Ray Beckerman, the attorney leading the legal fight against the RIAA's anti-fan lawsuits, has posted the transcript of the RIAA's technology "expert"'s testimony. He's looking for skilled geeks to rip it apart, exposing it as the lies of a Vichy nerd who's gone over to the other side.

As many of you may already know, the courts of the Netherlands and of Canada have rejected the "investigations" conducted by the RIAA's "investigator", Tom Mizzone of MediaSentry. See, e.g. BMG v. Doe and Foundation v. UPC Nederland , based largely on the type of reasoning set forth in the indendent experts' report of Prof. Sips and Dr. Pouwelse of the Parallel and Distributed Systems research group of Delft University. Their report critiqued the "overly simplistic" nature of MediaSentry's work, in that it had omitted a number of procedures which would have been thought necessary to a sound online 'p2p filesharing piracy' investigation.

It should therefore come as no surprise that in the United States, more particularly in UMG v. Lindor, in Brooklyn federal court, the RIAA is trying to prevent disclosure of the "instructions", "parameters", and "processes" of MediaSentry's investigation. In fact, at the oral argument of its protective order motion, the RIAA took the positions that (a) MediaSentry and its investigators are not experts at all; (b) MediaSentry will not testify as to any copyright infringement, but will merely testify as to what it did, and (c) the only witness who will actually be testifying that there was a copyright infringement will be a Dr. Doug Jacobson of Iowa State University, the founder and co-owner of Palisade Systems, Inc., who supposedly will connect the dots based on what MediaSentry will testify that it did.

Link (via /.)

Opening tonight, and continuing through March 31: "Island of Relative Stability," the debut Los Angeles solo show by artist Sean Higgins at sixspace:

By depicting purposely-vague environments where location and situation is left to interpretation, Higgins creates an environment where the viewer has no place to stand and no solid sense of place. His vague landscapes are constructed from images, either found or taken by the artist, that are transferred to the back of Plexiglas via an acrylic transfer process - the front of the Plexiglas is then hand-sanded by the artist to produce the desired hazy effect. He attempts to deal with landscape in the contemporary world of "Google Earth" where people interact with landscapes and place in a very different way than previous generations.

More on the show here: Link. Shown here, a detail cropped from Terraform, 2007 (Inkjet print transfer and acrylic on Plexiglas, 36 x 36 in). Link to full-size.

I'll be at the opening tonight with other friends of BoingBoing -- stop by and say hi!

MAKE's Weekend Project producer Bre Pettis has a video about making a GPS tracking weather balloon that's going to go 100,000 feet above the surface of the Earth.

We're using weather balloons to go up to approximately 100k feet armed with 4 cameras... 20 megabytes of camera! We'll be taking shots every 7 seconds for two hours and measuring the temperature with the Make: controller and thermistors!

It took 16 people working on this, countless cases of mountain dew, lots of take-out food, and a lot of sleepless nights, and we intend to fly Sunday!

Cloud cover, snow, and mechanical failure may postpone the launch, but we're ready to give it our best shot this weekend.

In this Make: Video Podcast, you'll learn all the details of how to put a weather balloon up into space! The weather balloon will make it up to about 100,000 feet. That's almost 20 miles up and more than twice the height of being in an airplane. It's high enough that the sky is black and you can see the curvature of the earth.

Why would we want to send a package into space? To take pictures and temperature readings of course! We'll be using the Make: Controller to boss around 4 canon sd cameras set up to take a spectacular panoramic picture every 7 seconds! It will also have thermistors on it to measure the temperature as it goes up?

We'll be tracking it with two different systems. The primary system is a gps module connected to a tinytrak which makes the gps data into aprs ham radio packets and then sends them out on 144.39mhz which will get picked up by our receivers and repeaters and then routed to the internet where anyone can watch on google maps and earth in real time!

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• 50 most recent videos on Boing Boing

Kara Shallenberg says,

LibriVox volunteers have just completed a public domain audio recording of Charles Darwin's pivotal work, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" -- free to download, copy, and share. It's unabridged and over twenty-four hours long!

