The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.

Dan McTeague is the Liberal MP from Pickering-Scarborough East, and he's set to become the successor to Sam Bulte, the MP who lost her job for funding her campaign to get elected and appointed Heritage Minister by lining her pockets with massive donations from the very industries she would have ended up regulating. Reliable sources tell me that he's the guy who pushed for Canada signing onto the WIPO copyright treaty in the committee's anti-counterfeiting report last year, and that any time anyone in committee mentions fair dealing and user rights, he has a complete melt-down and shouts them down.

At a recent copyright panel in Toronto, McTeague essentially read out a list of record industry talking points about Canada's supposed status as a pirate nation, characterizing infringement as theft and refusing to acknowledge user rights; saying that Canada's international reputation had been tarnished by its soft copyright laws (the World Economic Forum says that Canada's copyright system is more advanced than Japan's and the US's). and, incredibly, proposed that we should pass a law making it illegal to use the Internet to "threaten" Members of Parliament with negative publicity if we don't like their political positions.

The supposedly non-partisan Public Policy Forum is holding a major, one-sided IP symposium on Monday. Invited are the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association, and other big-stick-swingers for American-style copyright disasters. But when copyright lobbyists discovered that noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf would appear on just one of the panels, they went berserk and pushed successfully to have Knopf removed, ensuring that dissenting voices would be minimized on the day.

Science painter Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects and paints mutant bugs in the vicinity of irradiated wastelands like Chernorbyl, around nuclear plants, and nuclear refining sites. This handsome, lopsided li'l fella came from nearby the reactor at Gysinge, Sweden. Link (via Neatorama)

The fun-loving gamers at the Unreal Tournament forum have recreated Super Mario Bros as a rockin' UT2D level. Link

Bill sez "Curly, a blogger and photographer from South Shields (in NE England) was pursued by police after they received an emergency 999 call from someone who saw him taking photos in a funfair where children were present. He ended up showing his pics to a policeman in order to be allowed to leave."

“Is there something wrong with my car or my driving?”

“No, no sir, nothing like that at all, we are responding to an emergency call from someone in The Sundial who has reported you as taking pictures of children in the play park”

“Play park? I haven’t been near any play park! I’ve been on the beach and in the fairground, and I’ve never been anywhere near The Sundial either, surely you must have the wrong person?”

“Sorry sir, but we tracked you on the CCTV cameras, got your registration number and that’s why I need to talk to you, you are exactly as described”

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

I was delighted when I got home today and saw Mark's post about the injured turtle outfitted with a set of wheels (top right). I had just visited the amazing headquarters of designer toy firm STRANGEco where I scored a wonderful Turtlecamper figure (top left) by Jeremy Fish. Coincidence? Some might think so. Link (Thanks, Gregory Blum!)

Pietro Arosio's many-drawered chests come with small numbers on each drawer. The effect is curiously pleasing, and, one supposes, very handy. Link (via Cribcandy)

The Canadian indy band The Western Investor (formerly Feisty) have released their rare, out of print first EP as a remixable Creative Commons download (it's the band's tenth anniversary and they're celebrating). I've been listening to it for the past 20 minutes and there's plenty there to like -- some of these tracks appeared in the movie "Better Than Chocolate." Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Vint Cerf, an heroic pioneer of the Internet, tells Esquire what he's learned:

It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play World of Warcraft with your son. But you're actually interacting with each other. You're solving problems. They may seem like simple problems, but you're solving them. You're posed with challenges that you have to overcome. You're on a quest to gain certain capabilities. I haven't spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft, because my impression is that it takes a serious amount of time to play it well...

In Silicon Valley, failure is experience. Now, if you fail at everything, that's different. But a failure is a mark of experience more than anything else...

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Voluminous is a subscription-based public domain book delivery program. Once you buy the app, it'll let you know whenever likely books are scanned and put online; they also keep a bookmarkable library for you.

There are literally tens of thousands of books. Voluminous makes it faster and easier to find the ones you want. Would you rather waste your time hunting around for them, or have Voluminous do it for you?

Voluminous also:

* Will tell you when new books are available
* Keeps automatic bookmarks for each book in your personal library. If you read a book on a webpage, your web browser will only bookmark that web page (typically, the start of the book), not where you've read to.
* Tracks which books you're currently reading, for quick access
* Takes "plain text" and turns it into a beautifully laid-out book in the style you choose
* Offers full-screen mode for distraction-free reading
* Has tools to share interesting books with friends

These are just some of the advantages of using Voluminous.

