistan (it's next to the Good Ole USA option). Much to my surprise, FedEx has a pretty graphic to let me know how Frightentingly Easy it is to ship from there to just about anywhere.

Update: Mercy! A quick series of pull-down menu tests shows it's also Frighteningly Easy to send packages from Iraq, Rwanda, Niger, Egypt, Bhutan, and other friendly places. (Thanks, Bill)

Reader comment: Courtney says,

I can confirm the ease of shipping from Afghanistan. I worked as a civilian on a Canadian military camp and we used Fedex to ship a lot of our documents back to Canada. Whenever we had something that needed to go out we'd give them a call, they'd show up at our gate and voila, the transfer was made. Almost easier than trying to use Fedex back home!

Google repression is old news. With all the hullabaloo about Google's restricting Chinese access, I thought I'd point out that the same is true of folks living in Azerbaijan (where I've live the last 1 1/2 years). If you surf to the main Google.com site, you get bumped to Google.az, which gives you a significantly restricted set of search results. The same is true of countries like Uzbekistan. The work-around, at least in the former Soviet Union, is to go to Google.co.uk; can Chinese Googlers do the same?

Reader comment: Darren says,

Back in 2001, I worked at an Irish startup called Cape Clear (Link). We built this absurdly simple thing: If you send an email to google@capeclear.com, with your search terms in the subject line, you'll get an email back with the top ten results. It was just a trivial gimmick for us, but it got ridiculous attention from the media. It didn't seem very useful, but we heard back from two groups who dug it: blind users, whose automated readers liked the plain text emails as opposed to websites and Chinese folks, who could apparently use it to circumvent censored results. The address is still functional--I'm not sure if it's a useful strategy for Chinese searchers in 2006 or not.

Reader comment: Sean O'Rourke says,

I'm not sure what people think of China's blocking power, but it's not as strong as the impression BoingBoing gives. And this gives a different impression of Google's complacency. In Beijing, I am able to access the "Tiananmen" Google searches and images without much problem. I can see all of the protestors' images. The Great FireWall of China only shows up in a couple ways:

(1) Blocks entire domains. E.g., the BBC. Certain subdomains may be blocked as well. This can be gotten around by proxy. Google.com will show all these sites as results, but you will be unable to directly access it in China. Images from sensitive sites will not be shown on an image search, but you will see where they were supposed to be.

(2) Prevents a page from loading. This is the most annoying, as you are often unsure whether there is a slow connection problem (which happens often). The page will simply stop loading before it gets to sensitive text. You'll then wait a few minutes for the timeout. News sites and blogs often have this happen. When the sensitive material is removed, the page loads normally.

(3) Temporary blocking. Not sure if this is keyword or a per-site/page basis. The latest news pages on the HK Disneyland fiasco were having issues (i.e., I could load www.local6.com, but not http://www.local6.com/news/6681871/detail.html) until Xinhua came out with their own version. Search for something too sensitive on Google ("6-June Incident" in Chinese), and you can't get to it again for the next five minutes or so.

These are the most common, but sometimes there are other fortuitous "errors" that I'm unsure about.

The point is that the FireWall cannot prevent you from knowing that there's something you're not seeing. **That's the insidious nature of Google.cn: you're now never sure if there's something you're not seeing.**

There's also monty@hexten.net. You can use it either to fetch an arbitrary URL by placing the URL in the subject /or/ to perform a google search by making the subject

"google " <my search term>

Send it mail with the subject 'help' to get a reminder of those. I haven't touched it for a while - but if there's demand I'll add functionality...

Mr. Oz agrees that making Cookie Monster sounds is an arduous occupation. "I never trained for it and I blew my pipes out," he told me. "It's completely unnatural, an explosion of force that comes from the belly through the throat. I would do a day of it and my normal voice would be a half an octave lower." (During our conversation, Mr. Oz demonstrated the Cookie Monster voice. The sudden force was startling and the volume so loud, I had to pull the phone from my ear.)

Following up on previous Boing Boing posts about the region-locked issues on the Bubble DVD, it might interest your readers to know that they can get an XviD version and NTSC region-unlocked version on Usenet now (alt.binaries.dvdrcore and alt.binaries.movies.divx).

This link is to a screenshot from the XviD version.

Web Zen Home, Store
(Thanks Frank!)

This is a photo of a new street sign in Amsterdam which locals and tourists will see appear in some neigbouroods.

The accompanying article is in dutch but says so much that a neigbourhood in Amsterdam has put up these new signs and is also selling the signs to other neigbourhoods for 80 euros.

The text under it reads "blowverbod," which your travel dictionary would translate as "blowing forbidden."

If you run the story text into WordLingo's translator, it seems there's a little more to the story...the translation seems to imply that the signs were quickly stolen a couple of times since they went up Wednesday, so the neighborhood gov't (A'dam is divided into something like a dozen boroughs, sorta like NYC) decided to start selling the signs for a "good aimcause" of some sort (in NL, it could be anything!).

In written evidence, the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance (Laca) said there were "widespread concerns in the library, archive and information community" about the potentially harmful effects of DRMs.

"We have grave concerns about the potential use of DRMs by rightholders to override existing copyright exceptions," its statement said.

In the long term, the restrictions would not expire when a work went out of copyright, it said, and it may be impossible to trace the rights holders by that time.

"It is probable that no key would still exist to unlock the DRMs," Laca said. "For libraries this is serious.

"As custodians of human memory, a number would keep digital works in perpetuity and may need to be able to transfer them to other formats in order to preserve them and make the content fully accessible and usable once out of copyright."

One thing I've learned from 3 EM rotations is: Stay away from people named "Some Guy" or "This One Dude", because they for whatever reason, just punch someone in the face or hit them with a crowbar and run off. If I see them on the street, I cross the street to get away from them...

Never, ever leave flashlights, shampoo bottles, beer bottles or any long, circular object on the floor because someday you will fall on it and it will somehow, work its way up your rectum.

Update: How about DefenderSpace Invaders on your tummy? (Thanks, Dylan!)

The comic will be released under a Creative Commons license (natch) and sold online -- I'll post again once it's on sale so you can get your copy! Link

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

Update: Mike sez, "Here's the competition's 1971 catalog. The two companies later merged, and the resulting company and technology survives to this day. At least one kit from that era is still being sold."

I previously wrote an article describing Orlowski's unwillingness to correct himself when he has taken pot-shots at people and organizations he holds in low regard (for example, taking three months to  acknowledge that a tipster had forged an email from Robert Scoble), in which I cited the EFF-attacking article as an example of this. However, according to the source at The Register, the person who made the factually incorrect statements in that particular article was a different regular contributor to The Register.

There's no indication of whether The Register will correct the inaccuracies in its piece on Electronic Frontier Foundation. Link

I will show highlights from my career as "family photographer of America's erotic underground." The show will include 45 silver prints, several large silkscreen images, and recent collage work. Admission is free. There will be light refreshments, erotic readings and a ritual performance.

Sony BMG was outed on October 31, 2005, for including anti-copying software that employed "rootkits," a technique that made it impossible for users to uninstall without damaging their Windows installation, and which opened them to new security vulnerabilities. Subsequently, Sony was also outed for using a piece of spyware called MediaMax, from SunnComm, which also created security vulnerabilities.

One class action suit in the US has been settled, while other suits and government legal actions are pending in several US states, Ireland, Canada and Italy. It's not known yet whether Sony will face legal reprisals from the US government for the military and government computers that were infected with its software.

* Sony released at least 34 titles in Canada with sales of approximately 120,000 CDs

* Sony waited two extra weeks to begin recalling CDs in Canada as compared to the United States

* Sony did not do enough to remove the CDs from store shelves. One of the named complainants purchased the CD on Boxing Day, weeks after the recall was announced and the complaint alleges that the CDs are still being sold.