Link. Too bad none of that crazy "evolution" and "biology" stuff is true. Everyone knows all life was created in an instant, bam!, by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Jack of Fables: The (Nearly) Great Escape is the latest collection from my beloved Fables comic-book serial. The Fables books tell the story of the magical creatures of storybooks who were banished to Earth when "The Adversary" -- a brutal conqueror -- enslaved their homelands.

Jack follows the story of Jack (of beanstalk, giant-killing, spring heels, etc fame), a rogue Fable who is banished for the sin of making best-selling movies about his adventures. He is kidnapped by mysterious, ultra-violent "librarians" who are responsible for neutering the old, mean stories and turning them into tame, docile things, and plots a grand escape for he and his fellow captured/forgotten fables.

As with all the Fables books, the writing just sings -- snappy dialog, punchy plots, and the artwork is a great mix of the cartoony and the hyperreal. This is a kind of American comic magic-realism, a blending of the mythical and the real. Link, Link to all Fables collections, Link to free download of Fables #1

See also: Scheherezade meets every fable of every land - comic

When I was a Mac user, I kept my million-plus-email archive in Apple's Mail.app program, and suffered through incredible delays whenever I tried to open or search my archival mailboxes (for what it's worth, I'm thrilled and delighted with the performance of Thunderbird under Ubuntu Linux).

The Mail.app fan-site Hawk Wings has a great tip for Mail.app users -- a simple command that many are swearing by as a means of evincing a gigantic speedup in Mail.app's performance. If you're suffering through the same hell I lived with back in my PowerBook days, you might give it a shot.

Note: I haven't tried this. You might nuke your mail forever. Make backups. Don't say you weren't warned.

1. Quit Mail.
2. Open Terminal.
3. Type the following:
cd ~/Library/Mail
sqlite3 Envelope\ Index
An sqlite> prompt will appear.
At that prompt, type vacuum subjects;
After a short delay, the prompt will return. Type Control-D to exit.
4. Restart Mail and enjoy the extra speed.

Link

Update: Steve sez, "I have taken the idea of running the sqlite vacuum command on the database for Mail to speed it up and written a script to do the same things to Aperture's database."

Canadian Industry Minister Maxime Bernier recently introduced Bill C-47, the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, through which the Vancouver Olympics are guaranteed exclusive public use of the following words: winter, gold, silver, bronze, sponsor, Vancouver, Whistler, 2010, tenth, medals, and games.

It's amazing how the Olympics have come to symbolize bullying corporate greed; overreaching, violent "security measures;" drug abuse and destruction of public facilities and low-income housing.

Bernier has no time to deal with spam, spyware, privacy, or net neutrality but commits to legislation on behalf of the organizers of a sporting event? Moreover, the legislation grants the Olympic organizers enormous power to police the use of anything approaching association with the Olympics. For example, the bill contains a list of expressions to be considered by the federal court to determine whether someone has misled the public into believing that their business is endorsed or associated with the Olympics. The expressions include: winter, gold, silver, bronze, sponsor, Vancouver, Whistler, 2010, tenth, medals, and games. While this looks like a recipe for abuse, the Olympic organizers have assured the public that it "is committed to applying the proposed legislation in a disciplined, sensitive, fair and transparent manner." Perhaps, but many Canadians may justifiably be left to ask whether anyone should be granted the right to govern the use of generic words such as winter or Vancouver.

Link

Update: Fat Cramer sends us this "trailer for a movie made by Conrad Schmidt (of the Work Less Party) documenting opposition to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics."

Britain's shortage of public pissoirs means that 95 percent of Brits have urinated, defecated or vomited in public. Entrepreneurs are opening £10 luxury shitters on Oxford Street, while developers are converting old Victorian "public conveniences" into (tiny) luxury flats.