Link (via Wonderland)

This week's installment of The Command Line podcast is a recording from a panel on Secure Computing Environments with Vernor Vinge, held last weekend at Penguicon, the free software/science fiction convention in Novi Troy, MI. The panel's really fascinating and far-ranging, covering the nitty-gritty of how trusted computing is -- and might be -- implemented, to the policy, surveillance, and activist possibilities opened up by a universally available secure computing platform. Link

In this episode of Make's Weekend Project, Kipkap shows how to build a mousetrap-powered car.

Today on BoingBoing gadgets, we poured ourself one from the firehose, studied from the codex of lilliputian laptops and, still thirsty, drank some vitamin water, which, in defiance of physics, mixes just fine with snake oil. Rob set about building a MAME machine inside the joystick, while John asked if anyone cared about MP3s killing off the LP. As for me, I relaxed under a fake skylight.. We wondered at yet another tiny computer; burned effigies of a disgraced tech CEO; looked at the future of prosthetic fingers; sniffed at some tasteless telephones; learned to play Beer Pong; and checked out the modern take on cheap, obnoxious electronic doorbells. Tonight, we'll be relaxing in the world's first LED spa before destroying worlds with new DARPA superweapons—all from the safety of electric unicycle-back. And, finally, a strange cigarette helps us off to the land of nod.

Here's a neat poster to help you visualize all of the top-level domains in the world...

At the end of every URL and email address is a top-level domain (TLD). Although .com is the world’s most popular TLD, it is far from alone. There are more than 260 TLDs in use around the world, most of which are country code top-level domains (ccTLDs).

The Country Codes of the World map includes 245 country codes, which encompasses all United Nations countries as well as numerous islands and territories. Each two-digit code is aligned over the country it represents and is color coded with the legend below for quick and easy reference.

Link, they're $30 each plus shipping. (via Kevin Kelly)

I don't know about you, but this sign makes me awful hungry for rabbit meat. Link (via Vegan.com)

Jim Lee is a contributor to MAKE magazine, and is interested in turtles and bamboo. He built a set of wheels for an injured box turtle, shown here.

Little Bit, a young Eastern Box Turtle was hit by a car in September of 2000. Her shell was crushed and she was left partially paralyzed. There was no way she would ever be released to the wild as happens with most successful rehabs. I repaired her shell using velcro strips epoxied to anchor points on her carapace. After some weeks Little Bit seemed to have made a full recovery except for the use of her hind legs. So some wheels seemed to be the way to go. Some lightweight model airplane wheels on a wire frame did the trick. The removable wheels were secured by a velcro strip epoxied to her plastron. The velcro strips on the carapace were removed after four months. She was eating, drinking, and exploring all the rooms of my house. Eventually she was able to move around outside as well. She lived until early in 2002 when she died unexpectedly (and suddenly). After all she had been through I did not have the heart to order any kind of post mortem from the local vet school. I simply said goodbye and thanked her for what she had shared with me and others who met her.

Link

Nature has a good article about the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), an ionospheric heater that became fully operational last July.

The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) has been entwined with controversy since its birth. Originally envisioned as a way to facilitate communications with nuclear-armed submarines, HAARP took almost two decades to build and has incurred around US$250 million in construction and operating costs. It consists of 360 radio transmitters and 180 antennas, and covers some 14 hectares near the town of Gakona about 250 kilometres northeast of Anchorage.

With 3.6 megawatts of power at its command, HAARP is the most powerful ionospheric heater in the world. At its heart is a phased-array radar that emits radio waves that are partially absorbed between 100 kilometres and 350 kilometres in altitude, accelerating electrons there and 'heating' the ionosphere (see graphic, right). In effect, HAARP allows scientists to turn the ionosphere, the uppermost and one of the least understood regions of the atmosphere, into a natural laboratory.

Link (via the day they tried to kill me)

Gus and Fin perform Blitzkrieg Bop on ukulele. (And here are the Ramones doing it, live.) (via Otomano)

Wired defense technology blogger Noah Shachtman says,

Smoking weed can improve your performance in all sorts of activities -- from playing reggae music to watching Battlestar Galactica to writing blog posts.

If you're an already ill-trained, semi-motivated soldier in the Afghan Army, however, spliffs are a particularly poor way to prepare for battle, as this little clip illustrates..

Link to post, which includes more happy fun stoner warfare video goodness. Hey, how do you say, "Duuuuuude... what?" in Pashto? Your answers welcomed in the comments.