Second, the complaint includes considerable analysis of Sony's alleged violation of both consumer protection and national privacy legislation. Given the analysis, the question that immediately comes to mind is whether the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Competition Bureau have launched investigations into the Sony rootkit incident. If not, why not?

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

The attraction will feature the addition of two of Hollywood's most infamous buccaneers, Captain Jack Sparrow and his nemesis Barbossa. Joining the wildest crew that ever sacked the Spanish Main, Captain Jack and Barbossa add an exciting new twist to the attraction's original storyline as they race to be the first to claim a cache of plundered treasure.

"Successfully adding the popular characters from the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' films with the mythology of our classic attraction is an example of Disney synergy and Walt Disney Imagineering at its finest," said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. "These additions will result in an exciting new chapter for the attraction and an unforgettable experience for our guests, giving them another reason to come and be a part of our continuing 50th anniversary celebration."

Woven into some of the attraction's most memorable scenes, the rival swashbucklers will be seen interacting with some of the more familiar Audio-Animatronics buccaneers found inside the ride-thru adventure. Also making a guest appearance is the ghostly Davy Jones from the second movie in the series, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." But new characters are only the beginning. New special effects will also be added to enhance the "Pirates of the Caribbean" theme park experience.

"HR 683 has just passed the US House of Representatives, and is now being considered in subcommittee hearings prior to presentation to the Senate Judiciary Committee. This new law, if enacted, will severely restrict the rights of your readers to portray trademarked items and phrases in their work. Quite literally, if someone paints a picture of flowers in a Coke(r) bottle, they may be liable for damages under the proposed statute.

"I encourage you to educate your readers regarding this pending legislation, and ask them to contact their Senators in anticipation of these rule changes." (Fortunately, Warhol created Brillo in 1964, before this foolishness arose. -- Mark) Link

Each Perplex City card has a puzzle on the front. Sometimes the puzzle will lead you to a faux corporate website or blog with additional hints. By entering your answer on the Perplexity website, you get points and can compare your ranking with other players.

Some of the cards have delightful gimmicks, like heat sensitive or ultraviolet inks that contain hidden clues. In addition to the obvious puzzle (I think there are 260 cards in the entire series, half of which have been released), each card contains elements of meta-puzzles of varying complexity.

Sometimes you have to send text messages to get information, or check the classified ads of newspapers in China, or in one case, be a published author to gain access to a research library that contains critical information:

Some time ago, the players had to get a character credentialed to do research with a library. In order to do this the character needed to be a published author. So a group of players *wrote a book* for it and it is going to be published shortly and distributed under a creative commons license from Lulu. The Perplex City publishing company is http://seaside-press.com/ (though the book being published has not been updated there yet).

Eventually, someone is going to solve enough of the puzzles and pick up enough additional clues to locate a real artifact secreted somewhere on the planet and claim the $200,000 prize -- a six-inch block called the Receda Cube. (My eight-year-old daughter, who is as enchanted by Perplex City as I am, is convinced the cube is in our neighboring town of Reseda.)

Here's more information about the game from a spokesperson:

Two years in the making, Perplex City has defined a genre by creating its own self-supporting universe. First off, players can purchase silver packs containing six, cryptic puzzle cards have been created by a range of leading designers and illustrators. They range in difficulty from 'fun and easy' to 'captivatingly complex,' the wide range of unusual puzzles include beautifully crafted riddles, origami challenges, pop culture trivia, logical mindbenders, 3D mazes and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Many of the cards can be assembled together to create large maps or new puzzles, and there is often hidden content to find. Once solved, they provide the player with their first clues to the location of the buried treasure. However, the cards are only the entryway into Perplex City. Go deeper and there is a further series of interlinked puzzles which spill into the real world - from baffling websites, coded newspaper ads, TV clips, billboards, cryptic anonymous phone calls, stray emails, sky writing, mystifying text messages and urban treasure hunts in random cities around the world.

I don't play games, because I don't have time for them, but I'm making an exception with this one. I think it's going to be a genre-busting bestseller that will break open the floodgates to a new form of popular entertainment.
Link

Owen "Ditherati" Thomas shares the following original monstrosity masterpiece of pop music parody with BoingBoing. "If you film the music video," says Owen, "I'd gladly pay $1.99 on iTunes for it."

"BLOGUE"

Strike a post
Strike a post
Blogue, blogue, blogue
Blogue, blogue, blogue

Surf around, every page you load is tragic
Tripe everywhere that you go [surf around]
You try everything you can to escape
The mainstream media you know [media you know]

When all else fails and you long to read
Something better than your feeds today
I know a place where you can have your say
It's called the blogosphere, and here's what it's for, so

Chorus:

Come on, blogue
Let your fingers move to the music [move to the music]
Hey, hey, hey
Come on, blogue
Let your fingers go with the flow [go with the flow]
You know you can do it

You don't have to do real reporting
Link to it, that's what it's for [that's what it's for]
Stay inside, for your finest inspiration
No need to open the door [open up the door]

It makes no difference if you're black or white
If you're a boy or a girl
If the server's pumping it will give you new life
You're a microstar, yes, that's what you are, you know it

(chorus, substituting "groove" for "move")

Traffic's where you find it
Not just where the AdWords mine it
Hits are in the trivial
That's where I feel so pivotal
Whimsical, like Justin Hall
So get up on the blogosphere

(chorus)
Blogue, [Blogue]
PageRank's where you find it [move to the music]
Blogue, [Blogue]
PageRank's where you find it [go with the flow]

Mark Cuban, Malik, Om,
Nick Denton, Doctorow
Calacanis, Weblogs Inc.
Written up in Wired magazine

Daily Kos, Wonkette, Kaus
Fierce with a computer mouse
Metafilter, Dave Winer
Peter Rojas, gadget finder

They had style, they had grace
Kottke had the interface
Arianna, Ana too
Robert Scoble, Bill loves you

Ladies with an attitude
Fellows that were IMterviewed
Don't just stand there, let's get to it
Strike a post, there's nothing to it

Blogue, blogue

Oooh, you've got to
Let your fingers move to the music
Oooh, you've got to just
Let your fingers go with the flow
Oooh, you've got to
Blogue

People who feel naked without their cellphones, who carry around a set of keys with storage devices like flash drives that contain their digital life, who have their entire music collection on an iPod, have already created an information envelope around themselves, said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif.

"They are living a life in which they have a symbiotic relationship with communication technologies that are as familiar a part of the body as braces or glasses," Mr. Pang said. "For these people, the idea of putting an RFID tag in themselves is no stranger than putting in fillings."

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency.

According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

My friend Steve Akers is out in LA working for a company that provides blow-up dolls to serve as extras in background shots for films. He made a nicely edited and scored little movie showing his crew inflating, dressing, masking and arranging 5,000 blow-up torsos to fill seats at the Rose Bowl for an upcoming Clint Eastwood film. Reminds me of "The Lonely Guy".

While the value of these games -- which include a Space Wars title and a version of Breakout -- is debatable, the camera, a little over six ounces and less than an inch thick, is no slouch. The V10 has a three-inch L.C.D. screen and a 3.4-times optical zoom lens, and it can digitally zoom up to 5.7 times. It will cost $349 when it is released in March.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive: here's MAME running on a big old Kodak digital camera -- (Thanks, Alex!)

Mark Ward wrote the story and it's only his second publication. Based on this, I'm certainly looking forward to reading his next.

