COOP is now issuing limited edition vivid Giclee prints. These beauts are signed and numbered in editions of 50 for just $100 each. Whatabargain! (Also coming in the next week, a very special COOP/Boing Boing collaboration!) Link
A Nepalese member of the team spotted three footprints and alerted (Destination Truth's Josh) Gates, who told the BBC the first print was a "pristine" right paw mark, 33 cm (13 inches) long, with five toes in a wide spread of 25 cm.Link (Thanks, Chris Courtney!)
There was also a heel print and another fainter one.
An excited Mr Gates described the main footprint as anthropomorphic, meaning it had human characteristics.
He said he did not believe the prints were man-made or that they came from a known animal such as a bear.
But he also said he was not sure he believed in the Yeti, and did not know what to make of it.


As you have no doubt guessed:Link* there is no such thing as a "special courtesy rate"
* "guaranteed savings" is a meaningless phrase (and indeed you can often find magazine subscriptions cheaper through an agent--check eBay--or a credit card loyalty program)
* it makes no difference if you reply by the "reply by" date
* "statement of benefits itemization" are just empty words meant to invoke an invoice
* all those "free" or "included" things are just the regular content that's in the mag for everyone.
The terms and conditions are kind of a mess here. On the one hand, the terms say (i) that this is a purchase, not a mere license, so the file becomes your property and (iii) that you're basically only expected to obey copyright law, not a bunch of made-up rules that Universal has imposed on you as a condition of selling you the music.
# The store is truly international: No, really international. Not the US and Canada international. The store will sell to 42 countries, and will extend to Southeast Asia including China, India, Latin America, South Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe including Russia. Two words: 'bout time.# There's real variety: In a genre badly abandoned by an entire industry recently -- long before Napster, in fact -- DG has put up a serious catalog. And in a big change, instead of publishing a subset of their current catalog, they've actually re-released "out-of-print" albums. Lest you think I'm shilling for UMG, they've released a couple of my personal faves I only had access to on vinyl, and made contemporary music far more accessible.
But on the other hand, you "agree" (iii, iv) that this is only for personal use without any right to redistribute (sell, loan, give away) the files, which are all rights that you get under copyright. Link (Thanks, Tony!)

My first novel was the first book released under a CC license, which means that my novel-writing career is turning five in January. Time sure flies! Link

Purrcast is a soothing little podcast that consists solely of the sound of cats purring. The website includes biographical information on each feline purr-former. Link.
Image ganked from Lazy Lightning's Flickr stream. (Thanks, beezers)

- todd hido
- sara hobbs
- mused
- artcoup
- city shrinker
- cowscapes
- a plat venture
- postcard polaroid
- flickrvision
- deleted images
previously on web zen:
- photo zen 2006 pt. 2
- photo zen 2006 pt. 1
Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

The Smoking Gun reveals the identify of the director of "2 Girls, 1 Cup," the internet's latest shock-meme. 2G1C's director is a Brazilian named Marco Fiorito. The 36-year-old from Sao Paulo describes himself as a "compulsive fetishist" and "an artist in the art of movie making." He started a porn production company with his wife in the mid-'90s, focusing at first on foot fetish films:
While Fiorito contends that his revolting films are not illegal in Brazil, some of his works have been branded obscene by U.S. prosecutors and led last year to the indictment of Danilo Croce, a Brazilian lawyer who lived in Florida and was listed on corporate documents as an officer of a company distributing Fiorito's films.Link to court filings at The Smoking Gun (8 pages).In his legal declaration, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fiorito contended that Croce, 43, had no role in his movie business, other than helping to process credit card transactions through a travel company the attorney owned. In June, Croce, who cooperated with investigators, copped a plea and was later sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation (since he was returning to Brazil) and ordered to forfeit $98,000.
In his declaration, Fiorito explained that had he known that selling his films in the U.S. was illegal, "I would have stopped because the money is not the main reason that I make these films." He then added, "I have already made fetish movies with scat/feces using chocolate instead of feces. Many actors make scat films but they don't agree to eat feces."