Snip from a New York Times piece by John Schwartz on a new online archive of stereoscopic human anatomy images, produced in the early 1960s:

[David L. Bassett] was an expert in anatomy and dissection at the University of Washington. For more than 17 years, he was engaged in creating what has been called the most painstaking and detailed set of images of the human body, inside and out, ever produced. In 3-D.

Working closely with William Gruber, the inventor of the View-Master, the three-dimensional viewing system that GAF Corporation popularized as a toy in the 1960s, Dr. Bassett created the 25-volume “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy” in 1962. It included some 1,500 pairs of slides, along with line drawings that made the details more discernible. The paired slides could be examined with a View-Master, making the chest cavity look cavernous, and making details of structure and tissue stand out unforgettably.

The atlas was an immediate success and the images became an important resource for medical students, even more so as schools have de-emphasized gross anatomy and cadaver work. But the atlas eventually went out of publication in the 1960s.

Thanks to Stanford University’s school of medicine, however, the work will soon be available to the world. The school is bringing the images online, (See a sampling.).

Link to full text of story, here's a cool slideshow. Images shown here courtesy of Stanford, and Gruber's family.

A months' worth of web access to the "head and neck collection" is eight bucks; so far, all the other body parts are not yet online. I don't understand the pricing structure, or why they bother charging for access at all -- but, (shrugs), the content sure is wonderful.

Previously on BB:
• Incredible human dissection photos on Flickr Link

Snip from news item:

"China's torch has arrived in Australia amid protests in Sydney and Canberra. Four Tibet activists were arrested after unfurling a large banner on a prominent Coke billboard in Kings Cross protesting Coke's sponsorship of China's tainted torch relay. "

"Enjoy Compassion," the banner reads. (courtesy SFT, thanks Oxblood).

Sneak peek at a show opening at New York's Adam Baumgold Gallery on May 1 -- "Alphaville," by Scott Teplin, features meticulously rendered pen and ink and watercolor drawings inspired in part by Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film (which happens to be my favorite movie, ever, period). Snip from the show description:

Teplin has filtered the city of Alphaville through his own imagination and drawn a world devoid of people - only evidence of their domestic and work environments remain for exploration.

Godard filmed Alphaville when computers were in their infancy and not well understood by the public. As a result the film is haunted by Alpha 60 - a dictatorial talking computer that rules the city and forbids the concept of free individuals. Teplin's recreated Alphaville takes place in the present, where computers are not much more than an occasional laptop on a table and a few rooms set up for surveillance of other rooms in secret. Humor is always a prevalent thread in Teplin's work and he has used Lemmy Caution's name as an inspiration for weirdly overgrown indoor potted lemon trees that seem to devour the very wall that contains them - in the title piece of the show. Also featured in the exhibition are individually, vividly watercolored pen and ink drawings of each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, whose surreal rooms and environments follow the deductive structure of the letters. Another set of drawings focus on words and letters such as SLUMBER LORD and GRACIOUS HOST that become Teplin's eccentric, isometrically spaced rooms.

The exhibition highlights Scott Teplin's artist book(s) "Sinker Down and Out," (2007) a Kafkaesque journey of a donut's travels through the digestive path. "Sinker Down and Out" is a hand-drawn 'editioned' artist book. The first part is simply an artist book, similar to other tightly engineered volumes Teplin has created in the past, including maddeningly detailed pen drawings accompanied with strategically placed, scalpel-incised holes. Because artist books are notoriously difficult to exhibit, the second part of this project was born. It consists of one fully-bound book, identical to the original master copy, for each of the 21 page spreads in that master.

Link to gallery website, and here is the artist's site (thanks, Coop!).

Boing Boing tv visits New York Comic Con, the largest comics convention on the Eastern seaboard, and we find games, geeks, and graphic novels galore. Our guide through the event's board game realms is Dr. Gregory Wilson, author and fantasy fiction professor at St. John's University of New York, who teaches us little-known tools for game quality evaluation. "You can tell this one is awesome because of the weight of the box -- it's probably about 15 pounds," he says as we pass one title. "This one takes two hours just to set up! Clear evidence that it, too, is awesome."

Part two of today's episode is a little alternate reality game of our own design -- we like to call it "Count the Cosplayer."

Link to Boing Boing tv post, with discussion and downloadable video.

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BONUS AWESOMENESS: In related news, Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City blog says: "I set up a small online quiz asking people to label unidentified visitors as either art fair or comic-con attendees. There are a few surprises in there, which keeps it interesting."