The policeman placed a sheaf of papers before Duffy. "And this is the evidence. You, well, your phone, is the key. When it meets other blocks of code spread around the gadgets of your mates those strange things start to happen. We think the code was crafted from some brutal utility turned out by a People's Republic propaganda unit turned spam outfit. Very clever stuff. Different attacks get kicked off when different people are together. That's why it took so long for us to work it out. It also grabs any spare processor cycles to crack away at any passwords or security software it finds. Cycle theft, that's what it's called. Among other things."

At News.com, Anne Broache reports:

Politicians on Wednesday attacked Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo for declining to appear at a briefing about China's Internet censorship and called for a new law to outlaw compliance with such requirements.

The four technology companies said earlier this week that they were not able to schedule an appearance with short notice but would testify at a similar House of Representatives hearing scheduled for Feb. 15.

"These massively successful high-tech companies, which couldn't bring themselves to send their representatives to this meeting today, should be ashamed," said Rep. Tom Lantos, the California Democrat who is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which organized the briefing.

"With all their power and influence, wealth and high visibility, they neglected to commit to the kind of positive action that human rights activists in China take every day," Lantos went on. "They caved in to Beijing's demands for the sake of profits, or whatever else they choose to call it."

Reader Comment: Matt Browner-Hamlin from studentsforafreetibet.org says,

Students for a Free Tibet launched NoLuv4Google.com today to help people "break up" with Google on Valentine's Day.

We have online actions for them to take part in, resources to form protests at Google offices, downloadable images, lists of alternatives to Google, testimonials for them to read written by people who've broken up with Google, and answers to some FAQs about our campaign. We've also formed an online action for people to tell Microsoft and Yahoo how they feel about their ongoing partnerships with the Chinese government. We also have a video blog post up on our blog, Tibet Will Be Free.

The blog also currently has a script that changes the Google homepage for any local Google domain to our jammed Google logo -- "I'm feeling lucky" is replaced with "I'm feeling repressed".

"It is really a strong smell," radioed Apollo 16 pilot Charlie Duke. "It has that taste -- to me, [of] gunpowder -- and the smell of gunpowder, too." On the next mission, Apollo 17, Gene Cernan remarked, "smells like someone just fired a carbine in here."...

What is moondust made of? Almost half is silicon dioxide glass created by meteoroids hitting the moon. These impacts, which have been going on for billions of years, fuse topsoil into glass and shatter the same into tiny pieces. Moondust is also rich in iron, calcium and magnesium bound up in minerals such as olivine and pyroxene. It's nothing like gunpowder.

So why the smell? No one knows.

This $4,000 fellowship will provide a young artist with a chance to be free for a semester or summer to explore the use of the digital world of Second Life as an artistic medium. In doing so, we hope that we will see Second Life used to even greater potential in the expressive arts to the benefit of both the Second Life culture and the broader world of art.

There's also a great conversation with Wrye Sententia and Richard Glenn Boire of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics on the NeoFiles show, also hosted by RU on the MondoGlobo Network. Link

The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index... found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past.

Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent)...

When asked to select the career field in which they are most interested, arts and medicine were teens' top choices (17 percent each). Teen girls were significantly more likely to be interested in medicine or health-care careers than teen boys (25 percent vs. 9 percent). Engineering was the third most-attractive career choice (14 percent of all respondents), but it was significantly more popular with teen boys than girls (24 percent vs. 4 percent). Only 9 percent of respondents chose science and only 8 percent chose business as their top career choices.

To him [a member of the Washington Post's Iraqi staff], Jill Carroll's white head scarf conveyed specific meaning: "He could tell by watching the video that basically she was still with the Sunnis because Shiites would never have put a white scarf on her," Spinner related. She [Washington Post reporter Jackie Spinner] noted as well that "Jill and I both wore headscarves, two-piece things that you don't really have to hook--it's difficult to get your scarf to look exactly how an Iraqi woman wears her scarf if you haven't done it since you were an adolescent. So you can cheat and use these two-piece things that you just flip over your head."

But her Iraqi colleague noted that the way the scarf was tied in the latest Carroll video was "a well-known way that women scarf themselves in the Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad."

Previous BB posts on Jill Carroll: Link

Update: Dory Adams of Paper Street Press tells Boing Boing that by through literary blogs, some writers are organizing a symbolic act: send blank books to Al-Jazeera News "in the hope that Jill Carroll might soon be able to fill it." With the blank books, participants are asking the network to "do [its] best to convey this message to her captors: Let Jill Carroll go."

Dory explains,

Writer Abby Frucht is trying to organize readers and writers in this act. Abby’s original idea was for authors to send their published books (see her previous posts at Readerville), and it has since evolved to this wider symbolic act so that readers and authors without book publications can also act. As Abby explains in an earlier post, “. . .they are being sent to Al-Jazeera because it is the conduit by which the kidnappers have elected to communicate with the rest of the world. Therefore it should be the conduit by which we attempt to communicate with the kidnappers in return.”) Writer Gayle Brandeis has also posted the same info at her blog.

An interesting side-note on the debate around Stephen Soderbergh's movie "Bubble." While it's certainly a commendable experiment to release a film on three different platforms simultaneously, bypassing age-old, rigid marketing techniques, I was surprised to see that the DVD of Bubble is listed as being Region 1 encoded.

While this is obviously (and thankfully) not an issue for most people with a keen eye on international DVD releases, it still uses (and thereby supports) a technology which essentially was created to keep us (non-Americans) from watching films released on DVD in the United States.

This whole region-coding thing is a disaster from a cultural POV, considering how many films are released exclusively in the US, and there are LOTS of them (including a substantial amount of European films), and if some of the bigwigs in Hollywood had their say, we wouldn't even be allowed to buy them in the first place (never mind that you are not allowed to openly sell them here, not even on ebay).

Additionally, there's the whole issue of computer DVD-drives -- only being able to switch the regions up to five times before it's locked. WTF is that about?

From a marketing standpoint I understand the idea of implementing a region code. But since multi-region players are freely available in Europe (even though, to the best of my knowledge, they aren't allowed to be marketed as such) why bother? Will the eventual European release cover all countries? Will the DVD be available day-and-date over here as well? Who's interests are being protected by using this restriction?

I don't know for a fact that the dvd *is* actually region-1-encoded, so far I only have the cover scan to go by.

Previous BB posts on Stephen Soderbergh's Bubble: Link

Reader comment: Gary says,

Although your burner and software may tell you that you can only change your drive's region 5 times you have full control. It just takes a bit of work research. Link

Reader Comment: Ben Laurie says,

Not sure where "here" is for Norman, but certainly in the UK region-unlocked DVD players are freely available. Even from Amazon. They're also damn cheap! Also, no idea what he means by "can't sell them openly" - see, for example: Link OK, it isn't "Bubble", but it is region 1 and they'll deliver worldwide. Not that I disagree with the foolishness of region-encoding, just wanted to point out that its completely ineffective in the UK, and always has been.

Apart from PS2 games, that is - I want Katamari Damacy, but it doesn't work on UK PS2s!

Reader comment: Chris McMahon says,

Thankfully in Australia region-free DVD players are generally the norm, with even large retail chains openly selling them region-free out-of-the-box. DVD player manufacturers are contractually bound by the DVD licensing terms to implement RPC (Regional Playback Control). They get around this by having a 3rd party modify their players before sale at no extra cost to the consumer. In fact region-free players are so widespread that any manufacturer selling non-modified players is at a commercial disadvantage in the Australian retail market.