See also this essay by internet security expert Adam J. O'Donnell: Security Implications of "Two Chicks, One Cup": not a joke. Snip:
Websites have started sprouting up that claim to host the video, but actually host malware. If you attempt to search for either "Two Chicks(Girls), One Cup" or "Two Chicks(Girls), One Finger", you may end up at malware sites likes these. This is similar to the codec attacks recently described by Sunbelt Software. I am concerned that... I can't believe I am writing this... security vendors will be loathe to post warnings regarding malicious versions of the content because the content itself is so wretched.Link.
(Image from andrewc; Thanks, Oxblood Ruffin, Jake Appelbaum, and Jota)
Previously on Boing Boing:
It all began in 19th century Bengal. The first example of modern Indian SF was probably a Bengali story, Shukra Bhraman or ‘Travels to Venus’, by Jagananda Roy in 1879. Or, depending on your perspective, much before that. “Science Fiction has been a part of Indian literature since the Puranas and the Mahabharata,” says MH Srinarahari, General Secretary of the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies (IASFS). “There was the palace of wax made by the Kauravas and Ram faced Mrigmarichika, which was nothing but an illusion.”...Link (Thanks, Partha!)INDIAN SF also often comes with a moral message. “It should have a social purpose,” says Srinarahari. “If a writer is speaking of an imaginary world or change in his environ, how can he cope with it? Reading about it will educate a person.” Deshpande agrees. “There has to be a mission,” he says. In his story, the protagonist dreams that a bacteria is speaking to him, saying that increasingly powerful antibiotics are not the way to get rid of pathogenic bacteria. Peaceful coexistence between humans and the bacteria is the need of the hour. The subtext here, says Deshpande, is about nuclear weapons and terrorists.
Amazon sells uranium ore, "in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations." $23 a throw.
Link
(via Making Light)

Ashley Hope paints from crime scene photos. The images in this gallery depict murders of women. Snip from artist's statement:
There are certain moments in life when one experiences space and time to an excruciating degree. There are seconds -- fleeting, momentous seconds -- when the world seems relentlessly clear, and the very nature of existence graspable. When the moment passes, you think to yourself, "My God, I just saw it. It. The truth. What was it?" Although you are unable to define, the sensation of knowing stays with you. Most likely, the Real cannot be set in words, it is beyond words. Human tragedy is almost always accompanied by that glimpse of the Real.Link to her website. Image: Laundry, 4' x 5', oil on panel, 2007. A debut solo exhibition is currently on display at New York's Tilton Gallery. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin, via rileydog)
I'm fanatical about Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years. It's got every issue on three DVDs and works with Windows and Mac.
Once you install the reader application, searches are fast. They're even faster if you copy the DVDs to your internal hard drive. (You're not allowed to copy them to an external hard drive, which is a bummer, because I have a 100 GB external hard drive that is just waiting to be filled with something like this.) The first disc contains the print run from 1967 to 1983, which is pretty much all I care about, so I copied that one over to my internal drive.
It's fun to search on terms to see when they first appeared in Rolling Stone. "Punk Rock" made its debut in 1973 (though it was about garage punk, not the punk rock that began in 1975). An October 1977 article by Charley Walters called "Punk: Pretty Vacant Music" is the first to mention The Clash. (Walters has good things to say about The Clash, but dismisses punk rock music in general as "overly simplistic and rudimentary. It's also not very good.")
Hunter S. Thompson's first article for Rolling Stone (October 1970) is an exuberant, drug-fueled 12,000 word account of his nearly-successful run for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado.
The magazine got its first taste of MDMA on Decemeber 19, 1985 in Gary Wolf's article "Don't Get Wasted, Get Smart!" in 1991 P.J. O'Rourke's "Tune In. Turn On. Go to the Office Late on Monday." (Thanks, Jack!)
Boing Boing didn't show up until February 22, 2007 ("a must click resource for budding futurists since it broke news of the Segway personal transport in 2001").
It's also fun to simply browse through the early issues and admire its zine-like design.