Woohoo! I'm on the Locus Award ballot -- twice! Once for Best Novella for my story After the Siege and again for Best Collection for my book Overclocked. Thanks to everyone who voted for me! I'm in damned good company too -- if you're looking for a masterclass in contemporary sf, this would be the place to start:

SF NOVEL
The Accidental Time Machine, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
Brasyl, Ian McDonald (Pyr)
Halting State, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Spook Country, William Gibson (Putnam; Viking UK)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

FANTASY NOVEL
Endless Things, John Crowley (Small Beer Press; Overlook)
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)
Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
Territory, Emma Bull (Tor)
Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada; Roc)

Link

Instructables have just published their latest installment in their series of HOWTOs inspired by my forthcoming novel Little Brother, a young adult book about kids who use technology to wrest liberty from the Department of Homeland Security. This week, it's HOWTO block or kill an RFID chip.

-The easiest way to kill an RFID, and be sure that it is dead, is to throw it in the microwave for 5 seconds. Doing this will literally melt the chip and antenna making it impossible for the chip to ever be read again. Unfortunately this method has a certain fire risk associated with it. Killing an RFID chip this way will also leave visible evidence that it has been tampered with, making it an unsuitable method for killing the RFID tag in passports. Doing this to a credit card will probably also screw with the magnetic strip on the back making it un-swipeable.

-The second, slightly more convert and less damaging, way to kill an RFID tag is by piercing the chip with a knife or other sharp object. This can only be done if you know exactly where the chip is located within the tag. This method also leaves visible evidence of intentional damage done to the chip, so it is unsuitable for passports.

-The third method is cutting the antenna very close to the chip. By doing this the chip will have no way of receiving electricity, or transmitting its signal back to the reader. This technique also leaves minimal signs of damage, so it would probably not be a good idea to use this on a passport.

-The last (and most covert) method for destroying a RFID tag is to hit it with a hammer. Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks. This will destroy the chip, and leave no evidence that the tag has been tampered with. This method is suitable for destroying the tags in passports, because there will be no proof that you intentionally destroyed the chip.

Link, Link to RSS feed for Little Brother Instructables

See also: HOWTO Screen-print a tee

Ape Lad sez, "Every time I see this it makes me smile: ballet dancers performing to the Pixies' 'Where is my mind.'" Link (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

A Denver TSA employee who brought a handgun to the airport and passed it around the metal detector is still on the job. The TSA won't say if he's been disciplined -- or how -- for doing this stupid thing that would land any of the rest of us in Gitmo for a decade's worth of stress-positioning. Of course, we can't expect TSA screeners to be held to the same legal standard as the rest of us -- since they work for the security administration, then everything they do, by definition, must be good for security.

Airport documents show that the security office suspended Crabtree’s badge for 30 days as a result of the incident, but a TSA spokeswoman cited privacy rules when asked if Crabtree received any formal punishment.

Link

Liliputing has done a fantastic roundup of the existing and forthcoming micro-notebooks, the Eee and its successors and competitors. There's a lot of interest in these things in my household -- we're all sick of shlepping around shoulder-tearing laptops and the idea of a 2.5 Lb, sold-state submicro tablet is pretty attractive all 'round, especially if it goes for a couple hundred bucks. Link (via Gizmodo)

Heather sez, "A new painting & print from the fabulous Suzanne R Forbes is on Etsy. $10 of each print purchase goes to the EFF. "

Miss Eva G posed for me in her SOMA loft, dressed in her own fabulous steampunk finery, with an antique crossbow she brought back from China. The painting took several sittings with Miss E and then many hours of work painting in the detailed background. She is defending early implements of the computer revolution, Jacquard punch cards and IBM cards, a CDV of Ada Byron, and Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2. An apple core represents Turing, eaten up by the intolerance of his era. Also prominently displayed are so

me wonderful modern creations- The Steampunk Laptop by Datamancer and the Steampunk Flatpanel and Keyboard by Jake Von Slatt- who were kind enough to allow me use their work in the painting. The packet-sniffing rat under the desk is a nod to the EFF’s most recent victory; the EFF logo appears among the luggage stickers on the trunk. I added the bullet shells at the last minute when I learned that Miss E. is a crack shot.

Link (Thanks, Heather!)