The A.C.C.C (the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - a national government watchdog organisation) is on the side of consumers on this issue. In a statement from 11th May 2001 (available in PDF on their website here), the Commissioner of the ACCC stated, under the section "DVDs & THE TRADE PRACTICES ACT";

"The Commission believes RPC is anti-competitive with Australian consumers lacking a choice of DVD videos and possibly paying higher prices." (...) "The RPC prevents the importation of DVDs from smaller filmmakers around the world. Their sales are generally too small to justify catering for region 4. This reduces competition to the advantage of US studios." (...) "The essential point here is that in the Commission's view, there is an attempt to use copyright laws for a purpose related to areas beyond their real purpose. This coding system is a mechanism to allow price discrimination, not to protect the inherent rights of Intellectual Property owners."

Buying and importing DVD movies from other regions is also legal for personal use, under the Copyright Act 1968. More information about RPC on the ACCC's website can be found here.

It may interest you to know that *all* the DVDs produced by the Indian movie industry (including Bollywood and the regional movies) are region free.

I apologize for the lack of basic information on my part. I live in Austria and should have clarified this, as well as the fact that much of what I was complaining about applied to Germany, Switzerland and Austria. I'm sure there are similar problems in other European countries but I have no details on this. In any case, there have been numerous instances of people being sued (and even having their homes raided) for privately selling Region 1 (and in one instance, a Region 4) DVDs on ebay.de. One was even sued for using the cover-art of the Region 1 disc! And others for selling (legally) imported music CDs before they were released in Europe.

While it's doubtful anyone would make a fuss over someone selling, say, "Bubble Boy" on R1, it's still, essentially, illegal in these countries (dunno about UK...).

But to return to the point I was actually trying to make: I find it saddening that a unique and in ways even visionary approach to releasing and marketing a film is marred by the most useless and ridiculous forms of restriction. I realize that slapping regional coding on the DVD of "Bubble" essentially doesn't change a thing, but symbolically I find it regretful.

link, quite old and in german, but the copyright laws certainly haven't changed for the better since then: Link (detailed article about regional coding, copyright and various examples of "crackdowns" on sellers of R1 discs)

Brokeback Mountain + Back to the Future = Link.

Produced by a group of Emerson College students known as "Chocolate Cake City" (thanks, Paul Simpson, and Ian W.)

Also, this Defamer post herds up some of the many examples of Brokeback-inspired fan-art roamin' around on these here cold, lonesome internets. Link

Huh. This image reminds me of... something... I've seen... somewhere... before. If only I could remember. [shrugs]. Link (Thanks, anonymous fan of the Motion Picture Association of America's logo)

One of the oldest documents on the subject of tarantism, Ferdinando Ponzetti's Sertum Papale De Venensis (1362), had suggested that the victims of shade-dwelling spiders were hostages to the music of the tarantula's bite, to its 'cantum tempore'. Ponzetti's contemporary, William de Marra, scoffed at the ignorant and ill informed who believed that the tarantula actually sang as it bit, but all classes of Apulian society, from peasant to noblewoman, turned to the tarantella. The bite of the tarantula was thought to be potentially fatal. Each summer, moreover, it was liable to re-awaken and the same tarantati would again be called to dance beyond exhaustion.

The symptoms of the tarantula's bite were extremely varied. The most immediate of effects – nausea, headaches, livid complexion and difficulties in speech – might be followed by paroxysms of laughter or tears, sexual excitement, paranoia or a state of mute and listless abjection. These different responses were commonly believed to reflect the different characteristics of the offending spider itself. To purge the venom, musicians attempted to evoke cadences that matched the music of each individual spider. The lively and impassioned Panno rosso, the wistful pastoral of the Panno verde, the slow and staggering Spallata were some of the melodies that were performed. Before the musicians began to play, they would attempt to establish the colour of the spider and the physical location of its bite – clues to its musical character.

"Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator -- and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale."

Depending on three different flight scenarios, Hocking and Foster found that airline passengers in three different scenarios were 5, 23, or 113 times more likely to catch a cold than if they had not flown at all!

...

The most logical reason for infections would seem to be the limited amount of cabin air shared by the passengers. But Hocking, Foster and other scientists have found this is only one factor. The very low humidity in an airplane seems to be much more important.

...

Very dry air dries up the mucous system that captures and expels bacteria and viruses from our noses. This may be a key reason why airplane passengers catch more colds.

GLTerminal emulates a 1970’s terminal monitor, complete with flaws in brightness, warped display curvature, and flicker. It even simulates baud rate lag. And! for extra verisimilitude, the character colors can be green or amber.

Reader comment: Doug Kaye of The Conversations Network says,

Probably the first fan-created book podcast was a weekend project suggested by AKMA (Link) for Larry Lessig's "Free Culture" in March of 2004. See also this link.

Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, a member of the executive board of Bertelsmann AG and the board of trustees of the Bertelsmann Foundation, and chairman of the board of directors of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, will participate in an LSE Director's Dialogue with Howard Davies on Thursday 2 February at LSE...

Director's Dialogue with Rolf Schmidt-Holtz is on Thursday 2 February at 6.30pm in the Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, LSE, Aldwych, London WC2A. This event is free and open to all with no ticket required.

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

Imprisoned for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression, a right entrenched in international law and the Chinese Constitution, Shi Tao is considered a Prisoner of Conscience.

Companies must respect human rights, wherever they operate. Yahoo’s business ethics are becoming questionable due to its role in assisting the Chinese government to sentencing Shi Tao. The company has signed the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Internet Industry, effectively agreeing to implement China’s draconian system of censorship and control.

Amnesty International has raised its concerns with Yahoo. The company has responded without addressing all the concerns raised.

Previously:
Xeni's LAT op-ed: war, blogs, news, and profit.
Yahoo rats out Chinese reporter to Beijing

Robinson comes to the MPAA from the Transportation Security Administration, where he served as Federal Security Director at New Orleans International Airport.  He has had a noteworthy career in law enforcement that spans four decades, having first started as a state trooper in Michigan and working his way up to become the state’s first Homeland Security Director.  During that time, Robinson served eleven years as Director of the Michigan Department of State Police, where he was responsible for all state-level public safety and emergency services.  Robinson’s international reputation in law enforcement has earned him the respect of colleagues throughout the country, who in 2000 chose him to serve a one-year term as President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police- which represents 18,000 police executives in over 100 countries.

Update: Bill sez, "Michael Robinson is no friend of privacy. From a statement he made in 1999, while he was Director of the Michigan State Police:

"The IACP's position on the encryption issue is clear. We strongly believe that the unchecked proliferation of robust, non-recoverable encryption technology poses an enormous danger to effective law enforcement, public safety and to society as a whole. Therefore, the IACP believes that any encryption legislation that is enacted must protect the ability of law enforcement agencies to perform court authorized electronic surveillance and the search and seizure of criminally related information stored in computers."

I wrote about US-VISIT in 2004, and back then I said that it was too expensive and a bad trade-off. The price tag for "the next phase" was $15B; I'm sure the total cost is much higher.

But take that $15B number. One thousand bad guys, most of them not very bad, caught through US-VISIT. That's $15M per bad guy caught.

Surely there's a more cost-effective way to catch bad guys?

As an active member of FreeCulture.org, and the president of the NYU chapter, I feel both obligated and prepared to stand behind the organization’s stance on where copyright is headed, and where it should be. I can not, in good conscience, renounce my beliefs in the hopes of gaining a rung on the corporate ladder.

Update: Tor Books's Patrick Nielsen Hayden sez, "We're donors; we're not joint-venturers."

Thomas Hawk has written a great open letter to Myra Borshoff Cook, Tour Organizer for the book in which he spells out why her excuses for restricting the liberty of people who shoot the manuscript are bogus.

It's possible that shooting this with a flash might have long-term negative effects (though we're not talking about the Constitution here, and besides, it's under glass, so you won't get anything but glare if you use your flash), but that's a reason to ban flashes, not photography. The manuscript is a palimpsest of Kerouac's thought processes and revisions and it photographs beautifully.