I'm still just beginning to understand the awesomeness of having a searchable complete run of Rolling Stone at my fingertips. If I'm not answering my email or phone calls, you'll know why. Link
I have been inspired especially in the last couple years by the effort the magazine is making and have referenced many articles while making Speed Racer...which will be a nearly 100% GREEN SCREEN movie (like 300 and Sin City on crack) with many virtual sets created with HD QTVR locations...something that many VRMAG contributors are converging toward. I also think there is a new entertainment medium under way which will be manifested through some of the experiments reported by them.Link (Thanks John Battelle for the intro!)
I was fortunate to become friends with Roger Price in his later years, and fondly remember his encouragement when Carla and I were publishing the print version of bOING bOING.
LinkRoger Price is my favorite forgotten comic, though this album may only give you the slightest idea why. Mr. Price is the self-same Price who co-created Mad Libs with Leonard Stern, and is therefore the Price in Price/Stern/Sloan (or pss!) – but that's not why, either. He also wrote for Bob Hope, Harvey Kurtzman's Mad and Steve Allen's Tonight Show, but that's also not why.
In the early 1950s, Roger Price invented the Droodle. That's why.
More specifically, Roger Price is aces with me because of the two collections of Droodles published by pss! – a little red book called "Droodles" and a little green book called "Oodles of Droodles" (formerly "Droodles #2"). I've had them since I was very young, and they were a major force in shaping my sense of humor. It's not the Droodles themselves so much, though they were certainly amusing and clever, as the commentary beneath them, which would often be ambling monologues only tangentially related to the picture above. Check out the "Crookshank" essay on the back of the "Roger and Over" record jacket for a sample of what I'm talking about.
eBoy, the art collective that designed the Boing Boing logo, has created several styles of beautiful giftwrap, which you can purchase from the eBoy site. Link
New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have provided evidence that the universe may ultimately decay by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.Link (Via TDG)The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have determined that the cosmos is in a state when it was more likely to end. "Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may provide evidence that the universe will ultimately decay," says Prof Krauss.
Richard Dawkins' best-selling atheist manifesto The God Delusion was at the centre of a growing row over religious tolerance yesterday after the Turkish publishers of his book were threatened with legal action by prosecutors who accuse it of 'insulting believers'.Link (Via TDG)Erol Karaaslan, the founder of the small publishing house Kuzey Publications, could face between six months and a year in jail for "inciting hatred and enmity" if Istanbul prosecutors decide to press charges over the book, which has sold 6000 copies in Turkey since it was published this summer.
This digital elevation model was then used to create contour line data, relief shading and to plan where the roads and features should be placed for map compilation. Real New Zealand public domain data was then added for the surrounding islands.Link (Thanks, Mike Love!)
LinkWe have recently started a weblog of images of various Owls and Owl-related human cultural representations, with minimal commentary. This project began as a casual parody of the contemporary art-scene weblog www.VVORK.com.
Of possible interest is where the links tend to go:
Laibach parody
Canned Heat
Auto parts distribution database
Astronomy Student Photography
Luftwaffe production politics
How to properly dispose of old Owl costumes
FBI's spy network
Ookpik amputation
Video of a home-made bike that lets you can spin while you ride. Link
Won't you please help him in this worthy endeavor?
LinkThe 1968 penny collection began on September 27th, 1999 with just a single 1968 penny, and over the years it has steadily grown both in size and the number of contributors.
The goal of this website is to keep the collection growing indefinitely by soliciting 1968 pennies from as many people as possible. This is a group effort.
Everybody who contributes pennies to the 1968 penny collection will be featured on this website.
Quality and condition of pennies is unimportant, as all certifiable 1968 pennies (whether uncirculated & shiny, or well-worn & grimy) are accepted and added to the collection equally.
All pennies are 100% 1968 guaranteed, and this collection is never to be cashed in, as its value as a collector's item is greater than its monetary value.
Of the 4,858,503,583 pennies minted in 1968, an untold number have been forever lost to history, which is why it is important to save the remaining 1968 pennies NOW while they are still relatively easy to find. If every American donated just one 1968 penny, the collection would number in the hundreds of millions.
Craig sends in this "video of Charlie Stross's visit to Google's headquarters where he gave a reading of his book, 'Halting State'." Halting State -- a novel about a heist in a multiplayer online role-playing game -- is one hell of a fantastic book and Charlie's a GREAT reader.