In the current New Yorker, anthropologist Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, looks at the vengeance practices of tribal societies in New Guinea. While Diamond was conducting field work in the New Guinea Highlands, he was driven around by a young man named Daniel Wemp of the Handa clan. The two got to talking and Daniel recounted how he avenged the death of his uncle who had been killed by the neighboring Ombal clan. The tale is amazing, insightful, and gets you thinking about our own, er, taste for revenge. From the New Yorker article, titled "Vengeance Is Ours":

The war between the Handa clan and the Ombal clan began many years ago; how many, Daniel didn’t say, and perhaps didn’t know. It could easily have been several decades ago, or even in an earlier generation. Among Highland clans, each killing demands a revenge killing, so that a war goes on and on, unless political considerations cause it to be settled, or unless one clan is wiped out or flees. When I asked Daniel how the war that claimed his uncle’s life began, he answered, “The original cause of the wars between the Handa and Ombal clans was a pig that ruined a garden.” Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeperlying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig. Any Westerner who knows the story of Helen and the Trojan War will not be surprised to hear women named as a casus belli, but the equal importance of pigs is less obvious. However, New Guinea Highlanders, whose main food staples are starchy root crops like sweet potato and taro, are chronically starved for protein, of which the island’s dark, bristly pigs traditionally furnished the only large source. As a result, pigs are prized symbols of prestige and wealth. Peaceful competition and ostentatious displays involve pigs, and they are also used as currency for buying women. Pigs are individually owned and named, and, as piglets, they are sometimes nursed at one breast by a woman nursing an infant at her other breast.

A typical Highland village is a cluster of huts housing between a few dozen and a few hundred people plus their pigs, traditionally surrounded by a fence, and situated a mile or a few miles from the next village. A village’s pigs are taken out to forage during the day, and are prone then to wander into people’s vegetable gardens, breaking down or digging under fences erected to keep them out. A single pig can root up and ruin an entire garden in a few hours. If the intrusion happens at night, or if the offending pig is not caught in the act, it is virtually impossible to prove which particular pig was responsible.

That was how the Handa-Ombal war began. An Ombal man found that his garden had been wrecked by a pig. He claimed that the offending pig belonged to a certain Handa man, who denied it. The Ombal man became angry, demanded compensation, and assaulted the Handa pig owner when he refused. Relatives of both parties then joined in the dispute, and soon the entire membership of both clans—between four and six thousand people—was dragged into a war that had now raged for longer than Daniel could remember. He told me that, in the four years of fighting leading up to Soll’s death, seventeen other men had been killed.

Link

My old pal Rodney Ascher has curated a show in Los Angeles of strange, provocative, creepy, and downright freaked-out narrative photography. For example, Rodney created "The Fumigator Series" (above left), which he describes as "a rightwing fantasy inspired by vigilante movies of the 70's and 80's and action/adventure paperbacks like The Executioner, the Enforcer, The Death Merchant, and the Penetrator." Others shot fake movie stills and dramatic tableaus, like the one seen here above right created by The Blacksmoke Organization. The exhibition, Photo Fictions, runs until May 17 at the Show Cave. Link

The Red Ferret's had a little experiment with a dual-SIM conversion kit for GSM phones -- pop it into one of the many compatible handsets and you can flip back and forth between two different carriers. I have a British and a US SIM that I switch between, depending on which continent I'm on, so this could be pretty handy.

The only thing I’ve noticed so far is that the offline mode doesn’t seem to be really offline with this thing in, because my battery now runs down a lot faster in offline mode than it used to. It’s no biggie, I’ll just switch the phone off or take out the twin SIM on flights, but it’s something to watch out for. It may just be a peculiarity of my setup, of course.

The other thing that’s not really clear from the site is the compatibility of handsets. The site has a long list of compatible handsets on it, which includes a lot of standard 3G and other phones, but even though the Nokia 6110 Navigator I upgraded wasn’t on the list, it still worked fine. So maybe it’s a matter of taking a gamble if your handset is not listed? Oh and remember you’ll need a phone with a back cover which bends enough, or has enough room to cope with the extra SIM.

Link

Listeners to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio program Search Engine, gathered the information necessary to allow the CBC's President to lobby the Chinese ambassador to Canada to have the service unblocked by the Great Firewall of China:

Thanks to their efforts our show broke this story, which was picked up throughout the country and resulted in the CBC's President appealing to the Chinese Ambassador to end the blockage at once. Today the news is out that the CBC, along with Wikipedia and the BBC, is back online.

This was a great display of citizen journalism in action. Our China-based listeners alerted us to the blockage, then confirmed it throughout China by working the message boards. We tapped other listeners in the area through our Facebook page, and every one of them responded, testing our sites and others. Through that we were able to establish that the blockage was limited to China and didn't occur in neighbouring countries, which helped rule out technical failure as a cause.

Several of the people who helped us have requested anonymity (one is an Olympic torch-bearer and wants to keep