I was recently interviewed by Vancouver's Georgia Straight and we ended up talking about the public, outdoor urinals that the City of London sets out around Trafalgar Square (departure point for the city's night-busses) on weekends as a way of reducing the rivers of piss that otherwise course through the area. The article notes that some cabbies have taken to driving with empty soda bottles to relieve themselves into in extremis. I once had a cabby tell me that it was legal to get out of a cab and piss down the wheel-well.

In Beijing, where the average salary is a 10th of London's, there are 7,700 toilets, or one for every 1,948 people. China's capital plans to renovate 3,700 in time for the 2008 Olympics. London, which will host the 2012 games and has one toilet per 18,000 residents, has no such plans...

A 53 percent increase in London house prices during the past five years has helped fuel the decline of the public toilet, as authorities sell valuable real estate to developers.

``It's not cost-effective to keep them,'' said Tony Wood, a real estate agent who helped convert a multi-stalled Victorian- era toilet in Forest Hill into a split-level apartment that rents for 700 pounds a month.

Link (via Digg)

Steampunk Magazine is a new $3 print/free PDF zine celebrating the steampunk aesthetic with fiction, art and articles. The premier issue is truly a thing of beauty with fiction by an interview with Michael Moorcock, a HOWTO for "electrolytic etching," and some very tasty use of recycled, gloomy Victorian woodcuts. Bravo!

Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.

Even if we had to make it all up.

Link (via Warren Ellis)

See also:
Steampunk Star Wars
Steampunk watch
Beautiful steampunk laptop
HOWTO make a steampunk keyboard
HOWTO make etched brass steampunk journals
HOWTO make a steampunk spinning-wheel
Steampunk walking robot
Steampunk cartoon from SciFi channel: Amazing Screw-On Head
Homebrew mechanical steampunk lion from Belgium
Steampunk robotics
Steampunk weekly serial - handsome editions
Steampunk rayguns
Steampunk Transformer-bots
Ukrainian steampunk plane
Steampunk casemod with a "furnace"
Steampunk submarine free paper toy
Steampunk/dead media photoshopping contest
Brighton's steampunk rolling sea-platform
Steampunk Slashdot
Steampunk mecha-wars
Steampunk car-wars
New York's steampunk pneumatic subway

The US Post Office has removed clocks from 37,000 postal outlets in order to alleviate the problem of people feeling like they're waiting in line for two long. A clockless atmosphere will apparently encourage a state of meditative interest in the workings of the postal service, without distracting with the sense of time's fleeting passage. Consumerist's Meghann Marco nails it:

Um, correct us if we're wrong here but:

* People carry timepieces.

* The post office is not a casino. People aren't going to lose themselves in the fun and mail more letters than they'd originally intended.

Is this the best they can come up with?

Link

The Zelda/Led Zep mashup tees from Hot Topic allow you to express your allegiance to both metal and 8-bit video games, two of the best things about the 80s. Link (via Wonderland)

Sunita Williams, an astronaut on board the ISS, had a "wasabi spill" while preparing a special fake-sushi meal on the space station. Astronauts on the ISS get "bonus containers" filled with their favorite foods, and Williams's included the sushi kit and its nuclear-hot mustard-paste. The astronauts have banished the wasabi to a cargo pod, and vowed to prohibit the consumption of too-spicy condiments on board.

Williams, whose father was born in India, has several Indian dishes in her bonus container, including Punjabi kadhi with pakora - vegetable fritters topped with yogurt and curry - and mutter paneer, a curry dish. The dishes are packaged to have a long shelf life in space.

Her U.S. crew mate, astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, is an even bigger "foodie." Lopez-Alegria, who was born in Madrid but grew up in California, had Spanish muffins known as magdalenas, chorizo pork sausage and latte in his bonus container.

Link (via /.)

Best Buy has admitted to maintaining a fake version of its website for internal use at its stores. This is part of a scam where Best Buy lists cheap prices online and invites customers to come to the store to take advantage of them. When the customer gets there, a dirtbag salesman loads up the fake website and shows them that the price has "gone up" while the customer was driving over to the store and offers to sell the item for the new price.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after my column disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com.