Ms. Borshoff Cook, you have been entrusted with running a tour of one of the great pieces of literature of the written English language. Even more significantly *how* it is written is of great historical import. This document deserves to be shared beyond the confines of a small room in a basement of the San Francisco library. This document deserves to be shared with everyone online. They deserve to see the time worn type and corrections that Jack made to his document to get a sense of the historical uniqueness of it. Rather than allow the public an opportunity to share in this experience, you position weak copyright objections which don't hold up. Are not most books and documents in the San Francisco Public library copyrighted? In fact is not their own copy of the book "On the Road" back in their shelves copyrighted? And yet I see no sign there prohibiting me from taking photos of the actual book, or any other book in the San Francisco Public Library.

Update: Michael's created a Flickr group for your Kerouac scroll piccies!

Thirty-two full-color, removable, oversized postcards, perforated for your pleasure. Attaboy's maniacal undersea creatures and otherworldly vermin are together here for the first time. This postcard set features fans' favorite images seen the world over, along with characters from Atta's Vinyl Toy and Plush line, including the Axtrx and Gooberry! A great gift to send anyone for their next goo-filled visual vacation.

A renegade toy designer whose goo-filled images glow with an eerie, distrubed, childlike sensibility, Attaboy has emerged as a one of the many leading talents in a toy and design movement that might be called "Creaturism." His images appear in galleries, magazines, comics, strange candy devices, calendars, and toys all over. His T-shirts are sold in Japan, his art has appeared in numerous galleries, and his candy-coated stickers and eyesore-causing books are sought after by young and bold. Enter the toof-decayed and festering Yumfactory of Attaboy!

When Eckersall started at Wet Design, he was asked to double the height of the Bellagio's water spray to its current 160 meters—"high enough," he says, "that the Federal Aviation Administration has complained that it shows up on radar." The shooters he helped design can propel water so powerfully that it disappears into a vapor. The new design also greatly improves control of the sprays. Today, the oarsmen can direct water to nearly one-thousandth of a degree. That lets the show designers pick the precise point at which two streams touch during the show.

Surprisingly, Eckersall says, one of the biggest challenges with the Bellagio fountain is maintaining the seemingly mundane housekeeping computer. It controls, among other things, the pond's filters, which catch everything, "from coins to nappies," he says.

"Also, Boing Boing itself is on one of the cards!

"There are also some live events coming up in New York and London, making it especially news-worthy right now - anyone can participate, as they aren't especially about PXC, just friendly puzzlin' competitions. Although the London event is closed to sign-ups, after 600 people applied..."
Link (Here is Guy's quick-start guide to the game.)

In the 21st century, we no longer think of reality as particles and force fields. Instead, scientists and philosophers view the world as a sea of computation. "The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul," by Rudy Rucker, explains and expands upon this new way to understand nature, society and the mind. In other words, its about what gnarly computation taught the author about ultimate reality, the meaning of life, and how to be happy.

Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, novelist, software engineer, BoingBoing contributor, and former professor of computer science at San Jose State University. He is well known for his popular books about science, as well as his thirteen novels. He is considered one of the core cyberpunk authors, and is the two time winner of the Philip K. Dick Award. For more info, see www.rudyrucker.com

AT&T Corp. (which was recently acquired by the new AT&T, Inc,. formerly known as SBC Communications) maintains domestic telecommunications facilities over which millions of Americans' telephone and Internet communications pass every day. It also manages some of the largest databases in the world, containing records of most or all communications made through its myriad telecommunications services.

The lawsuits alleges that AT&T Corp. has opened its key telecommunications facilities and databases to direct access by the NSA and/or other government agencies, thereby disclosing to the government the contents of its customers' communications as well as detailed communications records about millions of its customers, including the lawsuit's class members.

The lawsuit also alleges that AT&T has given the government unfettered access to its over 300 terabyte "Daytona" database of caller information -- one of the largest databases in the world. Moreover, by opening its network and databases to wholesale surveillance by the NSA, EFF alleges that AT&T has violated the privacy of its customers and the people they call and email, as well as broken longstanding communications privacy laws.

The lawsuit also alleges that AT&T continues to assist the government in its secret surveillance of millions of Americans. EFF, on behalf of a nationwide class of AT&T customers, is suing to stop this illegal conduct and hold AT&T responsible for its illegal collaboration in the government's domestic spying program, which has violated the law and damaged the fundamental freedoms of the American public.

"I'm shooting a special for MTV and they told me all I had to do was push my lips out a little and the monkey would give me a peck, but instead she rammed her tongue inside my mouth and swept it all around in a circle.

She touched every inch in there! It was the most disgusting thing ever!"

– Jessica Alba

I love music, movies, and books. I also love technology. I want to use technology to deliver the media I love anywhere, anywhen, with anyone.

This is fair use: I bought it, let me use it. I will tell all my friends about my favorite music. I might play it for them or even give them a digital version of a song. This is evangelism, not theft. This is advertising you cannot buy.

Restrictive copyright is like a vegetarian knife. You bought the knife, but if you cut meat with it, we'll sue you. Excuse me? Let's think again.

Update: Lyle sez, "He's no longer taking orders."

During his closing argument to the jury, prosecutor Robert Nelson put on a black leather mask with a zippered mouth opening and re-enacted the bondage session.

With both hands, he reached back and clutched the top of a blackboard as if strapped to the rack. Then he hung his head as if dead.

Asher's lawyer objected, and the judge agreed.

"That's enough Mr. Nelson," Judge Charles Grabau said. "Thank you for your demonstration."

A candidate for governor whose platform includes public impalement of terrorists found himself behind bars today on a pair of outstanding arrest warrants.... ...launched his campaign last month. His platform includes an emphasis on education, tax breaks for farmers and better benefits for veterans, but he also said he favored impaling certain wrongdoers in front of the State Capitol.

Previously:
Satanist runs for governor in Minnesota
Wife of MN Satanic gubernatorial candidate fired for being witch

1992: 19     1999: 16
1993: 32     2000: 93
1994: 33     2001: 92
1995: 28     2002: 80
1996: 44     2003: 82
1997: 34     2004: 57
1998: 66     2005: 113

Update: David sez, "Several weeks ago I did something similar to get a rough measure of whether IP and commons based peer production have moved closer to the center of public consciousness. I searched for variations on 'open source software,' 'copyright,' 'patents,' and 'innovation' in the NYT, and in Wall Street Journal abstracts. At first glance it looks like there is a slight upward trend in IP-related terms, but not a very dramatic one. 'Open source software' is of course through the roof. I did these counts quickly, and a serious analysis would of course have to adjust for things like total number of articles published annually. You can take a look at the xls spreadsheet and a few Mickey Mouse regression graphs.

I posted a link to James Gosling's photos and description of longtails a couple days ago, and Alexander wrote in with this fascinating tale of their origin:

It's not well known that those boats originate from a change in the British government's motor vehicle Construction and Use Regulations in the late 1960s. What with the new motorway construction programme well under way, the (largely old) truck fleet had begun to get in the way. So the then Ministry of Transport introduced a minimum power-to-weight ratio.

This meant that a ton of trucks with Gardner LX 105hp (mostly) or Perkins P4 engines suddenly became obsolete. Exporting second-hand trucks to places that would accept them (essentially, the third world) was not great business, so they were either scrapped or retrofitted with more wallop. Hence a mass of very reliable, very user-serviceable diesel engines going begging.