Link
(Thanks, Craig!)
See also:
Charlie Stross's Halting State: Heist novel about an MMORPG
Opening chapters of Charlie Stross's "Halting State"
If you're in the UK, please help petition the Prime Minister to abandon plans to create the Information Sharing Index, a national database of all children between birth and eighteen.Link (Thanks, Glyn!)How many parents are aware that the DfES is planning a huge national database of every child in the UK? As well as their names and addresses, it will also hold parent's contact details and the name and contact details of every education, health and social care practitioner that children come into contact with. At this stage we don't know exactly who will be able to access that information, but the plan is that practitioners will be able to contact each other to share information without parental consent. Parents will no longer have the right to act as gatekeeper and your child's privacy and the right to withhold information about their education, health and social welfare will be lost completely. Remember, this will effect every child, not just children deemed to be 'at risk'. Could this be a national identity scheme by the back door? Once a child has been given a unique ID in a database such as this, how easy will it be for the Government to keep that ID after the age of 18?
And in all the protest about Contactpoint, let's hope that the other national database, eCAF, doesn't quietly slip through. A national system containing the in-depth personal assessments of 50% of children is even more dangerous.
If you're intrested in these types of issues in the UK you should check out the Open Rights Group.
Austrian tech-art-pranksters Monochrom show us how to hack into the human brain using a vintage calculator, duct tape, a USB drive, and some pickled onions (preferably Romanian). Then, Mark shows us how to make a very simple motor -- another fun project from scitoys.com.
Link to video for this episode, and full text of blog post with comments.
See also: BBtv: Monochrom's love song for Lessig

See also:
Video for Frontalot's nerdcore song about Zork
New MC Frontalot nerdcore album
MC Frontalot: Nerdcore rapper
Last August, Andrew Burt, the vice president of SFWA, sent a list of thousands of works that he alleged violated the copyrights of Robert Silverberg and the Isaac Asimov estate. This list was compiled by searching the Scribd site for the words "asimov" and "silverberg" and it included my own novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a teacher's guide to great science fiction for young readers, and the entire back-catalog of a science fiction magazine whose editors had placed their work on Scribd. Burt sent an email to Scribd's management in which he said that this list wasn't "idle musing, but a DMCA notice."
In the ensuing debacle, Burt (who's position as SFWA vice president is the result of an uncontested ballot) repeatedly claimed that his list contained "three errors" -- the real number was more like dozens, if not hundreds, of innocents who were accused of being pirates because they had quoted or merely mentioned science fiction writers.
He also singled me out for vilification, suggesting that I had timed my public disclosure of this in order to cause him damage -- I posted the information as soon as I had all the facts, in the middle of the afternoon at the World Science Fiction Convention, after taking the time to talk it over with many fellow writers, including fellow past officers of the organization (I am the former Canadian Director of SFWA). Burt persists to this day in claiming that I posted "at midnight on a holiday weekend," a gross mischaracterization that's as absurd as the claim that "only three works" were misidentified by his notice.
Burt's copyright projects for SFWA have been controversial and divisive. He created a push-poll that attempted to convince the membership to stop Amazon from indexing their books; he created a non-working system for poisoning ebooks and ruining the download experience and then patented it, in his name, at the organization's expense (he has promised to return the money); he helped create a loyalty oath in which members were told to swear to "respect patents and trademarks" and so on.
SFWA's response to Burt's embarrassing and damaging negligence in the Scribd matter was to dissolve the "E-Piracy Committee" that Burt had chaired and to charter a new committee to investigate better ways for the organization to grapple with copyright. That committee was chaired by John Scalzi, whom I respect and like. I declined to work on the committee, however, as I was skeptical that it would make progress , given that Burt was to have a seat on it. Update: John Scalzi clarifies in the comments below, "the committee of which I was the chair did not have Andrew Burt on it; I would not have participated on it if it had, for the reason that having him being the committee would not have been useful."
The committee returned its recommendations to the SFWA board and included (in the words of committee member Charlie Stross) "[a] further recommendation was discussed...brought to the attention of the president of SFWA via a back channel...at all costs, Andrew Burt must be kept the hell away from the copyright committee. In view of his earlier activities, his appointment to it would automatically destroy any credibility the new body would have."