Blumenthal said Wednesday that Best Buy has also confirmed to his office the existence of the intranet site, but has so far failed to give clear answers about its purpose and use.

Link (via /.)

Update: An anonymous Best Buy salesman objects to being called a "dirtbag" above -- he says that it's not known among the sales staff that they are participating in a enormous, systematic fraud on Best Buy customers who were being deliberately deceived by an illegal, unethical fake website:

That's exactly right. I take particular pride in trying to do right by the people who ask me a question. All I have is the internal system which we use; I can't get out to the public site from inside a store, because the computers are locked down to prevent general Internet access.

Since I heard about the differences between the internal and external sites, I have been telling customers (quietly, so the managers don't hear) that there can be differences. I've even submitted an "Ask the BUS (Business Direction Team)" question, requesting clarification on what the hell the company is doing with differing prices on the external and internal websites.

Does that sound like the actions of a dirtbag?

BoingBoing reader Vidiot asks:

How long until a phisher knocks up a copy of the P2Plawsuit.com online settlement page and starts intimidating people into paying up?

And anonymous adds,

The design on that RIAA site -- which doesn't even display the RIAA logo -- is so low-rent, it already looks like a phishing site.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Here's a copy of the RIAA letter sent to college students

NPR "Xeni Tech" - RIAA vs. college students, Gizmodo boycott

I'm 99.99% sure that this Finding Nemo sushi is a fake, but oh, man, if Disney had the guts to actually release this as a product, wouldn't that be the best thing ever? Link (via Neatorama)

Update: Regina sez, "The Nemo was actually done up as a campaign in New Zealand...I so want one!"

I can't figure out of Biggles sells these edible chess brass cookie-cutters/candy molds, or if they just exhibit them to taunt those of us who dream of eating our way to victory in the game of kings. Link (via Cribcandy)

Update: Laura sez, "I have a friend whose Dad loves chess, and seeing Cory's post about the Biggles chess cookie cutters made me wonder if anyone had them for sale. Sure enough, this website has six chess figure cookie cutters. I'm not sure what to do about the chessboard though."

I love comic art books. I buy them without regard for my financial situation or almost non-exisitent bookshelf space. I'm a hopeless case. Of the dozen or so I bought last month, here are three of my favorites.

Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles, by Will Elder.

Will Elder was a longtime contributor to Mad Magazine and a partner with Harvey Kurtzman on many post-Mad projects, including Playboy's Little Annie Fanny. This slim book features many pencil sketches and doodles from Elder's notebooks, revealing a whimsical and curious mind. The title "Chicken Fat" comes from the tons of little inside jokes and funny extra goodies Elder added to his super-dense yet highly-readable comic book panels. He's on the top of my list for all-time best comic book artists. (See also my review of Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art)

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, by Matt Madden

I can't believe I didn't find out about this book until a couple of weeks ago. The author came up with a one-page comic book script -- a very mundane one about a man walking to the refrigerator and getting interrupted by someone in another room who asks him what time it is, which makes him forget what he wanted to eat or drink. It sounds dull, but Madden has drawn 99 different comics based on this script and the result is enthralling. He draws the page in various genre styles (superhero, manga, paranoid religious tract, underground) and also using different literary and cinematic conventions. If you like Scott McCloud's books about comics, you'll want this one.

S Curves: The Art of Shane Glines

400 full color pages by one of the modern masters of Good Girl Art. His smooth lines and clean style has been influenced by the best magazine illustrators from the 1920s through the 1960s. This hardback book costs $100, because Shane self-published it using Lulu, but the quality is great. If you aren't familiar with his work, visit his site.

A Boing Boing reader says: "Remember Jonathan Coulton's cover of 'Baby's Got Back' you posted last year? Some genius has taken it to it's natural extension and synced Sir Mix a Lot's original video with the new version. The results are hilarious." Link

BONUS: Gilbert & Sullivan style version of "Baby Got Back" (Thanks, Jim!)