Some sly fox saw a chance, and went round the country buying the engines and shipping them to Hong Kong and Singapore for sale to chandlers. As the engine arrived complete with the reverse box and the end of a propshaft, they just put in a length of shaft and a prop. Local boat builders came up with the rest and a new, unmistakable craft was born.

They still have (even brand-new ones with much later power units, radar and GPS) the traditional eyes on each side of the bow, a custom recorded everywhere from the Mediterranean to Japan and back into pre-classical antiquity.

China is already the world's second-biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions and is expected to surpass the United States as the biggest. Roughly a third of China is exposed to acid rain. A recent study by a Chinese research institute found that 400,000 people die prematurely every year in China from diseases linked to air pollution.

Nor does China's air pollution respect borders: on certain days almost 25 percent of the particulate matter clotting the skies above Los Angeles can be traced to China, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental experts in California predict that China could eventually account for roughly a third of the state's air pollution.

But buried within those many citizen comments is this gem:

No mark of the beast for me you Luciferian beehivers. You can take all those RFID chips wrapped like a burrito in the HR 4(6+6+6) national id bill and stick it up yor own arse!

Jesus is the way, not the antichrist of the beast system. Read God's words in the Book of Revelation lest your soul is burned in hell. The great test is upon us all...

Reader comment: ADM says,

There has been an established link between the anti-RFID movement and fundamentalist Christians for quite a while now. One of the leading opponents of RFID as a mean of identifying individuals is Christian media publisher Thomas Nelson, who this month released The Spychip Threat: Why Christians Should Oppose RFID Technology and Surveillance. This book follows up on Nelson's earlier Spychips release. This was mentioned in Wired a while back: Link.

Princeton's Ed Felten and Alex Halderman have published the final installment in a brilliant series of excerpts from a paper-in-progress on lessons learned from the Sony DRM disaster, in which the company incurred millions in legal liability for deliberately infecting its customers' computers with anti-copying software that left them vulnerable to worms and viruses, destabilized their computers, and spied on their actions.

In today's installment, Ed and Alex talk about attacks on the custom players installed by the DRM on Sony's crippled CDs. These players were meant to impose restrictions on users, but they made many common beginners' security mistakes, leaving them vulnerable to simple attacks that could disable their restrictive behavior.

It is well known that DRM systems like this are vulnerable to rollback attacks. In a rollback attack, the state of the machine is backed up before performing the limited operation (in this case, burning the copy). When the operation is complete, the old system state is restored, and the DRM software is not able to determine that the operation has occurred. This kind of attack is easy to perform with virtual machine software like VMWare, which allows the entire state of the system to be saved or restored in a few clicks. The XCP and MediaMax both fail under this attack, which allows unlimited copies to be burned with their players.

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

Yesterday, I posted about StarForce, a harmful technology used by game companies to restrict their customers' freedom. StarForce attempts to stop game customers from copying their property, but it has the side-effects of destabilizing and crashing the computers on which it is installed.

Someone identifying himself as "Dennis Zhidkov, PR-manager, StarForce Inc." contacted me this morning and threatened to sue me, and told me that he had contacted the FBI to complain about my "harassment."

If you're looking for reasons to boycott StarForce-crippled games (besides the obvious ones), you might add their use of bullying legal threats to your list.

From: "Dennis Zhidkov" <denis.zhidkov@star-force.com>
Date: January 31, 2006 9:55:40 AM BST
To: "doctorow@craphound.com" <doctorow@craphound.com>
Subject: StarForce Response to Cory Doctorow

StarForce Inc. response to Mr. Cory Doctorow  

Dear Sir, calling StarForce "Anti-copying malware" is a good enough cause to press charges and that is what our corporate lawyer is busy doing right now. I urge you to remove your post from http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/30/anticopying_malware_.html because it is full of insults, lies, false accusations and rumors. Your article violates approximately 11 international laws. Our USlawyer will contact you shortly. I have also contacted the FBI , because what you are doing is harassment.

Sincerely,
Dennis Zhidkov
PR-manager
StarForce Inc.
www.star-force.com

Update: Looks like this isn't the first time Mr Zhidkov has sent legal threats to critics of this company -- check out this email he sent CNet, which opens "Dear Sir, calling StarForce 'nefarious Rootkit/Virus' is a good enough cause to press charges. How do you like that for a start?" (Thanks, Alexander!)

Update 2: Fiona sez, "I just contacted a friend who works in the testing department of the UK branch of the worlds largest games publisher, and they hadn't heard of it! I now think they have the (very healthy, by all accounts) fear of god about what this thing could do to peoples systems. They're testing a third-party game that uses it, and have found the drivers on their test box. They're not happy about having it on an open test system,"

Update 3: Avi sez, "Their business seems to depend on people not knowing how much they suck. For example, I was on a private beta list for a new game I won't mention by name due to NDA -- but the game authors agreed to drop StarForce after an outcry from the community. You don't often hear the stories about game developers dropping StarForce in favor of their customer."

Many supermarkets in Foshan, a city in South China's Guangdong Province, have reported an increase in sales of about 50 per cent...

...This often makes it almost impossible for passengers to pass through and reach the toilets and they are forced to go without relieving themselves for the whole journey.

"In this period, a common train has to transit 2,000 passengers, with only around 1,000 seating tickets," Zhang Dazhi, an officer of Guangzhou Railway Group, said.

Because authoritarian means there's only one authority, and that authority has got to be the President, has got to be the government, and has got to be his allies. What the right-wing in the United States tries to do is undermine the press. They call the press "liberal," they call the press "biased," not necessarily because it is or because they have problems with the facts of the left--or even because of the bias for the left, because it's hard not to be biased in some way, everyone is always going to enter their editorial opinion--but because a press that has validity is a press that has authority. And as soon as there's any authority to what the press says, you question the authority of the government--it's like the existence of another authority. So that's another part of truthiness. Truthiness is "What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true." It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.

Update: August from Campus Progress points us to "an earlier interview with Colbert from July 2005, right before the main work on The Colbert Report started. Colbert spoke with Campus Progress about mocking our nation’s foibles, meeting Bill Clinton, and making everything stupider."

According to their figures, one flying windmill rated at 240kW with rotor diameters of 35 feet could generate power for less than two cents per kilowatt hour--that would make them the cheapest power source in the world. For greater power needs, several units would be operated in the same location--Sky Windpower says that an installation "rated at 2.81 megawatts flying at a typical U.S. site with an eighty percent capacity factor projects a life cycle cost per kilowatt hour at 1.4 cents." And they would have far better uptime than most windmills--since the jetstream never quits, they should operate at peak capacity 70-90% of the time. Output would also be less dependent on location than it is on the ground, simply because terrain doesn't matter much when you're at 35,000ft; however, since the jetstream and other "geostrophic" winds don't blow much at latitudes near the equator, it would be useful primarily for middle- and higher-latitudes.

In a wing devoted to explaining gene expression they had some stuff about DNA and the coolest thing was this video game that taught you about building blocks of life, then proceeded to a real DDR game where you have to step to the DNA parts being shown on screen.

The best part was when one of the 20 amino acids were built, it would say the name. So you'd see A T T G C and so on... and then it would shout "Cysteine!"

Yesterday, I spoke at a DRM conference in London. Just before me was the opening keynote, from Microsoft's Amir Majidimehr, Corporate VP of the Windows Digital Media Division, which oversees licensing and deployment of Microsoft's DRM.

Amir's presentation kept referring to Microsoft DRM as "open," which was curious, because it's actually the opposite of open. An open platform is something like an electrical outlet: if you want to design something to plug into an electrical outlet, you can -- you might have to satisfy a regulator that it won't burst into flames, but you certainly don't need to talk to General Electric or any other potential competitor.