Stross has posted an angry public denunciation of the Board's response to these recommendations -- specifically, the Board's decision to reinstate Burt as chairman of the renamed Copyright Committee. One commenter has pointed out that Burt got to vote for himself in the Board's deliberations, and did not recuse himself on the basis of a conflict on interest.
John Scalzi has also posted on the matter, in less heated voice, but with equal definitiveness: dissolving the E-Piracy Committee and replacing it with a new committee with the same chairman is not an effective resolution to SFWA's problems with copyright.
Stross feels that the Board's reinstatement of Burt was a betrayal of the committee members who volunteered to work on a new direction for the organization on copyright. I believe he's right.
To say that this is a fuckwitted decision is an understatement. Under Dr Burt, the new copyright committee will almost inevitably devolve into a reincarnation of the old piracy committee. If I thought it'd do any good I'd be resigning in protest right now; only the expense of a life membership purchased a couple of years ago is restraining me right now. Clearly the current executive of SFWA is making damaging decisions and ignoring input from committees it appointed, and and in view of this I call on SFWA president Mike Capobianco and the rest of the SFWA executive — including Andrew Burt — to resign immediately. Meanwhile, I'd like to call on all other SFWA members who don't want to see their organization commit public relations suicide to make their voices heard.Link to Charlie Stross's post, Link to John Scalzi's postAs for my own role in the affair, I consider this to be a betrayal of trust. I've been used as a stalking-horse to legitimize a process I absolutely despise; I've put in a fair amount of work on a project that was clearly intended as a distraction and which has now been set aside and ignored by the man who commissioned it. I will not forget this — and the current SFWA executive should consider that cozening and lying to their own members is not usually considered best practice for representing the members' best interests.
See also:
Science Fiction Writers of America abuses the DMCA
Why writers should stop worrying about "ebook piracy"
Wael Abbas is an award-winning blogger in Egypt whose work documenting human rights violations through online video has been blogged here on BB before. Wael claims that his YouTube account, with which he has posted more than a hundred videos of alleged police abuse, has been terminated over complains the clips contain "inappropriate material."
Abbas said YouTube sent him an e-mail saying they had suspended his account. "They didn't ask me to remove it. They said 'Your account isn't working,' " he said. When asked about Abbas, a YouTube spokesperson said, "We take these matters very seriously, but we don't comment on individual videos."Link to CNN account.YouTube regulations state that "graphic or gratuitous violence" is not allowed and violations of the Terms of Use could result in the ending of an account and deleting all of the videos in it.
Snip from related item at Foreign Policy blog:
There are plenty of other video-sharing sites and third-party tools out there for posting viral videos, but Abbas says he's lost his entire archive, the fruit of years of painstaking work. Also this month, Yahoo! accused Abbas of spamming and shut down two e-mail accounts of his.
Link. Here's the post on Wael's blog about the suspension of his Yahoo email account: Link. (Thanks, Rafe)
Previously: Supporters Work to Free Egyptian Blogger
Leave it to Canada to have a cryptozoological beastie like a sasquatch as its Olympic mascot. Earlier today Vancouver 2010 unveiled their Olympic and Paralympic mascots: Quatchi the Sasquatch, Miga the Sea Bear, and Sumi the Thunderbird.Link (Thanks, Scott!)
Continuing in BoingBoing's ongoing exploration of highbrow internet cinema, I now present to you a reaction video of some guy's poor grandma seeing the German New Wave classic "Zwei Mädchen eine Tasse" for the first time.Clearly, she is overwhelmed by the heady metaphysical influence of Fassbinder and Herzog evidenced in this masterwork, which treats its characters in a scope of almost Wagnerian breadth.
Link. (thanks, Jason, and Teapunk!)
Previously:
(Warning: This is my serious voice now. The reason I will never link directly to the shock video referenced in the title of this post can best be expressed in this equation from BB reader Ivan: 2Girls_1Cup = Goatse * TubGirl / White_Unicorns).
Update: Here's a t-shirt idea for fans of this cinematic great from Flickr user Andrewc.