The Smithsonian has a fun article about time machines.

A physical time machine—a device available at Wal-Mart, as opposed to a natural wormhole somewhere in the cosmos—is possible. You begin with something square. Next, install mirrors at the corners and send a beam of light, perhaps from a laser, at one of the mirrors. The light will bounce to the second mirror, the third, the fourth and back through this cycle forever.

The force of this constantly circulating light will begin twisting the empty space in the middle. Einstein's theory of relativity dictates that everything happening to space must happen to time, so time begins twisting, too.

To fit a human inside this time machine we need to stack a bunch of these mirrors on top of each other, and add more light beams. Eventually, we'll have a cylinder of circulating light. Once we step inside, we're ready to fly through time....

Here's the catch: The time machine only allows someone to travel as far back as when the machine was first activated. Since no time traveler has shown up yet—check-out aisle tabloids notwithstanding—no such machine has yet been invented.

In January, This American Life featured a terrific story about a physicist named Ronald Mallett who had spent five decades trying to make a time machine to visit his dead father. Mallett wrote a book about his quest, called Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality.

Link

Cognitive Daily ran an experiment to find out how good people were at recognizing famous faces and other things in extremely low-resolution photos.

How good are humans at identifying faces? Amazingly good, even with only a few sparse pixels' worth of information. Inspired by the research of Pawan Sinha, who had found that people can recognize faces using just 12 × 14 pixels' worth of information, we wondered if people can distinguish between faces and non-faces with even less information. So, last Friday, we asked CogDaily readers to try to identify faces as small as one-quarter the size of those used in Sinha's study: just 6 by 7 pixels. Readers rated 8 different photos in four different sizes ranging from 20 pixels wide to just 6 pixels. How'd they do?

Link

Olga Mauriello, 74, of Naples, Italy, washed off a potato from a sack she'd just purchased and discovered that the spud was actually an active hand grenade. A bomb squad was called in and the grenade safely detonated. From Reuters:

Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War Two. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes...

"If I hadn't felt its weight, I wouldn't even have realised that it was a bomb," she said.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Jennifer Mee, 15, of St. Petersburg, Florida, has finally gotten over five weeks of hiccups that started January 23. That's nothing though compared to Charles Osborne's Guinness World Record-setting case that lasted 68 years. Fortunately, Mee's hiccups stopped when she was sleeping. Nobody knows why the hiccups finally ended. From the Associated Press:

"Right now, my nose is burning and my throat hurts," she told the St. Petersburg Times, but she said she felt a lot better than she has in weeks...

She saw an infectious disease specialist, a neurologist, a chiropractor, a hypnotist and an acupuncturist. She tried a patented device that is designed to stop hiccups, plus all the old remedies.

Link

As far as I can suss out by Googling, these print ads for Polaroid sunglasses were developed for Brazilian readers. Either Dan Clowes did the illustrations or someone was aping his style. (If the scans were big enough, I'd be able to tell for sure.) Link | (Many more Dan Clowes posts on Boing Boing here)

Update:

Jenny Ryan let me know that Fantagraphics has more information about this. It's not Clowes, but it sure looks like him. Nick Parish says the illustrator is Felix Reiners. Why didn't they just hire Clowes in the first place?

Bonnie sez, "Artist Eric Poulton mixes the retro factor of Star Wars characters with the coolness of steampunk to make some truly unique art."

More machine than man, Vader is the Empire's most decorated General and a very powerful practitioner of the Force's dark arts. He is obsessed with communicating with the spirits of the dead, spending every sleepless night trying in vain to contact his lost love. Twisted and broken in body and mind, Vader is driven with sadistic passion.

Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Billy Cottrell a brilliant theoretical physics student at California Institute of Technology, is serving an 8.5-year-sentence at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary for destroying $5 million worth of Hummers. Judith Lewis of the LA Weekly wrote a long, fascinating article about his life in prison.