Microsoft's DRM requires that device makers pay Microsoft a license fee for each device that plays back video encoded with its system. it also requires every such vendor to submit to a standardized, non-negotiable license agreement that spells out how the player must be implemented. This contract contains numerous items that limit the sort of business you're allowed to pursue, notably that you may not implement a Microsoft player in open source software.

The bombshell was Amir's explanation of the reason that his employer charges fees to license its DRM. According to Amir, the fee is not intended to recoup the expenses Microsoft incurred in developing their DRM, or to turn a profit. The intention is to reduce the number of licensors to a manageable level, to lock out "hobbyists" and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with.

I was pretty surprised to hear an executive from Microsoft describe his company's strategy as intentionally anti-competitive and intended solely to freeze out certain classes of operators rather than maximizing its profits through producing a better product and charging a fair price for it.

Isn't that why the Justice Department and the EU went after Redmond in the first place? Link

Update: Kevin points us to this explanation of how an issue of the AppleGeeks comic gets made -- it's a noteworthy study in contrasts.

Update 2: Here's a great comic describing how a comic in India is created -- thanks, Avi!

1) "Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google cookie value?"

2) "Given an IP address or Google cookie value, can Google produce a list of the terms searched by the user of that IP address or cookie value?"

John says,

To [Google's] credit, it rapidly replied that the answer in both cases is 'yes.'

Adam has been posting some interesting related items on his blog, too -- including this post, which explores how HTTP referrer headers can make it possible for third party websites to track your personally identifiable info: Link.

Previously on Boing Boing:
Search privacy challenge: show us the data, MSN, Yahoo, AOL
Can you foil search data trackers with crafty queries?
Google and other search engines log IP addresses. So what?

Previously: It's Peanut Butter Federline!

Most memories decay naturally, but people under extreme stress pump an abnormal amount of stress hormones during the event — so the memories are stored differently, said Dr. Alain Brunet, professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal.

“If you have (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) your memory is so fresh it’s as if the event is happening now,” he said. “For a person to have that vivid flashback certain hormones are released by the brain. If you can block these, the memory is weakened or even removed completely.”

Brunet and colleagues had 20 people suffering from PTSD recall their experiences as vividly as possible in therapy sessions, after being given doses of propranolol — a beta-blocker used to treat high blood pressure, angina and abnormal heart rhythms. Preliminary findings indicate the PTSD sufferers experienced fewer flashbacks and less severe symptoms after taking the drug.

Link to post on Warren Ellis' blog.

"I haven't used it yet, but I can't wait! Check it out… It pumps propane and pure oxygen into the gopher holes for about 5 minutes… and then let's a spark go and all the gopher holes blow up, killing all the gophers!

"If anyone would like to bring up a twelver of Keystone Ice and help me out in the coming weeks…. Let me know! We'll drag the propane tank around their 4 acres blowing up gophers!"
Link

Update: Richard says: "Here's a Caddyshack-esque video that folks might enjoy as well."

"The future is now." --N.J.P. (1932-2006)

This project consists of photographs and video, which depict various San Francisco landscapes. I make the landscapes by constructing scale models of the architectural elements which I use to make molds. I then cast the buildings in Jell-O. Similar to making a movie set, I add backdrops, which I often paint, and elements such as mountains or trees, and then I dramatically light the scenes from the back or underneath. The Jell-O sculptures quickly decay, leaving the photographs and video as the remains

Over several decades, scientists have offered at least a dozen explanations for the purpose of avian duets. The theories have focused on the forest, the pair, or conflicts of interest between individual birds.

The abundance of duetting in the tropics inspired some of the early explanations. Scientists in the 1970s noted that dense tropical vegetation would make sound especially important for mates identifying each other or keeping in contact. Recently, theorists have suggested that tropical birds duet to stay in sync reproductively, despite limited seasonal cues such as changes in day length.

Other scientists have stressed the partnership. For example, in the 1980s, the "coyness hypothesis" proposed that birds that consummated their pairing only after the arduous job of learning to duet would have a stronger bond that would discourage extra-pair adventuring.

Yet other theorists have suggested that duetting enables a bird to judge its mate's commitment to the partnership. Discouraging interlopers has been a popular theme, both in duetting to defend a territory and duetting to drive away a potential mate stealer...

The current generation of duetting studies often compares his-and-her agendas. One possible agenda is the male's clear interest in fathering the female's chicks. He may be chiming in to the female's song as a musical claim to paternity.

Dr Chris Moulin first encountered chronic déjà vu sufferers at a memory clinic. "We had a peculiar referral from a man who said there was no point visiting the clinic because he'd already been there, although this would have been impossible." The patient not only genuinely believed he had met Dr Moulin before, he gave specific details about the times and places of these 'remembered' meetings.

Déjà vu has developed to such an extent that he had stopped watching TV - even the news - because it seemed to be a repeat, and even believed he could hear the same bird singing the same song in the same tree every time he went out. Chronic déjà vu sufferers are not only overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity for new experiences, they can provide plausible and complex justifications to support this. "When this particular patient's wife asked what was going to happen next on a TV programme he'd claimed to have already seen, he said 'how should I know? I have a memory problem!'" Dr Moulin said...

"The exciting thing about these people is that they can 'recall' specific details about an event or meeting that never actually occurred. It suggests that the sensations associated with remembering are separate to the contents of memory, that there are two different systems in the brain at work." Dr Moulin believes a circuit in our temporal lobe fires up when we recall the past, creating the experience of remembering but also a 'recollective experience' – the sense of the self in the past. In a person with chronic déjà vu this circuit is either overactive or permanently switched on, creating memories where none exist. When novel events are processed, they are accompanied by a strong feeling of remembering.

A group of gamers has started a site to spread a pledge to boycott video-games that come with a dangerous anti-copying mechanism.

Starforce is an anti-copying program that some games covertly install when you install the game. The software causes system instability and crashes. The company that makes Starforce refuses to address the damage their software causes; instead, they blame the people on whom their malware has been forced: "According to our research those of users [sic] that do run into compatibility problems are beginner-level-hackers that try to go around our protection system."

The list of games infected with Starforce is long and depressing -- there are dozens of these. If you're a gamer, you owe it to yourself to have a look and check to see if Starforce might have damaged your PC. What's more, you should join the boycott of any game that comes with this malicious software onboard.

For example, here's one of the common problems brought by Starforce: under Windows XP, if packets are lost during the reading or writing of a disk, XP interprets this as an error and steps the IDE speed down. Eventually it will revert to 16bit compatibility mode rendering a CD/DVD writer virtually unusable. In some circumstances certain drives cannot cope with this mode and it results in physical hardware failure (Most commonly in multiformat CD/DVD writer drives). A sure sign of this step down occurring is that the burn speeds will get slower and slower (no matter what speed you select to burn at). Starforce, on a regular basis, triggers this silent step down. Until it reaches the latter stages most people do not even realise it is happening.

Moreover, the Starforce drivers, installed on your system, grant ring 0 (system level) privileges to any code under the ring 3 (user level) privileges. Thus, any virus or trojan can get OS privileges and totally control your system. Since Windows 2000, the Windows line security and stability got enhanced by separating those privileges, but with the Starforce drivers, the old system holes and instabilities are back and any program (or virus) can reach the core of your system by using the Starforce drivers as a backdoor.

Update: StarForce, the company criticized below, has threatened to sue me for describing the problems with its software.

The theory that viruses could play a part in obesity began a few decades ago when Nikhil Dhurandhar, now at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU, noticed that chickens in India infected with the avian adenovirus SMAM-1 had significantly more fat than non-infected chickens. The discovery was intriguing because the explosion of human obesity, even in poor countries, has led to suspicions that overeating and lack of exercise weren't the only culprits in the rapidly widening human girth. Since then, Ad-36 has been found to be more prevalent in obese humans.