Because Cottrell is autistic, he has a hard time playing by the unspoken rules of prison life. The guards have taken a special dislike to him.

In his letters to the Weekly, [Cottrell] says one prison official took away his physics papers, telling him that the science he was studying conflicted with the teachings of Jesus. Another forbade his Chinese studies, even after he had learned Mandarin so well that, he says, he served as a translator between guards and a Chinese-speaking prisoner.

But his worst months in prison came late last year. Shortly after the Bureau of Prisons Office of Inspector General released a report suggesting that federal prisons — including Lompoc — were not dealing harshly enough with convicted international terrorists inside the prisons, Cottrell was told he would have to serve as a witness in a bizarre “investigation.”

The probe focused on Lompoc’s Department of Corrections education coordinator, who procured the Chinese-language study materials for Cottrell. Cottrell says that when he refused to testify against the education coordinator, he was thrown into the Hole at Lompoc, and denied visitors and phone calls.

Cottrell says he was not given a clear explanation for his detention. “I haven’t been given any formal sanctions, no lock-up order from the Captain [of the prison guards], no rationale, no date of release, no anything,” wrote Cottrell in a December 18 letter to the Weekly. “They’ve taken every single physics text, Chinese story and piece of literature I’ve accumulated . . . and told me it’s all going to be burned.

“As far as I know,” he concluded, “I’m in the Hole for studying Chinese.”

Link

Twin Sumatran tigers and two baby orangutans are buddies, sharing a nursery room at the Taman Safari zoo in Bogor, Indonesia. From the Associated Press:

After being abandoned by their mothers shortly after birth, the four play fight, nipping and teasing each other, and cuddling up for a shared nap when they are worn out.

"This is unusual and would never happen in the wild," said zoo keeper Sri Suwarni, bottle-feeding a baby chimp on Wednesday. "Like human babies, they only want to play."

Link (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

Yesterday, Mark posted a first-person video shot by a skydiver who fell three miles without a chute and lived. A few years ago, my old friend Rodney Ascher made a fantastic short film about a similar event during WWII:

"Triumph of Victory" is a reenactment of a WWII airman's similar fall. I ballparked the amount of time he'd've spent airborne based on a terminal velocity equation I found online. Shot in a little studio in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, and starring Sean Kelly of the late, lamented Spanganga art space.

Link

Former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer, 83, suggests that alien technology recovered from crashed UFOs could provide green alternatives to fossil fuels. From the AFP:

Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told (the Ottawa Citizen)...

"We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough," he said.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

UPDATE: David Reevely of The Ottawa Citizen points us to the original article about Hellyer's comment and also writes, "Mr. Hellyer has a long history of interest in space. When he was the defence minister back in the 1960s, he actually flew to a small town in Alberta to inaugurate the UFO landing pad it built, apparently just in case." Link

Jennifer Emick alerted me to this silly tattoo. Link

Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson, Mayor of Salt Lake City, called for the impeachment of President Bush before the Washington State Senate Governmental Operations Committee yesterday.

I am honored to address you today and am pleased that you, unlike so many members of Congress and most state legislatures, have recognized your solemn responsibility to examine whether proceedings should be commenced for the impeachment of the President of the United States.

Never before has there been such a compelling case for impeachment and removal from office of the president of the United States for heinous human rights violations, breaches of trust, abuses of power injurious to the nation, war crimes, misleading Congress and the American people about threats to our nation’s security and the supposed case for war, and grave violations of treaties, the Constitution, and domestic statutory law.

GOP state Sen. Mike Hewitt was displeased, calling the hearing "misguided, partisan and political. It's important to remember which Washington we're in. These are issues that should be handled at a federal level." I'm sure Hewitt say the same thing if it were Clinton (Bill or Hillary, take your pick) instead of Bush.

Link (Via Impeach for Peace)

Ben says: "Brute force Vista attacks will cause Microsoft headaches. It's ugly, but it appears to work and could create huge problems for microsoft and their malware."

It is a simple brute force attack, dumb as a rock that just tries keys. If it gets one, you manually have to check it and try activation. Is is ugly, takes hours, is far from point and click, but it is said to work. I don't have any Vista installs because of the anti-user licensing so I have not tested it personally.

The method of attack has got to be quite troubling for MS on many grounds. The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people

It won't take long for boxes bought at retail to be activated before they are bought, and the people who plunk down money for the mal^h^h^hsoftware for real get 'you are a filthy pirate' messages. Won't that be a laugh riot at the MS phone banks in Bangalore.

Link

Reader comment:

Ian says:

The number of people on the planet is a bit over 6 billion. Let's say for argument sake that there are 10^10 people alive. Let's ignore the actual character set used for Vista keys and assume for argument sake that it just uses decimal digits*. That gives a keyspace of 10^25 keys. So, if every person on the planet brute forced a key they would only have used 10^-15 of the keyspace. Assuming that Vista keys are randomly distributed in the keyspace the probability under these conditions that a forced key will match a legitimate one is vanishingly small (the birthday paradox means that it'll be greater than the naive 10^-15 but I haven't time to calculate it because m'dinner's arrived.). Obviously the real keyspace is even bigger, probably on the close order of 36^25 (8 x 10^38).

* This is just to simplify whipping up an example and saves me from having to find the actual character set used in Vista keys.

The video from "PWNED," my UNC talk on copyright last week, is live. UNC iBiblio's Paul Jones adds, "Thanks to Joey Carr for toughing it out with the tapes." Link.

See also: My 2004 UNC talk
iBiblio's speaker series

John Brownlee of the Wired blog Table of Malcontents says,

John Edwards' Blog has a wonderful account up about how their Second Life headquarters was defaced with "Marxist/Leninist posters and slogans, a feces spewing obsenity, and a photoshopped picture of John in blackface." John Edwards' is apparently working with Linden Labs now to figure out the perps. I love it, especially the shrill, self-righteous tone of the post: they just can't believe it, which is a riot. You see countless news stories about this, over and over again: the sorry gray drones of political parties or corporations rushing to establish a presence in Second Life because it's the thing to do, only to find themselves staring in horror directly into the collective Goatse.cx of the Internet's soul.

Link. (thanks, Howard Rheingold!)

Consumerist points to a PDF of the "pre-litigation settlement letter" RIAA lawyers sent to college students accused of copyright infringement. The accused are invited to fess up and pay up in 20 days (at this website, for instance), or the RIAA will sue (and, this FAQ says, tell their parents):

We have asked your Internet Service Provider to forward this letter to you in advance of our filing lawsuit against you in federal court for copyright infringement. We represent a number of large record companies, including SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, as well as all of their subsidiaries ("Record Companies,") in perusing claims of copyright infringement against individuals who have illegally uploaded or downloaded sound-recordings on peer-to-peer networks.

We have gathered evidence that you have been infringing copyrights owned by the Record Companies. We are attaching to this letter a sample of the sound recordings you were found distributing via the AresWarezUS (Ares) peer-to-peer network. In total, you were found to be distributing 321 files, a substantial number of which are sound recordings controlled by the Record Companies.

The reason we are sending you this letter to you in advance of filing suit is to give you the opportunity to settle these claims are early as possible. If you contact us within the next twenty (20) calendar days, we will offer to settle the claims for a significantly reduced amount compared to the judgment amount a court may enter against you...

Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

NPR "Xeni Tech" - RIAA vs. college students, Gizmodo boycott (radio report)

Reader comment: Mark Levitt says,

The newly launched RIAA website "p2plawsuits.com" has an FAQ section full of half-truths, at best. I've taken a few moments to comment on the worst ones and written it up on my blog.

UPDATE: Here's an account of university response to the RIAA letters from the USC campus publication, and here's another from Arizona State. A number of schools have already handed over student data to the RIAA, and others are now weighing whether or not to do so. (Thanks, Matt Abney)