In the current study, Whigham et al. attempted to determine which adenoviruses (in addition to Ad-36 and Ad-5) might be associated with obesity in chickens. The animals were separated into four groups and exposed to either Ad-2, Ad-31, or Ad-37. There was also a control group that was not exposed to any of the viruses. The researchers measured food intake and tracked weight over three weeks before ending the experiment and measuring the chickens' visceral fat, total body fat, serum lipids, and viral antibodies.

The latest of these downgrades is version 2.60 of the PSP firmware, but as of today, there is a cracked version of this firmware available. Now all PSP owners regardless of their firmware versions can load their own software.

That’s right, the day we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived! Thanks to the fantastic work by our forum moderator Fanjita and his coding companion Ditlew, it is now possible to play vast amounts of homebrew programs and emulators on every PSP in the world, including those with 2.60 Firmware! Thanks to their monumental achievement, every PSP in the world is capable of playing homebrew!

Yesterday, Carroll's pal and former colleague Natasha Tynes blogged this update on renewed calls throughout the Muslim world for her release: Link, and more from Natasha on today's news here.

Jeff Tynes adds,

Apparently this tape had a time/date stamp with the 28th of Jan., but the group is still requesting the release of female Iraqi detainees. Five of nine were released on Friday the 27th. So we're not sure what to make of that. Apparently in this new clip Jill is wearing a veil and weeping. It is very distressing news.

Anyone with a heart will feel distressed that an innocent woman like Jill Carroll would be treated in the manner shown in the latest video aired by Al Jazeera. We add our voice to those of Arabs around the world, and expecially to those in Iraq, who have condemned this act of kidnapping. We ask that she be returned to the protection of her family immediately

Reader comment: Robert Emslie says: "Here's the website of Gérard Pétremand, a Swiss photographer located in Geneva that also does great tilt-shift photography. Notably, his Silicon Valley series."

I asked Stuart how this came together, and he tells Boing Boing:

It has been an historic couple of days here with the Islamic militant group, which has killed hundreds of Israelis, sweeping to power. In between my "proper" BBC duties I knocked off a quick podcast, which I mixed on my laptop while travelling across the West Bank with my colleague in our armoured car and uploaded from an internet cafe in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Previous posts about Stuart Hughes on Boing Boing: Link.

Link to CNN Headline News "Showbiz Tonight home (airs 4pm PT / 7pm ET), and here is a related AP item about the eternally undead Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, which led to the DoJ's subpoenas for search engine data.

Also, Search Engine Watch news editor Gary D. Price says,

I put together this compilation of reports that come from the respected Congresional Research Service. They might be interesting reading and good reference tools. Link to Research Reports from the Congressional Research Service on Internet Privacy, Net Technology, and Protecting Children from "Unsuitable Material"

Join the creators of MAKE magazine, the MythBusters, and thousands of tech DIY enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, science clubs, students, and authors at MAKE's first ever Maker Faire.

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After coming to power in 2001, the government has taken an increasingly harder line on Christiania and its estimated 850 residents, closing its open-air hash market, Pusher Street, in 2004, and threatening to bulldoze the colony entirely.

The new construction could add as many as 400 new residents to Christiania's population.

In addition, current residents of Christiania will be forced to become members of a public housing organisation, and will likely have to begin paying a normal rent on their properties. Currently, adult residents pay DKK 250 per month to live in Christiania. The new rent would be between DKK 2500 and 4600 for a 50 sq. m apartment.

Update: These vintage 'jacks were reprinted in a Dover art book -- thanks, Lorelei!

Princeton's Ed Felten and Alex Halderman continue to post excerpts from their forthcoming major paper on the lessons learned from Sony's covert infection of millions of its customers' computers with malicious software that was intended to restrict their ability to use the music on the CDs they bought.

Today's installment discusses installation of CD-DRM, wherein CDs try to convince you to install anti-user software on your computer, and to prevent you from ripping the CD while it's doing so. As with previous installments, this is really fascinating, top-notch work.

The greatest limitation of the XCP temporary protection system is the blacklist. Users might find ripping or copying applications that are not on the list, or they might use a blacklisted application but rename its executable file to prevent the installer from recognizing it. Since there is no mechanism for updating the blacklist on existing CDs, they will gradually become easier to rip and copy as new applications not on the blacklist come into widespread use. Application developers may also adapt their software to the blacklisting technique by randomizing their process image names or taking other measures to avoid detection. [Footnote: An extreme extension of this would be to adopt rootkit-like techniques to conceal the copying application’s presence, just as XCP hides its active protection software.]

Previous installments of the Sony DRM Debacle Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

(Sony taproot graphic courtesy of Sevensheaven)

If Yahoo, MSN, and AOL didn't reveal any personal info to DoJ, let's see them publicly post the results that they sent back to the DoJ.

They sent "a generic list of aggregate and anonymous search terms, and not results, from a roughly one day period" (AOL)? Let's see it. The public can decide whether there are privacy violations in there.

They sent "a random collection of page URLs that we had web-crawled"? Let's see them.

No need for barrels of ink to speculate with, let's just look at them. There can't be a problem with looking, if there's no personal privacy issues involved. There's no trade secrets here -- these are queries typed by end users, and web pages set up by end users. Right?

So, America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo: will you please release the data publicly -- or show us where it already exists online? This way, everyone who uses your services can take a look for themselves, and evaluate whether they believe the information shared was privacy-violating.

Thank you,
Cory, Xeni, Mark, and Pesco.

Previously: Keeping Google's records out of government hands.
Search and privacy: Danny Sullivan, Declan, GoogleAnon
Xeni on NPR: Bush Administration Seeks Search Records
AOL: We did not comply with all of the DOJ's search data request
DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes.
DoJ demands user search records from Google

There's a bunch of work that computer scientists and cryptographers are doing in an area called "Private Information Retrieval" that tries to find ways of asking search queries in a way that you get the answer you want, but the database doesn't know what you asked for. I wrote a brief semi-layman's explanation of the ideas at this link.

I'm not an expert though: for more information, Bill Gasarch at the University of Maryland maintains a list of (academic) papers on this topic: Link.

And for a more practical take on this: Link.

* Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents major Hollywood film studios and is leading the global fight against piracy.

* Lavinia Carey, director general of the British Video Association (BVA), the trade body for the UK video and DVD industry, which has been central to the British anti-piracy campaign.

* Curt Marvis, chief executive of CinemaNow, which is billed as the leading legal movie download service, allowing fans to watch or buy films over the internet.

* John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, which represents US cinemas.

I'd also like to know whether they think that since Sony advertised the first generation of VCRs as tools for making libraries of your favorite shows, and since that has never been held to be legal by a US court, should Sony be busted under the Grokster decision, which makes you liable for infringements that you "induce" among your customers? If not, does the MPAA believe that making libraries of movies that are aired on broadcast TV is a fair use?

Finally, I'd like to know if the MPAA agrees with its spokesmen who have defended the practice of prohibiting backups of DVDs by saying, "Well, you can't back up a set of crystal glasses either?" and whether, should the ability to back up a set of crystal glasses ever emerge, should the glassmakers have the right to prohibit it? Link (Thanks, Andy!)

"It was a most unfortunate and regrettable accident, but we are glad that the visitor involved was able to leave the museum unharmed," said Duncan Robinson, the Fitzwilliam's director.

The museum declined to identify the man who had tripped on a loose shoelace Wednesday.

Asked about the porcelain vases, Margaret Greeves, the museum's assistant director, said: "They are in very, very small pieces, but we are determined to put them back together."